Here on the Experience Architect Weblog, we talk a lot about the cross-channel Customer Experience but we also like to highlight innovation that is occurring within specific channels as well.

Here's a company that is working within the "addressable advertising" space - not just to change the way television advertising works - but to revolutionize the creation and assembly of addressable ads. This has ramifications now, as well as for the web and mobile channels, as well.

Enter Visible World, a company that has successfully pioneered advertising technology to enables the on-the-fly assembly of highly targeted television advertisements to any single broadcast or cable network and any broadband internet destination.

As Tara Walbert, VP and GM of Visible World explained it to Cable 360 last month, it's easiest to think of Visible World's technology as "mail merge for television".

Visible World’s technology streams a set of commercial elements (pieces of a commercial - video, text, audio, etc.) down a dedicated feeder channel from its own production/post production toolsets. The Visible World package then interacts with household data contained within the set top box, including information regarding geography, household behavior, interests and channel/programming preferences. Using this information, the technology applies pre-established variables (essentially business rules) set up within the post-production tools to assemble and deliver the most appropriate ad in real-time.

Visible World offers a suite of tools to enable "Intellispots." The tools include a specialized Ad Server called the "Ad Jukebox," which is used by media companies to serve addressable ads. The company also provides dashboards and production tools, which enable agencies and creative resources to envision, create, control and measure addressable advertisements through participating networks.

Visible World's production tools can also utilize data from other sources (e.g. Prizm data, geographical data - even databases like AccuWeather or client database information to enhance the conditional logic for ad messaging.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how this might be used by the creative advertiser, as Jonah Bloom at Ad Age pointed out this week.

In the arena of addressable advertising there is a host of vendors innovating and competing in the space, including OpenTV, Navic, Invidi and others). In the fray, Visible World has been at this awhile – and their campaign management tools are something to consider for the experience architect of the future. The company promises also to enhance its tools to meet emerging needs within online and mobile channels as well (IPTV).

My readers can demo the technology yourself through a simple web interface here. Just enter USER ID = leigh and PASSWORD = path (all lower case).

I emailed the company to obtain more information about metrics, privacy and integration with traditional advertising infrastructures, but did not hear back in time for this posting.