81% of advertisers satisfied with addressable TV, survey says

A growing percentage of advertisers are either currently satisfied with addressable TV or plan to start using it in 2023, according to new survey results from industry initiative Go Addressable.

Go Addressable, along with Advertiser Perceptions, polled 300 brand and agency respondents for survey.  It found 81% of advertisers are overall satisfied with addressable TV advertising options today, an increase from the 72% who said the same last year. Alongside more advertisers satisfied, of those polled that are currently using addressable, 37% plan to increase their ad spend in the area in 2023.

Helping to drive more satisfaction, Go Addressable said survey respondents highlighted that the medium is now simpler to buy, alongside improvements in the number of options and cost to implement. Almost all (96%) using addressable today said they’re buying from either AVOD, programmers, OEMs or MVPDs.

And more advertisers plan to incorporate addressable advertising. Of those not already doing so, 41% of marketers said they plan to use addressable in 2023 – a large jump from a quarter of those surveyed the same time last year.

“We’re thrilled to see that momentum is continuing to build behind addressable advertising headed into 2023,” said Kevin Arrix, SVP at Dish Media, in a statement. “These latest findings capture the industry’s enthusiasm and adoption of addressable, which has become an increasingly important tool for advertisers to reach their audiences effectively and with tangible ROI.”

Dish this fall introduced programmatic ads across its satellite and streaming TV services, tapping SeaChange International and Beachfront to provide sell-side and ad-insertion tools. Dish in September said that the new National Linear Programmatic tool would allow advertisers real-time programmatic buying across the 7 million-plus households reached by Dish TV and streaming service including Sling TV.

Go Addressable was formed in June 2021, with support of major TV distributors and the aim of addressing challenges facing the addressable TV ecosystem. On Wednesday the group said it surveyed participating companies and found that the initiative has helped enable a monthly average of 53 billion linear advertising minutes since its inception. The report on advertiser perceptions coincided with the group’s addressable advertising event, which kicked off Wednesday morning.

During a panel session on buyers' perspectives, Kelly Metz, managing director of Advanced TV Activation at Omnicom Media Group, gave kudos to both Dish and DirecTV.

“I’m going to applaud Dish and DirecTV here because they … made their inventory almost fully available for programmatic in the ecosystem, which is exactly where this is all headed,” Metz said Wednesday. Metz pointed to the idea that she can now manage campaigns on behalf of advertisers and the frequency components with precision, noting that the company is actually much better at managing frequency than its supply-side partners. 

In predictions next year, Metz said Omnicom expects “to see an explosion on programmatic side here, even if it’s programmatic guaranteed” but stressed there will be advancement down an automated path.  

In terms of addressable advertising, all of the panelists, which also included Samantha Rose from Horizon Media and Jen Soch from GroupM, said addressable came down to one main point: audience targeting.  

Metz said for Omnicom the pitch on addressable starts with unifying measurement.

“If we can’t measure it, we don’t actually want to buy it,” she said.

And when it comes to addressable, “it’s about the audience, it’s about the plan, it starts with who they’re trying to reach and then we customize everything else. That’s really the key here, we have to get smarter and better about audiences,” Metz said.  

Soch, executive director of Channel Solutions at GroupM, also has hopes for progress on TV audience measurement in the year to come, with access to data that would allow it to do more outside of the current household panels available with Nielsen.

“We’ve got to find ways to prove out that this is incredibly successful,” she said of addressable advertising. “We know it is…we need some more proof points we need to show people that it fits into the real world.”

The focus on addressable advertising comes as the ad market is currently facing macro challenges.  Speaking at an investment conference on Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav said that the ad market is currently weaker than at any time during the pandemic slowdown in 2020, adding it will be difficult to achieve the company’s 2023 earnings expectations if it doesn’t improve.