As more ad tech providers sought to prove their programmatic chops this year, their underlying mission became “workflow.” Online video marketplace operator BrightRoll is telling ad network, agency and advertiser clients that with its newest console update, it will be able to do things that used to take hours in just minutes.
The changes involve bringing more engineers in house, said Tim Avila, BrightRoll’s VP product marketing.
“Our engineering team now makes up roughly 25% of the company and we’ve doubled the number of engineers in the past year,” Avila said, noting that BrightRoll’s total workforce in the US, Canada and Europe is about 300. “That’s going to continue into next year and will help accelerate our product rollout.”
Next year, BrightRoll will expand the console it unveiled at the end of October. It had been in beta test mode for much of the summer with a small number of clients, Avila said. Among the several reasons for the console revamp, BrightRoll wanted to align itself with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Quality Assurance Guidelines.
Video buyers will be able to target and filter inventory according to factors like placement (e.g. above the fold)audio settings (e.g. auto-play, user initiated). And users can more easily align with certain content and context, or target by screen size and device type.
Avila didn’t break out shifts in percentages between direct response and branding buys on BrightRoll’s marketplace. Still, while it’s clear that RTB is still the dominant use of its tools, more TV advertisers are using it for non-RTB purposes. Those new customers do not want to deal with systems that make the process of buying online video any more complicated than TV advertising is.
“The overall goal with the console change was that we wanted users to be able to traffic campaigns more quickly,” Avila said. “In a typical console, trafficking eight different creative for different markets and DMAs could take four or five hours. The new console can do meet those requests in just a few minutes.”
When the console was released at the end of October, about 30 of BrightRoll’s clients immediately began accessing it. The new dashboard is now available to all its clients, with new ones being added daily, a BrightRoll rep said.
And while a number of companies in the ad tech space are shifting their business models to SaaS-based, fee-for-software and managed services, BrightRoll expects to continue with its revenue-share means of charging clients, even as its customers’ use of its tools evolves.
“We do have some customers on the platform that are fully managed, while others are self-service, even as others continue to use us to plug into RTB platforms,” Avila said. “We have ways of working with each of those use cases. Today, we’re mostly centered around revenue-share based on media spend and I don’t see any drastic changes there. But some are interested in exploring more SaaS based models and we can adapt to that if needed.”
