SAN JUAN — It was billed as the revolution for television ad sales – the emerging prospect of using internet-connected platforms and audience viewing data to plan, execute and measure TV ad campaigns in real-time.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
DISH Network\u00a0director, ad sales, Dish Media<\/a>,\u00a0Jim D’Antoni<\/strong>:<\/p>\n 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”.<\/em><\/p>\n He responded: “Yes. There is still some friction.<\/p>\n “And that’s just dealing with one<\/em> supplier – if you’re on the buy side, you’re going to have to deal with that three<\/em> or four<\/em> times. So there is a long way to go in terms of streamlining the process.”<\/p>\n Videa\u00a0VP sales\u00a0Archie\u00a0Gianunzio<\/b><\/strong>:<\/p>\n Automation is what Videa<\/a> is aiming to bring to the market. The company makes platforms that reduce friction in ad avails, makegoods and posting<\/em><\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Google\u00a0Head of Telco\/Video Partnerships\u00a0Peter Dolchin<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Asked for the most important priority, Dolchin said: “Interoperability.”<\/em><\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Experian\u00a0director of TV solutions, Experian Marketing Services,\u00a0Brad Danaher<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Danaher said his company had helped political advertisers target campaigns during the recent US mid-term elections.<\/em><\/p>\n “It was a big cycle for political.\u00a0Even though it was big, we actually thought it would be a little bigger.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n