Bringing the power of internet to TV advertising

Amagi Media Labs uses the concept of targeted advertising on television. This concept is new to TV.

Imagine you are watching a national television channel during prime-time in Mumbai and your friend is doing the same in Pune. While you are greeted with a particular set of commercials in Mumbai, your friend sees a completely different set in Pune. Surprised? Common abroad, this concept - targeted television advertising - is slowly catching on in India.

After three technology entrepreneurs from Coimbatore - K A Srinivasan, Baskar Subramanian and Srividhya Srinivasan - sold their first start-up, Impulsesoft, in 2005, they were fishing for new ideas. After the mandatory hand-holding period that lasted two years, the three friends who had worked for Texas Instruments, Bangalore, before turning entrepreneurs in 1999, began scouting for their next big venture.

"The year was 2008 and digitisation was beginning to gain ground in television," says Srinivasan, 39. We thought, why don't we leverage our skills in technology in a medium such as television?"

This was easier said than done. Television has various sides - production, distribution and advertising. The question was which part of the value chain were the three looking to leverage. They zeroed on advertising - targeted advertising on TV. And, Amagi Media Labs was born.

The venture began commercial rollout in 2009.

The concept

For technology entrepreneurs, targeted advertising isn't a new concept. It is, in fact, a tried and tested model on the internet. Thanks to the ability of websites to gauge the number of people visiting a page, advertisers seeking to place their ads online can determine their targets. For television, however, this isn't the case. The ability to pick and choose audience down to the last person is hardly possible on television networks, especially national TV channels, which are beamed to a large number of households on a daily basis.

There are 210 million TV households in India. Of these, the cable and satellite universe encompasses about 155 million. The rest is accounted for by terrestrial TV homes - channels received via television antennae or overhead aerials. Amagi doesn't work with terrestrial channels such as Doordarshan; it focuses on cable and satellite homes, which include both analog and digital cable.http://www.afaqs.com/news/story/38179_Bringing-the-power-of-internet-to-TV-advertising