• Cadent Enhances Addressable TV Solution to Enable Cross-Screen Advertising

    Video ad tech provider Cadent announced this morning enhancements to its core addressable linear TV solution to enable ad delivery across OTT, network DVR and VOD as well. The entire system connects to multiple third-party ad servers through open standards so that pay-TV operators can fulfill on advertisers’ desires to plan, deliver and measure video campaigns holistically across screens.

    In a briefing, Cadent’s CTO and COO, Stephanie Mitchko-Beale told me that a big differentiator for Cadent’s solution is that all ad decisioning is done in the cloud, which reduces the load that set-top boxes must carry and allows operators to dynamically insert ads in appropriate places. Operators can aggregate audiences across the different ways viewers consumer content, in turn giving advertisers a total view of usage.

    Operators can also use a new operational dashboard to asses various metrics. Cadent also announced the granting of a new patent, the company’s eighth, for how its system adapts to operators’ legacy infrastructures.

    Addressable TV advertising, whereby ads are targeted using relevant data to viewers when they’re consuming via set-top boxes, is a major growth area. Just last week, eMarketer forecast that U.S. addressable TV ad spending will jump 66% in 2017 to $1.26 billion and nearly triple to over $3 billion by 2019. Still addressable TV ads will represent a minor (1.7%) portion of overall TV ad spending in 2017, though growing to 4% in 2019.

    Even as advertisers embrace data-enabled TV ads through addressable, an overhanging issue is that they’re a distinct category, neither a true form of digital video advertising (online/mobile/CTV/etc.) nor conventional linear TV. This is a key reason why Caden’t announcement is critical - it helps blend the buying, delivering and measuring of addressable TV ads with other video viewing to support advertisers’ desire for simplification.

    Cadent said that it is engaged with two tier 1 pay-TV operators who are testing the new unified solution.