OpenAP no longer just wants broadcasters to use the same language in their sales pitch to advertisers. Now it also wants to do the selling, too.
Under its first iteration, the two-year-old consortium is the means through which Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision have harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets. Now OpenAP is making a step forward.
“The first step was just standardising how we talk about audiences and how we define those,” says OpenAP CEO David Levy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But, to really bring skills to the marketplace, we needed to actually build a marketplace.”
Levy was speaking as the organization launched just that – a new way for buying TV ads using data across the organizations.
“An advertiser can come define any audience segment that they want, build their own campaign across linear and digital and get one consolidated proposal back where they can actually see unduplicated reach for that target segment across all the publishers in our marketplace. Which is close to 50% of the overall TV marketplace. So really excited about that.”
Buyers can either buy direct from OpenAP or go through dedicating buying platforms via integrations with the new marketplace.
The new marketplace does not undo the significant direct buying efforts the individual TV groups already have. Advertisers can still buy from individual operators.
OpenAP’s launch announcement claims the tag team can reach “more than
90% of all U.S. television audiences through its combined member footprint of 20 cable networks, three broadcast networks and a vast array of digital video”.
It’s all about using audience segments that can find people across broadcaster properties, in pursuit of a single advertiser goal, and with cross-network forecast insights.
Levy became full-time CEO of the group in May after a stint at Fox after consortium members decided it should be a dedicated effort.
“Previously, all of us were spending about 25% of our time trying to push things forward,” Levy says. “If we could create a marketplace, that could truly bring scale to the advanced ad formats. But to do that we needed a company and we needed actually dedicated team who has focused a 100% of their time on building this vision”
Levy also gave a recent interview to Variety on the evolution of OpenAP.
