I found myself in a classic “chicken or the egg” TV industry debate at a recent business dinner. 

The conversation centered on whether the internet and connected TV led to innovations in television or whether the massive revenue increases from advanced TV advertising led to investments in innovations like CTV, streaming and a move toward digital-first distribution. 

How the bits make it from point A to point B on a screen doesn’t matter, whether it’s a set-top box, tablet or mobile phone. Under the hood, CTV is still just television that happens to be delivered over IP. And FAST? Besides a cool-sounding acronym, free ad-supported television is still the traditional broadcast model. I don’t pay to watch CBS broadcast TV free over the air — advertisers do! 

Somebody at the dinner table pushed this starry-eyed view: “You don’t need standards in CTV.” 

On the contrary. To build any kind of industry, you must eventually have standardization. Every growing sector has two choices: 1) you standardize and have an industry or 2) you don’t standardize, and you have a monopoly or, worse, an ad hoc conglomerate. 

I know about this cycle. My own company was one-half of an addressable advertising tech duopoly and we’ve now grown as much as we can in the U.S. We must now work to standardize and build an industry so that we can work with the other partners in the space to grow it. That’s the only way forward.  

The entire television industry is based on this classic business arc. RCA was once an early example of vertical integration, owning content creation via NBC, transmission through station-group ownership and manufacturing, making cameras and television sets. When the move to color was happening, the Federal Communications Commission held a competition and RCA’s NTSC lost to the Color Wheel developed and backed by CBS. When RCA threatened to go its own way due to its market dominance, the FCC reversed course and adopted NTSC as the “standard.” 

Program-guide software in cable television is another example. The guide technology was held by a single company that charged exorbitant fees and became a roadblock to new technologies that cable operators wanted to deploy. The solution? A major cable operator invested heavily in developing its own hardware platform and software stack, effectively putting the guide company out of business and commoditizing the set-top box industry at the same time.  Another monopoly tumbled. 

Free markets abhor monopolies. They’ll put up with them for a little while but eventually everybody hates paying the freight because monopolies can charge whatever they want and stifle innovation. At some point, someone will break in and disrupt your model just to steal market share because monopolies are unstable.  

CTV and FAST may be today’s dangling shiny objects to many in the industry but they did not magically appear overnight. They both followed the classic monopoly-to-standardization pattern that started with the internet’s birth in the ’60s. The internet was a Defense Department and university monopoly until the creation of the Ethernet protocol and HTML as its everyday language, standards that allowed everyone to participate, not just a privileged few.  

The tech monoliths have created their own monopolies by building impenetrable silos for advertisers, but even those are slowly starting to crumble.  

Google’s ad monopoly started being chipped away the second the IAB and major advertisers banded together to create header bidding and threw pebbles into the Google Ad Manager gears. Suddenly, the playing field was leveled, and Google was forced to work with companies they never had to before, pushing it toward transparency and universal standards. 

Meta’s time is certainly going to come. It offers a platform to create campaigns that can exist only on its own network and nowhere else.  

Still, marketers believe they have to spend money with them. There are too many users there and they can’t afford to ignore them. 

In the short term, Facebook will continue to attract advertising dollars But in the long run, like many other content companies, its walled strategy will become a loser and it will have to conform with standards just like Google.  

The tide is turning against Facebook on two fronts:  Advertisers are tiring of making endless calls to multiple ad tech ecosystems to reach their desired audiences, especially when they want to know exactly what they are getting in return for their investment and added work.  

At the same time, Facebook’s prime demographic is moving out of the age group that advertisers really care about, pushing the company into an identity crisis, even trying to make themselves look like TikTok. Parent company Meta’s stock price spent much of 2022 beaten down on weak earnings, and their metaverse strategy is looking like a very expensive albatross. 

We may be seeing the writing on the wall that being a monopoly forever is not in the cards for many technology-driven brands, including those in television. 

Make no mistake: CTV is here to stay and there are lucrative businesses to be built around it. They may seem sexy as the new shiny tech gadgets. Taking pages from the Google and Facebook playbook, they’ve built up many silos and we have seen how those monopoly cycles eventually fail. Expect chaos in the short term as competing technologies ultimately create a stable business ecosystem. 

However, the hockey stick of growth will not come for CTV until everything works the same way when standards are in place, even if it is “the Wild West of the internet.” ■ 

Invidi Technologies said it is launching Conexus, a platform designed to allow programmers to easily execute national addressable campaigns across multiple distributors.

With more networks looking to make their national inventory addressable, Conexus is designed to simplify and standardize interacting with distributors who all have different advertising technology stacks.

Conexus will be able to put addressable ads into 20 million homes served by Invidi’s customers, including DirecTV, Dish Network and Verizon Fios, Invidi co-CEO and global CTO Bruce Anderson told Broadcasting+Cable. 

Invidi technology is also used for addressable advertising by programmers including AMC Networks and WarnerMedia.

“Conexus will unify the Invidi footprint so that programmers can access Invidi’s addressable capabilities through a single set of interfaces and reach all our distribution partners,” Anderson said.

"Conexus also provides the flexibility to use additional value-enhancing tools, and preserves the choice to use existing tool chains, he said. “Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Conexus is a bridge to other addressable distribution systems, allowing for a national addressable ecosystem to become a reality.”

Also: Addressable TV a Key Priority for Brands and Buyers: Study

Invidi hasn’t actually run a campaign through Conexus. “Not yet. In the very near future. There’s definitely networks cued up to take advantage of Conexus,” Anderson said.

Anderson said Invidi has been working for a long time to unify the marketplace and make it simpler for advertisers to access addressable inventory and for networks and programmers to activate their inventory in an addressable fashion. Conexus is designed to make that happen.

“You've got all these different distribution technologies and all these different connection points and and we saw an opportunity to simplify how the market can interconnect all these different distribution points,” he said. “We built Conexus in order to make it much easier for the marketplace.”

In addition to its current footprint of mostly satellite homes, Anderson said Invidi is in talks to be able to also connect cable homes via Comcast’s technology company FreeWheel and Canoe Ventures, which is owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications.

“We’re actually in discussion with the Canoe folks and FreeWheel about how to tie the whole place together so that you don’t have these independent silos. Conexus will be a piece of that,” he said.

“Canoe continues to talk with non-Canoe distributors and their technology partners on how we enable ease and scale on addressable TV for our shared Programmers and their advertisers,” said Chris Pizzurro, senior VP, sales and marketing at Canoe.

AMC Networks in February said it was enabling addressable advertising in every hour of the original programming on its AMC Network and We tv. It launched a national addressable ad campaign for Amazon that reaches 35 million cable households using technology from Canoe.

Even more homes may be reachable soon. “AMC will be activated through the Invidi footprint via Conexus in the very near term,” Anderson said.

Invidi is also looking to work with smart TV makers offering addressable advertising. Anderson noted that Invidi was part of Project OAR, the Vizio-led group setting standards for addressable advertising. “In fact we’re the ad tech behind WarnerMedia on the Vizio platform,” he said.

Invidi said Conexus features order management, campaign information on inventory, audience, scheduling, creative assets and impressions, cross-distributor monitoring for performance and attribution and support for traditional spot-based ad placement.

“This is a situation where providing this technology is going to be good for the industry and good for the consumer because their ad load will be more tuned to their own desires and needs, and it should generate additional revenue for the inventory holders, so it should win all around,” Anderson said.  ■

Addressable advertising company Invidi said that a handful of senior executives have been promoted as part of a new senior management structure.

Getting new roles are Howard Fiderer, named chief operating officer; Niru Krishna, upped to chief innovation officer; Prasad Sanagavarapu, tapped as chief business officer, and Michael Kubin, who will oversee global communications as executive VP, media.

Former COO Dan Carella has left Invidi, as has Derek Sawkins, who was head of sales and is being replaced by Sanagarvarapu.

“Our customers are increasingly looking for trusted partners, not just vendors,” said Bruce Anderson, who is co-CEO of Invidi with David Downey. “They seek guidance in building a profitable advanced advertising business and assistance in developing their respective markets. Breaking down silos allows Invidi to be more transparent and nimbler, and ultimately become more responsive and effective.” 

Fiderer had been chief product officer and has been with Invidi fro more than 13 years.

Krishna, a 16-year Invidi veteran, had been senior VP of software development. Invidi said she is the highest ranking female officer in the company’s history and, as a woman engineer, a rarity in the connected TV industry.

Sanagavarapu was senior VP, corporate development, emerging markets.

Kubin has been promoting Invidi for 15 years. ■

While addressable TV advertising — the notion of being able to send specific spots to individual viewers depending on their demographics — is becoming more popular than ever, much of that popularity is tied to the rise of streaming.

Streaming, by its nature, is built for addressablity. With the exception of some linear-like channels on the free ad-supported streaming TV platforms (FASTs), it is almost exclusively on-demand.

Linear, though, is a different story.

The U.S. has had a linear addressable market for some time, led by satellite-TV providers Dish Network and DirecTV (now AT&T), which had national audiences and the right software in their set top boxes to allow linear addressable to happen. 

While advertisers liked the Dish and DirecTV solutions, the satellite providers did not have the scale to make linear addressable anything more than a niche solution.

Project OAR and Nielsen’s linear addressable solutions set out to rectify the scale issue by allowing for addressable overlays on smart TVs, regardless of which provider the viewer was subscribed to.

Ready to Scale Up

Now the addressable universe is poised to gain even more scale.

Invidi, long a powerhouse in this space, has recently launched two initiatives that hold great promise for increasing the scale and scope of linear addressable.

The first is a collaboration with middleware provider Irdeto to create a solution that allows set-top boxes running on Irdeto to deliver addressable ads. This opens up the addressable linear market around the world, especially in Europe, where Irdeto has a sizable footprint. 

Just as important, it allows for all distributors — cable, satellite, telco as well as broadcasters and operators (pretty much anyone with a set top box) — to offer an easy and complete linear addressable solution, one that agencies and brands should find much easier to buy at scale, as it eliminates any concerns about compatibility across distributors.

The Irdeto deal builds on the momentum of recent news that Invidi has been certified by Project OAR (Open Addressable Ready) to deliver addressable ads from WarnerMedia via Vizio smart TVs.

Project OAR uses smart TV’s ability to recognize what programming the (opted-in) viewer is watching and then deliver a more targeted spot as an overlay. For networks, it’s a way to sell and deliver addressable spots directly, without having to go through the multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). 

Scale is the big takeaway here too: Invidi is now able to deliver WarnerMedia’s addressable ads across not just Vizio TVs, but across Verizon, Dish and DirecTV set-top boxes as well. By increasing the size of the potential audience, the deal makes it easier for buyers to justify running addressable ads on WarnerMedia’s networks as they can reach a larger audience across both set-top boxes and smart TVs.

The goal is to expand this arrangement to other networks and other set-top boxes and OEMs so that the linear addressable buys can easily be made across a much larger potential audience. This will be key as the shift to streaming will not happen overnight and brands will need to continue to have a strong presence on linear for the next five to 10 years.

Two Definitions of Addressable

While addressable advertising is indeed hot right now, we’re also seeing the development of two somewhat different definitions of what addressable actually means. For many brands, “addressable” involves bringing in either their own first-party data (e.g., their loyalty program members) or buying that sort of data from a third party and then targeting ads to only run against that audience.

That setup is in line with how digital advertising is sold and for a long time has been the primary way that linear addressable was sold too.

But as viewers are shifting from linear to streaming, an alternate definition has cropped up where, rather than buying against a specific target, brands are buying against the same Nielsen demo they’re targeting on traditional linear (e.g,. women 18 to 49) as a way of extending reach.

These buys are mostly being made on streaming, as brands use streaming as a way of extending reach, hitting audiences they are missing on linear,  while still casting a fairly broad net. Because the ads are not going to the entire audience, they are frequently called “addressable” as well, though it seems clear that a new term is needed for these types of reach-based buys. 

Another item for the to-do list. 

Ad tech companies Adcuratio Media and Invidi Technologies said that AT&T-owned DirecTV has joined their addressable advertising platform.

DirecTV joins Dish Media, which had already signed up for the platform, along with programmers A+E Networks, Fox Corp. and ViacomCBS.

Adcuratio aims to make more of the programmers’ ad inventory available for addressable advertising across the distribution footprints of both large satellite operators using Invidi’s linear addressable technology platform.

“Our plan has always been to scale the local-break addressable business via our national sales force to a sufficient level of maturity, which we have done, and now are more than ready to enable the programmers’ national minutes,” said Jason Brown, head of sales for AT&T’s Xandr Media unit, who leads national sales efforts for DirecTV’s addressable TV business. “Programmers’ advertising teams no longer have to be selling a single spot with the same creative to all households.”

Adcuratio provides end-to-end tech and workflows to the value chain across advertisers, agencies, networks and MVPDs. 

“By bringing the precision of household addressability to national commercial inventory, our platform delivers significantly increased value to an advertiser’s TV investments. The addition of DirecTV to this alliance takes it to the next level,” said Chris Geraci, CCO, Adcuratio Media and former head of broadcast at media buyer OMD.

Invidi has been in the addressable business since 2003. In 2017 it was acquired by a venture among AT&T, Dish and WPP, with AT&T holding a controlling interest in the venture. Michael Kubin, executive VP of media at Invidi said national programmer ad minutes have always been on the company’s roadmap. “We’re excited to participate in this kickoff with DirecTV and Adcuratio. We’ve been working with Dish Media, Adcuratio and A+E in launching national addressable minutes; now marketers can benefit from the greatly extended reach to send the right spot for their goods and services to the right audience. Addressable television has worked exceptionally well at the local level, now that success will extend to national programmer availabilities as well.”

Adding another layer of consolidation to the ad-tech industry, AT&T, Dish Network and WPP said they struck a deal to acquire addressable/targeted ad specialist Invidi Technologies.

Financi terms were not announced, but Invidi will continue to operate independently under the collective ownership of the three companies, and AT&T, Dish and WPP will name reps to the Invidi board of directors. AT&T will hold a controlling interest in the venture.

Invidi will maintain its employees in their current locations, which include Princeton, N.J., Newtown, Pa., New York, Denver, Colo. and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Invidi, founded in 2000, makes addressable video advertising software and platforms that enable targeting based on demographic and psychographic attributes and can be further customized for advertisers.

Invidi, which has raised more than $132 million, according to CrunchBase, announced last year it had secured a patent for the national insertion of targeted advertising.

AT&T, Dish and WPP are teaming on the acquisition of Invidi after Comcast bulked up its advanced advertising portfolio through a string of purchases that included Visible World, a programmatic and targeted ad-tech company, This Technology, and Freewheel, which acquired StickyADS.tv earlier this year. 

AT&T, Dish and WPP said they’ll work together and with existing INVIDI clients to expand the ad-tech vendor’s addressable capabilities and product offerings to other video delivery platforms.

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The deal is also coming together in the wake of the AT&T-DirecTV merger and the subsequent absorption of DirecTV’s ad business.  Dish Media Sales, meanwhile, introduced addressable advertising in 2012, and now serves targeted ads to more than 100 networks and north of 8 million homes via Dish Network and Sling TV.

“Invidi gives us a great opportunity to expand our addressable advertising capabilities,” Rick Welday, president of  AT&T AdWorks, said  in a statement. We have significantly increased revenue with targeted advertising across multiple platforms. This deal will help us accelerate growth in our addressable advertising business and explore innovation and expansion into new platforms.”

“We were the first strategic investor back in 2007 and are retaining our position so that we can influence the addressable ecosystem for the benefit of our clients,” added Irwin Gotlieb, chairman, GroupM Global, WPP’s wholly owned media investment management company.

Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, tweeted that the deal is good news for the advanced ad tech ecosystem:

HUGE step towards standardizing TV ad addressability RT AT&T, DISH and WPP to Acquire INVIDI, Operate it Together https://t.co/MBcTfuHOmH

— Timhanlon (@Timhanlon) November 21, 2016