Addressable TV is set to revolutionise TV advertising and provides a “golden opportunity” to the TV advertising world as it fends off challenges from Google. To smooth its arrival, Keith Kryszczun, Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Cadent Technology, says broadcasters and pay TV providers must overcome traditional rivalries and obstacles to forge workable business relationships.
What do you think is holding addressable TV advertising back in Europe? What is likely to be the catalyst for change?
To date, it has been the fact that business relationships and commercial frameworks need to be set up between a broadcaster and the pay TV provider, specifically to share revenue on addressable advertising. Getting these relationships working in a way that’s beneficial to all parties will be the catalyst for change. Now, these are obviously sensitive discussions because for the first time, pay TV providers will get a portion of advertising revenue since they own the video infrastructure, which enables the targeted ad delivery, as well as the subscriber relationship and the viewing data. Also, there needs to be in place advertising technology platforms that are integrated on both the pay TV providers side as well as on the broadcaster side. There are very few players that do this well, and can integrate on both sides of the fence, maybe only Cadent.
Do we simply have to accept that the TV advertising ecosystem is always going to be complicated when it comes to ad technology — i.e. because of the different sets of delivery mechanisms and infrastructure across various markets — or is there more we could do to simplify the ecosystem and introduce common standards?
Simplification is coming, especially as pay TV providers upgrade their legacy, predominantly uni-cast video delivery systems (where targeted and personalized advertising is much harder to enable) with systems that support multi-cast. Also, advertising technology solutions like Cadent are now mature, and our whole purpose is to simplify and normalize dynamic, addressable ad insertion across legacy (e.g. QAM) and newer (e.g. IP) video delivery systems. As this happens, the upstream challenges with blending traditional TV advertising with more targeted dynamic ad insertion becomes less of an issue.
Is the TV industry moving quickly enough to fend off challenges from companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon?
It remains to be seen. Right now I would say that I think the key thing is that technology is NOT the hurdle to enabling more targeted multi-screen TV advertising at scale. The challenge is putting in place the commercial relationships between the broadcasters and the pay TV providers. There remains a golden opportunity to bring very powerful targeting and measurement to the TV advertising world, especially while there is still massive scale and viewership.
Cadent is part of Cross MediaWorks, which also includes TCA, a full-service and creative agency, and One2One Media, which works with the buy-side on addressable TV. How should we think of Cross MediaWorks. Is it a type of holding group for the various companies, or is there a common offering?
We like to think of Cross MediaWorks as a family of companies with a vision – that vision is to bring forward the next generation of TV advertising. The acquisition of Cadent, one2one and TCA was by design – to help drive the advance TV revolution. While each company’s offerings vary, the combined mission is to help our clients and partners effectively target audiences with relevant messages, all while simplifying advertising workflows across any and all screens.
How is addressability changing the measurement of TV advertising today?
I think addressability is driving the industry towards more granular measurement that is more aligned with Marketers’ ROI and utilizes their greater access to customer data. Measurement will expand beyond traditional ad viewership information at a broad demographics level, towards more results oriented metrics. Also, I expect much more unification of TV and digital video measurement. To date this has been hard because of technology and agency buying silos, but these are quickly collapsing as ad insertion and targeting capabilities become normalized across digital and traditional TV delivery model.
