• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, 11 hours ago

I am not a fan of our industry’s obsession with acronyms. They can be great shorthand for communicating with people in the know, but all too often they become overused crutches by people who don’t even know what the acronyms stand for. Also, they exclude people new to an industry or those less tech-fluent.

So I ask for your forgiveness as I anchor my column today around one of our industry acronyms -- DDL -- that is undergoing a metamorphosis.

The DDL acronym for “data-driven linear” TV advertising emerged a decade ago to refer to using a sophisticated predictive analytic platform fueled by billions of data points on TV audiences, viewing, programming and purchase behaviors to help advertisers and agencies better deliver their linear TV ads to specific target audiences, achieving desired outcomes.

DDL basically brought digital’s audience-based approach to what was historically a much blunter medium, enabling TV buyers to separate people from programs, just as audience-based banner ads in the 2000s helped advertisers separate people from pages.

As we learned over the years, better-targeted ads are powerful complements to content, sponsorship and direct-response buying strategies. But the overhead of linear television’s legacy systems and procedures added cost, complexity and enormous time delays for advertisers and agencies hoping to bring digital approaches to the massive available audiences on linear TV.

But that’s been changing -- first gradually, and now quickly. After a decade of imagining, testing and scaling automated planning, activation, measurement and post-campaign data processing for audience-based TV ad campaigns, the linear TV ad industry is finally on the verge of experiencing a massive wave of automation.

Linear TV advertising is entering its second phase of DDL: digitally delivered linear. This change has been happening on many fronts, as data-driven platforms added digital pipes and linked them directly into TV companies’ planning, sales and execution processes and systems: some through APIs (application protocol interfaces); some through secure chat systems; some through application widgets; some through EDIs (electronic data interchange) or FTPs (file transfer protocols) of old; and, finally, now with true agentic transaction architectures like what Fox Broadcasting showed off at Cannes in June.

What does this future of DDL 2.0 promise? It means that advertisers and agencies can finally have their cake and eat it, too. They can get the targeting of “data-driven linear” with the speed, flexibility, efficiency and closed-loop performance optimization capabilities of “digitally delivered linear.”

And this is happening just in time. Performance TV is a fast-growing part of the connected TV ad world and marketers are chomping at the bit to extend those techniques into the massive scale of linear TV ads, turning old-school direct-response ads into modern, digitally driven performance ads.

What do you think? Is the industry ready for DDL 2.0?