The ability to target TV audiences with granular data, going beyond traditional age- and gender-based contextual matching, may have existed for a couple of years now.

But history will likely show that the opportunity is still just getting started.

“The opportunity is huge,” says Erica Schmidt, the global CEO of IPG Mediabrand’s ad-tech unit Cadreon. “Whilst it’s a significant part of our business, it’s still not at the scale that I would like it to be. In the next 12 to 18 months, there is a huge opportunity to blow this out.

“It’s slightly outside the paradigm of thinking for the client and the paradigm of their measurement and the paradigm of the models they build internally usually around what their media mix should be.”

According to a previous eMarketer forecast, US addressable TV ad expenditure was due to make up just 1.7% of total TV ad spending ($72.72 billion) in 2017. By 2019, that proportion was forecast to grow to 4.0%.

Schmidt says Cadreon is extending its centralized Unity programmatic platform to the TV-buying opportunity.

“I still think we’re only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the opportunity, but we’re pushing really hard on that, and it’s further manifested by the attention that the IPG agencies are giving towards our audience measurement platform and the potential for that to empower them,” Schmidt adds.

She talks about two other key imperatives – spreading Cadreon’s US programmatic success to other IPG agencies around the world, and “moving strategically upstream” so that her agencies can activate clients’ audiences in multiple different channels.

This interview was conducted in New York this week after her keynote presentation at The Drum’s programmatic summit.

This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.