Blog: Addressable TV @dmexco 2018
dmexco, the event, meeting place & a community for key players in digital business, marketing and advertising. We went to see how addressable TV market is doing.
Shortly: TV is still seen as THE media to build brand awareness and reach. Addressable TV must happen.
Connected TV, or CTV, were a platform on which many were involved in projects monetising applications and content within CTV portals. However, none worked with linear broadcast content, it was all streaming and in-app advertising. Whether this is addressable TV or not, ..? The challenge pointed out by many is the number of platforms and versions to manage and support.
Analysing advertising performance is crucial for advertisers and media agencies in their campaign planning. It is just as important to broadcasters to optimise their inventory. As companies become more and more familiar of real-time reporting and KPIs the TV audience panels and “two week reporting delay” is seen as “outdated”, especially when talking with the digital only businesses like Zalando and others, who have big TV marketing campaigns. TV spot reporting has been addressed mostly with audio finger-printing in order to know when the spot runs. It is missing the real-time audience data, which can be added once the panel data is available. Check our Audience Measurement -solution for data gathering.
Data, data is king say some, is another interesting topic at DMEXCO and many considered TV as the anchor for a household that can be used to link other devices to be used for cross-device re-targeting, especially with the spot run-times. None of the current data providers was however able to offer the data input in order to achieve this in large-scale. Solutions based on HW are on offer, but are usually limited to a single CE manufacturer, limiting the reach considerably. It is a deal the providers need to make directly with the CE vendors and not all of the even offer that, e.g. Samsung.
Not to forget Addressable TV, it was clearly a hot topic for digital savvy advertisers.
Back to Addressable TV in linear, which is a daily business in Germany and Czech. From both markets we got input from media agencies that the demand is there. Broadcasters are unfortunately quite slow in deploying these new ad-formats, but as advertisers demand is there, the situation is forecasted to change soon.
Many seemed to fear on the technical risk, that something unwanted will happen on the TV, black-screen being the worst case scenario. However user surveys by a broadcasters have shown that frame-accuracy is not a requirement on video replacement. Viewers have gotten used to some “black” in their video experience, thanks to online video I would guess. Another commonly approach to start with Addressable TV was to begin with broadcasters own program promotion, but using addressable TV formats. This way they can gather experience and peace-of-mind before introducing these new ad formats to advertisers.
There is clearly a lot of happening under the radar. What we need to do to convince the broadcasters to open their inventory is to offer un-parallel risk free technical platform. TV works, period, and the user experience must be paramount. This is something we have been working hard to achieve and I believe we are there. More on our solution can be found here.
All in all DMEXCO was a very fruitful trip and recommended to anyone working with addressable TV. I believe it will be a topic on almost every booth in 2019.
