The melding and pruning of assets within AOL and Yahoo under Oath started a year ago this month. A key indicator of Oath’s priorities arose in March when it shut down ONE TV, the self-serve platform for programmatic linear television, to go all in on addressable TV.

“The future of how TV is being delivered is changing. We believe all or virtually all what we now call television impressions will be addressable,” says Brett Hurwitz, Oath’s Business Lead for Advanced TV.

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Hurwitz sat down with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz to discuss the path to that advanced-TV future and how more big-brand marketers are embracing addressable TV.

“I still believe that indexed-based television is smarter for marketers than traditional TV buying,” says Hurwitz. “But Oath has made the decision that with the changes that are taking place in the way television’s delivered, having an offering in that space is not something that makes sense for us to be investing in.”

Instead, “We’re investing in what we see to be the future of premium video and the future of television.”

The Fios TV addressable offering was launched in the fall of 2016 and initially ran in parallel with One TV, as Multichannel News reports.

While the term “household addressable” has mainly been the province of MVPD-based offerings, advanced TV encompasses a broader set of solutions. They include index-based offerings by networks (for example OpenAP) along with OTT and connected TV.

Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., whether the ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to use the same dataset to target audiences across all platforms, Hurwitz says it goes beyond that basic application.

“Going a step further, you can do things like based on a certain level of exposure to a television commercial then place a target on a digital kind of lower-funnel activation tactic,” Hurwitz says.

So will Oath’s previously programmatic offering revert to direct-sold inventory?

“I think the way we’re beginning to view these types of pieces of inventory is as super premium video, and so ultimately having that type of inventory available in our video programmatic environment is something that we’re exploring,” says Hurwitz.

He believes there will always be a place for the Upfront negotiating season and does not see the future becoming “one audience, one price.”

What Hurwitz is seeing right now is advertisers that originally were staying away from addressable now starting to come in.

“Because what they’re realizing is the data that you can get from addressable campaigns has tremendous application to what creative you run on your larger linear campaigns,” Hurwitz says.

“The kind of conventional notion that the only advertisers who should pay a premium CPM to work with addressable television are advertisers who have a relatively small target we’re seeing really start to change.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By Steve Ellwanger on    @steveellwanger