Digital Video Drives Demand for More Linear Targeting: Xandr’s Pete Doe

Television advertisers are seeking the same kind of audience targeting features they've grown to expect among digital channels, a demand that will help to support the growth of addressable advertising on national TV.

Measuring the effectiveness of those campaigns will be a key part of the next stage of linear TV's evolution.

"A lot of what's happened in the last few years is responding to the digital challenge," Pete Doe, head of research at Xandr, the advertising and analytics unit of AT&T's WarnerMedia Commercial unit, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

"Attribution is something that commonly comes along with digital measurement.

Increasingly, what we're seeing is that people involved in the buying and selling of TV are used to seeing what happens in digital, and expecting similar measurement and effectiveness." Data-driven linear TV has a role in reaching mass audiences even as advertisers shift spending into addressable channels for more focused targeting.

"If we think about television still being a great medium for building reach and improving consumer sentiment, sometimes it doesn't require addressable," Doe said.

"It requires a well targeted linear campaign.

Addressable has its part at different parts of the funnel." A key challenge is developing measurement tools that help buyers and sellers of advertising to form a common understanding of the value of addressability.

"There's still a long way to go to get to a standardized approach for addressable.

There's a lot of progress being made toward that," Doe said.

"For data-driven linear, we've made a lot of progress in standardizing how the numbers are counted." Xandr participates in the Advanced Targets Standards Group, which was formed in 2016 to bring together buyers and sellers of advanced TV advertising.

The group developed guidelines for data use, cross-platform consistency and data-driven linear transactions.

Source: eMarketer Cord-cutting is forecast to become more common, challenging advertisers to reach households through connected devices that carry a mix of streamed video and live TV.

As consumers switch among platforms and devices, measuring their viewership will help advertisers see a more complete picture their prospective customers.

"People have been talking about 'cross-platform' for well over a decade, now, and will continue to talk about it.

This year we will see some real progress with that," Doe said.

"Buyers and sellers of advertising want to understand the holistic behavior.

The ability to holistically combine the OTT and linear inventory is what we're focused on.

We're making great progress on that." You are watching “Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, ” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.