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Reaching the Light TV Viewer

How multiscreen addressable TV advertising makes national campaigns better

By Melanie Hamilton    September 24, 2024     4-minute read

In the early days of addressable TV advertising, it was best known as a tactic for niche advertisers to reach precise audiences. If national TV delivered too much waste against a narrow target, addressable TV advertising offered a new solution. But for those advertisers with mass-appeal products — think toothpaste brands whose "target" was defined as anyone with teeth — dedicating an investment to addressable advertising simply didn't make a lot of sense. Mass advertisers, like consumer packaged goods manufacturers, could still rely on traditional television to reach their audience.

A lot has changed since addressable's inception. While consumer viewing has continued to grow more fragmented, addressable advertising has increased in scale and matured its technological capabilities to become a must-have strategy for broadly targeted and narrowly targeted brands alike.

Addressable is now key to solving one of national advertisers' biggest challenges: the battle for incremental reach.

Reaching Incremental Audiences

While addressable advertising is best known for its ability to reach an advertiser's specific audience (say, in-market car buyers), addressable is also a tool for mass reach. By focusing on light TV audiences (i.e., households that spend less than an hour a day watching traditional TV) with addressable advertising, advertisers can fill in the holes in their campaigns and ensure they are reaching their entire audience.

Used as a complementary tactic to traditional TV, multiscreen addressable advertising augments reach by focusing on households that have not been exposed to an ad's campaign on TV. In fact, the February 2024 study "Guidelines for Planning & Buying Addressable TV Advertising," by addressable TV trade organization Go Addressable and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) found that addressable advertising can deliver nearly 40 percent reach regardless of whether a brand has a high or low target audience penetration. So, whether a brand has huge Super Bowl-sized spend or is working with a leaner budget, has mass appeal products or multiple audience targets that require custom creatives, all can leverage addressable advertising to maximize exposure.

But addressable only matters if advertisers are reaching the right households.

Finding the Right Households

One key to driving incremental reach hinges on understanding which households are being reached — and which are not. Another key is the ability to deliver a message to these households. Both are in the wheelhouse of the multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) who sell addressable advertising.

MVPD insights rely on deterministic data from tens of millions of households, authenticated through a customer relationship between the household and the MVPD. This deterministic dataset is the foundation for MVPDs' addressable offerings. It leads to higher match rates and, ultimately, greater audience reach for advertisers, whatever the target. In fact, the Go Addressable/CIMM study found that the match rate for household addressable through an MVPD was 95 percent, compared to 60 percent for IP address matches, which are often used by non-MVPD connected TV sellers.

How Does It Work?

Using their authenticated data, MVPDs can develop audience insights. And while these insights can tell an advertiser many things, for those focused on driving incremental reach the most important information is which households are heavy versus light viewers and which are more or less likely to have seen the ad.

Using this data, MVPDs can build audience segments comprised of light or medium and light viewers. Then they can run an addressable TV campaign targeted to those audience segments to complement a traditional linear TV ad buy. The addressable campaign can be optimized to reach households who are less likely to have been exposed to the traditional TV ads, whether they are watching traditional TV, live streaming, or video on demand.

Addressable campaigns are good at this: Comcast internal analysis of ad exposure data from addressable and data-driven TV campaigns collected between November 2022 and March 2023 shows that addressable campaigns are 46 percent more likely to reach light and no-TV households than traditional TV alone. A similar internal study of data collected between September 2023 and March 2024 found that one in three target households would not have been reached at all without addressable advertising.

And that's not all. When campaign strategies require further customization, MVPDs can apply frequency caps that limit or cut off ads to those households over an agreed upon exposure level. Thus, addressable TV serves as a remedy for the age-old problem of delivering too much frequency to some households while missing out on other hard-to-reach ones.

But Wait, There's More

The benefits of addressable advertising campaigns aren't limited to their ability to reach incremental audiences. These campaigns also deliver on MVPDs' premium, brand-safe environments instead of being pushed into other digital channels, which may not adhere to the same quality standards.

Studies have found that ads shown in premium content can lead to better brand results. In Comcast Advertising's 2023 report "What Is Premium Video?" content delivered within premium content was found to have a 58 percent higher unaided recall than user-generated content.

Addressable also allows for better measurement than traditional TV alone. As such, advertisers can determine accurate campaign performance and measurement across screens, allowing national advertisers to optimize future traditional TV campaigns through a test-and-iterate approach. For the many national advertisers who struggle to efficiently reach their full audience and prove real ROI, this is a win-win.

So, whether selling toothpaste to a mass audience or luxury cars to a lucky few, addressable advertising can help national advertisers achieve their goals. Used as a complement to traditional TV, addressable TV advertising empowers national advertisers to more strategically and efficiently reach their audiences. It should be on every national brand's media plan.

Comcast Advertising is a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.