Dish Network - Power of Audience Targeting for TV

On Monday, Dish debuted their programmatic supply-side platform technology powered by IPONWEB. This opportunity is still in beta and they only have a few initial demand side platform partners participating in the beta (TubeMogul, Rocket Fuel and DataXu); however, they plan to open up to more demand side platform  partners and trading desks in the near future. How is this announcement shaking things up in the programmatic TV realm?

Well… this is allowing TV buying to adopt similar programmatic optimization levers and granular audience targeting. TV buying is becoming more efficient and a channel that can now be turned on and off without months of planning and execution which would allow for advertisers to expand their current audience reach as well as discover new audience targets. We also foresee advertisers that have never done TV advertising before expanding their media buys to programmatic TV due to gained efficiencies when compared to standard TV buy.

The area that Dish Network will have the highest impact is on addressable TV inventory availability. This is actually a big step forward for the opportunity of critical mass in Programmatic TV.  Due to the limited amount of inventory available to pay TV providers, only a small portion of linear TV is addressable. Addressable TV allows advertisers to use data from cable/satellite companies (age, gender, zip code, etc.) combined with data from third parties (Datalogix, Experian, etc.) and target a different ad to each household. Therefore, advertisers will be able to build multiple audience segments and truly reach the audience that fits within their parameters at the household level.

This opportunity is still in beta and it may take some time to work out the kinks before becoming a true scalable opportunity for addressable TV. This will certainly open the doors to start conversation with other satellite and cable providers which would make this offer even more powerful considering that Dish Network has 8MM HH but Direct TV (11MM HH) and Comcast (22MM HH) still have access to the highest number of households.