National broadcasters increasingly will make more of their advertising inventory addressable, giving marketers a way to show different commercials to different households during the same programming.
Instead of being limited to two minutes an hour among multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), addressable advertising will become a bigger part of the 14 minutes an hour that national networks sell themselves.
“Addressable advertising on linear TV has been highly in demand. It outstrips supply,” Scott Worthem, global executive vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at media measurement and analytics company Comscore, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
Moving From GRPs to Impressions
Worthem sees addressable advertising as more valuable to buyers that want to reach targeted households, while the sell-side can command a higher price for their inventories. The shift to addressable advertising will coincide with changes to how audiences are measured. Instead of gross ratings points (GRPs), television will continue to move toward impression-based metrics that have been more common with online media. That includes newer over-the-top (OTT) video platforms that viewers watch on internet-connected devices.
“Moving from GRPs to impressions puts the industry on par with how most other media is evaluated,” Worthem said. “GRPs miss some of the mark in being able to results on the back end.”
Impression-based metrics help to provide a more holistic pictures of consumers as they watch programming among different screens, including TVs, smartphones, tablets, desktop computers and even movie theaters.
“As we move to cross-platform, you’re able to have media comparisons of how an ad might play in OTT or in mobile, versus how it might play out in traditional TV,” he said. “This is an opportunity for TV to take another new set of currency and go down to an impression level that can make outcomes-based measurement, which is really in demand by a lot of our clients.”
Top Priorities for Addressable
Comscore recently participated in an effort led by Dish Media to evaluate the current and future state of addressable TV strategies. They commissioned Forrester Consulting to do a study, “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” published this month.
The study found that a top priority is making addressable advertising easier for marketers and agencies to reach bigger scale, with 100% of them saying they had experienced at least one challenge in that goal. Cadent, Canoe, Invidi Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia joined Dish in sponsoring the report.
Source: Forrester
“The Forrester report really did a good job at a point in time where we needed feedback from the industry and the buyers that are out there considering addressable,” Worthem said. “I was pleasantly surprised that there is a lot of interest. There were a lot of categories that had people who were interested in addressable, and a lot that have already been trying it.”
Ninety-two percent of advertisers and agencies want a single measurement standard from media companies, and 93% want greater interoperability among their technology partners, according to the report. Meanwhile, 66% said they want to simplify buying and managing campaigns across suppliers, and 65% want to see increased scale for addressable ads.
“That was something that we’ve all heard in independent meetings and internet forums,” Worthem said. “Forrester was able to nail down some diagnostics around what we can do as an industry.”
You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
