Next Steps For Addressable Advertising

Addressable Advertising has been an active albeit custom application for media purchasing for several years. There are agencies who have been very strategic in folding in addressable advertising campaigns for certain clients and there are several data oriented companies who have built successful businesses helping advertisers from insurance companies to political candidates more efficiently and successfully target their consumers.

Last week, at BC-Multichannel's Advanced Advertising conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC, a stellar roster of industry experts from data originators to programmers to agencies brought us up to date on not only where addressable advertising is, but also where it is going. The ability to more efficiently harness the values of addressable advertising has moved forward but there are still some necessary next steps that need to be taken before it is a universal component of an advertisers buy. 

According to the various panelists, addressable advertising has the following goals to achieve over the next year:

Measurement

If there was one resounding theme across most of the panels, it was the need for better measurement. Currently cross platform measurement is "in development" with some partial solutions from data and measurement companies. Rentrak's Cathy Hetzel spoke about her company's ability to measure the combination of television, movie attendance, mobile and online as well as adding shopper data and demographics. According to Tara Maitra, TiVo can currently combine TV with online.  And I know that Nielsen has begun to cross- populate its Television meter panel with homes from their Net-Ratings service. As the choice of merge-able datasets expands, let’s try to add platforms missing from the data such as tablets.

Good Creative - Programming and Marketing

Damon Williams of Music Choice said that while the biggest change to addressable advertising is measurement, consistently good creative is important too. Andrea Ching of CNN added that it is important to create great storytelling opportunities where advertisers can tell their story across all screens.

Scalability

Despite the ever increasing repositories of fascinating and valuable datasets, there is still the challenge of scale for the current addressable advertising campaigns. One reason for this is because the current datasets of addressable ready boxes is a percentage of the total footprint. And only on digital cable boxes. And only among those MVPDs who make their STB data and footprint available. Dani Benowitz of Universal McCann would like to see it go beyond cable television but would like to see at least all MVPD data included so as to get closer to scale.

Targetability

A huge proven advantage of addressable advertising is its ability to target consumers with messages that more closely speak to their lifestyles.  But another important component is the ability to tie media exposure to purchasing, according to Andrea Ching.  Jonathan Bokor of MediaVest stated that the full implementation of DAI is also an important addition to improve target ability.

Agency Challenges

Some agencies are still siloed where buying and planning of television is separate from digital etc. More and more though, agencies are breaking down the siloes thus enabling a more efficient business structure to deliver the most efficient and optimized targeted campaign for an advertiser.

In sum, “it is important to stay relevant”, noted Dani Benowitz. With all of the advancements in data and technology, greater measurement competition and expansive offerings from content providers, that might be the easiest goal to achieve.