AMENIA, NY — As the TV upfronts season starts to wrap up, media agencies are noticing some key trends emerging in the way advertising is being bought and sold.
Increased flexibility to move away from firm commitments and options, plus an acceleration in programmatic ad buying – especially around live sports – are two of the biggest themes this year.
“It’s something that our clients have been asking for, something that we’ve been able to deliver on this year, especially with that move to programmatic,” said Alex Stone, SVP of Agency Partnerships & Advanced Video at Horizon Media, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Curating Programmatic Packages
To help make sense of the growing programmatic TV opportunity for clients, Horizon Media has been building out products that curate and package up inventory from the growing array of suppliers.
The agency’s Select TV product, for example, combines more than 50 private marketplaces (PMPs) from top-tier multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), broadcasters and native streaming partners.
“We’ve basically built that out to make it a little bit more optional, allow accounts to select which partners they want included in their package, and then we deliver transparent reporting and show where the performance comes from,” Stone said.
Sports Value Rises
Stone observes that the value of live sports programming continues to increase, even as audiences fragment across a wider array of channels and services.
“There’s a finite amount of sports content, however, that has increased and improved the success and popularity of the WNBA,” he said. “Now we see that as another viable place to put our dollars, but certainly as what we’re seeing is that the rate of change in sports is completely different than other places. And that’s because the demand is there. Live eyeballs really do make a difference.”
Experimenting with New Ad Formats
As audiences continue to shift towards internet-connected TV platforms, new ad formats like pause ads and native ads are creating fresh opportunities for brands to engage viewers.
Stone likens native ads in streaming environments to the kind of high-impact homepage takeovers that were popular in the early days of online advertising.
“It is the first screen you see, it’s where you’re going to get the eyeballs. It’s great for our entertainment accounts, it’s great for our QSRs and retailers,” he said. “The pause ads again, is more akin to, I guess, 10, 12 years ago also with some of those slate ads that we used to see in the early days of Hulu.”
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