NEW YORK—The development of a new, open standard for addressable advertising on connected TVs will be a group effort, as a number of America’s top media and technology companies and smart TV company Vizio are forming a consortium called Project OAR, which stands for Open Addressable Ready.
Joining Vizio as part of Project OAR are Disney’s Media Networks, Turner, Xandr, Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBC Universal, CBS, Discovery, Hearst Television, AMC Networks and Inscape. The goal will be to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver more relevant advertising experiences within linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.
“We all recognize the most important goal of this initiative is to drastically enhance the TV experience for people at home,” said William Wang, Vizio founder and CEO.
Inscape will be the ones developing the technology, with input from the other companies. The standard is expected to implement a technologically sound, dynamic ad-delivery system that utilized industry best practices. “The standard will define the baseline for ad delivery, impression verification and privacy compliance, but networks will have plenty of room to create unique and enriched advertising experiences,” said Jodie McAfee, senior vice president at Inscape. “We are making this flexible enough to enable interactivity and other bells and whistles that have yet to be imagined.”
Vizion has made the pledge that once the consortium has developed the standard it can be deployed on its opt-in footprint of connected TVs. The goal though, is for the protocol to be open and designed to enable any internet-connected TV maker and connected-device company to use.
Project OAR is hoping to have a working product by spring 2019, with full deployment targeted for early 2020.
