In November 2019, ITV announced Planet V, a platform enabling data-driven buying, optimization and monitoring of ads on ITV Hub, the multi-platform app through which viewers can watch catch-up and live ITV shows.

Whilst the system has been in the market, it reportedly has not been fully operational.

In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts, Rhys McLachlan, ITV’s director of advanced advertising, says Planet V is now ready for prime-time.

“Over the quarter four of 2020, we’ll be rolling this out to all our agency partners,” McLachlan says. “We’ve got agency partners lined up to get hands on keyboards imminently, and we’re very excited about that as a seminal moment in the transformation of ITV.”

Regaining control

So, what is Planet V? It is a mechanism for buying ads in ITV Hub, the viewing platform which ITV operates across devices. The system is run by software ITV has licensed from Amobee, exclusively so in the UK and Ireland.

To target viewers, advertisers can use ITV’s own data on registered ITV Hub users or bring their own data. ITV Hub disclosed 30 million users 12 months ago.

“Planet V represents probably the beginning of our journey in advanced advertising,” McLachlan says.

“The proposition is a response to the market appetite and expectation for more programmatic, more data-led buying, but done in a way that is on our terms. We’re ensuring that we’ve maintained sovereignty of the entirety of the value chain.”

McLachlan joined ITV earlier this year after several years at Videology, including Amobee, which had acquired Videology.

Planet V includes a supply-side platform, demand-side platform, data management platform – all of which means tight alignment which buying manifests ad agency buyers will use, McLachlan says.

Behind ‘Planet V’: Amobee’s Jamboretz On Powering ITV’s VOD Ad Sales

Open to all

At the time of announcement, ITV’s Planet V was notable for operating only within ITV’s footprint, at a time when many other UK broadcasters were partnering on addressable ad solutions.

Sky’s pioneering AdSmart solution has become popular, signing a deal to power rival cable platform Virgin Media’s target VOD ads as well as deals to addressable-enable ads for broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 on those platforms.

But ITV is a powerhouse in its own right, and McLachlan suggests partnerships are coming.

“There’s a relatively well-known public statement, an invitation that we’ve extended to the other broadcasters and premium publishers in the market to participate in Planet V,” he tells Beet.TV.

“I can share that we have well-developed lines of dialogue with a number of parties in this space. And we’re optimistic that, come quarter one of ’21, that there will be a number of partners operating within the platform alongside ourselves.

“There are well-established lines of communication between ourselves and the other broadcasters regarding other areas of collaboration which we need to be consolidating around, to ensure that we are presenting one unified voice to the market that will enable us all to thrive and prosper.”

ITV hires Rhys McLachlan as director of advanced advertisinghttps://t.co/eQrKdO5FSC pic.twitter.com/QbgrWZ6pW0

— Mediatel News (@MediatelNews) March 5, 2020

Data matching

Leveraging Amobee to build its addressable advertising future is not the only such ad-tech partnership ITV has made.

This summer, it invested £1 million for a minority stake in InfoSum, whose technology helps publishers and brands combine audience data in a “clean” way, without sharing it, to build stronger targetable audience profiles.

“InfoSum was selected after a rigorous RFI process to be the partner that we will be working with to extensively develop our data proposition and to enable us to create utility in our data to match it with data from other parties to create really detailed customer audience segments,” McLachlan says.

“We’ve developed a solution which will enable us to work with advertising customers to match data sets and bring those data sets on onto Planet V for the purposes of targeting and buying.”

ITV picks InfoSum to 'blend' audience data ahead of Planet V launch https://t.co/kPsIEcBVVw via @campaignmag

— Simpatico PR (@simpaticopr) September 3, 2020

The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced “Planet V” at ITV Palooza, a celebrity-filled, advertiser-facing event in the mould of the US TV upfronts showcases, in London on Tuesday.

Planet V, powered by Amobee, enables buying, optimization and monitoring of ads bought on ITV Hub, the multi-platform app through which viewers can watch catch-up and live ITV shows.

Advertisers can use ITV’s own data on 30 million registered ITV Hub users or bring their own data.

“(ITV) realized that, technologically, they were going to be relying upon third party vendors,” said Ryan Jamboretz, Amobee chief development officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV back in June. “It was important for them to actually take some ownership and control. We are working with them very closely to develop what will be their stack.”

Cheeky Piers Morgan photobombs Holly Willoughby at ITV's glitzy Paloozahttps://t.co/hcxqkTFj1v pic.twitter.com/vuFJ37Gt1c

— Mirror Celeb (@MirrorCeleb) November 12, 2019

AdSmart Gearing up

ITV’s move comes in a quickly developing UK market.

Satellite platform Sky has pioneered UK addressable TV delivery with its AdSmart since 2014, beginning by swapping out ads stored on its TV set-top box. AdSmart is now becoming an agreed-upon UK standard of sorts, signing a deal to power rival cable platform Virgin Media’s target VOD ads as well as deals to addressable-enable ads for broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 on those platforms.

This week, Sky signed a technology deal with the BBC, whose UK broadcasts are not allowed to carry advertising, through which AdSmart will nevertheless power personalized BBC show recommendations in the form of video trailers.

Planet V will work with digitally-delivered programming and ads, not linear non-digital broadcasts.

Say what?#itvpalooza pic.twitter.com/qPCRLi5CGQ

— Susan McLellan (@Speedqueenie) November 12, 2019

Going it alone?

A growing collection of partnerships between rivals in both the US and UK is currently aimed at amassing greater audience scale for addressable TV. That is a response to what has become the many fragmented islands of addressable opportunities.

However, ITV – which, beside the ITV Hub software, does not own its own distribution platform as Sky does – is breaking away from the pack of main UK broadcasters by not throwing in its lot with Sky’s AdSmart.

Of those broadcasters, it arguably is in the best position to do so. ITV is the UK’s largest commercial broadcast network – regulated as a public service broadcaster but, unlike the BBC, funded by advertising.

With shows like The X Factor, Downton Abbey and Coronation Street, its inventory is still a huge draw for advertisers trying to reach large audiences.

ITV says it is “extending an open invitation to any other broadcaster to join the platform”.

ITV has been searching for a paid VOD business model to bolster its historic advertising reliance.

Now it is taking that ability up a notch, with a two-way partnership with an ad-tech platform helping it go one step farther.

The broadcaster, which airs Downton Abbey and Coronation Street in the UK, recently picked Amobee as the platform through which it will distribute its digital ad inventory.

The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on its VOD catch-up service, the ITV Hub.

“We’re seeing increased demand for more addressability … the ability to really target individual viewers based on the data we have on those viewers,” says Steve Bignell, ITV advanced advertising director, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We’ve got 29 million registered users on the ITV Hub and we collect a lot of data about themselves, about their consumption behavior, and we can allow advertisers to target those people really granularly within our content.”

Bignell says the deal with Amobee is a “pretty unique partnership”.

“It’s going to really drive .. programmatic enablement …  ease of (ad) purchase,” he says. “It’s about enabling our buyers, be those media agencies or clients, to easily be able to access the fantastic inventory that we have on the ITV Hub.

“The Amobee ad stack really helps us to bring up the data we have at ITV, the pretty unique first party data we have. Bringing that to bear, again, easily for our advertisers.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee.  For more videos from the series, visit this page.  To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

“We saw early on the continued growth of connected TV and OTT supply and obviously it continues to increase dramatically,” the SVP of Data & Client Strategy says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.

“But the need to think about that supply in an addressable format really wasn’t available until Tru Optik came to marketplace bringing data assets and appending attributes to an IP address.”

Amobee’s integration with Tru Optik included the ability to do addressable targeting across connected TV but also support opt out, “which was a key factor around privacy and the needs for us to support a single opt out across all video devices.

“It wasn’t until our integration with TO that we really were able to start powering addressable powering across OTT and connected TV supply. It’s very much needed,” Schleider says.

One result was an increase of brands wanting to access that supply. Some weren’t going in that direction because in the digital world brands were used to being addressable on digital video and on mobile video and display.

“And so they really didn’t think about connected TV, OTT as an option until the addressable aspects really started growing and the ability to target against that supply became more available.”

As soon as that addressable targeting became available, “we found more brands adopting those channels because they could frequently cap and they use first- and third-party data to reach audiences on the big screen in an addressable format,” Schleider says.

Because of limited addressable linear TV across MVPD’s, “connected TV really filled a gap in the addressable linear side because of the IP-based capabilities that Tru Optik helped bring to marketplace.”

Meanwhile, Amobee has been quite active overseas. A week ago ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on the ITV Hub. According to a news release, it will enable ITV to launch a new, fully programmatic, premium advanced advertising platform giving advertisers complete control over the purchasing of their campaigns across ITV’s premium VOD service, the ITV Hub.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, commercial content director Gary Knight cautions against getting “obsessed” by addressable TV advertising.

“There’s an element of personalisation that’s good for the ecosystem,” Knight says. “But the good old-fashioned mass targeting … is something we also want. That needs to exist alongside this obsession with big data. It needs to be a balanced ecosystem.”

Sixty-year-old ITV broadcasts over both terrestrial Freeview and satellite and cable pay-TV, and owns a growing production capability of its own.

Certainly, Knight – an ITV veteran who runs broadcast sponsorships and relations with advertisers and agencies for content partnerships – wants to capture first-party data about his viewers. But, without owning the underlying broadcast infrastructure, ITV has no way to know who its linear viewers really are.

That’s why ITV is starting online, recently renaming its ITV Player catch-up TV service as “ITV Hub“, claiming 12.5 million user registrations.

But Knight is so far frustrated with promises made by advertising technology.

“Every time you plug in a system that helps you with better advertising … you hit these technology roadblocks,” he says. “There are enormous costs of being able to achieve this nirvana. I’m not certain when it will ever get there.

For the app for “Britain’s Got Talent” app, he says that while there were some 750,000 downloads and there have been millions of “buzzer” actions, the app is currently being used by just about 12,000.

Also in this session, Daglish speaks about the marketplace for television via digital devices, the emergence of mobile video and its ad load which is lower that television and other topics.