If you didn’t happen to watch the main stage of AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO New York this week, then you missed a great (albeit way too brief) conversation about CTV’s programmatic progress.
On Monday afternoon, I was joined by Nicolle Pangis, VP of advertising at Netflix; Liane Nadeau, chief investment officer at Digitas; and Jamie Power, SVP of addressable sales at Disney. Our chat revolved around how quickly the rate of programmatic innovation has accelerated within just the last year.
For Netflix and Disney, that evolution has been especially rapid.
Netflix, of course, started their own ad offering three years ago and only just launched their proprietary ad suite in April. According to Pangis, their focus is now on creating more “optionality for buyers,” which includes new partnerships with major DSPs and more flexible ways of delivering targeting and measurement data.
Similarly, Disney has seen huge growth in programmatic buying. Over the last few months, Power has oft repeated the surprising stat that 70% of Disney’s biddable transactions were tied to an upfront commitment this year. She also told Programmatic IO’s audience that the company’s inventory is now connected to over 35 DSPs and recently unified its entire tech stack, so ESPN is now buyable on the Disney ad server as well.
But for Nadeau, at least, acceleration in CTV programmatic has also brought with it a lot of fragmentation. That’s a “very real concern” for brand clients of Digitas, in no small part because introducing more layers and more steps in between a buyer and seller also introduces more fees.
“They’re thinking about, ‘How do I manage all of these dollars now going to not only all the networks, but also all the CTV providers?’” Nadeau said.
Which brings me to what felt like the most important takeaway from the panel, on both the buy side and the sell side: Programmatic, in Nadeau’s words, is “not a strategy” in and of itself. Marketers still must think about how they want to find and engage their consumers, which doesn’t necessarily have to include programmatic transactions – especially if it’s not being done for a well-thought-out reason.
“Programmatic is a pipe,” added Pangis, who also said the channel shouldn’t be considered a “race to the bottom.”
Instead, she said, “it should give us much more opportunity to be much more creative and strategic as an industry, because it just gives us all more tools.”
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“We want to make sure that we’re not replicating a broadcast linear experience and that we are optimizing for a world of streaming with everything we do,” concluded Power.
