There’s a big celebration at FourthWall Media today – and not just because it’s Tim Peter’s birthday (yet again). We’re celebrating May 3rd as the landmark day when advanced advertising steps out of R&D and becomes an operational business. Because today we announced the launch of Ad Widgets® in San Juan, Puerto Rico with OneLink Communications.
Ad Widgets is an addressable, interactive advertising solution that moves advertising from zapp-able to umiss-able. Our Ad Widgets will drive consumer engagement, making advertising more valuable and more trackable. These are the innovations and insights TV advertisers have lusted after for generations.
The OneLink launch is a landmark event because it’s a living example of what the cable industry envisioned when they created all the specifications and standards for synchronous interactivity. Ad Widgets are based on these industry specifications; all the loops have been closed from media sales, to delivery, to reporting back to the advertiser in an operational environment.
The entire ecosystem is poised for success. We took no chances. None. The sales tools are in place and the media sales team has been trained. The Ad Widgets Manager is installed and interactive spots are being created in minutes, with a few simple clicks. Those spots are being delivered through the normal playout system, data is getting collected, and reports are being generated. The pipes are clean, and the ads are flowing.
People in our world understand the significance of this achievement. It’s not easy connecting all those disparate dots that are flung across digital ad insertion systems, splicers, multiplexers, set-top boxes, operating systems, and resident apps. The work done with our ecosystem partners and the OneLink team was an amazing, collaborative effort, and we’re incredibly proud to have delivered certified, addressable features.
The Ad Widgets features include Request for Information, Voting & Polling, Click-to-Call, and Billboards. Next in the queue are VOD Telescoping, T-Commerce, Microsites, and cross-sell/up-sell features – which have already been implemented within our Yellow Pages app. These Ad Widgets features can increase the value of TV advertising by as much as 240%.
For us efficacy is a foundational pillar. So FourthWall conducted independent research across key media formats including cinema, Internet, network TV, cable TV, radio, print, and outdoor, isolating the drivers that determine value and efficacy. We then mapped these findings to Ad Widgets features. Depending on the specific feature and campaign reach, the increased value was projected to be between 15-240%. And now that we’re past the technology integration period and have entered into the operational phase of advanced advertising, we can focus on delivering this for advertisers.
Thanks to Ron Dorchester, OneLink CEO, for his support and dedication that made this project possible, and thanks to FourthWall Media’s incredible engineering team. Our guys are simply the best set-top box engineers around.
If you’ll be at The Cable Show next week in Los Angeles, come see us in the CableNET booth. We’ll have a live setup of Ad Widgets including the Ad Widgets Manager: we’d be happy to build an interactive spot for you while you watch. We’ll also be running a suite of TV Widgets® in the CableNET, Rovi, and Comcast Media Center booths. So whether you’re interested in advanced advertising or interactive programming, we have the right applications and the EBIF platform to power them.
Let the celebration begin, and happy birthday Tim! Again.
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