SAN FRANCISCO  —  Inscape’s addressable TV data consortium is kicking off with nine programmers this week, the latest cooperative to try bring scale and simplicity to the targeted TV ad opportunity.

Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks will begin their tests of Project OAR, on June 24, while Disney Media Networks, Discovery Networks, Hearst and WarnerMedia will start their trials in mid-August, Adweek reports.

Run by VIZIO’s Inscape, which uses data from VIZIO TVs gathered by automatic content recognition (ACR), it is the latest consortium following OpenAP and Nielsen’s test of an addressable TV ad-swapping technology.

Piece-by-piece

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Zeev Neumeier, Inscape’s President, stakes out Inscape’s credentials for openness and integration.

He says Project OAR eschews the approach of building an end-to-end tech stack for managing all connected TV ad services.

“The television industry, this doesn’t work like that,” Neumeier says. “It’s unreasonable to expect the $70 billion industry to just give you their inventory and say, ‘Have fun with that’.

“It would really have to be in an open standard and it would have to be in component-by-component where you allow players to pick the components that they want to use.”

How it works

Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs. The Open Addressable Ready consortium was announced in March 2019.

Earlier this year, the group announced it had begun technical integrations with major ad delivery and enablement engines FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager, Xandr and INVIDI.

Through the Open Addressable Ready standard, media sellers watermark the inventory that they want to make addressable. If a buyer wants to swap out a static ad with an addressable ad, VIZIO smart TVs read the watermark and send that information to the seller’s ad server, which swaps in the addressable ad in real-time.

It comes as Nielsen continues a beta test of its addressable ad placement technology.

In November, eMarketer estimated that connected ad spending in the US would reach $6.94 billion in 2019, and by 2021 it will total $10.81 billion., with 59.4% of that being traded programmatically.

The importance of being open

Neumeier says Inscape is still working out its own business model.

“This isn’t free,” he says. “We are going to charge for this. But if we charge for it by selling more data, or if we charge for it by selling impressions, or if we give people freedom to pay a little bit by impressions and a little bit by data, or vice-versa… that remains to be seen.”

One thing seems for sure. Whilst VIZIO’s Inscape has kick-started the consortium, Neumeier is pitching it as just one member.

“Project OAR is an open standard,” he says. “We are the official cheerleaders of Project OAR, we don’t own the thing. We’re the cheerleaders.

“This thing is created from the ground up to make it easy for other OEMs to say, ‘Look, you can implement it yourself’. You don’t need to call me.”

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews