Cogeco, a Canadian cable company, is attempting to sharpen the blunt instrument of TV advertising by providing demographic-based advertising to cable subscribers that can be split into different segments that can be shown to different audience. So while you might see one ad during a particular advertising time slot of a TV show, other people you know might be watching a completely different ad.

While this is probably a little creepy to most people, in that your cable company knows this much about you (although it should come as little surprise, given the amount of time and energy companies spend to learn how to get you to spend your money with them), this seems like a natural and necessary progression for TV advertising. TV ads are still the bread-and-butter for most companies that want to advertise, and they’re often wasting ad cash showing their ads to people who couldn’t care less about their products.

In many ways, this seems to be taking the contextual advertising that is standard fare on the web and moving it over to TV. Always interesting when you start to see what was once a ‘start-up’ ad space like the web start to influence the more mainstream ad spaces like TV.