Now it’s ready to close the loop back from TV to online media, too.

Company chief marketer Fred Di Blasio tells Beet.TV the firm is readying to spread its cloud-based ad inventory decisioning engine, helping buyers segment and target audiences, from TV over to digital, coming this fourth quarter.

That will allow customers to count impressions across devices, for what he’s calling an “all-glass” strategy.

Addressable TV is already coming to fruition, impressing advertising, Di Blasio says, claiming a 92% renewal rate on addressable ad buys.

The company recently rolled out in Belgium, underpinning an addressable TV advertising launch by Liberty Global’s Belgian broadcaster Telenet and channel owner SBS Broadcasting.

Back in January, CEO Dave Downey told Beet.TV: “We have 92 million homes under contract, 30 million of those installed. Last month, we did 9 billion addressable impressions and we’re gonna triple that by next year so it’s at a rapid pace of growth.”

Invidi has now taken a hefty $132.25 million in funding from 13 investors in more than a decade, including big-name Google, WPP Ventures, GroupM and DirecTV.

This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.

But Caspar Schlickum doesn’t quite see it that way. While many tech vendors get excited about converting TV in to another programmatic video end point, the regional chief of Group M’s Xaxis data unit, is more realistic, saying the promise just isn’t there yet: “We’re a way away from really having figured that out.”

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Schlickum says: “We’re thinking about addressable TV very myopically.

“There’s a bigger opportunity – certainly, in the short term and, I would argue, even in the medium and maybe long term – on taking TV data and making that addressable across existing platforms like display and video.”

That is an inversion of the way that many people are coming to view the TV advertising opportunity – not using data to super-target and deliver ads on the TV screen, but using TV viewing behavior data to target ads to consumers in other, online media.

That’s something Xaxis is doing with its Xaxis Sync offering – which serves ads on to second-screen devices, in sync with their TV airing – and with a new suite, already available in Italy and due for roll-out elsewhere, that targets light TV viewers online using demographic and interest profiles.

“We need to think about TV much more holistically,” Schlickum adds. “Rather than just a place to put ads … not just the executional platform … also a place where data is being generated.”

This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.

Rather than hosting one big industry event, AT&T AdWorks will produce a series of some 100 smaller events around the U.S. starting next month. The events will be largely educational, meant to convey the value of addressable to the marketing and media community, she explains.

Beet.TV  Partners with AT&T AdWorks on Video Series

As part of the Addressable Upfronts project, Beet.TV  will produce a series of 25 video interviews with leading marketers and agency executives on the topic of addressable and advanced television advertising.  Production begins next month in New York and Chicago.  AT&T is the series sponsor.

Experience at the bottom of the funnel proved that TV drives actual sales, according to Tracey Scheppach, EVP, Publicis Precision Video.

“Unfortunately when we raced to the bottom of the funnel we forgot about the other layers of the funnel,” Scheppach says.

One of the things SMG has done is to combine location data—big data coming from mobile phones and off of TV—and combining them at the agency’s “safe haven,” Acxiom. This activity falls within SMG’s Maps platform, launched this time last year.

“We’ve done three campaigns with Maps and seen phenomenal results,” Scheppach says. “For example, we see for a tourist advertiser that we sent a message to you and you actually visited the locale that you were interested in. For an auto we can show that you’ve actually visited the showroom, or for a retailer that you actually went to the store.”

Along with a bigger addressable advertising footprint by Comcast, SMG foresees a big move into the addressable TV space by pharmaceutical marketers as soon as the ad formats move from 30 seconds to 60.

“I think you will see a significant increase in some of the pharmaceutical companies that are willing to do addressable television,” Scheppach says.

We interviewed her at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York.  Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here. 

Advertisers will be able to bring their own data to a self-service, “private marketplace.”  They will be able to see results in a fully transparent manner, explains Jason Brown, VP for National Advertising Sales at AT&T AdWorks.

The new programmatic marketplace is powered by Videology.  Details of the AT&T plan was discussed on Thursday at an industry event on advanced TV presented by Videology in Manhattan.   We interviewed Brown there.

News of the plans at AT&T was reported earlier today by the Wall Street Journal.

We interviewed him at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York.  Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here. 

Ad agency SMG has already reported a tripling in client addressable TV business last year

And SMG’s director Steve Murtos says lots of clients finally “leaned in” after years of evangelizing.

“There’s more scale coming,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Primarily, it’s been MVPD-led inventory but we’re starting to see some other sources come online.

“As you see more inventory, you’re gonna see more of everything else. It allows us to be able to secure more budgets, there’s going to be more data available for us to continue to measure. so I think 2016 is going to be a big year.”

Last year, SMG launched SMG Maps TV, an addressable TV measurement product that it says links addressable TV ad exposure to brand location visits,in partnership with PlaceIQ and Acxiom.

But Murtos thinks the industry isn’t changing overnight. “I think we’re still maybe two, three years out before we’re, before it’s at scale,” he says. “There’s still a lot of confusion in the marketplace, too many players all trying to do the same thing. I think that’s going take a good two years to shake out.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.2 

The new concept means brands can advertise only to relevant segments of TV viewers, targeted at the household level, cutting out wasted spend.

Joanna Thissen, targeted TV division at Modi Media, Group M’s division working on addressable, says car makers were the first brand category tobuy in.

“It just makes sense,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I mean, I live in Manhattan, I am never going to drive an automobile … You could blast me with an auto commercial 100,000 times, it could be the prettiest commercial of all time, and I’m still not gonna buy a car.

“Once some clients saw big players coming to the market, especially in the auto category, they saw the press and they were like, ‘this is a really cool idea, look at how successful these campaigns are’, and ‘if the auto industry with all their big money is coming to play, then maybe we should try to dip our toes in the water and see how that works’.”

Now 43 million US households are available to target addressably, Modi said recently. So who is next to the party?

Thissen sees financial services providers coming in next.

“If I already have a certain credit card, stop showing me ads for it – maybe show me a card that has a better interest rate,” she says.  “CPGs are big to the industry, too. There’s so many different datasets – from NCS to 84.51° which was formerly Dunnhumby and Shopcom. All have this amazing shopper data that will allow brands to go and specifically target their competitors to drive sale and steal share.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.2

The company already has traction, and the pace of change it is already seeing suggests a big uptick in the opportunity this year.

“We have 92 million homes under contract, 30 million of those installed,” CEO Dave Downey tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Last month, we did 9 billion addressable impressions and we’re gonna triple that by next year so it’s at a rapid pace of growth.”

Invidi is currently in a big international expansion, with the company’s technology due to underpin an addressable service launch by Liberty Global’s Belgian broadcaster Telenet and channel owner SBS Broadcasting.

That is just one part of its ambitions. Downey says he has another 100 million homes identified all over the Pan Asia area, Europe, South America and other markets.

So what does “addressability” mean to this addressable pioneer?

“If we’re watching American Idol or The Voice or any of the more popular television shows and they go to a commercial break and the commercial’s for Revlon, obviously that’s a commercial geared towards a female of a particular age group,” Downey says. “There’s obviously other people watching that show who are outside that cohort.

“With addressability, we’ve been able to take television advertising and increase the value of single commercial instances of up to 700% … Think of direct mail with the sight, sound, and motion of TV – it’s a great combination.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

That is what we cover regularly here on Beet.TV, and that is the trend seen by Ashish Chordia, CEO of Alphonso, an ad tech company helping advertisers harness device data to target those ads on multiple devices.

“There is a thirst for data-driven, TV data, viewership-driven real-time TV data-driven advertising,” Chordia tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Being able to retarget these audiences using this data has been just huge and a very massive growth area.

“I can target exactly the people who have watched my TV ad on television on the same day on their digital device – within that same few minutes. And that wasn’t possible a few years ago. It is insane what’s happening and what will continue to happen.”

Of all the ad tech vendors promising to light up video opportunities, Alphonso is one of the smaller in the pack.

With offices in San Francisco and New York and a small amount of funding under its belt according to Crunchbase, the company made a good fist of bolstering its profile using a video summit around last year’s TV upfronts season, however.

“At the heart of Alphonso, is a system that enables all sorts of OEMs – whether it’s TV or smart devices like set-top boxes or living room devices or mobile apps – to be able to collect data on what people are watching on those devices in real time,” Chordia adds.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.2 

There is a chance that targeting could lead marketers to “invisibility” warns Rob Norman, Global Chief Digital Officer of GroupM, in this interview with Beet.TV

We spoke with him at his office in New York for this lead-up to CES.  You can find more videos from the series here.   This series is sponsored by YuMe.

The tool “will ultimately be self-service”, the company’s TV strategy senior director Oscar Rondon tells this Beet.TV panel discussion.

“If you start with a TV plan, we’re trying to find what’s the incremental reach if you come to TubeMogul and you execute the buy,” Rondon says. “And, if you start with a digital plan where you have an audience, where can you find that audience across television networks?”

TubeMogul is partnering with measurement services like Nielsen and Rentrak plus Experian but also letting customers use their CRM data, to find audiences on addressable TV services.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by Xaxis SVP Christine Beaumier.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page. 

Deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV the service, which allows advertisers to target individual household set-top boxes using more than 532 attributes held by Sky about its customers, has clocked up 700 advertisers, 4,000 campaigns and billions of impressions.

“More than 70% of the advertisers active on the platform are new to TV or new to Sky, and they’re coming from a real diverse mix of market categories,” West adds, “from … garden centers or car dealerships, to … high-end finance, software-as-a-service.”

Now Sky wants AdSmart to go large. The company is already planning to roll it out across its enlarged European footprint, after the UK company merged with its German and Italian siblings.

And West reveals: “We turn over about £1.2 billion a year. Of that, at the moment it’s about 13% of our revenue is non-core, non-linear TV. We have ambitions to make that much closer to 70-30 within a couple of years.”

This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page. 

“Once the sales reps see incremental sales revenue … they become converts. But bringing the horse to water required a lot of time and effort,” COO Kristin Dolan concedes.

The proof is now clear, though. “You can do almost a laser-like media schedule for an advertiser that has never done television advertising before because they didn’t think they could afford it,” Dolan adds.

Here are three examples of how local addressability can work on Cablevision:

1. “Our favourite one right now is Horseback Riding School. If you re trying to target upper-income families who live within a certain distance of a riding school, there are certain type so programming they watch, you can do that.”
2. “We saw an ad on our systems last week for a local car dealership – at the end they had the photos of the sales reps at that particular dealership.”
3. “Even a local jewellery store can do a quick tag at the end (of the ad) and not have to spend a ton of money.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The questions were asked by Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

Does any of this matter? Some marketers are becoming excited about the prospect of unifying ad measurements in to a single, holistic metric. But is that feasible? An entertaining panel convened at Beet.TV’s recent executive retreat debated…

• comScore executive chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni: “I don’t think there is a single currency in the digital world. There may be in television – but, in digital, a whole bunch of different ad servers are used that provide the count on which buying and selling occurs.”
• Rentrak CEO Bill Livek: “We live in a common-sense world where there is a basket of currencies. The economy functions well because we have multiple currencies. In television, we are already there with multiple currencies.”
• Nielsen agency solutions EVP Dave Hohman: “TV has got incredibly fragmented. No one system can measure all of it. That’s why, slowly, we have seen the adoption of multiple currencies. We accept that these standards aren’t perfect.”
• MediaVest SVP Steve Murtos: “The only data that we’re using is coming out of the box. We’re combining with whatever data we can find at a household level. You can’t rely on the box forever, as things become more dispersed across devices.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

With deployments from Cablevision, Comcast, DirecTV and DISH Networks, the number of targetable TV sets is growing but, lately, we have heard still-optimistic executives sound a note of caution – don’t go expecting the technology to reach prime-time in 2016.

“We still only have 40+ million set-top boxes that are addressable,” Videology CEO Scott Ferber tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Big marketers want to drive goods. They really need scale.

“As the addressable footprint grows in the linear feed, we’re going to see a massive increase very quickly in the amount of money spent on it. (But) it will be another couple of years before it gets mainstream-big.”

Ferber is pegging threats from Google and Facebook as likely to stimulate the roll-out of wider footprints from cable operators. The fireside chat  was moderated by comScore executive chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.  You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page. 

But the US TV system is an outlier in a global context. Smaller, more integrated national systems in other countries seem to make partnering for programmatic or addressable initiatives more straightforward. Could they also be more lucrative?

“Two minutes an hour is just a US phenomenon. The rest of the world, where I’m doing deals, it’s programmers, broadcasters and distributors coming together,” New Jersey-based addressable TV platform provider INVIDI‘s CEO Dave Downey told a Beet.TV panel.

“We’re most excited about other markets where this two minutes an hour doesn’t exist.”

Next year, INVIDI’s technology will underpin a launch by Liberty Global’s Belgian broadcaster Telenet and channel owner SBS Broadcasting. The integrated system means far more minutes per hour are available to addressability. And Downey says it’s the “same thing in China, same thing in South America”.

Outside of the US, we are also seeing operators like the UK’s Sky launch advanced TV targeting, benefitting from owning both the network, the channels and the media sales operation.

But Downey says US addressability is scaling up hard, with DISH, DirectTV and Verizon combined serving up nine billion monthly addressable impressions recently.

Steve Marshall, CEO, INVISION, a multi-platform advertising campaign management technology provider, also spoke on the panel.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page. 

Already this year, the pair told Beet.TV they would team up, after RTL’s $144m investment in to SpotX in 2014 and $19.4m in Clypd this April.

Clypd CEO Joshua Summers says the hook-up is enabling advertisers to buy unduplicated audiences across both digital and linear video inventory, including retargeting from one medium to the other.

Although this works on an individual-advertiser basis, Summer tells Beet.TV the pair will bring it to “open market” in 2016.

Clypd already works to help US cable networks and channels like Discovery better target viewers. Summers says the RTL investment is helping Clypd understand the disparate multi-market of Europe.

This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum presented by Xaxis. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

Asked if the current wave of new advertising technology just amounted to introducing a set of new acronyms whilst not intrinsically changing the business, Bank Of America media SVP Lou Paskalis replied he “violently disagreed”.

“It is a massive paradigm shift … that allows us to use advertising inventory for a much larger sweep of use cases,” he says. “I’m going to take a CRM mindset and modality in to paid channels.”

Today, there are an estimated 43 million US homes that can receive such adverts, and the prospect got a short in the arm from last week’s partnership between GroupM addressable unit Modi Media and Cablevision. But Paskalis sounded a warning.

“The creative people are still marching to different music. They’re making 30-second stories, little ad-like objects – but they don’t understand what the targeting modalities allow us to do now. I don’t know how that works. We have to march them back in to this.”

Eyeview CEO Oren Harnevo agreed, saying: “The creative is completely separate. They made 30 seconds two months ago and that’s it.” That’s where Eyeview comes in. “We’ll make hundreds of thousands of different video ads, and then we’ll provide the different video ad for a person who likes this type of food,” Harnevo said.

In the panel, Modi Media targeted television director Joanna Thissen said most first-wave advertisers used the technology for “bottom-of-the-funnel” ads, those which can achieve sales return – but a coming second wave will be “moving up-funnel”.

Meanwhile, Comcast Media 360 VP Andrew Ward explained offering addressable TV ads gives Comcast access to customers that had never bought spot TV ads.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, commercial content director Gary Knight cautions against getting “obsessed” by addressable TV advertising.

“There’s an element of personalisation that’s good for the ecosystem,” Knight says. “But the good old-fashioned mass targeting … is something we also want. That needs to exist alongside this obsession with big data. It needs to be a balanced ecosystem.”

Sixty-year-old ITV broadcasts over both terrestrial Freeview and satellite and cable pay-TV, and owns a growing production capability of its own.

Certainly, Knight – an ITV veteran who runs broadcast sponsorships and relations with advertisers and agencies for content partnerships – wants to capture first-party data about his viewers. But, without owning the underlying broadcast infrastructure, ITV has no way to know who its linear viewers really are.

That’s why ITV is starting online, recently renaming its ITV Player catch-up TV service as “ITV Hub“, claiming 12.5 million user registrations.

But Knight is so far frustrated with promises made by advertising technology.

“Every time you plug in a system that helps you with better advertising … you hit these technology roadblocks,” he says. “There are enormous costs of being able to achieve this nirvana. I’m not certain when it will ever get there.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, CEO David Downey reveals the company’s technology will underpin a launch by Liberty Global’s Belgian broadcaster Telenet and channel owner SBS Broadcasting.

The European addressable opportunity is a world away from that in America.

“It’s quite different,” Downey says. “As we head around the world, that same concept of two minutes an hour is not as prevalent. You’re dealing with a broadcaster, which has 24 hours a day of inventory availability, as opposed to the way it works in the United States in the MVPD community, where they own two minutes per hour for their advertiser capability.

“Europe is playing a bit of catch up in terms of addressability. But this is a very sophisticated system. This has the potential to really demonstrate to the rest of the world the power of addressability.”

Privacy concerns have previously been said to slow the rise of addressable TV in European countries like Belgium. Downey says his system includes sophisticated control over the targeting of viewers.

European broadcasters have already been delivering addressable campaigns using HbbTV technology from rival Smartclip.

This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum presented by Xaxis. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

But what does the future look like, now that operators are lighting up household targeting for connected TV ads?

Those two minutes could either get longer, or be more efficiently used, a Beet Retreat panel concluded:

• AT&T AdWorks ad sales VP Chris Monteferrante: “I think we’ve only just scratched the surface in terms of addressable and utilising the two minutes. Next year, you’ll probably see a 3x or 4x jump in terms of the number of advertisers coming on board and the dollars you’re gong to see them spend.”
• Dish media sales VP Adam Gaynor: “There’s a lot more to do in those two minutes. The two minutes becomes a lot more when you start to slice and dice the spot to reach that right audience.”
• Comcast Media 360 SVP Kevin Patrick Smith: “I don’t know who invented the two minutes. I don’t know if it’s the right amount. We’re also now getting access to their VOD inventory and IP digital video inventory.”
• Cablevision Media Sales president Ben Tatta: “Twenty-five percent of those two minutes an hour that we get were unmeasured up until we rolled out census-level measurement. You can see the billions of dollars that are just sitting there.”

Media General chief revenue officer Jamie Elden also joined the conversation.

The panel was chaired by industry consultant Tim Hanlon. 

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“There’s two parts to scaleability with addressable:,” says Invision CEO Steve Marshall, whose company helps deliver ads to “addressable” TV sets:

1. “There’s the technology, being able to scale the backend technology to serve more ads in more commercial breaks.”
2. “Then there’s scaling the revenue.”

Marshall claims to be “very bullish on the ability to do both” but he thinks they won’t happen at the same time.

“2015 was the year when the addressable model was proven,” he adds. “Now, scaling the revenue… over the next two to three years, you will see significant increases They’ve really just scratched the surface of the inventory. MVPDs have only lit up a small percentage of their two minutes per hour.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“To us, addressable and programmatic are two distinct words,” according to DISH media sales VP Adam Gaynor. “Addressable can be programmatic, but it doesn’t have to be, and programmatic is not addressable.

“To us, addressable gives us the opportunity to deliver specific messages to specific households. Plain and simple. What programmatic does is add a level of automation to that process.”

Gaynor says TV ad buyers used to request targeting of broad-brush customer demographics but are now beginning to get a lot more specific.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“We do dynamic creative optimization on the fly based on each individual’s specific history,” says GroupM global chairman Irwin Gotlieb. “In the television world, we haven’t quite gotten to that, but a company called Visible World, in which WPP invested I would guess 15 years ago, gives you something called creative versioning.

“The creative is developed in little segments. Segments are assembled on the fly based on data points. You have a large retail department store… you have a generic opening (to the ad)… if it’s cold climate, you do a snow blower (ad); if it’s a warm climate, you do a lawnmower (ad) … then you do a generic close. That’s creative versioning. It exists.”

Comcast acquired Visible World from investors including WPP Group, Viacom and Time Warner Investments earlier this year.

At last week’s Beet.TV executive retreat, customized delivery of video advertising was a major topic of conversation on the lips of several ad agency executives and vendors including, Eyeview which also delivers customized video ads on digital and via linear TV.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.  You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“I’m putting about three times as much money in the marketplace as I was a year ago,” Starcom MediaVest Group’s precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty way to go for “addressable” to reach its full potential.

So what’s next? Scale and breadth, Scheppach hopes. She wants to see addressability applied to linear TV ads and to have more inventory opened up to the process. Particularly, she would like brands unaccustomed to TV advertising to be enticed to begin.

“I had hopes early on that we’d start to bring in new advertisers,” Scheppach says. “But what we’re seeing is the deepness of television players use television more efficiently and effectively.

“The big opportunity is to pivot to bring in new advertising forms – political is one, direct mail is another huge category… whoever they were going to send the catalogue to, I can send a 30-second spot to.”

Programming note:   Scheppach will be a featured speaker at the upcoming Beet.TV executive retreat in Fort Lauderdale in November.

This video is part of the series Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented by SpotX. You can find additional videos from the series here.