Since they’ve controlled infrastructure, subscriber files and advertising inventory, MVPD’s have been the primary gatekeepers of the growing addressable television business. Enter Sorenson Media with its fledgling, smart-TV-based addressable ecosystem and you’ve got some diversity in the marketplace.
That’s how Mike Bologna sizes up Sorenson’s “somewhat unique” position in the addressable marketplace in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he discusses the lack of consistency in executing and measuring campaigns and the financial hurdle of producing multiple creative iterations.
Sorenson uses automatic content recognition to discern what’s happening on smart-TV screens, paving the way for advanced audience targeting and measurement.
“Sorenson’s product introduces a little bit of a new proposition to where the gatekeeper is really the smart TV and the inventory could be either cable or broadcast, national or local,” says Bologna, who is President, one2one Addressable, Cadent. “That’s a little bit of a different spin on it and I think it introduces some addressable diversity to the marketplace, which is a good thing.”
Meanwhile, “business is booming” at one2one Addressable (formerly one2one Media), according to Bologna owing to the company’s efforts to simplify a marketplace that is totally lacking in consistency, from data to tech pipes.
“There is no standardization when it comes to addressability. There’s no standardization, there’s no automation, but what there is is a very high valuation proposition and a very high return on investment,” Bologna says.
“The lack of standards generally translates into complexity. What we do is we simplify the addressable business in the absence of agreed upon industry standards.”
What has changed recently is that advertisers and agencies are spending less time “picking apart all the different data sources” that can be used for advanced TV targeting and “refining how that data can be used to fill a strategic objective of a particular brand.”
For the most part, “The creative remains as is,” meaning addressable campaigns are still largely the domain of campaigns created for traditional, broad TV audiences, according to Bologna.
“We love to send different pieces of creative with different messages to the appropriate audiences and then tie that back to sales analyze accordingly. But in many cases, the cost to produce the creative outweighs the value of that small segment.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
