ATLANTA – As the upfront TV ad sales season gets going, will connected and addressable TV finally make a big splash, or will it fail to convince buyers it doesn’t have to be so complicated?
Many in the industry hope the channel can make in-roads during the traditional sales season.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Canoe’s SVP and GM of addressable advertising David Porter says new research proves addressable TV is gaining in understanding – but that it still has challenges to overcome.
Research data
The Era Of Addressable survey of media buyers was carried out by Forrester for DISH Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, INVIDI Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia.
Porter says he has two takeaways from the research:
- “We have empirical evidence that advertisers and agencies understand and value addressable TV. And so, I mean, that’s, that’s fantastic. You know, it’s not as if we have to persuade them that addressable TV is valuable. They, they know that that was clear.”
- “It really highlighted the complexities of what it takes to execute an addressable campaign – particularly with regards to the various distribution footprints that addressable TV runs on each of those different delivery systems have unique characteristics.”
“In the, the upfront season, I think addressability will have a key role,” he adds.
“And you’re going to see that, in this years upfront, the use of targeting the use of robust data and even attribution is going to play a key role in the upfront sales strategies for, for programmers – not only what their sales strategy is, but they’re actually thinking about how addressable TV fits the needs of their client, the advertiser, how it fits into their marketing and business plans.”
Up-tempo upfront?
Major broadcast owners’ upfronts presentations kicked off this month, with digital NewFronts continuing into June.
Last year’s TV upfronts were affected by pandemic ad spending constraint and turmoil. Many brands called for a delay to the season.
Many brands have tried to move toward more agile ad-buying approaches, which connected and addressable TV is seen as catering to.
But the move to this kind of buying was underway before the pandemic. Many think the 2021 upfronts is when pandemic agility, declining linear viewership and the emerging comfort with targeted TV buying is when the advanced TV technique will take off.
Complicated questions
That’s the theory.
The truth is, for all the excitement, addressable and connected TV is also still plagued by complexity, thanks partly to a proliferating series of new viewing services that often require different means to access their audiences.
The Forrester survey has found the buy side calling for change:
- Simplify buying and managing campaigns across suppliers (66%)
- Increase scale (65%) and national footprint (64%)
- Interoperability among MVPDs (74%); technology partners (93%)
- Single measurement standard from media companies (92%)
Ironing it out
Porter says Canoe wants to help.
The company provides integration, monitoring, resolution and analysis to improve the experience of MVPD VOD, including understanding audience target segmentation data.
“In our footprint, we have 22 and a half million linear enabled households and 34 million VOD enabled households,” Porter says.
“We map that segmentation data to our footprint, to the MVPD footprint. And then we distribute that targeting criteria to the programmers ad decision server so that they can actually do the targeting.
“And then when the campaign is done, we also will take the ad exposure files. We bundle those up and we’ll ship those off to an attribution vendor so that the programmer can get an ROI study.”
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.
