Addressability Is Paying Off for Cable

NEW YORK — After years of imminent-breakthrough moments, addressable advertising is actually being used today, making clients’ ad buys more cost-efficient and driving consumer purchases.

Cable-industry executives have often spoken of ad-technology enhancements, predicting that following a year of testing or deployment, the next year would be the year the technology goes mainstream. Not so at last week’s addressable-advertising panel here.

“I think, if anything, this was the year of the ROI,” or return on investment, Caroline Horner, senior vice president of innovation at TV-measurement firm Rentrak, told panel moderator Jon Lafayette, business editor of Broadcasting & Cable.

DirecTV senior vice president of ad sales Keith Kazerman, who’s been in the news lately discussing DirecTV and Dish Network’s new offering of household-addressable ads to political campaigns, defined addressable ads as video advertisements targeted at specific audiences at the household level, via live, on-demand and DVR-recorded programming.

Chris Monteferrante, vice president of ad sales at AT&T AdWorks, said targeting techniques in the AT&T TV Blueprint approach have been shown to reduce the cost-perthousand impressions of ad buys by 20% or more.

Rentrak’s Horner said addressable campaigns have also been shown to increase the return on investment by 10% to 20%, as seen from clients’ research, customer-loyalty programs and other evidence.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.