Canoe Turns Up The Heat On Linear Addressable: Pizzurro

The company conceived as an ambitious cable industry effort to insert ads in interactive TV says it is forging ahead with enabling addressable ad targeting for linear networks.

In the last few months, it has added linear addressability to 22 million homes in its footprint of 38 million.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Canoe's sales and marketing SVP Chris Pizzurro explains the development.

Expanded VOD Canoe recently began allowing two supply-side platforms (SSPs) - Beachfront and FreeWheel, which in turn are connected to eight large demand-side platforms (DSPs) - access to TV networks' VOD inventory.

Pizzurro says the result was 25 campaigns bought via those DSPs.

"And now the capability is expanding to more TV networks and more DSPs," he says.

"So we're up and running and we look to really turn up the heat in this year." Pathway to linear But the latest development is about going beyond VOD.

"We used to be a single-threaded company just doing video on demand," he says "Now we've taken on the responsibility of linear addressable, so that, now, when one of our national programmers run an addressable campaign, that's going to cross across linear and across VOD.

"In Q1, we provided addressable services on 27 campaign lines, spanning across seven TV networks," Pizzurro says.

"We stewarded audience segments, those addressable segments, across the three MVPDs - across Comcast, Cox, Charter - and ... now out expanding that to more national TV networks and MVPDs." Turning up the heat In the US, approximately two minutes each hour are made available to cable or satellite operators to sell TV ads, limiting the amount of targeting that can be done using at-network infrastructure.

But Pizzurro says things are changing.

"So yes, we have absolutely finally moved beyond the two-minute local avails and into the many, many more opportunities that are the national programmers.

"It's early days, but we've got the system up and running.

We're running campaigns, and we're just going to turn up the heat more this year." Pushing forward Canoe provides integration, monitoring, resolution and analysis to improve the experience of MVPD VOD, including understanding audience target segmentation data.

Canoe has been enabling networks to sell their VOD ads for the last nine years.

"Today we don't have the exact capabilities and programmatic as CTV programmatic does for the Canoe footprint," Pizzurro acknowledges.

"But we are pushing toward that with a path forward, while still maintaining our quality.