As Hulu’s audience has continued to grow, the company has been building up its sales efforts and offerings for programmatic advertising transactions. “So now that we have that kind of scale we want to make sure that we’re maximizing it from an advertising perspective,” says Anthony Laurenzo.
Hulu has had programmatic capabilities since 2014 but “only recently we built a sales team around it” to work with Hulu’s local, national and performance marketing teams, the Regional Sales Manager of Advanced TV says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. “Hulu hasn’t been the easiest to work with programmatically in the past.”
The company works with “pretty much all” DSP’s, offering three types of programmatic deals. The first is automated guaranteed, wherein Hulu uses various data and determines targeting. “And then we send all those targeted impressions to the advertiser,” Laurenzo says. “It’s a fixed price. We do all the decisioning and pass those impressions on.”
Hulu’s second programmatic offering also is based on fixed pricing, called “unreserved fixed,” but it offers advertisers the ability to do the decisioning. “So based on the bid stream, they can decide if they want to accept or pass on those impressions.”
Three months ago, Hulu added a third programmatic variation that Laurenzo describes as the company’s “most differentiated deal type” called an invite-only auction.
“This is our first biddable model where you can actually go in and bid on inventory from Hulu,” Laurenzo says.
“It’s also the first time we’ve allowed multiple brands to run through one single deal ID. That’s a big deal for our DSP partners because that’s typically how they would prefer to work anyway.”
Asked about working with MediaMath, Laurenzo says, “We love the transparency, not arbitraging our inventory. We have so many issues in the marketplace with people representing Hulu inventory when maybe they shouldn’t.”
Given Hulu’s audience growth, “the DSP’s are actually working with us to help find ways to better utilize some of that extra capacity that we have.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
