BSkyB’s sales-house, Sky Media, has decided to end ‘red-button’ advertising after nine years.  Sky is one of the best-known pay-TV operators offering this application, according to which viewers press the red button on their Sky remote control during a commercial spot to gain extra information about the advertised product, or to receive a brochure or sample in return for entering their details. At its peak in 2006, 160 such campaigns were running on the red-button service.

However, the service was always clunky - particularly when trying to enter personal details via the remote control - and the advent of green-button ‘bookable’ advertising, which allows viewers easily to watch and access long-form ads recorded on their PVRs or in parallel broadcast streams, has rendered the old service obsolete.

While hybridisation of Sky’s HD platform with broadband might have rescued red-button advertising by increasing its functionality and sophistication, comments made last week by Sky confirm that the priority is to use the IP connectivity of its installed HD base to launch a ‘true’ VOD service (‘Anytime+’) later this year.

Sky’s next generation of advertising technology will instead exploit the partitioned hard drive incorporated into later models of the Sky+ box to deliver targeted ad substitution, along the lines of the Sky AdSmart technology currently embedded in its online Sky Player product. This ‘push’-based targeting is unlikely to be very granular, perhaps only addressing homes by zone or region.

It will be interesting to see how Anytime+ integrates this model when it surfaces this year. Because of the quality mis-match between ads delivered over the air and over-the-top video, targeted advertising on VOD pre-roll ads is more likely to be inserted at source. But whether BSkyB’s aim is to make such ads more tightly personalised remains unclear.