SpotX says the elections for president, House Of Representatives and Senate is a watershed for the channels.
Previous elections have been called, if crudely, “the first internet election” or “the first social media election”.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, SpotX’s Allan Welch says November 2020 is “the election of OTT and CTV”.
“A lot of political advertisers have really begin to understand the power of CTV and OTT,” Welch says. He describes five main driving factors.
“A lot more streaming platforms that are ad-supported have been being developed and released for consumers,” Welch says. “That’s been really helping political advertisers understand the power of where they can reach their voters again.”
“(They are) using their data and using their information to find their voters where they are,” Welch says. “It’s been traditionally news publishers, news sites, news, media or owners that they’re interested in working with because that’s really where the most interested voters will be. But (now) it could be on any publisher. Sports is very popular (for campaigns). ”
SpotX’s Welch says connected TV advertising is no longer just being used by campaign advertisers when traditional TV inventory runs out, as has historically been the case. “Now it’s going to become an integral part of their actual media buy from the very beginning,” he says.
Facebook’s decision to cut off political ads a week before the election is causing some campaigns to switch to advanced TV. “Talking to our clients, we have seen some movement of budgets over to CTV and OTT,” says Welch. He thinks some of that spending is coming from many ad buyers switching video ads from social media to CTV.
Whilst COVID-19 is a societal health crisis that has also robbed TV networks of spend from newly-averse brands, for those which can provide effective audience targeting, the US election comes as blessed relief. Welch says the use of CTV ad targeting for the election has been bolstered by enhanced viewing thanks to stay-at-home measures. According to Nielsen, streaming grew to more than 25% of total TV minutes viewed in the second quarter of 2020 alone, compared to 19% in the fourth quarter of 2019.
]]>But, slowly but surely, fraudsters are following the money to the booming OTT TV landscape.
So ad-trading platforms are plugging in fraud-fighting software in a bid to eradicate the problem before it smothers the nascent opportunity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nick Frizzell, Vice President of Inventory Quality and Planning at video and connected TV (CTV) ad platform SpotX, describes the trend.
“CTV is an emerging medium. There’s always going to be little nuances or technical details that we’re catching up on. Some of the industry initiatives like Ads.txt are not as widely adopted.
“There’s also bad actors out there that are trying to garner that media-spend away from legitimate actors. Bad actors always follow the money, and CTV is definitely where the money is heading.”
What do viewers think of the streaming wars? Unsurprisingly, they want access to content without increasing cost. Get the full details in our latest blog post. https://t.co/PSc4r8WvPX
— Nick Frizzell (@NickFrizzell) September 3, 2020
But the likes of SpotX are not going to take the rise of fraud lying down. They are turning to ad fraud-fighting software vendors, many of which have a track record in reducing fraudulent activity in digital display environments.
“You can get there, be confident in your media-buying strategy if you implement the right tactics, ask the right questions and tailor your media-buying strategy to the CTV landscape,” Frizzell says.
SpotX is using DoubleVerify, the 12-year-old company that is one of the leading such suppliers.
“DoubleVerify helps proactively eliminate any invalid traffic from being monetized within SpotX,” Frizzell says.
“So, before a media buyer even has the opportunity to place a bid and serve a programmatic impression, it’s first being pre-filtered by DoubleVerify to eliminate any forms of invalid traffic
“So we’re providing buy-side partners with ideally fraud-free inventory, or as close to fraud-free inventory as possible.”
In June, DoubleVerify told Beet.TV how CTV ad fraud is occurring in three ways:
DoubleVerify’s (DV) recently-published new Global Insights Report 2020 lifts the lid:
The report says that operators assume CTV is 100% viewable – but DoubleVerify says it has found Video Completion Rates of 90% and Fully On-Screen rates of 88% in CTV.
We're thrilled to launch our 2020 Global Insights Report! In it, we uncover actionable insights for advertisers to drive efficient return on their media investments and address future trends expected to impact digital advertising strategies. Download here: https://t.co/YQGxvgCjqU pic.twitter.com/ayOXhr7SyX
— DoubleVerify (@doubleverify) August 19, 2020
This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Whilst the European market, like the continent itself, is fragmented, its broadcast ecosystem is far less so. Furthermore, initiatives like HbbTV have seen the entire chain of electronics manufacturers and broadcast groups come together to define common device standards.
Systems are simpler, through which media owners, more than underlying distributors, tend to control their ad sales.
That is something SpotX, the video ad serving platform, has discovered since it was fully acquired by RTL Group of Luxembourg in 2017.
“We see … a duty to work through the fragmentation, and the changing regulation around audience and targeting capabilities, around measurements,” says SpotX’s Sean Buckley in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re hard at work with, not only our customers, but partners across the industry, to really streamline those concepts.
“You … have a lot of inventory fragmentation in the market, in the US, in terms of who gets inventory rights, depending upon how the consumers are accessing content. Less so, in many cases, in some of the European markets.
“In markets like Germany and France and Italy, for the most part, the broadcasters control all of the inventory, and they’re just bringing these new capabilities to market. (They are) not as much dealing with the fragmentation, and distributors having an inventory share, et cetera.
“We do think OTT is the game-changer for that.”
This segment is part of a series titled The New Global Marketplace for Premium Video, produced at Cannes Lions and sponsored by RTL AdConnect. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. For all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, McGurn explains the company’s new relationships with distributors and why the upcoming Cannes Lions event is “always a dealmaker’s paradise” for Vevo, which is owned by Universal Music and Sony Music and has global music video licensing rights with hundreds of other labels as well.
About this time last year, Vevo decided to phase out elements of its owned and operated platforms. With its business centered on YouTube distribution, it wasn’t cost effective to continue funding video distribution on its own.
The subsequent strategy was “finding endpoints of distribution in neighborhoods that users frequent where they might enjoy music videos again on television,” says McGurn. Vevo is about to divulge “a number of partnerships” and is offering “inventory anchored in connected television in the YouTube application on the TV’s and in living rooms to market in the UpFront.” McGurn quantifies the inventory at “about a nine-figure body.”
Vevo has typical inventory sharing relationships with MVPD’s in the 10% to 15% range “and they sell it on an audience basis, nothing specific to music or videos.”
The company handles sales for the rest of its inventory, including the use of various programmatic channels and working with SpotX. “We have the mass majority of inventory that’s there and we are a centralized point of buying for music television on all these distributors,” says McGurn.
“The demand is there. We have a larger supply than most people would even know about. The reaction so far from those buyers has been very positive and we think we’ll be able to sell it out in the UpFront.”
McGurn says Vevo’s “technology stack in the living room starts with FreeWheel. That’s our dynamic ad insertion vehicle.”
Vevo is counting on search, discovery and recommendation to ramp up ad sales, along with its understanding of the viewing behavior associated with music television that “far exceeds short-form behavior. We can see all the way up to sixty-five minutes of viewing behavior in a lean-back experience on TV’s if that search and discovery and recommendation is hit right.”
Looking ahead to next month in France, McGurn says, “Cannes for us is always a dealmaker’s paradise” as the company seeks domestic and global deals based on its extensive video licensing rights. “Audiences are aging in the living room and we represent a great counterbalance, to reaching almost twenty-five percent of every country’s population that we operate in.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean Buckley, CRO of SpotX , says brands are now seeking out deeper, more meaningful relationships with fewer tech suppliers.
That follows a few years in which the number of point-solution tech products explosion. Now we are seeing something of an implosion, driven both by M&A and by changing buyer habits.
“We have seen a move toward consolidation in the space, which is actually a reversal of maybe how things were looking a few years ago,” Buckley says.
“What we’re seeing from the buy side is interest in fewer but much deeper partnerships. We’re seeing both the agencies as well as brands launch initiatives to really focus in on the partners who are trustworthy, important, and necessary in the supply chain, and then take those relationships to the next level.
“That’s been a major trend over the last few years, folks going from perhaps 30 or 40 downstream technology partners on the supply side to maybe only six or eight total partners.”
Buckley says over-the-top and connected TV have now become the majority of SpotX’s business – a topic on which the company will be hosting a panel at the upcoming Cannes Lions festival.
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“And also as we get into more interesting things like measuring unduplicated reach, we think it’s a really exciting product for the market,” Buckley adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
Discovery and Fox among the first media owner partners planning to leverage the new data-driven solution to enable cross-platform ad sales. MRI-Simmons will be a key data partner in helping to deliver a unified audience target across platforms, an essential aspect in the clypd/SpotX solution, according to a news release.
SpotX has bee working on three main categories of data enablement. The first is enabling media owners to bring their first-party data “into the fold in a protected capacity” to use it particularly for programmatic ad transactions. “We also enabled media owners to license that data to other media companies on the platform in a safe and secure manner,” says Buckley.
SpotX then worked to onboard the major third-party data marketplaces to ensure all of the major third-party data segments are available to any of its customers.
A major focus has been activating buy-side data so that brands and agencies synching their data with the SportX platform gain enhanced planning and forecasting capabilities.
This facilitates automated guaranteed and programmatic guaranteed transactions “in the way the industry wants to do it. In order to do that well, we have to refine the inventory down against exactly what the buyer is looking for, including perhaps data they may have housed on their side before we even send the ad requests out,” Buckley explains.
“So once we have the full picture, all the targeting attributes including the data the buyers are using on their end, we’re actually able to refine those ad requests down so when the buyer actually gets it they’re able to respond ninety-five, one hundred percent of the time with an ad.”
SpotX now has more than 600 employees in 26 offices around the world. In addition the merger of SpotX with sister company smartclip, SpotX parent RTL acquired dynamic ad insertion provider Yospace, as The Drum reports.
“It’s clearly a core integral technology that our customers need,” Buckley says of the Yospace contribution. “And we feel there’s huge potential between pairing that SSAI technology with the monetization platform in terms of what we can deliver for our customers.”
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.
]]>Just ask Mike Shehan. He co-founded the company as a self-serve off-shoot of another company he was at.
Acquired by European broadcast group RTL in full last year, now Shehan is speaking from a vantage point at which he has seen tremendous growth. But the SpotX CEO feels like the whole industry is about to experience a whole lot more.
“If you looked at Spot X two years ago, we had no [ad] inventory in OTT, it was very nascent,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But we started two or three years ago entering that space. Today, now 40% of our spend globally is through OTT, and actually a majority of that is via the big TV.
“No-one knows how big this market could be, but if we’d know that the linear market is $80 billion, I think it’s anyone’s guess that CTV or OTT could be say $10 billion in the next couple of years, $20 billion, it could be even more depending on that continued adoption of OTT by the consumer.”
That seems to stand in good stead any company offering technology for buying digital video and over-the-top TV ads, as SpotX does – though the market continues to swirl with competition and consolidation.
One of SpotX’s key strategies has been diversifying out of its native US market, starting with investment by RTL and, later, outright acquisition. North America now pulls in 60% of its revenue, but Europe represents 35% of the remainder.
The company sees market traction especially in Italy, Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.
But that doesn’t mean Shehan isn’t seeing growth at home, too.
“Last year, we started seeing in the fall, we started seeing all these big spikes in [ad] calls and we’re like, ‘Why are we seeing this?’,” he explains.
“It was football, it was American football. It was college football, it was NFL football. We were seeing calls of 250-300,000 concurrent users where we’re just getting slammed because people were actually watching those games now on their mobile devices or the other Roku device. That’s just so cool to be part of.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>In this interview today at the annual DMEXCO conference, Sizmek CEO Mark Grether says given the company’s focus on agencies and advertisers, simplifying the process of buying various TV inventory is a key goal of the rollout, scheduled for later this year.
“The challenge was how can we actually provide our clients the biggest positive pool of inventory from an advanced TV perspective,” he says.
Last month, Sizmek released an enhanced version of its AI-powered DSP, offering advertisers and agencies greater efficiency and effectiveness for programmatic buying. The advanced-TV rollout will help bring together data, media, and creative across all digital media channels.
“I do think in the future what you will see is this coming together of media and data and creative in one single platform,” Grether says.
Sizmek will provide inventory by partnering with several advanced-TV supply platforms, including Telaria, Spotx, and Freewheel.
While having a lot of partners on the supply side “is certainly a key asset for us to have,” Grether emphasizes the utility of Sizmek’s ad server’s impression-level data “which we can now leverage as it’s integrated into AI when it comes to programmatic advanced TV buying.”
He notes that topics of conversation at DMEXCO typically include perceived next frontiers, as in how to leverage data in and advanced-TV environment in combination with dynamic creative optimization.
“I think that’s the next kind of big holy grail,” says Grether. “Advanced TV plus creative optimization. And that’s what we want to bring to the table here.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“The business is changing so fast and there’s so many different opportunities and solutions out there that are going in so many different ways,” says Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales at DISH Media Sales.
As an operator, “There are much more resources and much more technologies and opportunities at our company to help grow the advanced advertising space,” Lowy adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “And I think that’s helping us to be able to put more resources, more effort, coming out with more products faster, quicker, stronger for the marketplace.”
He calls opportunities like programmatic “becoming hugely important and a huge growth business” that makes it “easier, faster and stronger for the buying community to go ahead and buy addressable.”
DISH has put programmatic and addressable together for buying contextually or addressably. In May, DISH announced that it had partnered with SpotX to create addressable data segments representing anonymous viewers of Sling TV. The segments involved included would-be-vacationers, auto intenders and back to school shoppers.
“Programmatic for us was just an easy, simple way for us to take the next step into advertising and to go ahead and put those automated needs in. It’s working with an SSP and going ahead and exposing our inventory and working with all the demand side platforms to go ahead and get into Sling TV,” says Lowy.
“It’s been a huge growth for us and what we’re looking at next is putting platforms together as we have our own programmatic business, we essentially act as the SSP on the DISH business. And we’re looking at putting those together to have one complete opportunity to buy our audience and to buy contextually across DISH and Sling programmatically through the simple easy turnkey approach.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Sling works with two supply-side platforms—SpotX and Telaria—and interfaces with all the major demand-side platforms, Lowy explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We set up different auctions, whether they’re contextual auctions where we set up ways to access inventory into World Cup, March Madness, sports networks, news networks, kids networks and we set auctions into that.”
In addition, Sling does addressable auctions wherein certain audience segments can be bid upon. “And we set up different auctions. Some are always on, some are on during different times of the year, whenever we feel most appropriate,” Lowy adds.
“What’s essentially happening is the way that we’re seeing our growth, so much of our business is now going into these bidding type of process or programmatic private auctions.”
He stresses the private nature of the auctions. “We don’t do open auctions so we are pretty clear on what’s coming through our pipes. We want to make sure it’s safe and top tier premium stuff coming through into our top tier premium content.”
More than 50% of DISH’s Sling/digital business last month came through auctions, while more than half of the advertisements were coming through a bidding process, according to Lowy.
On the TV side, DISH built its own supply-side platform a few years ago, “and that is growing well. Over time, we are looking at merging these two platforms where you’ll have audience-based buying or contextual buying all bid upon, whether it’s on the Sling platforms or the DISH set-top box platform.”
While Lowy foresees a continuation of the Upfront selling process and other ways to buy, he believes that almost all impressions will be done through a bidding process or an auction.
“That opens up a whole new way to buy inventory, a whole new way to buy television. You get the true value of your content, your true value of the audience.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief revenue officer of ad-tech firm SpotX explains that his company has seen a swing for its revenue mix toward OTT – but that is not the case uniformly.
“We’ve seen over the past few years, pretty heavy disruption, cord cutting, and consumer behavior beginning to shift toward these new viewing habits,” Buckley says.
“But, if you look at specific markets, like Germany or Japan, the OTT business hasn’t had that sort of turbocharged growth that we’ve seen in the US.
Last year, Ampere Analysis published figures showing how subscription OTT adoption had reached 84% of US households – more than twice the prevalence in the second-placed market, the UK (41%), and far more than trailing Germany (25%) or Japan (18%).
Ofcom ICMR: Global SVOD penetration, by @AmpereAnalysis. US nearing all households, 2x next-biggest market https://t.co/vkDe7uV1Ji pic.twitter.com/da9XSwoo4B
— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) December 18, 2017
What is the reason the US is so far ahead? A stronger culture of free and linear consumption is one reason, Buckley explains.
He cites “the heavy penetration of free-to-air broadcasts where many folks in the population are actually not even paying for a TV”. “Ad loads (are) lighter,” he adds. “Instead of 14 minutes an hour, you’re seeing something like six minutes an hour.”
Still, what is true today may not be true tomorrow. Buckley, whose company merged with Smartclip earlier this year, says he anticipates the rest of the world may catch up.
“In the long run, especially among the younger generations, I feel like they’re growing pretty accustomed to the app ecosystem, the mobile ecosystem, and I think they’ll drive a similar change in markets around the world,” he explains.
Buckley says SpotX’s “third and newest pillar for the company” is data enablement – helping media companies activate their first-party data in the programmatic ecosystem.
]]>May 25 is the final deadline for compliance with the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), legislation which came in to effect two years ago and which gives consumers significant new protections against their data being tracked and processed.
“How we look at the ad-tech ecosystem, how we transact, how we make decisions, is going to be very, very different in a post GDPR world,” says SpotX’s Nick Cuniffe in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Under GDPR, the concept of PII (personally-identifiable information) now is basically anything about you that I can use to single you out … Your cookie ID, that was usually anonymized, is now a piece of PII. Any identifier coming from your device is PII.”
Under GDPR, consumers can stop companies anywhere in the world from collecting and processing their personal data, including the right to stop automated decisioning- something which much modern advertising technology depends.
Penalties for not supporting the new rights run up to 4% of global turnover, up to a maximum €20 million, and GDPR applies to any worldwide company processing the data of European citizens.
With months to go, companies are now scrambling to achieve compliance throughout their operations, despite GDPR being nearly two years old.
“We’re kind of looking at it from two phases,” says SpotX’s Cuniffe. “We see GDPR being the first beachhead in May and there’s going to be a separate new initiative called ePrivacy (Directive) coming in the second half of the year.
“SpotX has put together a cross-functional team – product, legal, business operations, as well as ad-ops (to tackle them).”
But, whilst GDPR seems to pose a threat to the very fabric of digital advertising, which now relies on tracking people across devices and sites, then running algorithms on their data, Cuniffe believes advertising will cop collateral damage but is not the target.
“I believe that GDPR was really built in a way to protect personal information, banking, health, medical records, things of that sort,” he says. “It wasn’t really meant to wreak havoc in the ad tech ecosystem. It was also meant as a way to level the playing field between all companies and how they process customers’ data.
“So I think while they intended to prohibit walled gardens and protect customers, I think they might see some unintended consequences around that.”
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But Amazon could be an advertising partner, too.
Earlier this month, SpotX, the digital video ad tech vendor, announced a deal with the retail giant to make video ad deliver more seamless. And, in this video interview with Beet.TV, SpotX strategic partnerships SVP Jeremy Straight explains the rationale.
“Instead of the client, or the player, calling us for an ad request, it comes from the server,” Straight says. “We send that over to Amazon, they stitch it into the content, and that’s delivered with one seamless stream.”
Specifically, SpotX announced interoperability with the Amazon Web Services cloud suite. Even more specifically, it has connected with Amazon’s Elemental MediaTailor product, part of its AWS Media Services, to certify its server-side ad insertion product.
Those are the technical details. What it should mean is quicker and more efficient delivery for SpotX-derived ads, thanks to the heft of Amazon’s cloud.
“Where it’s important is in connected TV environments, because that’s where we see the majority of server-side ad-inserted placements,” Straight says. “What it does, it streamlines the workflow for publishers using both Amazon and SpotX.
“It also does some other things. It helps with the content being distributed in a more seamless manner because, instead of the ad being called, waiting for any sort of buffering, looking at bit rate, encoding, all that type of stuff, the ad content is stitched with the video content in the same bit rate, the same codec, and it’s delivered right to the player, regardless of where that in-point is.”
This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“Obviously this is a new area of the business and it’s changing very rapidly,” says SpotX Chief Revenue Officer Sean Buckley. “Consumers are really starting to shift their consumption behavior. And obviously we’re seeing on the flip side some of the virtual MVPD’s and digital offerings really start to take off.”
Just a few years ago, the broad conception in the industry was of a shortage of premium video supply, what with much of it locked up by things like traditional Upfront marketplace deals.
“That was definitely true for a long time,” Buckley says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Certainly over the past three to six months we’ve seen the amount of supply, specifically around OTT both VOD and live streaming, really start to surge.”
SpotX’s major offerings are its ad-serving platform and programmatic infrastructure for media owners like Sling. The company also has an agreement with DISH Media Sales wherein DISH can leverage its first-party audience data through SpotX’s platform.
“We’ve seen great results there,” Buckley notes. “We’re taking that data and not only enabling programmatic transactions but we’re doing that in both VOD and live streaming environments, which is really the cutting edge of the digital ad industry.”
Given the learning curve that exists in the OTT space—both on the buy- and sell-sides—SpotX created an Advanced Solutions Group to help everyone figure out the “various technologies that touch our platform. It’s a different engagement with each of our customers,” Buckley adds.
On the buy-side, SpotX helps to decipher live, linear OTT traffic patterns because they “tend to look a lot different than what, for example, the DSP’s or the agencies are used to. You have to address the traffic differently and the environments differently than you would, for example, a desktop web environment.”
Asked about pricing of premium video ad inventory, Buckley looks at it from a digital perspective. OTT commands a premium over formats like out-stream and short-form, “but we think we’re reaching the point where there’s great balance in the market. Pricing isn’t necessarily a huge barrier and I think both sides see value in what the market is bringing to the table at this point in time.”
This video is part of series on developments with OTT. The series is presented by Sling TV and DISH Media Sales. Please find more videos from the series here. For the Sling/DISH report on OTT and the marketplace, download this report.
]]>In an interview with Beet.tv, Siotis acknowledges that the one problem all markets face is “enabling them to make a more efficient transaction.”
As the conversation shifts to census-level audience data, Siotis sees it “still quite siloed as regards the Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB) in the U.K. and Nielsen in various markets.
These sources “don’t really take into account the way that people are engaging and consuming broadcasters’ content,” Siotis says.
He points to the BARB’s Project Dovetail as one positive development. Project Dovetail melds two complementary data sources: BARB’s panel of 5,100 homes for representative viewer information, and device-based data from webservers showing how TV is being watched.
Looking ahead to 2017, Siotis is excited about the rise of over-the-top viewing.
“The number of impressions or potential ad impressions on the platform have grown exponentially and it’s a huge area of focus for us going into 2017,” Siotis says.
A major sea change that while not breaking news has had a positive impact on publishers is the “death by a thousand cuts” of FLASH and the rise of HTML5, according to Siotis.
“It’s important to sellers, because ultimately sellers want to offer a seamless experience for users across any device,” he explains. “Unfortunately, FLASH doesn’t work across every different device.”
He also foresees a tightening of the marketplace in the form of increased consolidation across the video distribution industry. “There’s not that many players within our space that are left to be acquired but I imagine you’ll see some smaller buys happening to fill out peoples’ stacks,” says Siotis.
Asked what he’d like to see happen in the near future, Siotis yearns for more experimentation among broadcasters in the area of advanced TV so that it represents “more than a rounding error to their businesses.”
We spoke with Siotis at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“A lot of people have asked why AOL, why Yahoo,” Jacob says in an interview with Beet.TV. “We are the supply chain while AOL and Yahoo are on the demand side of things. We’re the tech organization.”
Noting the importance of being able to dynamically insert ads into live or linear video feeds, Jacob says VDMS has welcomed joining with other companies’ technology.
“We have been known in the industry to actually be agnostic to whom we’re integrating with,” says Jacob, citing the likes of DFP, FreeWheel and SpotX. “We continuously focus on how can we enhance the technologies that these service providers actually provide. Our integration with AOL and Yahoo is just at the beginning.”
In less than three years, VDMS has grown to nearly 1,200 people. This expansion has occurred amid constant change in the adtech space as all manner of companies try to adapt and survive.
“The providers that have services such as FreeWheel have taken notice that in order to stay relevant, they need to be playing with companies such as Verizon and VDMS,” Jacob says.
Describing as “super smooth” the company’s existing ad decision integrations, Jacobs adds, “We’re looking into potentially building our own sometime in the future, which is why the acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo happened in the first place. We’re very excited on where we can take this over the next couple of years.”
]]>Ad spending in the upcoming presidential election could trump the last poll by 20%, reaching $11.4bn, with digital breaking the $1bn barrier, according to a Borrell Associates forecast.
And programmatic video could get a big leg-up from the vote, a panel of ad-tech vendors convened by Beet.TV agreed…
“Television, for the political arena, is already sold out, and has been sold out for months now,” said Novak, whose Rubicon powers programmatic ad trading for many of the world’s publishers. “But there’s billions of dollars that need to be bought. There’s a huge opportunity. It allows some really quality case studies to be able to test this system in a huge way.”
Other panelists believed the upcoming vote will crystallise how media consumption habits are changing dramatically, as candidates switch screen – and buying method – to reach voters who are tuning out.
“We’re going to see a desire to access that youth demographic that is viewing in OTT,” DashBid’s Herman.
“With all the cord cutting that’s really happening. and especially among the youth group, there’s a real need to access that inventory. There’s a lot of premium video inventory available in the OTT ecosystem that just hasn’t been either addressable or it hasn’t been measurable. The elections are going to drive a real hunger for that inventory and I think they’re going to move us in a really great way.”
As OpenX’s Reed Scharff wrote on Huffington Post recently, programmatic could be the dream of political scientists and campaigners who want to reach individual voters and targeted demographic groups with specific messaging. And the election could be the perfect opportunity to bring that promise to the mass market.
“It could be a domino effect, which is really exciting,” said SpotX’s Buckley, whose company is part owned by a TV operator and producer, RTL. ” It could also have an impact on other industries. Other folks are going to feel that (inventory) shortage as well… (for example), auto. It could have a residual effect, it’s not just going to be limited to the political landscape.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
]]>That, finally, is spurring ad-tech vendors to cater to advertisers’ new-found desire to be on Apple TV – a promise that, previous to the new model’s new app paradigm, was barely possible.
“That’s one of the most exciting areas of growth and opportunity,” says ad-tech platform SpotX‘s platform SVP Sean Buckley. “With the recent changes in the Apple TV ecosystem, I think it’s going to create an immense democratization of video content in the living room. We’re really excited about content publishers and their ability to now reach users in that environment.”
Shortly after Apple’s announcement last year, SpotX unveiled an SDK supporting ad serving inside the new tVOS. That sits alongside integrations for other platforms like Roku and games consoles.
“Whatever connectivity the user is trying to get to the content, we want to be there and supporting our publishers,” Buckley added.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
]]>In July 2014, the big European broadcaster RTL Group acquired a controlling interest in the company. Then, last year, the outfit rebranded from its former name, SpotXchange, as it gained traction in Europe thanks to the RTL deal. At the end of 2015, SpotX also partnered with RTL Digital Hub stablemate Clypd to support optimized targeting of ads on TiVo set-top boxes in the US.
After a year of “thought leadership”, CEO and founder Mike Shehan says the company is now embarking on a 2016 that will be “the year of execution”, with some company announcements coming soon.
First, Shehan says SpotX will be revealing which broadcasters are using its Clypd relationship to buy TV ads programmatically
1. Programmatic TV
“We’ll be announcing our first clients”, he says. “Those will be broadcasters, media owners who will be managing media with a link solution that’s both digital and linear.”
“You’ll also see some announcements from us in Europe, with set-top box activity – advertising on TV through the set-top box.”
2. Asia launch
In addition to its UK office, SpotX also opened in Amsterdam and a German joint venture last year. Now another continent is on the roadmap, and soon.
“The same announcements you saw in Europe we’re going to be making in Asia … next week,” Shehan says.
Connected TV
Shehan says advertisers are getting excited about over-the-top TV devices: “We saw, just over the holidays, traffic triple from Apple TV. A lot more people are buying them. That inventory is really desired by the advertiser side.”
After the sale
Despite selling up to a big company, entrepreneur Shehan says he is not moving on from the mothership any time soon: “RTL allow me to run the business. Our executive team is still in place, we’re still motivated and we still have pretty big goals to achieve.
Our coverage of CES is presented by SpotX.
]]>Earlier this year, The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters together formed the Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to pool first-party ad data for ad buyers to target their combined 110 million users in an automated fashion.
French conglomerate La Place is another cooperative powered by Rubicon Project, and several have cropped up in Latin America. What’s behind this new coming-together?
“In some European markets, we’ve seen major broadcasters responding to the threat of American technology companies who have achieved massive amounts of scale,” says video advertising technology platform vendor SpotX‘s programmatic demand VP Alex Merwin. “For example, in Germany, the online video views of IP Deutschland, Axel Springer and ProSieben combined pale in comparison to the uniques that a Facebook or Google-YouTube bring to the table.
“The agencies want local-language content. But the disparity in scale is getting to a point where significant portions of ad spend are shifting to non-local publishers. You really need to band together and have a unified offering. That’s why we’ve seen publisher coalitions take off.”
SpotX is launching a new tool, dubbed “curated marketplaces”, to give its customers even more control over how they access advertising inventory programmatically. Whilst so-called “private marketplaces” allow buyers to gate off the inventory pools they use, they nevertheless involve much effort on the ground, Merwin says. So SpotX’s “curated marketplaces” aim to allow them more control.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>“(It) is going to allow us the opportunity to live-sync digital audiences with a TV set using first- or third-party data, which gives us this universal view of the value of audience,” according to the company’s programmatic TV VP Randy Cooke.
“That’s ultimately what we’re getting at here, is ‘What is that value of audience and how can a media owner extract that value across all distribution channels?’
“(The) long-term goal here is to enable media owners with sort of a closed loop view of RROIY at a campaign level. If you think about the ability to sync audiences across screens, what you effectively can do is create a campaign stream for a media owner that allows them to value inventory inside of a campaign.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
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But that is easier said than done.
“One of the challenges in bringing about this programmatic ubiquity is the fact we are talking about two distinct business models here,” says SpotX programmatic TV VP Randy Cooke, whose company is one of many vendors addressing the problem.
“Television (broadcast model) monetizes at the point of content distribution; with unicast (digital IP streams), we’re monetising consumption where there is real-time audience discovery.”
To help out, SpotX recently began working with Clypd, a television ad targeting optimization platform vendor, to enable cross-screen ad buying.
“We’re building tools to allow the business models .. to co-exist in a singular ecosystem,” Cooke adds.
This video is part of the series Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented by SpotX. You can find additional videos from the series here.
]]>But things are changing, according to one boss of a programmatic ad tech platform.
“We’ve seen premium publishers start to launch private marketplaces” says SpotX CEO Mike Shehan. “We’ve seen some of these private marketplaces are actually garnering CPMs that are 25% higher in some cases than their direct sales.”
And ad buyers are often happy to pay those higher rates, Shehan adds, saying he thinks the sector has reached a “tipping point” of acceptance.
SpotX, now partly owned by German broadcaster group RTL, has just inked a partnership with the group’s ad sales house which will see it create a marketplace for unsold ad inventory.
This video is part of a series about programmatic video presented by SpotX. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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“You see this shift within the C-suite where CMOs are really being tasked with much more than customer acquisition, retention and engagement,” he also observes in an interview with Beet.TV. “They’re almost system and data operators and integrators.”
Merwin notes that many brands which have conspicuously leaned into programmatic, such as Netflix and Procter & Gamble, have a long history of working with customer data.
“It’s not a surprise to me to see these organizations lean into media procurement practices than enable them to use that information [about customers and prospective customers] to gain more returns,” he says.
Shifts on the client side are inevitably resulting in shifts in the agency business — and creating new opportunities for agencies that lead the way with data-driven marketing practices.
“That’s where the agencies have been successful — some more than others, naturally — at guiding their clients through really making a culture shift internally to enable [their] data assets to be closer aligned to marketing activities,” he says.
Merwin also observes that SpotX has a product in beta, Curated Marketplaces, to make it easier to operate private exchanges to sell premium video inventory programmatically.
This video is part of the series Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented by SpotX. You can find additional videos from the series here.
]]>“Although we’ve seen tremendous growth over the last five years, still believe that it’s very much in its infancy,” Siotis says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “In 2015, only 22% of video advertising was spent programmatically – and that number is expected to grow to 60% by 2020. That’s an incremental $500m within this market over the next five years, which just goes to show you the huge opportunity that is still to come.”
Siotis was quoting research carried out for SpotX by IHS, the research firm, which predicts programmatic video in Europe will become a €2bn industry in 2020. Amid that expansion, growth will be uneven in different parts of the continent.
“Although a lot of the focus is usually on the UK and France as programmatic pioneers, are really starting to see tremendous growth across Spain and Italy,” Siotis adds. “Italy 2016 is seen as a brigadier for them. Now, they’ve been testing the waters with programmatic, but, as there’s an increased appetite on the demand side for video, we’re really expecting them to open up the floodgates.”
This video is part of series: Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented by SpotX. You find additional videos from the series here.
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