DirecTV Advertising and Dish Media said they have collaborated to create a standardized way for programmers to make more of their national advertising inventory addressable.
With their national footprints, satellite companies DirecTV and Dish Network have been pioneers in addressable advertising. But it has been tricky for programmers to run national campaigns at scale because of the different technologies and business practices employed by distributors.
“We feel we're industry leaders in addressable and between us and Dish, we're kind uniquely suited to kind of meet this moment in time together and provide programmers with a simpler implementation process to better fit their needs,” Matt Van Houten, senior VP of product, business development and sales operations at DirecTV Advertising, told Broadcasting+Cable and Next TV.
Demand for addressable advertising is growing and advertisers pay higher rates for addressable advertising because they get better results. “Programmers are now getting keyed into that and programmers want to reap those same benefits,” Van Houten said.
“In the past, the programmer enablement process has been custom and often quite manual, slowing down the adoption of addressable and the benefits that it brings,” Kevin Arrix, senior VP of Dish Media, said. “By offering these standardized and consistent solutions that improve programmer operations, we’re making it easier for media owners to light up more of their inventory for addressable targeting across our platforms.”
Most early addressable campaigns have run in the local time given to distributors in their carriage agreements with programmers. Now programmers are looking to run addressable advertising in their national inventory.
Dish and DirecTV have created three ways for programmers to activate addressable campaigns. The first is through a direct integration via the Invidi Conexus consolidated campaign management platform. There is also a plug-and-play solution for broadcast, and for programmers who operate both broadcast and cable networks from Adcuratio that includes live events. The third solution uses Canoe Service Assurance to create unified workflows across multiple distribution endpoints.
Van Houten said DirecTV is working with its rival in Dish to boost the overall addressable market. “We’re a big believer that all ships rise with the tide,” he said.
Dish and DirecTV have worked together before. Their D2 partnership sells addressable ads to political campaigns.
“Our clients were pushing us towards more standardization so we thought we’d take this problem head-on with Dish,” Van Houten added. “We want the programmers to be successful as we reach this connected, addressable slate.”
Programmers have been embracing advanced advertising as a way to boost revenues and compete against the digital giants including Google and Facebook.
“We are fully invested in growing our linear addressable offerings and providing more scale to advertisers,” Paramount Global executive VP, advanced media Julian Zilberbrand said. “There’s a need for solutions that require fewer custom integrations with the various distributors in the marketplace. Dish Media and DirecTV Advertising’s standardization solution is a significant step forward in alleviating assorted operational inefficiencies and is one of the steps needed to streamline and move the ad buying community into the next era of addressable advertising.”
