The masses are coming. The online masses consuming TV through all manner of internet-connected devices, that is.

All of a sudden, TV isn’t what it used to be. And neither will TV advertising be. The ability to target individual viewers may signal the death knell for a sector that has long sold its spots on loose, upfront demographic sales.

A big shake-up is coming, and TV companies are going to have to watch out for devaluation, according to one ad-tech exec helping them manage the change.

“There is a tremendous amount of audience that will be moving to device-targetable distribution streams,” says SpotX programmatic TV VP Randy Cooke in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The economies of TV and digital video have to reconcile. Every single impression could be monetizable based on being able to identify that device.

“Media owners have to focus on preserving the economics of TV in this transition.
If you’re getting a $50 CPM in your linear inventory today and your digital inventory is worth anything from 40 to 60 bucks, as a programmer you’ve got to keep an eye on what’s going on in the spot TV market.”

The change is coming because an industry predicated on selling 30-second slots ahead of airing is being augmented by the new discipline of household-level targeting and even relatively dynamic ad insertion.

This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.