MIAMI – Spectrum Reach has been running test campaigns in Los Angeles and New York for its first addressable advertising offering on linear television with the goal of having both markets activated this year. “We’ll have five million households by the end of 2018 and then expand to the rest of our footprint and beyond,” says Rob Klippel, SVP, Advanced Products & Strategy.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018, Klippel scopes out the company’s growing cross-screen audience targeting and campaign attribution capabilities and talks about its collaboration with TV data specialty firm 605 in developing the new AudienceApp product.

Klippel believes there’s a misconception that only addressable TV campaigns can generate detailed data on linear-viewing audiences along with ad exposure data. Whether it’s a traditional spot schedule, an audience-optimized schedule for an actual addressable campaign, “We’re able to pull back the same level of audience, ad exposure and impression data to run detailed reach/frequency analysis, ROI and lift and attribution studies to get a comprehensive view of how a cross-platform campaign has performed,” Klippel explains.

Addressable linear TV is the latest complement to Spectrum Reach offerings spanning set-top box video-on-demand and other digital products. Buyers can buy linear schedules the way they’ve always done and deliver unique creative to different households.

“We’ll also be launching the ability to sell different audiences to different advertisers within the same break and deliver only the specific households that a particular brand is trying to reach,” Klippel adds.

Surveying the addressable linear landscape, which has been constrained by the walled operations of multiple operators and content owners, he likens addressable to the advent of interconnects that have helped to make buying local cable inventory easier.

“We’re going to start seeing a lot more collaboration and a cohesive approach around addressable TV, not only among operators like in the case of interconnects but even across operators and national programmers,” Klippel says.

The past 18 months have seen the melding of three companies—Time Warner Cable Media, Bright House Media Strategies and Spectrum Reach, which is the advertising sales division of Charter Communications—while unifying their product portfolios. While all of that was occurring, Spectrum Reach “managed to build and start deploying an audience-based platform that’s fundamentally changing the way we’re selling television,” Klippel says.

That platform is called AudienceApp and it was first activated in Austin, TX. With AudienceApp, buyers can can look at audiences and other key audience attributes to identify and target messages on TV in specific markets based on virtual, real-time access to household viewing data.

“One of the major reasons we were able to have the focus and deliver that in such a quick turnaround was our partnership with 605, who helped us develop the platform and has a management team of executives that are familiar with and have worked with set-top box data and linear optimization,” says Klippel.

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.