Basically what they will do is log what kind of shows you are watching and together with other information they have on you they want to offer you more targeted advertisements.

And I believe that this is a good idea. I would like to have an intelligent service help me filter out what I would be interested in, and just skip the other – to some extent…

And here comes the problem. If the service is not intelligent enough so I do not understand what kind of ads I get I will get irritated. And then you have the basic problem with us humans… we don’t like to be left out. And we want to be able to make the choice about what we should and should not see.

If you use iTunes you are familiar with Genius recommendations. Ever wondered about them? The good thing is that it has the link to why when you see it. “You have music by XXXX” That why we recommend you “YYYY”. The problem here is that your taste of music is probably more sophisticated than that and therefore you get recommended lots of albums you never would have even thought of buying.

No lets transfer this to SKY TV. One important difference (and I say this before even seen the SKY solution) is that when you see a commercial on SKY you will not get a link (an explanation) for why this ad came up, instead of something else. On iTunes you can choose to use Genius, on SKY you will not have a choice. So you cant train the system (as Genius lets you do) to give you more relevant ads (and the feeling of control).

Just based on this simple fact I think SKY is going to have a lot of angry customers when they do this. And the customers will follow them very closely and react if they do not understand why they are seeing a specific ad.

So again: This is the way to go but HOW they implement it will determine the success.

Behavioural advertising comes to Sky TV