In a world where advertising partners play for both teams, you never really know who is on your side.
So says one executive whose company felt so strongly about that issue, it split in two.
Telaria spun off its division serving ad buyers back in September 2017 to focus only on providing a programmatic advertising tech platform to publishers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, video publisher ad tech maker Telaria’s CEO Mark Zagorski explains why, by continuing to be beholden to both the buy side and the sell side, big platforms like Google can mislead customers.
“Those guys have content that they can compete against,” he says. “Their platform competes against the people that they’re selling technology to.
“Same thing with Comcast. Comcast creates content and they have a platform they’re trying to sell to other content producers, so every dollar you pay them, they’re going to take that dollar and use it to create competing content.
“It’s a big deal and I think it’s becoming a bigger deal as CTV and OTT become a bigger part of people’s businesses.”
The playing-both-sides question has been an industry issue in recent years. Over time, many suppliers try to hit scale by aiming to serve both sides of the ad coin.
The transparency debate has changed that, to some extent, with more platforms concluding that, to maintain customers’ trust, they need to make the best impact for just one kind of customer.
For Zagorski, a former Nielsen executive, doubling down on ad sellers comes at a time when those sellers are trying to respond to the rise in multi-screen video consumption, over-the-top TV delivery and the infrastructure requirements needed to capitalize on the power of “addressable” connected TV targeting.
“When I started (at Telaria), that part of our business was less than 3% of our revenue, and now it’s approaching 30% of our revenue,” he says. “It’s a big development. It’s a big part of our future.
But TV’s embrace of new-style “programmatic” selling techniques comes different from the way in which the tactic arrived in display ad media. Zagorski says private programmatic marketplaces, allowing sellers more control over to whom and for how much they sell their precious ad space, are more commonplace than real-time auctions.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.