COLOGNE — It’s no wonder MTG’s VOD service looks so slick. After all, the Swedish media company’s Play catch-up TV offering is based in Stockholm, whose digital designers have created brands like Spotify and beyond.
Now MTG’s pan-Scandinavian, free Play is changing the way it monetizes the multi-platform application.
“We’re transitioning that sale model from a direct sales model to more of a programatic-direct sales model,” Play Scandinavia VP Alexander Bastin tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Bastin is talking about the half-way house between programmatic, the automated trading of online ads that came to prominence in lower-value ad networks, and the traditional direct sales model, in which ad sales staff would manually make deals to sell air-time ahead of time.
Now “programmatic direct” is emerging as a way to enjoy the efficiency of programmatic but only within certain set parameters, mimicking old-style control.
“Selling your premium inventory programmatically does not mean that you erode the value of it, sell it cheap and sell it as a back-fill model – it is the future of all of your sales,” adds Bastin.
“We are as premium as you can get. Agencies see our completion rate at 97% and they are just blown away by that.
“I’m hoping that eventually offline and online TV will be viewed and sold as one and the same.”
We spoke with Bastin at the recent FreeWheel European summit in Cologne presented along with StickyAds.tv. Please visit this page for additional videos from Beet’s coverage.
