The search behaviour habits now being leveraged can be combined with any of 1,000+ existing AdSmart attributes – from postcodes to life stage, or mosaic groups – to refine campaigns. Ruth Cartwright, Investment Director at Sky Media, believes that, “Being able to embrace the best capabilities of digital but in the brand safe, big-screen world of TV, makes campaigns more relevant and impactful.”

Sky says its latest advertising innovation is driven by industry demand to bring digital and TV campaigns closer together. “Search Behaviour attributes allows brands, for the first time, to target audiences based on specific online search behaviours, including frequency and intent,” the company explains.

Seven search behaviour categories are available at launch: Home & Garden, Travel, News, Job & Education, Arts and Entertainment, Games, and Pets & Animals. As well as mixing this knowledge with existing AdSmart attributes, it can also be matched to advertiser first-party data. “As an example, a custom campaign could see a holiday or insurance company target those who are actively searching for holidays or flights. This could be further refined or creatively adapted to those looking at beach, sightseeing or ski holidays in a specific area of the country,” Sky Media explains.

The Search Behaviour targeting capability has been developed in conjunction with Captify, which boasts of having the largest onsite search dataset outside walled gardens, harnessing 1+ billion searches a day on 2+ billion devices covering 6+ million websites from over 1,500 publishers (and all in five languages!). Captify emphasises how up to date its data is (real-time), demonstrating interests and needs right now. Captify talks of having “the first intent-powered audience platform for the open web”.

She outlined research from Médiamétrie – France’s TV industry JIC – and Ekimetrics, which shows that TV makes a 40% contribution to global incremental sales (while having only a 31% investment share) and makes €5.6 global ROI for every euro spent on the channel. According to the research, TV has a better ratio between global ROI and global contribution to incremental sales than any other channel, including search, social, OOH, radio and display. The research also shows that, in France, the weekly reach for linear TV is over 90% for all target groups.

While TV does not have a problem with effectiveness, Kolymayer believes that it does have an attribution problem. She remarked: “This is because 50% of the effectiveness of TV is long-term effectiveness and it’s quite difficult to demonstrate. Usually we use marketing mixed modelling – long-term models – to demonstrate this effectiveness, and it’s more complex than what we do in digital, with attribution to the last click.”

Kolmayer believes that France experienced a major revolution in its TV measurement methodology this year. In June, the members of Médiamétrie voted to include audiences at home and out of home (who are watching on TV sets) in its measurement in 2024, as well as audiences viewing on all other digital devices. She said this development came as Médiamétrie committed to developing a cross-media measurement, which will include tools to be able to de-duplicate contact and measure incremental reach.

In 2024, TF1 expects to be able to sell all of its inventories – including linear and non-linear on all devices – together. She said this will be done “probably programmatically and probably as well on the same currency.”

Kolmayer said the French broadcaster had developed a broader range of content in AVOD and FAST channels over the last year, and has started to deploy this OTT offering on connected TVs. She revealed that TF1 had experienced a 68% increase in AVOD consumption over the year. In addition, it registered a total of 2.7 billion views on its catch-up TV and news service.

In 2022, TF1 had over 250 advertisers on addressable TV according to Kolmayer, and the broadcaster wants to build sales partnerships with social media platforms: “We have a big community of fans on social networks and we intend to develop addressable inventory there as well.”

Despite a fragmented ecosystem and changes in viewing habits, Kolmayer believes linear TV can still offer a unique proposition on the advertising market. She said: “For broadcasters, the winning combination is to keep on providing brand safe and engaging content for delivering mass reach, but to also develop addressable inventories at scale.”

He said: “When you think of CTV, with its lower commercial loads that have lower retention issues, [linear commercial time per hour in the U.S.] should not be 14 minutes, but around eight.” Aside from a clear viewer preference, the proposition of  lower ad loads is also justified by addressability’s capacity to produce a “four times or five times increase on rates” which reflects its efficacy in achieving campaign goals, he argued.

Another theme discussed was the obstacles addressability faced while being launched. Brown noted that during the early stages of addressability, the TV ecosystem largely based media planning and buying on Gross Rating Points (GRP), as well as age and gender. He emphasised that the [price] premium associated with addressability, while justified by its capacity to eliminate the waste associated with TV advertising, also created the challenge of persuading advertisers of its power to drive results.

He said: “We knew this product was going to have to get sold in at the client level to be able to change the currency at the time with the agencies”. The approach taken by DirecTV involved building successful case studies that could show the precision of targeting, while working “…in combination and partnership with agencies… to develop client vertical best practices.”

Brown also highlighted the important role frequency capping played in making addressability appealing to advertisers. He remarked that through no fault of its own, the TV advertising industry had previously been unable to limit the frequency with which viewers were exposed to the same ads during a campaign. The result often meant 20% of households saw 80% of adverts, while light TV viewers and others were underserved. Frequency capping allowed DirecTV, alongside other satellite and MVPD operators, to show advertisers how to cut waste in their campaigns by leveraging addressability.

Kubin asked whether scale or capacity pose a problem for addressability. Brown replied, “Scale isn’t an issue. If you look at studies, the perception is that there is a lack of scale, but every MVPD cable operator and satellite operator now has addressable, so you’re at full capacity in the cable universe”. He noted that there is no duplication between his company’s streaming subscribers and DirecTV linear [broadcast TV] subscribers, which gives marketers unique reach while advertising across linear and CTV platforms.

Brown also emphasised the need for the industry to rally behind technology which can increase the capacity to serve ads in live and VOD, praising INVIDI’s work in this direction: “You guys solved for this – the ability to run thousands of ads in set-top-boxes, dynamically inserted at the same time in live”.

Brown also outlined the trajectory he envisioned for addressability and the developments he was most excited about. One theme discussed was the movement towards automated ad trading he had observed among agencies and DSPs, allowing target viewers, he believes, to be served with less friction. Brown predicted that capturing more programmer minutes in the U.S. – approximately 14-16 minutes of commercial time per hour – is the next step for addressability. He said: “We’re not so far away from a place where all inventory is addressable, and an advertiser can choose what’s the right mix of upper funnel and lower funnel. That’s what I’m excited about.”

The Future of TV Advertising Global took place physically in London in December. The entire event will also be streamed to the world on January 18-19 and then all sessions will made available on-demand. You can register to watch this content (free) here.