In fact, that future is already happening. It’s called “addressable TV”, and recent estimates of the number of addressable US TV households count about 45m properties.

So what’s next in the addressable journey? Beet.TV convened a panel of leading exponents to offer their views.

Innovation will start in Europe – Dave Downey, CEO, INVIDI:

“We launched the most sophisticated targeting system in the world in Brussels. It’s a cloud-based decision system, it supports several million simultaneous linear buys

“We pioneered that technology in Europe hoping to bring it back to the United States. You … get this system going in the United States and the first reaction of the MVPD owners is, ‘I want to keep this for my inventory,’ because they’re getting great results.

“Well we, of course, always wanted to do it with NBC and CBS and ABC because that’s where the big money is. So a lot of our innovation goes and happens in another market with an eye towards, ‘When will it be ready for the States?’ And I think we’re getting close.”

National addressable will happen – Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology:

“There will be MVPDs, broadcasters … all selling addressable-linear … in the future. It’s a combination of … the technological deployment, the business model and… the human condition.

“We all have to get comfortable with the fact that the world is changing, be okay with changing it. Twenty years ago, the idea of saying you were tethered to some sort of electronic device that was always with you, you’d be like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ So that’s the human condition element.”

Addressability will hit scale – Brian Cordes, director, AT&T AdWorks:

“The marketplace is demanding it. We’re at over 50 million households right now. Projections are that, by 2020, we’ll be in over 80% of households nationally.

“What’s been happening with advertisers demanding these increased metrics and accountability is something that’s going to drive us forward and I think it’s inevitable for it to happen on a national scale.”

This panel was moderated by The Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.

This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

In an interview with Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, Cordes cites financial services companies as one sector siphoning direct mail dollars.

“In the credit card space, these financial companies have to stay compliant with fair lending, and a direct mail list is a compliant list that can be easily applied to addressable households in the same manner,” Cordes explains.

This is because direct mail lists are based on names and addresses, as is addressable TV. “It’s really a seamless way to take those same segments and move them to TV,” Cordes says. He adds that some marketers experiment with direct mail and addressable TV and weigh the outcome.

Asked by Spiegel about back-end correlation for addressable TV campaigns, Cordes says it doesn’t end with, say, someone in a targeted household simply opening a financial account.

“If you open up a brokerage account, for example, that’s a great acquisition for that company,” he says. “But if they never actually fund that account, that financial institution never makes any money off that customer. We can understand both the acquisitions and the funding part of it.”

Overall, AT&T is seeing more marketers use addressable TV for “increased frequency against those most likely to convert,” according to Cordes.

When the company launched its addressable TV product four years ago, it would not have expected consumer packaged-goods marketers to be among the ranks of the interested, much less involved.

While CPG, according to Cordes, was not expected “to be a major player but if you look at the numbers, it actually is.”

AT&T is in the process of “connecting the dots” between its more than 25 million pay TV subscribers and the 100 million-plus mobile screens it reaches, Cordes says. One stumbling block is getting advertisers and agencies to embrace a “video-neutral” strategy.

“One of the issues, frankly, we’re seeing is that a lot of times the mobile budgets will be siloed separately than the TV budgets and you got to work with two different teams to get a deal done,” Cordes says. “I think that’s changing.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605.  Please find more videos from the event here.