ViacomCBS and Dish Media announced today they have executed an addressable campaign in live national broadcast through the set top box. 

Addressable ad replacement was executed on a live campaigns across Dish's 9 million household footprint in select CBS-owned-and-operated markets, marking a technical advancement in broadcast TV, according to ViacomCBS. Addressable advertising refers to the ability to target and deliver messages down to a household level. 

It has long been the goal of the industry to light up national inventory to be addressable-enabled. Currently, only the two minutes of ad inventory per hour sold by cable operators is typically available to be bought addressably. 

“While cable networks have been addressable for years, addressable national broadcast has remained technically unreachable until now,” Mike Dean, senior VP of advanced advertising at ViacomCBS said in a statement. ViacomCBS can now combine “the reach of national broadcast with the targeted relevance of household addressable.”

A CBS broadcast can now include a “marker” that will tell a Dish set-top box when to play targeted advertisements. The set-top box downloads the targeted ads beforehand and makes them ready for the marker signal. The national broadcast will play its uninterrupted set of advertisements if the set-top box has no targeted ads.

The technology uses marker signals from Adcuratio, with set-top box technology from Invidi. Dean says the tech test was done for a subset of ViacomCBS’s market, but the company has plans to roll out the technology in the future. He declined to give specifics about the release.

Dean says despite the rise of cord-cutters and a move to online streaming, the test will help reach an important TV audience. “This has been the one tranche of inventory that has been technically unreachable until now. We want to bring this to television in all forms.”