Puerto Rican Cable Op, OneLink, to Deploy BIAP's Ad Widgets Interactive TV Advertising System

Plano, Texas-based interactive TV software provider, BIAP (note: last year, the company--whose name is an acronym for Broadband Interactive Applications--secured a five-year license agreement for its ETV User Agent with Time Warner Cable--see [itvt] Issue 8.23 Part 2B), announced Wednesday that OneLink Communications, a cable operator serving the metropolitan area of San Juan, Puerto Rico, will launch the BIAP Ad Widgets Advertising System on its networks later this summer to enable interactive TV advertising.

According to BIAP, the Ad Widgets system allows 30-second spots to be enhanced with request-for-information (RFI), voting and polling, video-on-demand telescoping (i.e. the ability to jump from a spot to related long-form on-demand content), and click-to-call features. The system is built on the Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) standard, which allows interactive TV applications to run on low-resource legacy set-top boxes. When launched in San Juan, BIAP says, it will become the first-ever deployment of an interactive advertising solution based on the EBIF standard.

In addition to using the system to offer interactive advertising capabilities to its clients, OneLink plans to use those capabilities itself in order to promote various cross-platform products and services to its customers, BIAP says. "Everyone agrees that interactive features built into traditional television advertising will generate incremental revenue," OneLink CEO, Ron Dorchester, said in a prepared statement. "This is why the cable industry created the EBIF standard. We have been running BIAP's EBIF platform since September 2008, and we have tremendous confidence in it. Over the past 10 months it has performed seamlessly supporting various applications, and we are excited about the economic upside of interactive advertising made possible with BIAP's advanced advertising solution." Added BIAP CEO, Tim Peters: "Interactivity is now no longer an experiment. Ad Widgets is an opportunity for the cable operator to earn millions of additional advertising dollars starting now. We are very pleased that this agreement will allow OneLink San Juan to become the first cable operator anywhere to launch a complete interactive advertising system using the EBIF standard."

According to BIAP, Ad Widgets includes media sales support tools that help an operator's sales force demonstrate the value of interactive features to potential advertisers; and also allows sales people to capture key information, along with advertiser orders, during the sales call. All of this information is digested by the campaign management system and the client's commercial runs with the embedded interactive feature, the company says. In addition, it says, state-of-the-art analytics delivered during the campaign allow the advertiser to make changes on the fly to improve performance and drive ROI. The system is also billed as providing a complete post-buy report after the campaign that provides "extraordinary data not previously available."