CTV & video · also called Addressable television
Addressable TV
Addressable TV is the ability to show different ads to different households watching the same programme, based on data about each household, across set-top boxes, smart TVs or streaming.
Traditional TV sends the same ad to everyone watching a channel. Addressable TV lets advertisers target specific households: a family with young children sees a nappy ad, while the household next door sees a car ad, during the same show.
It started with cable and satellite set-top boxes, such as Sky AdSmart in the UK and pay-TV operators in the US, where the operator knew subscriber data and could replace ads in the box. Today it also includes CTV and streaming, where ads are chosen per stream via SSAI, and smart-TV-based ad replacement using ACR. Targeting typically uses household-level data such as location, demographics, purchase data or first-party customer lists, matched through identity graphs.
Addressable TV combines TV's reach and impact with digital-style targeting and measurement, but scale can be limited and costs are higher. Privacy law applies to household data, and measurement across linear and streaming is still fragmented.
Think of it like this
Addressable TV is like a newspaper printing slightly different adverts in each copy depending on who lives at the delivery address.
An example
A UK electric-car brand uses addressable TV to show its ad only to households in areas with good charger coverage and high car ownership, cutting wasted impressions compared with a national linear buy.
Related terms
Household ID
A household ID is an identifier representing a home and the devices in it, rather than one person, used mainly in CTV and addressable TV for targeting, frequency capping and measurement.
CTV (connected TV)
CTV (connected TV) is any television connected to the internet, such as a smart TV, streaming stick, games console or set-top box, and the advertising shown in streaming apps on it.
Linear TV
Linear TV is traditional scheduled television, broadcast, cable or satellite, where viewers watch programmes at the time the channel airs them, with ad breaks sold to all viewers of that channel.
ACR (automatic content recognition)
ACR (automatic content recognition) is technology, often built into smart TVs, that identifies what is on screen by matching audio or video fingerprints, used for audience measurement and ad targeting.
Identity graph
An identity graph is a database that links the many identifiers belonging to the same person or household, such as emails, device IDs, cookies and IP addresses, into one profile.
Sources: IAB Tech Lab CTV standards