Alcatel-Lucent adds targeted advertising to IPTV

Alcatel-Lucent today announced a new system for implementing user-targeted advertising in IPTV services.

A new blade for the equipment vendor’s 7450 Ethernet services switch, available in next year’s first quarter, will allow carriers to insert targeted and interactive advertising into IPTV services. To deliver the full system, Alcatel-Lucent is relying on partners including Invidi Technologies, Microsoft Atlas and ThinkAnalytics.

“You’ll be able to see, second-by-second, what each user has done,” said Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer of Alcatel-Lucent’s Fixed Access group. “Whether they watched an ad or changed away – it will all be dumped into the subscriber intelligence system.”

Weldon anticipates high demand for the system in North America, despite the controversy that has plagued some aspects of targeted advertising of late. (A US House of Representatives committee summoned telecom executives to testify on the issue this summer, and a number of companies have halted their trials of the technology sold by one of the leading suppliers in the space, NebuAd.)

“The only issue is whether you use private information to do the targeting,” Weldon said. “The key is to make sure it’s not based on information that should have been restricted.”

Alcatel’s system delivers ads using what it calls “anonymous subscriber profiles based on service usage and demographic data authorized via an ‘opt-in’ process and retained in a secure, privacy-protected repository by the service provider.”

“[Advertisers] only get aggregated information on the [ad] campaign,” Weldon said -- not specific personal information about individual users.

In fact, Weldon believes consumers are eager for the right kind of targeting, preferring their video-on-demand libraries and, in some cases, program guides, to be tailored around their demonstrated interests. Still, he suggests service providers offer bonus features to users as an enticement to opt in – vouchers or discounts on subscriber fees, for example.