The CEO of TubeMogul prefers the term “data-driven” to “programmatic” television advertising. But regardless of the moniker, this emerging form of audience targeting accounted for 10% of overall ad spend through the company’s software in the first quarter of 2016.
“It went from nothing to very real,” Brett Wilson says in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual LUMA Partners DMS conference. That 10% of overall spend represented 30 times what TubeMogul saw in the prior year’s first quarter.
Simply stated, data-driven or programmatic TV “brings automation and data to the world’s largest ad market,” Wilson says. “Data-driven TV is probably a more accurate description than programmatic because there are pieces that are automated and there’s pieces that are less automated.”
A year ago, the concept was just an idea, but since then “we’ve seen some of the pipes built out,” Wilson says.
Referring to discussions at the LUMA event about dominant players in the video space like Facebook and Google, Wilson acknowledges their heft but observes that the field is still growing.
“I think what’s actually happening is it’s getting more fragmented, not less so,” Wilson says. “Yes there’s some very dominant players out there. But there’s also huge new platforms that didn’t even exist a couple of years ago like Snapchat. So the implication for advertisers is it’s getting more complicated and fragmented.”
TubeMogul will be launching in China later this year, the world’s second-largest ad market, as it continues to build products to “stitch together all the different types of video out there,” says Wilson.
