After many years of testing the waters with addressable television, it seems that the development of this hyper-personalized form of advertisement is finally coming to full fruition. “Addressable TV” is a term used to describe an advertising process in which brands are able to target video ads to specific households during scheduled programming, often aided by agencies such as Finecast to ensure commercial compatibility with the viewer. Though addressable TV isn’t set to completely replace traditional advertising any time soon, it is becoming more and more prevalent as a marketing tool among advertisers.
This essentially means that the advertisements we view on our TV screens will be much more diversified, and even hyper-attuned to our own lifestyles, and our personal likes and dislikes. Using this commercial tactic coupled with panel-based research, various households can be segmented by location, demographics, or behavior in order to market brands to them in a more productive way. With the help of addressable TV, a company will be able to advertise various different versions or models of the same product to different households across the country at the same time.
The Advantages of Targeted Advertising
This new wave of intelligent, focused advertising may hold a lot of implications for the average TV user. In many ways, addressable TV leads to a much more cohesive and satisfactory viewing experience. Read on to learn more about the key benefits of customized television.
- Produces Topical Ads – It makes sense that, for example, households that include children will be shown advertisements for childcare or family-based products. It’s a great way to gain audience insight while providing an efficient and engaging streamlining of relevant ads to the public.
- Makes TV More Flexible and Accessible – With the nature of addressable TV centering around the lifestyle of the viewer, this form of advertisement has proven to be extremely malleable and easy to market to a variety of demographics.
- Increases Ad Engagement – Studies show that user attentiveness can skyrocket by as much as 35% when viewing a personalized commercial, compared with more traditional forms of advertisement.
The Challenges of Targeted Advertising
There are still quite a lot of technicalities of broadcasting services to iron out before addressable advertising becomes truly commonplace, including but not limited to:
- Privacy Concerns – Standardised TV advertisement is held to extremely rigorous rules and regulations that are integral to the protection of both the companies and the users involved in the viewing experience. With the policies surrounding legal data collection constantly changing, it can be difficult to navigate the issue of privacy when it comes to targeted ads.
- Segmented Viewership – Though segmenting viewers into different categories in order to better understand their needs is a key feature of addressable television, there are also notable downsides to this process i.e. lack of constructive collective feedback from viewers.
- The Cost – Marketing to individual households can be extremely expensive, especially factoring in the price of customized assets and inventory being sold at a premium cost.
A Brief Overview
Now that we’ve covered the ins and outs of addressable TV and its dynamic with contemporary TV users, it’s not hard to understand why this method of marketing is catching on in such a big way. From increasing ad attentiveness to connecting with the hyper-specific wants and needs of the viewer, it’s easy to see that targeted advertisement definitely has its place in the future of television.
