TM Forum Builds Bridge from Hollywood to Madison Ave.

There are 2,788 highway miles between the advertising mecca known as Madison Avenue in New York and the entertainment capital of the world in Hollywood, Calif. Still, the distance always has seemed short, almost non-existent. The two have worked hand-in-hand for decades. However, network technology is providing new options for the content and come-ons these giants produce and the TM Forum is trying to help service providers wiggle their way in between to build an even better bridge.

The forum itself is evolving to include new types of members from both worlds. In addition to the now 23 cable company members, Rory Sutherland, vice chair of the Ogilvy Group advertising agency in the U.K., joined the forum’s advisory board. The forum also has succeeded in establishing relationships with Hollywood through both its Content Encounter Catalyst project and the inclusion of Alan Bell, CTO of Paramount Pictures, among its keynote speakers at Management World in Nice in May.

Having Bell speak at the conference was interesting enough, but what he said was both important and welcomed by the telecom industry. “We know we need to collaborate with business partners to make sure we all fit within the integrated consumer digital media experience. And the pathway to the consumer is through the telecom networks,” Bell said.

Keith Willetts, chairman of the TM Forum, called Paramount Pictures the vanguard of content distribution and said the industries need to begin in earnest to find standard practices for working together. “We have always had a one-sided business model where the telco delivers services and the end user pays the bill. That’s a great business, but it is changing and it is no longer sustainable on its own. That’s why telecom has to learn how to partner,” he said.

Willetts said that if some markets are running out of steam in terms of growth, they should be looking for things to run on top of the network and that is where partnerships with content companies come into play. And along with that content, there is about $250 billion in potential revenue at stake in the advertising market.

“The telecom industry can be the vehicle through which existing revenue for advertising can flow if it gets this right. There is a one-time opportunity to transform from a communications play to a digital commerce play over the next few years,” Willetts said.

And companies like Paramount are lining up to play. “We will talk to any company with serious opportunity to address another way to bring our content to the public,” Bell said.

He added that Paramount already shares box-office revenue with a number of partners and service providers could be another one of those partners.

For the forum’s part, it has created an advertising council that will act as a steering body for the four market segments within the TM Forum: cable, mobile, IPTV and media companies.

Liaisons with content companies in the various verticals will be handled at the council level. “We need to figure out what is common across all four sectors,” said Kelly Anderson Neiman, head of the Cable Markets Sector at the TM Forum. “And we have to create or compliment existing standards by building processes and best practices.”

Stressing the urgency of the work needed to be done, Neiman said, “We don’t want a council that gets on a conference call every month, we need action. If the ad council stalls, everything stalls,” she said.

The council will try to establish liaisons with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. Through those liaisons, it will address key integration issues. The first perhaps would be settlement. “Settlement is a huge issue for the advertising initiative,” Neiman said.

Another important issue is what Neiman calls micro demographics. She said these demographics can be a way to work around restrictive regulations against providing individual user information. “The service provider could identify a home with a teenager that watches MMA fighting rather than Disney and target that kind of content to a household. That is enhancement of data without personal identification and that is not a violation of customer proprietary network information (CPNI) rules,” Neiman said.

The forum’s advertising council will watch closely the work of groups such as the Cable Access Network Operations Extensions (Canoe) project at CableLabs, which is evaluating common interfaces, such as Tru2way, for advertisers to connect with cable companies and perhaps IPTV providers as well.