Marketers are buying more CTV inventory programmatically than ever before. But what about linear inventory?
In recent years, broadcast cable providers and SSPs alike – like DISH Media, Charter Communications and Magnite – have experimented with ways to make linear TV buys more addressable, data-driven and programmatically transactable.
This past August, Spectrum Reach, which is Charter’s advertising sales arm, took a step further toward that goal via a partnership with London-based ad tech company tvbeat. Advertisers will be able to programmatically transact on Spectrum’s linear inventory with the same tools they use when buying CTV inventory.
Although tvbeat was originally founded in the US in 2012, these days it has a much larger presence in European and Oceanic TV markets, where its broadcasting clients include Sky (the UK), TV4 (Sweden) and Foxtel (Australia).
I wanted to learn more about tvbeat and what marketers could expect from the partnership. So I spoke with Founder and CEO Robert Farazin, who previously founded DoubleRecall, the Y Combinator-backed ad monetization platform.
Farazin doesn’t consider tvbeat to be an SSP or a measurement provider but an “ad tech orchestration platform” that offers forecasting, planning and optimization tools to broadcasters.
The company’s goal is to help media providers maximize their effectiveness by unifying their linear and CTV inventory into a single converged system – something that Europe is, apparently, already doing much more effectively than the US.
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
AdExchanger: How would you describe what tvbeat does?
ROBERT FARAZIN: For traditional broadcasters, changing the ad stack is very hard. They had linear inventory for many years. When they added streaming, they added another ad server. Then, maybe they added some on-demand – that’s another ad server. After 10 years of doing that, they have a very fragmented environment with multiple ad execution systems. Tvbeat is an orchestration layer connecting all of that.
From your perspective, are European CTV markets substantially different from North America in terms of how things are structured?
There are maybe two high-level differences. Some of the European markets are a bit ahead in terms of converged, holistic TV. In Scandinavian markets, 90% of campaigns are converged campaigns. Traditional broadcasters sell audience-based inventory across linear, digital, everything. Based on what we’ve seen, the US market is probably 18 months behind that.
The second thing is that, in the US, I’m hearing a lot about programmatic. In other markets, they’re a bit more careful about that.
Why do you think that is?
I think the media owners are afraid to lose control.
That said, all our European and Australian customers are automating workflow, and they’re exposing their traditional inner inventory to impressions-based buying. Where they are more careful is how much of that is exposed to a DSP.
So it’s a bit closer to PMP deals.
Exactly.
A lot of industry experts argue that someday we won’t be making a distinction between linear TV and CTV. Is that something you agree with?
Yes. I’m a strong believer that we are not selling platforms anymore; we are selling audiences. But the challenge is that all these media companies are structured by the platforms, not the audiences.
Buyers don’t really care if they’re on linear or streaming. What they really care about is reaching that audience in the most efficient way.
Some markets are pushing impression-based metrics as a default metric. In some of the Scandinavian markets, they charge for impressions with co-viewing factors – not the device impressions but people-based impressions.
How do you think a focus on impressions works out for advertisers who want to focus less on what they see as vanity metrics and more on outcomes?
I would be quite surprised if everything goes into outcome measurements. I think we will see a combination of both.
Everyone has a different definition of impressions. What we are trying to do with our clients around the world is unify that for them.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Questions? Comments? Let me know your thoughts about this newsletter at victoria@adexchanger.com.
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