One of the easier sells when it comes to addressable television advertising is the entertainment category, where advanced targeting can give a major boost to tune-in messaging. “I think it is something that we feel is a pretty integral part of the buy. We’re beyond trying to extol the virtues of addressable. It’s a base part of the plan,” says Mike O’Connor, Horizon Media’s SVP and MD of Video Investment.
Horizon’s client roster includes A&E Networks, Scripps and Turner, in whose category “in terms of driving viewership and tune-in to programs that we’ve seen a lot of success with addressable TV because you can really hone in a specific audience,” O’Connor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
“You can really identify who the target is, see how that target performed when you delivered the message and then also see how that target performed when you didn’t deliver the message. We’ve seen that there can be a lift of twenty, thirty percent in terms of tune-in, which is obviously a huge lift when you’re trying to drive next day ratings.”
For clients in other categories, addressable is not as easy a sell. It all begins by deciding on particular campaign results, according to O’Connor.
“We have to dig in and look at the target we’re trying to reach. Is it worth going the addressable route? Is there enough waste there? Is there a specific enough target that we can deliver a message to, or are we okay with kind of the spillover into a larger buy?”
Although advertising inventory of the various virtual MVPD’s is “still a pretty small portion of the overall universe,” it does have its values.
“We do have clients that are reaching out and buying those specifically, particularly a lot of our digital-first accounts, whether it’s ecommerce or brands like that. We use that to drive down costs to some degree,” says O’Connor.
He sees huge opportunity for the VMVPD’s “particularly when you think about something like a DISH and a Sling, is where you can supplement something like an addressable TV buy and you can use the Sling as a portion or complement to what you’re doing through the traditional or satellite set-top box.”
A constant thread regardless of the platform is more advanced audience targeting. “I don’t think that there are many advertisers out there saying ‘just give me adults eighteen to forty-nine,” says O’Connor.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
