• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, October 20, 2023

Addressable TV got another boost this week with the news that Canoe Partners has officially partnered with DirecTV Advertising and Dish Media to integrate nearly 20 million satellite households into Canoe’s unified addressable advertising solution spanning linear, video-on-demand and streaming.

The two leading satellite distributors may have so far failed to agree on a route to a merger, but with their subscriber numbers dwindling, they’ve been cooperating for some time to help programmers by supporting streamlined, scalable addressable campaigns that help them light up more of their ad inventory across the platforms.

Addressable commands higher ad rates because its targeting helps drive better results. Interoperability challenges across buying platforms have posed obstacles to industrywide adoption and scalability, but with marketers' urging and major advertising dollars at stake, cooperative initiatives among the players have brought addressable a long way in a few years.  

In April, DirecTV and Dish introduced standardized solutions for programmers to streamline the process and workflow for activating addressable campaigns across multiple distributors — one of addressable’s continuing challenges — via three options. One of those was using Canoe Service Assurance to achieve unified workflows across distribution endpoints.

With both carriers’ customers now being added to Canoe’s system, the national programmers that own most of the per-hour inventory when their programming is carried on MVPD platforms can now support addressable linear and VOD campaigns across cable and satellite.

Canoe’s addressable solution enables programmers to help advertisers build an audience, pitch creatives and define cross-platform campaigns’ parameters once, reducing duplication and inefficiencies. Audience onboarding, campaign management, order entry and reporting are included.

The satellite carrier integration brings Canoe’s total household reach to 54 million — creating the largest aggregated addressable footprint in the U.S., according to Canoe.

DirecTV and Dish TV had 12.23 million and 6.9 million subscribers as of Q2 2023, according to Leichtman Research Group. In February 2022, when it added AMC, Discovery, TelevisaUnivision and WarnerMedia as publisher partners, Canoe reported having more than 35 million homes that subscribed to the cable systems of its owners, Comcast, Charter and Cox.

AMC Networks and Warner Bros. Discovery signed as the launch partners for Canoe's satellite households integration, and Canoe is working with Invidi, which provides the ad server technology for DirecTV and Dish, to complete the integrations.

“In the intricate world of MVPDs, each endpoint has distinct, and sometimes complex, nuances,” said Canoe Ventures CEO David Porter. “We’re excited to team up with DirecTV and Dish Media to empower programmers to run addressable advertising campaigns in a more streamlined manner, with even greater efficiency and simplicity, in today’s fragmented and complicated TV ad landscape.”