The words “sophisticated” and “manual” would seem to be mutually exclusive, yet they go hand in hand with addressable television advertising. That’s because everything’s manual with addressable at this stage of its evolution, according to Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media.
“So you could argue that the most sophisticated and exciting part of the television business is the most manual,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.TV. “There’s more automation or automatic execution with legacy national television than there is with household level addressable television.”
In the interview, Furious Corp. CEO and Founder Ashley J. Swartz asks Bologna whether true, unduplicated reach exists for cross-screen addressable ad campaigns. “We’re there today,” he says.
Working with individual multichannel video programming distributors, MODI takes audience segments like “in the market to buy a luxury vehicle,” or “purchased soup in the past 30 days.” It identifies those segments on TV and then replicates them on mobile devices.
“We measure them together via an Experian or Acxiom. And what we end up with is unduplicated reach and frequency of an addressable spot cross device. So it is here today,” Bologna says.
Asked how everything comes together from a systems and workflow perspective, Bologna says, “Everything’s manual. There’s nothing coming together from a systems perspective.”
His crew toils away in Excel spreadsheets and its pivot tables to make addressable work. “I hope to change that,” Bologna says. “I don’t know how to fix that myself. I’m relying on other people to figure out that.”
This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.
