VIEQUES, PR — Video ad-tech vendors have spent the last couple of years sniffing around the TV industry, hoping to start processing even a fraction of the $75bn US TV advertising industry in the same way they have begun gobbling up online video ads.
But a new rationalism has recently dawned on the vendor community, and ad-tech suppliers, aware they won’t change the TV industry overnight, now realise they must work with existing TV industry structures and business models.
At a Beet Retreat panel, a variety of executives debated how so-called “programmatic” technology might gain a foothold in traditional TV.
And Jamie West, advanced ad director of leading UK pay-TV platform Sky, which has trialled DataXu and a combination of FreeWheel and Videology as ad-tech suppliers, told the panel of suppliers what a broadcast operator is looking for.
“The ad-tech industry consistently and regularly over-promises and under-delivers,” West said. “Claiming that you can create world peace, make millions for the business, just doesn’t wash anymore.
“We need to take in to account regulatory compliance, customer experience, advertiser experience. You need to ensure we can deliver out against every single element, before we start thinking about how we’re going to move to a biddable platform or process.
“I don’t see that we’re going to have a huge amount of RTB in TV, but we will have inventory traded via full system-to-system integration between agency/advertiser and platform publisher.”
FreeWheel markets SVP Neil Smith conceded: “Nobody’s going to rip out existing (TV industry) systems, they work really well and serve their purpose.” So he feels the question becomes: “How can we build out an evolution for enabling those systems to talk better with each other, to ultimately where we move to a state where the technology converges?”
Google global partnerships top partner lead Amy Young explained why she had been hired from CBS: “One of the impetuses was, they realised, we need to understand a bit more about how the broadcast business works. Direct sales is not going away.”
DataXu co-founder Sandro Catanzaro explained: “We believe (TV ad) spots are here for quite a while. Technology that works today should enable to traffic in spots as well as an impression-by-impression level.”
Videology partnerships SVP Tony Yi acknowledged that “there’s a lot of legacy systems” in the TV industry, but his company has found a way to work with broadcasters’ ongoing inclination to use them for the time being.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.