ITV has announced the launch of addressable advertising across ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and ITVBe in 1.3 million YouView homes in the United Kingdom. It follows a successful beta trial of ad-replacement technology over the last 12 months, during which more than 30 million addressable ads were deployed, powered by insights from ITV’s registered user data.
ITV says that this is the first step in rolling out addressable targeting in live linear viewing. It complements the over 12 billion addressable ad opportunities already delivered by ITVX, extending the scale and reach of sophisticated addressable targeting available to advertisers.
The broadcaster has also upgraded its Automated Contextual Targeting tool, through a partnership with search intelligence platform Captify.
ITV will use It will use natural language processing and machine learning models to extract precise meaning from subtitle data to identify certain types of moments, themes and even emotions during ITV programmes for advertiser targeting.
ITV is launching live linear addressability with Omnicom this month and campaigns will be planned and managed exclusively via the self-service system that ITV has developed, known as Planet V.
Ben Allen, the director of commercial strategy and trading at ITV, said: “Linear addressable has been a key objective as we evolve our commercial proposition and our offering to advertisers. It materially enhances our addressable footprint and is an important milestone towards our target of enabling addressability across our entire output.”
Adam Turner of Omnicom Media Group said: “We’re delighted to be partnering with ITV on this progressive initiative. Addressable TV, at the scale ITV is now offering, is enabling us to plan more sophisticated mass reach targeting strategies, enabling our clients to have more relevant and efficient customer engagement. This is a game changing step forwards for the TV industry.”
ITV says that it can reach 1.3 million YouView homes, which presumably includes BT Vision and TalkTalk TV customers, as YouView has less than a 1% share of the market.
There is also no mention of offering addressable advertising on the main commercial channel, ITV1, which delivers over 90% of all commercial programmes in the United Kingdom with over 3 million viewers and 95% of those with over 5 million viewers.
So, with 27 million television homes in the United Kingdom, there is still has some way to go before ITV can offer comprehensive addressable coverage.