Brands, Agencies Lay Out Addressable TV Priorities, Challenges

New Forrester research with more than 500 brand and agency media decision-makers confirms that optimizing addressable TV and other emerging channels is a top priority, but also confirms that key challenges remain to using addressable at scale. 

The research, commissioned by Dish Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, Invidi Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia and completed last month, included surveys of 522 executives with authority for media-buying strategies, including addressable TV. Forrester supplemented the survey with six interviews about buyers’ addressable TV perceptions and strategies. 

Asked about their primary media objectives for 2021, nearly half (46%) of the executives cited optimizing strategies for emerging media channels. 

Other top priorities include better defining/understanding key audiences for media campaigns (36%), improving or performing attribution on campaigns (34%), and better understanding media investment ROI. 

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More than half (52%) said their organizations are focused on using addressable TV to improve the effectiveness of their TV campaign targeting; 47% intend to use addressable TV’s ability to tie TV spend to business or sales outcomes; and 44% intend to use addressable to deliver more personalized, relevant ads. 

Buyers said they view addressable TV as a means of combining the scale of linear television with the refined targeting, measurability, and accountability associated with digital advertising.

Those that use addressable TV for awareness and consideration objectives said they’re looking to reduce waste and manage frequency. Those using it for conversion objectives said they can more easily make the business case for experimenting with the channel because of its promise for greater visibility into media spend performance. 

However, 100% of participants said that they’ve experienced at least one challenge in implementing addressable at scale, including convincing other stakeholders of its importance, fragmented platforms/lack of interoperability, lack of adequate measurement, and lack of skilled personnel. 
Participants confirmed a series of improvements that would make clients more likely to increase addressable TV budgets: 

The report also lays out steps that should be taken by the various players — including MVPDs, media companies, brands, agencies and technology companies — to address the core challenges and accelerate addressable TV adoption. 

"The study confirmed our belief that addressable has the potential to transform the industry, but also renewed our sense of urgency to create an aligned and open ecosystem of distributors, measurement platforms and media companies," said Kevin Arrix, senior vice president, Dish Media. 

1 comment about "Brands, Agencies Lay Out Addressable TV Priorities, Challenges".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, March 25, 2021 at 6:33 p.m.

    I find it odd that "addressable TV" rates so high as a" top prority" yet there seems to be a lot of fuzzyness in the "problems" cited as holding it back. On the latter count, no clear issue stands out and many of them seem to be about the same thing---like problems in execution, for example. I think that if advertisers were serious about better targeting they would rush to at least test the concept to see if the key question---how does it perform in terms of ROI both long and short-term can be answered? If this could be determined---even with various problems yet to be dealt with, a savvy advertiser would be ready to move in with greater spending---or not--when "addressablel  TV" attains the desired levels of scale, has better audience data, etc.

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