LONDON – The ability to precision-target TV ads at individual households – currently limited to a relatively small proportion of available broadcast time – will soon expand to the majority of inventory, according to one exec making it happen.
Keith Kryszczun, president of global sales at Cadent, a technology company which enables the practice for broadcasters, says addressability is on the march.
“You’ll see a lot of demand for the addressable inventory,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “There’s been limited availability of inventory for addressability. In the US market, it’s been limited to the two minutes (per hour), so far. You’re going to see that expand across the rest of the eight, 10, 12 minutes of traditionally broadcast, or network-owned spots.”
“In the UK market, a really big thing is not only Sky now having access to do this across their own footprint, but Virgin Media’s. Also, they announced a deal with Channel 4.
“Carol McCall, the CEO of ITV, said): ‘Still 85% of our viewing is on linear’. So I think you’ll see a normalized workflow between addressable, linear, and VOD. If you’re competing for new ad dollars to television against Google and Facebook, to not use the linear scale of your TV business is like fighting with both arms behind your back.”
Sky + Virgin = Scale
Sky, the UK’s largest pay-TV provider, operating primarily over satellite, launched AdSmart in 2013, storing ads on satellite subscribers’ set-top boxes for subsequent targeted playback. It has since spearheaded the UK’s addressable TV revolution, and has become known as a global pioneer in addressable TV enablement.
Rival Virgin Media, despite its advantage of delivering via cable, was relatively late to offer targeted TV ads, which it had previously done in limited fashion. But, as we reported in mid-2017, signed a deal with Sky which extends the AdSmart capability to Virgin Media’s TiVo set-top boxes.
Those boxes, as well as Virgin Media’s network infrastructure, are enabled by Kryszczun’s Cadent technology.
Keith Kryszczun, Cadent SVP of Global Sales, Technology, gives an overview of the addressable linear advertising market in the EU with @Beet_TV in London. pic.twitter.com/gdDwR6qAKj
— Cadent (@CadentTV) December 9, 2019
Splice the ads
“We’re integrated with the broadcast streams,” he says. “There are markers around the linear spots, and we have an integration that picks up those markers and we can say, ‘All right, we’re going to splice an ad, in real-time, into that linear viewing spot’.
“That ad can be personalised, it can be optimized, it’s in the context of other non-addressable linear ads. We’re obeying policy restrictions as well, so, (for example), we won’t put an addressable car ad against another car ad that’s been in the linear stream that is not addressable.”
Kryszczun says Cadent worked on “sophisticated integrations” between the Virgin Media and Sky technology to enable the link-up.
Sky also recently announced further deals:
- one in which AdSmart will power addressable ad sales for public service broadcaster Channel 4’s linear-channel TV ads over Sky and Virgin Media
- another in which it will power next-show recommendations inside the BBC’s iPlayer software service carried over Sky boxes.
- Comcast is merging NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, after the owner acquired the European pay-TV company last year.
+ Sky will carry BBC's iPlayer app – relenting on integrating BBC VOD in its own, fake-iPlayer UI.
+ Sky's AdSmart targeted-ad tool will be used to serve personalised trailers for BBC shows.
+ BBC Sounds soon for Sky and Now TV.
= TV is disaggregating in to broadcaster-led apps. https://t.co/unesfhMn6q— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) November 11, 2019
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
