Programmatic buying isn’t big enough to have a huge impact yet on the TV upfront, says Gibbs Haljun, Managing Director of Media Investment at GroupM, during an interview with Beet.TV. “It’s not happening yet because there isn’t huge scale. Look at Duck Dynasty. That has a very small viewership online….there is less of an incentive to shift money. My goal is to drive value for clients and to pay a 30% premium to add an incremental audience of 1% doesn’t make sense,” he says.
What drives TV buying is the ability to create mass reach quickly, which is hard to do with online video and display, though that will change over time, he adds. Scarcity of inventory drives price and prevents sellers from wanting to go programmatic. Of course, it’s possible to find viewers online too, but TV still has the water cooler benefit. Nevertheless, programmatic buying is growing in use, and in many ways its roots have been in place for some time. The data sources that marketers have relied on for years, such as MRI, Experian and Simmons, form the building blocks of how data is being used today, but in a more automated fashion, Haljun says.
For more insight into programmatic buying and its interplay with TV, check out this report. Haljun was interviewed on stage by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Beet.TV summit on programmatic advertising for video hosted by Xaxis in New York and sponsored by Videology.
