Obstacles Slow Advanced Advertising Adoption

TV station group and media agency executives agree that industry efforts to make serious strides toward addressable advertising continue to be too slow, but they also agree that one of the stumbling blocks is not being able to reach consensus on how to best accomplish it.

Speaking at TVNewsCheck’s TV2020 Monetizating The Future conference in New York on Wednesday afternoon, Jennifer Hungerbuhler, EVP and managing director, local video and audio investment at Dentsu Aegis Network, called addressable advertising “the holy grail” for her media agency Carat and its clients.

She said for a dog product client to be able to specifically target dog owners with TV ads, for example, would be an ideal scenario. But even with a coalition of broadcasters commiting on Wednesday to the introduction of a ATSC 3.0 standard that would, in part, allow advertisers to run more addressable ads, it will take some time for it to become a consistently used practice.

Robert Weisbord, chief revenue officer at Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose stations have been testing 3.0 since 2017, believes it can be offered in homes in 25% of the markets in which Sinclair stations operate by next summer.

But Hungerbuhler thinks that percentage is too optimistic. She doubts ACTS will have that level of adoption where agencies and their clients can actually use it in an optimal manner by next summer.

Addressable advertising is not the only area in the advanced advertising realm where advertisers and stations feel there needs to be more progress. Another goal is making it easier for agencies to deal with stations during the ad buying process. And particularly with making the makegood process easier to resolve.

That could be accomplished with the adoption of Open API (Application Programming Interface), which would make the entire buying process smoother.

Hungerbuhler would like to see a process where rather than resolving ad makegood situations manually, they could be resolved via a programmatic process where a client’s criteria for a makegood is submitted and pre-approved and if a makegood is needed it can be properly credited in an automated way.

Frank Friedman, VP, consumer engagement, local media at E.W. Scripps and former CEO of Zenith Optimedia Canada, agrees that the buying process at the local station level needs to operate with less friction. He says the backend of the local buying process needs to be fixed.

But Hungerbuhler says “not one platform has figured out” how to fix it.

And Weisbord says where there is friction within the buying process, “the spot [ad] business leaks,” adding that up to a point “the process has been too manual” and needs to be more automated.

The panelists said moves by Nielsen and comScore to provide more relevant viewer data is a positive but again the process for accomplishing that is too slow. And complicating the process is that it is hard to get everyone in the industry on the same page.

And Weisbord said further complicating the viewer data upgrading, is that every agency has its own “data scientists” and the TV networks and stations also have their own research experts, all of which creates more of a walled garden than fostering cooperation.

In order to move the process forward, Weisbord says, “it’s a matter of a meeting of the minds.” He says the stations and agencies need to partner more and share data.

Hungerbuhler said customer relationship management (CRM) systems at stations could also contain more detail and pertinent information that can make the buying relationship between the client and station smoother.

“Not every station has a good CRM database,” Hungerbuhler said, adding that there are opportunities for local stations to get more ad dollars if they can improve their local CRM databases.

Read all of TVNewsCheck’s TV2020 coverage here.