While local TV has its appeal for campaign marketers buying specific programs like local news, the medium still doesn’t have the same targeting capabilities as digital when it comes to programmatic.
That’s partly because of limited inventory, according to Lauren Fisher, a programmatic analyst at eMarketer, which recently crunched survey data from Strata Marketing. It’s appeal is also limited because programmatic TV ad buying is still new. In fact, the definition of programmatic ranges from audience targeting using data or simply automated buying.
Strata’s study found that nationally two-thirds of ad agency professionals said they’ll not spend any programmatic ad dollars on local TV. Meanwhile, 18 percent of respondents would allocate 10-20 percent of their programmatic spend to local TV, 3 percent said they’d budget 20-40 percent and 11 percent said they’d budget 40-60 percent. Only 1 percent of respondents said they’d put more than 60 percent of their programmatic spend into local TV.
Mobile programmatic advertising has more appeal because marketers want a cross-device approach, said Fisher.
“Advertisers are realizing more and more that it’s not about hitting someone on a TV and laptop in isolation,” Fisher said. “It’s really a coordinated effort.”
That approach could be more challenging in the future. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into cross-device tracking. And the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry trade group, recently published guidelines that state advertisers must provide notice of the practice.