If connected TV technology seems to make it easy to target TV ads at individual households, well, tell that to the people charged with making the spaghetti soup of a system work together.<\/p>\n
As powerful as CTV can be, a common complaint is that it remains too complex.<\/p>\n
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Al Lustgarten, Senior Vice President, Technology & Information Services, Hearst Television, explains how Hearst tackles the issue.<\/p>\n
“We know our sales are becoming more complex,” he says. The tasks include a strategy that now offers OTT platforms, converged selling methods and advanced ad targeting.<\/p>\n
Lustgarten says Hearst is currently figuring accommodating everything. Next up, it wants to develop one platform to embrace it all, “over the next few months”.<\/p>\n
For now, though, challenges are sufficient. “We’re experiencing very large growth in our digital business while maintaining our legacy linear broadcast business, and figuring out the path forward to have a unified workflow to accommodate both those lines of business is something that we’re spending a lot of time on currently,” Lustgarten says.<\/p>\n
“We’re dealing with disparate platforms. Some of those platforms are legacy, so we’re dealing with platforms that are not necessarily accustomed to doing integrations or developing APIs. We’re working with the vendors to put those in place. Then we have the industry-old issue of dealing with disparate platforms on the buy side of our business and on the sell side of the business.”<\/p>\n
Lustgarten says Hearst is trying a few technology approaches to make it all work:<\/p>\n