Europe. The key challenge is to make sure,
both for brands and the traditional media
industry players, that the infrastructure in
place evolves fast enough to deliver maximum
value to all stakeholders, including consumers
whose expectations for relevant and
entertaining advertising are also increasing,”
he observes.
“The technology is readily available, but
it isn’t advanced enough to deliver the high-
end, advertising experience necessary to make
it viable yet,” asserts Jim O’Neill, principal
analyst at Ooyala. “While the infrastructure
is in place to deliver relevant adverts, current
addressable advertising technology won’t
deliver advertising that a viewer would look
forward to watching and even see as valuable.”
“The way audiences view TV content has
evolved,” notes Leon Siotis, MD of SpotX in the
UK and Southern Europe. “Viewers expect to
watch their favourite shows across devices and
at flexible times as OTT (over-the-top) delivery
formats have developed and become the norm.
This has led to the advancement of advertising
technology built specifically to provide
broadcasters with the infrastructure they need
to compete in the market. Our Addressable
TV Platform covers full ad logistics, with ad
serving and decisioning, ad operations, and ad
management, as well as measurement and
reporting of TV reach and usage data.”
MATURATION. Walt Horstman, SVP and
GM of advanced media and advertising at
TiVo, suggests that the addressable market has
started to reach a true maturation point, but
the issue really seems to be scale. “A recent
report by ANA and Forrester showed that 15
per cent of the ANA members who answered
the survey are already including addressable
TV in their plans, while another 35 per cent are
currently experimenting. If the industry can
collectively work together to scale addressable
TV, then TV can provide the kind of granular
targeting that the ecosystem needs and wants
in a more brand-safe infrastructure than
digital has been able to provide.”
Tom Pollard, VP of product management,
Verimatrix, also notes the maturity of
the American market. “Addressable TV
infrastructure has certainly been available
for some time in the United States, primarily
driven by Comcast, TWC (now Spectrum)
and AT&T. Global challenges around scale,
targeting and measurement, however, still
remain. It’s the sort of chicken and egg
problem. We believe trustworthy and secure
measurement, from all multiscreen devices,
is the foundation for growing demand in
the market and helping advertisers to target
consumers, based on context rather than
audience segment,” he
“We see momentum states.
Alain Nochimowski,
in making each
executive vice president
platform capable
innovation at Viaccess-
Orca, notes that although
of some form of
still in its infancy,
targeted video
advertising.” - Boris addressable TV is
showing solid growth in
Felts, Ericsson
the North American and
Media Solutions
UK markets. “Operators’
“When broadcasters
go D2C with an OTT
offer, they gain
direct, first-hand
data on viewers.” -
Nick Moreno, Arqiva
direct access to TV inventories combined
with sophisticated and granular third-party
data offerings (facilitated by historically lax
privacy protection regulations) have helped
fuel this growth. Recent innovations in the
field of connected and smart TV data (e.g.,
through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)
technologies) will accelerate TV channels’
migration from traditional GRP (gross rating
point) sales to programmatic advertising, with
the ability to overlay granular segments on TV
viewership,” he explains.
ECONOMICS. “The situation is different
in continental Europe. It is expected that the
GDPR regulation, approved in May 2018,
will dramatically impact the economics of
targeted advertising, making it more expensive
to obtain opted-in third-party datasets.
Moreover, the absence of direct access to TV
inventories by most EU operators, which still
control the largest TV audiences, will force
them to invent new collaboration models with
TV channels. In parallel, connected TV-centric
approaches, such as HbbTV, have not yet
reached maturity. The dust is far from having
settled on this topic,” he declares.
“At YouView we are developing the
technical capability to allow broadcasters to
make use of addressable advertising in linear
TV, leveraging the opportunity across our
three million homes,” advises Susie Buckridge,
the connected TV platform’s director of
product and business development. “YouView
will enable adverts to be served and targeted to
individual households and data on views to be
returned in real time.”
As to what the broadcast industry should do
to make data gathering and analysis as efficient
as possible, Comcast’s Bremond recommends
EUROMEDIA 15