Each holiday season, people look forward to presents, spending time with family or good food. Kim Portrate is looking forward to a big industry milestone.

“We’ve got about 50% penetration of connected TVs – or we will have that sort of by Christmas in Australia,” says Portrate, CEO of Think TV, an association advocating for the power of TV advertising on behalf of four Australian TV networks.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Portrate outlines the state of addressable TV – the practice through which advertisers can target individual viewers – Down Under.

“The broadcasters jointly own a business called Oztam which contracts to Nielsen to measure live viewing and also video player viewing,” Portrate says. “It is in the process of developing up an industry-wide group of addressable audience segments which will be released next year and will be able to be traded on across all the broadcasters.

“You’ll end up with the traditional sort of demographic and gender trading segments but they will be enriched by addressable audience segments like an ‘auto intender’ for example.”

Think TV represents founding stakeholders Seven Network, Network Ten, Nine and MCN/Foxtel.

This summer, Think TV released data showing total TV ad revenue increased by 1.8% to AUS $1.98 billion for the six months to June 30, 2018.

That included a 40.% jump for half-year broadcast VOD ad revenue.

And, like every broadcaster representative body, Think TV has data to show TV and video ads live longer in the memory than those in other formats.

Portrate admits that Australia’s market still has a way to go until it transitions from the traditional method of TV ad sales – that is, selling inventory against shows – toward selling individual addressable audiences. But the market is on its way.

“Three out of four of the major broadcasters are already interested he addressable advertising space through their digital assets,” she says. “They’re already playing in that space.

“A number of them have already got very good data sets, one has return path data, two others have sign in services for their OTT product, irrespective device.”

On an EGTA-arranged study trip to New York with other global broadcastesr, she observed that many of the challenges faced by broadcasters around the world are similar.

This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom.   EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page