Know that feeling seeing a really nice sweater on a website, but closing the tab because you thought it was too expensive? And then, five minutes later while scrolling through Facebook, seeing that exact sweater pop-up on the side of your feed again? We already know that when on the internet, you can find personalized ads. You can choose to opt out of these, by ticking off the right box at the cookies pop-up, that show up when opening a new website. We are familiar with these kinds of personal ads, but right now KPN is testing personalized ads on television¹.
It will be possible to show ads for certain tv-shows or documentaries, based on what you have watched before and other personal information. KPN also promises customers to see the same advertisement less often. Right now you could watch a movie on live television and see the same commercial in every break, which means about every 20 minutes. Personalized ads would reduce this, while also providing you with advertisements that might appeal more to your personal interests.
This sounds promising, however a difficulty with this is the length of the commercial break. The length of the personalized advertisements needs to be exactly the same as the amount of time planned for a specific commercial break. Otherwise, you would have different starting and ending times of the television shows, which would lead to big planning problems especially with live television. Another difficulty is gathering data to personalize the advertisements. Gathering data online is easier than gathering data from these type of customers. This might be partially solved if a television network combines online data and customer data, but that depends on a tight relationship with the customer. The growing concern around privacy is making it generally more difficult for companies to use customer data as well².
To conclude, personalized advertisements are currently being tested by KPN and have interesting possibilities for the future. However, there are some difficulties to this, which might explain why competitor Ziggo does not have any plans for personalized television advertisements (yet).
1. https://nos.nl/artikel/2252164-je-buurman-krijgt-bij-kpn-straks-andere-tv-reclames-te-zien-dan-jij.html
2. https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/industry/retail-distribution/sharing-personal-information-consumer-privacy-concerns.html
