Addressable TV Targets Key Demos For Advertisers

people watching tvThe advent of addressable TV advertising is much anticipated in the advertising industry, but several companies say they're already doing it. All the consumer needs is digital TV service and a remote control.

According to Jacqueline Corbelli of BrightLine, her company allows advertisers to target viewers based on their interactions with programming and advertising, enabling BrightLine to deliver precisely targeted ads and interactive environments that engage users with a brand.

In the most effective campaigns, Corbelli said, "Marketers are finding a way to feed the digital television appetite of their target consumers." For example "brands like Axe, which are branded entertainment savvy, know the programming their guy is watching. {They} invite them into a branded experience, where they can interact with the brand, play games and also see cool VOD videos." To date, BrightLine has worked with advertisers like Nike, Unilever, Pepsi, Disney Pictures, and Lexus.

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Most important, all the behavioral and demographic data is yielded voluntarily by viewers, beginning when they engage with the first interactive offering, Corbelli said. This can take a number of forms, including interactive spots, interactive channels, customized sponsorship of video-on-demand with ad insertion and interactive program integration.

In addition to keeping logs of viewer interactions, documenting what kinds of content spur deeper engagement, advertisers using BrightLine can solicit detailed demographic and personal information from the viewer, allowing it to craft ever-more appealing offerings. They can also get contact information, opening the way for email or direct-mail marketing coordinated with the video platform.

At the center of BrightLine's system is a massive database that collects anonymous behavioral data on viewers from all its campaigns and sorts it by demographic and psychographic characteristics. BrightLine's automated system then analyzes this data to help advertisers create campaigns that will be most engaging for their target audience. Corbelli emphasized that this data only pertains to what kinds of content are engaging to viewers; the database doesn't retain any information showing, for example, which specific viewers responded to particular brands or product categories.

Another company, Visible World, has developed a software-based open standard that enables advertisers and agencies to integrate addressable advertising into their TV campaigns, serving ads to specific dayparts, programming genres, geographic zones or even individual households. Visible World's service allows advertisers to utilize any source of data they use to define their consumer targets. Then, they can have those ads served to any platform capable of delivering targeted TV advertising, including network television, local broadcast, local cable, broadband, as well as household-specific addressable television outlets.

The development overcomes a major obstacle for TV advertisers and their agencies, which previously had to manually translate and convert their consumer targets from the proprietary or syndicated databases they use for other media into versions that could be integrated into addressable TV advertising servers.

Tara Walpert-Levy, president of Visible World, boasted: "We've basically made it easy for addressable advertising scale." She estimated that Visible World served about 100,000 different addressable TV advertising executions during the past year -- still just a fraction of the millions of individual commercials created by U.S. advertisers each year. About half of those addressable TV spots were created via Visible World's digital production systems, which enables agencies to produce multiple versions of TV ads targeted at specific types of consumers. The other half are produced by agencies utilizing other digital production. facilities.

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