The Changing Face of Television Advertising

Watching TV used to be a common practice; Thursday evenings were reserved for watching your favorite weekly drama, and who can forget buckling in for an hour of intense reality gameshows like Survivor on Monday nights?

The television game has changed drastically over the last few years. With a smart phone in every pocket and access to the internet almost anywhere, keeping up-to-date with who’s heart was broken on The Bachelor, or which super car was driven on Top Gear no longer depends on getting to your TV in time.

Thanks to technologies like PVR and On Demand programs, viewers are still loyally tuning into their favorite programs except now they can watch what they want, when they want. For advertisers, this means there are even more ways to reach consumers and advertising on TV can still allow advertisers to be there for that part of the customer’s journey.

We know that companies like Expedia, Netflix, and Facebook (and Strathcom) have developed ways to personalize user experiences. My Netflix looks different than your Netflix because of their algorithm. Expedia will show me different hotels than it will show you based on what each of us viewed on their site. Strathcom can personalize the way your website appears based on the location and/or the pages clicked by the user. So how can advertisers adopt this strategy when promoting their brand through TV? Google has answered this question with Addressable Advertising.

Advertisers can show different ads to different households while they are watching the same program. This form of advertising lets the advertiser scale down to show the most relevant and interesting content to the viewer. In other words, you can share your message with only those that are most likely to be interested in your ad.

With any new technology, there are going to be challenges. There were some concerns about the ability to achieve accurate measurement and implementation with Addressable Advertising. However, with the launch of DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion, Google has seen a huge advancement in how to achieve reliability in measurement for this new form of advertising!

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