AOL building platform to target ads at screen audiences

AOL's bid to ramp up its share of a still nascent mobile media market is the big focus at the moment for its chief executive Tim Armstrong, who combined a trip to AOL's London base last week with a visit to its Dublin offices. While mobiles might be a "second brain" for consumers, however, AOL also has an eye on bigger screens.

AOL engineers in Dublin contributed to the development of One by AOL, an advertising platform that lets brands target their ads at highly specific audiences across all screens, including television, using automated data-driven methods.

Australia has become a test ground in this area for AOL, which last year launched an automated, data-driven television platform – aka a “programmatic” way of selling advertising – in conjunction with Australian TV sales house MCN.

Ultimately, the same kind of programmatic ad technology common in the digital display ad market is expected to completely change the television business – it just won’t happen overnight.

“It is probably going to take a long time, it might take a couple of decades, but it seems to me that the delivery of video will become IP-based overall,” says Armstrong, “and once it is IP-based, you have operating systems that are running linear TV to consumers.”

“A natural merger” in the software behind digital advertising and the business of selling television advertising will then occur.