The healthy tension between art and commerce – or content and commerce, if you want to be less pretentious about it – has always been tricky to maintain.
And as any of us who work in digital media can tell you, commoditization often represents a death knell for brand differentiation. The open internet knows what I’m talking about.
But while programmatic ad buying may have inadvertently commodified the open web, CTV’s best and brightest are confident that it won’t do the same for their industry.
Well, mostly confident.
Here comes the content
At AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO event in Las Vegas this week, our executive editor, Sarah Sluis, asked a panel of experts from NBCUniversal, Roku and Tubi if programmatic buying will inevitably lead to a repeat on CTV of what happened with digital media publishers.
The answers? A “no,” a “no” and a “maybe.”
The group concluded, with fingers crossed, that audience scale and content scarcity will prevent commoditization from truly taking hold in streaming.
“If you want an NFL game,” said Dominick Vangeli, SVP and general manager of advanced advertising at NBCU, “there’s literally only so many CTV publishers you can go to, especially if you want access to that programmatically.”
Plus, there’s built-in scarcity – or there should be – when it comes to the ad experience. Adding another display ad to a webpage is less taxing on a visitor than adding another fifteen-second spot to a commercial pod on TV is to a viewer.
Both fair points – although talking about scale and scarcity together feels like a bit of an oxymoron, said Dylan Moorhead, Roku’s director of global publisher business development and strategic ad partnerships.
Better data integration and “supply shaping” – as in, packaging inventory in a way that emphasizes differentiation – is one way Roku tries to differentiate from its competitors, Dylan said.
However, Vijay Rao, SVP of partnership sales at Tubi – the lone “maybe” from earlier, in case the context clues weren’t obvious – was less dismissive of the concern that programmatic could eventually homogenize CTV publishers.
“Programmatic environments traditionally lend themselves to commoditization,” Rao admitted. “So, if you’re a publisher, you just have to be very adroit at navigating some of the challenges there and start to take control of the way in which your supply is brought to the market in programmatic channels.”
Why not both?
One way for CTV publishers to take control is to create some fanfare around their inventory.
Although programmatic CTV buying is considered sexier – well, according to some, anyway – TV is traditionally a futures market where ads are bought up to a year in advance. In programmatic, Sarah remarked, ads are bought milliseconds in advance.
But that doesn’t mean programmatic hasn’t carved out a pretty big space for itself in TV upfront conversations.
For example, more than 85% of NBCU’s programmatic business is made up of one-to-one deals tied to the upfronts. In Tubi’s case, roughly 50% of its ad sales are transacted programmatically.
Publishers can also trade on their valuable audience data, which is a big selling point in addition to the content itself, Vijay said.
And even in cases where it’s technically all the same audience – there are surely people, for instance, who watch Tubi and NBCU and Roku content – CTV publishers can highlight what else differentiates them, whether that’s contextual relevance, ad load or some other factor, Dylan said.
“The upfront is a wonderful vehicle to lock in value up front,” Dylan said. (Guess that’s why they call it the upfronts!)
But when advertisers are deciding how best to transact on that value, they’re turning more and more to programmatic.
