COLOGNE \u2013 Sky TV is developing a portal for advertisers to plan their addressable television campaigns. Just don\u2019t say it\u2019s about \u201cbiddable\u201d inventory.<\/p>\n
To Jamie West, Group Director of Advanced Advertising at Sky, programmatic transactions in the broadcast world are about automation. The notion of biddable inventory is not \u201cparticularly relevant for a broadcast world,\u201d West says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO<\/a> advertising and trade show.<\/p>\n Like other traditional broadcasters, Sky has made a big push to enable advertisers to do business with its various platforms via whichever means they desire. Hence the continued evolution of its AdSmart<\/a> addressable platform, Sky Advance cross-screen offering and Sky Analytics media planning and transaction tools.<\/p>\n With AdSmart, current efforts involve building out the reach and targeting capability and easing the friction in the transaction funnel. \u201cThe feedback from the market has been \u2018you\u2019ve got to make it easy and transparent for the market to use.\u2019 That\u2019s one of the things that we\u2019ve been focusing on for the last few months,\u201d says West<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the cross-screen realm, Sky Advance is designed to bring down \u201cthe barriers between TV and digital so that we can serve sequential campaigns across TV and digital.\u201d<\/p>\n The next big phase at Sky is around analytics tools, including launching the ability for advertisers and agencies to plan addressable TV campaigns on a portal so they can then \u201cpush a button and get that integrated into our booking systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Sky believes that TV campaigns \u201cwill still be traded in a truly linear way, much in the same way as they are today through direct buys.\u201d Nonetheless, \u201cIt\u2019s important to enable brands and agencies to transact however they so wish with Sky, and that\u2019s what our partnerships with the likes of Videology and Comcast are all about.\u201d<\/p>\n Like their U.S. broadcast counterparts, Sky is trying to determine the appropriate commercial load and lengths for TV and digital viewing. In linear TV, the U.K. tends to have about nine minutes of commercial time per programming hour, \u201cwhich is substantially less than the U.S. model,\u201d says West.<\/p>\n In digital, \u201cWe tend to have a relatively clean environment,\u201d with perhaps two or three pre-roll ads and two or three mid-roll positions.<\/p>\n Asked if Sky would offer six-second ads as do some U.S. broadcasters, West said that while \u201cwe tend to operate on metric lengths\u201d of possibly five, 10, 15 or 20 seconds, if the market wants six-second spots Sky will oblige.<\/p>\n