As we get ready for the TV Innovation Summit in NYC on Sept. 18, we checked in with speaker Chris Pizzurro, head of product, sales and marketing at Canoe Ventures, to get his take on the future of VOD and dynamic advertising–one of the many topics we’ll explore at this full-day conference.

With dynamic VOD advertising now a reality, how can cable operators and programmers take it to the next level?

Now that the “basics” are there, they are working together to drive overall viewership to programs.  For instance, having linear drive to VOD and having VOD drive to linear. Some operators and programmers are working on programming stunts that do just that.
On the ad technology capabilities side, operators and programmers are working together to prep the VOD inventory to take full advantage of the Canoe DAI platform to have the maximum flexibility in how ad units are bought and sold.

How does the consumer trend toward “binging” on TV content affect the VOD landscape, especially from an advertising perspective?

Consumer trends to VOD viewing are way up year over year, and “binging” is part of it. Like any medium, when consumer eyeballs are trending up, it becomes attractive to advertisers. Canoe is seeing that in dynamic VOD. We see some of our programmers increasing their ad load, which tells us the advertising demand is increasing.

What’s the biggest challenge that Canoe faces as it evangelizes to the industry? What areas require the most education and outreach?

We still need to get to more agency and more marketers. Canoe is taking a leadership position here and is planning more agency seminars. We had an agency VOD DAI Seminar back in April of last year in New York. It was so successful that we are planning 3 more of them in New York, LA and Chicago in the Fall. Many agency people still think of the old manual VOD. They do not know that ads can now be swapped out on the fly and that viewed ad impression reporting comes back from Canoe the next day.

Do you view OTT as a competitor or a partner to VOD? And how does the emergence of subscription VOD (Hulu, Amazon, etc) change the overall ad-serving landscape?

The consumer has many choices. We believe free VOD has its own unique value to a consumer in its convenience. For instance, they do not need to switch back and forth between devices. It is all right there on one remote. And it is free with their cable subscription. No other box to buy and no additional monthly fees.

How do you see Canoe’s services evolving over the next 2 or 3 years? What are some new areas that could emerge around VOD and dynamic ads?

Now that we have set-top VOD well on its way, we have recently expanded the Canoe service to managed cable IP. This is where we leverage the same ad workflow as set-top box VOD, but now we can also send that same ad to any IP device in the home that the Operator  may have their VOD service running on. Our programmers have responded well to this capability. We are also looking into what targeting capabilities are of value to our Programmers. For instance, being able to target a campaign by age/sex demo is something we are working on.

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