MIAMI – With addressable and programmatic advertising converging in the form of OTT television, expect a lot more one-to-one brand messaging and interactive viewer functions like commerce.
“By bringing the strength of programmatic from the online and digital space over to this converging marketplace, it really changes the game of how you can buy and sell television advertising,” says Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales for DISH Media Sales & Sling TV.
Since game changing requires education, DISH and Sling recently published a road map of sorts titled The Marketer’s Guide to OTT. In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Lowy discusses the report’s highlights and explains why today’s TV viewers are more comfortable buying things as they see them promoted within video content.
DISH and Sling offer marketers the ability to tailor creative depending on, for example, the time of day.
“If it’s on mobile during a commute one, you target a different ad as opposed to at night if you’re on the big screen watching on television…that same brand but different creative,” says Lowy. “As the business scales up I see tremendous growth there.”
One of Sling’s big points of differentiation—in addition to being launched about two years ago—is its offering of live TV, which captures the types of viewers who have dropped or never had linear pay-TV service.
Sling advertisers can bid for audiences impression-by-impression, within such groupings as auto intenders, vacationers and households with kids. Then there are contextual auctions around real-time programming such as the NBA and NCAA.
As things progress, Lowy believes OTT will achieve what early attempts at interactive TV fell short over the past two decades. That is, enabling viewers to buy something as soon as it appears on their screen.
“You’ll see a lot more advertising that won’t necessarily be within the ad environment that we know today, i.e. ad pods,” he says.
One reason for this is the personal nature of viewers’ digital devices and their familiarity with logging in to view content on big screens.
“We look at the environment today and see that society is comfortable interacting with their devices,” Lowy adds. “I’m okay buying something through an ad because it is my device.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
