Dish Network for about a year has been...

Dish Network for about a year has been an “innovator” in “national demographic-addressable advertising,” Warren Schlichting, senior vice president-media sales and analytics, told a recent New York media briefing. Analysts speculate that’s the type of technology Dish will contribute to its partnership with DirecTV, disclosed Monday, to offer a platform for household-tailored ads by political campaigns (CD Jan 28 p6). Of demographic-addressable advertising, “that’s a lot of words strung together there, but what it means is we can actually send an ad to your DVR, just like someone would send a piece of direct mail to your post box,” said Schlichting, a former Comcast executive, at a pre-CES briefing Dec. 11 in New York. “That has been the long-sought-after holy grail of advertising, and it’s gotten a terrific response in the ad industry.” Of all the “advanced advertising products” he has worked on over the years, including in his Comcast career, “this is the only product that has met its first-year projections,” Schlichting said, without saying how much revenue Dish draws from the technology. “If you look at folks who do heavy direct mail, they do list matches -- anonymous, respecting the privacy of the recipient -- and we do exactly the same thing with many of the same data companies.” Whatever the advertiser, “we'll actually send an ad that’s specifically targeted to your household demographics,” he said. “It might be age, income, presence of kids, presence of pets. All told, I think we offer over 600 targeting parameters, eight or 10 of those are the most common.” Dish regards the technology as a “win-win” for advertisers and their targeted consumers, Schlichting said. “It’s much better for the advertiser, because you're not going to have all these folks who are not going to buy your product receiving the ad. From the consumer standpoint, if you're eligible to buy that product, you're going to be more engaged in the advertising itself. It’s not something where the ad necessarily will just wash over you. So we think it works for both our subscriber experience, and obviously the advertisers are just tickled about it.”