As more ad spend shifts to CTV, there are new opportunities to make errors with campaign delivery.
Ad sales teams are still adjusting to the technology and workflows of programmatic buying for TV – including identifying problems that arise during campaign flights, according to Zeev Neumeier, who founded Inscape Data. (Vizio acquired Inscape in 2015 for its automatic content recognition technology.) Pacing algorithms, budget optimization tools and biddable auction setups add complexity that wasn’t there before.
To help address the issue, Neumeier is launching a new venture called GraySwan. The startup’s name refers to small but costly events that are hard to detect before they do substantial damage, Neumeier told AdExchanger. Historically, it could take as long as several weeks to detect problems with a TV ad campaign’s performance, he said.
GraySwan’s first product is a revenue optimization tool designed to identify changes in the amount of ad transactions happening between buy-side and sell-side ad platforms. GraySwan also has plans for two more tools that address reporting and predictive planning. The initial product is integrated with programmatic platforms and several CTV publishers (which GraySwan declined to name), and the company said it’s also in conversations with prospective buy-side clients.
GraySwan currently has 4 employees and has raised $1.5 million in funding from strategic investors. It emerges from stealth mode after two years in the making.
Is your campaign pacing or racing?
GraySwan’s tech analyzes log-level ad serving data, which reveals when and where an ad delivered. It depicts deviations from a client’s normal campaign pacing, such as a dip in ad transaction volume.
The most common problems this helps detect are poor pacing and pricing setups. For example, if a buyer makes adjustments to a campaign’s spending or audience targets that end up having an adverse effect on revenue returns, a programmer would know and be able to contact the buyer about the issue. Since available CTV inventory varies by audience and daypart, changing one of those variables could reduce the pool of available supply, which would in turn decrease a buyer’s ability to scale a campaign.
Another common problem impacting campaign performance is pacing algorithms that cause “midnight spikes” in ad transactions by “blowing through” too much of a day’s allotted campaign budget at the start of the day, aka the middle of the night, Neumeier said. That pacing pattern misses out on demand from buyers willing to pay premiums for popular and prime-time dayparts.
Getting to the root of the issue
To help clients troubleshoot problems, the tool also identifies the particular supply paths from which issues are originating.
It doesn’t single out individual platforms, however, and not just because it wants to be “agnostic” to business marketplace relationships. It also wouldn’t be all that productive, because many of these common problems crop up between a particular pairing of supply and demand sources, not within any one platform, Neumeier said.
Which is partly why the point of GraySwan’s platform is not to find fault, Neumeier said. “People aren’t trying to point a finger at each other; they just want [enough] visibility” to be able to remedy an issue, he said.
The focus on remediation explains the platform’s integrations with Slack and JIRA so teams can raise and troubleshoot an issue quickly. Neumeier said clients are notified of a campaign abnormality within an hour of it occurring.
All hail the consumer experience
Although the main purpose of the new product is to help sellers and buyers optimize their CTV campaigns for revenue, Neumeier said he also expects it’ll have a positive impact on the viewer experience.
When a company spots an issue within a campaign flight several weeks too late, buyers often panic and lessen their frequency restrictions, Neumeier said, which worsens ad repetition. And in other cases, when there isn’t enough demand for inventory that meets certain campaign parameters, publishers have to serve “We’ll-be-back” slates, another massive viewer pet peeve.
But if buyers could troubleshoot issues faster, Neumeier said, they wouldn’t need to resort to pulling levers that turn off consumers. The longer consumers stick around, the higher return on investment both advertisers and publishers stand to gain.
