Almost a decade into its work with addressable television, Cablevision Systems Corp has learned that long-tail networks can greatly over index the biggest networks for reaching audiences with particular attributes and that not all households want scented products.
The key takeaway for Ben Tatta, President of Cablevision Media Sales, is that addressable TV is not for each and every advertiser.
“Not every client is a perfect addressable candidate,” Tatta says during an interview with Beet.TV at the 2016 NAB Show of the National Association of Broadcasters. “That’s one of the misnomers. Early on we thought everything’s going to be addressable.”
Not withstanding the big technological advances the TV industry has made from the days of buying audiences solely based on broad demographic segments, TV remains a mass reach vehicle. Thus the ability of advertisers being able to select very specific audiences “may or may not be terribly relevant” in some product and service categories.
Tatta says he recently got a lesson in olfactory sensibility with the case of a marketer of a scented deodorant. As it turns out, that’s a product for which mass audience reach isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution because there are scent lovers and scent avoiders at the household level.
“Either they like scents in the household or do not. Whoever does or doesn’t usually wins out in terms of what the household chooses,” Tatta says.
Nonetheless, being able to combine addressable at a full census level—meaning every household—combined with the ability to capture audience data and ad exposure data at a household level, has “really transformed the business,” Tatta says.
In addition to addressable, which it started about eight years ago, last year Cablevision rolled out its Optimized Linear offering, which basically allows advertisers to use their own data or third-party data to maximize reach, as MediaPost reports.
“Our focus is to use the data in as broad a fashion as possible. Each advertiser is a little different,” Tatta says.
This video was produced as part of a series on the need for standardization of premium video advertising. The series sponsor is the NAB. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
