Supply-path optimization may not be the trendiest three-letter acronym in ad tech anymore, but the SPO trend is still playing out – especially in the CTV category.
Which explains why Xumo, the TV and streaming distributor jointly owned by Comcast and Charter, announced on Thursday that it is integrating with OpenPath, The Trade Desk’s direct-to-publisher demand channel. Xumo also unveiled an identity framework at CES this month that improves targeting and measurement, including with The Trade Desk’s Universal ID 2.0 (UID2) initiative, as well as TransUnion, LiveRamp’s RampID and Yahoo’s ConnectID.
“We want to have the most direct path to demand,” Jerrold Son, Xumo’s VP of ad operations and integrations, told AdExchanger. And SPO “helps us grow our demand base” as programmatic buying becomes more popular in streaming environments, he added.
The Trade Desk launched OpenPath in 2022 and expanded it to include connected TV in 2024. Vizio, Cox, Disney and Fox are among the streaming broadcasters already using OpenPath.
While OpenPath is available through all the major CTV ad servers, according to The Trade Desk, Xumo is the first CTV publisher to integrate with it using FreeWheel as its ad server.
Pays to be direct
There is a reason that SPO has been all the rage in the TV ad industry: It simplifies convoluted buying processes and, in turn, creates efficiencies and value. TV advertisers are also unaccustomed to data sellers and tech vendors in the supply chain taking double-digit percentages of the total media budget, so increasing their rate of spend on media is a priority.
When it comes to the programmatic supply chain, “having one less hop is a benefit,” Son said. And OpenPath “removes one layer,” he said, referring to SSPs.
OpenPath is the next stage of Xumo’s “broader strategy around simplifying supply paths and maximizing revenue,” he said, by attracting more ad budgets earmarked for premium video.
Sounds like there’s more disintermediation in the air. But The Trade Desk maintains that it is not trying to render SSPs obsolete.
“We think pubs benefit from a direct connection. It gives them a point of contrast with which to judge the efficacy of all other paths,” said Will Doherty, SVP of inventory development at The Trade Desk.
In some cases, OpenPath “validates” data in the bidstream from SSPs, Doherty said. In other cases, it “exposes technical issues or inefficiencies that we can now resolve.”
In other words, OpenPath should encourage competition by incentivizing SSPs to continue innovating and improving their own offerings.
“It’s not that all of a sudden we just saw money shift [away] from our existing programmatic pipes and get replaced by OpenPath,” Son said. “The OpenPath integration has been accretive.”
Such is the case for one of the top TV industry buzzwords: optionality.
More data, please
Optionality, or allowing buyers to activate media with whichever methodologies they prefer, ideally doesn’t just apply to inventory access; it also applies to the data available for media decisioning.
Xumo tapped UID2 to increase its “data fidelity,” which helps the distributor raise its bid rates, Son said. This move addresses the larger TV ad industry adoption of deterministic data over probabilistic signals like IP addresses for targeting and measurement.
Son added that The Trade Desk’s seller-facing dashboard, PubDesk, also provides more visibility into how campaigns perform.
According to Doherty, the TV industry is at an inflection point related to the quality of media and the data backing it.
“There is almost an infinite amount of supply in the CTV space, but there is a finite amount of premium content,” Doherty said. For the streaming media category to compete, he said, the media sellers must “have the right signals to express the value of inventory.”
Which means one can expect the debates about what constitutes premium content in CTV to intensify.
