A buyer's guide to addressable advertising

Strategies for using addressable TV to drive results.

For decades, marketers have used TV advertising’s mass reach to build brand awareness and preference. As its advertising capabilities have developed and continue to evolve, the role and value of TV advertising has expanded. It continues to support mass reach in a fragmented viewing environment. In addition, however, its data-driven and technological capabilities also serve more tactical lower-funnel marketing objectives including promotion and sales activation, as well as measurement and performance attribution. The evolution of TV planning from the use of age/gender proxies to the use of desired audience segments (e.g. Men 18-49 proxy versus households in the market to buy a truck) opens up the opportunity for advertisers to take advantage of new data-driven TV planning capabilities, known as advertiser-specific, audience-based planning tools. The ability to match anonymized aggregate household-level TV viewing data to a broad range of third-party data sets, or even the advertisers’ own data sets, makes it possible to develop TV advertising plans that are more likely to reach the intended audience.

  • In addition, the use of more automated, audience-based TV planning, and more timely reporting, enables ongoing campaign optimization whereby campaigns can be updated based on how much of the advertiser’s target segment population is being reached with a desired effective frequency. In doing so, the ongoing TV campaign plan can be adjusted to deliver ads to the portion of the target audience segment that has yet to be reached with sufficient frequency. Given that TV viewing behaviors and the density of the advertiser’s target audience segment may have significant differences across various local geographies, many advertisers are benefiting from doing audience-based TV planning at a market, or even more local geographic level, either as a complement to a national TV ad campaign, or as a stand-alone locally-focused TV advertising campaign.
  • Last, and perhaps the most important addressable TV advertising capability, is the ability to measure down to the household level, for more precise campaign measurement and performance attribution. Measurement also makes it possible to derive more relevant insights relative to campaign effectiveness and its impact on business performance, within and across both traditional and addressable TV advertising. Such insights can then be used to better allocate, adjust, and align the various components of an evolving media mix to the marketer’s desired objectives.

As a result of these advancements, addressable TV plays a new and evolving role within the overall TV advertising mix, and can assist in driving marketer’s objectives throughout the entire purchase funnel.