ABC, which offers full episodes of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Modern Family” and other prime-time hits via its free ABC Player application for Apple’s iPad, has doubled the number of ads in each episode. According to an interview in the Videonuze blog with Disney/ABC Television executive vice president of digital media Albert Cheng, downloads of the free ABC Player are more than 800,000 two months after the iPad launch. Viewers have started more than 4.2 million episodes in that same time frame.
The doubling of ads is based on ABC research showing that 90 percent of respondents prefer ads to paying for content. Meanwhile, texting company textPlus, which ran campaigns for Target, Dove and Ford Lincoln on the iPad, partnered with AdMarvel for ad serving, said that the campaigns delivered average interaction times of 30 seconds and up to 53 seconds. Although textPlus did not reveal specifics, the company said that the interaction rates were up to six times the benchmark for comparable ads on desktop PCs.
