MIAMI – Verizon was ahead of the technology curve when it began offering fiber directly to the home with Fios (fiber optic service) in 2005. Now that its Fios addressable television offering just celebrated its one-year anniversary, the company is able to tout the benefits that speed brings to advanced TV targeting.
Because it’s a wired network that doesn’t rely on satellite technology, “we have closer to a real-time connection to the household,” says Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV at Oath, the new Verizon subsidiary.
When the Fios addressable offering became available in the fall of 2016, it added some 4.5 million homes to the addressable TV ecosystem—increasing it by about 14%, Hurwitz explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
“We have great representation in areas where some of the other players in addressable are under-represented, particularly in major cities where satellite dishes are a little less commonly seen,” says Hurwitz.
Speed has its advantages, among them the ability to deploy campaigns in days as opposed to weeks, swapping out creative quickly and swiftly generating data for back-end campaign attribution.
“We also have reporting from 100% of set-top boxes,” says Hurwitz. “So there’s no modeling when attribution studies are done within our household addressable footprint.”
He’s seeing roughly two categories of marketers taking up addressable TV: those with specific audiences that are thought to be in-market for certain products or services, and some that have broad targets and aren’t readily inclined to pay a premium for addressable inventory.
“But what we’re seeing a bunch of innovators do is take a portion of their linear TV budget, spend it in addressable and through the backend reporting that’s possible through addressable use that information to inform their linear TV buying,” Hurwitz says.
This can help to unearth audience insights from data showing number of impressions delivered on specific networks and particular times of day. For example, “I never realized that my target audience watched a lot of Bravo.”
Part of the educational aspect of addressable TV is explaining and rationalizing CPM’s and ECPM’s. “That’s a process for advertisers to go through as well as the agencies,” Hurwitz adds. “Some agencies are further along in arming their teams to work with clients to explain the value of addressable television.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
