It’s an experience we’ve all had. You search a phrase online and shortly thereafter an ad pops up for a product or service on your social media relative to your search. Coincidence? No. This is what’s known as addressable advertising — personalised ads that are tailored to individuals and households based on their lifestyles and interests. Addressable advertising (also referred to as data-driven advertising) is one of the greatest growth opportunities we’re seeing within the premium digital advertising landscape right now and with it, advertisers can move beyond large-scale traditional TV ads and focus on ads that are relevant to their viewers.

In Asia, there’s a real opportunity for addressable advertising to take off. The demand for OTT services is on the rise, especially in countries like Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines where there’s a strong uptake in mobile phone usage. According to a recently published report from the Asia Pacific OTT TV and Video Forecasts, the revenue generated from TV episodes and movies is expected to hit a staggering $48 billion by 2024.

With advertising being such a lucrative revenue stream for OTT video, it’s important that your ads are reaching the right eyeballs. You want to make sure the money you spend is going to communicate directly with people who are interested in your product. According to eMarketer, the money spent on addressable TV advertising is expected to reach $3.37 billion in 2020.

This makes sense to us because data-driven advertising makes it possible for advertisers to improve their connection with their desired audiences. It considers all of the data you have about your customer’s behavior and interests and applies it for a more meaningful interaction.

The goal, obviously, is to help increase revenue and preserve the premium nature of the content. But let’s not be foolish; addressable advertising is not an overnight revenue win. We think there’s still too much focus on speed versus effectiveness, especially in Asia, when it comes to driving revenue. From our perspective, we want to set our customers up for long-term success. This means having the right infrastructure in place, sourcing a reliable technology partner and consistent data. If you’re not focused on putting structures and platforms in place to grow your business, you won’t see ongoing growth.

Owing to this, server server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is a popular technology that’s being used to monetize online video. With SSAI, the video advertising creative is transcoded to match the quality of the content being consumed. SSAI normalises advertising content to align with the adaptive bitrate streaming profiles of the content being consumed. This results in matching picture quality as well as audio levels, therefore preventing any volume variations, etc. But many of the offerings on the market right now deliver a less than ideal viewing experience, with disruptive transitions and buffering causing some of the main issues. And if you’re going to invest the time and money in advertising, you certainly don’t want your ads blocked.

Since we’re not in the business of offering our customers a quick fix, we’ve engineered our AdEase SSAI technology to deliver the long-term growth that we’ve highlighted here. AdEase enables addressable personalised advertising across individual and household connected devices. It delivers a continuous video stream that makes it near impossible for ads to be blocked.

These benefits not only make the most of revenue, they also deliver a targeted and seamless advertising experience to viewers, with zero buffering.  With the OTT market being quite fragmented (in terms of devices and platforms), doing things on the server side means you have greater access to data that will help enrich the ad targeting process.

We think it’s this type of tailored ad delivery that really defines the art of making money from advertising. Though the concept of advertising isn’t new, the very definition of television has evolved considerably since its inception and if you want to generate longstanding growth, you have to keep innovating. Advertising funding is very much an evolving and changing space with new challenges and opportunities arising all the time, which means that you need to adapt your model so that it plays a key role in your future revenue. It’s these kinds of new and different methods of advertising that will keep you relevant now and into the future. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how SSAI technology plays out in Asia.