VIEQUES, PR – With several years of addressable television, digital ad serving and analytics experience under its belt, Sky TV has committed to rolling out its Sky AdSmart addressable platform throughout its five-country footprint between now and the end of 2018.
One key competitive advantage is that it only charges advertisers for impressions that garner a 75% view-through rate, its Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Jamie West, says in this interview with Beet.TV. West was one of some four dozen advertising and media leaders who gathered for the Beet Executive Retreat 2017 titled Video Everywhere: The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
Sky is Europe’s largest entertainment company, serving the UK, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Italy, West explains in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., the inventory and supply chain management company serving premium publishers.
“When you think about Sky from an advertising perspective, we’re most known for our advanced advertising products and scale,” says West.
As The Drum reports, Sky takes an agnostic approach to competing for advertising budgets not only with the likes of ITV and Channel 4 with with digital giants. “We as a broadcaster and an innovator have to compete head-to-head and toe-to-toe with the likes of Facebook and Google to truly compete in the digital age,” he told The Drum.
Asked by Swartz about the biggest change to Sky’s business over the last three to four years, West cites data enablement. It’s been a driving force behind not only Sky AdSmart but also Sky AdVance, which West describes as the ability to serve ads in a digital environment “as the result of some kind of consumption, whether viewing to apps or programs.”
The third pillar of the company’s operations is its analytics capabilities, including its viewing panels that now reach some 3- 3.5-million households and provide insights into second-by-second viewing. “With that appended to device ID’s and IP addresses means that we can serve ads across the whole digital estate as a result of that viewing consumption,” says West.
With Sky AdSmart, advertisers are charged only for impressions that have a 75% view-through rate. “On a 30-second commercial, that will be something like 20 seconds of incremental value versus some of the digital players that charge on one or three seconds,” West says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
