It is now over a year since some US TV networks came together to strive for commonality in how they tap the opportunity of advanced TV ad targeting.
Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.
Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.
‘Not waiting’
“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.
“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’
“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”
Brands ‘thirsty’ for more
That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.
“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”
Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.
“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”
Tech ‘not ready’
Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
