SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—An early entrant in digital marketing, independent buy-side platform Sizmek has been eyeing its near-term future from a “video extension perspective” as its reach moves beyond web video to television. It was a logical move considering the big shift in video viewing to big screens, according to Managing Director of Product Hardeep Bindra.
“The last few years have really seen the transformation in the digital living room, where the TV has gone from being a content generator or content distributor to now really just becoming a device in the living room,” Bindra says.
“For us, we look at the extension of video going onto the TV screen, the largest screen, as something that we have to deliver to our clients to give a more omni-channel output to their campaigns.”
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Bindra talks about the challenges of working within connected-TV and OTT environments and how the digital side needs to learn from past mistakes when branching out to TV.
“We’ve run into similar challenges as other DSP’s of how do we take our optimization and our reach capabilities that the marketplace really knows us for and recognizes us for and then expand that into this new arena,” Bindra says. “There’s a lot of work for us to do around this.”
Sizmek has been running test TV campaigns, some of which began on the digital side, that have for the most part generated responses he describes as “fantastic.” But outside of test environments, it’s the same story that many others are encountering.
“We’ve run into similar issues of scale, of data on a de-duplicated or a deterministic basis,” Bindra says. “So a lot of our technology, which is very much centered around being precise, now has to start to look at things in a less-than-perfect environment from a data perspective.”
Data access isn’t the problem, nor is figuring out who a particular viewer is since everything is at the household level, “but also how attribution works and the time delay in getting that information back while the campaign is running,” he adds. “Our focus has really been in how we can collapse that time gap and who we should partner with to get data back to us in a near real-time fashion.”
Asked to reflect on Beet Retreat 2018, he says it was “extremely helpful” being around knowledgeable practitioners who are open about discussing issues common to many participants. “Being relatively nascent in this space, this access was very valuable to us. There are things that you just don’t know where to start and who to talk to and how to evaluate things,” says Bindra.
Another common sentiment at the Retreat was a willingness to solve, according to Bindra. “In the digital side, we have made mistakes and we are now acknowledging those mistakes, we are trying to learn from those mistakes.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
