What’s next for TV advertising? Four changes that will drive the industry forward

The white paper explores how TV is transitioning from a broadcast-only industry to a multiplatform video market thanks to the rise of digital and on-demand offerings. It also looks deeper into how this alters the way brands and agencies should look at TV’s diverse, multiplatform offerings.

“TV is in a strong position,” says one senior advertising executive, who is among the report’s contributors. “The main priority for the industry today is to unify broadcast and digital video inventory into a single offering and to make it easy for the buy-side to transact with. We also need to embrace programmatic platforms.”

The white paper report has four sections, one of which directly covers these hopes that TV will embrace more programmatic platforms.

Industry-wide standards to drive innovation

How can TV develop the technical solutions, standards, and working practices required to support addressability across different pools of linear and digital TV inventory? The research explores targeting of smaller audience groups and specific customer segments, how advertisers can best interact with younger audiences, and the steps that need to be taken to facilitate data-driven attribution and ROI analyses.

There’s also information on how the industry is moving towards more industry-wide standards to improve cross-media video measurement, and how those on the sell-side can make it easier to transact across all different pools of video inventory from linear, video-on-demand (VOD), over-the-top (OTT) and digital. “Our main priority as an industry is to improve integration between linear and OTT or streaming,” says another one of the paper’s contributors.

“Linear TV advertising is robust and scaled with its own systems and underlying infrastructure – it’s tried and tested. However, we have to integrate linear advertising management into VOD and OTT, which is complex. This is an essential priority for the industry during the 2020s, and something I’m glad this white paper addresses.”

Applying programmatic to television

How can agency and advertiser workflows transform to take full advantage of artificial intelligence, automation, and programmatic solutions? With more and more viewing happening on connected devices, new opportunities to apply data to inventory and to deliver addressable ads are rising. Comcast Technology Solutions looks into the programmatic solutions available for marketers and how cloud-based ad management services might ensure TV campaigns become more efficient than ever before.

The industry’s priority around measurement and data is covered thoroughly in the white paper, which looks practically into how better measurement solutions can be created through investment and cross-industry collaboration.

“It’s all about innovating and enhancing our product offering to provide greater agility for both incumbent and prospective clients,” advises an advertising worker at a major TV broadcaster. “These investments will help to future-proof the TV ad market, integrate inventory, and make it easier to transact with TV in a data-driven way.”

Opportunities for collaboration

As an industry, how can we better identify opportunities to collaborate in the development of standards, solutions, platforms, and capabilities, sharing investments, and leveraging the benefits of scale? By committing to adopting common standards and frameworks, the TV advertising industry will be able to break down the silos that exist between TV and premium video offerings, operations, and sales points, therefore supporting greater integration.

“As we look toward the future, with addressable and creative optimization on the horizon, we need to start laying the foundation for a transparent media planning, management, and data loop,” explains Richard Nunn, vice-president and general manager of the Advertising Suite at Comcast Technology Solutions.

To find out how you can become a part of laying this foundation and to learn how you can make a success out of TV as an advertising channel across the 2020s, download the new white paper report here.