Vendors Aim to Solve ‘Hard’ Ad-Tech Issues for Programmers
BY SADAF SUNDAS Riaz
Islamabad Pakistan: Television executives are looking for technology that can help them optimize ad revenue as the media landscape changes and viewing habits shift.
.png)
“I don’t think anybody feels they’ve totally solved the ‘making the money’ problem. The word that comes up over and over again is profitability,” said Steve Reynolds, president of Imagine Communications.
The increasing importance of advertising revenue has the business going back to the way things were before streaming growth. “They’ve realized they can’t build a business unless they build it on both pillars of subscription and advertising,” he said.
Products are being offered to simplify buying and selling through automation while reducing operating costs
“We are looking for partners to continue to streamline our linear advertising operations and looking for tech that is interoperable and Television Interface Practices (TIP) compliant,” said Kurt Rao, chief technology officer at Tegna.
TIP is a standard designed by station owners to provide buyers with the broadest access to local television supply.
Another issue operators face as viewing shifts is having to share revenue between lower-priced streaming inventory and higher-priced linear inventory. Companies like Imagine are offering products to help sales organizations manage their inventory holistically, in order to optimize yields.
For example, Imagine acquired a product from Marketron that is rebranded as Crossflight. The product helps media sellers create campaigns and proposals across multiple audience segments and multiple delivery platforms.
Imagine also has a product that helps sell linear inventory as if it were digital, based on impressions. Another product is a digital ad decision server, which enables programmers to sell digital inventory as if it were linear, using the quality of impression ability to sponsor a sporting event, get the first placement in the first ad break and provide competitive separation to boost prices.
“Ad operations are just fundamentally hard,” said Marty Roberts, senior vice president of Product Strategy & Marketing at Brightcove.
It was easier when most ads were sold directly, “but as soon as we tip into the programmatic world there are really hard problems to solve,” Roberts said.
Those include linking up with demand-side and sell-side platforms and making sure they’re configured correctly so that data passed through inventory is best represented to maximize CPMs and fill rates, he said.
Last year Brightcove launched an ad monetization service that dozens of customers have signed up for, Roberts said. At first the service worked with Magnite and recently PubMatic and Google have been added, increasing demand.
More recently the company introduced Brightcove Ad Insights, which calculates how ad loads affect viewership, impressions and eventually revenue per minute watched. Turns out it’s better to run fewer ads during lunch hour, when people may be catching up on shows, than during primetime when they’re more settled in. Also, bigger screens support fuller ad loads.
With short form content “we find that most of our customers actually get more monetization if they don’t run pre-rolls and instead run one video, then an ad, another video then two ads.”
Tech company LTN has been preparing for some shift to streaming, helping customers create streams for multiple platforms. Built into its distribution products is LTN Connect, which customizes the ad inventory in that content depending on the platform, said Rick Young, senior vice president, Head of Global Products.
Certain platforms tend to skew older, some skew younger. Others have a lot of sports fans, he said. “There are still too many examples of one feed for everybody.”
LTN takes the signals from upstream production equipment and traffic systems and separates them from the video stream. The signals can get to programmatic decisioning systems early, with more bidders for ad inventory when it comes in at unpredictable times in live sporting events.
“We can give the programmatic insertions a heads up that in six seconds you’re going to have a break coming. Now the system can go out and query multiple systems to find the right ad for particular viewers,” Young said.
The capability is especially valuable in the growing amount of live programing being streamed. “Live really matters. Live is a differentiator. Live is a churn reducer,” he said.
Emmanuel Müller, managing director of Americas at Mediagenix said customers are revisiting their over-the-top strategies to become more business-oriented.
“A key element for customers is the ability to launch FAST and AVOD services efficiently and with existing resources to allow optimization of growing ad sales versus having to focus on the costs of the infrastructure or external third-party systems to manage their business,” he said.
To do that they need tools that allow for not only the management of the content and commercials, but the tool to integrate data for direct ad sales possibilities, Müller said.
MGX is announcing the acquisition of an ad tech product and unveiling an automated content scheduling and management system that provides a framework to help broadcast networks expedite their monetization of FAST channels.
We need NAB Show to provide the forum for this education to effect the change broadcasters need to diversify their business in a way that produces new revenue opportunities while extending reach to loyal viewers, Müller said.