LONDON — Amongst the broadcasters on AOL’s Adap.tv client roster, the BBC’s revenue-making arm has begun to sell some of its online video advertising using a programmatic system to attract higher bids.
“If you’re dealing with a fixed-price IO (insertion order) business all the time, it’s very difficult to increase the rate,” Adap.tv‘s EMEA MD Brian Fitzpatrick tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“If you’ve got a very valuable commodity like the BBC does, you want to put this as much as possible in to competition, so you have many buyers coming in trying to access this premium inventory.”
The partnership concerns some of the video material published by BBC Worldwide outside of the UK, where, thanks to license fee funding by Royal Charter, the public broadcaster is mostly forbidden from making commercial domestic revenue.
But the relationship is a project-based one, including on the Top Gear car site, and does not cover all BBC Worldwide videos – illustrating how content owners are still feeling out the potential of the paradigm.
Watch the full video to hear Fitzpatrick on how there is no need for Adap.tv to merge teams with new owner AOL, which acquired the firm earlier this year for $400 million.
