More than one-third of U.S. homes have at least one TV connected to the Internet, and as that figure rises advertising innovations experts are grappling with how to move brands into the new medium, says Rex Harris, Innovations Supervisor at SMGx, a unit of Starcom MediaVest, in an interview with Beet.TV.
We caught up with him at the AppNation conference in New York this week for an exclusive chat about the future of advertising on connected devices.
"The adoption is ramping up and we are tying to figure out what consumers are doing with these conencted devices and what ad opportunities exist," Harris tells us in this video interview. Connected TV usage is still nascent and consists largely of viewing Hulu and Netflix, but social TV and second-screen apps will likely broaden the behavior, he says. The Xbox is another area SMGx is tracking, especially given the consumer adoption of that device. After the TV set, the Xbox is the second most popular device for viewing online video, according to a recent study from online video technology provider FreeWheel. In fact, Leichtman Research Group also noted that gaming consoles are driving a large portion of the adoption of connected TVs.
Harris also tells us that SMGx is tracking how tablet video usage intersects with connected TVs.
