When OpenAP, a TV industry consortium for making advanced TV targeting more straightforward, announced the addition of CBS to its repertoire last year, it was just the latest addition to a roster that now numbers:

  • Fox
  • ViacomCBS
  • NBC Universal
  • Univision

But Ed Davis isn’t stopping there. In this video interview with Beet.TV at Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the consortium’s chief product officer Ed Davis explains why he wants to see more names on that list.

“We’re pretty focused on more publishers that offer premium programming,” Davis says. “There are a number of publishers that aren’t under our umbrella.

“Some of them of course might not be within the next year, but many of them, I think, have been taking a step back and let’s just see how these things unfold.”

OpenAP Adds CBS To Grow Advanced TV Scale

“Those are the conversations that we’re having right now,” Davis adds. “We have a number of active conversations with other networks and I think we’ve sort of shifted the way you integrate with us and made it a lot more straightforward. Even here at CES, we’ve been having a few of those conversations and we can see that, just (by) reducing a little bit of the friction to activate with OpenAP, the response has been very, very positive.

“So I think you’ll see not a lot of surprises in membership over the next year. It will be people you’ll say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense. They’re in good company if they join OpenAP’.”

Big Five US broadcast networks not on OpenAP’s list include ABC and The CW, though, of course, considering the wider world of premium non-broadcast video, the universe is much larger.

OpenAP launched three years ago as  the means through which the TV networks harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.

Recently, OpenAP made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.

A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns.

“The initial phases of OpenAP were very focused on clients who wanted to come and build an audience with OpenAP,” Davis adds. “And what we’ve realised through a lot of conversations with clients is, a lot of them don’t really need or want help defining audiences.

“What they really want to do is take all of the investment they’ve made in their own very sophisticated data solutions and have an easy path to activate all of those audiences so that they can be used for targeting. So we sort of reframed what we do on the audience side.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews