MIAMI – As connected-TV/OTT viewing proliferates and adds to viewer fragmentation, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if you can buy audiences as opposed to demos. And while two minutes of local able advertising inventory remains the norm for addressable campaigns, that’s slowly changing.
In the connected-TV and OTT space, “There are quite a few ad-supported services and those are growing,” including Crackle, Vudu and Pluto TV, says Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange.
In terms of channels or apps being viewed, non-linear viewing does continue to fragment viewership, Bokor explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. And since inventory on platforms like Roku is purchased across the entire footprint, it’s done by demographics.
“But we’re starting to see and we’re working on programmatic activation. Instead of buying demo, buying audiences on connected TV, which I think is the promising area. Fragmentation is somewhat less of an issue when you’re buying an audience across apps.”
Cable TV operators continue to enable addressable advertising technology, thereby expanding the pool of households than can be targeted with specific ads, but it’s a system-by-system approach and doesn’t yet provide anything near national reach.
“We do get sort of national reach with the satellite operators because they can be accessed anywhere, but it’s a spotty national,” Bokor says.
What’s changing is that programmers themselves are trying to up the addressable inventory pool.
“I’ve seen some outreach from a few of the larger network groups who have secured some inventory on the Comcast platform coming to us and wanting us to invest in addressable TV through the programmer as opposed to the MPVD. That’s a big difference,” Bokor adds.
Streaming pioneer Hulu “really is connected TV and it’s the largest publisher,” while Roku aggregates ad inventory it secures from programmers. “Roku has been a significant source of inventory.”
Publicis is “working very hard to identify the partners” that can provide “a programmatic pathway for our video teams to be able to access audiences on connected TV across any connected-TV 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.
