Addressable TV in Europe: is the flame already fading off?

In our last publication on the matter, we went through the status of addressable TV offers in each of European top 5 biggest advertising markets. To follow up on this and complete our overview of the segment, we will now expand our analysis to Northern, Central and Southern European markets. If the choice of deploying addressability on either HbbTV or STB in Western Europe usually depends on existing market structures and mostly revolves around technical capabilities, other challenges arise in countries where ad markets offer more limited perspectives. Coming across technical and commercial reality checks: when addressable TV faces discouraging limitations In smaller European markets, addressability is a limited promise. The efforts and costs induced by linear dynamic ad insertion along with legal barriers have been deterrents to launching the full spectrum of addressable TV capabilities in several markets. In the Nordics, the rather small size of ad markets and the very limited interest that operators have in this segment led to very limited projects so far. Telia in Sweden was the most active in this field and launched addressable campaigns on its VOD service TV4 Play on ComHem’s platform, while also opening addressable capabilities to partnering broadcasters Discovery and NENT on its own pay TV platform. But generally, broadcasters focus their efforts on improving targeting capabilities directly on their streaming platforms, like TV2 Play in Denmark. In Switzerland, a catch-up-only iteration of addressable TV was launched last year in a quite limited version. Historical telcos like Swisscom and UPC Sunrise but also younger players like Zattoo came together to build a common framework for the whole country that enables addressable campaigns on catch-up services with geolocalization targeting mostly. In Portugal, Playce was launched in 2020 bringing together NOS, MEO and Vodafone to offer addressable campaigns on their catch-up services. They offer targeted ad campaigns across over 120 channels and we estimate that they currently reach around 2.8 million households. There has been no sign that dynamic ad insertion will be launched later on in the market. Key markets are still missing out on addressable TV opportunities Several key markets still miss the mark, notably the Netherlands. The development of its addressable TV capabilities suffered a huge blow when KPN announced its retractation from the cooperation that was started with Talpa, RTL and VodafoneZiggo back in February 2021. We expect the latter to launch an offer soon nevertheless to capitalize on its footprint of 3.2 million digital TV subscribers. Group owner Liberty Global also already benefits from a strong expertise in this field since the launch of Telenet’s dedicated offer back in 2017 and after Virgin Media started collaborating with Sky AdSmart in 2019. As we look at the opportunities...