Interactive television ads are increasingly providing meaningful engagement for both brands and viewers. “It’s that direct access and ability to understand something in the moment that I think is really interesting,” says Jon Stimmel, Chief Investment Officer at global media and advertising agency UM.
What needs more refinement is marketers’ understanding of specific households for audience targeting and a more uniform way to execute addressable campaigns, Stimmel explains in this interview with Beet.TV. The latter drawback has resulted in “kind of like a Frankenstein approach to audiences,” he says.
With interactive ad units, viewers can act directly to obtain more information. “You don’t have to now log out, log in, write down something and do something later.” As for value and pricing of ad units, “Those things are still being worked out,” Stimmel adds.
The scale of addressability “will be critical,” he says. “As then you funnel down toward that purchase journey, how am I able to then convert that into some sort of action or obviously business outcome that critical to our clients’ business.”
He hopes that addressable ads are heading toward a place “where everybody can come together and understand what that advertising platform is and be able to sell it in a more national, simplified way.”
In the meantime, picking and choosing from different environments and interfaces can mean negotiating many hurdles. “It just becomes incredibly complicated for a media agency, a creative agency, a client to be able to work that way on a campaign-by-campaign basis.”
The same applies to emerging ad formats of varying length and utility, according to Stimmel. “We’re measuring things differently, the methodologies are all different, the ad loads are different. So there’s not one cohesive measurement that we’re working off of. It’s kind of like a Frankenstein approach to audiences.”
Stimmel would like to see more clarity about the characteristics of households for targeting, particularly purchase propensity that can be linked on to sales activity.
“We don’t want to cross the privacy boundary ever, but I really would like to understand exactly what are the type of households that we’re looking at. I think it’s ripe for us to be able to identify more about who these households are, these people, in order to make that even more responsive and get more out of that advertising investment on the back end.”
This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.
