The term ‘holy grail’ is one we use far too often in digital advertising, but few would argue that serving ads programmatically into linear video streams isn’t one of them. In Belgium, Erik Portier, an ex-Googler who has also worked with both RTL and SBS Prosieben, has trying to crack the problem. Here he explains the challenges and opportunities that are emerging around programmatic linear, and how his company – Digital Video Market Place – are trying to solve them.
Could you explain what Digital Video Market Place are doing with programmatic linear video advertising?
Digital video consumption is growing rapidly. Consumers are increasingly digital, mobile, interactive, social and connected. This leads to a convergence between TV content and internet video. TV screens and second screens such as laptops , tablets and smartphones, are becoming more and more complementary and ubiquitous. The convergence of screens and content offers unseen possibilities to innovate both from the viewer and advertisers perspective.
This creates both challenges and opportunities for broadcasters and digital video content providers. The challenge is to create the necessary technical and business models that allow publishers to facilitate a migration to an advertising ecosystem that meets those challenges and opportunities. The opportunity lies in the unique advantages it provides to deliver a more addressable and interactive advertising solution to the viewer while demonstrating clear and measurable value for the advertiser.
To help this integration in a new advertising ecosystem the Digital Video MarketPlace is creating a marketplace where a single source service/sales side platform aggregates content and delivers linear and nonlinear dynamic adinsertions to offer a complete digital offering based upon programmatic marketing in real time.
Would linear lend itself to RTB or are we more likely to be talking about programmatic direct buys?
The emergence of digital media and, in particular the Internet, has created a personalized and interactive experience for the home user that is very attractive to advertisers. Ad revenue of Internet companies such as Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) mastering the auction model has increased exponentially each year.
Broadcasters have been selling TV ad space the same way like they did decades ago while innovation mostly occurred at the technology side, today’s conservative sales models are not aligned with the current disrupted market dynamics.
With the ongoing media fragmentation new sales models need to emerge making use of scarcity of digital video inventory to increase monetization and the technology to scale and increase client base.
Broadcasters and publishers will embrace programmatic marketing in their strategy but it will be different for everyone. Some will use programmatic marketing as a yield tool managing effectively direct buys or private seats, applying semantic pricing while others will see this as a re-enforcement or extension of their sales teams.
Which markets are you working in? Which of those countries do you think programmatic linear will grow most quickly?
DVMP launched in Belgium in 2013 and we planned to expand to the Netherlands and France for Q1 2014. Programmatic will grow significantly all over Europe, but NL, FR , UK, SP, IT , DE are certainly the category leaders.
What are the technical challenges you need to overcome with programmatic linear?
The different platforms and distribution forms are the biggest obstacles to over win. IPTV, Satellite, Cable all support different technical architectures and standards.
Although the signal coming from the broadcaster/publisher is the same , the ways in which this is distributed and delivered to your home varies a lot.Merging the different worlds is the technical challenge we need to overcome.
