Recently, I sat down with my five-year-old son and explained to him what I do for a living. After a 15 minute conversation he said, “So Mommy you send commercials to me for things that I like, like M&Ms and apple juice because I like them.” I’ve been working in the advanced television space for more than seven years, and yes, it really is that simple! I explained addressable TV in simple English instead of speaking in acronyms or big, scary words. 

From experience, I can tell you that the concept of addressable TV is pretty easy to understand: identify the right households, send messages only those high-value audiences and have the ability to measure each campaigns impact against a brand’s KPI. 

Set-top-box addressable television (via cable and satellite providers) began rolling out more than ten years ago, hitting real scale (70 million households) in the last couple of years. In addition, as traditional TV audiences continue to fragment, OTT addressable applications give marketers the ability to target high-value audiences across all screens.  

When speaking to brands or agencies or reading trade publications, I’m constantly surprised at the misconceptions around addressable TV. And the language we use as an industry doesn’t serve the goal of clearing up what’s possible and not possible with the medium. It’s clear that the marketplace cannot truly scale until we all start to speak the same language, understand the true opportunity and come together to create standards. 

The reality is that agencies want to enter the world of data-driven television, but it’s still difficult to activate an addressable campaign in a unified way. When all is said and done, there aren’t a lot of tools that let agencies reach audiences in granular way through TV. Understanding how to reach customers at scale without duplicating ads is tricky. 

Post campaign, it is challenging to surface campaign attribution  in a meaningful, uniform way. If the targeting, test design and metrics are not consistent across screens and suppliers the data is not useful. Analytics groups/data scientists’ time is eaten up by how manual addressable advertising campaign reporting is today, taking in differently formatted raw data from multiple suppliers and or viewing environments before they actually can analyze it. 

In order to move addressable TV from a buzz word to a flowchart staple, much easier execution is necessary. 

There a few things brands and agencies understand about this new reality.

We live in a multiscreen world. Just 25 or so years ago, TV didn’t have much competition. The Internet existed, but smartphones didn’t and neither did tablets. These days, consumers have many tools with which to consume premium television content, and to get an accurate picture of viewing habits, you have to take all of those into account. Nielsen recently found that nearly half of TV viewers always or very often were using a digital device while they watched TV. Often they used devices to look up information related to the content they were watching, “using digital platforms in tandem with TV and audio to augment their overall experience.” Using a second device is a part of how people watch premium, engaging content today, making it more important than ever to focus on the entire picture of who the consumer is versus what content they’re watching. 

Cross-channel attribution is the future. It’s typically difficult to use a thoughtful approach across all screens today, but it’s possible to activate on data across screens fairly easily from both an addressable and indexing standpoint. Starting with an understanding of television is key. With full transparency into how TV compares to digital performance, agencies can recognize when they should allocate more to digital or more to their addressable spend.

Automation is possible, and it’s changing everything. Agencies want to focus on gleaning insights from their campaigns to have the ability to optimize their efforts. Simply knowing a campaign worked is not enough. It’s important to go beyond results and provide recommendations to optimize future addressable campaigns, linear television media effectiveness, the value of an impression by viewing environment and/or  targeting audience allocation. Automation makes execution easier for both targeting and attribution, and it creates the ability to cleanly target a uniform audience and measure campaign impact. 

One objection agencies have to addressable TV is that have tried doing it manually at scale and found it to be too complicated. That’s a valid criticism. Historically, executing an addressable campaign manually has been extremely complex and very arduous. Putting together an addressable TV campaign has been accessible only to those who have put in the time to understand its nuances versus those of traditional television and were willing to put in the time to manage the manual processes. Technology is starting to change that, and the partners who solve challenges through unification, automation and data science are the ones who will guide brands and agencies into a new era of TV that’s data-rich and technology-driven. 

Learn more about Cadent addressable, or get in touch with us.

For every three-person startup selling T-shirts on Instagram, there is another Glossier or Casper building toward becoming a billion-dollar business. How will they get there? To date, DTC brands have been focused on sending targeted ads to consumers via premium online video. Now, some major DTC brands are now starting to take their marketing to the next level by using television to reach their target audience. The same data these brands have been leveraging to find audiences in a digital environment can now be used with television advertising. DTC brands are using addressable TV to find, target and send messages to their high-value audience prospects with closed-loop attribution.

Challengers Face Challenges

Challenger brands are taking market share from more established incumbents, sparking a transformation in retail, and the fragmentation and diffusion of consumers/retail channels runs parallel to the changes in TV audiences. Gone are the days of tens of millions tuning into shows on the big three networks. Viewers are harder to reach at scale thanks to expanded television viewing environments (Linear, VOD, TVE, Connected, OTT, etc.) and the explosion of content.

Now, as the DTC space matures, reaching the right audience on the right digital platform with the right message is getting more expensive. As DTC competition increases, multiple brands are fighting to reach the same audience, digital ad costs are on the rise, and it’s harder and harder to break through to potential customers.

Tactics like influencer marketing and hyper-targeted digital advertising initially won favor with these efficient businesses. Traditional channels like TV advertising were avoided because historically, they were considered effective at delivering ads to broad demographics. It’s rare to see a DTC brand “wasting” precious marketing dollars on a big broadcast ad buy.

But as a these brand continue grow, they are learning some of the earlier DTC go-to tactics (like influencer marketing) are not everything they were cracked up to be, with a loose focus on metrics, too many variables and no deterministic accountability. Luckily, just as these brands are growing and getting smarter, TV is as well.

Precision at Scale

Addressable TV offers marketers the ability to find and target precise audiences at scale, with the power of the sight, sound and motion and the brand impact that only television delivers. Data and analytics come together to give DTC brands the ability to extend their precise digital campaigns to a powerful television platform, a far cry from the scattershot approaches of yesterday.

Addressable TV create a one-to-one connection between brands and consumers with full brand safety built in. Challenger brands are built on the power of their connections with audiences (and customers). They are consumer-first, as well as digital-first, and as a result, all that great data created must be leveraged to generate ROI across all channels. Addressable TV makes all of a brand’s first-party CRM data work harder, as they precisely target desired audiences at the household level, and deliver the right brand message to the right people.

Brands that want to grow their scale and reach with precise audiences can now deliver massive results with addressable TV advertising. For example, we saw a DTC brand’s holiday campaign leverage the hard work of their efficient digital programs and sophisticated audience segmentation efforts. They took a first-party audience segment of existing holiday shoppers, precisely targeted them with a TV campaign, and drove more than three-times higher return on ad spend versus digital. For all campaigns, we can calculate the value of an impression based on the viewing environment.  

Addressable TV gives brands visibility into exactly which households were exposed to brand messages, and who took action as a result with deterministic measurement. The path to success for upstarts has been built on using the most efficient marketing strategies to raise awareness, build audiences, drive sales and increase loyalty. Driving that efficiency is confidence in leading-edge, data-driven tactics that are measurable and impactful.

In order to fully leverage this new data driven television ecosystem, there are over 90MM households across STB (set-top-box) and IP addressable TV that can be aggregated to send targeted messages to high value audiences at real scale.  

And, as consumers move across devices, addressable campaigns can be optimized to ensure the right frequency and maximum efficiency across all screens.  Now, every channel, including TV, is accountable to the same metrics that DTC brands were built on. Brands and their consumers have changed, and TV is changing right alongside them.

Learn more about why TV is vital to direct-to-consumer brand growth.

Today, we launched an advanced TV platform that will make addressable television planning, execution and attribution easier for advertisers.

From experience, I can tell you that Addressable television is not hard to understand. The concept is pretty simple: identify the right households, send messages only those high-value audiences and have the ability to measure each campaigns impact against a brand’s KPI. Yet for all its promise, addressable television still does not get even close to its fair share of an advertiser’s media budget to date.

Over the last 5 years, our team has executed more than 3,000 addressable television campaigns. From that experience, I can also tell you that historically properly executing an addressable television campaign at scale was an extremely complex and very manual pain in the a$$.   

However, the application of technology finally makes addressable television a scalable media channel for advertisers. Data enabled TV is starting to gain more significant traction with advertisers – according to an ANA and Forrester study, a third of advertisers plan to leverage addressable TV this year. As the medium gains ground with advertisers, Cadent is helping meet demand by making addressable easy via our advanced TV platform.

Simply put, addressable without technology is hard. Cadent Advanced TV Platform solves for all of challenges our team has worked through over the last five years. Our historical data, predictive analytics and algorithms help brands optimize campaigns against their desired business outcomes.

Here’s how we can help:

Deliver unified targeting at scale. Cadent Platform lets the user define target audiences that can be uniformly executed across all 70 million addressable TV households. Same data set, same target audience, across all screens – the platform is data agnostic.

An intuitive workflow that simplifies processes. Our simple step-by-step wizard guides users through the process. Campaign specs are entered, including budget, flight dates, targeting selections. Most importantly, campaigns are optimized based a client’s campaign objective. Optimal budget, reach and frequency are recommended by understanding the specific goal for each campaign.

Learn from our mistakes. Our platform brings proprietary algorithms for more informed addressable buying and the ability to forecast audience delivery/reach by each supplier and recommend optimal frequency to drive results.   

Aggregated results with actionable insights.  The platform has consolidated reporting. Campaign pacing, media delivery and advanced analytics are brought together in a single view.  Post campaign, an interactive report is sent to agencies or advertisers – clients are able to access easy-to-understand charts, gain insights against specific KPIs and fully understand performance.

Recommendations for optimization. Because simply knowing a campaign worked is not sufficient for clients who want to constantly improve performance, our platform goes past results and provides recommendations to optimize future addressable campaigns, linear television media effectiveness or targeting audience allocation.  

Read more about our Addressable Platform.

Consumers have more options than ever to watch video.

Look at the 2018 World Cup, for example. Viewers in the U.S. could’ve watched the Denmark vs. France match on Fox’s national network channel and the Switzerland vs. Costa Rica match in Spanish on NBC Universo. If they wanted, audiences could stream the games through OTT service fuboTV. Out of those who livestream World Cup matches, 65% will do so on their smartphone. Seven out of ten will watch live matches on linear TV, the IAB found.

Conventional advertising models are evolving in response to the changes in video consumption. It’s clear why this is a necessity – more than half of all U.S. consumers’ televisions are now IP-connected and an estimated 51 million OTT households steam content without a traditional cable or satellite service.

For some in the industry, this shift feels chaotic. However, we are excited about the new possibilities that data and technology bring to the television marketplace. Addressable TV, which enables targeting on an extremely granular level, could seem intimidating to those used to buying ad solely based on programming. Some marketers may not understand the full range of possibilities that addressable presents and how to optimally leverage their data to take advantage of today’s TV landscape.

With the right expertise, marketers can navigate the addressable landscape and make the most of its opportunities. And while there has been talk about audience-based television buying, Cadent’s one2one Addressable has been doing it for years. We’ve traded eight billion addressable impressions—a lot by anyone’s standards—so we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. We know the most responsive data sets, the optimal levels to plan by category and desired KPI, and we’re ready to share our knowledge.

Simply put, we know TV and addressable, and we’re dedicated to simplifying the ecosystem for our clients. We do this by aggregating all addressable supply, unifying the data and communicating with customers throughout the entire process. We’re screen-agnostic, so we can find the target consumer, wherever and whenever they’re watching content.

Our wealth of historical data combined with our predictive analytics algorithm means that our partners never go into a buy cold. Audience buying is already a great complement to broad demo buying, and our accuracy and efficiency are only going to get better as measurement methods catch up with these new modes of consumption and standards become fixed.

Historically, television was used mainly as a vehicle to drive awareness. With addressable, we’re able to use TV to drive conversion and uncover an incredible amount of data on the back end of the campaign. We can analyze campaigns, identify what worked and what didn’t work, and then use that data to optimize future addressable campaigns or even linear campaigns.

Addressability is still in its infancy, and in many respects, it’s like the early days of digital. As advertisers test, measure, and then leverage data to optimize their campaigns, we can help to guide them. That’s why Cadent – with our expertise and technology from linear to advanced television applications – came together as one. We strive to be the partner that drives the marketplace forward and demonstrates the full potential of this space.

See more information on one2one Addressable and how our unified platform connects brand campaigns with audience data and channel inventory.