Patent ID: 8296793

Claim:
A system for broadcasting advertisements to an audience which comprises: a profile gatherer that creates programme-receiving audience profiles, the profile gatherer operating with an interrogator that interrogates set top boxes with individual IP addresses to determine the nature of programs viewed by the programme receiving audience for each IP address; a profile matcher that matches a given advertisement's target audience profile to one or more target audience profiles for each of a plurality of advertisements; a broadcaster that broadcasts the advertisements in an IP network environment using the target audience profiles and the programme-receiving audience profiles; and a dictator that dictates that the broadcast of certain identical multiple advertisements shall be initiated to different IP addresses within the programme-receiving audience in a same respective advertisement slot during the same broadcast; wherein: said profile matcher operates with an analyzer that analyzes viewer habits for particular IP addresses in order to generate different programme-receiving audience profiles for first and second target IP addresses; and said broadcaster transmits identical multiple advertisements to the first and second target IP addresses for the same advertisement slot, with each advertisement to each target IP address having a Time to Live (TTL) inbuilt expiry mechanism conforming to IP Network TTL protocol, the TTL being utilized to achieve selective play-out of the advertisements in the IP network environment, the selective play-out being achieved by setting the initial TTL values of some of the multiple advertisements to a value at or approaching zero so that those advertisements will expire before they can be played out at the target destination according to IP Network TTL protocol, and setting the TTL of other advertisements to higher initial values so that the other advertisements are successfully played out at the target destination using IP Network TTL protocol, the multiple advertisements including first and second subsets of advertisements respectively associated with the programme-receiving audience profiles of the first and second target IP addresses, the TTL value of at least one of the advertisements associated with the first subset being set differently than the TTL value of at least one of the advertisements associated with the second subset such that the subset of advertisements played out at the first target IP address is different than the subset of advertisements played out at the second target IP address for the same advertisement slot, thereby spoofing the IP network so that it appears to the IP network that all of the advertisements are being played out at both of the first and second target IP addresses even though only separate subsets of the advertisements respectively reach the first and second target IP addresses based on the initial TTL values of the advertisements.