• by Wayne Friedman , March 16, 2017

TV networks’ new OpenAP platform consortium -- which looks to standardized new targeting of TV audiences -- may have initial use for marketers, but less impact for overall revenue growth at TV networks.

OpenAP, which is backed by Fox, Viacom and Turner, intends to deliver “cross-publisher targeting and independent measurement for advanced audiences,” per the companies.

A new targeted audience group could be, for example, viewers with pets with SUVs or upscale income viewers who vote in a specific way. All this comes with growing concerns that standard TV viewing measures -- which just looks at age and gender -- need immediate changes.

Tom Eagan, media analyst of the Telsey Advisory Group, says: “The TV networks hope that by offering the reach of TV with the targetability of digital, ad dollar migration from TV to digital platforms will slow.”

But Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, doesn’t think this will mean higher revenue results for TV networks:  “The ‘pie’ of ad spending that will be directed to TV will not be meaningfully impacted by adoption of different forms of inventory prioritization.”

Wieser adds: “Network groups can still benefit because these techniques should allow some advertisers to see hidden value in certain inventory they didn’t see before — and direct spending to places that may have realized lower prices previously.”

Considering this, networks might need to use less inventory to satisfy advertisers' demand -- which could limit or drop ever-growing advertising loads in programming.

Cable network TV company goals are ambitious over the next few years when it comes to inking new advertising deals based on new non-Nielsen audience guarantees from new targeted audience metrics.

Eagan says Turner hopes that 50% of its future advertising revenue comes this way by 2020; Viacom is looking at 50% by 2018.

Currently, he adds, Viacom gets 25% to 30% of its revenue from non-Nielsen viewing metrics; NBCUniversal (which as yet is not part of Open AP), gets 15% to 20%.