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Data-driven programmatic online advertising has been a boon to marketers looking to target specific audience segments and has allowed many content creators to monetize their output without investing in an expensive direct sales effort. But as direct-to-consumer, over-the-top delivery becomes a bigger part of the traditional TV business, some broadcasters see a potential downside to opening their streams to programmatic ad servers, and are seeking solutions from streaming technology vendors.

“The major broadcasters are very concerned about OTT becoming an advertising wasteland, like display,” Adobe’s director of product marketing for the Primetime streaming and monetization platform Campbell Foster said in an interview at CES last week. “They want to make sure it doesn’t create conflicts with their direct [ad] sales and attracts brand marketers.”

To that end, Adobe partnered with sale-side ad platform Videology in December to create what Foster called the industry’s first SSD for OTT.

“What our customers have asked us for is an ad platform for OTT that works similar to how linear TV works,” Campbell said. “Our partnership with Videology is really focused on the planned media space, rather than bidded media, so that OTT can become part of a planned, multi-screen campaign for large brand advertisers looking for scale.”

Adobe is also integrating Primetime with its Adobe Marketing Cloud suite of services to help media companies better coordinate content delivery with marketing analytics and customer relationship management (CRM). “Up to now Marketing Cloud has been focused on things like auto, e-commerce and retail. This is the first time we’ve focused on the M&E vertical,” Foster said.

Another challenge with many programmatic ad platforms is that they’re vulnerable to ad-blockers. Programmatic platforms often rely on client-side ad-insertion, which requires the video player to request an ad from a third-party ad server at particular points in the stream. Those call outs are what most ad-blockers exploit to prevent the ad from being served.

At CES, Verizon Digital Media Services touted its cloud-based OTT platform called Slicr, the encodes and uploads broadcast content in parallel for OTT distribution. According to VDMS, Slicr allows broadcasters to “slice and dice” their linear feed on the fly to create unique streams tailored to individual viewers or audience segments. At the same time, Slicr’s  server-side ad-insertion capability helps  avoid ad-blockers by eliminating call-outs to third-party ad servers, ensuring those streams can be effectively monetized.

As with the Adobe-Videology platform, server-side ad-insertion helps broadcasters integrate their OTT offerings with planned media buys by assuring marketers that their ads will be seen by the viewers they want to reach.