At MIPTV in Cannes, Wednesday, studio-backed, subscription-free, "over-the-top" on-demand TV service, ZillionTV, announced that it has secured a major advertising partnership with MillerCoors, the second-largest beer brand in the US. ZillionTV bills its service, which is currently in beta, as giving content owners three main options for monetizing their content: offering it for sale, offering it for rental, or offering it free-of-charge with targeted and addressable advertising. According to the company, MillerCoors will be leveraging the service's "advertising video-on-demand" (AVOD) model, which it bills as allowing viewers to select advertising categories based on their interests and preferences (their preferences will then determine which ads are delivered to them). "At MillerCoors, we're always looking for new ways to provide legal drinking age consumers with compelling reasons to choose our brands," MillerCoors' VP of marketing services, Jackie Woodward, said in a prepared statement. "ZillionTV's digital distribution platform and advertising VOD model is truly innovative, and provides a unique opportunity to test and learn on a new marketing platform."
According to ZillionTV, its service will allow advertisers to target audiences by geography, demographics and consumer preferences, and will also let them gather real-time consumer feedback, test creative campaigns, and gauge consumer adoption success, as well as quantitatively and qualitatively determine advertising value. Content providers that have signed up for the service to date include Disney, 20th Century Fox Television, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, The Weinstein Company, and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. According to ZillionTV, consumers wishing to access the service will pay only a "nominal, one-time, initial service activation fee" for a hardware device that allows delivery of content to the living-room television set and for the service's "motion-sensing" remote control. (Note: for an in-depth overview of ZillionTV's service, see [itvt]'s interview with CEO, Mitch Berman, in Issue 8.33.)
