New York —Likening the industry push to the
space race of the 1950s and 1960s, SMGx executives
are urging a major acceleration of targeted, addressable
advertising by decade’s end.
Just as President John F. Kennedy marshaled the
nation’s resources across various disciplines to reach
the moon first after the Soviets had launched Sputnik,
John Muszynski, chief investment officer of SMGx,
and Tracey Scheppach, SMGx senior vice president
and innovation director, want the industry’s constituencies
— programmers, distributors, technologists,
researchers, advertisers, agencies and consumers —
to coalesce and fuel the advance.
“It’s our intention to work together and be 100% addressable
by end-of-decade,” Scheppach said during
the executives’ keynote address at the “Advanced Advertising
3.0, The Next Big Thing” event.
“We need to be in the business of targeting people
with messages, not TV shows,” Muszynski said.
SMGx serves clients at all three Starcom MediaVest
Group media shops.
Should fragmented viewing cause ad support to wane,
Scheppach said, the television industry would face “harsh
outcomes,” such as having to signifi cantly hike subscriber
fees or lose viewers as content quality erodes. Targeted
advertising could be a solution, they said.
SMGx participated in addressable ad initiatives
with 8,000 Comcast households in Huntsville, Ala.;
60,000 with Comcast in Baltimore and “a few hundred
thousand Cablevision customers” in Brooklyn.
Those efforts yielded “greater effectiveness and efficiency” for clients and helped set the stage for a more
ambitious gambit with national scale, involving up
to 10 million DirecTV subscribers with DVRs, come
September.
“We’re committed,” Muszynski said, asking for others
to e-mail their intent to IAmIn@smvgroup.com.
