With that challenge, it may seem like the ongoing limits being placed on digital user identifiers would hamper the process.
But, piece by piece, companies are giving publishers, broadcast owners and buyers new tools that, in many ways, are better than traditional targeting tech.
The Trade Desk kickstarted Unified ID 2.0, a post-cookie solution for making identity buyable by using hashed and encrypted email addresses.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, JoAnna Foyle, SVP for inventory partnerships at one such firm, The Trade Desk, says the mission is to build an effective, consumer-safe identity system.
“We think, frankly, it provides advertisers and publishers with a better option than cookies ever offered,” Foyle says.
“It really is an opportunity to rise all boats for the open internet.”
Elaborating on that idea, Foyle says: “For those of us companies who philosophically believe in an open internet, this is a way for us to band together and continue to offer targeting for publishers and for advertisers at scale in a world where cookies are no longer the option.
“What we talk to our buyers and our publishers about a ton is the notion of interoperability. We don’t all have to use the exact same solution, but our solutions have to talk to each other because that’s the only way we come up with a solution for cookies, at scale, across the open internet.”
To that end, recent months have seen the announcements that UID 2.0 will be integrated by the likes of Epsilon’s CORE ID, OpenAP and Blockgraph.
And UID 2.0 just began its first ever deployment in Asia-Pacific, in Taiwan.
For The Trade Desk’s Foyle, it’s all about balancing advertiser and publisher interests plus a good consumer experience.
She says, too often, the inability of different channel screens to stitch together a single customer identity leads to excessive frequency of ad exposure, and she urges companies to use new tools available to overcome the problem.
Meanwhile, UK TV media sales house Sky Media in May announced it would tap The Trade Desk to make its VOD ad inventory available to buy programmatically.
That inventory exists in the VOD services not only of Comcast-owned Sky, Europe’s large satellite TV provider, but also of the broadcasters whose ads it represents, including Channel 4.
You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Well, after an explosion of new services and a tsunami of viewer adoption, that has changed.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tim Sims, chief revenue officer of The Trade Desk, says CTV has crossed the threshold.
Marketers face a dramatically different TV landscape in 2021. Read our report for insights on what this means for the future of TV advertising. #FutureOfTV https://t.co/fgSzw0HAqj
— The Trade Desk (@TheTradeDesk) March 23, 2021
Sims says the pandemic in 2020 “accelerated a few years of change into about a nine-month period”, during which consumers embraced a new wave of ad-supported VOD services (AVODs).
“We saw a huge influx of inventory come into the programmatic media ecosystem,” he says.
“That has really put connected television and programmatic really perfectly aligned for the moment in time that we’re in right now today.”
Sims can quantify the development, and the numbers tell him CTV’s footprint is now as big as regular TV’s.
“We see 87 million households on our cross-device graph,” he says. “We’ve reached this equilibrium point where, in connected television, you can reach as many households as you can in linear television.
“It’s kind of mind-blowing to think about that. That’s just an amazing milestone.”
“That myth that, ‘Hey, there’s no scale and connected television’ is completely gone at this point. I think we’ve crossed this tipping point into in CTV now where it’s just becoming a core part of any marketers media plans.”
Tubi Projected to Be $1 Billion Business and a “Core Pillar” for Fox
By as early as July 2020, The Trade Desk reported CTV ad spending was up by 100% from a year earlier.
Its stock price has been motoring through the pandemic as a result.
The ad-tech firm is benefitting from new services like Tubi, Pluto, Peacock and HBO Max, Sims says.
He thinks those two factors combined – swollen consumer interest plus the scale brought by new services – is combining to beckon marketers in.
“I think that shift that we’ve seen on the consumer side from a media consumption perspective is now going to be followed by a shift in advertising dollars that will move more rapidly into these AVOD services than it has in years past,” Sims says.
“I’m really excited for the future because I think CTV creates one of the greatest opportunities in the history of marketing.”
You are watching, “The Stream: New Audiences, New Opportunities,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Tubi. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is the call from one of the leading advertising demand-side platforms, when it comes to measurement.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, The Trade Desk UK GM Anna Forbes says: “It could be improved and I think that there’s a real opportunity here for standardization across both linear and connected TV because they’re coming at it from different worlds.
“I don’t think that’s going to change overnight, those two competing systems are gonna need to work side by side. I’d call on industry bodies that represent those two categories – whether it’s the IAB, or Thinkbox [UK commercial broadcasters’ advertising umbrella] – but to work together to create that harmonized measurement that will ultimately help drive revenue forwards, get brands comfortable, and ultimately help monetize that inventory better.”
In the UK, the TV measurement agency BARB has been measuring online TV viewing through main broadcaster apps since 2015.
Under BARB’s “Project Dovetail“, the agency aims to generate census data for online viewing. As part of that scheme, BARB is due to launch this month a “fusion” measurement combining data programmes viewed across four screens: TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones. BARB has also explored whether it should extend the measurement to short-form online video.
Forbes say UK brands are keenly looking at spending in connected TV and benefitting from its targeting capabilities.
But there is also what she calls a “secondary brand audience that might not have had budgets”.
“There’s incremental opportunity here for broadcasters to monetize their inventory with people that traditionally haven’t been able to reach that really high threshold of traditional linear TV buying that can now buy very specific impressions,” she explains.
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.
]]>Fast-forward a year, and The Trade Desk is also helping Sling sell its OTT digital TV inventory through its DSP.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, The TradeDesk TV strategy and partnerships director Bennett Crumbling explains why the company followed the path – and why it’s a good one.
“When we entered television, we really looked to try to figure out where we could add the most value … the fastest growing segment was OTT,” he says.
Crumbling explains how ads in addressable TV platforms, which allow brands to target individual households using data, are unleashing new powers for new kinds of ad buyers.
“When I think about some of our other clients that are maybe smaller, like the independent shops … this is the first time to actually buy television inventory,” Crumbling says. “They can buy the big screen, now. They can serve impressions inside of the living room, and they may have not had the capacity in the past to be able to do that, because they didn’t have a relationship with an NBC or a Fox or someone like that. They were too small to really be able to do that or to participate in an up-front.”
This summer, The TradeDesk released three new products:
On addressable TV, Crumbling continues: “It’s super-desirable, because it’s addressable, it can be purchased programmatic, you can maintain all of the buy=side decisioning.
“So, we see a lot of our clients leaning in and doing kind of what they did a few years ago with mobile and even further back with programmatic, where they’re trying to really design their own way of saying, ‘Well, how do I plan this sort of media, and how do I measure the success?'”
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.
]]>That is the view of one of the leading ad-tech platforms helping to inject ever-more video in to its historic programmatic operations.
“Connected television spend on our platform from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017 grew over 500%,”The Trade Desk inventory partnerships SVP Tim Sims tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Now, we’re starting to get into a territory of real dollars moving into the connected television channel in programmatic, which is really exciting as we look forward in the 2018, 2019 and beyond.
“Brands are starting to recognize the opportunity here where there is a gap of people that are just not able to reach on linear television anymore and connected television helps fill in that gap.”
In ad land for the last couple of years, much of the chatter has been about the risk that media agencies, which help brands develop plans for buying the right inventory at the right time, will be disintermediated. In other words, the new wave of programmatic platforms allow brands to operate their media-buying strategy all by themselves.
But, whilst Sims’ platform serves many brands directly, he doesn’t quite see it that way.
“We work with both agencies and marketers,” he says. “But, when we do work with the marketer, we (also) work with their agency. It’s become a really powerful kind of triumvirate of expertise when it comes to the programmatic channel.
“As programmatic continues to grow, it becomes a much more important strategy for everyone to understand how they execute the media dollar inside of the programmatic channel.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“That is certainly one of the objectives for us as well as for a number of partners that we work with in the space, and it certainly seems like it’s going to require a number of stakeholders to get to where the industry wants us frankly to be,” says Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud.
With 97 of the top 100 US advertisers and slightly less of the top 100 globally, there’s very little in the way of data that Oracle hasn’t seen on the digital side. Now a core focus, according to Harrison, is to “deliver solutions to all flavors of TV, from national linear to addressable VOD, linear to connected and OTT.”
Oracle doesn’t lack for partnerships in the TV space, counting Hulu as an early collaborator and also The Trade Desk, DataXu and TubeMogul, all of which have been “investing quite a bit to solve for TV through their own initiatives so we are working to align closely with them,” Harrison says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
The first time that Oracle Data Cloud enabled its purchase-based audiences for linear national TV was through a linkup with Simulmedia, something company founder Dave Morgan called “a defining moment in the transformation of TV to a data-driven, audience-targeted business.”
Asked about the quest for unified, cross-platform measurement, Harrison says clients are indeed looking for a more holistic approach to planning and activating both digital and TV. That would mean no longer having to ““drop that digital audience that you’ve customized and invested a lot of time and effort into at the gate and then pick up a totally different audience derived very differently to solve for it in, let’s say, TV and other media.”
A second priority for Oracle’s clients is measurement, i.e. what’s really driving lift, and to bring its digital methodology to the TV space. “That’s where again you come up against the uniqueness of each of these different media types and the need to address them first in and of themselves and then in a more overarching way across media.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“This is late mainstream for consumers,” says Brian Stempeck, Chief Client Officer at The Trade Desk, the demand-side platform.
Similar to when people in ever-increasing numbers began to use smartphones, there was a lag in marketers allocating ad dollars to reach them on those devices.
“We’re now in that interesting phase where media dollars start to follow. That’s what we’re seeing happen right now,” Stempeck says in this interview with Beet.TV.
As a result, The Trade Desk has seen “an explosion” of connected and OTT ad inventory.
“The amount of inventory available has gone up by ten X in the past year. That’s a game changer,” Stempeck adds.
Some of that seismic growth comes from consumers changing over, some of it from companies like Sling and Roku, which have “huge amounts of inventory and they’re moving it into programmatic.”
To access Sling inventory for its buy-side clients, The Trade Desk partners with Telaria (formerly Tremor Video). “DISH/Sling makes inventory available. We then use audience data, geo targeting, whatever the marketer really wants to hone in on. We then buy that inventory,” Stempeck says.
“The benefit of programmatic is that the marketer can now say, ‘I actually just want to target people in market for a car, or in this DMA, or this town or ZIP code’ and they can bring their own decisioning to that.”
Many advertisers still want to lock in traditional Upfront linear TV inventory deals, but they want more say in choosing certain inventory—stipulating that, say, 10% of Upfront deals are to be transacted programmatically, according to Stempeck.
Like many DSP’s, The Trade Desk cut its digital teeth on display ads back in 2009, making a big push into video in the past several years. Part of that expansion stemmed from the realization that agencies didn’t necessarily want to think of media channels in silos.
“They don’t necessarily want a mobile DSP, a video DSP, a DSP for Indonesia, a DSP for South America. They want one platform that’s global to hit all of their marketing channels,” Stempeck says. “Video is now one of the biggest channels that’s bought in our system.”
This video is part of series on developments with OTT. The series is presented by Sling Television 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.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, The Trade Desk inventory partnerships SVP Tim Sims explained the company’s thinking.
“One of the big growth areas we’re looking at in the future is connected television,” he said. “There’s a huge shift in the way that consumers consume long-form video content. The new TV audience is very interesting and compelling.
“If I (as a buyer) can extend that (marketing) conversation to the bigger screen in the living room through a connected device and address that audience at the household level and utilize my data as a marketer, that’s an extremely compelling offering and something we’re really focused on.
“It’s still very early days in connected television. There’s a lot of devices and applications.”
The Trade Desk’s website now lists connected TV as its primary product. The company has written that connected TV inventory needs to prove its scale, buyers deserve hybrid performance metrics and OTT viewers deserve a better ad experience, including fewer ads.
In February, the company said it wanted to target connected TV, Asia and mobile video as growth opportunities.
In August, The Trade Desk’s CEO told Business Insider: “We’ve seen the amount of inventory in connected TV ads jump 10x to 20s since last year.”
But the company has had to invest in building out its connected TV capabilities, which it now shows off on its website.
More on the company’s expansion in the connected TV space reported today in AdExchanger.
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But, though those publishers seek higher prices normally transacted through direct or human-sold deals with advertisers, auctions are still super-relevant in the video world – and can actually bring higher returns, says one programmatic platform operator.
“An auction is actually the best place to start if you have something that’s in scarce supply,” says The Trade Desk chief client officer Brian Stempeck, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “If you’re a publisher where you’ve got video inventory going for a high CPM, it’s actually the best place to run an auction.”
Why is auctioning inventory a better way to sell it? Because, like any auction, prices go up and because, like the best auctions, you can choose where to start the bidding.
“Let’s say you’re selling it for a $15 CPM and you’re sold out, that happens at a lot of video publishers,” Stempeck continues. “They can say, ‘Let’s set the floor at $15 and see what we can get above that’.
“That’s where programmatic comes in. There may be buyers on the demand side who say, ‘For this particular audience, I might be willing to pay $25’ – that’s more than the publisher got by selling it directly.”
Stempeck is talking about private marketplaces, a development on programmatic’s original auctioning ethos whereby publishers can limit who bids on their inventory and for how much, creating a rule-based marketplace that, in theory, should operate in their favour.
And private marketplaces are now more common in the video world than they have even become in display advertising, says Stempeck.
On the one hand, big TV networks are traditionally more likely to continue wanting to sell their expensive ad space directly or otherwise with strict controls. On the other, programmatic technologies now let them bring viewer data to bear on ad targeting. In the middle, Stempeck is hoping to benefit from growing consumer demand for online TV and video content.
]]>But, while brands are certainly now putting a hand on the tiller of their ad-tech, that doesn’t mean they no longer need an agency to pilot the ship.
That is according to one trading platform executive watching brands trying to navigate the new-look waters of advertising.
“Oftentimes, in the media, you hear it’s this black-and-white decision of marketers either taking things in-house or working directly with an agency, and those are (said to be) the only two paths,” says The Trade Desk chief client officer Brian Stempeck in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“What we’re seeing is agencies are going for a middle path, where they’re saying, ‘I want to have a technology license with a DSP, I want to get closer to the DSP and know what’s going on if I’m spending $50 million a year in programmatic. But I don’t necessarily want to take that in-house, I want to take that to my agency to push the buttons on the campaigns, to optimise, to give me insights.’
One common idea in ad-tech is that tech platforms are actually happy to cut agencies out of the relationship with brands, so that they can gain higher-value contracts and work directly.
But The Trade Desk’s Stempeck says going all the way wouldn’t necessarily serve advertisers best, thanks to all the complexity that programmatic actually brings.
“Because programmatic is now in every channel … there’s a lot to take on,” he adds. “So (advertisers are saying) ‘I don’t necessarily want to take this in-house … I want to pay more attention, I want to get closer to the technology and we think that’s a good thing.’
]]>In “header bidding”, rather than publishers entertain bids from multiple bidding sources in a “waterfall” sequence, they can see them all at once, and decide on the best price quickly.
But the technology is both good and bad news, says The Trade Desk chief client officer Brian Stempeck, concluding that header bidding is a net benefit…
The duplication challenge
“It used to be that you might see one impression, one time from an SSP – (for example), The New York Times selling through Rubicon; an impression comes in.
Well, (now) The New York Times might have a header implementation with a bunch of SSPs – OpenX, Index, Google. So, in some cases, we might see the impression more than once, there’s some duplication that’s happening
“So, as a buyer, you have to be a little bit more choosy about ‘Which pipe are you buying from? Which exchange do you want to buy from?’ So, supply path optimisation is a new variable to consider.”
The price payoff
“Five years ago, programmatic was more (about) remnant inventory. Now the publisher is saying, ‘With header bidding, lets open up that whole waterfall programmatically, to let previously-remnant demand compete with my direct-sold demand.
“Some inventory that the New York Times sold directly via insertion order five years ago, we now have a chance to bid on. That’s a good thing.
The trade-off
“It’s a double-edged sword. Costs go up the more impressions you look at – but, if you’re getting better inventory to look at in the first place, we look on that as a good thing.”
]]>But we’re not there yet. That’s why, when Tim Sims imagines the spectrum of things people mean when they say “programmatic TV”, he’s living in the here and now.
“Some of the more exciting things in the near-term on programmatic television are on the left (OTT) side of that spectrum,” The Trade Desk‘s inventory partnerships VP tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“On the linear end of the spectrum, programmatic may even be the wrong word to describe what we’re doing.
“In the OTT and streaming space, it’s much more similar to what we do today. More and more people are starting to migrate toward that method of consuming content. “
The Trade Desk is abuy-side vendor of data management platform and other tools. After display and video, Sims sees audio, native ads and, soon, out-of-home ads also benefitting from programmatic ad-buying automation.
This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis. Please visit this page for more videos from Seville.
]]>Now Trade Desk advanced TV sales director Matt Mitchell tells Beet.TV in this video interview: “We are very close to releasing a self-service UI for executing programmatic TV buys.
“We’re using a number of data sources to power that … to buy through the guys like WideOrbit, Placemedia, and other inventory sources that are coming down the pike.”
Although the promise of ad tech and, in particular, programmatic trading is all about software automation, some vendors still need to engage potential customers in sales chat and to hold their hand through usage and buying. TV is a particularly thorny medium to turn self-service.
The Trade Desk’s revision means its customers will get to do more for themselves on the platform. Beet.TV has covered other platforms that have gone self-service.
About 400 agencies and brands already license The Trade Desk’s software to make programmatic digital ad buys.
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.
]]>The Trade Desk, a demand-side advertising platform, is working to bring more ad targeting to Roku, the connected TV box in 14 million US homes.
“Because it’s device … it’s really no different than a mobile phone or a laptop with a cookie. They can overlay audience data on top of that. You can do targeting at the Roku device level,” Brian Stempeck, chief client officer, tells Beet.TV.
“Companies like LiveRail are starting to activate that data to say, ‘Ok, this cookie that Coca-Cola has, that’s the same as this user on a Roku’ – so you can then target those users.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
]]>“Display is essentially the dress rehearsal. Television and video is where all the money is at,” buy-side programmatic platform The Trade Desk‘s CEO Jeff Green tells Beet.TV in this video interview at DMEXCO.
“Display is the best opportunity to touch users with the most frequency to get data … once you’ve activated that data, video is where it’s at. Video is the dog – everything else is the tail.”
Green says his company has grown video revenue ten-fold in both of the last two years, and hired 100 people this year, taking it to 14 offices around the world.
]]>