At Advertising Week, Confusion About Addressable Was The Order Of The Day

Addressable TV advertising is hot right now, though you may not always hear it referred to as such.

Sometimes it’s called “data-driven” advertising.

Sometimes it’s called “targeted.”

Regardless of the nomenclature, what is happening is that programmers are starting to serve up different ads to different households watching the same show at the same time. 

Notice that I said “households”, not people. 

That’s because TV viewing data is largely based on household data and because people frequently watch TV in groups.

The problem with addressable, circa Fall 2019, is that it is still largely without any sort of commonly accepted rules, standards or definitions. Which meant that every panelist talking about it had their own personal view of what it was. A view that was usually different from the view held by other people on their panel.

To the point that when the journalist who was leading one of the sessions tried to get her panelists to agree on a basic definition of “addressable TV advertising,” she was met with a hail of buzzwords and a sea of conflicting opinions.

The problem with all this confusion is that it’s making addressable very difficult to execute.

There is no commonly agreed upon definition of various audience segments. So that if, for instance, you are looking to reach “new mothers”, one platform may define that as “women with children under six months”, while another platform may define it as “women with children under three years.” Which makes it very hard for a brand to do an apples-to-apples comparison of their media spend and the results of said media spend.

Speaking of results, measurement is another area where there is little agreement among the various platforms.

There are a range of data sources, everything from Nielsen’s panels to set top box data to ACR data from smart TVs, but no universally accepted way to parse all that data. 

OTT platforms are measured in impressions and rely on a range of sources and algorithms. Linear platforms are still measured in terms of GRPs.

And even within linear, things get tricky: if an ad slot is given to a single advertiser, who then slices it up among its own brands (e.g., Ford sends some households minivan spots, some sports car spots and others truck spots) then Nielsen will measure that ad slot in its C3/C7 ratings.

But (for now—they are working on this) if the ad unit is split between different advertisers, with some viewers seeing a car ad and others seeing a soda ad, then the spot is not measured by Nielsen’s C3/C7 ratings.

Confused?

Well you’re not alone. So, it seems, were many of the people on stage.

That was why the one clear message was that there needed to be standards. That the industry needed to operate off a common currency once more so that everyone was on the same page and could actually take all that great data that was now available and use it to craft a cohesive media plan.

One of the first vendor companies to create something similar to this, that creates a platform agnostic future, is Videa, an online buying and selling marketplace for automated television advertising, with their announcement of free, transparent, TIP-based API specifications helping to pave the way for programmatic transactions and software integrations.

It’s a task that is easier said than done, but if the industry is going to move forward, it needs to happen.