An unofficial line in the sand was drawn at yesterday’s Future TV Advertising Forum Canada in Toronto. Those who have signed on to use addressable advertising talked about it in positive terms, and those who aren’t there yet used more negative language.
Squarely on the side of addressable TV were Jamie West, deputy managing director at the U.K.’s Sky Media and Jamie Power, managing partner at Modi Media, the division of GroupM dedicated to advanced TV buying.
West has overseen the development of Sky AdSmart, which went live in January 2014 and has since run campaigns with 848 advertisers.
Highlighting results from some of the campaigns they have run, West said Audi saw a 17% lift in likelihood to purchase, Xperia experienced a 41% jump in brand awareness and Tesco had a 6% jump in toy sales after running ads on the Sky AdSmart network.
West said Sky Media saw the emergence of digital companies like Facebook and Google as an opportunity to use the data that it had from consumers when it first started developing Sky AdSmart seven years ago. He said the launch of addressable has meant that his team is now also able to attract smaller businesses that had been strictly advertising on digital, but can now afford to get on TV with the more targeted STB offering.
In addition to brand results, West said that Sky AdSmart has also yielded programming results, with ad switching dropping by 33% when targeted advertising is in place.
Noting that Modi Media was developed in 2014 when training traditional TV buyers for addressable TV wasn’t moving quickly enough, Power said that thus far one-third of U.S. TV households are currently addressable-ready. He expects that number to rise to one-half before the end of 2016.
Tackling concerns around the mass potential of addressable TV that were again raised during an agency, tech provider and broadcaster panel, Power said that addressable TV will never replace traditional TV spots, because consumers need to be led down the purchasing funnel, and not see ads for the first time when they’re in the precise target demo.
She said addressable TV isn’t always recommended for a client, noting it makes sense to use when there is a target incidence of 5% to 30%. Power said that there also needs to be first and third party data to target precisely as well as access to direct or third party sales data in order to create a closed-loop ROI analysis or brand effectiveness study on the campaign.
When asked about the costs of buying addressable TV with Modi Media, she said that the division charges between 8% and 15% of the net spend for each project, which is higher than the costs associated with buying traditional TV spots.
To date Power said that entertainment advertisers have bought the most addressable ads with Modi at 25%, auto trailed slightly behind at 21% and financial came in at 18%.
Correction: Jamie West, deputy managing director at the U.K.’s Sky Media was previously misnamed as Jamie King. We regret the error.
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