MIAMI \u2013 The old adage \u201cdon\u2019t take it personally\u201d will be upended in the world of advanced television. Respecting viewer attention and guiding them to relevant content are going to be critical elements in perpetuating the ad-supported business model.<\/p>\n
Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what\u2019s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017<\/a> moderated by MediaLink<\/a> Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid<\/a>; Walt Horstman, SVP\/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.<\/p>\n \u201cThere will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,\u201d said Chalozin. \u201cHow do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they\u2019re interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n These elements won\u2019t be optional. \u201cAll of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,\u201d Chalozin added.<\/p>\n Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.<\/p>\n \u201cIt won\u2019t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,\u201d said Chalozin. \u201cI don\u2019t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.\u201d<\/p>\n TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced<\/a> the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all about natural language understanding,\u201d he said. \u201cPick up the remote and say \u2018what\u2019s on TV tonight?\u2019 And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you\u2019re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we\u2019ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.\u201d<\/p>\n This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed \u201csponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. \u201cYou\u2019ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we\u2019ve got. We\u2019re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We\u2019re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.\u201d<\/p>\n