This is a revision of an earlier post.

Yes people are advertising in HD, but not many. I would venture to guess, hardly any. I know of 3 or 4 post houses in San Francisco that are taking on HD, although I believe their ad agency client list is fairly short. I worked on an HD project last August and the post house had only 1 agency client that was using HD, the rest was corporate stuff. It's an expensive proposition and since the tsunami hasn't hit yet, I don't think companies are eager to request it.

On the other hand, broadcasters were forced to take it on several years ago, and the film industry has been working with it as well. And of course the sporting world and other high-tech industries are working with HD too.

Producing something in HD is one thing, but the distribution and the actual broadcasting of it is the tricky part. There are virtually no broadcasters - including some of the networks - that have the equipment in place to get it from the tape to your living room. (With the superbowl being an exception.) Coupled with the fact that people are using different formats, advertising seems non-existent. And no station, including the netwroks is investing the high dollars into a an HD server.

I certainly hope a standard format emerges, like 720P (did I say 1080i?). But as long as there's others out there, it will not be in the forseeable future to get advertising distributed on a non-network level.

I'm a bit of a novice in this area, I do work in a top 20 market and even my friends in San Francisco are not working with HD.

I also know that HD sets are starting to sell like hotcakes, and it might behoove a major national client to work with the networks to create and broadcast advertising in HD. I'm talking about an agency negotiating a deal on behalf of ALL their clients to invest in the technology alongside the networks.

If the equation is already being solved, I would be very interested in learning some of the particulars. And, someone please let me know if I'm off base...