I am in San Francisco this week covering the TV of Tomorrow show being held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  This two day event covers a wide range of topics from emerging technology standards to new end user experiences and revenue potential.

One of the hot topics for day one was addressable advertising.  The panel members were made up of a diverse set of individuals from companies including Quantcast, MTV Networks, Google, Universal McCann, McKinsey and Comcast.  Everyone on the panel agreed that addressable advertising was needed and is the direction that television is moving towards but not a single person could what the best approach is to slice and dice the data and get the creative folks in prepared.

For the uninitiated addressable advertising in the television space is where advertisers want TV to become a more accountable medium for placing their ads.  The web has shown people the way regarding rich datasets around views, click throughs, time spent, etc.  With the advent of interactive television and modern set-top-boxes we are moving towards web like measurement of TV media instead of old school audit based styles which has been traditionally done by folks like Neilsen.

Keval Desai, Product Manager for Google TV Ads, expressed his views on addressable advertising giving consumers more choice and recording the "click stream" of remote control presses.  The panel as a whole flinched at the idea of looking at everything as clicks a-la the web stating it would most likely cheapen the value of brand building.   Several members of the panel pointed out how the web has struggled to find its way for branding building purposes while being really great at running direct response campaigns.

In regards to brand building the woman from MTV Networks brought up a fantastic story about working with BMW and how just about everything for them is long term brand building…, to the tune of 10-15 years out.  They talk about targeting kids that are young and maybe just starting to drive and positioning their cars as a desireable goal that might not be reached until the person has reached their late 20’s or early 30’s.

All parties involved in the TV ad pie are eager to move the technology and industry forward.  Ad planning and creation seems to be one of the major sticking points and the down economy of course is not helping matters.  CMO’s do not have the room to think about extra expenditures on interactive and multiple targeted ads when they are looking down the barrell of the quarter end revenue targets.