The digital world finds itself in the position of knowing more about how TV needs to build its future than TV does
Sometimes, a media disruption approaches that’s so huge and so obvious, you wonder what’s taken it so long. In Canada, and imminently right across the world, programmatic TV – ads addressed to precisely chosen TV viewers through data and automation – will be that kind of disruption.
This summer, media giants Rogers Media and AOL made Canada’s first play. Other networks and ad tech companies around the world are converging on the same goal. And while the television business obviously has work to do in making the programmatic politics work, this one is certainly happening. (Disclosure: Rogers owns Marketing and MarketingMag.ca)
Here’s what programmatic TV is good for: as viewing edges online, programmers need to be able to place ads against content regardless of the screen the viewer is looking at. That requires a far more automated approach than the highly labour-intensive TV planning and buying business as we know it.
The upside of addressable ads for advertisers is obvious: they will be able to sharpen their targeting, cut back on redundant ads, hit only the people who are interested.
Watching from the world of digital, this flow of data into TV advertising is a development that is beyond inevitable. Data-driven advertising is responsible for more than half of all online display spending, but it accounts for only around 4% of television spend.
As a result, the digital world finds itself in the position of knowing more about how TV needs to build its future than TV does. The ultimate potential of programmatic TV depends on a marriage of creativity and data that we know well.
Advertising creatives need the insights the media and data people provide if they are going to create TV ads that can be varied and targeted in real time, and in numerous versions. And if creative is to work, programmatically or otherwise, it won’t only be working through one channel.
Already in digital, we’re aiming for something you might call programmatic creative: programmatic in that it reacts to and uses multiple data signals, but with messages that work across not only display, but into social, PPC, SEO and content in general.
Look at it like that, and the incentive to get programmatic TV right is the opportunity to build it into the matrix of screens, touchpoints, data and creative called digital – one that is already working hard to sharpen targeting, cut back on the redundant stuff and only deliver messages to the people who care.
Sean Smith is the managing director of Tug Canada
