Addressable TV is coming to Adobe, the company announced on July 31, following a partnership with LiveRamp that will integrate the onboarding giant’s IdentityLink for TV solution with Adobe’s advertising cloud.
“By signing this agreement with LiveRamp, Adobe now has the ability to sell our addressable TV solutions, and that’s a totally new revenue stream for them,” said Allison Metcalfe, general manager of TV at LiveRamp.
For Adobe, this is the latest in a series of enhancements whose logical endpoint was addressable TV. In November 2016, Adobe acquired TubeMogul, a leader in video advertising at the time, which enabled brands and agencies to buy video advertising on desktops, mobile, streaming devices, and TVs.
“Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul will create the first end-to-end independent advertising and data management solution that spans TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for the world’s biggest brands,” the press release announcing the acquisition stated.
As complex and fragmented as it has been for brands, this latest partnership between Adobe and LiveRamp is a flex-of-the-muscles for the ad landscape across TV. It’s a commitment to delivering highly-coveted, people-based marketing solutions. The majority of Americans (74 percent) still report they’re viewing TV ads that aren’t relevant to them, in large part because most TV buys are still executed manually, with targeting and measurement limited to age, gender, frequency and reach.
How will it work?
The key component of LiveRamp’s IdentityLink solution for TV is that it enables campaigns to zero in beyond basic metrics. It is, what LiveRamp itself calls, “the foundation of omnichannel marketing.” Advertisers can now leverage advanced datasets, as well as household-level targeting, using “CRM and other trusted audience data on TV in live, linear, and addressable environments.” For example, two neighboring households can be served different ads, based on their habits and viewing history.
“What happens on the Adobe side, is a customer is going to say, ‘OK, let’s set up this addressable TV campaign. I want to target yogurt-loving moms that are in the market for a minivan,'” Metcalfe explained. It often will work like this: Adobe sends LiveRamp first-party data with initial segmented parameters, and LiveRamp then crosschecks the data with IdentityLink’s more detailed subscriber files. The resulting overlap between those two information sources is the addressable TV audience.
“The TV landscape is at a watershed moment, created by the convergence of digital, and the cord-cutter — or cord-never — generation,” said Todd Gordon, director of programmatic TV at Adobe. “To stay relevant as the industry evolves, digital and TV must work together to create seamlessly-executed omnichannel marketing. We are excited to work with LiveRamp to bring omnichannel, people-based marketing to our customers, so they can deliver personalized marketing experiences that inform and inspire consumers.”
Metcalfe said there are already pilot campaigns underway, with plans to further integrate IdentityLink for TV down the road.
“It’s not limited to Audience Manager … it could be a client that’s only using [Adobe’s] analytics tools,” she said. “In the coming weeks, we’re going to be working closely with Adobe leadership to activate and train their field sales team, because this is a capability that any department of Adobe can sell to any Adobe customer regardless of the technology that customer uses.”
