The top two stories on TechMeme this morning, both from The New York Times, directly involved the addressable web.
First is the story about the cable industry trying to appear serious, finally, about targetted advertising, and creating a joint venture, known as Canoe, to go after it. News of Canoe has been dripping out over the last couple months. It is an ambitious idea — for the major cable companies to throw their ad inventory into one pool, stir in a little technology, and have a large inventory of highly targettable advertising to sell, presumably at much higher CPM than what is charged today. The idea itself is eminently smart. The problem, as I see it, is twofold: first, media joint ventures tend to fail, and the notion of a cable joint venture brings back memories of @Home; second, well, it is cable, so check back in 5 years when the field trial is completed…
The second article is about a recent comScore study, done for The Times, showing how much data large Internet players collect on its visitors in the aim of serving targetted ads to them.
Although the idea itself certainly is not new, it does feel that the market is moving more tangibly toward making the web the addressable medium it promises to be.
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