Addressable TV in Europe: where do we stand one decade after AdSmart?

At the end of 2022, addressable TV advertising on HbbTV or on set-top boxes had been launched in just 17 countries across Europe. It came with some serious restrictions in a handful of these countries, limiting addressability to catch-up services only. Over a decade after the launch of Sky AdSmart in the UK, more than 5 years after the first addressable TV campaigns aired in Belgium, and just 2 years after the long-awaited launch of segmented TV in France, it's time for a market review across the region. The UK is by far leading the addressable TV industry: with its well-established solution AdSmart, it secures more than half of the sector's revenues across the continent. AdSmart is proven to be a rolling success, and despite limited growth over the last few years as the product is already quite mature, it paved the way for what addressable TV stands for and should look like. It has been waved as the ultimate blueprint for every broadcaster and distributor that followed suit afterward. But not every actor could replicate the experience with such a favorable outcome, mostly because each TV and advertising market across Europe has its own specificities to account for that don't always drive incentives to invest in addressability on the main screen. A decade after AdSmart’s launch, what’s up outside of the UK? The structure of the TV distribution market in each country defines if and how addressable TV can be deployed. In Germany, the second biggest addressable advertising market in Europe, local advocates have been pushing for addressable advertising campaigns to be rolled out on HbbTV standards very early on. The two main commercial broadcasters' ad sales houses, SevenOne Media and RTL Ad Alliance, have launched commercial offers with addressable capabilities on this technology as early as 2016. By now, more than half of the country's TV households are equipped with connected HbbTV devices that can be addressed based on advertisers' audience target needs. With the progressive deployment of TV sets equipped with the latest HbbTV standards, addressable campaigns are slowly moving from legacy L-shaped banners to seamless dynamic ad insertion (DAI) in the linear content stream, providing publishers with the opportunity to sell premium video ad inventories in an addressable ecosystem on the big screen. HbbTV addressability also has bright days ahead in two other key markets of Western Europe: Italy and Spain. In the latter, AtresMedia Publicidad was the first ad sales house to launch HbbTV addressable campaigns back in 2019, and was followed by PubliEspana at the end of 2020. Local publishers have decided to capitalize on this opportunity rather early on, and rightly so: Spain is the 5th biggest TV advertising market in Europe, and...