As a founding member of the addressable advertising standard consortium Project OAR, smart-TV manufacturer Vizio believes competitors work together to create an ecosystem that all can benefit from. 

Project OAR—which stands for “Open. Addressable. Ready.”—includes such members as Comcast/NBC Universal, Disney, Fox, Viacom/CBS, WarnerMedia, and many others. For VIZIO VP of Network Partnerships & Head of Addressable Adam Gaynor, welcoming others into the fold is an important step to realizing the full potential of addressable advertising. 

“The idea of OAR was to develop and ultimately deploy a set of standards for addressable advertising,” he says. “We do need standards as we move addressable further into the industry. As the networks are now adopting the standard, there’s an oppty for all of us to benefit.”

Vizio recently launched an internal tech stack with partner Beachfront Media to offer OAR members the ability to use any stack that adopts the OAR standard. 

“The ultimate goal is to connect what’s happening in the connected TV world to addressable using the same segments, data, and reporting. I’m really excited to make that a reality as we move forward.”

Learn more about Project OAR and how Vizio is driving the standard across the ecosystem in this TV[R]EV Thought Leaders Circle interview. 

GAYNOR: For us at Vizio, we helped bring together Project OAR, which is now part of my responsibility and to run OAR. OAR stands for open, addressable, ready, which has attracted most of the major media companies to join.

The idea of OAR was always there to help develop and ultimately deploy a set of standards for addressable advertising and I think that's a really important key factor here is that we do need standards as we start to move addressable further and further into the industry, and they're not Vizio standards they're OAR's standards and so as much as OAR has Vizio as part of it, OAR welcomes LG and Samsung any other OEM to join because I think as we try to push the standard into the industry and as all the networks are now adopting that standard there's an opportunity there for all of us to benefit.

The way that OAR sits today is we've got 11 members many of them are up and running and doing addressable as we are speaking right now. Many of the rest of them are starting to get more and more into testing. We recently launched our own internal tech stack, which Beachfront has helped to contribute to and so we're proud to be partners with Beachfront and now we're able to offer board members the opportunity to use our stack or their stack, we're able to offer other inventory owners the ability to come into addressable.

Really for us, I would say. the ultimate goal is, in our world, the Vizio world, to connect what's happening in the connected TV world to addressable using the same segments using the same data using the same reporting. And I'm really excited to to make that a reality as we move forward.