• by Wayne Friedman , January 11, 2019

TV doesn’t want to make the same mistake with advanced advertising that digital media platforms have — over-targeting.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday in Las Vegas, Nicolle Pangis, CEO, NCC Media, the cable TV advertising consortium, says: “What we did wrong in the digital world -- which I hope we don’t repeat in this new world of data-driven television --  is that we shouldn’t over-target in television. If you over-target, the inventory is not going to be there.”

What about getting more advanced/addressable TV ad inventory?

“The scale comes when we get national programmer inventory and broadcast inventory lit up,” says David Clark, executive vice president, advanced advertising, Comcast Corp-GM, FreeWheel.

“It’s not a technical challenge at this point. It’s more an operational challenge, a measurement challenge, a go-to-market challenge, and a user-transactional challenge.” Clark believes the business will rapidly grow in 2020.

Won Jin Lee, executive vice president, Samsung Electronics, said: “The TV industry has no choice. The market demand will put more pressure on this inventory becoming available.”

With some 40 million Samsung TVs in operation in the U.S., Lee says the big TV and device/appliance manufacturer looks to help marketers growing the advanced advertising business. “We are making device ID on the TVs publicly available. So if others are trying to manage [commercial] frequency [or other advertising attributes], this can be a critical piece of data.”

Pangis says TV’s current strength come from its big scale when it comes to marketing brand messages. The idea to add data-driven TV advertising is “to create this full funnel attribution which TV historically has not been able to do.”