MUMBAI: In its intension to bring targeted television advertising to the national level,
DirecTV has reached an agreement with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG).

With the agreement in place, SMG will offer its clients like Coca-Cola, GM and Procter & Gamble the opportunity to provide what it expressed in a statement as "scaled, household-addressable advertising."

Both SMG and DirecTV have said that after the initial testing is completed next year, these ads will reach 10 million subscribers with DVRs based on demographic data and other criteria in the second half of the year.

The Invidi technology, that primarily uses Neilson data, will support this system at the initial stage. Further for more detailed customer segmentations, third-party data providers including Experian can be used as well.

Said Starcom Media Vest chief executive Laura Desmond, "We are finally at the tipping point. Advertisers‘ biggest complaint so far has been that many tests of this service haven‘t been big enough in terms of scale."
A test conducted by SMG and Comcast last year covering 60,000 households showed that homes with targeted ads switched stations 32 per cent less often than the norm.
According to projections from Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, addressable ads will total $11.5 billion in the US by 2015.

DirecTV has been in plans on this for three years.