Addressable TV Addresses the Needs of a Targeted Media Mix

The continued evolution of the media ecosystem has afforded advertisers more and more platform and content choices to reach their target consumers and drive sales. And with the increasing sophistication of technology, the expansion of usable datasets and the implementation of machine learning, both buyers and sellers are able to craft compelling, engaging and relevant campaigns designed to reach highly specific audiences.   

But even as these advertisers expand their portfolio of media marketing efforts by incorporating digital, print, radio and TV into their mixes, consumer attention continues to fragment with shifting consumption behaviors throughout their day according by device. Successful marketers are those who not only refine their messages according to platforms (taking into account engagement across the day and viewing platforms) but who also understand the value of hyper-messaging to the household in a way that maximizes their reach to an advertiser’s desired target audiences.

That is where addressable advertising can offer a way to reach target consumers with measureable ROI capabilities. What exactly is addressable advertising? According to the CIMM Lexicon, addressable advertising is advertising that is directed to specific geographies or audiences to increase its relevance. This means that it enables the delivery of the right ad to the right target at the right time in the right market, with measureable and impactful results.

Once a custom proprietary advertising opportunity, addressable advertising is swiftly moving to more standard-izable campaigns through the expanded use of sophisticated technology and usable relevant datasets. It is a targeting opportunity that more marketers are considering. While still only a small percentage of overall ad spending at this time, overall addressable advertising spending is projected to grow year to year +50% 2017 vs 2016 and +80% 2018 vs 2017 according to MyersBizNet Annual Advertising and Spending Report. As the universe of reachable homes increases from the current 49.8 million TV homes to total U.S. homes of approximately 115 million homes, this growth should accelerate.

“Addressable advertising is based on data driven solutions that enable scale, maximize reach and offer a transparent ROI linked to first party data sets,” explained Brian Norris, Director, Short Form Media Sales at DISH Media Sales. “It offers advertisers the reach of television with the attribution and back-end reporting of digital. Addressable TV is all about accountability. It makes the results of every campaign perfectly clear, arming marketers with the knowledge of exactly what’s working and what’s not,” he added.

Addressable can offer additional insights to cross-platform buys. Many major marketers are using addressable in conjunction with other platforms as Ed Beadle, Senior Manager at Acura Integrated Marketing, states, “We will simultaneously target a specific audience across digital, social and addressable TV” which improves the effectiveness of the messaging.  

Addressable also enables better targeting with more relevant ad messages. Brands believe that consumers will respond better to ads that directly speak to their needs. As reported in Adweek, Allstate, which purchased addressable inventory from both Dish and DirectTV, focused their message strictly on viewers who rent, as opposed to a general age gender target.  In this way only the most relevant target consumers would see the ads.

There are many MVPDs committed to addressable advertising.  DISH Media Sales, for example, worked with a national advertiser to utilize addressable advertising to target households with motorcycle owners, which are typically hard-to-reach homes. This additional spend through addressable was intended to supplement their already robust national buy. The national buy, which ran in tandem across a 13-week flight window, was compared with the additional addressable buy. The result was that the addressable campaign reached 90% of the target, while the national campaign reached 70%. Net/net, the addressable campaign successfully served ads to an incremental 20% of the brand’s desired households, ultimately driving additional sales.

In sum, addressable advertising has the potential to increase the delivery and reach of potential targeted households by leveraging demographically targeted, household-level messages on a national scale with transparency and accountability.  Traditional TV can offer reach and frequency but addressable delves deeper (while still complying with privacy considerations) by linking specific households to specific sales.

To learn more about addressable advertising and the value it provides to marketers, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Addressable Advertising Pushes the Television Evolution

The recent B&C Content Show dedicated a full half day to discussions regarding the advancements in addressable advertising, TV programmatic and transforming traditional advertising. But it was also a love song to STB data, segmentation, ROI data and analytics.

Addressable advertising is reaching scale according to Jaime Power of GroupM’s Mobi Media who said that the footprint is currently "42 million HH and expected to grow to 60 million HH" with a steady expansion from local into scatter and national outplays." But he cautioned that "addressable will not replace traditional TV because we need traditional TV for reach." I agree with Power to a point because I believe that traditional TV itself needs to evolve from a spots and dots sales model to segmentation and proof of ROI. Addressable may facilitate traditional TV’s evolution especially as addressability rolls out to a more nationalized  distribution and as television itself becomes more digital in the world of 100% smart TVs.

The Traditional TV Model is Changing
The television business has been undergoing stress and change. Sales are down across many networks and projections indicate that the trend could continue. When asked if Addressable can save the TV environment, Power replied that "TV has to evolve- it is unrecognizable compared to ten years ago. We need to understand the new landscape and find ways to measure it. Not all customers are the same. We need to need to get to the custom level and reach core segments. Like purchase data where we can locate not just households with a dog but households that buy a certain dog food. You need to prove you can steal share by honing in on people's viewing behavior. We are using STB data and working close with analytics teams."

Research and Analytics are Critical

Virtually every panel touched on the need for measurement, targeting, analytics and usable data sets as part of their company's addressable initiative. Ben Tatta of Cablevision explained that "Data analytics is a new thing for television. Now we are conducting forensics on the data, on exposure and on response. (we recognize the ) importance of first party data. For the first time advertisers can use their own customer file. Age and gender have been proxies. We now don't have to do modeling. We are literally counting Sales." Keith Kazerman of DirectTV fielded "over 500 campaigns this year where we go into deep analytics that are more than age and gender."

What is Big Data?
A panel on big data moderated by Barry Frey of the DPAA was tasked with defining big data. According to Chris Pizzurro of Canoe, "For us big data is about a ton of small data. We dig in and bring up insights from that. We measure each individual ad." Eric Schmitt of Allant had a slightly different view saying "We see big data and bigger data. Big data is 120 million TV households. Bigger data is activity data. We bring them together in a privacy safe way getting to audience based models across a range of platforms."

Sales Feels the Pressure

The pressures on the traditional TV sales model are coming from several angles. AMC’s Arlene Manos said that “TV advertising has to change. We didn't have the tools and weren't asked for the accountability but now we have accountability in digital and they want it in TV.” Mobi’s Seth Walters cast a more somber note explaining that “a clunky interface is part of the reason that viewers go OTT. Netflix is another reason. Roku is far easier to navigate and in some cases they are faster. Viewers can easily and quickly identify content that matters to them. What is the role of TV advertising once that occurs?” The sales solution? Brian Stempeck of The Trade Desk believes that it is “inevitable that TV will go programmatic.”

Despite all of the hand wringing I believe that traditional television has succeeded for over 60 years because it responds to change and continuously evolves. There has always been competition from other platforms from radio and print to digital devices. While we continue to grapple with how to evolve the business model in this changing environment, new successful solutions will be found. As Adam Lowy of Dish concluded,“Eventually we will get there. TV is the first screen.” I agree.

First published, in abbreviated form, on MediaBizBloggers.com

What is Next For Rentrak?

It can be challenging to keep up to date with all of the industry innovations today. Rentrak in particular has launched several new initiatives that offer new ways to parse and append data.  

I sat down with Rentrak CRO Bruce Gorelich and talked to him about some of the new Rentrak initiatives including their purchase of ITVX to measure in program product placement, international movie measurement in China and, arguably the most interesting, the expansion of the use of their data capabilities in the political realm by adding Republican campaigners in addition to Democratic ones.

Here are the five videos on the subject.

Rentrak's purchase of ITVX to facilitate the measurement of in-program product placement:

Rentrak's use of Big Data in the voter targeting and election process:

Rentrak's initiatives at the local agency level:

Rentrak's work in the international and movie sectors:

Uses of other datasets like those from DirectTV:

The strategic use of data in the election process has been around for years but now, with big data sets allowing for greater granularity, companies like Rentrak provide insightful instruments for political success.

It has been reported  that the strategic use of Rentrak data matched to certain target voting groups helped get the Democratic message across to voters and re-elect President Obama. Just recently, the Republicans signed up with Rentrak as part of their campaign strategy. Gorelich talks about what Rentrak did for Obama For America and what the possibilities are going forward to this next election cycle with both parties using the data.

How did it all begin? Gorelich assured me that Rentrak approached both Republicans and Democrats prior to the election cycle in 2012 but it was only the Democrats that signed on for the data. The rest is history, and a lesson to the losing side that granular big data, used strategically, can make the difference between winning and losing.

I asked him to go through the process.

BG: “From August 2011 to October 2012, we provided (the Democrats) with custom ratings based upon their voter profiles. They sent 25 million voter names and addresses across 44 markets to a third party. We then sent our operator name and addresses to that third party to match in a privacy protected way. So we did not know who was who. We got back an anonymous ID with a tag attached to it. The tag would say this is Obama Segment A, this is Obama Segment B – there were about 8 to 10 segments depending upon the market and we didn’t know what those segments meant. But what we were able to do was for that year, produce for them on a quarter hour basis in each of the 44 markets, a rating for all the stations and networks in those markets. They then used that data to inform their buying process.”

He continues, “The results were two fold – first how they bought. Typically they bought about 60 networks deep in a market. And when they did buy a station they were much broader in how they bought a station in a typical political buy. We looked at the Romney campaign. The Romney campaign bought on average about 18 networks and was much more narrow in where they bought during the day. So we were able to allow Obama to be much richer in their selection of networks and time periods also, because we were measuring 230 odd networks compared to the other guys who are much smaller. So the network buy was much richer and broader for Obama. And, what they have said in public is buying this way allowed them to deliver 20% more of their target. So if they had spent the same amount of money but had bought on women 18-49 for example. They would have gotten 20% less on those segments. So it was a better way to buy, a richer way to buy, a more efficient way to buy and, of course, because they won, a more effective way to buy.”

I look forward to see how each side uses Rentrak for this next election cycle. Stay tuned, and don’t forget to vote!