Groundhog Decade: Still Waiting for Addressable TV to Work

The same panels, the same promises, and somehow still five contracts for one campaign.

Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
May 20, 2025

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Welcome to the warm, slightly malfunctioning embrace of addressable TV — that one friend who keeps promising they’ll finally get their act together, only to show up late, confused, and clutching three different identity graphs.

The Promise, the Pain, and the Pixels: Welcome to Addressable Groundhog Day

Let’s rewind the tape.

📼 A Brief, Punchy History of Addressable TV

From Set-Top Boxes to CTV Dashboards (and Everything in Between)

Addressable TV began its awkward adolescence in the early 2010s, when companies like Cablevision, DirecTV, and DISH had the bright idea: Hey, what if we didn’t show the same toilet paper commercial to every single household in Queens?

Enter the set-top box — the original smart device, minus the “smart.” It gave advertisers the novel ability to serve different ads to different households watching the same linear show, provided the show aired somewhere between "Wheel of Fortune" and "CSI: Miami."

This was 2012. Obama was in the White House. The phrase “cord-cutter” still got you weird looks. But the dream was planted: TV could become digital — targeted, accountable, maybe even measurable. Just like those pesky Facebook ads following you around like a digital mosquito.

Fast forward: Streaming explodes. Smart TVs infiltrate living rooms like Alexa bugs. CTV becomes the cool kid with its dashboard full of apps and promises of data-driven reach. Suddenly, “addressable” is everywhere — and nowhere at the same time.

📡 The Dream That Broke Itself in Public

Addressable TV was supposed to be the great unifier.
One audience. One buy. One gloriously efficient cross-platform campaign.

Instead, we got a high-gloss PowerPoint fantasy — and a deeply broken backstage.

Let’s break it down:

Fragmentation: Comcast, DirecTV, DISH, Verizon — all doing their own addressable thing like four rival house DJs refusing to share a turntable. Standards? LOL. Measurement? Bring your own.
Walled Gardens: Samsung, LG, and Vizio — the holy trinity of smart TV dominance — decided that opening up to industry-wide standards was for peasants. They built empires, not ecosystems.
Technical Gaps: Remember Project OAR? Great idea. Except it only worked on newer Vizio TVs — a sliver of the market. Meanwhile, everyone else shrugged and went back to YouTube.
Incentive Misalignment: Distributors and content providers see each other not as partners, but as competitive frenemies in a 24/7 turf war. Why collaborate when you can hoard?

Result? Addressable TV today is a Frankenstein’s monster: slick in theory, but stitched together with duct tape and mutual distrust.

🧠 What Buyers Think They’re Getting vs. What They Actually Get

Let’s play fantasy vs. reality:

Buyers think they’re buying:

One-to-one targeting (like digital!).
Seamless cross-platform execution.
Beautiful unduplicated reach.
Real measurement.
And hey, maybe even some ROI.

What they’re actually buying:

Household-level targeting with a hint of shrug.
The same ad being served to the same person across five platforms with no frequency cap.
Measurement that’s slightly better than guessing — but still worse than email open rates.
And, of course, five contracts for one campaign.

It's like ordering filet mignon and getting five samples of beef jerky — nicely labeled, still chewy.

💼 The Civil War Inside Agencies:

TV Investment Groups vs. Programmatic Pirates

While the adtech world preaches convergence, agencies are living a soap opera called “Separate Budgets and Mutual Resentment.”

TV Investment Teams: Legacy buyers who speak fluent GRP, measure success in upfront commitments, and treat Nielsen ratings like gospel.
Programmatic Pirates: Keyboard cowboys bidding on CTV inventory in real time, optimizing with machine learning and an unhealthy dependency on acronyms.

These two don’t just buy differently — they think differently. One dreams of reach. The other dreams of ROAS. The only thing they share is a Slack channel and mutual disdain.

This split leads to:

Duplicated efforts
Contradictory goals
Creative misalignment
And enough chaos to make media buyers cry into their dashboards

📈 Why 2025 Feels Like a Tipping Point

(But We Don’t Know What We’re Tipping Toward)

Here’s the thing: CTV is booming. Nearly 90 million U.S. households are watching something on a connected device. And addressable ad spend? It's climbing like a crypto chart in a bull market.

But no one agrees on what’s next.

Are we heading toward real convergence?
Or a dominant walled garden scenario?
Or just another year of panels where everyone pretends it’s solved?

Answer: All of the above. Welcome to the Addressable Schism.

🎤 Larry Allen’s Take: Comcast, Chaos, and the Hope for Unity

Larry Allen, VP at Comcast Advertising, doesn’t mince words. He’s one of the few execs who admits the game is still in progress.

Yes, Comcast has made its inventory more accessible. Yes, they’ve partnered, unified, and structured data for better attribution. But real convergence? Still stuck behind:

Competitive turf wars
Technical clogs
And an industry that treats “collaboration” like it’s a group project in high school

Comcast is pushing for a more open, unified addressable future. But until every player stops building their own walled garden and just opens the gate a little — it’s going to be a long, glitchy road.

🧨 TL;DR: Addressable TV in 2025

Great idea.
Messy execution.
Big potential.
Even bigger silos.
Everyone’s racing toward the future — they just forgot to bring a map.

Subscribe to ADOTAT+ to unlock Part II — where we talk about identity… and why your hashed email is a lying liar who lies.

Because pretending “programmatic” and “addressable” are the same thing is like pretending decaf is coffee.

Stay bold. Stay curious.
And know more than you did yesterday.

New White Paper: The Liquidity Crisis in Ad Tech: DSP Payment Gaps and Market Impact: 📣 Welcome to the Real Programmatic Crisis Playbook

This white paper you’re about to read?
Not meant for the masses.
Not being handed out at conference cocktail hours.
Not quietly whispered in LinkedIn echo chambers.

FOR ADOTAT+ MEMBERS.

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Groundhog Decade: Still Waiting for Addressable TV to Work

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