Video ad tech provider Eyeview is ramping up its emphasis on addressable TV, hiring former TiVo SVP Brian Katz as its new VP, Advanced TV Insights & Strategy. Katz is charged with helping retail, CPG, auto and travel clients understand how to leverage addressable TV in conjunction with their digital campaigns. Eyeview focuses on outcome-based video marketing, with highly personalized video ads driving purchase conversion.

In an interview, Katz told me that a key part of his role will be removing the complexity of addressable TV advertising for clients and helping to educate them, in order to accelerate spending. Addressable TV has been complicated by fragmentation in the pay-TV space, where addressable set-top boxes have been rolled out at different paces by operators, making it difficult to execute and measure campaigns at scale.

Katz said that Eyeview has solved this by forging relationships with pay-TV operators that together account for a footprint of approximately 40-45 million addressable homes. Eyeview believes this scale allows campaigns that are focused on lower funnel metrics like conversion to generate positive ROIs. Still, Katz emphasized that it’s relatively early days for addressable TV, with industry fears of pushing ahead, lack of education and concern about commoditization as key challenges.

Addressable TV also doesn’t allow the user-specific ad targeting and personalization that digital does, but Katz still sees household level targeting with different viewing segments, as meaningful. Eyeview doesn’t get personally identifiable information, but it does get anonymized household data. Today’s set-top box technology are also limited to serving 5 different pieces of creative per operator per week, compared to thousands in digital.

As clients forge into addressable TV advertising, Katz sees most doing so in concert with their digital buys, in order to optimize across screens. However as clients get down the learning curve on addressable TV, he does anticipate some doing standalone campaigns. In all cases, Eyeview is maintaining its focus on outcomes - how both addressable TV and digital campaigns can deliver actual results for clients.