Addressable TV ads, the kind that are aimed at individual households by cable and satellite providers and streaming TV services, continue to grow as a category, offering brands the promise of targeting the right audience and digital-style reporting of business results. Advertisers today can reach a majority of households by running addressable ads across the available platforms, aiming at targets using more precise characteristics than Nielsen age and gender demographics.
A panel of experts, though, point out that there are still lags in stitching together different delivery platforms and in judging how successful a campaign is while it is still going on. B+C business editor Jon Lafayette led the panel at the Advanced Advertising event during Virtual Fall TV 2021.
“Where we sit now is how to bring it all together so that from an advertiser’s perspective, an addressable ad can run across multiple platforms,” Adam Gaynor, veteran of the category who is now VP of network partnerships and head of addressable at TV-set maker Vizio. “I think we‘re there. We have enough homes, we have enough screens, I think there’s enough tech that’s out there. It’s just piecing it all together.”
Brian Lin, senior VP of product management and advanced advertising sales at Univision Communications, agreed that “bridging it all together is the hard part.” Tim Myers, head of strategy and product at Dish Media, said it‘s important to speed up the feedback on a campaign‘s results, or provide early indicators of success or advice on what to tweak. “That is one of the complaints that we hear from agencies, it just takes a lot of time to get results back.”
Daniel Church, head of advanced TV product at ad-tech provider Beachfront Media, joked that he was “very happy that I enjoy integrating systems and it’s one of the joys of my life, because it’s a lot of integrations across the board.” He did offer praise for industry partnerships working to make those integrations easier, especially Project OAR (which Beachfront and Vizio have worked with) and the Go Addressable initiative. Interoperability and standardization will continue to be priorities for addressable TV backers in 2022, Church and Gaynor said.
“The technology’s there, and the value prop is there, too,” Lin said.
Virtual Fall TV 2021 (free to attend) continues this week with the Next TV Summit and the 17th annual Hispanic Television Summit, and event-session replays are available to attendees. ■
