In a world of fragmentation, partisanship and increasing separation, there is an untold story of cooperation in the media business.
Around the world, operators are coming together in partnership, seeking scale to fight common challenges.
That is what Germany-based broadcast group RTL is doing with more than 400 partners.
Its Adconnect unit is an ad sales arm for RTL-owned broadcasters and shows made by its Fremantle Media subsidiary (American Idol, Got Talent, X Factor) around the world, but also those owned by other operators.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, RTL Adconnect CEO Stéphane Coruble talks about the big idea, and how a recent extension to the partner network adds additional scale at a time of change.
“If you want to advertise for a single point of contact that we are, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Spain, we can do that,” Coruble says. “An American company could say, ‘I really would like to reach Europe, and to reach the inventory of launching a group from one point of contact’. And you can do that, we can deliver that, through the video marketplace.”
RTL Adconnect does this using a video marketplace platform to access premium inventory across linear TV and VOD, built on SpotX and Smartclip, both of which RTL acquired in recent years in addition to VideoAmp and Clypd.
The idea is to give video and TV companies a leg-up in ad sales against the might of tech platforms, appealing to international companies with a clear pitch in a fragmented market: “Buy Europe”.
The UK’s main free-to-air commercial broadcaster ITV recently signed a deal with Adconnect in which the latter will represent ITV outside of the UK on ad sales.
That is in addition to existing deals to represent RAI in Italy and Medialaan in North Belgium.
This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom. EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page.