Television advertising for years has been the best way to reach mass audiences, and ongoing technological advancements are helping to refine its reach with better targeting. Addressable TV advertising is poised to grow with upgrades to the ad-delivery infrastructure and integration with audience data that will shape the marketplace in the next decade.
Adam Gaynor, who this week was named vice president of network partnerships at Vizio, has been immersed in the effort to develop addressable advertising for most of his career in TV and digital advertising sales. In his new role, Gaynor’s responsibilities include developing Project Open Addressable Ready (OAR), a technology consortium led by Vizio, into a profit center for the electronics company.
“My goal in this role is to move Project OAR from project status to a business where Vizio can make money and the partners can make money,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re getting to a point where we’re not talking about the consortium anymore because the consortium has done its job.”
Project OAR’s partners include media companies that are conducting live trials of a common technical standard for addressable advertising. In the past year, Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks have joined the effort that aims to transform how billions of media dollars are spent.
“When Project OAR was initiated in 2018, it was built on two founding principles: flexibility and scale,” Gaynor said. The two principles work together to “grow the footprint of available screens that can adhere to those standards,” he said.
Gaynor aims to build relationships with networks on Vizio’s SmartCast platform, which streams content to multiple devices, and its advertiser-direct business unit, Vizio Ads.
“Addressability has been talked about for a while, and it’s come in different stages,” he said. “Now, we have the opportunity with set-top boxes, smart TV glass and internet-connected devices to drive addressability forward.”
More than 50% of U.S. households own at least one smart TV, making the devices the most important way to consume video content at a time when viewing times are growing, according to a study by researcher Park Associates. With more households canceling cable and satellite TV service and hooking up smart TVs to the internet, video consumption has risen 40% to more than 20 hours a week this year from 2017 among U.S. broadband households.
Before joining Vizio, Gaynor was vice president of AMCN Agility, the data solutions sales team for AMC Networks. He also worked as vice president of media sales at Analytics for Dish Network, where he led the company’s media sales division that included addressable, interactive, programmatic and over-the-top efforts. His prior experience includes jobs at Game Show Network, Comcast and CBS.
