The Future of Buying ‘TV’ Everywhere – What Does That Mean?

“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger Research. 

If you’ve seen the agenda for AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in January, you may have noticed that I’ll be giving a presentation on “The Future of Buying ‘TV’ Everywhere.”  In advance of that talk – which will coincide with the release of an underlying research report – I thought I’d give some context on what I plan to address.

Spoiler alert: It’s not going to be research on “TV Everywhere” (notice where the quotes are), “a business model wherein television broadcasters—particularly cable networks, allow their customers to access content from their network through internet-based services—either live or on-demand, as an aspect of their subscription to the service.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

It’s going to be about the broader evolution of the buying and selling of sight, sound and motion advertising – whether on a television set, a desktop, a tablet or other handheld device.  Because I think – whether you want to call it “television” or simply “video” advertising – this is the next frontier for programmatic disruption.

I’ve spent the last year or more obsessed with the idea that the television market was going to go “programmatic” – where buying and selling processes and decisions were both more automated and driven by data – in a way that simply is not the case with most linear television advertising today.

I’ve been impatient for change.

Well it finally feels like the times, they are indeed a’changing.

For me, the key indicators can be found in actions taken by the biggest and most influential ad spenders in the world – when P&G pursues a goal to divert 70% of digital budgets to programmatic by year’s end and the CMO of Kraft publicly discusses using tools like DMPs and DSPs in service to their transformational data-driven approach to marketing, it’s only a matter of time before the pressure on the traditional linear television industry to evolve supercedes its maintenance of the status quo.

I recognize that the time horizon for the real and true transition to data-driven, automated sight, sound, motion advertising within and across screens is not going to happen overnight. It necessitates massive change management in a very entrenched industry where “the way things work” has been in place for decades – handshake relationships, measurement frameworks, ad insertion, and billing and reconciliation systems – so it’s important to unpack how this change happens, what the steps are along the way, and of course, where we end up and when.

And, hugely importantly, as with programmatic in digital, I firmly believe the only sustainable future is one where buyers and sellers alike see meaningful benefits from data driven automation – this can NOT be about buyers pillaging content owners. This is where the rub may be – how the market transforms where both parties in the negotiation have power and know how to use it.

There is so much more to say about this that far exceed the bounds of a Marketers Note. So I’ll simply say, stay tuned!

Joanna