Public Funding for The Zap Corporation Limited

A feasibility study to show the devlopment potential of the Company`s existing US Patent for use within the Amercan targeted advertising market. Exploitation would be through a collaborative arrangement with an existing US company who have been identified and targeted following a business trip to the States last year which was part sponsored by a small UKTI travel grant .

The proposal is to examine the market demand for building a cross platform analytics tool which will seek to pool and analyse internet , televsion and mobile data for targeting purposes . The method is to demonstrate the potential for using the consumption and transaction patterns of individual consumers in a way that delivers a more holistic approach to subscriber profiling. The commercial rationale will suggest that enhanced profiling can provide network operators with a way to monetise consumer data by onselling refined analytics. These will have much value as targeting mechanisms for advertising purposes. Zap will use an existing draft business model and a technology demonstrator which it has recently created to show how this could actually work in practice. It uses basic TV audience viewing data and builds out targetable clusters which can then be used for enhanced advertisement delivery

This project seeks to build an audience profiling tool for use by IPTV ( Internet Protocol delivered Television ) operators. These platforms offer a new way of delivering television over broadband type networks. As such as they use IP technology and have the potential to create and support much more intuitive personalised television services than the existing distribution systems with which they compete - ie terrestrial , satellite and cable. However ownership of the networks is largely in the hands of the global telco community for whom television has not been a traditional core business. They are therefore slow to innovate in this space and as a result IPTV has been characterised by relatively slow growth in most countries since inception around 2003 and a certain dependency on smaller companies to provide drivers for differentiation strategies. This project addresses one such differentiation strategy based on providing the end consumer with a highly targeted television service based exclusively around his/her individual tastes. The key deliverable will be a basic prototype demonstrator which will show what is potentially achievable using real live consumer data sourced from a UK network operator when aggregated and converted into a targeting tool. The underlying key premise is that there is a linkage between TV viewing habits and the likely consumption behaviour patterns of consumers. This information exists in the form of clues which can be deduced from both programme and channel viewing trends evaluated over time. The revealed patterns are totally individual - just like fingerprints - and once properly interpreted and aggregated they are invaluable to any advertiser. The project output will be a software based programme which allows the consumer to reap significant benefit from the technology whilst remaining totally passive – ie they are not requested to interact with the system although the system in turn continually learns more and more about them in real time. The interaction is there but is non – obvious to the consumer and therefore does not distract from their normal enjoyment of TV viewing. Something similar already exists with internet based recommendation technologies but similar developments in the TV space remain immature. This evolution will provide a key next step towards intelligent television networks. The commercial end game is to refine the analytics and the software to a point where this kind of rationale can be used as a basis for making decisions about the likely spending patterns of individuals within households and then households within audience universes. In addition the project will construct a new business model to fit the initiatives into the new IPTV based eco systems. Growth projections from analysts suggest that this type of intuitive analytics will become increasingly dominant for the provision of accurate targeting systems in next generation television platforms over the next five years.