

“There is a return to premium media from an advertiser perspective, an appreciation and a willingness to pay actually a premium price,” says Sandro Catanzaro, Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer of dataxu.

It’s not uncommon to see cost-per-thousand impressions ranging from $10 to $60. “And those are really healthy prices for quality programming,” Catanzaro says in this interview with Beet.TV.

“This is pretty much in contrast with the trends that used to happen like probably ten years ago when it was a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and not necessarily with the quality.”

The amount of TV inventory that can be targeted is growing exponentially. “In the last month, we have seen four-point-seven billion impressions on a TV set” measuring at least 40 inches. “This has been growing very, very significantly in the last three months.”

The last three years have seen dataxu receive an infusion of some $10 million from Sky Media, helping to fuel the company’s investment in software that facilitates people-centric messaging by connecting the dots of device ownership. If the target is potential luxury car buyers, “I can understand all the other devices they own and I can show them ads and target ads on all these other devices,” says Catanzaro.

On the analytics side, exposure can be linked to conversion, for example being exposed to an ad on connected-TV and then logging into a computer and taking an action prompted by the ad.

“So we can create a closed loop from that computer to the exposure on the TV and create attribution in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

Eroding linear TV ratings have made content owners “much more open to have conversations about technology,” Catanzaro says.

One end result for consumers from better targeting will be a reduction in ad loads in programming over the next several years, he adds.

“With the ability to target advanced audiences and only show ads to those individuals you as an advertiser care about, they’re going to pay a premium price but you don’t need to show that many ads to create the same revenue from the media seller side.”

Today’s ad load of 12 to 13 minutes per hour could “drop to probably half, maybe a quarter. While at the same time the cost per unit will rise and probably create incremental revenue for the media seller.”
