Addressable Broadcast TV Is Finally Here. Now Comes The Hard Part.

For decades, addressable advertising has been one of broadcast television's biggest unrealized opportunities. The technology existed. The demand existed. But the infrastructure—and industry alignment—never quite came together.

That may finally be changing.

On the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon speaks with Hearst Television VP of Distribution John Robertson and Viamedia President & Chief Strategy Officer Evan Rutchik about their effort to bring household-level addressable advertising to local broadcast through MVPD streaming environments. The conversation explores why this breakthrough matters, how broadcasters can combine the premium reach of linear TV with the targeting and measurement capabilities of digital media, and why success ultimately depends on creating an industry-wide marketplace rather than a single-company solution. If local broadcasters are looking for a new growth engine, this may be one of the most important developments they've seen in years.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Welcome. You are In the Vicinity. Welcome to the proceedings. My name is Tim Hanlon. I'm the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago. We consultatively advise a whole smattering of companies in the media and technology spaces, and our little weekly want around here is to delve into all things local media.

And we welcome you to the proceedings. If this is the first time here, we appreciate you finding us, and if you're a return listener pull up a chair and get yourself comfortable. You know what we do around here. And this week, a really intriguing conversation. I was really excited to get these two guys on literally a day after I saw the news, 'cause I had to look two or three times at the headline and read the article over again because I wasn't too sure this was actually a real thing.

But lo and behold, Hearst Television and Viamedia.ai have been working on something for a number of months to bring ad addressability to local broadcast television. A holy grail, I think, for a lot of innovative entrepreneurial minds in the media space, but for various reasons, not a reality because of longstanding issues generationally.

Certainly not technologically, but the idea of being able to bring addressable targeted ad inventory into a broadcast feed has been just not even comprehensible, frankly, given how media has evolved over the last 40 to 50 years, the advent of cable and satellite and MVPDs and broadcasters getting retrans payments for their full signals and not letting any of the pipes get involved in any of their ad inventory and deliveries of such.

But we live in interesting times, and we're gonna talk to two of the gentlemen who have been behind the scenes making this project work even though it's still relatively early days. Hearst Television represented by John Robertson here in this conversation, VP of distribution, who's been doing the Lord's work trying to get broadcasting folks like Hearst to open their minds and possibilities to what could be in addressably targeting advertising avails in broadcast feeds.

And we're gonna talk about that perspective, but also the technology that's beginning to facilitate this thing courtesy of Viamedia, and the president and chief strategy officer of said Viamedia company Evan Rutchik, and he will be here to talk about their contributions to this project, which is fascinating to me.

And it's alive out there in the wild. Again, still relatively early goings, but the fact that a major broadcaster like Hearst, a 20% coverage, I think, of the United States, their signals in major markets like Boston and many other places, with cutting-edge technology from one of the pioneers in MVPD ad delivery in Viamedia, it's like cats and dogs living together.

Can you believe it? But yes, you can stay tuned to this conversation because we get to really granular answers to some of the questions that I have about how this partnership came about, the process by which these guys have been at the grindstone trying to make this all work, and frankly, what's in store.

I think you'll hear pretty early on in the conversation that this is not necessarily gonna be exclusive to Hearst and Viamedia but perhaps some early learnings and best practices that the entirety of broadcasters can start to take advantage of and benefit from, and increase their ad intake revenues from such, and frankly, open up new possibilities to some advertisers who could now, for the first time benefit from broadcast advertising not only across a DMA, but within various pockets of the DMA going forward.

More digital by the minute if things continue to go along as this project has developed thus far. And again, it is truly a breakthrough, I think, because if they've cracked the code, I think this can reinvent and reinvigorate, frankly, what the broadcasters can offer marketers in terms of their advertising capabilities.

So let's not waste any more time and get right to this really intriguing conversation chock-full of insights and best practices and learnings, and frankly, just honest assessments about what's going on. Here's my conversation we had with John Robertson from Hearst and Evan Rutchik from Viamedia.

Please sit back and, as always, enjoy.

Thank you both for saying yes to my relatively immediate outreach 'cause I think what you guys have been up to is a big deal and needs a bit more of a spotlight. And to the extent that we're a spotlight, we're happy to have this conversation. But before we get into it, both Evan and John, I'd love to hear your respective backgrounds, maybe in that order and where you guys sit right now, what companies you're at so I give our audience a bit of a sense of, I think, how important this really is thus far.

Evan Rutchik: Sure. Yeah, I'm happy to go first, Tim. Thanks for having us on here. So I'm Evan Rutchik. I am President, Chief Strategy Officer at Viamedia. Viamedia has a very rich history in representing MVPD's local cable inventory as well as providing digital omni-channel solutions for advertisers and supporting MVPDs through monetization efforts on the linear side, and then also more prevalently lately on the streaming side.

I have been fortunate enough to partner with John on our most recent launch of Parrot ADS and taking Viamedia's business from cable and FAST channels and all the other stuff we're doing in omni-channel into the local broadcast world too. Very exciting. 

Tim Hanlon: And before we get to John, I wanna ask this question, Evan. Viamedia's historical business has largely been in and around the cable realm all these years. So maybe a little bit of history on that and maybe how you have dipped your toe and then some into the broadcast space because it's always been a cat fight between cable and broadcast since cable became a real deal, right?

Evan Rutchik: We're peacemakers. We're creating bridges wherever we can. No, yeah, Viamedia's been around for a couple decades and like you said, has a history of getting access and representation of local cable ad inventory on MVPDs. So speccing out the mid-market and bigger in, historically other MVPDs quite, pretty sizable in years past.

But more recently in the mid-market, we'll say. And in the last four, I haven't been here that entire time, but I'll say in the last couple years that I've been here Viamedia actually acquired my company which is called Local Factor, and brought into the organization my company that focused on digital programmatic activation and optimization and monetization and things like that too.

So in the last couple years, we've combined those businesses and created. Our new mantra is the local first omni-channel operating system. And so we've set out to work with everybody in a way, and through our experience on the cable side, understood what it would take and how to execute a technology like this with a broadcaster, right?

It required us understanding how the cable world or the MVPD world tech stack really came together for us to be the ones to get this done. So that's how that history plays into the broadcast future. 

Tim Hanlon: That's very interesting. All right, it's a perfect segue then to John. John, your background, and then I'd like you to put a finer point on your approach from a broadcaster perspective, because as I hinted at before, and I won't put words in your mouth or into Evan's mouth, but it hasn't been necessarily a collaborative environment over the last 30 years when it comes to local cable and local broadcast and then advertising.

John Robertson: Sure. Thanks for having me on. I'm the Vice President of Distribution at Hearst Television, and my background is not quite traditional in the ad space. I started as a CPA at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I went to law school and found myself at Hearst, a prior client of mine at PwC focusing really on retransmission consent deals and network affiliations.

But I've also always overseen new product development and really just a broader strategy to help us move to the future, whether it's digital or broadcast. To your second question where did this come from? We have always been really focused on how do we take our very valuable linear inventory and give it all the best characteristics of digital, which has been obviously growing and hurting and coming after a broadcast, local broadcast ad share.

So we recognize that as a one-way transmission system, that becomes very difficult. I've also, while I'm here, done a lot of work around ATSC 3.0 and been front seat to what that could mean for us from an addressable advertising standpoint. I've also been front seat to the slow-paced adoption of ATSC 3.0, but the promise of using an ATSC 3.0, a broadcaster app, as being the kind of back channel to do addressable advertising piqued our interest, but we needed a way to fast-forward and find what was now gonna be a partner to really serve as that client-side ad insertion point.

I think my background with having these MVPD relationships has helped because what became clear is that they're gonna be the quickest path for broadcasters to get the data and the late-stage kind of insertion to make all this work. So that's how the genesis came but it was really around taking what we have as this incredibly valuable inventory and making it as smart or smarter than the competitors that have come up in the kind of 16 years I've been here.

Tim Hanlon: So two things that strike me, John. One is the fact that you're 16 years, okay maybe you're a veteran of the broadcast television space per se, maybe I can crown you with that, but arguably it's not 30 or 40 years, right? And there are a lot of people, with all due respect, and this only in the nicest way, who have been there forever, right?

And have grown up and have been in this pitched battle between the cable interlopers and the local broadcast thing and we've known that those ad units have never been the same ever since that sort of happened, right? But number two, I also find it interesting that you mention ATSC 3.0, and Lord knows I've been waiting for it for at least 10 years, and one of the earliest leaning forward types of all of it.

And there are various reasons for why it's taken so long, and ultimately it may just indeed get there. But that's actually refreshing in itself because. You're one of the first people I've actually heard from the broadcaster space, I'm sure there's others like you, I just need to get out more.

That are trying to say, "You know what? If this isn't an inevitability or an opportunity to do addressability in this new standard environment, if and when and how we get there, we gotta do some real-world stuff, trials or on-ramps to doing this." And frankly I, again, refreshing is the word that pops up.

It's been hard to get people to think that way, and I applaud you for looking at it through that prism, because arguably, and God forbid, it's actually gonna be helpful anyway, even if ATSC 3.0 still is on the launching pad. 

John Robertson: Yeah, the way I look at it, this in relation to ATSC 3.0 is that we are gonna need to serve addressable ads at every device endpoint.

It's gonna be over through our cable partners, which has, we know our business relies on the cable broadcast partnership through retrans. So that's gonna be some portion of the audience. What we do on digital platforms, vMVPD or OTT, that's gonna be a share of the pie.

And when ATSC 3.0 comes out, that's gonna be another share. None of them have to supersede each other. We gotta get to all of them. It was always very hard to get traction to do addressable testing on 3.0, 'cause the ROI really just is not there. The impression level that you could serve is low at this point.

But what we have found and maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit talking about technology, is that what we're doing in the MVPD space will translate to the 3.0 space when it's ready, right? The signaling and all those things the broadcaster app is gonna play the same role as Via's ADS, as things that we may do with vMVPD partners or things we may do on native apps and things like that.

It's all signaling from our stream and how do we play with the distribution partners at the other end? And what is gonna be really interesting is when you can put those inventories together and you can serve across them, and you can serve ads specifically to who's living in those environments.

Evan Rutchik: Yeah. What they're watching and whatever else. And we've talked about this, a future where this is a new category and a new channel of inventory that advertisers can allocate dollars in a meaningful way and have access to incredibly high-quality content that, Hearst as an example, the stations and whatnot that are putting out there in that programmatic way is a game changer.

And in many ways enabling the existing teams at the broadcasters to have more tools in their tool chest to, to get more deals done and be more effective for their clients as well. It enables all kinds of aspects of the value chain and just is designed to create that additional incrementality for everyone involved.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Okay. Before we get to the story about how you guys came together and made this happen and then the dynamics of all that and the behind-the-scenes and I'm sure the very smooth ride it's been ever since. But I want you both to describe for me, and maybe, Evan, why don't you start first, and then we'll pivot to John for fill in, what this is?

What is it? It's addressability in local broadcast inventory environments, but maybe you can explain that to people who don't really know what that means because they don't believe it could actually happen. 

Evan Rutchik: You nailed it. You nailed it right there with exactly what it is. The way I typically will describe it is — and John, keep me honest on all this obviously — is the feed or the stream that comes in from the broadcaster to the cable provider, right? At the moment, or prior to this moment, had been delivered on a one-to-many households, right? And for most set-top boxes that'll still be the case.

But for the streaming environment, which is now 80% of the cable subscribers are probably in some sort of streaming environment at this stage that will now be delivered on a one-to-one basis, right? So the stream comes in, the ad mark calls, and we can address that household with a specific ad to that household based on a myriad of different data signals and characteristics about the household and about the type of consumer the advertiser is looking to serve an ad to, right?

So that in itself is the main innovation, right? And it creates the addressability, the accountability of the targeting, but also the accountability of the measurement side as well. Now being able to measure and track how many impressions delivered in this environment is a difference in the ecosystem for broadcast that hadn't yet been done either.

So those two pieces create a ton of value for everybody involved. 

John Robertson: I think that's exactly that. It's being able to do this household level addressability is what we've done here. 

Tim Hanlon: So John, tell me about how you frame this in terms of all the different touchpoints by which people are getting. Say you're a station in Boston, right?

The amount of people who are experiencing it through the station app or experiencing the not so full signal through a FAST channel environment, through MVPDs, and through over-the-air, right? Those are already a couple of splits of audiences, right? But this is largely for which parts or all of those streaming environments?

John Robertson: Yeah, what we've worked on here and where I think we've made a really good discovery is around the MVPD environment. We have the ability in the streaming world to the targetability of our ads and our content and, but now we've taken that to the MVPD partners and to that stream.

And what's really important about that is, is that we, because of, rights that we have and really relationships we value with the MVPD partners, that's the highest value content. We do not stream Sunday Night Football on our NBC station apps. We're not allowed, but we also, we have to protect the value proposition we have with our MVPD partners.

This takes all the best characteristics that we can do on streaming and puts it right alongside what is the most premium content in the video space. 

Tim Hanlon: So to clarify though Evan, this does not touch the MVPD-delivered viewing of Hearst stations in the let's call it the set-top box environments, correct?

Or satellite environments, correct?

Evan Rutchik: In the set-top box environment, it is, we're calling it one-to-cohort, right? It's one-to-cohort.

Tim Hanlon: What is that? 

Evan Rutchik: It's a zone. It's limited to the zone, the cable zone, right? As opposed to...or the cluster, whatever you wanna call it. As opposed to in the streaming environment, which the MVPD, some MVPDs are full streaming at this point.

Not all of them have set-top boxes anymore. In the streaming environment, it's any touchpoint like John was saying. So that's why I was referring to about 80% or so of what we'll call cable subscribers are in that streaming environment. So it's the scale of cable where this touches.

Tim Hanlon: I guess what I'm trying to do is give you credit, because this is anticipatory of what's happening to the, let's shall we say, the legacy MVPD delivery environment, right?

Yeah. So in respects, punting on that part as the older way of delivery is actually not a bad thing because it's all moving off of that eventually over time. How long would the debate- 

Evan Rutchik: Yeah. You could say five years ago it was the other 80/20, right? It was probably 20% streaming and 80% boxes, and now it's the other way.

So if that gives you any sense of the velocity of that evolution. And, in our conversations with our MVPD partners it's a challenge. The s- in managing the technology of the set-top box is a challenge in itself given the legacy nature of it and whatnot. So there's a lot of conversations on how do I go streaming?

How do I move this to here and aim to maintain my subs, right? Things like this, and how do I continue to monetize it the same way? That's a lot of the conversation we're having to help these companies take that remaining 20 and go full 100. Yeah. 

Tim Hanlon: So John, help me out here. So I'm watching, I'm assuming through a quote-unquote cable operator's streaming app.

That's my linear channel's delivery environment. I'm seeing WCVB in Boston which I think are the call letters if I'm not mistaken on that. So you're in that environment. That's an authenticated environment, right? You're passing through all the network programming, all the syndicated programming.

You're not touching any of that inventory 'cause you can't. But do I have this right in some respects that the aperture is opening and closing, if you will, in the local news stuff that you guys control in that environment for advertisers?

John Robertson: We have the ability to make addressable in the MVPDs. I think it's a little broader than the streaming environment because there are set-top boxes which are IP-based. Yes. So that is also an audience that we're reaching. So in that, in those connected set-top boxes, not the old school- ... chrome boxes, but the IP-based set-top boxes, we are, we have the ability to mark any spot that we have control of, so that's in not only local news, but, if we have barter and syndication in our network avails, in our in our network programming.

We can mark that as addressable. And that can be replaced dynamically on a one-to-one basis on, on, on the MVP. 

Tim Hanlon: So right there that's also a further mind blow, right? Because now you're kinda nibbling at what was historically viewed as verboten, right? And that you're n- you're never, ever gonna be able to touch that.

And again, for some of the reasons historically, but also arrogantly, but the reality is the ability to offer an increasing amount of viewership, the ability to sub DMA target to some level, the ability... An ad that's better suited or targeted that alone from the broadcaster's perspective is a huge step forward.

John Robertson: Yeah. And again, this is the inventory that we gained, that is contractually ours. We certainly are not t- rolling over the syndicator spots or the national network spots. That's not what we're doing here. I don't even think we have the technical ability to do that. Certainly wouldn't do that.

This is the ad spots that we control and, w- we're gonna learn about when, spots that are sold in a traditional way is the, that inventory is, that's the highest and best use of it, or when we're gonna tag it to be addressable. And the thing is it can live somewhere in between and that's the world that Evan and I are embarking on now, if we put these pipes in, how do we pull the levers and really find a way to raise, grow the pie for the broadcast stations.

And, just from where I sit on, on, on my day-to-day- This is one of the few zero-sum relationships between the broadcasters and the MVPDs. This is not if I pay more, if they pay more, they make less. This is something we can make money on together. So that's a business that I've always wanted to be in, is someone who negotiates retrans deals.

I love a point where we can talk about how we're both growing the pie together, not one versus each other. 

Tim Hanlon: All right, so let me ask two sort of monetization questions then to both of you. The jumping point, maybe, Evan, you wanna jump in first. Enlighten me and the audience as to, and maybe this is still contentious or still in conversation, but what's the initial thought around what the rev share and/or avail splits for this inventory that John and Hearst's stations has rights to deal with, and what you do to package and sell, and how are you splitting either the ad- the inventory and/or the revenue for this?

Or is it still early days? 

Evan Rutchik: I'll answer that question this way, and then it's early days, that's first and foremost. But our role in this equation, sure, we can help with monetization, we can help with that, all the extra pieces that come with it, and we've got a great sales organization.

We got all the things that could help do it here. But our desired role, our role here is to really be more of a technology enablement tool, right? We're a partner to the broadcasters and to the cable and MVPD provider, but our role is to be the technology, be the service, be the experts that know how to, Connect all the pipes, connect all the dots, and then service the pipes and service those dots, 'cause there's a lot of pipes and a lot of dots that have to get connected at all given times.

So as it relates to the monetization and the rev shares and whatnot, there's a lot of that I'd say a broadcaster, John, would work out with an MVPD partner directly. Or in the case where we're monetizing, then we'd have some sort of arrangement where we're sharing back revenue to the broadcaster and others that would be involved in that execution.

So a non-answer, but also an answer at the same time. 

Tim Hanlon: In theory, it could be a programmatic waterfall where there's…

Evan Rutchik: Yes. Sorry, didn't mean to cut you off, Tim, but yeah, exactly. You could have a programmatic waterfall, you could have direct sales efforts.

You could have all the different ways to get the inventory sold. What I mentioned before it's really important to just hammer in this, is that it's not in- it's designed to be a tool that the broadcaster can use as well, right? So it's not just us monetizing, it's the broadcaster's team.

What they do on a day-to-day is deliver this for their advertisers. So how can this technology support them in getting more value for their customers in addition to maybe filling in some gaps where there might be something that drops further down in the waterfall and there needs to be additional monetization, right?

So it's kinda playing all those different sides. 

Tim Hanlon: So John, between crawling and walking, right? My assumption is that one of your biggest challenges internally is to try to figure out maybe what the process looks like for, let's, shall we say, maybe even as a starting point, right? What a broadcast sales op scenario looks like for whatever units that you've identified that you wanna make addressable, right?

There are a couple things I think that are embedded in that. One is, how much inventory in the units that we have should we make hot or not hot for this stuff, right? Is it one per pod, to start? That kind of stuff. I'm sure it's very incremental to begin with. But then second, I'm guessing too, is probably the distinction between w- where is it gonna be financially advantageous for us not to addressably s- slice and just sell it as a whole unit across a DMA, and/or where, what kinds of programming and environments do we, will we benefit and get additive revenue because we're able to split it a few different ways?

I'm projecting here, but what's your mindset as you try to figure out how you ultimately go to market with this? 

John Robertson: So I think the answer is yes to all of those things. But I th- that's exactly the problem that we have and it's an absolutely great problem because, just a little bit back to the monetization question, if we succeed in rolling this out widely and really driving imp- addressable impressions- That is gonna be money that is coming back to the broadcast ecosystem that has either left or was never there.

And so for the monetization point, there's gonna be partners in the value chain. It's gonna be MVPDs, it's gonna be platforms like the, There's gonna be rev shares that go back to them because but for them, we would not be able to claw that money back, and we have no issue with everybody benefiting from that.

You know what and then we get to, so now this is, if you think about that as, basically recovered or incremental money, the problem that we have is exactly as you stated. Which pods, at what rate, how much, at what time do we do? And so that is definitely something we are gonna, we're constantly thinking about.

We had to think about it at the outset with no history, so we kinda just used some good judgment and some guesses. But the nice thing about this versus a lot of the other linear sales we do is we have absolute direct data of what we're doing, and we will be able to do things like AB test.

Or do we for two weeks make X amount addressable, and we back it off? And we can, just, we just now have such precise data back to even just ourselves, let alone what we can deliver to our advertisers about the performance of this class of inventory that, we'll be able to start to kinda dial in the levers.

But that's gonna be, that's gonna be the kind of next evolution is how we make this additive to what we do. And, finding the best value for the customer, the best value for all the partners involved and really finding that CPM that we're just raising the total impressions that we're moving through the system.

Evan Rutchik: Yeah, the direct feedback component changes the game there. And as it scales as it scales out to more partners on all sides of the equation, there's more data and there's more value to get passed around, right? To your point.

John Robertson: Yeah. It's gonna be a very data science intensive process.

It's gonna be a lot more science than art than I think TV selling has been in the past. 

Tim Hanlon: Okay. You're hinting, though, that you may be pioneering something for the betterment of the industry on broadcasters, right? Is that fair to say? 

John Robertson: I think that this does not reach full potential if Hearst and Via do this together.

We need to create a marketplace of addressable impressions. Hearst has, just shy of 20% of the country. That is not enough to compete with all the competitors out there. We need to create a critical mass of impressions that has all the best characteristics of digital, but is put against really the best content.

And an industry organization or a third party like an Ampersand or whomever is gonna be the aggregator and seller of that is gonna be able to go out and take our inventory and put it up against all the new platforms and say, "We can get you just as much with just as good characteristics, but the content is safer and higher quality."

Evan Rutchik: Just to piggyback on top of that is in the CTV space more broadly, there's articles on articles about fraud and all this garbage that's out there To exactly John's point, this creates a category or channel where it is verifiable, it is h- of the highest quality, and it has all the characteristics of a CTV digital-enabled ad, right?

So that in itself, combating the fraud world, it's gonna create a lot more inventory that's actual inventory. That's a huge deal. 

Tim Hanlon: Brand halo or the brand sold halo of a broadcast station. 

Evan Rutchik: And that's additional perceived value of the CPM, which maybe pushes the CPM a little higher, which John likes. 

Tim Hanlon: All right, a couple of quickies and then I'll get to one last round-up question. And I think these are both more John first and Evan for color, but what kind of categories do you envision or early on do you think are gonna alight to this sooner rather than later when it comes off the show floor?

I'm thinking political clearly because of the gerrymandering and all that kind of stuff just seems to be most obvious. But am I right and/or are there other categories, or do you, is it still too early to even as- ascertain yet?

John Robertson: I think we're a little early to ascertain. Political I'm gonna leave to the side.

There's some rules around political, and this is a bit new that we have to sort out and certainly not run afoul of any rules, new rules, even this week's new rules. There's some stuff to unwrap there. We, so that's not where we've made our focus, but we know that there are other partners in the industry who, who are focusing on addressable into linear, maybe outside broadcast where political is where they're going, and I think that's a very smart idea, and I hope that we can play in it at some point.

That was an over complication for this early on. But Evan's probably a little better to answer to that. Just, he has a much closer connection to the actual advertising community. But y- it's really anybody who... It's really anybody because everybody has a target market.

Everyone needs general branding, but everybody is branding to somebody. I don't think we're foreclosing on any categories yet, but Evan can probably speak to who's a little more ripe at this time and ready for it. 

Evan Rutchik: Yeah. It's interesting you said branding too.

This actually enables broadcast to become even a performance channel, which I think is exciting and opens the door for advertisers that are looking to get some sort of action on their site. We've done some early testing, without naming the brands themselves, we've done some early testing actually with some automotive, some real estate type companies that are helping people find new homes in their local neighborhood.

Also some pharmaceutical customers that are looking for key attributes of a household they wanna serve an ad to. It's I'll say it's too early to tell where the most ad, most budget's gonna come from, but if you're buying CTV, if you're buying digital, which at this point is probably everybody, this is a new, exciting, high-quality opportunity for you to expand your reach, expand your scale, and generate even more performance with a new category or a new channel.

So that's where that, that, that story goes from an advertising standpoint. 

Tim Hanlon: Which leads me to my last quickie, which is the harmonization of that. And John, again, I'm gonna assume that this is probably one of your, gonna be one of your biggest operational challenges, right? The way Evan has just described it is that those are three different sorts of buckets of inventory that sound like a challenge to harmonize from a trafficking perspective, right?

How do you aggregate a streaming audience, right? If that, some are on the app, some are being delivered in this environment through an MVPD IP-delivered bundle, and others are, say, watching a fast channel version of you on, I don't know, pick your SVOD platform. My suspicion is that the way those ads get delivered in those, just those three environments in streaming are all relatively different.

How are you grokking how to perhaps harmonize that yet? 

John Robertson: We're certainly gonna have to work with trafficking partners and whether that is some of the existing trafficking partners we have or finding, I will call it like a trafficking middleware that can speak to all the legacy platforms and aggregate and redistribute.

That's a challenge we're gonna have to figure out and face. It'll probably be a bit manual from the beginning, like it always is and, it's one of the reasons that I hope that this becomes more broad across the industry, and get some of those smart existing partners to say, "Wow, we gotta serve this new marketplace."

We've already heard from some existing partners who have thoughts on how we're gonna do this. Development and AI have really allowed some sort of normalization pretty quickly. So it- we don't have the answer now. I know we're gonna get there, and I've started to not really think that's gonna be an issue, just that some, the pace in this very short time that people have ideas on how we're gonna...

We can do this. And at the end of the day, an impression counts or, there's ways to homogenize it, and we can, and find a way to get the ads where they need. And V is certainly gonna play a role in that for us. 

Evan Rutchik: I don't know all the inner workings of how that'll all come together, but I can speak to the speed of innovation with AI and technology.

To produce new products and put them to market and evolve something to address something like this may be much more in reach than it was prior. And I could envision the way that this could resolve from an audio standpoint is not unlike an identity spine, right? Having everything linked down to an IP or down to some sort of a device graph or, we have our geograph.

Whatever it might be, something that resolves to a single identifier and connects all the dots that way. But that's really exciting to see where this can go and how it's gonna continue to evolve. 

Tim Hanlon: God forbid somebody's listening to this in that space and is ready to reach out to you guys 'cause they didn't believe this was actually possible.

All right, here's my last question. Finally, I know for you guys. And but for our audience, we're recording this just before the long holiday weekend. These guys have been really great with their time, which I appreciate. Give me a sense of your perspectives on the roadmap here.

This is relatively new in market. This has been the product of some trials and stuff. I- in a best case or maybe commonly delineated state how- what do you see the roadmap for this writ large over the next number of months and/or years? 

John Robertson: Yeah, I think that from the Hearst perspective we would like to get this live with our largest MVPD partners.

We are, we're a member of Go Addressable, a trade group who has taken the, the big four, Comcast, Charter, Dish and DirecTV and got them together of which we joined that group about a year ago to talk about things around addressable, both how do we take it to market, but also how do we homogenize it across MVPDs so that we're not developing solutions for each, you have individual broadcasters developing solutions for individual MVPDs and you end up with an exponential standard that it, becomes not uniform.

So yeah, that's what, our near term goal is to have this, make this available to any MVPD who wants it. On the broadcast side, we're actually pretty fortunate. It's a little more rinse and repeat because our biggest technical task here is around sending out signaling. That signaling is very consistent with what's done over digital video.

But that would be consistent, in our broadcast signal. So the signal we would send to a Via client would be the same we send to a Comcast or a Charter. So that's relatively straightforward on our side. We have to work out commercial deals with them. I don't see that being much of an issue, especially on a test base, and I'm confident that when they see the amount of inventory that we can put into the system to be monetized, they're gonna think it's worth it.

So that's, I think at that point, when we cover the largest MVPDs, fill in with the super regionals and really anybody who wants to take it because it's pretty simple for us. We now have a critical mass of impressions that can be made available to be sold by multiple people through multiple channels that are addressable and can really get us back into the competition with some of the digital platforms, CTV.

Tim Hanlon: And you're not averse to having some of the broadcast groups join you for the fun?

John Robertson: No, I think it has to be done. I think this has to be an industry-wide thing 'cause I think, and Evan can probably speak to it a little better, there is a critical mass of impressions that needs to be out there.

Think about the massive impressions that we are competing against from YouTube or something like that. Her television doesn't have enough impressions. Everybody together, all the broadcast stations, and there's no reason that cable, linear cable's impressions can't be aggregated and sold together.

And now you have a lot of viewership that you're able to use to satisfy audience demands out of an advertiser.

Tim Hanlon: You get the last word, Evan. How do you see this shaping? Do you share that vision?

Evan Rutchik: Our vision here, partner with the broadcasters, partner with the MVPDs, be the technology layer, be the managed service layer, make sure that all the dots, as I mentioned before, and pipes are connected and QA'd and working properly.

I think John's right. In the short term, it's more proof of concepts delivered with more catchers, more of the MVPD side of the world to generate additional revenue for Hearst, right? And continue to grow that partnership. And at the same time, we're actively working on getting more broadcasters to sign up and get tested and continue to grow the category.

This doesn't succeed unless there's scale, and I really think that us bringing high quality content to the programmatic marketplace, aside from competing with the YouTubes of the world just creating something of value for the programmatic marketplace that has so much scary underbelly, pushing all that out hopefully and creating something of value that these bu- that buyers can really sink their teeth into and have, and advertisers can sink their teeth into and transform their buys across programmatic there too, I think is a huge opportunity for the industry.

Huge. It flows more money into the broadcasters and into the cable MVPDs than they had before. So it's a great opportunity for everybody.

Tim Hanlon: My thanks to Evan and John and I think it's pretty plain to see that both are very intrigued not only with the possibilities of bringing ad addressability to local broadcast television streams, but also having others join the party, especially broadcasters outside of Hearst who, I would argue is pioneering this and arguably could be a real solve or an additive element to the ad sales proposition that local broadcasters not only historically have offered, but in the future could make even more impactful as more and more people stream first and ask questions later.

Love to have these guys back in a couple of months and see where these things stand for sure, and I thank both of them for joining us this week. A great chat, and we can't do this show without the good graces of our friends at TVREV. They know who they are, but I gotta shout them out anyway because it'll make me feel better.

Mike Gasbara, thank you. Melissa Hourigan, of course, Jessika Walsten, and the great Jason Damata, the chief cook and bottle washer over there. Thank you very much for your support and help along the way for this week and every week's episode. We can't do it, of course, without our sponsors, the folks at Madhive, in particular Nicole Lewis and Stephanie Nerby, the two main people there that make the show run from their perspective for us.

We appreciate that. And of course, last but certainly not least, the one, the only, the inimitable Jerry Payne, Dr. Jerry I like to call him, who is our chief knob twiddler and editor-in-chief. We appreciate his editorial efforts this week, of course, as always. All right. Thank you for listening. More coming next week.

I appreciate it very much, and we'll see you soon here In The Vicinity.