Challenges and Opportunities in Advanced Television

To many in the industry, advanced advertising holds the promise of optimizing inventory across all dayparts and platforms by targeting consumers no matter where they are and when they are consuming content. 

The benefits to consumers are that ad messaging is relevant and contextual, therefore meaningful and helpful. In a perfect world, the meeting of business commerce at all points of contact in the funnel will be both seamless and measureable.

But there are still a few bumps in the road for Advanced advertising that need to be addressed before it can fulfill its full national potential. A recent panel at the Advanced Advertising Summit discussed how the industry can put it all together.

Growth But Challenges
The Advanced advertising market is “seeing growth,” stated Chris Pizzurro, VP Global Sales, Canoe. Still, Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group, listed three main challenges. “The biggest problem is awareness, then ease of use and then measurement,” he explained. “We need to focus on education and make the big shift from linear TV to thinking about TV in the digital space.” It is important to explain to advertisers why they should invest in advanced advertising, proving to them that it is worth the investment. Steuer explained that the current compensation models are based on grps costs and delivery targets and, as an industry, we should be looking at deliverables in parallel with advanced results. He predicted that, “It would be more efficient and we will have money left over to retarget.”

Challenges But Opportunities
While still essentially local, Advanced is also global. Denise Colella, SVP Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU, noted that Sky TV has access to over 50 million global households enabling, “Global strategies that need to be implemented locally.” Measurement predicated on granular data points that are collected passively, and with privacy compliance, is improving. Jodie McAfee, SVP Sales and Marketing, Inscape, noted that his company, “generates TV viewing data on 10.5 million active TVs that must be connected to internet and opt-in to privacy.” Since all TVs sold today are connected TVs, the future will be more and more on the IP and thus facilitate the collection of all relevant consumption data. Inscape, according to McAfee, has a match key to the TV in the home anchored to the multi-touch devices, enabling better collection of usable data.

All panelists agreed that it is vital to think about the experience of the end users. Ease of use for advertisers is paramount, concluded, Colella. “We believe in an ad supported model that is hassle free,” she explained, “People are less tolerant of tech issues.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.