Targeted advertising may soon be appearing on your connected TV.
Facebook (FB) will begin using its advertising tool Audience Network to sell advertisements on connected devices such as Apple (APPL) TV and Roku TV apps, according to Recode.
The social media behemoth has made plans to distribute video ads that run on apps available on TV set-top boxes in partnership with publishers A&E and Tubi TV.
This opens a lot of opportunity for a company like Facebook, which collects data on its users for the purposes of targeted advertising. For consumers who use the A&E app and Tubi TV app on their smart TV, this would mean seeing more personalized advertisements on their smart televisions. For example, posting about your engagement on Facebook might mean seeing more advertisements for wedding dresses and floral arrangements. Searching the web for a new Volvo could produce car commercials on your big screen.
This is a big step forward for marketers in a still nascent market.
“It is interesting on any level to see connected television as the next frontier in digital advertising,” said Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer.
Connected TV allows digital advertisers to broaden their platforms in a way that’s similar to how traditional television advertisers have expanded their reach in the digital age.
“People currently do ad syncs from TV to digital,” said Rob Griffin, chief innovation officer at Boston-based digital agency Almighty. “There is a lot of interest from TV dollars to digital dollars to try to do the reverse of that.”
For more and more Americans, TVs connected to the internet, or “connected TVs,” are growing in popularity. Market research company eMarketer predicts that 60% of households will be using one by 2019.
Verna’s bullish attitude on connected TV advertising comes in part from the way people are exposed to the advertisements. In “lean back mode,” a descriptor for more passive information consumption, viewers who are relaxing on the couch watching television are less likely to skip or disable ads than they would be on a computer. However, advertisers can collect the kind of data that companies have been able to track from digital ads as well.
“It gives you the best of TV advertising and the best of digital advertising,” Verna said.
Advertising on connected televisions, however, faces more obstacles than traditional mobile advertising. One such issue has been the struggle to find a standardized way to measure audience size and demographics on over-the-top boxes, as Wes Nichols, the senior vice president of strategy for Neustar, wrote in Forbes earlier this month.