COLOGNE — Over the last year, we have reported how Belgian quad-play operator Proximus is trying to balance its broadband and TV subscribers’ customer experience with offering better ad targeting to clients.
Now the outfit is ready to find out how well that balance can work, by lighting up a new addressable TV ad offering for Proximus TV, its TV service.
“Thanks to FreeWheel, we will be able to replace one (ad) contents with another,” Gilles Roelants, business innovation manager at Proximus, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“The aim is to make it completely addressable. We’ll start from linear TV and then we will extend it to live TV. At the start, it will be limited. In the coming two to three years, I hope we will extend (addressable) to perhaps 10% or 15% (of all ads).”
Proximus launched its catch-up TV service a couple of years back. In June, consumer strategy director Jim Casteele told Beet.TV the company was in technical pilots to test programmatic ad sales with broadcast group RTL.
The company is concerned to keep advertising money circulating in Belgium by launching advanced offerings to rival big tech outfits.
“We know our customers’ own behaviour,” Roelants adds. “That’s something we want to provide to broadcaster and advertisers to make more adaptive campaigns. We want to attract new advertisers like regional advertisers.
“Our own customers need to have a better TV experience. That’s the main focus for a telco like Proximus. We hope addressable TV will be able to reduce the ad load due to the fact that we increase the value of each of the spots.”
Bur Roelants says addressable TV, which can serve up ads tailored for individual households based on data, must be careful not to be so specific as to lose the benefit of TV’s mass reach.
This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.
