Making the adverts our customers see more relevant

At Sky, we’re always looking for ways to use technology to give our customers a better experience, from screening the top Premier League games in 3D to offering hundreds of the top Hollywood movies on demand and on the go.  The award-winning Sky+HD box – which is now in more than 7 million homes – underpins many of the innovations our customers experience.

Over the coming months, we’ll be taking advantage of the capabilities of the Sky+HD box to roll out a new advertising service called Sky AdSmart.  This new service will help advertisers better tailor the ads they run, based on the likely interests and circumstances of individual Sky homes.  Essentially, this means that customers should see more of the products they’re interested in, and less of those they’re not.

AdSmart will work by taking some of the information customers share with us – such as age, gender, post-code or TV package – to build up a picture of what types of products or services might be of interest to them.  We will then substitute generic adverts running in live ad breaks with ones which we believe will be more tailored to a customer’s interests and circumstances. So, for instance, if someone already has Sky Sports, we’ll try and make sure they don’t see any more Sky Sports ads. Instead, they might receive a promo for a new drama series on Sky Atlantic.

The service also has the potential to help local businesses like florists or restaurants advertise on the TV for the first time, by allowing them to focus in on those households in the immediate area.   The bigger brands that already advertise on TV will be able better to tailor their ads so they are more likely to be relevant to specific types of Sky home.  For example, a Sky home with kids could be served an ad for a particular brand’s family car, while a young couple next door might see an ad for a sportier model.

This is all possible thanks to the demographic information our customers have shared with us, along with other publicly available data.  To be clear, this is not about using any information on an individual’s viewing behaviour, nor sharing any customer data with other companies.  Rather, we help advertisers group together those Sky homes that share common characteristics, so they can think about which ad might be most appropriate.

As ever, our customers have a choice over whether or not to receive new services like Sky AdSmart.  We think many of our customers will welcome more tailored ad breaks, but it might not be right for everyone.  That’s why we’ve written to all our customers to explain what we plan to do, and to give them the opportunity to provide us with their preference.   We will, of course, only offer Sky AdSmart to those homes that have provided their consent – and customers can opt in or out at any time.   More information on this can be found here.

With live TV viewing as popular as it’s ever been, being able to insert more relevant ads into broadcasts is an exciting development.  Although our customers might not think of tailored advertising in quite the same way as Sky On Demand or Sky Go, we think it’s just another step forward that makes the Sky experience even better for customers.