The digital platforms are commanding a greater and greater share of ad spend, and may even now be contributing to a forecast decline in US TV ad spend.
How can the TV industry fight back? By simplifying and going large, says Operative CEO Lorne Brown, in this video interview with Beet.TV,
Together with FreeWheel, Brown’s company just launched Premium At Scale – “an open, interoperable framework, to enable an accelerated path for media companies to simplify their ability to execute advanced advertising strategies against linear and digital content and audiences,” according to the company.
Brown says he has seen several initiatives lately designed to tackle this problem:
- M&A activity designed to create audience scale to support outcome-based advertising.
- measurement initiatives like OpenAP.
- location station initiatives like TIP
“But there’s one key initiative that’s still blocking everyone from taking all that direct response money – and that’s the technology bucket,” he says.
“The reason people still buy from Facebook and Google is because of simplicity. You can log in quickly, you can buy a lot of inventory, you can buy an audience segment, you can get it at scale.
“The TV companies have this huge opportunity to emulate a lot of the things that the digital giants have done because their content is much, much better. If (advertisers) can buy a large segment of auto and do that across premium content, (they are) going to start to move some of my money away from these digital companies into the TV sector.”
How will the industry get there? Through interoperability, allowing media companies to position their supply toward outcome-based buyers, in their preferred currency, in a simplified way, says Brown.
Brown, whose company focuses on pre-sale machinations of ad buying, says FreeWheel excels at post-sales yield and execution, allowing the companies to benefit from some of those technologies without investing in changing their own back-end tech stack.
