When you sit down at the end of the day to catch a little mindless entertainment, do you ever find yourself confused and overwhelmed by the cacophony of different television channels, digital stations, streaming platforms, and other options for accessing content? If so, you are not alone—but we’re not talking about your peers. For advertisers, the diversity and fragmentation of broadcast options has created a vast challenge, hindering their efforts to communicate effectively and optimally with their target audiences. In response, a new consortium called Go Addressable aims to cut through the confusion and help advertisers reach relevant viewers, regardless of the channel or platform they have chosen to access entertaining content for themselves. The innovative new venture includes eight media companies, including Comcast, Charter Communications Inc., Altice USA Inc., Dish Media, and the smart TV manufacturer Vizio Inc. Their goal is to address the problems that arise with media fragmentation, such as the needs for advertising buyers to develop marketing plans for each platform individually, making integrated efforts more difficult, or to pay professional aggregators to design their strategies, which is expensive. Whether Go Addressable can really overcome those challenges is uncertain though. Its announced aims mostly suggest a sort of advocacy effort, such as discussing how to update existing systems or defining the terms that advertisers should use to describe their processes, during monthly meetings. Over the long term, such efforts might be beneficial for the industry overall. But can they really help advertisers design their campaigns today—or help us decide what to watch tonight?

Source: Alexandra Bruell, “TV Operators Team Up to Simplify Fragmented Ad Market,” The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2021