LONDON – As Leon Siotis takes in Europe, “What’s most fascinating about today is to see that there is no one thing that is happening with programmatic TV,” says the Managing Director for video advertising platform SpotX. “Each of the different countries is evolving differently. They’re trialing different ways to sell their inventory programatically.”
In an interview with Beet.tv, Siotis acknowledges that the one problem all markets face is “enabling them to make a more efficient transaction.”
As the conversation shifts to census-level audience data, Siotis sees it “still quite siloed as regards the Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB) in the U.K. and Nielsen in various markets.
These sources “don’t really take into account the way that people are engaging and consuming broadcasters’ content,” Siotis says.
He points to the BARB’s Project Dovetail as one positive development. Project Dovetail melds two complementary data sources: BARB’s panel of 5,100 homes for representative viewer information, and device-based data from webservers showing how TV is being watched.
Looking ahead to 2017, Siotis is excited about the rise of over-the-top viewing.
“The number of impressions or potential ad impressions on the platform have grown exponentially and it’s a huge area of focus for us going into 2017,” Siotis says.
A major sea change that while not breaking news has had a positive impact on publishers is the “death by a thousand cuts” of FLASH and the rise of HTML5, according to Siotis.
“It’s important to sellers, because ultimately sellers want to offer a seamless experience for users across any device,” he explains. “Unfortunately, FLASH doesn’t work across every different device.”
He also foresees a tightening of the marketplace in the form of increased consolidation across the video distribution industry. “There’s not that many players within our space that are left to be acquired but I imagine you’ll see some smaller buys happening to fill out peoples’ stacks,” says Siotis.
Asked what he’d like to see happen in the near future, Siotis yearns for more experimentation among broadcasters in the area of advanced TV so that it represents “more than a rounding error to their businesses.”
We spoke with Siotis at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
