Addressable advertising may not be the best use of TV ad dollars – yet
Addressable TV promises advanced segmentation, but to the inevitable detriment of scale. Zenith’s Natasha Pelly explores why addressable advertising may not be the best use of your TV dollars … for now, at least.
Addressable TV has hit the headlines once again in Australia as Network Ten announced its addressable offering. But amidst an increasingly complex array of terminology and acronyms – ATV, PTV, OTT, CTV, addressable, linear addressable, VOD, SVOD, BVOD – we often struggle to understand what’s on offer, not to mention what we actually want.
Over the past couple of years, the Australian TV networks have been developing their ability to target more niche, richer audience segments via their online platforms, data partnerships, and technological investment. Though some of this addressable content is live streamed, it is important to understand that this technology renders the TV content addressable, not the TV itself.
This isn’t to say that such offerings aren’t a welcome addition to the marketing arsenal – on the contrary, they represent a promising step in the right direction. However, the present offering doesn’t really deliver on the promise of ‘the best of TV and digital combined’.
Hmmmm… I think someone needs a better understanding of how addressable TV, connected TV and linear TV works, both locally and in other regions as the above heavily blurs the lines of each.
Agree
The above article highlights one of the capability gaps within the agency groups at this point in time. If I were an agency I’d be concentrating efforts on bolstering my artillery with those from tech based roles in media owners.
Agencies consistently push media owners very hard for things, however also seem to blur the lines regularly.
Anyone who wants to properly understand addressable TV (indeed, ‘TV’ in general) should follow the American research guru Ed Papazian on LinkedIn. His comments regularly burst the bubbles of those who post hyperbolic ‘the media world has totally changed!’ articles and claims, especially around digital media (as in “No-one watches TV anymore!” Well, according to the data…). He lines them up in his researcher ‘show-me-the-data’ sights.
He writes this on (USA) addressable TV: “Several initiatives have been in development to better target TV buys. One of these, “addressable TV,” purports to eliminate “waste” audiences. The problem is that, except for the rare instances where the advertiser supplies the addresses of known customers or prospects, the actual buys are based on profiling, not on specific information for a given home, and the audience metric is set usage, without knowing who in the household is viewing. In addition, the national GRP inventory is very limited for addressable TV sales, and many homes still cannot be reached in this manner.”
Addressable TV will indeed become a part of what we do, but never all that we do. And the notion that linear TV audiences will ultimately disappear completely is fancilful bollocks.
We need our media experts to have a better handle on this area than what is demonstrated above in this piece.
Some do just not Zenith.
This smacks of an agency that doesn’t really understand what addressable is, its potential and where the industry is going.
As marketers build managed databases, then they will have 1st party data for addressable TV to use. Clearly, this won’t apply to all sectors, but for certain products the ability to target will lead to massive savings.