SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—For marketers, addressable television advertising should not be an either-or proposition, according to DISH Media’s Kevin Arrix. It’s all about deciding its appropriate role within the mix of advanced-TV options.
In this interview at Beet Retreat 2018, Arrix talks about the partnership between Sling TV and audience measurement provider Comscore and the need for a fuller understanding of addressable TV advertising within the industry. He was interviewed by senior television industry research executive Howard Shimmel.
In January of 2019, Sling partnered with Comscore to offer cross-platform addressable advertising measurement for campaigns across the live OTT service’s impressions and DISH set-top box impressions. Campaign performance is validated with addressable advertising metrics across platforms, using consistent third-party measurement.
“Instead of having measurement from a linear addressable source and an OTT addressable source, the Comscore product allows the buyer to look at it in one holistic way,” says Arrix, who is SVP of DISH Media. “To facilitate that on the sales side is just much easier.”
With Sling, addressable campaigns can be run programmatically. “It’s base-level audiences, but that’s really impressive and takes a lot of pain out of the process, both on the front end and the back end,” Arrix adds.
Noting the various MVPD sources of addressable inventory, he believes that the industry needs some level of automation on the planning side. “The industry needs a way to roll up all addressable sources for measurement and attribution and they need to be able to make the actual buy, the actual execution fairly simple.”
While addressable currently constitutes about 2% of overall TV spending, that amount will increase “because you can deterministically reach a consumer base. If you’re a marketer and you’re going to spend money on linear television and data-driven linear, I think it’s only going to continue to grow if they can definitely reach the target audience that they want to reach,” says Arrix.
As with any relatively new opportunity, there is an education process and learning curve that need to take place, according to Arrix.
“I think a decent portion of the marketplace is informed, but there are lots of people that still need to fully understand what’s happening with addressable and what it means. I think that’s a key part of it is defining it, make sure that everybody knows exactly what it is and what role it should play vis-a-vis linear television, data-driven linear, addressable connected TV.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
