SAN JUAN, PR — Nielsen is working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year.

A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January.

“The point of the beta is to start to integrate their linear workflow in a true addressable world and allow them to understand the commercial and business models that they want to execute and go to commercial launch in the second half of the year,” says Nielsen’s general manager of advanced video advertising, Kelly Abcarian.

“The programmers will work in our beta environment to really understand how to execute linear addressable, really testing their end-to-end workflows that are very unique in a linear television environment… things like setting up inventory roles like brand separation, or rules they want to apply around when they want to have ads replace, like do not replace any ads during prime time.”

Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.

Other industry initiatives include Project OAR, a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.

“We published an addressable measurement framework a couple of weeks back that we’ve made available to everyone in the industry,” Abcarian adds. “It’s really an instruction booklet around helping to understand what we’re doing to clean up and calibrate the data sources, the methodology we’re applying to combine the panel and the big data together, so that we can accurately understand the true linear audience and the addressable audience.”

Abcarian was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page