In a market where media is exploding and advertisers have more options than ever before, competition for advertising revenue has never been more intense. Entertainment and communications service providers are looking for new, innovative ways to offer rich consumer services and advanced advertising offerings in order to compete with new forms of media and interactive advertising that can cater to focused audiences and provide significant details regarding the return on advertisers' investments.
The growth and adoption of rich, interactive video services, such as Video on Demand and IPTV is now opening the door for entertainment and communications providers to deliver an unprecedented level of personalization and interaction with the viewer. This interactivity and personalization is enabling advertisers to connect with an "audience of one" - where each viewer receives focused advertisements that are specifically aligned to their buying interests.
Advanced advertising starts with understanding the customer – who they are, where they live, what they watch, and what they buy. Communications and entertainment providers are looking at new methods to gather and utilize increasingly available information about their customers in order to gain a better understanding of them, their buying preferences, and enable targeted campaign for their advertisers. These service providers sensitive to the collection methods and usage of customer information, to ensure their practices protects their customers' privacy concerns and provides them with opt-in and opt-out control.
Sigma's Advanced Advertising Solution combines the company's award-winning fulfillment platform with its award-winning Subscriber Information Service (SIS) and Active Mediation Platform (AMP) products to collect and leverage information from multiple sources such as freely available third party demographic sources, internally available customer and service package information, and can even be used to gather behavioral and usage data as acceptance and guidelines are established for the use of such information. Sigma SIS and AMP provide the enabling components used to collect customer information and identify the appropriate audience qualifiers so that communications and entertainment providers can present personalized TV advertisements to qualified audiences in real-time.
As interoperability, information usage, and communications standards evolve, the collection mechanism must embrace these standards to make implementation and integration easier for service providers to manage. Sigma is actively engaged with standards bodies who are developing these standards and Sigma's solutions leverage the most suitable standards from both the cable and telecommunications industries to unsure maximum flexibility, interoperability, and ease of implementation.
Figure 1 - Sigma's Subscriber Information Service
Collect and Correlate - Service providers already house volumes of crucial information about their customers – where they’re located, how much they spend, and to what services they’ve subscribed. Often this information is spread across different operations systems and stored in disparate formats. As standards like tru2way emerges, an overwhelming amount of new customer data becomes available for collection from the set-top box. This data provides keen insights into the viewers' preferences, but the data is raw and needs processing and analysis to become useful information. Sigma delivers the Advanced Advertising Solution providers need to centralize and normalize this information, manage it in a customer profile, and generate audience qualifiers that define new and more granular customer segments advertisers can use to super-target their campaigns and leverage dynamic ad insertion.
Deliver Privacy and Security- With so much new and detailed information about subscribers being stored and utilized, privacy must be enforced strictly. Standards like SCTE's 130 provide for audience qualifiers (AQs) which allow subscribers to be grouped into specific and identifiable segments and provide the groundwork to ensure that nothing that identifies a specific individual is accessible to the outside world. Sigma provides the tools and firewalls necessary to protect subscribers’ privacy, keep their identities secure, and to enable and enforce opt-out mechanisms that may be mandated or used for advanced customer management.
Automate and Execute Campaigns- Advertisements are not stand-alone entities, they are part of overall campaign strategies that can change continuously from the day ads launch. In a fast paced market where timing is everything, advertisers need service providers to move quickly and to measure response so they can optimize ad delivery to the best audiences. Sigma delivers the ability to rapidly deploy ad campaigns and insertions while automating results analyses and reports to drive campaign or up-sell optimization, as well all of the tools necessary to design and improve the operational processes that manage ad delivery and enable immediate feedback to the advertiser.
Conform to Standards – Sigma embraces leading edge standards that define the ways in which subscriber usage and viewing data is collected (e.g. IPDR), dynamic and interactive ads are defined, and real-time ad insertion decisions are executed. Sigma’s solution is designed to let service providers deliver tru2way’s real-time and interactive capabilities by linking end to end, automated service fulfillment with the interactive and on-demand information and services tru2way enables. The Sigma Subscriber Information Service, as part of Sigma’s Advanced Advertising Solution with the Sigma Active Mediation Platform, fully supports the SCTE 130/DVS 629 architecture standard including audience qualifiers and audience qualifier sequences that define relevant subscriber attributes and allow for creative and granular market segmentation. The solution also supports IPDR event collection standards for voice and video usage and will continue to support tru2way set-top data formatting standards as they evolve.
This year at Management World in Orlando, Sigma Systems unveiled an integrated, end-to-end joint advanced advertising solution with its partners: ARRIS, Biap, and BlackArrrow. This demonstration featured the collection and analysis of service package information, usage data, and third-party demographic data in order to identify audience qualifiers and present uniquely targeted ads to two different consumers based on their individual interests. To learn more about how this Catalyst Project help entertainment and communications provider provide the rich communications experience, click here.
Advanced advertising represents the next level of customer service, personalization, and revenue generation as all play evolves into a seamless and fully interactive offering. Sigma provides all of the complete solutions service providers need to deliver rich services and automate dynamic, market-of-one advertisement and promotions as an inherent aspect of their multiservice offerings. Sigma makes it easy to order, fulfill, and support new services and enrich them with greater personalization, interactivity, on-demand and multimedia content, bundling, and mobility.