LAS VEGAS—Hardware is still a big topic of conversation at CES, but Mindshare’s Adam Gerhart would rather talk about “the customization and utilization of televisions and devices” and the resulting addressability for advertisers.
In this interview with Beet.TV, U.S. CEO Gerhart discusses the “perfect balance” between TV’s scale and addressability along with the challenge that accompanies the need for increasing amounts of consumer data for targeting purposes.
“One of the biggest things that we’re starting to see is the unbundling of services,” says Gerhart, citing the Consumer Technology Association’s projection of a 27% increase in streaming revenue in 2019. “That’s huge and it has massive implications when you think about the control that it gives to consumers in terms of building their own packages with their own channels, their own networks.”
Byproducts of this customization can be positive or negative. Among the former is greater fragmentation, while the latter includes “understanding more about who those consumers are through the data that we have, from the suppliers providers and carriers that are actually starting to create some of those bundles,” Gerhart says.
He sees opportunity in the “perfect balance between the scale that TV can afford and actually the addressability that it creates. I don’t think we have many clients that are on one extreme or the other.”
Mindshare has a lot of small “challenger brands” that use addressable TV and new technologies to precisely target people who may be in market for a particular product or service. Then there are clients that need traditional scale and eyeballs, reach and impressions.
“And it’s the combination of those two and understanding where and how they intersect, that’s the art and science of what we do,” Gerhart says.
He believes there’s a paradox now in that “everybody wants to be as addressable and precise as possible. But in order to do that it means that we need more data and more information from consumers from providers, third party, first party, you name it. That’s the tension that we’re constantly faced with.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
