[Sponsored Post] Ben Antier, co-founder and CEO of Publica,discusses how his company’s new Elea AI technology can be used to improve the CTV advertising experience for viewers whilst also boosting performance for advertisers. Elea AI can detect which advertiser is about to run programmatically, even when advertiser information isn’t provided by a buyer.
Although AVOD is the fastest growing area of viewing on CTV, many viewers still cite the streaming experience as poor due to the way the ad breaks that fund the app are constructed.
One of the main reasons for this is due to the fact that critical data signals such as the advertiser domain are only present in about 34% of CTV bid responses today and this is why streaming audiences are constantly served the same ads back to back in the same ad breaks, because frequency management has thus far remained almost impossible to implement by publishers due to so few buyers passing advertiser details.
Publica is in a unique position as a demand agnostic ad server to see the billions of CTV bid responses monthly required for advanced machine learning models to start to build out the intelligence required by publishers to really solve for the frequency challenges in their ad breaks once and for all.
This is why Publica recently released a new solution that lets streaming publishers harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver seamless ad experiences on connected televisions. This new solution is called Elea AI and it enables publishers to detect which advertiser is about to run programmatically, even when advertiser information isn’t provided by a buyer. With this solution, Publishers can apply a multitude of controls and business rules such as: deduplication, competitive separation, frequency capping, advertiser block list, category block lists, etc.
Mid-2021, advertisers are lining up to buy CTV & streaming eyeballs. Nearly three quarters (73%) of CTV buyers report shifting budget from broadcast and cable to CTV in 2021. More than a third (35%) of buyers expect to increase CTV video ad spending this year also according to IAB’s Video Ad Spend 2020 and Outlook for 2021 report, released at the IAB 2021 NewFronts.
Despite this rise in advertiser demand for streaming audiences, frequency management has thus far remained a key challenge for many CTV publishers. In this context, the need for highly effective ad podding technology becomes crucial on the sell-side. Competitive ad separation, ad deduplication & frequency capping are among the top requirements listed by publishers to secure new & increased advertising budgets. Repetitive ads are also listed as a common issue causing users to drop-off from programs or cancel streaming services.
This is the reason Publica built Elea AI, an artificial intelligence engine that leverages CTV-specific ad delivery algorithms in the process of constructing ad-breaks.
The first application for Elea AI is utilizing a logo recognition Machine Learning (ML) algorithm to identify the brand behind a video ad. In real-time, the algorithm is able to double-check or supply the IAB category and advertiser domain from the ad.
Over the past few months, we’ve been analyzing factors enabling accurate ad-deduplication at scale. Critical data signals such as the advertiser domain are only present in about 34% of CTV bid responses today. The IAB category of the ad is passed in 51% of cases. Some technologies rely on clickthrough URLs which can be widely inaccurate in an environment where a click isn’t an option for the end user. Elea AI is a material step into further ensuring that our deduplication and frequency capping algorithms perform at the highest level, even in the absence of signals from the buy side.
Elea AI is now out of Beta and Publica have made this available to all publishers on our technology platform.
The R&D program led by the engineering team at Publica to enhance Elea is now focusing its efforts on bringing artificial intelligence into the Unified Auction, in order to keep maximizing the yield generated between programmatic & direct demand sources.
“The team at Publica is constantly innovating to help us reach the highest level of performance, for both monetization and user experience. We’re excited about this new layer of automation to ensure that our users are not inundated with the same ads over and over while enabling more programmatic buyers access to our premium video inventory.” says Reed Barker, Head of Advertising at Philo.
