Data and open minded clients aid purveyors of addressable TV to find pockets of successful ad spend

The success of addressable television, they feel, is that because of the back end data now available - data that explains what is being used digitally and across channels, they are able to take on the task of finding those pockets where addressability spend makes sense.

Tracey Sheppach, the former long-time SMG advanced TV executive who has just recently formed Matter More Media and Jamie Power, managing partner at GroupM's advanced TV recently spoke to Beet.tv about the pros and cons of advanced TV now that the ability to target individual households with different ads and different times is a reality.

With the number of addressable US TV households count at about 45m properties, Scheppach notes that one of the biggest questions she must face is “Does addressable work for everyone?”

"We get asked if it works for everyone, but that often comes to price. It is economic in many ways when we approach addressable television. It is still an open conversation of whether it will work for everyone," she said. Sheppach notes that with 52m households in the US, addressable is still only one percent of the inventory. Yet, she has seen addressable work in areas like the automobile industry, household products and movie promotions, and notes that addressable can up the frequency of how often people see ads. She sees more and more pockets of how and why it works and how clients can budget it in accordingly.

"More advertisers do need to come into the mix. Matter More Media is focusing on the middle market. Addressability opens up television to companies that have never been on television before. Because of the price point, precision and ROI that you can track, it does open up television to a new class of marketers," Sheppach said.

Power notes that one of the key things that holds potential clients back is inventory and scale.

"One of the most effective way to add scale to addressable tv advertising is to establish some standards," Powers said. “How do you scale this into a marketplace, especially when you want national broadcast buyers who are used to accountability and scale and standards when we still don’t have standards? The easiest thing to fix would be a standard media delivery report.”