Xandr’s Rick Welday Addresses the Future of Addressable

Rick Welday, President, Xandr Media is on the forefront of addressable advertising for his company. He spoke at the ARF conference this week about what it is, how it is defined and its future prospects.

The media industry is grappling with a changing and transformative marketplace where consumer consumption behavior is controlling the narrative. Advertising is responding by undergoing all types of assessments from ad length and format to targeting and measurement. According to Welday, when it comes to addressable advertising, “We haven’t seen anything like the scope of change happening now.”

What is addressability today? Welday defines it as “the ability to serve targeted ads to the household or user, based on deterministic identifiers, allowing brands to define and serve their message to the best qualified audience wherever and whenever they’re watching.”

He outlined some of the major trends and how these developments are advancing the capabilities of addressable advertising:

> Addressability continues to scale.
> Business models are being developed to facilitate that scale and make addressable easier to buy.
> Addressable capabilities are expanding across screens.
> Advertisers are committing with always-on budgets.

He noted that the technology is now here to push out different creatives for the same product or even completely different category ads that can be fed simultaneously to different targeted households. In addition, it is now possible to apply frequency capping so as not to oversaturate heavy viewers and underserve less frequent but still valuable consumers.

Looking ahead, Welday sees expansion, better measurement and further innovation:

> There will be more tracking and measurement of ad frequency and sequencing as brands partner with each other to see which creative works better.
> There will be more format innovation with innovation now driven to broadband interactivity.
> There will be more work on direct-to-consumer and experiences with the commitment to developing the right choices to consumers though such protocols as augmented reality.

The future may be closer than we think. “More companies are getting into addressable,” concluded Welday. “Multiple brands are investing.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.