Tom Morgan: The Key to Addressable Is Open APIs

This Addressable series is brought to you by Project OAR, the consortium of media companies aligned to bring standards for addressable advertising in linear TV. Learn more about the consortium here.

One of the chief concerns of our current era—at least when it comes to content delivery—is that of the walled garden. Having to conform to a specific company’s standards and use their data sets is beneficial, perhaps, to that specific company, but a nightmare of inefficiency for everyone else.

MediaD.tv principal Thomas Morgan has thought a lot about this inefficiency, and how an entity like Project OAR can deliver on the promise of addressable advertising while not forcing advertisers to adhere to a bewildering array of different standards.

“We can now replace basically anything,” Morgan says. Developing open APIs allows for device flexibility and a way to measure across those devices, a crucial component of Project OAR.

Here’s Morgan's full remarks on the topic of open APIs:

We can now replace basically anything. So the question is: Under what business logic have you sold it? What are your issues? How do we implement it? How do we make sure that the right ad is in the cache so they can be replaced by the right device?

Those open API's, in terms of implementing that, are the core of OAR. It doesn't say it has to be a VIZIO TV. It doesn't say it can't be a set top box. It doesn't say it can't be a Roku device. That's okay. That's still part of being an open API based solution.