When it comes to improving on 2020, there is plenty to be hopeful for.
On Evan Adlman’s holiday wishlist? Radically simpler infrastructure for selling addressable TV ads at national scale.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, AMC Networks’ senior vice president of advanced advertising and digital partnerships says the TV company is already enabling brands to do just that – but he hopes 2021 makes it easier.
Common approach
I think next year is really (about) perfecting the technology that can bundle a lot of this together for us,” he says.
“Because, while we are delivering national addressable campaigns, there are still many different systems that we work with today and they all reach and provide the same capability – but they all operate a little bit differently.
“So coming up with a common standardisation or bundled way for us to traffic, those campaigns internally would be easier, I would say.”
Going national
Until now, it has mostly been offered by local cable operators, but growing capabilities from national operators are expanding the opportunity.
AMC, whose brands include AMC, IFC, Sundance TV and the British streamers BBC America and Acorn TV, is amongst them.
Adlman says AMC is enabling national-level addressable ad sales through pilots on two initiatives:
- The On Addressability with Comcast, Charter and Cox through Canoe.
- Project OAR, to deliver addressable ads to Vizio smart TVs.
Whole-footprint reach
Adlman says the national approach is a big deal.
“Addressable advertising historically has been at the local level,” he explains. “We’ve been able to launch and deliver national addressable targeting on our linear channels.
“Now an advertiser doesn’t have to go to each individual endpoint to stitch together a national addressable campaign.
“They can come to AMC Networks and reach our entire footprint regardless of the platform that the consumer is engaging with the content.”
Tying it together
Even so, whilst things are getting easier for ad buyers, Adlman would still like it to become easier for networks to put the package together.
“It’s not easy, I’ll tell you that much,” he explains. “It’s important for us to figure out how to tie it all together. We’re kind of running a few different pilots today that cut across digital inventory and linear inventory.
“Our goal moving forward is stitching these products together to have a full addressable offering.”
A key part of enabling that will be SSPs, supply-side ad platforms that make it easier for such companies to offer up their ad inventory. Adlman says AMC uses several including SpotX and PubMatic.
“What we’re doing with SpotX today is supporting our IP-based addressable capabilities and trying to make that work within a programmatic marketplace,” he says.
In 2021, Adlman hopes industry agreement on measuring the channel will blossom.
You are watching “Addressable Advertising: A New Reality for Linear TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by SpotX. For more videos, please visit this page.
