Little did I know how long it would take. It was November 1979 when the article I wrote about TV and online ads tied to individual household IDs came out. It was 1993 when my then-client IBM persuadedLen Matthews and myself to found Next Century Media,the company that built the first addressable TV commercial system for John Malone and John Hendricks. It was 2004 when the NCM system was used to analyze the first Comcast addressable trial in Aurora, Colorado.
All through this period the press was saying that any month now these new units were going to take over and profoundly change the nature of television. This did not happen. Instead it was the Internet and then mobile and social that profoundly changed everything. Well, finally, addressables are happening at scale and it's going to change everything profoundly again.
Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, DirecTV and Dish are the MVPDs to whom industry gratitude is owed. (Multichannel Video Programming Distributors is the recently-coined term denoting the superset of MSOs that includes cable, satellite, and telco-cable.) Charter is not yet doing addressables but is the MVPD most responsible for helping data driven TV into existence, through set top box data, direct matching of advertiser purchaser and prospect lists to set top box data (often with TRA), and now through the affordable scalable enablement of microzone A/B testing.
Black Arrow , Invidi, and Visible World are the technology companies deserving our thanks for working with these MVPDs to make NCM's dream a reality.
The biggest operational deployment of addressables right now is in ad-supported Video on Demand (VOD) through Black Arrow and Comcast in nearly 30,000,000 homes. Invidi's operational deployment of about 18,000,000 satellite DVR homes is second (Invidi has deals for nearly 70,000,000), and Visible World's 3,000,000 Cablevision footprint is third in size, though started first.
Seth Haberman's Visible World has just put out a white paper indicating a 70% sales lift caused by addressable commercials based on a sample of over a billion ad impressions — addressable vs. non-addressable. This is approximately the same range as predicted by early NCM experiments, and results from the removal of waste impressions against people highly unlikely to buy.
While the gratitude is being passed around, the industry also owes a lot to Irwin Gotlieb, Lyle Schwartz and Mike Bologna at GroupM and to Tracey Scheppach and her colleagues at SMG. Many in the industry who rallied around the Addressable Advertising Coalition in the 90s gave up on addressables when their long gestation period was realized, but not these folks.
The Advanced Advertising Media Project (AAMP) founded by 4As and Black Arrow and led by Bob DeSena is the modern equivalent of the Addressable Advertising Coalition (which Bob also co-led with Lyle and myself, John Hendricks, AAAA, and many others). AAMP is the way we all can pull together to maximize the value of television and video advertising.
More about addressable commercials in future posts as new data come in.
Let the celebrations begin!
Best to all,
Bill
Bill Harvey is a well-known media researcher and inventor who co-founded TRA, Inc. and is its Strategic Advisor. His nonprofit Human Effectiveness Institute runs his weekly blog on consciousness
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