LAS VEGAS — Innovations in addressable TV have grown tremendously in the last ten years, and now Weather Channel is aiming to be the first fully addressable cable TV network, says Curt Hecht, Global Chief Revenue Officer at Weather Channel, in an interview with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.
Weather Channel has experimented with addressable ads, but most of that work has been manual so far. Now, with improvements via trading desks, workflow and better ad automation, there are new opportunities for addressable TV to grow. “The industry as a whole is behind this notion of more data-driven approaches to marketing advertising,” he says. Addressable TV advancements marry many of the methods of programmatic ad buying that has become so vital in digital advertising today. This type of refinement could work well for Weather Channel, Hecht says, since weather is something so many people care about.
“The notion of being able to bring that beyond mobile and PC properties to TV could be extraordinarily liberating. The currency is demographics. For a company like Weather being able to focus on specific audiences on an addressable basis could be a great growth lever,” he says. “We embrace it and are very open to working with different agency partners.”
