SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Television historically has provided one of the best ways for major brands to reach a national audience most efficiently. With technological advances, it’s increasingly becoming more addressable in showing different ads to different households during the same live programming.
“Linear addressability for us, it’s not just about incremental reach,” Steve Silvestri, senior vice president of audience solutions at Warner Bros. Discovery, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams at the Beet Retreat San Juan. “Seventy percent of the audiences are actually falling outside of prime time, so we know when clients are buying against our portfolio, there is a lot of audience to find and mine.”
The merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery brought together media brands including CNN, HBO, TNT, Turner Sports, Discovery, Animal Planet, TLC and HGTV. The combined company offers advertisers a way to target consumers one-to-one across a portfolio of 18 networks in all 210 designated market areas (DMAs).
“We have 50 million addressable endpoints – that’s both cable, satellite and OEM [makers of smart TVs],” Silvestri said. “We truly have a national addressable offering that we can offer the marketplace.”
The next steps in advancing its addressable offering include the ability to target consumers across more devices. For many younger consumers, their primary way to watch video is on a smartphone or other connected device.
“We want to be able to actually leverage a single audience set from our clients as we build up our data and identity spine across WBD, and apply that targeting across the entirety of our distribution footprint,” Silvestri said. “If we make those endpoints addressable and we can stand up an identity spine, which is in the works, we know that we can address those audiences regardless of anywhere, anytime they were consuming our content.”
You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.
