Television advertising is on the cusp of becoming more targeted on national cable and broadcast networks, giving marketers more control over the reach and frequency of their biggest campaigns. This addressability will support linear TV advertisers that want to engage focused audience groups and connected TV (CTV) advertisers that are looking for greater scale across multiple screens.
“The aperture of addressable has grown pretty significantly,” Jason Brown, addressable lead, national, D2 and local at WarnerMedia Ad Sales, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
Much of the growth in addressable advertising has occurred among multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) — or cable and satellite TV platforms – that traditionally have sold two minutes of commercial time to local businesses each hour. More recently, addressable includes streaming services that reach CTV households.
“Demand for local-level break inventory is getting to a level of maturity,” Brown said, foreseeing growth as the national inventory of 14 minutes each hour becomes more addressable. “We’re excited about moving beyond the two minutes into the 14 minutes of national inventory per hour on the networks.”
Advertisers are taking notice of addressable TV, with 85% of them agreeing that addressable TV is a reliable way to reach their audience, according to a study that WarnerMedia and DirecTV commissioned from researcher Advertiser Perceptions. In addition, 79% of advertisers said they’re satisfied with results from addressable TV campaigns
Roadmap to National Addressable
Major industry programmers and networks like WarnerMedia are working to build toward scale in national addressable. The goal is to bring the bigger platform to market by the end of next year, Brown said. Until then, he’s working on educating marketers and media buyers about the capabilities of addressable TV.
“There’s still some perceptions around scale,” he said. “I think that is perception versus reality. If you really break it down, now, there is quite a bit of distribution….You can get a pretty robust campaign across the current providers. In the future, it’s going to get even larger as we enable national addressability in the national networks, cable and broadcast.”
Measuring Performance
Addressable TV will help advertisers to measure the precision of their targeting, and its effect on key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales and website visits. Marketers also will be able to measure cost per incremental reach with improvements to frequency capping – or setting a limit on the number of ad exposures to a specific audience.
“With addressable and the technology of addressable, not only can you frequency-cap, but you can see which households were underexposed or not exposed at all to the national linear TV campaigns because they all run through our set-top boxes,” Brown said. “You’re able to retarget your exposed or likely exposed households to drive reach.”
That reach includes cross-screen campaigns on linear TV and CTV, which has grown more popular as more households connect their TVs to the internet.
“Buyers are investing in both,” Brown said. “They’re looking for unique reach against whatever segment, and it’s worth it to them to invest in both.”
