Orduna: Canoe Ventures to Publish Interactive TV Ad Template and Interfaces Later This Summer

Canoe Ventures--the company that is tasked with implementing Project Canoe, the US cable industry's initiative to create a national unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising (it is backed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House)--will later this summer publish a "template" to support an EBIF-based interactive TV advertising campaign that is slated to begin in the fourth quarter, Canoe Ventures CTO, Arthur Orduna, announced at Light Reading's Cable Next-Gen Video Strategies conference last week, according to a report by Jeff Baumgartner, editor of Light Reading's Cable Digital News.

According to Orduna, a number of interfaces related to the template are currently in draft form and will shortly be released to ad agencies and programmers that are working with Canoe and its MSO parents. Canoe recently revealed that it has, for the time being, shifted its focus away from addressable advertising and onto EBIF-based interactive TV advertising, as a result of various problems it discovered during its attempts to launch its Community Addressable Messaging product (note: for more on those problems, see the article posted on itvt.com, June 18th). Orduna told conference attendees that the template (which will be for an opt-in, RFI-type iAdvertising format) and its interfaces will need to be simple, in order to ensure that they are easily scalable: "Frankly, [EBIF] is not that hard a technology per se," he explained. "It was designed to be relatively simple. The real challenge is doing it at scale. That's why we need to make these templates simple." The template will be supported via a downloadable Web-based "Producer's Tool Kit," Orduna said, that will be available to ad agencies and broadcasters that are interested in launching interactive TV ad campaigns. He again stressed that the tool kit would have to be simple in order to encourage broad and fast uptake.