Wouldn’t it be nice to run your reverse mortgage commercial only in front of the viewers who eligible or had interest in the product?  Soon cable TV operators will be able to offer "addressable" ads onto the television.  "It hasn’t really been done on TV before," said Mike Eason, chief data officer of Canoe Ventures, a group formed by the nation’s six largest cable operators to launch targeted and interactive ads on a national platform starting this summer.

By the end of the year, Canoe will start rolling out ads that let consumers request information about advertisements they seen on TV.  Ultimately, cable will target down to the ZIP code and individual household, although when that will happen isn’t clear.

As an example of the way it will work, Yahoo Tech writer Deborah Yao uses the following example:

That means eventually, while you and your neighbor could be watching "Iron Chef" on Food Network at the same time, you might see a commercial for golf clubs, because you had tuned to The Golf Channel earlier, while your neighbor would see an ad for Disney vacations, because she has young children who like to watch Nickelodeon.

Experian, a data collection and credit scoring company, will cull profile data and match them with information advertisers have on their consumers. The advertiser won’t know who will get the ads. Advertisers can also provide a customer list to Experian, which then can make a match. So an ad can be targeted toward someone who just ended a lease with Ford.

Pretty interesting…

Cable’s answer to online’s ad success: targeting