CANNES – When Lucas Cridland compares broadcast television to digital video, he sees data gaps and a lack of flexibility in the former. “The dynamic nature of the premium marketplace is constantly moving,” says the President of Dentsu Aegis Networks’ Amplifi US.
But while there seems to be “a lot of innovation on the supply side,” unfortunately there’s “not as much as we would like in the traditional broadcast area,” Cridland says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We are always looking for good, quality inventory and the way to access it, and we’re trying to find a route to market that’s valuable, measurable and accountable for our clients.”
One desire among those clients is for better access to data from broadcasters, according to Cridland. He views a “big disconnect” between what Amplifi can obtain in alternative content environments for premium video with regard to “the data going in and the data coming out.”
That represents “a gap we’ve got to close in broadcast.”
On the issue of flexibility, he points to the traditional UpFront TV negotiating period as representing “an 18-month forward buy” that leaves little room for tactical maneuvering.
He finds addressable TV advertising at scale in broadcast “very exciting” even though it represents a small portion of client spending. Barriers to expansion include continuity across providers of addressable ad inventory.
To Cridland, addressable isn’t about making traditional metrics like CPM’s cheaper. “That’s not the end game in this environment. It’s about targeting and eliminating wastage difficult to do in a broadcast environment,” he says.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
