Advanced TV has grown more significant to advertisers aiming to reach consumers who are watching video on a broader variety of platforms. Audience fragmentation presents another challenge for brands that want a unified view of the entire landscape, including linear TV and digital video services.
“Buyers are looking for reach and frequency measurement across all screens, touchpoints and buying formats,” Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s media agency GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “As our industry gets closer to a point of unification, bringing together both programmatic traditional buying, linear TV buying, addressable buying into a workflow where the data’s able to feed and inform itself from a higher-level view is super important.”
The supply chain for advertising has become more complex with the rise of online exchanges that let buyers bid for ad placements, while relying on data providers to help improve their targeting.
“Buyers need to understand who’s involved in the transaction, what tools are being used in the decisioning, how the workflow is working,” Fisher said. “When there’s multiple vendors, multiple data partners, multiple buying paths involved in a transaction, it’s important for us as an agency and for our clients to really understand what value is being created by each of those initiatives.”
Meanwhile, content providers need to develop solutions that help media buyers to optimize their campaigns.
“The responsibility of sellers is to start to take their inventory, and add value to it beyond just standard buying, either in a digital landscape/impression-based, or in a linear environment reach-and-frequency-based,” Fisher said.
Providing a more unified view of the linear TV and digital video landscape will take a few more years, with ad ratings company Nielsen announcing last year that it had begun developing those metrics.
“Nielsen had a really good roadmap that they outlined, but that’s three to four years away,” Fisher said. In the interim, buyers and sellers of video need “to figure out ways to better leverage technology to figure out consistent measurement,” he said.
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