Cisco takes Sky AdSmart to US customers at CES

Cisco has partnered with European pay TV operator Sky at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to showcase the pair’s approach to addressable TV advertising with Sky AdSmart.

The pair demonstrated Sky AdSmart’s ability to target different ads to different households watching the same live linear TV program based on over 150 different demographic criteria. Sky has been operating Sky AdSmart in the UK for the past year.

According to Cisco, since the system launched, 357 UK advertisers have run around 1,000 individual campaigns using the technology. Of the advertisers that have used Sky AdSmart to date, 77% had not previously advertised on TV or had not advertised with Sky. In total, 895 million Sky AdSmart impressions have been served in Sky homes, Cisco said.

Cisco is showing the platform, jointly developed by it and Sky, to its customers and partners this week at CES. AdSmart stores targeted ads on DVRs in the user’s home and signals which ad should be inserted into the broadcast stream. Advertisers can choose from various factors like age, location, and lifestyle when choosing their audience, and data is derived from a combination of Sky’s own data and publicly available information from consumer profiler experts such as Experian.

Sky partnered with Cisco to create new service control elements for the Sky AdSmart ecosystem and integrate them into Sky’s existing video infrastructure, which included both internally-developed and third party components.

“Our work with Cisco to develop Sky AdSmart is helping us make TV more relevant to more brands, by enabling them to segment the audience in this way for the first time,” said Andrew Griffith, group CFO and managing director, commercial business at Sky.

“Our combined technology has made TV advertising accessible to brands that had previously thought TV too broad a medium, as well as to local advertisers who felt TV wasn’t focused enough for them. Those brands that have made the leap are seeing huge success with Sky AdSmart and we look forward to advertisers spending more with us in 2015.”