Closing the Addressable TV Household Gap with SpotX and Cadent

Addressable advertising is growing, with industry experts saying it’ll hit $3.3 billion in spend next year. As the medium continues to go mainstream in the U.S. and UK, and more international markets such as Germany, Holland and Belgium begin to enable addressable inventory, Cadent and SpotX are ready to take our partnership to the next level.

We recently sat down to talk about how we’re working together to move the industry forward. Our partnership, which makes it easier for premium TV media sellers to monetize their data and inventory by integrating their market-leading SSP and addressable execution platforms, gives agencies and advertisers greater access to cross-platform addressable inventory via an optimized workflow.

Below, SpotX’s Allen Klosowski and Cadent’s Paul Ranger discuss why we came together to unify premium TV inventory and streamline processes to enable cross-platform buying and selling and optimize reach, frequency and efficient execution.

Allen: Our team at SpotX is thrilled to work with Cadent, the leading addressable TV platform, on developing a solution to create a simplified way for agencies and advertisers to access cross-platform addressable inventory on premium TV across the U.S. as well as markets in Europe. Let’s talk about the power of addressable TV advertising and how our partnership helps address challenges in the ecosystem.

Paul: Sure. To start, addressability truly marries the power of premium TV reach and attention with the targeting and measurability of digital, but even in more mature markets such as the U.S., planning and executing these campaigns is tough. Fragmentation and legacy technology systems pose many challenges, and as we both know, there’s a lot of work to do.

What Cadent and SpotX are focused on doing for the industry is enabling inventory owners to surface their addressable linear and time-shifted inventory from multiple platforms and making it available to the demand-side to transact programmatically.

Allen: Yes – and by bringing digital planning and execution capability to target campaigns across all forms of premium TV including set-top boxes, we make buying and executing addressable campaigns across multiple platforms far more efficient.

This is great for the buy-side as more and more advertisers make addressable a key element in their campaign planning. And it means we can now accurately track and measure the performance of more premium TV inventory against individual advertiser KPIs, and we can conduct much broader ROI analysis on premium TV buys. This means buyers should see greater value or at least be able to refine and optimize their planning based on real attribution data.

Paul: Seeing the return on investment is really key to buyers seeing the value of the medium. And from the sell-side perspective, we can drive inventory sell-through and overall yield across the board so revenues are higher. Sky in the UK is a great example of this – they’ve demonstrated how addressability attracts new advertisers who previously couldn’t use TV as it had a connotation of wastage. We also make it easier for them to create new ad products for advertisers.

This partnership took a lot of collaboration, and we’re very proud of that.

Allen: Absolutely. For SpotX, this collaboration strengthens our mission to deliver a cross-platform, “Total Video” approach to ad-serving, and in our perspective, it comes at a pivotal moment for the industry.

Paul: I agree. We’re at a turning point now where addressable TV advertising is becoming more mainstream. About three-quarters of U.S. TV households are now enabled for addressable ads, but only one-eighth of that inventory has been made available to buyers. There’s a lot of work to do, and more collaboration across the industry will be critical to the success of all.

Allen: And there’s a huge upside to cross-platform solutions such as the one offered by SpotX and Cadent, which enable all ecosystem players to capitalize on this unmet demand and drive some of the $17 billion (and growing) digital advertising spend to television.

Paul: Another key part of this partnership is what it does for subscriber data and user experience. Platform operators can monetize their data in a more GDPR-compliant process so subscriber data is protected, and experience-wise, subscribers will see more relevant ads, and ad loads will be contextually optimized.

Allen: Definitely. It’s a win/win for the industry. Advertisers see better results and higher ROI on their campaigns, while operators and programmers see the benefits of better advertising yields and more incremental revenues to support their businesses. And as marketers focus on reaching people in the moments that matter with relevant messages, they’ll continue to ramp up their addressable spending and experimentation in the months and years ahead.

The medium offers clear value over the data-blind constraints of traditional linear. For service and content providers to thrive during this paradigm-shift, they’ll need to prioritize new partnerships with technology companies that can keep pace with evolving advertiser demand, as well as the ever-increasing expectations from consumers.

Read more about Cadent’s tools for content monetization.