Advertising on television is about reaching the masses. “Hey, everybody, look at this brilliant washing powder.” Advertising online is about chasing niches, segments, particular groups. “Based on everything we know about you, we think you’re more than averagely likely to need our brilliant washing powder.”

The television industry would like to adjust this oversimplified picture. Television is mass marketing, yes, but it can be great at targeting consumers too – or at least it can, in the future, be just as good at targeting consumers as the online crowd say they are.

Television advertising revenues in Ireland are growing again after a hideous recession, but the final tallies for 2016 are expected to be lower than the start-of-year projections. Brexit has instilled a certain caution among the consumer goods multinationals that are among the biggest television advertisers in Ireland, but decide on their marketing spend out of their London offices.

In the longer term, broadcasters need these consumer goods giants – Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, L'Oréal – to keep the faith with television as a medium. Their business is hurt when the big guys start moving their money over to Facebook at the expense of the traditional 30-second ads that helped build their empires.

There is a sense in the industry that some wounds are self-inflicted. The brands that have shifted cash online may have been dazzled by audience metrics that don’t always bear close analysis, but the way in which television audiences are measured hasn’t kept up with either consumption patterns and marketers’ needs.

Nielsen, the audience research body, and national industry groups such as TAM Ireland, have been working hard to correct this, but it's a more a question of applying "high-level maths", as RTÉ group commercial director Willie O'Reilly has put it, than it is a case of simply joining up some dots.

In the meantime, Sky and Virgin Media, companies that own both platforms and television channels, have been developing new technologies that will help their advertisers target viewers. In the future, it may be normal for viewers to be served entirely different advert breaks depending on who and where they are.

Sky is further along down the line. Its AdSmart technology, which is already up and running in the UK, tailors what is shown in television advert breaks according to the household’s profile and location and other information Sky has either acquired from its subscribers or derived from consumer-profiling experts.

The list of attributes from which advertisers can cherry-pick is detailed – they can target financially secure mature singles with cats and south-facing gardens if that’s what they fancy. “Brands and businesses can now advertise on national channels, but to relevant audiences,” is how Sky describes AdSmart, which it is still warming up to launch here.

Regional advertisers

TV3 owner Virgin Media, meanwhile, has been out and about talking about what it calls "addressable advertising". Parent company Liberty Global has established an Advanced Advertising unit in the Netherlands to develop the technology it needs to allow advertisers to hyper-target particular subscribers, and TV3's newly renamed sales house Virgin Media Solutions hopes to be in a position to offer it to the market as early as next year.

Insiders say that addressable advertising in Ireland won’t be primarily about bringing lots of new regional advertisers into the television loop. Realistically, a company like regional department store chain Shaws – famous for its “almost nationwide” slogan – can’t be depended upon to go to the expense of making regular television ads just because it suddenly has the ability to run them only in the areas where it has a store.

Instead, addressable advertising would be more about giving the big spenders the ability to channel their cash in particular directions. So, for example, a company like P&G could, if it wished, target an ad where they are running a particular discount offer or trialling a new product.

From the television industry’s point of view, this would neutralise the perceived targeting advantage that online advert giants like Facebook have when they make sales pitches to advertisers.

Interestingly, there is a limit to how much the household goods behemoths want to target specific consumers anyway. P&G caused a stir last month when its chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard revealed that it had "targeted too much" and gone "too narrow" in its online advertising. And that beyond advertising nappies to pregnant women, this wasn't a terribly effective strategy.

What P&G was looking for now, he said, was “the most reach, but also the right precision”. It’s not asking for much, of course. It’s just what every advertiser has wanted since the beginning of time: for its advertising to work. And there are plenty of people who will argue that television is in a stronger position than most mediums to mop up.