Written By Go Addressable

With the explosion of CTV and OTT inventory, marketer concern about digital ads showing up adjacent to unsuitable content has a new focus: content that makes it to the TV screen. Traditionally TV advertising was deemed brand safe as long as the inventory was on shows that suited the brand and reach goals of the advertiser.

Despite progress in fighting fraud and on safety issues on both the buy and sell sides, the industry is still searching for effective tools that allow advertisers to reach audiences in brand safe, premium environments. Ultimately, there are high stakes involved: a bad user experience such as ad placement within dubious content or contacting a consumer when they’ve opted-out can negatively impact brand sentiment. It’s imperative that advertisers maximize the use of the media and platforms that can deliver and better guarantee brand safety.

Addressable TV ¹ advertising, as defined by Go Addressable, offers a higher level of brand safety thanks to the inventory pool of premium TV content across screens and solutions described below. Additionally, recent tech advancements made it easier than ever to activate on both traditional and streaming / connected TV. Go Addressable believes advertisers should prioritize authenticated inventory and technology, like addressable TV, that ensures their ads reach the intended audiences in an environment that aligns with their brand.

Let’s take a deep dive into ways addressable TV is providing brand safety for advertisers.

1. Addressable TV Complies with Content Adjacency Requirements:
While brand safety isn’t only about content adjacency, context is essential as different brands have unique interpretations of what is considered “safe.” Addressable TV allows advertisers and agencies to determine if the ad placement complies with their policies for appropriate content.

2. Addressable TV Offers Full Transparency in Reporting and Measurement:
Fraud continues to be exposed as a serious issue² in the non-addressable³ OTT and CTV inventory. Many advertisers are seeking more transparency from their media partners to see exactly where their ads are running in addition to understanding how their ads performed. In the pre-campaign planning stage, addressable TV employs subscriber authentication using insights from first-party data. This ensures accurate household matching, cuts down on bot traffic and increases the efficacy of inventory for brands. Upon campaign execution and completion, addressable TV offers post-campaign reporting transparency, which shows exactly where ads have run, and highlights where a client’s target audience was exposed across a portfolio of premium video inventory. These ad exposure logs can be matched to attribution events (a purchase, a website, in-store visit, etc.) reliably based on the authenticated household identity. All of this provides highly accurate and transparent performance metrics for a campaign.

3. Addressable TV Respects the Viewer Experience:
Amidst growing concerns of poor experience across TV viewership, buyers and sellers have been focused on how best to ensure that their ads are relevant and non-intrusive. Addressable TV considers and respects the voice of the consumer. For instance, the authentication services that addressable impressions are delivered by (e.g., MVPDs, vMVPDs, D2C services, etc.) capture consumers’ choices as part of their registration process. They can also update their choices or preferences when they want and how they want. This also means that consumers’ decisions, choices, and privacy preferences are cared for and respected during the audience activation process of every campaign.

4. Addressable TV Upholds Consumer Commitments Around Sensitive Audience Data:
Another benefit of addressable TV regarding brand safety is that providers do thorough audits of the audience attributes in advertising segments. This audit is done to ensure that audience segments are not used inappropriately in order to safeguard the reputation of the provider and their direct relationship with the consumer.

The concept of brand safety has become vastly more complex, going well beyond viewability and content adjacency. Throughout the digital landscape including CTV, there is still concern from advertisers about the quality and control of inventory they are buying. So, in a time when reaching audiences in a premium and brand safe environment is more important than ever, advertisers need to understand which channels can really ensure brand safety. Addressable TV offers the industry a solution ensuring advertisers have brand safety built in, using audience-targeted capabilities to deliver relevant messages to receptive consumers at the household level on the big screen across linear and connected TV.

¹ Go Addressable defines Addressable TV as: “The ability to serve targeted ads to specific households based on deterministic identifiers, allowing brands to define and serve their message to the desired audience, wherever and whenever they’re watching content on TV/CTV/STB. Those targeted households can be matched to 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data sets or modeled by behavioral, demographic and/or geographic factors from 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data sets.”

² Ad Exchanger: Adalytics Exposes An Alleged $10.5 Billion Black Hole In The Google Search Partners Program, November 2023

³ Go Addressable defines non-addressable as: “Inventory that does not have the ability for advertisers to serve targeted ads to specific households or users based on deterministic identifiers.”

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