GroupM’s Finecast, an agency which specialises in addressable TV, has officially been launched in Poland.
It will be headed Maciej Olenderczyk, who before moving to GroupM a few months ago worked at Wavemaker, coordinating regional TV and offline media campaigns, and earlier at Spark Foundry (Publicis), where he dealt with the multiscreen market. Poland is the 15th market in which Finecast has begun operating, the others including the US, UK, Australia, Spain and India.
Finecast specialises in advertising technologies that enable planning strictly targeted video campaigns. The definition of addressable TV adopted by GroupM, in addition to traditional linear TV, captures the world of VOD services and applications available on the screen of a TV connected to the internet. The two key elements of this definition therefore assume the broadcasting of advertisements on a TV screen and in the environment of professional, high-quality TV or VOD content. Providing marketers with precise access to defined audiences, Finecast combines the power of traditional television with the targeting possibilities known so far from the internet.
Commenting on the launch, Olenderczyk said: “Given the degree of development of the VOD and the connected TV market in Poland, as well as the first opportunities to implement precisely targeted campaigns in linear television, GroupM decided that it was time for Finecast’s Polish debut. Observing the career of network-connected TV sets, intensive efforts of some broadcasters to modernise their commercial offer, as well as the huge interest of marketers in the offer of addressable TV, I see very promising development opportunities for us here”.
The idea of Finecast is to integrate the offer of TV stations and OTT/VOD services within one system for planning, optimising and buying campaigns. For the advertiser, this means the convenience of buying campaigns in various video channels (from linear TV to OTT applications for TV sets) in one place and based on consistent data from external suppliers, as well as with the option of using 1st party data.
Olenderczyk added: “We work with data providers, thanks to which we can create very detailed profiles of households according to geographical, demographic or behavioural variables. Advertisers who want to focus, for example, on viewers from Poznan, single women from cities with over 500,000 inhabitants. or owners pet owners, and at the same time be present with a campaign on the TV screen, will find us a great partner to conduct such communication”.
GroupM has been testing Finecast technology for the last few months. It was the first media group in Poland to implement campaigns using the addressable TV offer of the TVN Group. The test results proved the cost-effectiveness of this tool, both in the case of strictly geographically targeted campaigns, as well as in campaigns that diversified messages addressed to other customer segments of a given marketer.
Olenderczyk concluded: “we hope that other broadcasters as well as pay-TV operators will enable the dynamic insertion of advertisements, which would undoubtedly boost the addressable TV market in Poland. However, we already see great growth prospects for the world of vonnected TV, i.e. services and applications available on the screen of TV sets connected to the network. Recent data from the VideoTrack Wavemaker study show that almost half of Polish online viewers use applications on TV sets, and with every six months smart TV gains at the expense of smaller screens in the field of watching professional video content”.
GroupM’s forecast, which does not yet take into account the advertising revenues of Netflix or Disney+, which will also launch advertising packages in Poland, assumes that this year marketers will spend about PLN230 million (€49 million) on video advertising around professional content on TV screens.
