TORONTO — It’s now six months since Canadian TV and telco operator Rogers unveiled its shot toward the programmatic TV world, in the form of a data-enabled TV-buying product.

Tn this video interview with Beet.TV, Rogers programmatic trading and data ad solutions head Rose Hutchison explains how Rogers Enabled Data (RED), launched in April, works – and what it will become.

“When we did take it to market, we did call it ‘programmatic’,” she says. “But … the delivery is not automated the way programmatic is for digital.

“What we feel about RED TV is that it’s the actual stepping stone to an IP-based world, where we will have the addressable-level delivery of television ads to the actual household.”

RED had already existed before TV, as a suite of products that target real Canadians, through aggregated and anonymous audience segments, leveraging Rogers’ first-party demographic, behavioural and location-based data.

Rogers has known been demonstrating that kind of capability for TV, by helping Volkswagen custom target a TV campaign at only viewers known to be in-market for its new Atlas vehicle.

The company took audience data from Auto Trader in the form of cookies. From there, it merged the Auto Trader cookie pool with its own cookie pool, since both Auto Trader and Rogers each used a common data management platform from Adobe.

Using set-stop box TV data that reported what shows people frequently watched, for how long and when, the company was then able to custom target TV ads based on the multiple signals.

This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.