Questions for … Seth Haberman

Customizing Television Ads
To Keep Viewers on the Couch

When a television announcer says, "We'll be right back after these commercial messages," some couch potatoes consider it an open invitation to start changing channels. If Seth Haberman has his way, viewers will have a bunch of new incentives to stick around.

Visible World, the New York company of which Mr. Haberman is president and chief executive, has devised technology that offers advertisers the ability to digitally "tweak" their commercials so they contain elements relevant to viewers at the time they are seen. If enough advertisers go for the method, a beer commercial that airs during a baseball game could make mention of the teams that are playing, or a retailer could organize a daily countdown to an end-of-week sale that uses commercials that change every day.

'I have never seen anything interactive that could make you cry,' says Seth Haberman.

To be certain, such ideas could change the way the advertising industry works, from both a creative and a planning standpoint. Will viewers stay tuned? Will ad agencies need to make staff available 24/7 so advertisers can change their ads on a whim? Below, Mr. Haberman, 45 years old, offers some thoughts.

The Wall Street Journal: Many people are wringing their hands over the expected death of the 30-second TV commercial. But your company obviously sees life in this venerable means of promotion. Why?

Mr. Haberman: I have never seen anything interactive that could make you cry. When you seize control, it changes the way your mind is working. I have kids and I used to be a videogame programmer. When my kids play videogames, the heroes are killed a thousand times. There is no emotion other than the [exuberance] of what happens, not a sadness or a real deep emotional level in there. As you move from one level to the other, there is a bridge and they play a two-minute movie and the scene caused a tear to well in my son's eye because the hero dies in the bridge. Four hundred hours of interactive game-playing could not produce what a two-minute passage of narrative can. To create an emotional context, to create an empathy between a person in the audience and something that is going on on the screen is part of a passive narrative experience and not something that can be created in an interactive environment. If you have that as a guideline, you can make much more intelligent decisions if you are a marketer about how to spend your money, or if you are a programmer about what to invest in.

WSJ: If alternatives to TV commercials have been in the offing for a while, why has it taken people so long to act?

Mr. Haberman: If you are in the television ad-sales business, what do you see? You see, with the exception of 2001, year-by-year increases. In the case of broadcast, that's a remarkable record of garnering more dollars for less viewers, and so, if you are a guy who is in that business, you're doing OK. And all of the noise about technology and fragmentation, and all of these things, is not relevant to you. If you look at marketing, and see what percentage of a company's marketing dollars are spent on TV, if you start in the 1970s, the top 50-, 60-something percent of dollars were spent on television. You know what it is today? Today, it's just about 20%. So on a macro marketing level, TV is losing share. On a tactical, micro level, they are making more money. So what's the right thing to do -- continue on making more money or contemplate why dollars are flowing faster to many spaces, many of which are information-centric? For people whose job it is today to sell, they very rightly say, "Look, I'm still delivering stellar performance." If you are someone in the cable business, you have phenomenal growth. Why would I bother today to worry about something that hasn't affected the growth of my business?

WSJ: Advertisers who have sales and specials seem like obvious candidates for your service, but what other sorts of ways might the technology be used?

Mr. Haberman: The first is relating the offers directly to a customer. What the offer is is pretty straightforward to manipulate. The more you can tie them to sales or the more you can tie them to inventory or the more you can tie them to the audience, the more appropriate you are going to be. The second way is if you have relevance in a commercial. If you have a minivan, why is that relevant? For someone, it's about carrying kids around. For someone else, it might be about safety. For someone else, it might be about performance. You are touching upon relevant icons to people. The third, and we are seeing this as the genesis for some creative ideas, is changing the tags and the copy. For Ted airline, we sent different tags and copy to different parts of Chicago. People are starting to come up with some creative ideas. What if I had an idea tailored to different people based on where they live or who they are or what they do? Phil Dusenberry [former chairman of Omnicom Group's BBDO North America and a legendary creative executive] described it as a commercial that's 30 seconds long and a mile deep, which I think encapsulates the essence of what we do.

WSJ: Could one conceive of a situation where an advertiser and an ad agency would have to have someone on duty constantly to watch for opportunities to tweak an ad campaign? When you bring ad agencies in to discuss what you do, how do they react? Do they seem willing to consider such a model?

Mr. Haberman: Some look at it as a problem, and some look at it as an opportunity. Some agencies say, "I want to be in the business of running those dashboards [computer centers that manipulate how the ads are tweaked] because that's going to be serving clients." Some say, "We don't have anyone who can do this." So these changes, and these are not monumental changes, could be different depending on what people want to be and what they want their business to be.