TV supply-side platform Clypd rolled out Optimize on Thursday, a yield optimization tool and scheduler designed to let media owners predictively sort supply.
Conversely, Clypd hopes it will give TV planners a more accurate read into what inventory is available for purchase from those media owners, said the company’s chief architect, Bruce Dilger.
For more than 20 years, scheduling a television buy hasn’t changed. Because of technological limitations, planning decisions were made in advance with “decisions that boiled the whole thing down to age and gender,” Dilger said. “Someone with a book would look up a rating and schedule it to run on air, and during post-buy analysis they might look for extra rating points.”
In other words, the process was highly manual and didn’t accurately show inventory availability.
But companies like TubeMogul on the buy side, audience activation systems like Simulmedia and AudienceXpress, FreeWheel, WideOrbit and Clypd on the sell side, are trying to automate the television buying process and fine tune ad targeting. Clypd’s Optimize adds one more coin to programmatic TV’s coffer.
Optimize follows Clypd’s launch of Deal ID for TV and a programmatic API to allow digital demand-side platforms like TubeMogul to access some of its television supply.
Optimize helps manage supply from both media owners’ direct sales and third-party channels “so we can better inform how they structure their rate card on traditional linear and decide which ad breaks make the most sense and which are most addressable,” Dilger said.
Although the penetration of linear addressable households is still relatively low (addressable TV generates about $200 million-$300 million in spend compared to the $70 billion linear TV ad market whole), media owners have started recognizing the value of digital as a way to access incremental demand.
One of the challenges is for everyone in the ecosystem to agree on measurement, since many subscribe to broad Nielsen age and gender ratings despite the fact that advertisers want more granularity – for instance, buying households making $100,000 and that have pets.
“Those basic business questions need to be sorted out, but you’re seeing exciting movement from some of these major media companies who are thinking how to empower their teams in a way that enables new ways to sell,” said Jason Burke, VP of product for Clypd. “We work with cable operators, who are more likely to [look at] incremental demand, but [a premium network] might think more about enabling their sales teams.”
Univision Local Media, an early Optimize client, noted the need for a yield optimization tool that considers the nuances in pricing and inventory structures – spot-based by geography or specific market vs. network, for example.
Although TV may never be sold on an impression-by-impression basis (but never say never), media owners see the benefit of enabling finer audience targeting and availing previously untapped inventory streams to advertisers.
“We’re seeing a lot of marketers and media owners start to think about income, education and ethnicity,” Burke said. “As [advanced targeting tools] prove themselves, then I think you’ll start to see plans around actual ROI and how many cans of soup actually came off the shelf.”
“You’ll see the data impact on how that buy or sale is constructed, and then come back to the common currency like Nielsen to measure the overall efficacy of the campaign,” he added.
