Impact of Live TV’s Audience Spikes for Programmatic: Spectrum Reach’s Groysman

Live TV events like sports and breaking news drive huge concurrent viewership spikes, representing great opportunities for advertisers to achieve broad reach.

Now the programmatic advertising systems bidding for those ad slots in real-time are working to keep pace with that opportunity,.

That is according to Alex Groysman, VP of advertising product development at Spectrum Reach, the advertising and sales division of Charter Communications.

“When we start looking at viewership patterns during prime times, as an example, we start seeing that our supply grows almost exponentially from low viewership times because people are coming to watch television as families, communities,” Groysman says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Oftentimes in the programmatic space, we see a plateau effect. The buyers aren’t able to always keep up, or rather the systems the buyers are using are not always able to keep up with the supply as it scales.”

Scale Matters

Groysman says the challenge could lie with either demand-side platforms (DSPs), which place bids on ad inventory in automated auctions, or with data management platforms (DMPs), which are used for ad targeting, measurement and attribution.

“We’re seeing that there just isn’t enough scale yet for everybody in the ecosystem to keep up with spikes that we see with concurrent viewership, particularly when we look at things like Olympics and live sports,” he says.

“The DSPs are watching how much inventory is presented to them, and they’re pacing that against the budgets that they need to spend throughout a day, and they might be updating that data only on an hourly basis. It’s not truly a real time optimization.”

Keeping Up with Increased Demand

Groysman cites research from FreeWheel showing live TV is transacted programmatically 38% of the time.

He says the two main factors determining how much of a publisher’s inventory gets sold programmatically are “the alignment between supply and demand and the yield associated with it”.

“With programmatic demand coming in, a lot of the times we either have to accept the bid or we have to reject it,” Groysman explains. “With direct sold business, we have more control and flexibility over how we locate that demand across our supply.”

Ongoing Industry Alignment

Groysman wants to see more alignment from the industry. “I think we’ve gone a long way as an industry,” he says, recalling a live sports test from his earlier career stint at FreeWheel.

“There’s still a lot of things we can do to improve, whether it’s operationally, making sure that all the teams, whether it’s on the content side or marketer side, are prepared for these live spike concurrent events or technologically making sure taxonomies are aligned and making sure the right content and data signals are being passed to make these decisions.”