When you run a mass medium like TV and the largest advertising channel in the world, you hold all the cards. At least, you used to.
TV operators are familiar with setting the terms of the deals through which marketers get to buy air-time – even the very process which leads to deals getting done at all.
But, in an age where digital media have ripped up rules of other advertiser funded channels, TV must also learn to let advertisers have more control.
That is the view of Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, a company whose platform helps marketers better target TV viewers.
“The future of all marketing and all advertising is building products and building processes that are centered on the advertiser,” says Morgan in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“They must exert more control, we need to let them determine the actual inventory they take on a spot-by-spot basis much more. We need to let them make decisions.”
Morgan is talking about a TV ad buying system that operators themselves have historically controlled – the annual “upfronts”, in which channel owners present their upcoming content roster for ad buyers to bid against ahead of broadcast.
Now TV is learning a thing or two from the web and online video, which have dispensed with these manual modes of selling inventory and instead sell through programmatic platforms, automatically.
Morgan says the lesson from search and social is that, when a publisher enables that for a buyer, it can say: “We think we’re both going to win.”
He acknowledges automation raises fears, but thinks it can grow the market.
“Particularly the smaller emerging marketers who would love to exploit TV, they don’t want to work the old fashioned way with hand-sold ads,” Morgan adds. “They want a high degree of automation.
“The pressures that the TV companies are under in the U.S. from Wall Street will drive them more towards putting automation in the places they need, so that they can invest in things like content development.”
This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom. EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page.
