With the right number of partnerships and extended sales forces, national television networks can provide local and national advertisers with “a higher frequency of opportunity,” says A+E Networks’ Jason DeMarco. In the process, there can be a reduction in repetitive ads.
A+E’s core sales team handles linear, set-top box VOD and on-demand digital, Demarco explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We also then started to extend partnerships into the local station groups and MVPD’s…and tapping into DSP’s and SSP’s,” says DeMarco, who is VP, Programmatic & Audience Solutions. “When you look at all of those different pieces in one kind of pie, each represents a specific percentage that doesn’t necessarily overbear on the other pieces.”
As a result, “We’re not too reliant on any specific piece of the demand makeup, which allows us to run a yield management tool and process and strategy to maximize the revenue efforts.”
The higher frequency of opportunity for advertisers arises “as we look at all inventory and make it available to everyone. Lastly and most importantly, it also helps the user experience.” This is because ad frequency that might have originally emanated from 100 advertisers in a given month can balloon to 1,000 or even 10,000 across different DMA’s and regions.
“What we’re doing is limiting the amount of repetitive ads that someone may see while they’re enjoying our content in a time-shifted, on-demand experience,” says DeMarco.
Asked about partnering with local station groups like TEGNA, it’s easy if the technology is unified. “That’s the way the TEGNA piece has operated for us. We’re both FreeWheel clients, so it’s truly a server-to server ad-server integration that allows us to avail inventory to them as if they were any other seller or partner within our network.”
DeMarco welcomes the transformation from several years ago when advertisers were “looking purely at data and wanting to be targeting a person, and that was the main KPI.”
Now putting the right ad in front of the right person at the right time is still key, but “they have to be paying attention and engaged. If we think about the connected TV environment or time-shifted, appointment viewing, someone is in the comfort of their own living room, they’re relaxed and enjoying full-episode type content, so it’s the right environment to have your brand associated.”
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.
