By David Alpern Media Partners Worldwide is attending the ERA (Electronic Retailers Association) conference this month (September 13-15, 2016) in Las Vegas and one of the buzz words at the show is sure to be programmatic TV. Programmatic TV is gaining ground as data and automation advertising technologies advance. Programmatic TV provides the ability to finally be able to use television advertising to target specific audiences in a manner similar to digital programmatic advertising. What this essentially means is that TV media buying will ultimately move away from spots sold on a gross rating point (GRP) basis to an environment where ads seek targeted impressions bought on a CPM basis. Similar to digital today, TV advertising won’t be identical from screen to screen, but will vary based on hundreds of granular household or viewer data attributes. Challenges still exist on the journey to programmatic TV including the pace of household technology adoption. Devices such as over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV lend themselves quite well to the new programmatic ecosystem. Programmatic TV buying is far ahead on platforms like Roku and Hulu than can be found on national and local cable networks. Other challenges include measurement as both Nielsen and comScore are talking about implementing measurement capabilities but are not entirely there, yet. So, make sure to become familiar with programmatic TV advertising. It’s the wave of the future in advertising.]]>