Concurrent, FourthWall Media (BIAP) Team on End-to-End Advanced Advertising Solution

VOD and advanced advertising technology provider, Concurrent, and FourthWall Media, the interactive TV technology company formerly known as BIAP (note: for more on the company's rebranding, see the article published on itvt.com, October 26th), announced Tuesday that they have formed a partnership to deliver what they are billing as "the industry's first comprehensive, end-to-end advanced advertising solution for broadband operators."

According to the companies, the new solution--comprised of Concurrent's media data management solutions and FourthWall's ETV Platform, Ad Widgets and TV Widgets--will allow operators to deliver advanced and interactive advertising and to monitor and manage the data from consumer interactions in real time. "Consumers embrace interactivity, and in markets where it's been deployed, the response has been overwhelming," Paul Haddad, VP and general manager of media data and advertising solutions at Concurrent, said in a prepared statement. "We are providing operators and advertisers with an unsurpassed, 360-degree view of the consumer's linear, interactive and video-on-demand (VOD) consumption and enabling new levels of consumer engagement through advertising."

The companies claim that their joint advanced advertising solution addresses a number of challenges currently facing the industry as it attempts to roll out effective targeted ads: they say that it provides real-time data that allows operators and advertisers to measure ad campaign success across multiple markets--thus cutting decision-making time, leading to "smarter" investments of advertising dollars, and maximizing the ability to monetize video content. They also say that the partnership is designed to enable broadband operators to deliver a "multitude" of advanced advertising applications for VOD and interactive TV platforms, including dynamic, targeted VOD ad insertion, telescoping to long-form content, voting and polling, RFI, click-to-call, and more.

According to the companies, the solution provides a secure audience and media data exchange for operators and third-party data stakeholders, such as audience measurement firms, advertisers and Canoe Ventures affiliates. They say that the system provides these data feeds in a way that fully protects subscriber privacy by eliminating all personally identifiable information before the data is exchanged. The solution consists of an EBIF user agent and platform server, VOD and interactive campaign management, linear and interactive viewing data aggregation, and enterprise data warehousing and reporting. Based on SCTE-130 and EBIF specifications, the companies say, the solution provides operators with "an end-to-end, scalable advertising solution with census-based data collection" and has been designed to be forward-compatible with national CAAS initiatives.