Who says TV is the only media channel that could benefit from converged buying?
A few years ago, independent agency Horizon Media started consolidating its various media buying under the leadership of David Campanelli, president of global investment.
Now, Campanelli’s purview includes not just digital and video (which includes CTV and TV, of course) but also search, social and programmatic. As is the case at other agencies, programmatic was previously treated as its own separate channel.
“What we’ve evolved toward is that programmatic is a way to execute across multiple media channels,” said Campanelli, who told AdExchanger that Horizon often buys not just display and video but out-of-home and even digital audio on a programmatic basis. Horizon makes these buys for clients like Charter Communications, the NFL and Dave’s Hot Chicken.
AdExchanger spoke with Campanelli about how Horizon Media reorganized itself to tackle modern media investments and why sports content has broken out of its TV upfronts silo.
AdExchanger: How do you go about un-siloing an investment channel – or, in the case of programmatic, a mode of buying?
David Campanelli: What I struggle with is, how do you combine teams and make them feel connected but keep their expertise? The way we’ve tried to do that is by combining leadership, which has been very, very helpful.
Programmatic is its own unique piece, seeing how it sits in a lot of different media types. That’s been a little tricky. There’s almost a concern of, “Oh, I was buying this, now I’m handing it to the programmatic team – am I going to have a job next week?” So how we solved for that is, the media channel experts are the ones that are driving the decisions, and then the programmatic team is about execution. So we’ve found the division of labor there. It stopped being a threatening thing, and now it’s more of a collaborative thing.
What are the factors your team looks at to determine when programmatic CTV buying is the best option?
We start with the goal of the campaign and the clients’ objective for placing their video dollars. As those dollars move to CTV, we still want them to kind of act like linear dollars, meaning we’re intentionally buying content and programming that we know is of premium quality. So, the first step is usually buying direct, trying to emulate what we were buying linearly.
The next step over is programmatic guaranteed (PG). We do that frequently, and we’re doing that more and more, I would say. When you buy direct IO, the publisher is controlling the ad serving and any kind of campaign management. When you move it over to PG, you have more control or at least more understanding.
The last bucket is true programmatic, where it’s biddable, and for us it’s really purely audience-based, content-irrelevant. Biddable PMPs or open exchange give us a lot more flexibility, but the CPMs end up being a bit higher, and you have less control over where the ads are actually served.
Sports also used to be separated off from the rest of TV upfronts, and now it dominates the whole conversation. Can you dig into why you think that is from a media-buying perspective?
The value of linear TV has always been the immediacy of airing a spot and having a million, 10 million, however many people see it all at one time. Streaming just doesn’t have that. With regular streaming on demand, you’re aggregating impressions over a long period of time as you serve them on a targeted basis.
Over the past bunch of years, we’ve grown our presence in sports. We have a retail client where the fourth quarter is really important. If we’ve got a Black Friday campaign, we have to deliver those impressions in that week. We can’t underdeliver by 20% and then get make goods throughout December. Sports deliver that in full, and typically in-flight, so it continues to be more and more valuable.
Do you think we’ll ever hit a point where there’s no more availability in live sports content and it’s just completely saturated?
I think we are fairly well saturated now. The only way we’re growing the sports bucket is with moves like what the NBA did with this new season, which was to add many more windows to their deals. From an advertiser standpoint, the avails were tight this year. I don’t see the demand slowing down. And I think the leagues and networks are going to try and find as many ways as they can to continue to expand their windows to make up for it.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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