Heading into this year’s television Upfronts, advanced TV targeting will become a bigger part of conversations between buyers and sellers, as it will a year from now. “A corollary to that is so will addressable,” says Nick Troiano.
“We have knowledge and capabilities to essentially put dollars to work over three-, six-, twelve-month campaigns like we do in Upfronts,” the CEO of Cadent and one2one Media adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has.”
At this month’s Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan, the sister companies brought together industry leaders to discuss the state of advanced and addressable TV, along with end-to-end solutions encompassing mobile and over-the-top viewing.
Troiano shares two takeaways from the event: TV’s standing in the media hierarchy and the evolving role of data in driving brand engagement.
“With all that’s happened in the marketplace and the changes over the last couple of years, TV still is a dominant medium for brand advertising and will continue to be so,” he says. “Second, the use and influx of data is forcing evolution and change within our industry. Facebook, Google certainly have some of the best data in the space, but data isn’t what drives brand engagement. TV does.”
While the evolution will take time and will be accompanied by “bumps in the road,” the best way to achieve it is through collaboration by advertisers, programmers and technology/platform companies.
“I think if we keep true to the value of television, what it means for our advertisers and for our clients, and find ways to take advantage of what technology and data offers, we’ve got a bright future,” says Troiano.
Troiano says no one questions the value of addressability and the application of data to bring digital-like capabilities of ROI to TV. “The challenge that the industry has encountered is how do you actually make it easier to simplify that process to execute addressable television across a national footprint.”
In the past year since one2one Media joined Cadent under the Cross MediaWorks umbrella, “we’ve invested tremendously in technology and workflow. It’s exactly what we did with Cadent over the past three to four years where we brought scale and stability and ease and transparency to an unwired base of inventory.”
Asked to look ahead, Troiano thinks data-driven television “will continue to be a much bigger play for next year, a percentage of the media buy for the Upfront. The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has. Two years ago they dabbled with it. This year it’s going to be a significant part of the upfront, at least the upfront discussion.
“Whereas next year I think there will be a larger percent of the transaction in the Upfront for advanced TV, addressable we expect to be the same thing for next year.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
