Viacom wants to help deliver TV ads that are targeted at individual viewers. It just needs three industry challenges to be overcome first.

Back in 2015, Viacom was one of the first broadcast owners to sell ads based on data about advertisers’ audiences.

The product it launched to do that was called Vantage, and is now also used by rivals like Fox

In this recorded discussion at Beet.TV’s Identity in Focus forum, Gabe Bevilacqua, SVP for product management for advanced advertising at Viacom, identifies “three things we are going to need”…

1. How to identify audiences in places

“Progress has been made. Whether it’s through all of us creating crosswalks, working with matching partners, … OpenAP. There’s a pretty clear path to being able to say, ‘Okay, this intender … we can find them everywhere’.”

2. We need to plan and deliver the media

“Much harder – there is no one ad server to rule them all. So we just need to be really, really smart about deciding who we are trying to reach, where we are trying to reach them, and have that informed by some planning and measurement. We can make more progress here. And I think we’re getting there.”

3. Some kind of measurement

“At least measure and say, ‘We know where incremental reach lives across all these places’. We are doing okay there, but that’s a place where there’s a lot of partners we need to get involved with. The difference between measurement and currency – (there is a) big gap, there.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews