There's been plenty of industry buzz around the addressable TV advertising opportunity in recent years, but it has been challenging for marketers to feel like they've cracked the code on leveraging addressable within their broader efforts. That's because there's still a good deal of complexity to navigate, with major hurdles in first defining addressability, actually delivering scaled addressable advertising, and finally, in measuring success. This is manifesting in poor results, at a high price.

If you’re a brand or agency looking to maximize ROI within the premium addressable TV channel, there are a few fundamental planning considerations that can go a long way in terms of overcoming challenges and improving results. Here’s an overview of where to start.

Plan for Scale

The advanced planning required to achieve scale in addressable linear or CTV may be new to marketers who typically focus on digital campaigns. Two planning requirements for success include understanding scale limitations and solutions, as well as how your partners can support achieving your goals.

Limitations to scale often start with inventory and programming. On the digital media front, if an audience segment is underdelivering, the campaign will simply begin serving the next best segment. Marketers should be prepared to supplement audiences on the CTV and addressable linear side to achieve scale.

Optimize spend by deploying the same audience and message across digital, CTV and addressable linear campaigns. There is a good chance you will need to supplement your audiences with video campaigns to achieve the scale necessary to drive outcomes. Keep in mind as you shift between channels, the same audience may find different match rates, delivering incremental scale in one channel over another. 

It's important to be proactive and understand where audiences will be running from a network and distribution standpoint to ensure a campaign is set up for success prior to launch. Unfortunately, many campaigns stumble off the bat because this audience supplementation step is skipped, and campaigns subsequently end up drastically underdelivering.

Know Thy Partners

The TV partner landscape is deep and wide. It can be hard to tell who does what, and how well they do it. Understanding partner capabilities and resources will further support achieving scale and overall campaign success.

First look at platform partners. Several have cross-channel planning capabilities that assess inventory and delivery prior to running campaigns, giving advertisers an accurate sense of scale during the planning process, altogether enabling an optimized channel mix with scale on delivery.

Additional consideration is required for distribution partners in CTV and addressable linear. Do they have access to the right inventory needed to run an impactful campaign? Are their sources diverse enough to drive incremental reach? All the planning in the world won’t matter if the distribution partner can't deliver the inventory.

Focus on Households, Not Individuals

The promise of one-to-one audience targeting is an attractive one, but it might misdirect marketers to focus on the individual level in this particular channel. When considering CTV and addressable linear campaigns, this level of data won’t take advertisers very far. Brands and agencies need to work with data partners with active household-level data that can scale across CTV and addressable linear channels. By leveraging household-level data, marketers can achieve greater scale and unlock the opportunity to reach all members and devices within a household, rather than limiting their targeting to a single device or user experience.

When targeting at the household level, one additional element to keep in mind is context. With a possibly larger range of consumers in a household, from age, to gender, to interests, ensuring targeting is paired with relevant programming can help you ensure the right viewers in the house are seeing your message.

Understand the Reality of Success Metrics

When it comes to addressable TV, many marketers are challenged to identify the right success metrics for their campaigns. Should they be applying TV standards to these buys? Or digital ones? The simple reality is that, despite the increasingly digital nature of TV, these addressable TV opportunities are still top of funnel. Marketers should be thinking in terms of awareness and impressions, not just clicks.

Creative should be designed to influence viewers and move them down the funnel as a part of a larger omnichannel effort. As tempting as it can be, providing a 20 percent off QR coupon to viewers during a 30-second ad just doesn't work very well. It's best for advertisers to play to TV's strengths when planning their CTV and addressable linear campaigns.

Look at Omnichannel Performance To Assess the Validity of Audiences

That said, even though TV best serves brands at the top of the funnel, marketers shouldn’t fail to assess the impact of their efforts in a larger omnichannel capacity. This is particularly important when it comes to evaluating the success of audiences being targeted across multiple channels. 

Lower-funnel channels like digital display and social media lend themselves to complementing the household-level data with individual-level data that can be mapped back to the original exposure at the household level. Marketers should pay attention to lower-funnel metrics and understand who is converting as a result of omnichannel efforts that include CTV and addressable linear.

Measurement may become more complex, requiring advertisers to assess channels and audiences separately, and as a whole. This will help gauge incrementality as well as refine strategy. Future audiences can be modeled after the best-performing channels and segments.

The addressable TV opportunity for brands and agencies is a growing one, but properly leveraging this opportunity requires a hybrid playbook and a little added planning and evaluation. By taking the above five factors into account, marketers can improve their omnichannel results and ultimately bolster the long-term strategy and value of CTV and addressable linear within their media mixes. ■

Advertisers say addressable advertising hits the target for them, according to a new survey from Go Addressable, an initiative comprising the TV industry’s biggest distributors.

In the survey, conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, 81% of advertisers said the were satisfied with the addressable TV options available, up from 72% last year.

Among advertisers currently using addressable advertising, 37% said they plan to increase their spending on the marketing tactic in 2023.

Looking at the advertisers not using addressable advertising, 41% said they plan to next year. Just 25% said that in last year’s survey.

“This is a big moment in the history and future of addressable advertising,” said Samantha Rose, executive VP, strategic investment lead, Horizon Media. “The medium is one of the most promising and topical ones in today’s TV ad ecosystem. From ease of use to technical enablement to the number of options available, we’ve come a long way in unlocking the scale and potential behind addressable advertising, while doing so in a privacy focused way, and I look forward to what we, as an industry, can do to further its growth and evolution in 2023.”

Nearly all of the advertisers that have gone addressable say they are buying from either ad-supported video on demand programmers, traditional pay-TV programmers, device makers or multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). They said that addressable advertising is now similar to buys and costs to mount campaigns have improved.

Measurement has been an issue for addressable advertising, but 77% of marketers who have had addressable campaigns said they are satisfied with the metrics they can get.

“We’re thrilled to see that momentum is continuing to build behind addressable advertising headed into 2023,” said Kevin Arrix, senior VP Dish Media. “These latest findings capture the industry’s enthusiasm and adoption of addressable, which has become an increasingly important tool for advertisers to reach their audiences effectively and with tangible ROI.”

These latest research findings come as Go Addressable hosts its second annual industry addressable advertising conference Wednesday in New York.

Members of Go Addressable include Altice USA, Charter Communications' Spectrum Reach, Comcast, Cox, DirecTV Advertising, Dish Media and Vizio. ■

Blockchain could play a “critical” role in the ad-tech business, providing needed transparency and helping smaller companies counter the walled gardens of advertising behemoths like Google, Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook said during a session at NYC TV Week’s Advanced Advertising Summit Monday.

“Blockchain is going to play a critical role in advertising,” Vanderhook said, adding that one of the big concerns for ad-tech companies at present is whether publishers are getting paid properly. 

“When you think of the blockchain and putting the payment on the blockchain for the publisher, you can now have full transparency up the chain on who got paid what,” Vanderhook continued. “I think for advertisers, who we represent, they want trans to make sure we deliver the dollar to the publisher that was supposed to get there. So I think the blockchain is going to deliver transparency in spades, which is going to be an enormous thing.”

Also: More Coverage from the 10th Anniversary NYC TV Week

He also saw the currency as a means to return some control to smaller companies dealing with huge behemoths like Google for their ad revenue.  

“The blockchain can also help to counter walled gardens, big walled gardens like Google who run centralized ad exchanges,” Vanderhook said. “You’re basically at their mercy to get your check 60 days later. And they can change the impressions, they can change the dollar amount, there’s no real control. I think there is something around the blockchain in creating a decentralized advertising service that the whole Open Web can tap into that no one controls.”

Vanderhook admitted it will probably be a while until something like that becomes reality, but “I just feel like there’s there there.”

Vanderhook has made his living anticipating the future, with varying results. A co-founder of FAST pioneer Xumo with his brother Chris in 2011, the two sold the company to Comcast in 2019, just 12 days before the pandemic hit. 

“I looked at my brother and said, ‘Oh my gosh, it was the first time in life we’ve ever been lucky,’ ” Vanderhook joked. “And about a month later we spoke to the CEO [and], he said, ‘Man, you won’t believe it, revenue is up 400%, usage is up 500%,’ and they were off and running. Still not lucky.’ ”  

But that same year the two brothers repurchased another startup they founded and earlier sold to Time Inc., ad-tech firm Viant. The Vanderhooks bought back Viant for about $50 million in total valuation. When they took the company public in 2021, Viant had a $1.5 billion valuation and raised $286 million. The stock has since fallen sharply — it is down about 92% from its closing price on February 12, 2021, the date of its IPO, but Vanderhook added the offering served its purpose, providing the capital needed to move the business forward. 

“We got the capital and have been investing in R&D and the business is off and running and doing great,“ he said. ”The stock price is still in the tank, but the business fundamentals are great.”

Xumo was one of the first FAST services, but now it appears to be one of the hottest segments in the industry. Vanderhook said he and his brother based Xumo on the Spotify model, basically offering something for free with ads and driving those customers to the paid, ad-free service.  

Now companies that have held out from offering ads — Netflix and Disney Plus — are planning to launch ad-supported versions. Vanderhook said it could have a huge impact on revenue for both companies. 

“In the end, free users create who you go after to create paid subscribers,” Vanderhook said. “And free is the cheapest way to pull somebody into a new service. Anyone who’s in growth marketing knows that if you roll free content, you’re going to get a lot more people to tune in. That’s a lot easier and more cost-efficient than getting people to sign up for a free trial of a brand new service.” 

As far as the revenue impact, Vanderhook noted that FuboTV generates about $7 in ad-supported revenue each month. For Roku, it’s $3.75 per month and Vizio generates about $2 in monthly ad revenue. 

“This is huge when you compare it to $15 a month for just a subscription,” Vanderhook said. “It has the ability to substantially lift their revenue.”

Vanderhook also is encouraged about the rise in interactivity on the internet, but added he feels the industry has only scratched the surface. The ability to manipulate video and place interactivity over content, for applications such as live gambling, is a step toward realizing the technology’s true potential, he added. 

“We’re still pushing videos, pre-produced and edited in a flat file and pushing it out to people, which is what linear TV created,” Vanderhook said. “It’s a great experience, but it could be so much more.”

On the interactive advertising side, Vanderhook said among the hurdles to overcome are “cookies,” the small pieces of data that are used to identify a user. With connected TVs, he says cookies are the reason that ads are duplicated so often. And luckily, Viant's specialty is delivering targeted ads without cookies. That cookie-less future is where Vanderhook believes the whole ad business is moving. 

“We think cookies are a really big problem,” he said. “When you get into CTV, we all have the same experience in streaming, everyone sees the same advertisement over and over again. Why is that? There’s no user ID for a DSP like us to stop buying the ad. When that ad request comes across, it looks like a new user every time, even though it's the same one. So, solving identity in these cookie-less environments like connected TV, that’s what we set out to do, that’s what we accomplished — our ID works 90% of the time across the hit stream.“ ▪️

A lot more cooperation is needed for national, individually addressed TV ads to grow, even though there’s big demand for it. That was clear from a panel at the Advanced Advertising Summit, where it was said the addressable-ad spend was perhaps $4 billion to $5 billion a year and unlikely to hit $10 billion anytime soon. The 60 million potential addressable homes isn’t likely to be fully saturated at 90 million anytime soon, either.

“We’re just tapping into the surface of it even though we’ve been at it a while,” Tony Yi, executive VP of business development at Cadent, told B+C business editor Jon Lafayette at the summit panel. Yi said “people tend to overcomplicate addressable, especially linear [network] addressable.”

Muhammad Eldereiny, VP/group director, national video/audio investment strategy at RPA, the ad buyer on the panel, said he would steer 100% of advertisers to addressable ads, because they’re effective, but it’s too complicated to get into enough homes to keep clients happy. 

Also: More Coverage From L.A. TV Week

“Right now it’s super fragmented” to run addressable campaigns onto different distributors that don’t have the same technology, Eldereiny said. “It takes a long time.” RPA clients are definitely interested, though. “They like it, they just don’t know how to get there and we don’t know how to help them get there. Yet.”

Kent Tseng, VP of product management — advanced advertising at TelevisaUnivision, said being complicated makes going addressable a harder sell than if it was simple to do. “No one wants to be dealing with, ‘oh, this is very hard operationally and creating just a lot of time and operational headaches for us to execute against it.’ The easier we can make it, the better for everybody.”

The panelists were positive overall that addressable ads will reach their potential over time. Or at least growing half its current size in a couple of years if things go right, Yi said.

Bruce Anderson, the CEO and global chief technology officer at Invidi, said there was hope for enough demand by advertisers to push for common solutions among different platforms. Invidi works with DirecTV, Dish Network and Verizon Communications but not with Comcast or Charter Communications, for example. Smart TV makers, and soon enough Roku, have their own platforms, fragmenting things further. 

With the caveat that it’s been wrongly predicted in the past, Anderson said, “I really do think we are at the precipice of actually making this be an easily transacted part of the total business model of advertising on TV. I’m looking forward to actually seeing this happen.” 

Distributors are the key to making a nationwide buy possible, and those distributors are reluctant to share the data that advertisers need without being sure it’s secure, said Jason Manningham, the co-founder and CEO of Blockgraph, a company aiming at that data protection and backed by Comcast, Charter and Paramount (a big addressable backer). “I think data is the next battleground,” he said.

When it works, addressable ads are not only sent to the right people, they are shown often enough to build recall but not so often they become annoying, said Matthew van Houten, senior VP, product, ad ops systems & services and business development at DirecTV Advertising. 

He read some numbers from an addressable campaign DirecTV did in the last quarter for a pharma company trying to reach asthmatic viewers. The addressable ads generated a 27% lift in new-patient signups and a 66% lift in refill rates versus a control group, he said. Addressable campaigns have the highest renewal rate of any at DirecTV, he said.

“When it works it's a beautiful thing,” van Houten said. “More collaboration, that's what we need. We’re going to keep plugging away at that.” He added: “Let’s get to 90 million, let’s do it.” ■

Getting good ballplayers is easy -- getting them to play together is the hard part, said legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel.         

Addressability has reached an inflection point, so it is imperative that the biggest “ballplayers” play together.  

Here is what brought the industry to these crossroads: After eight years, the local market for addressability has now matured. Satellite companies deployed the technology first, so until the last couple of years, you went to DirecTV for addressable campaigns on live television because Comcast and Charter didn’t have those capabilities. That is no longer the case.  

Distribution companies like Comcast, and until recently AT&T, snapped up programming networks. When Comcast bought NBC, they wanted the network to leverage addressability through their Freewheel division, or in AT&T’s case, WarnerMedia executed it through INVIDI.

The result? Ad salespeople can’t sell their addressable inventories across the entire country, hitting roadblocks set up by each operator's reach. Imagine the frustration for an advertiser with a national addressable campaign who has to choose: one operator with reach of 25 million homes, another operator that reaches 10 million homes, or another operator with possibly limited addressable capabilities. 

It’s like ordering a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and getting only the peanut butter or the jelly, never both.  

These aggravating limits have rippled into other areas: measurement shortcomings (since Nielsen only measures national spots), and many small unique cable channels are not receiving the fairer value for their inventory, which they normally get from addressability targeting throughout cable’s “long tail.”  

There is one solution to break free of these aggravating limits: interoperability. Networks want to be able to sell any break position in their broadcast feeds addressably across the entire distribution footprint. They want to put it into a system, turn the crank, have the impressions counted, everything rolled up, and reported back to them.  

We have to offer an ecosystem where an order and its creative enter the system once and gets distributed out — whether that order enters through INVIDI, Freewheel or some other stack — and the data gets passed among all of them. Once the execution occurs, the reporting is collected from all the distribution points, and then rolled up into a single ratings report that happens for each addressable ad break — if everyone is speaking the same language. 

Playing ball together means advertisers and programmers shouldn’t have to specify audiences at DirecTV or Comcast because they’re each using different definitions for what counts as an impression. Nobody should be forced to learn both INVIDI’s Conexus and Freewheel’s MRM system if they’re already using one of them.  

All of us must agree on a body of standards we can all support that communicates an order line between our two technologies, including a common definition for an impression. All the wires are bi-directional. You don’t have to be tied to one system that rules them all.  

Imagine buying a hose from any hardware store and knowing it will fit the spigot at your home. Adding proprietary content to a standard would be like needing a special adapter to connect the hose to your spigot. This adapter adds no value, and you can only buy it from one source, meaning there is no price and competitive pressure to improve performance. It limits unified selling. 

Think about how interoperability can lift all boats. Traditionally, an advertiser approaches CBS and says, “I want to be on FBI: Most Wanted.” Prices are negotiated for a CPM rate, Nielsen verifies that the rate is delivered, money changes hands … it’s one stop.   

Interoperability can work the exact same way. You buy a program and specify the sub-set of audiences that you want as opposed to buying the whole audience. That kind of efficiency is better for the programmer because they can monetize those additional audiences in another way. Instead of selling the whole break for a $10 CPM, you can sell it three times at a $6 or $8 CPM. The advertiser pays less, the programmer gets more money and everybody goes to bed at night knowing slices of the entire country have been reached.  

Viewers win too because ad loads can actually go down. The days of “I don’t know how much of this NBA playoff game somebody is going to watch, so I’ll run this beer ad spot 45 times in the first half to make sure I get my required three impressions” will be over. You’ll know exactly when those three impressions have run, so there is no need to bombard audiences.  

Without interoperability, Freewheel can only grow to the extent Comcast does and INVIDI can only grow as far as DirecTV and Dish do. We both end up standing on shrinking ice cubes instead of being able to pivot the whole industry together. 

The best next step is for all parties to agree to a public, non-proprietary version of addressability standards. We all need to chip in for the greater good of the industry. 

If addressability is going to fully benefit the industry and live up to its promise — being the Swiss Army knife of true national advertising — everybody has to step up to the plate and play ball. ■

Top cable operators Comcast and Charter Communications, unable by themselves to make addressable advertising easy for marketers, have enlisted Dish Network and Vizio to try to solve their problem.

The new initiative is called Go Addressable and is designed to come up with industry-wide standards and solutions. 

In its official announcement, Go Addressable added that DirecTV was participating, along with cable operators Cox, Altice USA and Frontier Communications, pretty much covering the universe of pay-TV providers with addressable capabilities. 

Satellite companies like Dish have a national footprint, and have been able to mount addressable ad campaigns for big marketers. They also provide addressable advertising for political campaigns. 

Similarly, Vizio is able to insert targeted commercials into its sets all over the country and formed Project OAR, which aims to set standards for addressable advertising.

And one reason advertisers have been rushing into the over-the-top and connected TV market is that those commercials can be targeted and addressable like other digitally delivered advertising.

But cable companies each cover a specific part of the country and working together has been difficult for technological and business reasons.

In March, a study conducted by Forrester Consulting for companies including Dish Media, Canoe, Cadent, Comscore, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia found that addressable TV is a priority for brands, but that it is being held back by operational complexity and a lack of education.

Two years ago, Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications formed On Addressability, an industry initiative aimed at helping the cable industry deliver addressable advertising at a time when marketers were looking to use data to better target their commercials to viewers likely to be interested in their products.

Last year, On Addressability issued a playbook designed to help distributors, programmers, ad buyers and advertisers take advantage of cable’s addressable advertising capabilities.

With the launch of Go Addressable, On Addressability is being phased out.

But being able to mount an addressable ad campaign over cable still seems to be a remarkable achievement.

Last November, AMC Networks and Canoe announced their first addressable campaign running multiple commercials within a single ad availability across Comcast and Charter homes.

In election years, DirecTV and Dish have teamed up to offer addressable markets to political campaigns. 

Vizio said it can now dynamically insert commercials into live programming, enabling addressable ad campaigns that can reach 11.2 million of its smart TVs.

“Addressable TV advertising has arrived. Today’s milestone pushes the consortium beyond a ‘Project’ and into an addressable business,” said Adam Gaynor, VP, networks partnerships and head of addressable for Vizio and Project OAR, the consortium formed by Vizio and TV companies.

“We have worked to put standards in place in collaboration with top networks to deliver addressable campaigns at scale and enhance the TV experience for viewers at home. With the infrastructure in place and more campaigns going live in the market, we are making it possible to deploy, manage and sell dynamic ads for local and national inventory,” Gaynor said.

AMC Networks, Fox and WarnerMedia are among the networks that have run national addressable campaigns employing standards set by Project OAR, the consortium formed by Vizio and TV companies. 

“At Fox, we’re working to make advertising more accessible and effective for our marketing partners by delivering ad innovations with precision and purpose,” said Darren Sherriff, VP of advanced advertising products at Fox  “As the scale of addressable continues to grow, we’ve been working with OAR creating standards to drive adoption across the industry that will enable execution on a broader level moving forward.”

Univision joined Project OAR during the first quarter of 2021 and is set to run beta trials of addressable advertising. 

“At Discovery, we are happy to report that we are out of the test phase and are bullish to begin live addressable campaigns,” said Steve Silvestri, senior VP, advanced advertising at Discovery. “As a member of OAR, we have been on the front lines for creating the standards to move the industry forward. Programmer enablement represents a massive growth opportunity for the addressable marketplace and is bridging the divide between linear and digital, allowing advertisers to reach valuable audiences in a premium and brand-safe environment, across all platforms and at scale.”

Vizio and members of OAR are working with watermarking, decisioning, measurement and demand companies to expand the OAR ecosystem so platforms and participants can use their preferred tech stacks or existing solutions. Vizio has begun providing OAR certification to vendors that work directly with Vizio and have proven their commitment to driving addressable TV forward. 

Advanced advertising technology is beginning to climb out of the experimental phase, GroupM chief investment officer Matt Sweeney said at the virtual B+C/Multichannel News Advanced Advertising Summit Tuesday, but there is still a way to go before the tech becomes mainstream.

“Many of the tools in the advanced TV space have matured to a point where we're comfortable going beyond just testing and leaning in,” Sweeney said. “...We're still evolving on the advanced TV side.”

Part of the difficulty is navigating the number of advanced ad platforms and providers, he said. 

Also Read: As Viewership Fragments, Engagement Is the Key

“We're trying to figure out how we navigate this holistically, versus buying addressable TV from one platform partner and data driven linear from a second platform partner and digital video from a large media company that also has their own platform,” Sweeney said. “That's the challenge right now and it's about the proliferation of platforms, the proliferation of data sets, and then some of the challenges around measurement. We need all this stuff to come together, like it has on the digital side with programmatic.”

Another challenge is being able to activate the technology in both linear and advanced TV environments simultaneously. That requires more effective measurement. 

“You’ve got to be able to measure the effectiveness, not just of traditional linear -- and those systems are fairly well known and well established -- but doing that along with some of the advanced TV investments that we're making across digital and data driven linear and streaming and connected TV,” Sweeney said. “That's the challenge right now. But we've got many progressive clients who understand that nothing is going to be 100% as the market evolves. But it has matured and we're going to lean more heavily into that in this year's upfront and beyond.”

Also Read: Spring TV Events Offer a Look at Future of Television 

While advanced advertising technology is one way for marketers to recapture some of the ad dollars lost as more and more television viewers switch from traditional linear programming to streaming and lower commercial loads, Sweeney said they should also look toward other ways of driving engagement with viewers. 

Sweeney estimated that a typical one hour linear program has about 16 minutes of commercials, which drops to about six minutes for a one-hour ad-supported streaming show. While advanced ad technologies are one way that programmers and marketers can backfill some of that lost commercial time, in reality it forces them to try to broaden their audience reach. 

“...Really what it does is it forces marketers and their media agent to look at expanding the audiences and the ability to find those audiences beyond just traditional TV and digital, streaming and addressable environments. We need to go beyond that,” Sweeney said. “We need to look at audio as a channel, as a way to engage with folks. And then there are a lot of digital platforms that have incredibly high engagement numbers with younger demographics. We're also excited about some of those partnerships and how they're evolving as well.”

Sweeney was optimistic about the upcoming upfronts, adding they will be “a cake walk” compared to last year. But with the economy improving and demand declining, there is the danger of price inflation, of which Sweeney and his clients are well aware. 

“Our clients want to know where the value is,” Sweeney said. “I think there's a point at which the value of a unit or an impression gets beyond an effective and efficient investment vehicle.”

That could be remedied at least in part by expanding the audience reach through audio, digital and other means. Sweeney said GroupM and its clients will still lean heavily into  digital, streaming and addressable inventory across several platforms, “but we also have to have some optionality beyond that because at some point the prices don't make sense potentially.” 

Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising and data unit, went through some changes last year.

CEO Brian Lesser and other senior executives left and its platform assets were split from its media assets and those media assets were merged into AT&T’s WarnerMedia. Xandr and WarnerMedia had already been working together, teaming up during the 2020 upfront, for example.

In an interview, Jason Brown, who had been chief revenue officer for Xandr and is now head of agency planning & strategy, addressable, for WarnerMedia Ad Sales, talks about what clients are looking for in terms of advanced advertising and what WarnerMedia can deliver.

B+C: How is what you’re offering different now that you’re part of WarnerMedia?

Jason Brown: Being part of WarnerMedia, it opens up a plethora of capabilities for our advertisers. Now we go to market with the best of premium content and premium brands and precision tactics. A lot of brands are very excited about this because we’re able to combine both.

B+C: What’s the benefit of having both?

JB: Because both premium content and precision live on top of our subscriber base and we have the exposure data for both upper-funnel awareness and lower-funnel precision campaigns, we’re able to show the impact of both together. And that’s frankly what many advertisers have been asking us for, for years. What is the right allocation of upper-funnel media to lower funnel? What type of creative should I use? Because we have all those assets under one roof, setting one identity, we can show the impact of both together and answer some of those questions.

B+C: Is there an example of how that worked for a client?

JB: We have an auto client that previous to our combination was buying a big branding campaign from WarnerMedia and field-event campaign from AT&T addressable. There were two separate buyers, two separate sellers, two separate back-end reports. No narrative together. Now we’re able to work with that particular brand as one entity combining upper funnel, lower funnel and working across a nine-month customer journey.

B+C: So in terms of spending, does one plus one equal more than two?

JB: It depends. But our point of view is that we want to get our customers the answers to their questions and let the data speak for itself, being fully transparent. Sometimes it might showcase that they should be spending more money on upper-funnel activities and less money in precision or vice versa.

B+C: What did the auto client end up doing?

JB: Frankly, they’re investing in both and I think the data shows they should probably start to invest a little bit more upper funnel.

B+C: Are you seeing a change in what clients are asking for now that you’re part of a larger organization?

JB: As it relates to addressable, there’s an expectation that the scope goes beyond the DirecTV footprint and that we extend addressable advertising to not only our streaming services with AT&T TV, but also curated WarnerMedia digital inventory. And so we’re starting to work on bringing that unique capability to our advertisers now that we’re a part of WarnerMedia.

The other thing is WarnerMedia mostly lives with linear TV buyers, who are graded on reach and GRP goals. So one of the new capabilities that has been trending is our ability to bring forward a reach extension product using addressable technology. By looking at linear campaigns and seeing which households and devices were under-served and targeting that cohort we can extend reach while also managing frequency and attaching that to linear campaigns. We just look at it as the second flavor of addressable.

B+C: After COVID-19’s impact on the market last year, is the addressable market growing?

JB: Because of COVID, brands have had to really quickly pivot to new strategies and they need to understand the impact of those new strategies. So they’ve been using addressable to not only reach their current customers or prospects but to understand. Like in the auto category, are customers going to my website, as opposed to the dealership’s? There’s a need for data and precision and attribution even for brands like toothpaste that want to reach people who are staying home.

B+C: So how much is the addressable marketing growing now?

JB: It’s back to double digits.

B+C: Are you able to do addressable advertising on the linear Turner channels, or is that somewhere down the road?

JB: We worked with Adcuratio to test national addressable back in the third quarter and we will continue to test. 2021 is really a testing year as we build that foundation for the future.

B+C: Will HBO Max extend the addressable footprint when the ad-supported erosion gets introduced next quarter?

JB: No comment.

B+C: Everyone’s doing upfront planning. How will your team fit into the larger WarnerMedia approach to the upfront?

JB: Last year, before the integration, we acted as one team to the marketplace, embodying what we felt was the right approach, which was to provide flexibility and trust to our partners. That won’t be different this year.

A4, the addressable advertising business launched by Altice USA in April, announced that it is partnering with Inscape Data Inc., a leading provider of automatic content recognition (ACR) data owned by smart TV maker Vizio.

A4 specializes in positioning both local and national ads across digital and connected TV screens, using data culled from the set-tops of Altice USA subscribers.

Inscape sells data culled from Vizio connected TVs and has access to data from about nine million TV sets.

Related:Altice USA Unveils ‘a4’ Advanced Ad and Data Business

“With this partnership, A4 adds insights collected from nearly nine million smart TVs to its footprint of more than 90 million households, 85% of broadband subscribers and one billion devices in the U.S,” A4 said in a statement. “That data includes de-identified Altice USA subscriber data and viewership and device-level data from MVPDs across the country, which a4 receives in exchange for providing MVPDs with its platform.”

“To really be able to help our clients’ plans between channels. we need the full scope in what we’re calling the ‘premium TV landscape,’” John Povey, senior VP of marketing and analytics at A4, told AdExchanger. “That’s where folks like Inscape can really come in and help us be able to optimize where the most [viewing] time is being spent. That will ultimately [inform] how we stitch our campaign results back together.”

Alice USA was the first MVPD to offer addressable advertising in the New York DMA. It later purchased Audience Partners, a provider of privacy-compliant, authenticated IP addressability technology, and Placemedia, a leader in supply-side programmatic ad solutions for national linear, addressable, OTT and on-demand television.

After attending last week's network television upfronts, it is hard not to recognize how advanced the business really is and how much of what we have been talking about for so long has become reality. Television is no longer just about ratings, units and GRPs, but rather about the ability to effectively utilize data and technology to target and measure more specific, granular audiences within best-in-class content and an array of alternative distribution formats.

The concept of buying audiences and hyper-targeting is not new. It has been a standard practice in digital marketing for some time and has more than proven its value to the market. However, we are now lifting these trends and tactics and applying them to television at full scale, thereby demonstrating the value with metrics far beyond impression delivery.

RELATED COVER STORY > Breaking Point: Advanced Ads Emerge as Traditional Linear Models Erode [subscription required]

Five years ago, targeting in television consisted of standard demography, and reaching those identified demos was heavily based on using the content as the surrogate for the audience.

Today, every major TV network has incorporated the necessary data sets into their portfolio that allows advertisers to understand how the content they are aligning their brands with delivers against highly customized, handpicked segments.

In many cases, the transaction is based on the delivery of the commercial to those specified audience segments. These are valuable tools but, more importantly, it gives advertisers choice and options, which is critical in this ever-changing, highly connected and fragmented marketplace.

While data may be the backbone of this television evolution, it is not the only contributing factor. Technology now has a seat at the table. Measurement is no longer limited to our standard sources and delivered in confined buckets. Advertisers have true crossplatform reach and frequency understanding available to them, which allows for the application of technology towards near and soon-to-be-real-time optimization.

When thinking about television, it’s easy to keep the conversation focused on national networks and mass reach; however, it is important to recognize the role multichannel video programming distributors play in the transformation of TV.

Looking back again those five years, the notion of “addressable” targeting and campaign-level attribution were somewhere between a dream and a test. Today, more than 50% of U.S. TV households can receive a highly segmented message to the individual set-top box, with the results tied back to a sale.

Yes, we finally can identify households based on the type of car they drive, what brand of soup they purchase, what they watch on TV and even those who suffer from seasonal allergies. The identification and messaging to these homes is made possible through technology, data management and innovative business planning by many of our country’s largest pay TV providers. `

This mechanism of targeting an attribution is right out of the digital playbook, but without the concerns surrounding fraud and viewability.

The most exciting part of the television business today is that nothing is off the table.

Applications that we thought would never surface are being built as we speak, and the vision of a data-driven, majority addressable and semi-automated marketplace is within our grasp.

When I speak to advertisers and they tell me they have moved beyond the “test and learn” stage, and are truly vested in a data and technology market, it only increases my confidence in the future of our business.

Nick Troiano leads a family of Cross MediaWorks companies focused on addressing the current and future needs of television advertisers. Those companies include Cadent, a leading provider of media, advertising technology and data solutions for both advertisers and pay TV providers; TCA (The Cross Agency), a data-driven performance-based marketing agency; and one2one Media, a newly formed company focused on expanding and streamlining the addressable video marketplace.

Image by John Lund/Getty Images.