SANTA MONICA — For most in media, the quest for holistic cross-screen measurement is enough.
Now imagine trying to usher-in a cross-national cross-screen measurement future.
If that sounds like a game of 3D chess, it is one Stéphane Coruble is happy to play.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CEO, RTL AdAlliance, describes how he is catering to the unique European market.
The European project
“Whenever a consumer is watching a piece of content live or on-demand or on another device, we believe it’s the same experience, it’s the total video experience,” Coruble says.
“We need to make it simple to access, and this is what we do at pan-European level, combining different sets of inventory across multiple markets.
“The duty that we’ll have to follow in the future is to make sure that we have the correct measurement in the different countries.
“We don’t have a unique measurement across the different countries, unfortunately, but at least within the same countries. We need to be able to measure across different screens, across different devices… And we are all working towards that goal in Europe.”
Strategic shift
Luxembourg-based pan-European RTL Group owns RTL Television whose footprint is significant, including RTL Television in Germany, M6 in France, the RTL channels in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Croatia, Hungary, and Antena 3 in Spain, not to mention the Fremantle content business.
It had already operated AdConnect, a video marketplace platform to represent premium inventory across linear TV and VOD, built on SpotX and Smartclip, both of which RTL acquired in recent years in addition to VideoAmp and Clypd.
Earlier this year, the outfit announced it would merge three units, “to provide international advertisers with simplified access to a unique portfolio of media brands across TV, digital video, radio/audio, online, mobile and print”:
- RTL AdConnect
- G+J I|MS
- SmartClip’s media division
Responding to pressure
The integration is happening at a time when Coruble sees multiple “pressure” points building in the European market:
- Consumer inflation driven partly by the war in Ukraine’s impact on energy prices.
- Media behavior shifting from linear to streaming and on-demand.
- New actors competing for ad spend, including new social platforms, retail media and SVOD providers transitioning to ad support.
“Many other players want to have a share of the pie,” Coruble says.
“Our goal, as legacy broadcasters, is to understand what the public wants and we need to adapt and to bring them additional products in order to make it happen and to prevail in the future.”
You are watching coverage of Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2022, presented by Ampersand, MiQ, Nielsen, PubMatic, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and The Trade Desk. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.
