CANNES – The rapid growth in audiences for advertising-supported streaming video has pushed media companies to develop a viewer experience that matches or exceeds what traditional television offers. Marketers also want the assurance that their ads won’t appear so frequently that they become a nuisance and that the ads of competitors won’t appear in the same commercial break – especially as television advertising becomes more automated with programmatic systems.
“Our advertisers want to automate and find ways to efficiently manage their buys and manage frequency. Programmatic is going to be the majority of the way things are transacted in streaming,” Leo O’Connor, senior vice president of advertising at Paramount, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Tameka Kee at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Media companies like Paramount can receive orders for ad placements from a variety of sources in the programmatic marketplace, which adds more complexity to process of selling their inventories. Ads may be sold through a private marketplace (PMP) that offers premium inventory to preapproved buyers, or through programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals that reserve inventory for a buyer at a fixed price.
“The big challenge right now is making sure that we can still do that in a fashion that allows us to deliver TV-quality ad breaks,” O’Connor said. “Some of the boring stuff that may be ‘back office’ is now front and center in these conversations, making sure we can do things like competitive separation.”
Paramount developed a platform called Conduit to help manage how ads appear and avoid situations where advertiser such as an automotive brand places a commercial adjacent to a spot for other carmakers.
“In a single ad break, if you have a reserve deal and a PMP and maybe an inventory share with one of your distributors, we’ve got to make sure that those ads aren’t colliding with each other and have four auto ads run together,” O’Connor said. “Making sure that we can do that is really front-and-center in every conversation we’re having with our buyers in this upfront cycle.”
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