TORONTO — As Cadent’s technology powers the targeted-television advertising platform that pools the inventory of Sky and Virgin Media in the UK and Ireland, the company is busy helping to scale dynamic ad insertion in Canada. Among its tasks for Sky and Virgin are creating a “compliant, walled garden” to abide by GDPR privacy strictures, says Cadent’s VP of Technology Sales, Paul Ranger.
Just over a year ago, Sky and Virgin disclosed their intent to team up on addressable TV ads by adding Virgin Media’s customer base to Sky’s addressable TV offering, Sky AdSmart, as The Drum reports. In this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp. Founder & CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Future of TV Advertising Forum, Ranger provides an update on the alliance.
It’s been a few years since Cadent began working with Virgin to deploy VOD dynamic ad insertion on its Qam system. Cadent has also enabled VOD on Virgin’s IP system in the UK and Ireland “and now we’re looking at linear as well,” says Ranger.
“What’s been less talked about is the fact that it’s Cadent technology providing the system which is going to allow them to do that,” he adds of the Sky/Virgin initiative.
To be GDPR compliant, Cadent is “effectively creating a walled garden, which means Sky are abstracted away from all of the Virgin subscriber information and keeping it GDPR compliant from that perspective.
“We’re managing the exchange of the campaign data from Sky, because obviously Sky are very sensitive about handing over campaign information as well. We’re acting as the mediator between the Sky media campaign information and the Virgin subscriber data,” says Ranger.
In Canada thus far, Cadent has worked “specifically” with Rogers Cable, enabling VOD dynamic ad insertion for its 1.6 million subscriber households to pay-TV, along with Corus Entertainment and Bell Globemedia.
Ranger sees the role of Cadent as two-fold: being pioneers and educators in the interested of advanced television advertising.
“And we’re looking at it from a technology perspective as well,” he says. “One of the things that we don’t want to create is a whole load of siloed systems that make it very expensive to operationalize these new kinds of advertising.”
Priorities include normalizing data, making ad ops as efficient as possible and creating “a common technology product across multiple BDU’s that the major programmers can tap into and use to drive new revenue streams,” he says, referencing Broadcast Distribution Undertakings—satellite TV operators, as they are known in Canada.
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
