• by Jeff Sporn , September 13, 2016

As promising as addressable advertising seems to be in enabling advertisers to reach specific kinds of consumers, it’s still subject to the garbage-in/garbage out rule of data-driven marketing. Because addressable advertising is a powerful advertising approach based on selectively sorting TV audiences in real time, it must rely on the most accurate data available.  

Marketers have yet to fully grasp what addressable for TV is, and isn’t, as well as how segmentation and targeting are only as good as the data that drives them.

Consider the following:

Addressable for TV behaves differently from online and mobile programmatic. Campaigns are set up on individuals versus segments. Once the audience is defined, addressable campaigns can be as flexible as programmatic.

Achieving scale in addressable is different. Campaigns must use multiple platforms. This is actually beneficial, because in virtually every case, you can access different consumers on platforms, without a lot of duplication.

Addressable has unique targeting strategies. Retargeting has proven to deliver the strongest bang for the buck, enabling marketers to onboard Web site visitors as a population for addressable TV.  In addition, addressable advertising uses a combination of behavioral targeting and economic elements including estimated spending capacity and past behavior.  This data can help marketers avoid targeting based solely on online search behavior, which can sometimes reach people who likely do not have the capacity to purchase. Conversely, it also helps reach targets who likely have both purchase intent and capacity, but aren’t actively searching online.   

Accuracy has been shown to be significantly better. Digital and mobile campaigns use a variety of methods to tie down identity to a browser or device.  Post-campaign attribution studies demonstrate the efficacy of addressable TV and confirm the accuracy of the process.

Lastly, data quality matters.  Addressable campaigns can significantly improve both match yield and the number of meaningful clicks by using quality data and insight-driven database matching with multiple, vetted match attributes and then apply data cleansing and enrichment. Proximity of audience data to an unbiased primary source and its uniqueness also makes it valuable to the market.  

Strong analytics can drive addressable ads to take the guesswork out of finding and reaching the right targets.