The accompanying video unpacks why buyers are hungry for addressable, why supply is so constrained and the potential risks for sellers of over-indexing on this one type of inventory. It’s the sixth in a series of educational videos Furious has produced in collaboration with Beet.TV. Below is a sampling of Part 6:

Slowly but surely, the TV industry is making headway toward more audience-based ad selling and buying. Operators are priming the pump to enable more advertising inventory to be addressable and for more households to receive such ads. Programming networks have had success in recent years in enabling and selling dynamic advertising on free video-on-demand (VOD). And addressable advertising at a national scale—to be offered by broadcasters and cable networks, not only distributors—is once again on the agenda.

And yet addressable TV inventory is still highly constrained. At present, demand far outpaces supply of inventory and content suitable to reach hyper-specific audiences. The reason for that largely comes down to infrastructure. 

There are approximately 64 million U.S. households that have the hardware (i.e., a modern set-top box) to receive addressable ads. Those ads are delivered by cable and satellite operators, such as Comcast and Cox Communications, which have the data and technology to enable household-level targeting. (They can also let advertisers blind-match their first-party data against their own PII data to reach existing customers and prospects.) But those distributors only have two minutes of ad time per hour per channel available for any form of advertising—linear or addressable—and each operator can reach only their subscribers. 

The bottom line is that the audience available to advertisers using this fragmented “local” addressable is rather limited and generally not interesting to national brands, such as Coke and Pepsi, which view TV as a vehicle for mass reach to consumers who reside everywhere. 

– Ashley Swartz
CEO & Founder, Furious Corp.

This video is part of #BeetU – our weekly educational series for advertising and media during the COVID-19 crisis, hosted by Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, longtime Beet contributor and the Dean of #BeetU.

Whether a newcomer or a titan, we invite you to join us for this educational series during this reset – live-streamed Wednesdays at 1p ET on Andy’s LinkedIn and Ashley’s Twitter feed.

By Katy Charles on    @