A set of guidelines aimed at standardizing addressable advertising was released by Go Addressable, an outfit set up by cable and satellite distributors plus smart-TV set maker Vizio.
Despite the obstacles created by having to deal with different distributors in order to stitch together a national campaign, addressable advertising is expected to generate $7.5 billion in global spending this year, according to a report from Deloitte.
The group also identified vendors for data matching that work across operators (LiveRamp, Experian and Epsilon) and attribution vendors (LiveRamp, Experian and Neustar). More vendors may be added in the future.
“While addressable has been around for 10 years, it’s still in its early stages, and because of that, many providers are using different criteria and guidelines to deploy it,” said Matt Van Houten, senior VP, product, operations and business development, DirecTV Advertising. “This has caused unnecessary complication and friction in the process. With the unveiling of our easily accessible industry guidelines, all advertisers can be comfortable with the medium, knowing these guidelines are supported by many of the distributors operating in the space. And this is exactly why Go Addressable was created. By working together, we are providing more paths to acceleration for the medium.”
DirecTV is one of the members of the Go Addressable initiative, along with Altice USA, Charter Communications’ Spectrum Reach, Comcast, Cox, Dish Media, Frontier and Vizio.
Also: AMC, WE tv Go Addressable in All Original Programming
The phrase “addressable advertising” itself apparently needed some definition, so the group noted that audience addressable refers to the ability to dynamically deliver various advertisers’ advertisements targeted to different audiences in different homes all watching the same network at the same time, while creative versioning describes offering the ability to deliver different creative messages to different audiences (households) within the same spot for a single advertiser.
The group said that certain video formats should be used by all programmers and distributors. The specs call for a MPEG-2 stream, using MPEG-1 Layer 2 for audio, a frame rate of 1080i and an image width and height of 1920 by 1080. The distributors can dynamically insert standard 30-second spots.
Each distributor also has an established process to ensure that ads delivered addressable have a chance to be seen and are not being inserted or counted when the TV is off or when/if viewers are no longer watching, the group said.
“Consistency is critical in advertising and is something that previously hasn’t existed for addressable campaigns, which are often executed across multiple operators,“ Paramount executive VP, advanced media Julian Zilberbrand said. ”The industry guidelines created by Go Addressable give programmers a roadmap and guidelines that can be utilized when activating addressable campaigns across a national footprint. There is a lot of exciting work happening and we look forward to participating in the programmer council as we continue to scale our already robust addressable TV advertising capabilities for our clients.” ■
