Is personalised TV advertising the key in the fight against the GAFAs? With this question in mind, this week’s egtabite dives into the world of addressable TV advertising and a recent research project by SBS Belgium, Vlerick Business School and Telenet.

As new technological solutions are shaping the future of TV marketing, researchers examine how personalised TV advertising works, its impact on the local ecosystem and which players benefit from it. The joint research results were published in the whitepaper ‘Addressable Ads are shaping the future of TV marketing’.

The Belgian media landscape

Belgium – and especially Flanders – has a unique media landscape, characterised by a strong local content offering. However, local media companies find it increasingly difficult to compete against international tech giants such as Google and Facebook.

To assure the production of quality content, media companies are mostly dependent on advertising revenues. As advertising budgets shift to players beyond local TV, the ecosystem is losing value. Through this research, SBS Belgium, Vlerick Business School and Telenet map the local TV advertising landscape, expose the dangers and opportunities, and develop solutions based on the use of data in TV advertising.

This whitepaper provides an overview of addressable TV advertising and describes how personalised advertising technology influences this value chain. It lays out the challenges and the new value proposition as well as the benefits for the different stakeholders.

“Addressable advertising benefits all stakeholders in the ecosystem. For the viewer, the advertising experience becomes more personalised, more varied, and more local, leading to a better consumer experience with a stronger focus on content,”

says Leen De Schaepdrijver, PHD Researcher at Vlerick Business School, who authored the study.

The advantages

The paper underlines the myriad benefits that addressable advertising has to offer to the advertising within the sphere of TV advertising.

Consumers will have a more varied ad offering (due to more local players), a lower ad burden, and an overall better TV experience because of the ads’ increased relevance.

Advertisers can improve their marketing story by adapting to audiences and personalising the ad creatives, leading to less switching between channels. They can improve measurement and optimise ROI. Addressable advertising also makes it possible for smaller advertisers to promote their brands on TV.

Broadcasters and distributors alike benefit from gaining new-to-TV customers, and respectively will have less channel switching and more high-quality content by shifting back advertising budgets to TV.

The advent of addressable advertising changes media agencies’ role – they will shift to a supporting and advising role, providing campaign planning and bundling, processing and enriching data for companies while benefitting from improved measurement capabilities.

Competing against the tech giants

The advance of digital media threatens the comfortable position in which TV advertising has found itself over the past decades. Digital companies were the first to jump on the cart of the technological revolution and are now making fair use of the power of data. Digitisation has thoroughly shaken up the entire TV industry, which means that TV advertising must reinvent itself.

Until recently, personalised messages on TV were not possible in Belgium, but luckily addressable TV advertising changed that. Thanks to this technological advance, local media companies can compete against the dominant digital giants, combining TV’s advantages with digital advertising. This creates many opportunities for both the consumer and the advertiser, benefitting all players at local level.

Next steps

The whitepaper is just the first step in the long-term collaboration between SBS, Vlerick and Telenet. After the research paper launch, several questions and topics will be tackled in subsequent research; Firstly, what factors impact consumers’ willingness to share their data? Secondly, the study will focus on how the TV advertising loop can be closed and how other data sources can be linked to improving measurement capabilities and finally: how can other date sources be linked to enhance targeting capabilities? As always – egta will keep its members apprised of these fascinating insights.

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