Mapping the Transformation of Television at Dish. An Interview with Tim Myers

It is a given that television has been on an accelerated path of evolution with greater complexity, fragmentation and choice which offers both opportunities and challenges for addressable. To better understand the current and future ecosystem of television and the role that addressable plays in it, Dish embarked on a pivotal study titled The Transformation of Television, the results of which clarifies the underlying issues, mechanics and attitudes that impacts addressable’s multi-level adoption and expansion.

Interestingly, this study came on the heels of the pandemic which, according to Tim Myers, GM Addressable Operations & Strategic Partnerships at Dish, resulted in an advertiser pull-back. “We wanted to really understand the mindset of buyers and agencies as well as our peers on the sell side,” he explained, “We wanted to learn what the trajectory would be for us in TV and what we could do to change that arc.” The information gleaned from that study proved out as the pandemic year progressed.

Addressable’s Advantages and Challenges

“Addressable is a tremendous opportunity,” Myers began, “and provides a lot of value for both the buyer and the agency in terms of being able to deliver a product and of executing marketing and advertising campaigns that tie into the trends that began to emerge and accelerate during the pandemic with better accountability, different forms of measurement, (and the ability to) go after high value audiences that reach consumers in new ways.”

But there are challenges that need to be addressed across all sectors of the ecosystem. On the sell side, scale continues to be a challenge as well as, Myers pointed out, “Making sure that we remove some of the complexities that create headwinds that lead to a lack of confidence about integrating addressable into the mainstream.” From the buying perspective, he noted, “We have to make sure that brands and agencies shift addressable out of innovation buckets and into the mainstream.”  However, he admitted that the mainstreaming of addressable had its trade-offs requiring concrete solutions with the agreement that, “The industry would adopt this mainstream approach and help fund the work that needs to be done to make this a more scalable product.”

In short, the study revealed that, “We definitely need to simplify the buying, managing of campaign across suppliers, increase in scale, provide more of a national footprint, increase interoperability among MVPDs and technology partners and solve some of the measurement issues,” he said. Measurement specifically needs to solve, “across the differences in how people have traditionally planned and measured television, how these new impressions based models work and ultimately how you can tie this into attribution and other techniques to measure the performance.” All of this is not impossible but will take a coordinated full industry effort and commitment.

The Path Forward

It takes a village or, in this case, an industry, to facilitate the mainstreaming of addressable. For their part, Dish has been focused on forming sell side partnerships. “We’ve been working with other distributors and platform and technology partners that we directly interface with to begin to make changes and that would also include non-traditional partnerships with companies like DirectTV,” as well as Comcast, Charter and Cox as well as Ampersand for local markets. “We are beginning to partner with the programmers themselves and offer addressable services,” he added, beyond the two minute local avails and into the 14 minutes of national inventory. “It’s not just available through the more traditional buying channels,” he explained, and that enables the mainstreaming of addressable by solving for scale.

According to Myers, the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already occurring pre-Covid, such as the proliferation of choice for viewers and more fragmentation in the marketplace. “People were looking for more entertainment in the home during the pandemic,” he stated, “We at Dish are always concerned about making sure that consumers receive the most value for their spend. That has created new opportunity in the TV advertising ecosystem where we have this fragmentation but we also have these new ad supported platforms that are out there for consumers.”

Measurement and the Future of Addressable

When it comes to measurement, Myers noted that, “addressable is an impressions based product that measures at a household level and that opens up the ability to also provide attribution and other types of measurement metrics. That is one of the major benefits of moving to addressable TV. It was way more precise measurement not only the delivery of the impression itself but then it can be linked to clear consumer behaviors which ultimately help calculate the ROI and the performance of that media spend.”   

As far as the future of addressable is concerned, Myers is optimistic. “We will continue to see addressable build in terms of its importance in the execution of TV advertising,” he predicted. “We will see it shift from innovation budgets into mainstream. We will be able to provide a simple and interoperable means of creating these transactions. Measurement will make it easier to tie it all back to the sales activity. Attribution will become more seamless and easier to execute. In three to five years addressable will become a mainstream part of the TV advertising mix,” he concluded.    

This article first appeared in MediaVillage.com