MIAMI — It has a large and increasingly switched-on populace, and, when it comes to television, more and more of that consumer base is going straight to over-the-top.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CEO of a company GroupM has established to work on addressable TV advertising in the UK has an observation that may be surprising to some.

“It’s not as progressed as here in the US,” says Jakob Nielsen of Finecast. “(The) US is not as progressed as in China. I’ve spent quite a bit in time in China seeing that.”

Spend on OTT TV and movies in China will total $12.22bn by 2022, the massive majority of Asia-Pacific spending, according to a Broadband TV News forecast.

A host of new streaming boxes and services has emerged there in the last couple of years.

Nielsen says Finecast will have to take a different approach in every market in which it launches.

So far, the company has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters…

  • Channel 4
  • Channel 5
  • STV
  • Discovery
  • Disney

…in most of its main set-top and over-the-top devices…

  • Sky
  • Virgin Media
  • Samsung
  • YouView (the TV platform formed by BT, TalkTalk, Arqiva, BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and  Channel 5, and made available to BT and TalkTalk customers
  • Amazon Fire
  • Roku
  • Gaming consoles such as Xbox
  • TVPlayer

But Nielsen wants Finecast to become an “ecosystem” that operates across national borders.

He explains, the opportunity lets smaller and more local companies advertise on TV with cost efficiency they could not previously achieve.

“The predominant group of advertisers are around automobiles and financial clients because the notion of being able to do household targeting fits these clients very well,” he says.

“Imagine you are a BMW dealership, which is one of our clients, and you have all these different dealerships all over the world. The dealership in Manchester could never do TV because TV in the UK is six regions at the most detailed level, otherwise it’s national.

“If you’re a dealership in Manchester, you will waste an awful lot of money if you do national TV when you’re trying to sell a BMW in Manchester. Now, if they have a special offer, let’s say they want to sell X BMW X5s and they gift 15% discount that’s only relevant for the Manchester area and now they can start doing TV advertising. It changes everything.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.