TV OPERATORS SEEK SIMPLER ADVERTISING STRATEGIES

Numerous operators are making efforts to simplify their targeted advertising efforts amid an unstable marketplace. According to a report from the WSJ, Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc., Altice USA Inc. Dish Media, and Vizio are among the top eight companies that are making improvements to release more addressable advertising, targeted at a specific group of people.

Advertising with traditional business approaches has struggled to attract consumers who prefer streaming services, with some expanding their reach to digital platforms.Various marketers are encouraging digital companies to allow their ads to be targeted at specific audiences. “As media companies evolve their digital ad offerings, advertisers are tasked with cobbling together commercial space from various streaming services, smart TV companies, cable operators, and even some programmers that are carving out their national ad time to enable more precise targeting,” said Larry Allen, Vice president and general manager of addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising, a unit of Comcast Corp.

A meeting held once a month, known as the consortium, will cover  ways to implement appropriate ad companies, promote adequate products, and eliminate jargon. Planning tools will serve as one of the largest discussions.“The buyers need a solution to their fragmentation problem,” Mr. Allen said. “That’s a massive constraint on the market and the buyers that either bought individually or had to patchwork together or went through aggregators,” Allen said. “Unlocking that scale across multiple endpoints is really the endgame.”

However, there are limitations on the amount of inventory cable and satellite providers manage. Advertisers will seal ad deals with various cable and satellite providers but have found it to be more time-consuming. Now these operators and TV businesses are faced with growing competition from streaming services that offer precise ad targeting without regional constraints.

The new consortium is one of many groups working on advancing an antiquated TV ad business that faces declining traditional TV viewers. Among them are OpenAP, a group founded by TV networks to advance the use of audience data in TV trades; On Addressability, set up by Comcast and other TV operators to help programmers create more targeted ads; and Project OAR, which was formed by TV and ad businesses to help the TV networks send ads to people with smart TV sets. “Getting eight companies to talk about their problems—I look at it like a therapy session,” Allen said. “It took us a while to trust each other.”