Skip to main content

Surprising nobody, Vizio makes moves to fill your TV with targeted ads

Vizio wants to recommend more than just highly rated shows to buyers of its smart TVs: It wants to be able to bring targeted ads to your living room.

The electronics company has formed a partnership with nine media and advertising businesses, aiming to develop an industrywide standard that will allow smart TVs to show targeted ads to viewers around the world.

Recommended Videos

The new standard will address the issue of cookies, which are what allow internet browsers to show targeted ads when you surf the web from tablets, computers, or phones. TVs currently don’t use cookies, which makes it so that ads cannot be targeted to specific viewers.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

So far, every TV manufacturer has used different methods to target ads to viewers who own their brand of TV, making scalability of ad campaigns difficult, because various ad campaigns have to be targeted to owners of specific TV brands.

The ability to specifically target certain homes or demographics with certain ads is understandably exciting to those in the advertising business, as it could make nearly all ad campaigns significantly more effective. Understandably, major companies like Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, CBS, and AT&T-owned Xandr are part of the partnership, which is called Project Open Addressable Ready.

But while this may be great news for TV makers and advertisers, customers are likely to feel the opposite. After all, who wants to be shown targeted ads after spending major dough on a brand new smart TV?

Presently, most advertising on smart TVs is for content, so it is less likely to be seen as seriously annoying to those who own smart TVs. But with the advent and implementation of this new open standard, it is increasingly likely that TVs will be attempting to sell products that don’t simply increase your screen time.

With this new standard will come significant ethical questions. Will smart TVs be listening to conversations in your home and using them to target ads like Facebook and Instagram do with cell phones? What steps will be taken to make sure that individuals’ data is safeguarded? These are all issues that need to be addressed by the Vizio-led partnership.

With so many powerful companies involved, it appears your days of turning on your TV to an ad-free home menu are numbered.

Parker Hall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Parker Hall is a writer and musician from Portland, OR. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin…
Viziogram looks to make your Vizio TV more social
Viziogram photo and video sharing.

Television manufacturer Vizio today unveiled Viziogram — a feature that lets you share videos and photos from your phone directly to someone who has a Vizio TV. VizioGram will be free for users and is now available via upgrades to the Vizio mobile app, and software on the TV itself.

"The inspiration for Viziogram came from my desire to share the moments with my mom, directly to her living room," Vizio founder William Wang said in a press release. "I wanted her to be fully immersed in family moments, even from far away. There is no better way to stay connected than to send Viziogram in 4K HDR to her 65-inch Vizio TV so she can be part of the action."

Read more
MediaTek’s new Pentonic 1000 processor may make your next TV even better
MediaTeck chip logo.

MediaTek today at its annual MediaTek Summit unveiled its newest flagship system on a chip for televisions — with the Pentonic 1000 looking to future-proof your next television.

The multi-core, multi-CPU chipset will enable all kinds of specs and features that you've likely heard of before, but they'll be all tucked inside more TV sets than ever, with more video and audio codecs and broadcast TV standards, all in a single platform. (And, hopefully, enabling lower prices.)

Read more
Vizio has new smart TVs and soundbars for 2023, but the best may be yet to come
Vizio 2023 M-series TV hanging on a wall.

Vizio has announced its 2023 collection of new M-, V-, and D-Series smart TVs and M-Series soundbars, all with trickle-down features from the company's flagship products -- but totally absent were any new P-Series products.

Judging from what the company provided, it's continuing its aggressive pricing strategy while adding some small but valuable improvements, like better Wi-Fi, Bluetooth integration, and expanded variable refresh rate (VRR) support. That's great to see, and anyone considering a TV or soundbar purchase in the next few months now has more options, but it left us wondering, when will Vizio share its enhancements for its top-of-the-line P-Series Quantum and Quantum X TVs?

Read more