SAN JUAN, PR. Having just completed a fifty-page deep dive TV[R]EV Special Report into the hows, whys, whos, whats and whens of addressable TV advertising, it was more than a little reassuring to hear many of those findings echoed by the top level TV and advertising executives participating at this year’s Beet Retreat.
We started our report by providing a definition of what addressable TV advertising actually is, given that we’d found that almost every one of the hundred or so TV, advertising and ad tech executives we interviewed for the report seemed to put their own unique spin on the term.
Beet host Ashley Swartz must have picked up on that too, as she started her session by asking panelists to try and come up with a definition of addressable TV advertising everyone could agree to, which proved to be no easy task.
Her point though was spot in: rolling out universally accepted solutions for addressable TV advertising can only happen once everyone agrees on a universally accepted definition.
Otherwise, we’re all solving different problems.
In a similar vein, it was a treat to hear from Nielsen’s Kelly Abcarian and Project OAR’s Jodie McAfee—both are driving solutions to make linear addressable a reality, something we went into much detail about in the report. So it was encouraging to see that my fellow Beetniks (and TV ad geeks) found the inner workings of these solutions every bit as fascinating as we did.
Then there was the key takeaway, both from the report and from the Beet Retreat: if we’re going to make advanced advertising solutions like addressable a reality, then everyone in the industry is going to need to start working together and give up on the whole walled garden thing, to realize that the value of going it alone is never going to be as great as the value we will get from collaborating.
For as Ben Franklin noted over two hundred years ago, “we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
You can find the TV[R]EV State of Addressable TV Advertising report here.
Wolk was interviewed by Katy Charles at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
