Importance

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Abstract

Methods and systems to provide targeted advertising in a subscription television setting, wherein the households that receive the targeted advertisement may retain anonymity. This may be achieved by marrying an anonymization protocol and infrastructure with a mechanism for STB selection and reporting. This anonymizes the set of households that are selected to play an ad, by ensuring that when an STB meets defined criteria and sends a ‘criteria met’ message (during the selection process) or ‘ad shown’ message (during a validation or counting process) to a head end, an STB or household identifier is not revealed, thus anonymizing the household information from the head end. In addition, this allows the head end to control the ad campaign process by advertising only to those households that meet specified criteria, and to count the number of actual instances in which an ad was displayed. The head end is able to count the number of times an ad was displayed, without knowing which particular household(s) viewed the ad.

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First Claim