“We’re going to reach a point soon-ish, I would say, of mass scale,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “At that point, media planners will start to lead with addressable audiences.”
He said advertisers can be classified among three broad categories of addressable TV strategies. The first group consists of sophisticated, big-budget advertisers with a “total TV” strategy that are seeking to add incremental reach with addressable TV.
The second group includes advertisers that have an “addressable-only” strategy to reach audiences in the lower parts of the purchase funnel.
The third group is made up of marketers that are completely new to TV, and recognize the opportunity to reach target audiences economically.
“You don’t need a big budget that TV has often been associated with,” Harcus said. “Smaller budgets can still allow smaller, scale-up brands/startup brands to target their priority audiences.”
While digital advertisers are bracing for the continued loss of tracking cookies that help with ad targeting, addressable TV platforms haven’t ever relied on those kinds of identifiers. Instead, their targeting tends to be based on location, postal codes and households, Harcus said.
“We’ve got a future-ready data strategy for targeting and measurement that has been immune, to some extent, from the changes in the world of cookies and IDs,” he said. “That’s not to say that innovations aren’t going to come along.”
As more advertisers measure the success of their campaigns with outcomes, Harcus is advising them to gain greater expertise in addressable TV by experimenting with the platforms. Those tests should include different kinds of ad creative that are customized for audiences.
“Our research says there’s a very compelling case for getting the relevant creative message in front of the right audience, but also on the right screen around the right content,” he said.
You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But true use of the opportunity is running wider than that.
This is according to one man whose addressable TV company is celebrating having achieved a depth of real use cases.
In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in Australia.
Finecast aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Finecast UK MD Harry Harcus explains: “We were kind of a startup 18 months ago, but we’ve worked with 250 brands this year. We’ve run 2,500 campaigns. We’ve delivered almost three billion addressable TV impressions.
“As a result of all of that, we’ve learned a huge amount. We’ve learned … the diversity of use cases that brands are coming to us for – we’ve seen the full spectrum.”
Harcus says that spectrum includes:
Finecast claims to offer addressable ads in programming from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, distributed over platforms from YouVie, Sky and Virgin Media, using data partners like Acxiom, CACI, Experian and Mastercard.
Harcus was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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