By Anandan Jayaraman

"Customers buy for their reasons, not yours," said Orvel Ray Wilson, best-selling author and marketing guru.

In spite of increasing market awareness around targeted and relevant advertising, multi-million dollar advertising budgets are routinely squandered. Click-through rates and sales conversion rates on interactive advertising are still sub-optimal and well below the intrinsic potential offered by the medium. What if every ad is not an interruption but a relevant, targeted and carefully orchestrated campaign optimized for that specific customer context? Can interactive advertising make the transition from a nuisance factor and a necessary evil to a compelling engagement platform?

There is significant opportunity to improve ad conversion rates on Internet, mobile, IPTV and other interactive media by delivering a customized experience based on deep customer insight extracted from a 360 degree view of the customer. With deep customer insight, publishers and ad networks can deliver more targeted advertising, enjoy increased CPM / CPA rates and advertisers can realize better and faster ROI.

What is this deep customer insight and how does it help? Let us look at some examples.

The business executive from Japan who just landed in Spain receives an advertisement on video MMS on the best Japanese cuisine options around the hotel that he had booked using mobile broadband.

The user searching for a 60” HDTV and browsing HDTV offerings on his computer gets targeted ads on mobile with coupons from electronic retailers. He is exposed to a 30 second HDTV spot on IPTV from a manufacturer running a special promotion.

A feature phone user who has been searching for high end smart phones is exposed to an orchestrated campaign of a specific manufacturer’s smart phone ads on IPTV and display ads on broadband. The frequency is capped and rationed over time to avoid over-exposure.

More than any other entity in the advertising eco-system, the telecommunications service provider is in an unique position to understand the customer, his intent, interests, needs and preferences. Service providers are sitting on petabytes of data containing information about every subscriber including buying habits, payment preferences, travel locations, browsing, behavioral and consumption patterns.

However, despite a lot of talk about using customer data as a “strategic asset,” providers have made little progress on monetizing this goldmine and leveraging these insights. How can the service provider transform from a passive observer to an activist visionary who can redefine the advertising value chain?