If anything is holding back the growth of addressable television advertising, it’s not lack of inventory. DISH Media Sales, for example, manages some six million 30-second, addressable commercial spots each year, according to its VP of Media Sales & Analytics, Adam Gaynor.
But for advertisers to deal with addressable TV operators and their existing technology infrastructure on a national scale, “It’s just very labor intensive,” Gaynor told Beet.TV in an interview last week in Manhattan during the Beet.TV Leadership Summit on cross-screen addressability.
Following a panel discussion about the state of addressable TV, Gaynor said he heard “loud and clear is that our industry is changing. It is rapidly evolving and becoming more of an audience-based industry.”
To those who would question the place of set-top boxes in today’s viewing environment, Gaynor called them “a critical piece of the audience puzzle” that gives DISH and its advertiser clients access to “premier” first-party data. As evidence, he cited the renewal of DISH’s data deal with comScore and an agreement with Nielsen “where we now supply them our set-top box data so they can use it in different ways and make their product even stronger.”
Then there are the logistics of increasing the scale of addressable TV.
“What I also heard was an interest in how we grow the scale of audience-based buying on TV and how we make it easier to buy television with an audience,” Gaynor said. It’s his opinion that networks won’t be able to partake in the addressable market for “a number of years” until providers sufficiently upgrade their technology.
In the meantime, DISH concentrates on yield management to optimize its inventory. “We’re not running out of inventory,” Gaynor said. “What we do run out of is how we allocate the inventory. We have to make sure that we’re constantly evaluating the different needs of our different business.”
Nonetheless, addressable is definitely a priority but it also represents a juggling act.
“If I can move more inventory into an addressable product that yields higher CPM’s then I’m going to do that at maybe the cost or expense of some lower priced inventory,” Gaynor said. “Ultimately what I need to do is make sure that all the inventory is where it needs to be to satisfy the needs of all the different types of business that we write.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV leadership summit in New York on cross-platform addressability on July 26. The event and the series is presented by DISH Media Sales and Experian Marketing Services. Please visit this page to find additional videos from the summit.
