• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, November 28, 2023

Go Addressable, formed by pay-TV distributors in 2021 to accelerate adoption of addressable advertising, has added its first programmer member, Paramount.

At the same time, the group announced its incorporation as an official nonprofit trade organization.

Paramount joins founding members Altice USA’s a4 Advertising, Charter Communications’ Spectrum Reach, Comcast Advertising, DirecTV Advertising and Dish Media.

The organization, which intends to recruit more programmer and other members, said that the added participation and funding will help it continue to expand its efforts to educate marketers and drive greater scale for addressable.

Go Addressable cites two surveys it conducted this year with Advertiser Perceptions as indicators of its progress to date.

The first, conducted in April, found 73% of agency and brand executives reporting that they now use addressable TV in campaigns — up 16% compared to the previous year’s survey.

The second, fielded in July, found 47% of marketers reporting that addressable played a role in their 2023-2024 upfront negotiations, and 80% of those saying that addressable was an “important” aspect of the negotiations.

Go Addressable “has been instrumental in tracking and shaping the medium’s trajectory, including through launching industry guidelines and keeping a real-time pulse on the industry’s latest adoption, usage of this medium, trends and more,” said Larry Allen, the organization’s board chairman. The trade-organization status “will further enable us to amplify our thought leadership and education-rooted approach to raising awareness and adoption of this medium, as well as drive future innovation in this space.”

Plans for more specific initiatives are set to be announced during Go Addressable’s third annual summit on Nov. 29.

This year has seen several notable steps forward for addressable, most involving Go Addressable members.

In January, Ampersand, the ad-sales platform owned by Charter, Comcast, Cox, Altice and Verizon, introduced automated functionality for addressable TV planning and buying.

In April, DirecTV and Dish Media launched standardized process and workflow solutions for programmers to streamline activations of addressable campaigns.

And in October, those two distributors moved to integrate nearly 20 million satellite households into Canoe Partners’ unified addressable advertising solution spanning linear, video-on-demand and streaming, to allow national programmers to support addressable linear and VOD campaigns across cable and satellite.

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

In June, Ampere Analysis reported that addressable TV advertising reached $56 billion globally in 2022 and forecast it to grow more than 50%, to $87 billion, by 2027.

However, like Go Addressable’s own research, Ampere identified continuing issues and obstacles to addressable’s full growth potential that require more focus and education.

One is a still-common perception that addressable is too costly, or can’t be cost-justified.  

Asked about addressable’s top challenges, 41% of marketers polled in Go Addressable’s April 2023 survey cited inadequate attribution to prove ROI, and 34% cited confusion over how addressable TV measurement and attribution work.

That was despite the group’s work with the top 20 attribution vendors in the market, and despite positive feedback on cost-effectiveness from many of those who have actually used addressable.