CTV

NBCUniversal transacted 10-15% of its digital business programmatically during the 2015-2016 season, the company has revealed to AdExchanger. Prior to the upfronts, the company expected to secure 50% of commitments on a “converged” basis, with elements of both TV and digital in a single deal. In this most recent upfront, NBCUniversal’s digital business grew 50% and, of […]

DISH Network is subscribing to the programmatic playbook, enabling greater automation and data application for buyers bidding on addressable TV spots. The satellite pay-TV provider, representing 8 million addressable households nationwide, on Monday debuted a programmatic marketplace and supply-side platform running on IPONWEB. Its initial demand partners are Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul and DataXu. After an […]

Television may be a little late to the programmatic party, but addressable TV promises to blend performance efficiencies with proven sales lift – and that’s changing the face of the TV buy. Media agencies were historically agents of the upper funnel, but data and technology are redefining the awareness and consideration phase. “A client used […]

TV has long proven to be an effective channel for Ancestry.com, a provider of genealogical software and services with more than 2 million subscribers. And 1 million have purchased its DNA testing product, AncestryDNA. Commercials advertising Ancestry are meant to be emotional and explain the value of using the family history search site and DNA […]

Toyota Motors is a big TV spender. It bought, according to Kantar Media, three minutes of commercial airtime during Super Bowl XLIX –trailing only Anheuser-Busch and Fiat Chrysler. Although Toyota will continue to invest in big TV tent poles, it’s test-driving more digital video activation, and is sponsoring premium NBCUniversal video running on AOL’s network. […]

Sony Pictures TV thinks there’s power in remaining subscription-free. In the case of its free streaming premium video network Crackle, which clocks 22 million monthly uniques, it promises brand partners a 93% ad completion rate and an engaged audience. Sony Crackle in April staged its first upfront presentation. “Because we see ourselves as a TV […]

Nielsen’s having a tough week. On Tuesday, comScore and Rentrak, two of Nielsen’s top competitors, announced their intention to merge into a single measurement monolith. And on Thursday, business channel CNBC, a division of NBCUniversal, will officially kick Nielsen to the curb, turning instead to research firm Cogent Reports for its audience measurement. Comcast-owned NBCUniversal […]

Altice continued a string of acquisitions on Thursday when the Amsterdam-based telecommunications giant announced that it would buy Cablevision for $17.7 billion. The Cablevision sale comes six months after Altice’s first move into the US market, when the company bought Suddenlink Communications, a regional cable operator based in St. Louis, for $9.1 billion. Altice has […]

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view.  Today’s column is by Mike Zeman, director of global programmatic marketing at Netflix. Imagine you’ve walked into a convenience store to buy some milk. The cashier says, “That’ll be $5.” You hand him a $5 bill, only to be told, “I’m […]

More than 32,000 will congregate in Cologne, Germany, this week to spark a dialogue about the connected consumer and the state of the digital media economy. Among those gathered here will be MasterCard’s chief marketing officer, Raja Rajamannar, who will join a bevy of global agency and platform execs at the yearly Digital Marketing Exposition […]

DataLab USA, a boutique analytics firm that works mostly with financial services and insurance companies, is betting on advancing addressable TV through customized algorithms. “Our role in the data world is to aggregate all the aggregators,” explained Alex Aigner, DataLab Digital’s COO. “We’ve commoditized how we build custom algorithms. Whether those algorithms are used for […]

Comcast’s drumbeat of new video services is designed to support content parity across devices rather than to create a cord cutter’s alternative, per se. The cable giant recently rolled out to Xfinity Internet customers a $15-a-month streaming video service appropriately dubbed Stream. Comcast has also flirted with a Web video portal to rival YouTube and […]

Connected TV ads have piqued marketers’ interest, but there is not a watershed of demand – yet – as marketers still cite measurement and inventory challenges. According to a joint study released by the Association of National Advertisers and BrightLine, the maker of an interactive video ad server built exclusively for the connected TV space, […]

Beginning this fall, advertisers will be able to programmatically buy Hulu video inventory in a private marketplace across desktop, mobile and connected TV via Facebook’s LiveRail supply-side platform. In its Tuesday announcement, Hulu said it will also use Oracle’s data-management platform (née BlueKai), through which marketers can enrich their buys by combining their anonymized first-party […]

BlackArrow, a 13-year-old provider of live and video-on-demand ad products to TV operators, was acquired Monday by Cross MediaWorks, the owner of a national media network called Cadent and the full-service Cross Agency. Although BlackArrow, which has 100 employees, will remain as an independent entity, it will partner with Cross MediaWorks’ other business divisions to […]

The director of ad technology for Netflix, Tony Ralph, and director of marketing for Abe’s Market, Michelle Goldstein, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. Cross-channel attribution will be one topic discussed at the conference. As Netflix’s director of […]

LifeZette, a lifestyle site created by conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, launched in April and is quickly scaling up its video production. Moving fast will allow the fledgling site to grab some of the projected $1 billion in digital ad spend for the 2016 election. Ten percent of that spend will go to online video, according […]

Sarah Sluis and Ryan Joe contributed. NBCUniversal’s $200 million investment in Vox Media and its expected (though unconfirmed) $200 million investment in BuzzFeed isn’t the big broadcaster’s first date with a digital publisher. It had a disastrous marriage with top women’s lifestyle publisher iVillage, which it acquired for $600 million in 2006 and eventually merged into […]

Cox Media Group’s sell-side platform Videa is sinking more hooks into buy- and sell-side systems. Released earlier this year, Videa has since drummed up strategic partnerships with Gannett, Raycom and Media General on the local broadcaster side. That’s in addition to agency alliances with Carat and Amplifi and demand-side deals with Mediaocean and Videology. Now […]

Video demand-side platform TubeMogul reported that more than 20% of global spend running through its platform in the second quarter came from mobile, programmatic TV and display ad formats. Mobile ad spend drove 10-15% of spend, programmatic TV constituted between 5-10% and less than 5% came from display. “We think this is significant, given our […]

Though video ad company YuMe held to last quarter’s promise that it would release a programmatic ad stack, it did little to improve its Q2 2015 financial performance. “We had a disappointing quarter,” said Jayant Kadambi, co-founder and CEO during a Monday earnings call. YuMe’s Q2 2015 revenue was flat – $40.4 million in Q2 2015, […]

TV ad delivery will become more addressable as more viewers stream video from set-top boxes and consume IP-based content. Although the addressable TV ad market is still only worth $300 million compared to linear TV’s $70 billion, cable operators and agencies agree that growing the addressable TV footprint will introduce more flexibility into the cross-platform […]

Nielsen’s acquisition in March of data-management platform and exchange eXelate is already proving its value, the measurement company said during its Q2 earnings call Tuesday. EXelate is part of Nielsen’s marketing effectiveness suite and has been instrumental in securing client buy-in of marketing analytics. Recent wins include Walmart and major consumer packaged-goods companies, said Nielsen CEO Mitch Barns. “An increasingly programmatic […]

Digital advertising is a budget behemoth, but television advertising is still a nearly $70 billion business – a fact that informs the planning process at WWP-owned media agency MediaCom. Because although digital video and streaming is starting to take a big bite out of linear’s lunch, TV is still the dominant consumption source, according to […]

The Programmatic TV Standards Group is drafting a standard designed to set baseline parameters for national and locally distributed inventory. The organization is championed by a few industry vets, agencies (Magna Global, Starcom MediaVest), one third-party measurer (Management Science Associates, or MSA) and vendors (AudienceXpress). “The first standard we’ll be defining is [what constitutes] national […]

Consumer packaged-goods startup Hello Products is combining TV with offline activations to create a competitive edge for its oral care products. As a challenger to household names like Crest and Colgate, Hello aims to differentiate its ethos through natural formulas and bright and alluring packaging. The brand is now activating digital video and TV with […]

As video views shift from desktop and linear to mobile and over-the-top – Hulu, for instance, just revealed more than 58% of streams now happen on OTT devices – programmers like ESPN are using data to track total audience viewing and satiate advertiser demands. ESPN hired its first global data officer last week, The Weather Company’s […]

The TV ad makeover is gaining steam, judging by comments on the ground this week in Cannes. Cablevision and NBCUniversal/Comcast are talking up the data granularity and addressability of their millions of set-top boxes, and agency buyers are crowing about results they’re seeing from programmatic TV activities. For example, Modi Media, GroupM’s addressable TV agency, […]

Channels are so last season. “I don’t care what device you’re on – I care about reaching you at the right time,” said Robert Spratlen, Viacom’s VP of digital media, data and audience development at Viacom, at Tapad Unify Tech ’15 on Thursday in New York. “Our product is content, our currency is audiences.” These days, […]

Once measurement is fully in place, experts predict demand for mobile programmatic video and connected TV apps to reach a tipping point. Some programmatic platforms, such as mobile DSP Adelphic, are already seeing the shift. Mobile video accounts for 7.3% of all Adelphic campaigns, representing 18.2% of total spend through its platform. Sixty percent of […]