NEW YORK – Technology developers that are creating the infrastructure for digital television are finding ways for their platforms to work together. Darren Sherriff, vice president of advertising technology solutions at Fox Corporation, would like to see similar collaboration with companies that help to measure viewership of programming and advertising.
“We’re starting to see a lot more interoperability between the technology vendors, but we’re not seeing that on the measurement side,” he said in this interview with Jon Watts, editorial director of Beet.TV Events, at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “Everyone is still very solid and very much ‘me, me, me,’ versus ‘hey, let’s work together to find a comprehensive solution.’ Once we find that solution, it’ll unlock so many more opportunities and avails within the addressable world.”
Fox has expanded its trove of first-party consumer data to help marketers with their ad targeting by pushing ahead with its ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) offering that’s free for consumers to watch.
“Whether it’s putting up a marketing contest here, whether it’s utilizing third-party data from elsewhere and bringing that into our fold, we are organically trying to build up our first-party data to essentially be a powerhouse in this industry,” Sherriff said.
Technological interoperability has helped Fox to scale up its reach among multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs)
“Getting all the distributors to kind of play nicely so that we actually have that scale is really the biggest thing,” Sherriff said. “The last thing I want to do is have to go to each individual distributor and sign individual deals with each one. So, folks like Canoe, Go Addressable — they helped us package all this together.”
Further advancements in interoperability will give Fox greater flexibility in putting together media packages for advertisers.
“We really feel like we have a number of great tools at our disposal,” Sherriff said. “Putting it all together and being able to offer…a ‘one Fox’ package showcasing the benefits of all of our products…That is super exciting for us.”
