SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – In a media world that can sometimes seem deceptively like digital before it, how can the new crop of software firms facilitating ad buying best cater to their customers?
Through a range of partnerships that support diverse media plans.
That was the view delivered by Matt McLeggon – Senior Vice President, Advanced Solutions at Magnite, at Beet.TV’s Beet Retreat.
Smaller pool
On the one hand, McLeggon told interviewer Zach Rodgers, Magnite is having to secure a smaller number of higher-stakes partnerships.
“There’s just fewer companies now,” he says. “Unlike the display world, where partnerships are handled through industry standards and they’re really integrations, in the CTV space, there’s only a set number of players.
“So you really have to be close with everyone, even folks that people would say are your competitors on a Lumascape.
“Especially if you’re not one of the walled gardens, you have to cooperate. It’s partner or die.”
Magnite’s attraction
McLeggon got to Magnite through SpotX, which was acquired by the company.
Magnite, a sell-side independent ad platform created from the merger of Rubicon Project and Telaria in 2020, acquired video ad-serving platform SpringServe last year.
SpotX, an earlier acquisition of Magnite, had already made its own strategic investment in SpringServe.
SpringServe’s Bingewatcher software analyzes video content, turning attributes into valuable plain-text metadata that publisher systems can use to fulfil ad demand.
Join the dots
In the CTV software race, the imperative is about interconnections, McLeggon says.
“All the things that we know are the top things to solve are really just about making systems and different kinds of systems work together,” he explains.
“At the end of the day … buyers are buying CTV, they’re not buying a single publisher.
“They’re not buying just Disney or just Discovery or a whole other.”
Enabling deals
Even so, for buyers, CTV, despite being increasingly programmatically-powered, remains a different proposition from early digital programmatic, which was commonly associated with open networks and widely available inventory.
“That’s not what programmatic is in CTV,” McLeggon says. It’s 90% (private) deal-driven, so it’s not the open marketplace, it’s buyer-to-seller and it’s just the automation of programmatic.”
In October, Magnite began offering AMC’s ad buyers a single system through which to buy both linear and digital-device streaming inventory.
More broadcaster deals are coming, McLeggon says.
“We have a number of media owners launching in Q2, and for us that’s exciting,” he says.
You are watching coverage from Beet Retreat San Juan 2022, presented by AppScience, Infillion, MadHive, SpringServe, Univision & VideoAmp. For more videos, please visit this page.
