Addressable ad campaigns deliver incremental reach to large and small ad campaigns, a new study found.
According to A Guide to Best Practices in Planning and Buying Addressable Television Advertising from industry group Go Addressable and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), when linear campaign reach as much as 40% of an audience, addressable ads 20 to 40 more reach points, a lift of 32% to 87%.
When a linear campaign’s reach is higher than 40%, addressable adds 5 to 10 more reach points, providing a lift of 15% to 28%, the report said.
Addressable campaigns are relatively efficient on an effective cost per thousand viewers (eCPM) basis compared to the cost of traditional linear ad inventory when it comes to reaching light linear TV viewing audiences.
“The TV ad market is clearly changing, with viewing becoming far more widely distributed over a growing range of linear and non-linear services,” said Jon Watts, managing director of CIMM. “Addressable TV advertising has become an increasingly critical capability for the industry, helping advertisers to cost effectively build out the reach and frequency of their campaigns, including for larger target audience segments. Linear and addressable are better together.”
The report noted four cases in which addressable advertising is particularly useful. They are brands with low penetration target audiences, brands with small television budgets, brands whose linear television campaign reach curves have plateaued and brand that need to frequency cap at the household or set level.
“This is a pivotal time to be in addressable TV advertising,” said Larry Allen, VP and general manager of addressable TV enablement for Comcast Advertising. And board chair for Go Addressable.
“In today’s fragmented media landscape, the medium offers advertisers several key advantages for staying ahead of and anticipating shifting viewership habits, including targeted reach, ad relevancy and authenticated identity combined with the highest quality video ad inventory,” Allen said. “We hope that these best practices and insight will help the industry continue to move the needle forth on innovation as well as elevate, protect and prioritize the viewer experience.
Go Addressable is a non-profit trade group made up of the ad sales units of distributors including Altice USA’s a4 Media, Charter Communications’ Spectrum Reach, Comcast Advertising, DirectTV Advertising, Dish Media and Paramount.
The report found that MVPD addressable TV is more precise than IP address matching. An analysis found that 95% of addressable households were matched via postal address compared to 60% via IP address. After 30 days, 82% of addressable homes remained accurately matched compared to 44% of connected television homes.
It also found that MVPD addressable TV is not just for older adults. While many buyers believe that CTV addressable is best used to target younger audiences and multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) addressable is best used to target older audiences, the data show that CTV addressable and MVPD addressable play complementary roles in reaching adults 18-49.
In terms of best practices, the report recommends that advertisers develop a detailed audience target profile; benchmark the linear TV effect; determine the reach, scale and eCPM for various addressable pools; determine the point where the linear TV reach curve flattens out; and leverage all data and simulate the reach of the combined linear and addressable TV schedules.
