But, for over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV), lockdown looks like being a catalyst.
Not only have OTT services seen a big uptick in consumption during the period, but the whole ecosystem appears to have come together to improve the tools available for advertising placement and monetization.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Esra Bacher, Managing Partner and Programmatic Investment Lead at GroupM, the world’s biggest media-buying agency, says the group has lobbied ad-tech platforms for technology improvements – and has emerged with a richer toolset.
Growth during pandemic
“CTV has been going through a very interesting time especially during the current events caused by COVID-19,” she says.
“I believe that the current conditions are going to be quite favourable in shaping the future of TV.
“We have been very vocal about our needs and challenges when it comes to programmatic CTV activation.
“During this time, we have seen some great enhancements that are being offered by both the SSPs, DSPs and the publishers. They have listened to our concerns and have built some tools, some products that are facilitating the programmatic activation of CTV media.”
New tricks
Bacher says recent platform improvements include:
- reach and frequency reporting
- audience-based inventory
- enriched data partnerships with deeper audience insights
- automatic content recognition (ACR) integrations for true understanding of viewer behaviour
Still, Bacher says an “ideal” is for them to ingest TV schedules so that ad buyers like GroupM can have a true insight into audiences’ real behavior.
Publishers ’embrace’ programmatic TV
EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion. That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
GroupM’s Bacher says the tech improvements from SSPs and DSPs are encouraging media owners to make more inventory available to buy through programmatic mechanisms, increasing the scale available to buyers.
Together with the recent explosion in actual OTT TV consumption during the pandemic, it all appears to add up to a vastly increased opportunity.
But Bacher says she wants to be able to deduplicate – or distinguish between – TV viewing carried out through OTT and that carried out through linear, in order to better understand cause and effect.
The fragmentation of viewing options and diversity of ad placement requirements will continue to pose a problem, Bacher says. Next up, she would like to see “standardization” in the market.
]]>Traditional linear TV ads typically target mass demographic groups and offer little in the way of measurement to truly discern return on investment.
By contrast, the new wave of advertising-supported over-the-top (OTT) TV services is trying to make hay during the crisis.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jeff Quandt, head of programmatic partnerships at Pluto TV, one such service, says he is noticing an uptick.
New buyers emerge
“We’ve really seen things start to accelerate, especially in this work-from-home period that we’ve been in now for a couple of month,” Quandt says.
“We’re starting to see a lot more of the TV buyers come into the marketplace, really complimenting the digital buyers that we’ve seen buying Pluto for the last couple of years.”
Pluto was acquired by Viacom for $340 million in 2019. And, unlike conventional virtual MVPDs, Pluto does not simply retransmit providers’ channels, nor make their shows available as VOD – it curates their shows in to linear feeds. That means it can manage its own ad inventory in between.
Quandt says Pluto TV uses a range of ad selling options:
- Direct sales to brands themselves, representing the majority of deals.
- Setting up curated marketplaces with other similar publishers to extend the reachable audiences.
New bidding tech
Next up, Quandt hopes to benefit from header bidding, a technology that online publishers have been using to maximize their ad sales revenue and which is now emerging into the OTT space.
“It’s something that we’re very excited for it,’ he explains. “It’s going to open a lot of doors to us as well as buyers, I think in the really short term here as the technology really starts to grow.”
In header bidding, a publisher’s ad systems can entertain bids from multiple sources simultaneously, thereby increasing sight of best bids all at the same time, an improvement on the traditional “waterfall” sequence.
Head of steam
But Quandt is still hoping that technical barriers which have made it difficult for header bidding to operate in video and TV can be surmounted.
“It’s still starting to take off in the CTV space,” he says. “There’s some complexities around how we call ads and build our ad streams. Some ad serving technology is built for that, some is not.
“For us to deliver a fully optimised ad pod back to a viewer, we’ve been talking with a number of folks in this space, giving our wishlist.
“It’s somewhere where we see a lot of potential just based on current technology limitations around opening the inventory up to more buyers.”
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>But could the technology also be a boon for buyers?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the director of ad platforms at one of the two leading over-the-top TV device conduits says it could be.
Both sides benefit
“Header bidding is probably a good solution for both the buy side and sell side,” says Roku’s Youssef Ben-Youssef.
- “On the buy side, an agency or a DSP will be able to access a lot of inventory, improve their reach and reduce the fact that they have to reach out to each publisher and build the relationship with them before accessing that inventory.
- “On the supply side, this is one tool to help publishers sell their inventory in an efficient fashion and access a lot of demand that potentially they don’t have access to today.”
Ben-Youssef was speaking after PubMatic, an ad-tech platform vendor launched OpenWrap OTT, its header bidding solution for over-the-top TV services.
He acknowledges that header bidding, when applied to real-time TV, poses challenges on overcoming latency issues – the kinds of challenge that such vendors are having to tackle.
Rocking Roku
Ben-Youssef’s Roku leads the pack when it comes to share of the over-the-top (OTT) TV stick and box market, according to 2019 data from TDG and Strategy Analytics.
But Roku these days isn’t just a gateway to TV for other publishers and their advertising customers.
That deployment lead has given Roku an advantageous position both a direct ad sales house and a middleman.
The company made $742 million in advertising and commission in 2019.
The outfit holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Last year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.
Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.
Roku also operates a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.
All-in on programmatic
Roku previously acquired dataxu, a demand-side ad-buying platform, for $150 million, and then relaunched it as “OneView“.
“The OneView DSP will allow advertisers and agencies to reach the Roku households, about 39.8 million active accounts today,” Ben-Youssef says.
“Thanks to the awesome device graph that we have on the DSP, you can extend that reach actually to 105 million households through executing an omnichannel platform campaign.
“We understood from the beginning that all ads eventually will be running through programmatic.
“We sell our inventory in the programmatic entity fashion, also in PMP fashion. We do not sell our inventory in the open exchange and I talk a lot to publishers on our platform.”
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>Via as many channels as possible, automatically – but with a high degree of business control.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bill Murray, Vice President, Programmatic Revenue and Ad Products at Discovery Inc, explains how the company is working with ad platforms in a range of different ways to maximize value from its inventory.
Toward guarantees
“With very few exceptions, we make all of our inventory available programmatically,” Murray says.
“We work with multiple SSP (supply-side platform) partners so that our advertising partners are able to transact through whatever DSPs (demand-side platforms) they like.
“Programmatic-guaranteed is increasingly a sales channel that is being leveraged by our advertising partners. It provides them with the ability to obviously leverage the technology and reporting and such that they’re able to get from the programmatic channel, but maintain that familiarity that they have from their traditional buying.”
Whilst programmatic trading techniques initially emerged in open-auction ad markets, lately the industry has begun using programmatic “pipes” but with tighter business rules, often allowing only pre-specified parties to enter into trading relationships and with mandated price rules.
Programmatic-guaranteed is the process through which ad buyers agree to buy a fixed number of impressions for a guaranteed price.
Programmatic uptake
Discovery has kicked open auctions into touch, believing its “premium” content, coupled with advertiser demand, mean it is more valuable to do direct deals with ad buyers, even though they are often facilitated through automated, programmatic technology.
It’s not that Discovery doesn’t still do direct ad sales. Murray says content like premiers and exclusive content sponsorships are still cooked up manually. But everything else is done programmatically.
“It’s made more sense for us right now to participate in either one-to-one private marketplace deals or programmatic guaranteed deals with advertisers,” he says.
“We do have some private marketplace deals with DSPs, specific DSPs, the numbers very few.
Supply-side symbiosis
As Discovery leans on SSPs to take its inventory to market, Murray says it works best when both the platforms and his company are in harmony.
“The best practises (and) the most important partnerships that we have with SSPs, they’re ones where we create, combine roadmaps, where we are pushing each other to advance this marketplace,” he explains.
“There are partnerships where, when we have an operational problem, we can call them and they almost advise us and vice versa. We do the same for them.”
‘SSPs are extensions of our organization’
But the level of working-together that Murray is describing now goes beyond mere “partnership”.
“We’ve gotten past the point where they’re just entry points into our inventory,” he explains. “They’re truly strategic partners.
“They’re almost technology arms of our organisation. And, in a lot of cases, they view us similarly as partners for them to build new products and to test them and put them out into the broader market.
“I would say that we have weekly meetings with them. We generally have quarterly business reviews with them or future quarter planning sessions with them. They’re there. We consider them an extension of our organization.”
Ahead with header bidding
Now Murray wants Discovery to benefit from a technology that has already revolutionized the ad rates that publishers can get from digital display.
Header bidding, through which platforms can let publishers entertain ad bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, so as to get best bids all at once, is making the leap from the web and mobile to the living room, via connected TV.
Murray says that’s “inevitable” and “necessary”. “The evolution of OTT in the near future I think it will be interesting for organizations like Discovery,” he says.
“I think that there is an opportunity for increasingly marketers to try to access our audiences and to determine specifically which ones they’re interested in and when they’re associated with what content.”
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>In recent years, display advertising has been revolutionized by the technique, which sees ad auction systems able to entertain bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, thereby increasing publishers’ yield.
But header bidding has been slower to arrive in video thanks to issues like latency and vendor compatibility.
A growing number of vendors has found a way to offer the technology in video environments. And now they are even overcoming the challenges to rolling it out to connected TV.
Head of steam building
“Header bidding will allow hundreds of advertisers to compete for the same ad slot inside an ad pod. You need to make good decisions within seconds. The waterfall won’t work.” More from our Jeff Lee on future proofing the advanced TV ecosystem: https://t.co/Lb9zYI6CmL
— PubMatic (@PubMatic) July 15, 2020
“Traditionally, the OTT inventory has been very segmented,” says Mike Chowla, senior director of product management at PubMatic.
“You’ve got different providers, it’s in a waterfall (ad bidding sequence). And, if you’re trying to find your audience, that can make it difficult.
“Header bidding on the web opened it up to make it much easier for buyers to find that their audience and it’s going to do the same thing on OTT.”
PubMatic is an ad-tech vendor that just released OpenWrap OTT, its header bidding solution for over-the-top TV services.
Enabling agility
Based off the Prebid open-source header bidding technology that has been so popular in recent years, OpenWrap OTT is a new attempt to inject programmatic, real-time, digital ad auctions into a TV world that, historically, has preferred manual, upfront deals.
In recent weeks, we have many TV ad buyers pivot away from upfront commitments, preferring agile strategies, after the COVID-19 pandemic reduced businesses’ marketing visibility.
Some feel programmatic ad selling could give them that agility, whilst header bidding could help publishers, which have suffered large-scale ad rate drop-offs, maximize their revenue.
EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.
That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Fitting to TV
“Header bidding sees all the inventory and that inventory goes to DSPs and those DSPs get that opportunity to bid on it,” adds Chowla.
“If they need a particular audience, then they figure out what bid price they need to get it. That really wasn’t possible before because they might not be able to see the inventory since it’s getting waterfalled and going through different supply paths.”
Chowla concedes that bringing header bidding to television was not easy. Just as the technology required changes and workarounds to fit digital video, it needed a fresh approach in arriving on TV.
“It’s (about) giving you that TV-like experience,” he says. “There’s certain expectations that publishers in that space have that you’re able to do things like competitive separation and build ad pods that give that commercial break experience.”
Kidoodle.TV, Limpid, Glewed TV, IPG and MediaMath have signed up to use OpenWrap OTT.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>But where, once, TV was relatively straightforward to buy, how are agencies how approaching the proliferating platforms, opportunities and challenges?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Beth Weeks, VP and director of media at Digitas North America, explains.
Standardization sought
Weeks says she hopes the industry can begin to standardize some fo the many ways that are emerging through which agencies can buy ads in connected TV platforms.
Where, once, TV was a largely self-contained medium, with few operators and few places from which to buy advertising, now there is a plethora of services.
Weeks wants a solution.
“We know, as we like to continue to innovate and layer on, let’s say first or third party data against guaranteed audiences, there really is a unique opportunity to standardise the supply and the CTV space to make that a more unified approach,” she says.
“So we’re really working closely with our SSP and DSP partners to find opportunities to do that.”
Guarantees encourage buyers
Weeks says programmatic-guaranteed, the process through which ad buyers agree to buy a fixed number of impressions for a guaranteed price, can work well in connected TV.
“Whether that be with guaranteed opportunities or non-guaranteed auction based bidding, both really represent a great opportunity for our advertisers to access this premium, big screen inventory in a more automated way,” she says.
“We’ve seen this big sort of AVOD viewing. Fortunately it’s no longer just the Hulus and YouTubes of the world.
“But accessing that inventory really requires a great partnership with the SSPs as well as the DSPs … to be able to transact from a programmatic guaranteed perspective.”
Header bidding opens new opportunities
Weeks thinks header bidding, a software technique which sees ad auction systems able to entertain bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, thereby increasing publishers’ yield, can also work for ad buyers.
Header Bidding Can Redefine OTT Ad Sales: PubMatic’s Berlingo
“We’re eager and open from a buying perspective to see how header bidding will enhance CTV,” she says.
“We think it will help with monetizing that ad that full ad pod, which can open up that supply, which is especially beneficial as we look to continue to layer on first or third party and different data sources.
“But one thing to be cautious of is we know that the CTV space certainly has some technological limitations that are different than desktop and display. So it will be really interesting to see how header bidding will be able to navigate some of those challenges of the CTV space.”
Watching fraud concerns
Despite the opportunities, Digitas’ Weeks is keeping a watching brief on the possibility that ad fraud, which has so plagued the display and even digital video advertising environments, could yet manifest on TVs in the living room.
DoubleVerify, an ad fraud detector, recently told Beet.TV it had noted a 161% increase in fraudulent impressions on connected TV from January to April of this year versus last year.
Three Ways Connected TV Ad Fraud Is ‘Swelling’: DoubleVerify’s Ross
That’s after a study for the ANA last year pegged the problem at $5.8 billion globally.
“Where money flows, fraudsters tend to like to try and capture on that inventory,” Weeks warns.
“So I think it’ll be critical for us to work with our brand safety verification partners to really continue to figure out ways to be monitoring and identifying and preventing that fraud from happening.”
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>After a decade in which so much display ad inventory was traded through open programmatic exchanges, the emergence of connected, over-the-top (OTT) TV ads is coming with a key difference – broadcasters want to stay in control of the ads they sell.
But that doesn’t mean they want to continue selling ads through traditional direct-sold insertion orders.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Fisher, SVP of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a GroupM media agency, says supply-side platforms (SSPs) are becoming pivotal.
In control
“I truly believe that OTT is one of the safest forms of digital video that you can be buying programmatically,” Fisher says. “True television streaming content, that’s still sold directly by the end seller.
“We increasingly see our clients buy from who they’re comfortable buying from – the NBCs, the Viacoms, the Discoverys, the Hulus, the Comcasts of the world.
“Even though they’re executing it via programmatic pipes. They’re not buying in open auction because there’s really none of this inventory being made available inside of an open auction environment.”
Many of the networks Fisher mentioned have tooled-up with their own initiatives and platforms to sell ads. But many also want to use supply-side platforms to carve out private marketplaces or enable guaranteed deals.
SSPs in focus
Congratulations to @essenceglobal who was crowned #CampaignTechAwards 2020 Agency of the Year and to @kineticwwUK, @MediaComGlobal, @mindshare, @Ogilvy, @WavemakerGlobal who also scooped awards
@Campaignmag https://t.co/pOfMv1oKmD
— WPP (@WPP) June 26, 2020
“The SSPs have a really unique role in this space,” adds Fisher. “They’re not just a pipe for the publishers anymore, in order to get access to the buy side.
“They’re really also providing yield management, unified ad decisioning, server-side ad insertion, the ability to better manage a pod or an ad load, to more mirror television.
“That really becomes important as buyers look to migrate their linear TV budgets to streaming. As they look to say, ‘I still want to maintain competitive separation inside the (ad) pod’, or frequency rules that you would normally put in place with a direct buy.
“It’s really up to the SSP to develop the technologies that allow the publishers to do that.”
Evolving the SSP
By the same token, SSP vendors have to work hard to give publishers tools in a world where more of them want to take more control of their business and software.
They need to shake off the perception that the category still lingers in the older, open-auction programmatic world, where they facilitated long-tail, less-than-premium ads.
That is not something the TV industry is going to stand for.
So off-shoots like private marketplaces, which help publishers govern whom they trade with, may help assuage concerns.
Three tiers of viewing
COVID-19 has forced people to find new ways to do old things. It's also catalyzed entirely new behaviors as well. Sarah Walker, Global Chief Business Strategy Officer, outlines how to identify and respond to both replacement and displacement behaviors: https://t.co/gsDg9Ab4qT
— Essence (@essenceglobal) June 30, 2020
Either way, Essence’s Fisher thinks the existence of both SVOD and a new wave of advertising-supported video (AVOD) services is settling down into a three-tiered co-existence.
- “The average consumer is going to subscribe to one or two premium SVOD services, (like) Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max,” he says.
- “And then they’re going to fill in the holes with two or three different lower-tier paid services like the on demand portion of Hulu, CBS All Access, or others, which has a lighter ad load, but still ad exposure.
- “And then that’s really where they’re then going to turn to the free ad-supported services like Tubi, Pluto, Xumo.”
Fisher thinks the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing this kind of setup. According to him, consumption has boomed but many networks have struggled to commission new premium programming, leaving lower-tier, library-based content like that offered by AVODs to fill the gaps.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>For example, many now want to sell more than just 30-second spots in sequence, preferring to to sell the whole of a commercial break in one go.
Many also want to break out of the traditional “waterfall” approach to programmatic ad sales.
At the nexus of those two trends, Craig Berlingo sees “header bidding”, which lets publishers entertain multiple buyer bids simultaneously to achieve best prices, as a solution.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the head of OTT and connected TV product strategy at PubMatic, an ad-tech company, says more TV publishers are trying to find higher rates by selling more flexibly.
From spot to pod
“When television started moving over to digital, the first opportunities were looking at each individual ad slot and trying to get the high CPM for it and make sure that you match supply and demand,” Berlingo says.
“Now publishers are looking at the (entire) ad pod. A publisher now wants to fill those 90 seconds in whatever way is best. It could be one big, long 90-second ad.
“It could be 15 six-second ads. But you have to take into account the viewer experience, the value to the advertiser, and then ultimately the entire revenue per the pod.”
Unifying sources
Berlingo was speaking after PubMatic launched OpenWrap OTT, a new product designed to increase efficiency in the new world of connected and over-the-top (OTT) TV ads.
Based off the Prebid open-source header bidding technology that has been so popular in recent years, OpenWrap OTT is a new attempt to inject programmatic, real-time, digital ad auctions into a TV world that, historically, has preferred manual, upfront deals.
In recent weeks, we have seen a new wave of buyer skepticism toward upfront ad sales, after the COVID-19 pandemic reduced businesses’ marketing visibility.
OpenWrap OTT features include trading of ad pods, frequency caps, reduced latency and header bidding.
Header bidding
Berlingo says it has been challenging for publishers to put together a pod of, say, three 30-second ads because each of the likely demand sources may be different, which can sometimes mean the final slot in a pod goes under-filled.
“Their demand is all over the place in a lot of different ad platforms – they might have some campaigns that are in their ad server, other ones that are in an exchange or a relationship with a DSP,” he says.
So OpenWrap OTT aims to unite those demand sources with header bidding, overcoming the traditional “waterfall” approach to entertaining ad bids in order to achieve better prices.
Kidoodle.TV, Limpid, Glewed TV, IPG and MediaMath have signed up to use OpenWrap OTT.
The company says some of the companies have achieved a 7x better performance as a result.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>That is according to one agency exec whose company is rolling up its sleeves.
Header bidding is the technology process through which media owners can entertain bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, rather than in traditional “waterfall”, or sequential, fashion – thereby having sight of best bids all at the same time.
It has come to be influential in display ad sales and, increasingly, in digital video.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jean Fitzpatrick of IPG-owned Kinesso says it is also lighting the way to more connected TV ad transactions.
Head of steam
“Starting to see header bidding breaking into OTT and CTV in a really meaningful way is exciting,” she says.
“It means that that premium inventory isn’t always going to be locked up in direct IOs (insertion orders) because of technical challenges,” she says.
“There’s now an answer to that, which gives us the flexibility to buy an RTB (real-time bidding) scenario in the future or on a direct IO, depending on what the client’s needs are.”
Kinesso is amongst the early users of one such solution, OpenWrap OTT from PubMatic, which combined direct-sold and programmatic ads.
“I think, as header bidding gets into CTV, it’s going to break that open and enable publishers to do yield management the way they manage display, which is really exciting for our clients,” Fitzpatrick adds.
Programmatic TV growing
EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.
That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Technologies like header bidding could grow that slice by making the yield more appealing for programmers to open up.
Rebooting buying
For Fitzpatrick and Kinesso, OTT TV ads and the current global COVID-19 pandemic are converging to redefine how and why such agencies and their clients buy TV ads.
“The way that we were looking at media partners in the past has shifted,” she says.
“Having more options down the line is going to be better since we’re not necessarily buying in the same traditional ways we were in the past.”
She says many brands are looking to new inventory sources, given the migration of viewers from traditional media to subscription video. Connected TV services powered by ads can give them that alternative, she says.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>The CTO of kids online TV service Kidoodle.TV is witnessing amazing growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. And he is installing a stack of ad-tech to benefit.
“We’ve grown over 230% since beginning of March,” Riddell tells Beet.TV in this video interview recorded remotely in Edmonton with Canadian-based media company.
‘Safe streaming’
Based in Canada and available on smart TVs and mobile devices, Kidoodle differs from YouTube, and even from YouTube Kids, in that it offers a hand-picked line-up of kids shows, which parents can then curate further. When you register, you indicate a child’s age and can then enable or disable certain shows.
By comparison, initiating parental controls on a YouTube account is a minefield.
“We have over 21,000 licenced episodes on the service today, available in over 196 countries and territories globally,” Riddell says.
“We have actual human review of all content that airs on the service, whether that be programming content or advertisement content.”
Riddell even says Kidoodle has just signed a deal to acquire more than 92 shorts of Paw Patrol, one of the biggest kids TV shows in the world.
The ad play
So, Kidoodle is taking off. But where’s the monetization?
The service is available free with ads or for $4.99, ad-free. Riddell wants to use the ad-supported offering to offer toy tie-ins.
“We see all of the endemic children brands that you would expect to see with a children’s service, whether that be for movie premieres, for brands like Dreamworks with their recent Trolls release or toys from major toy co’s, like Spin Master with their PAW Patrol lineup, or LEGO or Hasbro or Mattel,” he says.
“But we also have a very large co-viewing audience. One of the things that we promote is family viewing because we do have that connected TV focus. We find that over 96% of the parents or guardians of these children do co-view with their children from time to time, and most often are within earshot of the television and hearing the adverts that are there.
“So, we also see some of that co-viewing advertised to them coming through, whether it be from consumer packaged goods or automotive or travel, really focusing on those family-friendly brands.”
Wash your hands with @pawpatrol
! Catch the full #WashYourHands music video on #KidoodleTV here: https://t.co/Doznx4p9ox #SafeStreaming#PawPatrol #Kids #Streaming #KidsTV #KidsApp #KidTech #KidsEntertainment pic.twitter.com/PeY0VE6pNa
— Kidoodle.TV ® (@kidoodleTV) May 4, 2020
Speed and safety
Kidoodle.TV recently joined Limpid, Glewed TV, IPG and MediaMath in signing up to use OpenWrap OTT, software from ad-tech vendor PubMatic that uses “header bidding” to help publishers get better ad rates.
Header bidding allows them to entertain ad bids from multiple buyer demand sources simultaneously, avoiding the historic “waterfall” or sequential approach, thereby getting sight of best bids all at the same time and – the theory goes – encouraging out-bidding.
Riddell expects Kidoodle to light it up in mid-July. But he is going to have to balance real-time bidding with Kidoodle’s mission to screen ads for kid safety. He trails “some enhancements to our internal creative review process to make it a more real-time system”.
Up next, the service is also talking with TV manufacturers about releasing custom remote controls for children, and releasing 4K and 8K content.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>That is what happens when brands, uncertain about their future prosperity, decide against making hefty upfront ad purchase commitments.
But, in their pursuit, instead, of agility and flexibility, could those brands be accelerating the adoption of programmatically-sold connected TV advertising? Growing murmurs in the industry seem to suggest so.
Earlier this week, Fox Networks Group also told us: “More and more advertisers want to find the exact household demographic that they’re looking for.”
Now, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean Robertson, partnerships director at DISH Media, says programmatic is giving pandemic-era advertisers the control they want.
From commitment to flexibility
“We saw a massive shift in upfront commitments,” he says. “And immediately there was the recognition that, while they weren’t looking for commitment … there was still product to sell. We knew that our partners needed to find audience and needed to have flexibility in placement.
“Walmart and some of the big box stores proved that there was still massive demand while people were staying at home and trying to shelter in place.
“So programmatic video proved to be a great outlet for those ad dollars to secure what would be upfront GRPs. And now that we’re coming out and the country is starting to reopen, I think folks that had been previously adverse to try an OTT products or shifting significant amounts of budget to premium OTT inventory have found that it operates just as well as your traditional video.
“It’s the same thing as television inventory, it’s just transacting in a different way.”
Programmatic ‘windfall’
EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.
That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Ad buyers are getting interested by the ability to target specific audiences or households, the ability to use other data in doing so and the ability
Robertson says the pandemic is provoking an acceleration of the trend.
“It’s really opened us up to a new slew of advertisers and agency partners who may have tried working with us on a trial basis and some who were already committed, they just deepened that level of commitment,” he says. “It’s been a true windfall for us and for our partners.”
Tipping to programmatic
Today, DISH Media announced that its set-top box Video On Demand (VOD) inventory is available for purchase programmatically and in real time. https://t.co/uwvlENuHW7
— DISH Media (@DISHMedia) April 22, 2020
Of course, DISH was already selling TV ads programmatically before the pandemic, including across Sling. In fact, Robertson says 60% of its transactions are now done that way.
The business still sells to agencies via traditional direct insertion orders (IOs), too.
It isn’t just about the transaction method. Connected TV technology allows DISH to offer its advertisers audience targeting and to attribute ad exposures to consumer outcomes.
“Being able to target them is one thing … but being able to actually prove the efficacy of a campaign (is another),” Robertson says. “We’re able to reach auto intenders. (Within) a 60 or 90 day window, we’re able to tell if somebody in that household (who viewed the ad) actually went to a dealership and/or if they actually transacted and bought a vehicle as a result of seeing the campaign.”
Partner selection
The rise of connected TV viewing and the decline of linear TV audiences, all while ad budgets are wrapped in coronavirus-related uncertainty, has both buyers and sellers yearning for flexibility, according to Kevin Arrix ,SVP of Media Sales at @DISHMedia https://t.co/tsvLYneHtL
— DISH Media (@DISHMedia) May 18, 2020
So, how is it done? Robertson says DISH has chosen to work with “a small number” of demand-side and supply-side tech platforms after learning which partners they, in turn, work with.
“Frictionless” integration is the key, he says.
“These decisions are being made in real-time – execution in real-time and feedback in real-time are all part of that cycle,” Robertson adds.
“So that’s really where video has had to mature and evolve and really catch up to our digital partners in the marketplace. So the expectation is that you make your video inventory as digital as possible.”
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>But ad agencies are now enjoying recent developments which are widening both of those apertures – audience breadth and geographic scale.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matthew Kramer, Managing Director, Advanced Advertising at Omnicom Media Group, describes the trends and technologies he sees presenting a wider opportunity when it comes to audience-targeted TV ads.
Trends evolving
Age: “Even when we look at 50+ or 65+ (Nielsen demographics), they’re already watching upwards to eight hours per week of OTT. We’re seeing that even the adoption among the older demographics is starting to happen.”
Breadth: “Having everyone stuck at home and isolating has increased adoption (and) the amount of time people are spending with OTT. Where they might have been people who (only watch) Netflix, YouTube or Hulu, the big players, they’re now starting to delve into less popular apps (like) Tubi, Pluto, Vudu and Crackle. We are seeing a massive increase in those impressions.”
Technology: “Device ID graphs and household graphs are getting strong enough that we can actually start buying audiences within the space.”
Programmatic growth
EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.
That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Ad buyers are getting interested by the ability to target specific audiences or households.
OMG’s Kramer wants to take the opportunity to gain a detailed view of all the channels through which clients’ ads are placed, including frequency-capping ad exposures across those channels.
National addressable
Next up, OMG is looking forward to buying TV ads addressably at the national level, by participating in beta testing with Project OAR, the consortium kickstarted by VIZIO’s Inscape.
“The ability to start inserting household addressable ads within the national pod … is very different from what we’ve had for household addressable, where we’ve mainly worked with the MVPDs or the cable operators … where you’re inserted into local pods,” Kramer says.
“For a lot of national advertisers who have been concerned about some of the environments that you can be in within the local pods, having access to national pods, I think, is going to be very exciting.
“And so we certainly want to be part of that pilot testing, which is going to be happening, I believe at the end of the summer. That conversation has already started.”
In doing so, Kramer wants to work with both supply-side platforms (SSPs) and publishers on decision-making.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>In recent weeks, we have heard from several executives who have suggested ad buyers are moving further down the marketing funnel, looking to improve the efficiency of their spend by finding more likely leads.
“With the quarantine that we’ve all experienced … you’re finding buyers becoming smarter about how they target folks,” says Darren Sherriff, VP of ad tech solutions at Fox Networks Group.
“The ‘spray-and-pray and hope you find your right customers’ methodology or mantra, I think, is going to the wayside. What we’re seeing is more and more advertisers want to find the exact household demographic that they’re looking for.
“They’re layering data, they’re bringing their own data, or they’re bringing third-party data of potential customers that they’re trying to target.”
More effectiveness sought
Google’s net US digital ad revenues will drop 5.3% to $39.58 billion by the end of 2020: https://t.co/zAhJwzfuB2 pic.twitter.com/aF46JwNh2d
— eMarketer (@eMarketer) June 25, 2020
EMarketer has revised-down its 2020 US digital ad spending forecast from a 17% growth to just 1.7%, with TV ad spend declining at double-digit rates.
There are also forecasts of big job losses at ad agencies, as some brands pull some of their ad-buying duties in-house.
Across the industry, companies are looking to wring more effectiveness out of their activities.
In advertising, that may mean less emphasis on brand-building and more on data-driven targeting to reach in-market consumers.
Warm targets
“There’s been an increase in the amount of data trying to be used and that they’re bringing to deals,” Sherriff adds.
“Some of the advertiser budgets who have declined and have essentially got hit hard with the COVID crisis, travel, autos, things that essentially were big purchases and sometimes luxury purchases… those buyers are going to now strictly target the folks that they know that have the disposable income who are still looking to travel, are still looking to make those big purchases, rather than just essentially hit a broad demographic,” he says.
Efforts to help buyers buy the way they want to buy are crucial if the evolving TV industry is to arrest anticipated decline.
EMarketer expects 2020 first-half US TV ad spending will have declined by up to 29.3%. Before the pandemic, it had expected a 2% increase.
The growing amount of TV consumed via internet-connected devices gives broadcasters a shot at presenting advertisers with the precise audiences they are looking for.
Provide evidence
Brands are also asking for new levels of measurement and analytics stats, in a bid to prove the effectiveness,” Sherriff says.
“We’ve seen more and more advertisers looking to measure in an aggregate fashion across their entire programmatic buy.
“We’re getting requests to support measurement studies. We’re getting requests to support sort of more robust delivery reporting, indicating where their campaigns ran, on what content, et cetera.”
Fox Networks Group is having to navigate CCPA and other regulations to figure out what audience data it can supply in response to the requests.
SSP shuffle
The Fox unit is selling digital linear TV ad inventory through a supply-side platform (SSP) marketplace, but is increasingly letting digital programmatic inventory compete with direct-sold ad space, because tools like programmatic-guaranteed afford greater control.
Sherriff says he started out by having many SSPs plugged into Fox’s inventory.
Over the last two years, however, he has consolidated around “a few key partners” whose technology has evolved to use OpenRTB, audience data and other features.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>That’s the view of one ad-tech executive trying to bring about the change.
“In the world we’re living in today, where you have parallel auctions, header bidding, millions of QPS in real time, I don’t see there being a need for ad serving in the new world of television, which is technically going to become advanced TV, OTT and CTV, because the logic sits within the server-side ad insertion companies,” says Jonas Olsen, VP of video for PubMatic.
“So I strongly believe that traditional ad serving as you know it, will kind of slowly fade away for the next 12 to 18 months.”
"What will matter most is that publishers are flexible in early agreements with advertisers to meet their measurement needs." Discover more OTT insights from Jonas Olsen, our VP of Video: https://t.co/ynztoSivPp
— PubMatic (@PubMatic) June 25, 2020
Header bidding for OTT
Olsen was speaking after PubMatic, a maker of programmatic online ad trading solutions, launched a new product designed to increase efficiency in the new world of connected and over-the-top (OTT) TV ads. OpenWrap OTT features include:
- Header bidding, which lets publishers entertain multiple buyer bids simultaneously to achieve best prices.
- Allows trading of entire ad pods, not just individual spots.
- Frequency caps.
- Server-side provision to reduce latency of ad delivery to screens.
Based off the Prebid open-source header bidding technology that has been so popular in recent years, OpenWrap OTT is a new attempt to inject programmatic, real-time, digital ad auctions into a TV world that, historically, has preferred manual, upfront deals.
But, in recent weeks, we have seen a new wave of buyer skepticism toward upfront ad sales, after the COVID-19 pandemic reduced businesses’ marketing visibility. Now “agility” is the watchword, and PubMatic hopes to give them that.
“This is how television is going to be bought and sold in the future,” Jonas Olsen, our VP of Video, says about OpenWrap OTT, our new Prebid-powered header bidding solution. Learn more via @Adweek: https://t.co/g0Bblnmlkf
— PubMatic (@PubMatic) June 17, 2020
Experience for TV
“We have seen, so far, in the product with several publishers, that all the way to 6x, almost 7X, increase in performance for publishers by adopting our technology,” Olsen says.
Kidoodle.TV, Limpid, Glewed TV, IPG and MediaMath have signed up to use OpenWrap OTT.
As an #AVOD modelled streaming service, we bring value to our users by having a viewer friendly experience paired with optimized header bidding for our ad clients with @PubMatic.#KidoodleTV #SafeStreaming #Advertising #VOD #TechNews #Tech #TechTwitterhttps://t.co/GZTWLnjLJT
— Kidoodle.TV ® (@kidoodleTV) June 22, 2020
TV publishers can benefit from header bidding, a technology which aims to coral ad buyer bids at the same time, rather than sequentially, in order to uncover best bids.
Olsen likens it prospecting for a future spouse by talking with a hundred people at the same time, rather than one at a time.
“In a header bidding scenario or a unified auction, everyone is competing in real time against all of the inventory,” he says. “You can have unified and simultaneous auctions going on, meaning reducing latency and creating that speed that we need to create that TV like experience.
Olsen says maintaining the experience at traditional-TV levels, however, is critical.
“You don’t want to things like buffering and repetitive ads in a TV like experience,” he says. “Everyone wants to create that perfect user experience because CTV and OTT, it is a TV-like experience.”
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
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