MIAMI — It needs to get bigger, but it’s not jus a scribble on a whiteboard anymore – the idea of targeting individual households with custom-placed TV ads, even in linear, is here and now.

So says the man who used to run programmatic advertising at The New York Times, no less.

“And the audience data pipes that have been connected, whether it’s through social or a lot of the same fundamentals from direct mail, are really starting to take hold,” says Matt Prohaska, now an independent consultant, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “You see it in people’s faces around here, where it’s not just theory anymore.

“It’s, ‘No, no, no we’ve actually done this and it’s real, it’s just, okay we want to now accelerate the actual process around this. We need a little more scale, we need the taxonomies to improve.”’Those are all just things that are gradually creating nice progress for everybody.”

Prohaska was responsible for global programmatic and channel revenue for the digital properties of The New York Times in display, search, text, mobile, and video between 2013 and 2014.

Now he runs his own Prohaska Consulting, with clients numbering Hulu, Grapeshot and Toyota.

Prohaska sees a world that’s changing fast. “A year ago, there was a little bit of people putting up crosses and wearing garlic and ‘get that programmatic word away from me completely’,” he recalls. “You’re starting to see enough at bats now from the sellers and certainly on the buy side.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.