Arthur Orduna has joined Canoe Ventures – which is working on building an advanced, nationwide advertising platform – as the company’s chief technical officer.
Prior to Canoe Ventures, Orduna was Advance/Newhouse’s senior vice president of policy and product. Advance/Newhouse controls privately held Bright House Networks, which was one of six cable operators – along with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter Communications and Cablevision – that reportedly put $150 million toward Canoe Ventures when it was first conceived as Project Canoe more than a year ago.
Orduna had served as the technical lead for the cable operators for Project Canoe and Canoe Ventures prior to becoming CTO.
Canoe Ventures officially formed in June, while CEO David Verklin started work in the Manhattan headquarters on August 4.
“Officially, Canoe Ventures is open for business,” Orduna said earlier this month to CED. “I think over the coming months you’ll hear David Verklin provide more details about our business intent and our specific objectives and goals. On the technical side, I will be supporting him on the technical details, architectural issues and standards we’ll need to support those goals.
“But overall, technically, as well as business-wide, the most important part is the ability for the MSOs to present themselves, and act in the most effective manner, as a national footprint,” Orduna said.
Verklin and Canoe Ventures are working on a plan to create a nationwide platform for addressable, or targeted, advertising, which will in turn stem the flow of advertising dollars to the Internet. Canoe Ventures will not only benefit cable operators, but also programmers, ad agencies, and even the consumers in front of the TVs who are watching ads that are specific to their interest.
Orduna wasn’t able to go into many details about Canoe Ventures’ plans from a technology standpoint, but he did acknowledge that tru2way, including OCAP and EBIF applications, SCTE 130 and VOD Metadata Content Specification 2.0, will play key roles.
Orduna said SCTE 130 will play a crucial role in providing the extensibility of existing advertising functions today, and at the system level for the advanced advertising data collecting functionality that both Canoe Ventures and cable operators will need. It will also enable individual MSOs the ability to take advantage of advanced advertising for local ad and individual marketing purposes.
While Orduna’s hiring is out in the open, Vicki Lins, who has been moonlighting as the marketing and communications lead for Canoe Ventures while also working as Comcast Spotlight’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, said Verklin is currently assembling the rest of his executive team and expects to make personnel announcements next month.
“We’re very much in transition right now,” Lins said to CED. “It’s not your typical startup in that we’re not going from nothing to everything overnight. Project Canoe has been in the works for quite some time with a team of people working on it, and it’s been an ongoing collaboration within the industry.
“David [Verklin] is starting to put structure and definition around the business as we know it moving forward. David’s strategy and vision will play out over the next couple of months, and we’ll start talking about it very actively once that starts to happen.”
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