What’s old is new again – but, in advertising, the old practices have also received a pretty significant upgrade.

So says Tim Castree, global CEO of the Wavemaker agency formed from the merger of Group M’s MEC and Maxus.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Castree says traditional TV viewing is declining – but, by means of consolation, many viewers are migrating to TV and video platforms with addressable advertising capabilities.

There, an old style of targeting meets a new one. Probabilistic targeting, in which a plan places an ad somewhere a planner believes a viewer is more likely to be in the intended group, is meeting deterministic marketing, in which the identity and intentions of a viewer can – thanks to data points – actually be known.

“We’ve been buying audiences since the 1980s,” he says. “We’ve been optimising demos into audiences. That’s what all of our optimization systems have been built on for 20 or 30 years. So in many ways, it’s not at all new.”

“What we’re doing now is really marrying that with more deterministic or addressable channels so we can know you’re absolutely in the market for a Mercedes versus probably in the market for a Mercedes.

“So it’s really the marriage of deterministic targeting with more probabilistic optimization, bringing that together in video, which is really what’s happening of the landscape of video at the moment.”

Castree says the ability to use both types of approach on the same screen will lead to new creative opportunities.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews