Markets

Canoe Ventures Not Paddling So Fast Toward Addressable Ads

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: June 19, 2009 / 1:28 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Canoe Ventures, the vaunted leap by the cable industry into bringing addressable advertising, via set-top box, into 60 million homes, has halted the plan indefinitely -- which raises the inevitable question of whether this was a viable idea in the first place. Backed by six of the major cable operators, Canoe was supposed to roll out a product any month now, which went by the moniker Community Addressable Advertising (CAM), that was positioned at the gold at the end of cable's rainbow -- no Rainbow Networks pun intended. By being able to target ads to almost 370 individual high-income areas, CAM was supposed to mean that cable networks and MSOs could reap a premium from ads, or so the thinking went.

But just look at the laundry list of problems with the system. Multichannel News, which broke the story, lists the following:

That the lead time for insertions from advertisers who would want to use the system was too long.
That the ads could only run right after a local break.
Conflicting technologies between Cisco Systems and Motorola would have prohibited the ads from being seen in some markets.

Mediapost piled on with these concerns from cable nets:

that they might have to pay Canoe a lot to get the product.
that advertisers wouldn't bite, particularly in the current economic climate.

In some ways, there's nothing new about failures to move the advertising model forward. And, in this case, as in others, it's not just technology, but about a staid industry that still holds onto old, and often inefficient, ways of doing business. David Verklin, CEO of Canoe, and a guy who's used to getting it done, admitted to Multichannel News that making CAM work would require an overhaul of the entire infrastructure that eventually leads to a commercial appearing on air. Especially in the ad business, that's a tall order.

As a post-script, what Canoe is left with is a lead-generation product, expected to still roll out in the fourth quarter.