1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to content delivery systems and advertising management on such content delivery systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advertising in traditional content delivery systems, such as radio and television, has existed since the inception of these media as a viable mass-market business. Advertisers and radio and television networks routinely collect data on program and advertisement viewing, using such services as the Nielsen rating system. The collected data is used to determine statistics, which in turn are used as an aid to target advertising to the most appropriate audience. Basically, the statistics are used to develop demographic profiles for television and radio programs, and advertisers then buy advertising time on the programs likely to be watched by the advertiser's targeted audiences. However, in this approach, there is no immediate feedback concerning the effectiveness of any advertisement, nor is there any direct interaction with the intended audience.
However, new technological advances are challenging the traditional advertising model. For example, television hard disk recorders, such as those marketed by Tivo and ReplayTV, allow viewers to manipulate the manner in which they receive and view commercial television broadcasts, including truncating and skipping advertisements. This capability challenges the current content distribution model of free or small monthly fee based television broadcasting sustained by paid advertising, by changing passive viewers into active viewers who can skip and reject commercials at will, thus redefining the value of the entire programming grid and “prime time” television and making audience metering significantly harder. Channel proliferation is also making it harder and harder for advertisers to reach their desired targets, increasing the cost of delivering a given message to a demographic subset of the audience.
Furthermore, the Internet and the World Wide Web have created new types of media and media delivery systems. The new media has resulted in a need for new types of advertising. For example, on the World Wide Web, advertising banners are commonly presented along with information in web pages, and by clicking on the banner the user may direct its browser to relocate to the advertiser's website. Banner ads, however, are generally acknowledged to have less impact than television ads because of the limited ability of a banner ad to tell a story.
Furthermore, some web sites such as mypoints.com allow site visitors to earn value by clicking on banner ads, joining certain mailing lists or groups, or activating other marketing opportunities while at the site. However, these web sites generally do not have compelling content like movies, music or short animations provided at or through the site. Rather, visitors come to the site primarily to activate the ads and other marketing gimmicks in exchange for earning value. This is different from traditional media such as broadcast television where viewers tune in primarily to enjoy the content provided and the advertising is secondary in importance.
It is also generally acknowledged that traditional types of advertising are riot appropriate for the Internet and World Wide Web, in part because they do not take advantage of the interactive capability of the new technology. For example, the two-way interactive nature of the Internet allows advertisers to compile statistics on individual users and/or networks and to track the use and effectiveness of advertisements. This data can be used to increase the effectiveness of advertisements and to more precisely target advertisements to particular groups. Traditional advertising does not take advantage of these advances.
Moreover, advances in compression technology allow the creation of new forms of content delivery systems that are approaching the quality and capabilities of traditional media, such as TV and radio. Examples of such systems include the Hughes DirecTV satellite television system, the TCI digital cable television infrastructure, and the transmission of audio files as MP3 encoded data over the Internet for Internet radio applications. However, unlike traditional television and radio, these new systems transmit digital data. The digital nature of these content delivery systems, when coupled with an infrastructure capable of two-way communication such as cable or the Internet, enables applications that extend media from a broadcasting paradigm into an interactive paradigm. Examples of this new kind of application include Real Network's Real Player and Microsoft's Media Player with streaming video capabilities, which have enabled media playback for thousands of web sites, and which are starting to evolve into fully interactive content delivery networks, such as Real's website www.real.com, Atom Film's website www.atomfilms.com, Ifilm (www.ifilm.com) and Yahoo's www.broadcast.com. These new ventures are trying to use a combination of subscription fees and paid advertising in the form of short commercials attached to each video segment played by the user, but are still significantly limited by the quality and bandwidth of the current global Internet infrastructure, and are focused in small segments to be viewed in a computer, as opposed to a more general entertainment network to be viewed on a television screen.
On the animation side, Macromedia's Flash player has received significant recognition as a 2D animation standard for the web. Macromedia's content site, Shockwave.com, is another example of how the combination of interaction, content and the Internet are creating new platforms for media delivery. Companies such as Pulse 3D and Shout Interactive are attempting to create 3D graphics equivalents of the Flash player in order to enable similar experiences for 3D graphics rendering. In the animation websites, most of the advertising is still limited to banners and loading screens, but there is a rapidly evolving infrastructure for content playback that advertising will no doubt try to leverage in the near future.
Thus, there is a need for approaches that enable effective advertising over digital content delivery networks. In particular, there is a need for advertising that is compelling for the user and also takes advantage of the recent advances in interactivity and data collection.