COLOGNE — The UK may be preparing to leave Europe, but UK satellite TV platform and ISP Sky is heading farther in to combining its European business and uniting advertisers’ opportunities, across multiple screens and across the continent.
The company, which is the UK’s leading pay-TV provider, has satellite addressable TV system AdSmart and cross-platform ad sequencing system AdVance under its belt.
“We go live in Italy in September for Sky AdSmart and then in Ireland in January,” Sky Media’s advanced advertising director Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “In the fullness of time, we’ll expand AdSmart in to the German market. We’ll then move AdVance across.”
With Sky AdVance, ads can be served across TV and digital media in a single campaign – in other words, multi-platform sequential targeting in which ad impressions are frequency-capped on every screen, not just the internet ones.
So what’s the big idea for Sky, which has long invested in or acquired from a pool of technology and ad-tech companies it hopes can help improve its offerings for consumers and brands alike?
West is thinking big, about “super-serving” advertisers in a larger geographical footprint and across a broader range of services.
“It’s no longer acceptable to only think about the execution or targeting of an advert or campaign,” he says. “We’re thinking about how we can amplify the full campaign lifecycle – plan, execute, evaluate and re-plan an advertiser’s campaign.
“The execution part is only a very small part. That will mean we can have that preferred partner status with brands and marketing directors.”
Over the last few years, Sky has acquired:
- Pace (set-top box maker)
- The Cloud (WiFi operator)
- O2 broadband (telco)
- Sky Deutschland & Italia (siblings)
It has invested in:
- Roku (OTT box)
- Jaunt (VR)
- 1Mainstream (OTT video)
- Whistle Sports (sports network)
- Pluto TV (online video aggregator)
- Sharethrough (native ads)
- Fubo (OTT sports)
- InCrowd Sports (sports marketing)
- DataXu (ad-tech)
We spoke with West this week at the FreeWheel European television summit in Cologne presented along with StickyAds.tv. Please visit this page for additional videos from Beet’s coverage..