After all, “programmatic” advertising unleashed “real-time bidding” (RTB) on to the world several years ago now. Today, real-time auctions for display ads are commonplace and many hope for a similar arrival in TV and video.

But a panel discussion at Beet Retreat discussed ongoing inertia in a $70 billion US TV advertising business where the legacy medium is proving reluctant to change…

DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:

D’Antoni was asked if ad buyers’ requests for audience segments are still processed “mostly in Excel and (with) manual extracts of data from various systems, lots of macros”.

He responded: “Yes. There is still some friction.

“And that’s just dealing with one supplier – if you’re on the buy side, you’re going to have to deal with that three or four times. So there is a long way to go in terms of streamlining the process.”

Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:

Automation is what Videa is aiming to bring to the market. The company makes platforms that reduce friction in ad avails, makegoods and posting

“We have found, much to our chagrin, that (even) within the same broadcast group … multiple stations are not speaking the same language. There’s almost no standards at all when it comes to broadcast.

“We spent probably two years on something that we called traffic normalization, which was literally just getting our system to understand all the different names that exist for one program so that when someone wants to make a buy across multiple markets, the buy could happen and the system can understand (what) they mean.”

Google Head of Telco/Video Partnerships Peter Dolchin:

Asked for the most important priority, Dolchin said: “Interoperability.”

“We like challenges, but this is clearly complex and we have some really smart, talented people at the company who understand it. We’ve been recruiting people from the industry over the past decade. And so, we know it’s hard, but we are testing in a variety of different ways.

“So with this new linear addressable solution that we’ve launched, there is the ability to look at set-top box tuning data real time and bring that into the decision making when they’re selecting the ad. That is one of the ways in which we’re bringing real time to it.”

Experian director of TV solutions, Experian Marketing Services, Brad Danaher:

Danaher said his company had helped political advertisers target campaigns during the recent US mid-term elections.

“It was a big cycle for political. Even though it was big, we actually thought it would be a little bigger.

“When we work with folks like DISH, we have a platform called Audience Engine, which basically allows counts to be accessed within seconds if needed be. If (the audience target is, for example), environmentally-aware consumers … we can tell the MVPDs through that platform within 10 seconds and you can go on the platform and know it, and then launch that into their media plan, knowing the sizing right away. That’s an improvement.”

DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:

D’Antoni was asked to describe the typical lead time to make an addressable TV campaign active.

“Typically three to five days,” he said. “And then that it served, it’s beamed up to the satellite. It’s (then stored) in the (set-top) box.”

Furious Corp  CEO Ashley Swartz:

That prompted the panel moderator to make a “broad” statement on the relative slowness of what many think should, by dint of being digital, be a fast process.

“There is no real-time in TV,” she said. “Tthere’s really very little real time data, real time insights, real time decisioning, real time delivery, realtime ops.” Fellow panelists agreed, though Google’s Dolchin explained that Google has launched a linear addressable TV ad solution which supports examining set-top box tuning data in real-time.

Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:

Gianunzio said he thought a lot of the infrastructure inertia remains in place because few inside the legacy TV business perceive a threat driving need for change.

“Within TV, things have always been relatively rosy. There’s this feeling that, ‘No matter whatever came along, we were going to be able to deal with it’.” He cited DVRs, internet and Netflix as examples of purported TV-killers that have not turned out to be.

“Every article that you read is like ‘The audience is down and yet it’s more important than ever that you’re using television to get your message out there’ – Facebook and Uber are (doing just that).”

But Gianunzio sees a change may finally be coming.

“The people who thought ‘we’re just going to go passed this and we’re not going to have to actually deal with it’ … they’re either retired or they realize that they’re not going to get to retirement without dealing with it. I think that’s what’s going to push us there.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

“We’re still the best way to get in front of an audience, but it’s changing how advertisers and agencies want to get in front of that audience,” Gianunzio says of broadcast TV in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018 in which he envisions a future where other local media can be sold alongside broadcast.

Videa partners with TV stations to deliver a live, supply-side marketplace for full-schedule, forward-reserve broadcast inventory that can be ordered weeks or quarters in advance. It’s a way of automating the buying process, with pricing approved by the individual stations and second-by-second campaign reporting.

It’s a process designed to “sand off the rough edges of how we buy and sell,” says Gianunzio. The fact that someone in a local broadcast buying department handles thousands of spots is “insane.”

He recalls his time as a sales rep for Cox as the digital age dawned and local broadcast revenues were declining. “And the revenue leaves not because there’s not a good return on investment by running your spots in broadcast. And it’s not because it’s not where advertisers want to be,” says Gianunzio, citing Google and Uber as examples. “The reason advertisers and agencies pull their money out of it is because it is so cumbersome.”

Videa has been building a “foundation” to unify station sales. “Within each station broadcast group we’ve got different ways of doing things. I’m just talking about getting everyone to think the same way” and hopefully agree on activities that should be automated. “Automation scares people because if I’ve been doing it manually, that’s what I’m getting paid for.”

He talks about the complexities brands face when entering a new market and wanting to surround prospective customers with ads across all the various media available and do it quickly. “You’d be discouraged from doing it,” says of the current environment of going seller to seller.

“And that’s when you can see real power in advertising, when you’re surrounding a consumer with each of the forms of media that you’re using so that it’s not a different message coming from each one.”

Videa’s future vision is to be able to unite more media sellers. “The idea is not for a platform like this just to exist for broadcast. It’s to exist for broadcast and everything that comes with it, OTT, VOD, then network and radio,” says Gianunzio.

“If we could build sort of a superhighway where media can exchange with data and exchange with revenue, we’re in a position where you can make a smart decision about opening up in a specific market, you can surround a market and have it all in one place.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

But in that reach also lays inefficiency. If TV ads reach consumers who can’t even access the buyers’ services, that’s wastage. But new-wave TV-buying techniques, infused with data, can help the problem.

“I live in Manhattan,” Videa sales and marketing VP Archie Gianunzio tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Every time I’m watching cable TV and it goes to break, in every pod there’s a Sonic commercial.

“The closest Sonic to me is 34 miles away and I am not going to take a bus to a train to a cab to go get a corndog at Sonic. And yet, they’re advertising on network cable.”

Gianunzio wants to solve that conundrum. Videa uses automation software to aggregate local TV ad inventory to be more sellable to a marketplace.

Videa’s private marketplace provides stations, agencies and brands with a simplified way to sell and buy local television station inventory at scale.

“Whereas, on a national buy, you can find the pockets that meet any criteria, on a local buy. in a local market, you might not find enough people that meet your criteria for it to be worth it in that market,” Gianunzio adds.

“The spot TV stations are sort of the last ones to get called up to the buffet, where national goes first. Now digital is getting a much faster look at a buyer’s budget than is spot TV.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

Videa’s private marketplace provides stations, agencies and brands with a simplified way to sell and buy local television station inventory at scale, Williams explains in an interview with Beet.TV. “It’s really an expansion of what we did in beta last year but it allows us to automate the buying and selling of local TV station inventory to national advertisers end to end,” Williams says.

The Videa platform plugs into demand-side platforms and systems like Mediaocean and STRATA. On the sales side, “We plug into the TV station traffic data and we automate all of the sales process in between,” she adds.

Williams has held various positions at Cox for almost 20 years, with other career stops in between, and is thoroughly familiar with the challenges of local broadcasters.

“A lot of the power of local TV has kind of diminished over time as network and digital and mediums that are either more addressable, more efficient or more targetable have come about,” she says. “This powerful reach medium has lost share to these other options in the marketplace.”

In the past, it might have made sense from an efficiency standpoint for advertisers that wanted to target just 40% of the country to do a network TV buy, according to Williams. “What our platform allows them to do is target that 40% of the country in a very efficient way. You don’t have to waste the part of the country you don’t want to buy,” she says.

From a targeting standpoint, Videa is not facilitating addressable TV. The company takes consumer data and overlays it with data about individual programs to see which ones over-index for specific targets. “I can’t send your ad to people who are Audi intenders but I can put your ad into programs that over-index for people who are Audi intenders,” says Williams.

As a sales platform, Videa collects “a small commission” on everything that runs through its platform. Creative messaging can be segmented geographically.

“For us personally, just getting to the place where we actually have scaled inventory is a tipping point for this space and that’s what 2017 will be about for us,” Williams says.

We interviewed her last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference.   Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi.   More videos from the series can be found on this page. 

“We’ve come a long way, but adoption is still really early,” according to 

Videa president Shereta Williams, whose company aggregates TV ad spots in to a supply-side platform, connected to buying platforms like Mediaocean, Videology and Adapt.TV (AOL).

“The next 12 months will be about getting that adoption curve… a lot more scaled supply available for buyers to buy. We’ll start to learn what are the right business rules, the right metrics, how much of an impact can this really have.

“It will be a lot of learnings over the next 12 months, and 2017 is when you’ll really start to see money shift in to this channel in a big way.”

Although tools like Videa are giving TV ad buyers digital-style chops, few go as far as facilitating linear TV ad buying in real-time, like some online display ad tech platforms. Williams is amongst the platform bosses who thinks it is better to work with the TV industry’s traditional norm of doing ad deals much farther in advance.

The deal was announced this week at the NAB Show.  To explain the agreement and its implications, we interviewed Scott Ferber, CEO of Videology in Las Vegas.