CANNES – With a background in sales at Turner and having participated in Upfront negotiations before the advent of digital media, Matt Prohaska has a unique perspective on OpenAP. Despite “a lot of energy and excitement” about the audience targeting consortium, he thinks it’s still ramping up during this year’s Upfront.
“What we’re hearing from buyers and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says in this interview with Beet.TV in which he also discusses the early impact of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
Another hot topic at Cannes was “what we politely call next Nielsen, and next Nielsen could involve Nielsen obviously, but sort of what’s next beyond age and demos,” he adds.
OpenAP is not yet one year old, having been announced by Fox, Turner and Viacom in March 2017 and activated that fall, so the current Upfront is its first. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal joined in, as did Univision.
“What we’re hearing from buyers, and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says.
He cites comments by, among others, OMD’s Chris Geraci—who was Prohaska’s boss at BBDO back in the day—to the effect that “there’s some usage there. But the real upside of being able to have proprietary data sets that you keep as a buyer or seller but be able to dip into this great pool and leverage these standards that have been worked on for awhile hasn’t fully been realized yet. I think there’s a lot of energy and excitement about trying to do that more while the legacy television and advanced television buyers and sellers sink their teeth into this marketplace.”
At the outset of Cannes, Prohaska heard of “a couple other” media that should be joining OpenAP in next couple of months, “and that’s all great. But not as much transactional, put to use on a campaign-by-campaign, brand-by-brand basis yet.
“We think we’re sort at that start of the hockey stick and hopefully next year this will become just become the way everyone does business in advanced television and we hope to be helping with a couple of our buyer clients and then one or two sellers maybe, we’ll see.”
GDPR has impacted the EU temporarily, but while many people still think of programmatic in traditional display mobile as sold by open auction, Prohaska says that’s not the case.
“Fortunately, what we’re seeing is a strong move to PMP’s in digital, strong move to deterministic versus probabilistic data strategy. As we’ve been saying for about a year, classic short-term pain for sure with a lot of organizations but long-term upside.”
Prohaska Consulting recently signed its 260th client in the company’s 230th week of business as it expands globally, with its publisher practice representing one-third, tech-one third, the buy-side 20% and the rest investors and trade groups. “Fortunately, that idea of kind of helping everyone move forward under the prism of client first and if we’re there to receive some thanks and compensation, great. It’s been paying off,” said Prohaska.
