Advanced and addressable TV advertising capabilities give programmers and advertisers super-powers – but, in some markets, local conditions mean the starting gun has barely been fired.
Case in point – Germany, where many kinds of modern ad practice are curtailed by regulation in a country long sensitive to privacy concerns.
That is something acknowledged by Rhys Nölke, SVP strategy at RTL Group, the pan-European broadcast and production owner.
RTL Group operates its eponymous RTL TV broadcaster in Germany, but it is nevertheless taking steps forward in upgrading the country’s advanced advertising capabilities.
Nölke says RTL Group is building on its previous acquisition of video ad-tech vendor Smartclip and its tech stack’s compatibility with Europe’s HbbTV technology standard, by launching a joint venture with Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, a broadcast channel owner.
Earlier this month, the pair formed a joint venture, allowing them to control a platform for the automated booking of addressable TV and online video, the latest in a series of European alliances between rivals coming together against big tech platforms.
Nölke, in this video interview with Beet.TV, calls it “a booking engine for clients to actually simplify access and actually have an addressable TV product available from one spot”.
He says German addressable TV ad spending remains small: “We’re not even there on a significant million Euro figure today.”
But he is seeing “the first encouraging signs on some very small, very simple products that we’ve got out there, which also are still under scrutiny of regulation because replacing spots, et cetera, is also not possible” due to regulation.
This segment is part of a series titled The New Global Marketplace for Premium Video, produced at Cannes Lions and sponsored by RTL AdConnect. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. For all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019, please visit this page.
