TV looks to tech to personalise advertising

Data gathering and addressability are key to successful TV ad tech innovation, according to an expert IBC panel on TV and digital video advertising.

John Gee, Chief Business Development Officer at TV data company Alphonso, whose tech is present in over 34m US households, said that a top priority for advertisers is ‘addressability at scale’ and finding out where the audience is.

AddressableTV advertising is the ability to show different ads to different households while they are watching the same programme.

“A view is still a view unless you want to have addressability - and for that you need to know who’s watching. We’ve seen various iterations of addressability in the industry but now it’s finally happening,” he said. 

According to Nielsen-owned ad tech company Gracenote, stitching different platform data together is something the advertising industry needs to improve on.

Jason Bolles, Gracenote’s Managing Director for Personalisation said: “There’s lots of big data being used to enhance TV but how do we bring that together to provide services across all platforms, to grab the data and put it together in one big format?”

“We need to be able to calibrate big data with panel data to make sure we have accurate measurements” Jason Bolles, Gracenote

Gee added that another challenge the industry needed to address was the fact that multiple device usage during prime time is affecting brand recall.

“Brand recall drops tremendously when there’s more than one device in the room – it falls from 47% to 20% and the highest occurrence happens during prime time, so it’s a real problem.”

Multiple device usage is one reason that Gracenote believes that it is important to measure every single aspect of the viewing experience - from traditional audience panels like BARB to digital metrics.

“We need to be able to calibrate big data with panel data to make sure we have accurate measurements,” Bolles said.

Google’s Strategic Partner Lead for Broadcasters, Oliver Friedrich, said that in territories such as Germany, the tech giant is cooperating with traditional data gatherers such as Nielsen, but he argued that “panels need to be more transparent and more modern.”