Email was the first killer app of the Internet and the Web browser the second. Perhaps Andy hasn’t realised how much money television programmers spend trying to predict what audiences will do. Enormous amounts are spent trying to figure out what television audiences have done. Trying to match the ad with the audience on television is an arcane art – it’s part Voodoo and part seat of the pants intuition built up over years of experience. Television still can’t measure any of this very well. But guess what? You can measure all this stuff very precisely on the Internet. The tools are already being used on high volume Web sites to serve highly tailored content and marketing messages to individual site visitors. Now that television is being delivered digitally and interactively television can use the same tools.
Just like PageMaker on the Macintosh made linotype operators obsolete visitor nerds wielding Web site traffic analysis tools and visitor profiling databases are going to quickly change the way marketing works not only on television but across all media. Right now large media owners are able to serve Web site ads for golf paraphernalia to visitors they know watched the Ryder Cup on television last night. Did your girl friend recently subscribe to Bride magazine? You may start seeing banner ads for formal wear hire or limousine rental services. If you get married you’ll trigger the appearance of banner ads for nappies in about 9 or 10 months.
This smacks of invasion of privacy? Some of this may be a bit close to the edge but with interactive television married to computing and the Internet site owners don’t have to know your name or email address to do some pretty finely tuned one-on-one marketing. This is really direct marketing. If the privacy thing gets a bit sensitive what would be wrong with marketing to groups instead of individuals? Imagine an advertising salesperson calls on a car manufacturer and says something like "I’ve got 200,000 young males that are interested in buying a new car coming to my site next week. I know this because we’ve tracked a group of surfers who have all spent at least an hour on new car related sites. We know this group comes to our site regularly. They watch racing on TV live in affluent neighbourhoods. Would you like to have your ad placed in front of these hungry new car buyers? They’ll be a slight premium charge, of course." This can be done right now with getting any site visitors to register, tell their email address or name. You don’t need any of that to market one-to-one.
TV is where the mass audience is. Internet content delivery technology allows efficient one-to-one marketing. The Internet makes possible very precise measurement of what site visitors do. Tie the technologies together and you have the most potent marketing tool to come along since the printing press. The television marketers have big war chests and will not let this opportunity go by. Andy Grove needs to lead, follow or get out of the way. It’s going to happen.
Email was the first killer app of the Internet and the Web browser the second. Perhaps Andy hasn’t realised how much money television programmers spend trying to predict what audiences will do. Enormous amounts are spent trying to figure out what television audiences have done. Trying to match the ad with the audience on television is an arcane art – it’s part Voodoo and part seat of the pants intuition built up over years of experience. Television still can’t measure any of this very well. But guess what? You can measure all this stuff very precisely on the Internet. The tools are already being used on high volume Web sites to serve highly tailored content and marketing messages to individual site visitors. Now that television is being delivered digitally and interactively television can use the same tools.