LOS ANGELES – OpenAP, the fledgling audience-buying partnership of Fox, Turner and Viacom, will use Accenture for back-end posting of campaign results as it seeks to add more publishing partners. “The third-party post will come from a company who’s got a great reputation in the media management field,” says Howard Shimmel, Turner’s Chief Research Officer.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Shimmel provides a look under the hood of OpenAP and the mechanics of trying to standardize audience targeting beyond age/sex demographics across several publishers.
“There is an immense appetite among agencies and advertisers to do audience deals, but nothing has made the infrastructure easy for them to do it cross publishers,” Shimmel says.
The problem has been that different publishers have used different data sets for audience targeting and schedule management has been disparate as well. “The whole idea behind OpenAP is to standardize that,” he adds.
Buyers use the OpenAP interface to identify their audience targets and will be able to see the size of those targets, according to Shimmel. The targets are then published so that all partners are aware of the deal.
“We then go through the normal process of optimization and managing the schedules,” says Shimmel, while on the back end buyers come back to OpenAP “and they will get a verified, third-party post in terms of delivery against the audience.”
Each publisher manages its own inventory in OpenAP, with Turner using its proprietary methodology, according to Shimmel. He notes that Turner tries to find the most appropriate inventory given the advertiser and its goals as opposed to “carving out” inventory specifically for OpenAP.
He hopes that more publishers join OpenAP so that it will incent advertisers and agencies to get involved.
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
