WPP’s Xaxis ad exchange to launch synchronised TV and mobile ads

AVOIDING those TV ad breaks by distracting yourself with your smartphone will soon be a thing of the past. New technology will see those ads stalk you.

Second-screen media consumption on smartphones are on the rise.

THERE’S no escape now. Distracting yourself on your smartphone or tablet during the commercial breaks is about to get a lot harder if the ad industry has anything to do with it.

Sick of viewers turning away from the commercials they’ve spent big money on, marketers and advertisers will now beam them into your phone, reported US publication AdAge.

Ad exchange company Xaxis has developed technology which will allow advertisers to sync their TV commercial broadcast with the ads you see on your phone. So if car brand X is playing a commercial featuring the requisite winding roads and happy people, you can expect to see the same ad at the same time on your phone.

You’ll have to go back to doing things the old fashioned way (toilet break or tea run) if you want to avoid the ads during reality TV, news or sports events (because what else do people watch on live TV anymore?).

Xaxis, and other ad exchanges, make money by selling ad inventory to brands looking to reach certain audiences. So while it won’t be able to insert ads on your phone willy nilly, if you happen to be on a website within Xaxis’ network and reach — (including Facebook), then it might be able to serve you the exact ad its clients wants you to see.

News_Image_File: The good old days when viewers could be distracted from commercial breaks by fancy technology.Xaxis told AdAdge it will be able to do this by combining information encompassing TV watching behaviour data, geographical data and indicators as to whether you’re logged into your home wifi (and therefore more likely to be in front of the TV) to predict what channel you might tune into. Scary.

Then Xaxis’s program, named Sync, can call on satellite data to coordinate your mobile ads with the TV ads. According to the AdAge article, a version of the program is already live in the Netherlands and it’s proving to be more effective than regular mobile ads.

Commercial TV broadcasters have been trying a variety of things to keep viewers engaged with the ad content which fund the rest of the programming. With more viewers tuning out in the breaks, more advertising content has been integrated in-program.

It’s understood Australia’s free-to-air TV industry association, Freeview, actually requires hardware manufacturers of devices such as set-top boxes and digital recorders to disable ad-skipping if they want Freeview’s official certification.

While viewers may blanch at the thought of those TV ads chasing you onto a platform people use to escape those very sponsored messages, marketers are going to love it.