Cadent has launched what it says is the first national platform for addressable TV advertising.
The aptly named Advanced TV Platform is designed to be a planning and reporting tool for major advertisers looking to buy addressable TV inventory. The interface is created from multiple first-, second-, and/or third-party data sources, integrated into a single platform so buyers can easily create the custom audience segments they wish to target.
With its supply partners, Cadent claims to reach about 70 million US households. Cadent Chief of Product Eoin Townsend said the company created 210 inventory profiles on the platform.
Cadent wants to create a system to streamline the process of addressable TV buying. Building that pipeline on the back-end isn’t easy.
“In TV, there isn’t a common language everyone speaks,” Cadent CMO Paul Alfieri told AdExchanger. “[Connecting systems] from Dish Network, Comcast, Cox, Charter and others requires a lot of technology on the back-end to enable you to see something seamless on the front-end.”
Cadent collects anonymized set top box data from the its TV operating partners and puts that into its system. Advertisers can also upload their own data into Cadent’s platform. Cadent also tried to create a consistent definition of an impression across the TV operators to simplify the planning process for buyers.
Alfieri declined to name specific agencies and customers using the platform.
Cadent has offered addressable TV solutions in the past, but the Advanced TV platform is the first time the company has released a single, unified platform for national advertisers designed to plan and manage addressable TV buys.
Alfieri hopes the tool will allow advertisers to be more judicious about where they allocate their TV spend, especially their national budgets. Roughly 15-17% of advertisers in the US say they currently include addressable TV buys in their media plans, according to a recent report from Forrester and the Association of National Advertisers.
About 20-30% of those same 126 advertisers say they will experiment with addressable TV buying this year.
