COLOGNE-As a former tech staffer at ITV in London, Jon Block knows the many challenges facing linear television broadcasters as they plunge into the addressable space. So it is with a fair amount of confidence that the VP of Product & Platform, EMEA, at converged TV and video advertising software provider Videology declares an industry crossroad.
“We’ve reached an inflection point because broadcasters have finally caught up with agencies and their thinking around the need for addressability and the need for audience targeting,” Block says in an interview with Beet.TV.
Agencies were the first to move because they are innovative and had direct relationships with their marketer clients. “Broadcasters are absolutely catching up, using same technology as agencies have been using,” Block says.
In so doing, broadcasters have taken back some control of yield management and optimization from agency buyers with “the ability to target campaigns to particular audiences across multiple devices and optimize how you run those ads.”
The path from linear to programmatic is a subject “close to my heart,” Block concedes. In the roughly one year since he joined Videology, the company has signed on to work with broadcasters like Sky, AT&T, and Bell Media and Rogers in Canada.
One of many challenges of replacing linear ads with dynamically inserted, targeted ones from third parties is to do it without running afoul of guidelines. Examples include ads for alcohol and gambling and those not deemed to be child-friendly.
This is why Videology recently formed a technology partnership with Clearcast, the company that pre-clears advertising copy for the UK’s major commercial broadcasters. “When broadcasters are choosing whether to approve third-party ads to run in their ad breaks, we automatically make calls out to the Clearcast API and see the clearance information about the ads,” Block explains.
Among other things, Videology needs to be able to guarantee that it can fill a given ad break with a mix of ads that the broadcaster sold directly and with those from third-party demand sources, all of them in a compliant fashion.
“It’s absolutely brilliant to be part of that project,” Block says.
This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.
