The BEE solution (which stands for Brand Exposure & Engagement) harnesses data from 2+ million Bouygues Telecom set-top boxes plus existing Realytics technology to provide deterministic single-source measurement of national linear TV, BVOD and addressable TV. The exposure data can then be linked to downstream online consumer activity, such as website visits, app downloads, SMS responses and calls to a call centre (including incremental activity).

Realytics provides a platform that helps buyers optimise their media plans by harnessing a previous understanding of how TV advertising impacted business outcomes, and this is also wrapped into the BEE solution. Thus, advertisers are given a better understanding of the frequency needed to generate web activity, the number of impressions needed to deliver X% of incremental reach, and also the consequences of over-exposure of a household to the same campaign.

Guillaume Belmas, CEO of Realytics, believes the French market provides an outstanding model for how to deploy addressable TV successfully, due to the exceptional pan-industry collaboration that enabled rapid take-off. As we reported previously, his company has just authored the second edition of its ‘Addressable TV in France’ white paper series, outlining progress and next steps.

One of those next steps is improved measurement and attribution, and with a large part of French TV consumption still found on the set-top boxes of service providers like Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom, operator partnerships carry significant weight. Discussing the market needs generally, Belmas says: “There are still improvements to be made on reporting addressable TV advertising.

“Everyone has been focused on making targeted TV a reality and signing deals, but in the last few months both the buyside and sell-side agreed that we now need more proof of the efficacy of campaigns.”

He observes that usage of smart TV sets and connected TV apps is low in France compared to the rest of Europe.  Catch-up TV and BVOD are overwhelmingly consumed via set-top boxes, and this means measurement efforts must include a core focus on the service provider set-top box.

“The first goal of BEE is to measure exposure and reach, because one of the buyside priorities is to understand how they avoid audience duplication as they spread their money across advertising on linear TV, catch-up and addressable. Then there are questions about the performance of the different ‘channels’: does my linear TV perform better than my addressable TV campaign, and what about the BVOD campaign?

“Our history is as a TV attribution company, so we can show if campaigns are driving web traffic or other outcomes. One of the big questions for brands has always been, ‘How many impressions do I need to trigger an activity like a website visit or app download?’ That is a crucial insight if you want to fix the ideal frequency for a campaign. Before, we could not answer these questions, but now we can.”

Within its wider product portfolio, Realytics has its own TV detection technology that will flag in real-time when an ad has aired, using fingerprinting, but the focus with BEE is using set-top box data to determine exposure, and this is the basis for showing de-duplicated reach across the different ‘channels’ being measured and therefore the incremental reach that addressable TV can deliver.

“Some of the top questions that buyers want answered are: what is the duplication per channel, how do I optimise to avoid duplication, which is the second or third ‘channel’ I should buy [for example, adding BVOD onto a linear campaign first, or using addressable first and then BVOD], and what is the ideal combination of those channels?”

With BEE, buyers can focus on exposure to gain these reach and incremental reach optimisation insights, but there is also the option to investigate performance as a second stage, and this is when Realytics’ TV attribution solution is fired up. “Not everyone is concerned with ‘drive-to-web’ but everyone is concerned with reach and frequency,” Belmas explains.

Realytics expects to expand the footprint where its exposure and attribution technology can be used.

Realytics has a central role in the French addressable TV advertising market, especially through its work with Bouygues Telecom. In addition to providing enhanced capabilities for measuring exposure and effectiveness of addressable TV advertising with the telco, its Adkymia DSP is part of the TVMOTIK alliance and tech stack designed to rationalise buying of linear TV and catch-up addressable TV inventory from multiple broadcasters in Bouygues Telecom homes. This alliance also involves Equative, which contributes campaign development, ad decisioning and scheduling capabilities.

TVMOTIK is based upon the principles of technical harmonisation (including use of AF2M/SNPTV requirements for linear TV) and therefore interoperability, and is designed to rationalise buying across multiple channels for advertisers, providing a one-stop-shop. It includes technology services and sales support. It is viewed as a way to lower the barriers to entry for TV channels of any size if they want to make their inventory available for addressable advertising (on Bouygues Telecom STBs).

Last year, in another project, Realytics worked with SNPTV (the advocacy group for TV and audiovisual advertising media in France), to investigate the effect of using linear TV and addressable TV together. One of the main points of the study was to determine if addressable TV delivers incremental reach on top of linear.

As indicated above, the Realytics product portfolio spans ad detection, ad exposure confirmation, programmatic buying enablement and TV attribution. The Adkymia Demand Side Platform can be used to buy both linear and addressable TV campaigns programmatically and Realytics is also using eight years’ worth of data (and 7 million spot impressions in Europe) to feed AI processing that optimises media buying to maximise drive-to-web impact via this DSP.

Realytics helps advertisers to synchronise their TV and digital campaigns, like timing their paid search (and especially their bidding in order to reach top search spot) to coincide with television ads. This is viewed as a key optimisation that can help ‘drive-to-web’. Online impact can be attributed to TV at a granular level, including on a per-channel (TV distribution channel) or per-day basis. The key principle guiding this technology is the idea that the first impact of TV advertising is usually seen in search.

The company also supports retargeting of exposed TV audiences in digital, including on Facebook, and targeting of non-exposed audiences within digital. There is also the ability to find audiences in the digital space who are lookalikes for the TV exposed audience.

As part of smartclip and RTL Group, Realytics is taking a pan-European view of the cross-platform and addressable TV markets and Belmas believes that in markets where HbbTV is being used by broadcasters to enable addressable TV in free-to-air homes, via television sets, it is realistic to believe we can unify addressable TV planning and buying to cover this and the Pay TV operator STB inventory.

In terms of measurement and attribution, the data available from a telco/Pay TV home is much richer than anything Realytics can get from an HbbTV household, but publisher (broadcaster streaming) data would be one foundation stone for exposure, and other data sources including ACR could be harnessed.

The paper, entitled: ‘Addressable TV: Digitalisation of an offline media’, is available to download now. It is the result of interviews with key players in the French addressable ecosystem including executives from Mindshare, Altice Media Ads & Connect, Gamned, Novembre, Canal+ Brand Solutions, M6 Publicité, SNPTV, Values, Jellyfish, Bouygues and France Televisions Publicité. This is the first time the annual white paper has been published in English and it is a good read for anyone that wants to understand the French addressable market since the law was changed in 2020 to permit household targeting.

The paper declares that, “Addressable TV has brought television into the digital age, sparking a renewed debate about its position in advertisers’ media mixes. This development allows the all-digital world to incorporate TV into its strategies, bridging the gap between a traditionally offline medium and the digital world.”

According to the SNPTV, the French TV advertising advocacy group, there were more than 1,300 addressable TV campaigns in France during 2022 – a three-fold increase over the previous year (the 2021 figure was 376 campaigns). Developments impacting reach include permission for prime-time ad substitution and the introduction of multiple targeted ads per ad break (in a market that opened with a rule allowing only one per break), while work is underway on a unified addressable TV solution that will get smaller TV sales houses into the game. Measurement is one of the big priorities ahead, and there is significant interest in what CRM onboarding (so use of advertiser data matching) can achieve and how that is implemented.

The paper, which is authored by Realytics and extensively quotes the interviewees, believes France now serves as a model for the rest of Europe when it comes to collaboration as the basis for addressable TV market growth. It points out that France is the only European country where all television channels and ISPs (telcos/service providers with Pay TV) have collaborated and agreed upon common specifications for addressable TV implementation. This includes clear rules and unified reporting for advertisers and agencies, and technology alignments to ensure a seamless viewer experience. SNPTV and AF2M have overseen the development of consistent standards. France has a standardised CPM buying method and uniform targeting, the paper observes.

Five of the TV sales houses (TF1 Publicité, France TV, M6 Publicité, Canal+ Brand Solutions, Altice Média Ads & Connect) have signed with Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom. M6 Publicité is already in the process of signing with Free. Addressable TV can be bought direct or programmatically. Third-party players are heavily involved in this ecosystem to support data (e.g., LiveRamp), performance measurement (e.g., Realytics) and programmatic buying (e.g., Adkymia and TheTradeDesk).

The paper outlines how addressable TV is being used in France today, with targets based on geolocation, household characteristics (e.g., income, family with children) and consumption (heavy to light TV users). By 2021, half of all campaigns used geolocation (and the figure was 52% in H2, 2022, and is expected to be 50% in 2023) with one-quarter based on household characteristics or TV usage.

Rapid growth has been recorded since 2021. Olivier Roberdeau, Head of Multiscreen at Mindshare, is quoted from the previous year’s white paper as he recorded how substitutions grew from 0.5% in January 2021 to 10% in January 2022. By 2022 addressable was gaining traction among traditional TV advertisers as well as new-to-TV advertisers, as witnessed by Isabelle Vignon, General Delegate for Marketing at SNPTV. One executive says the priority is to bring more of the 2,000 existing TV advertisers into this new market. Half of addressable TV advertisers in France are still new to TV, as of 2022.

By 2023, half of addressable TV advertisers came back for more, according to Nathalie Dinis, Deputy Executive, Director of Trade at France Télévisions Publicité. Five sectors stood out as addressable TV users in 2022, the paper says: tourism, retail, services, culture & leisure, and automobile. Beyond geo-targeting, use-cases include reach extension beyond linear TV (including into light TV households).

The white paper notes the importance of measurement. Since March 2021, Médiamétrie has been re-evaluating the corrected Gross Rating Points of broadcasted advertisements that were impacted by addressable TV spots. This recalculation is based on the number of impressions served during these spots.

Mindshare’s Roberdeau is quoted saying: “Advertisers treat addressable TV like digital media and anticipate receiving data similar to digital campaigns to maximise their investments across campaigns. In this regard, the BEE measurement study developed by Realytics presents an excellent opportunity”.

As the paper explains, with BEE, Realytics can deterministically measure the performance of national linear TV, addressable TV, IPTV and Replay TV campaigns in households with Bouygues Telecom TVs. The purpose is to show how complementary different TV-activated devices are, in terms of both audience and online engagement. This includes measurement of audience conversion into website or mobile app activity. In 2022, BEE measured the effectiveness of addressable TV campaigns, including when combined with either a national linear TV campaign or an IPTV Replay campaign.

The white paper suggests that the effectiveness of addressable TV will come under the microscope in 2023, with most sales houses focused on demonstrating the impact via test campaigns conducted near the end of 2022. TV sales houses and ISPs (Pay TV operators) are collaborating in these tests.

Another focus for 2023, and looking ahead, is the use of advertiser CRM data to enhance targeting and personalisation. This first-party data matching comes with both technical and legal hurdles (including the need for new consents), and one executive points to the need for large customer bases to even begin this journey. Additional costs, and therefore higher CPMs, may also need to be factored in. Nevertheless, the paper reports that 2022 saw a significant increase in discussions around this subject.

As of 2022, France Televisions Publicité was offering more addressable TV inventory than BVOD, and between H1 2021 and H1 2022 the French addressable customer base grew by 54% to 6.3 million households, the paper reports. Free’s entry into addressable TV could potentially add 6.9 million more subscribers to the audience pot.

The white paper is 71 pages long, so this summary barely touches the surface. If you want to get the deep-dive, you can download the English language version here. It includes full interviews with all the contributors, in addition to analysis of all the research. The paper argues that ‘addressable TV is strengthening the convergence between TV and digital advertising. The brand-safe environment and high completion rates with digital metrics are reviving the TV medium. TV is positioning itself as a valuable complement to video strategies.”