M+E Daily

Progress is being made to make advertising a seamless experience across multiple platforms and to be able to accurately measure viewership data for ads across all those devices, but challenges remain.

That’s according to comments made by ad agency and back-end advertising technology provider executives at an Aug. 9 panel in Santa Monica, California, that was sponsored by VideoAmp, a startup that develops technology enabling advertisers and media owners to run ads seamlessly across devices. The company just launched ATV, an Advanced Television ad platform that automates the use of data to buy and measure video campaigns running across on-demand and linear TV channels.

VideoAmp is “super-excited about” programmatic TV advertising, CEO Ross McCray said . “It was kind of the last missing piece for us to really bring an automated” element to the company’s new ad platform, he said.

But the term programmatic TV advertising is “a little bit of a misnomer,” Autumn White, regional digital director at media agency OMD West, said.

“A lot people think of programmatic in terms of digital and it’s real-time bidding,” she said. But she added: “It’s been very hard to do that real-time bidding in terms of linear TV. So, it’s been OTT, it’s been VOD, which has been great. We’ve been using a lot of it with a lot of our clients. But from a linear perspective, we’ve just been testing it out because the inventory maybe isn’t quite what we’re looking for. It’s a little bit expensive and the technology is still growing.”

FreeWheel doesn’t talk “that much about programmatic TV at our company because we are such a broadcast-focused software company,” Justin Beere, director of its FourFronts Partnerships division, said. “We just talk about TV in general and, since 2007, really the mission of our company is to kind of strive for that holy grail.” And that holy grail is based on this concept, he explained: “What if a media seller could just look at their inventory as just inventory and screens didn’t matter — whether it was an iPhone or an Xbox or a linear television or a set-top box or VOD? They could just unify all that inventory and sell it as television.” He added that “solving for that and sort of keeping our eyes on that prize is what we’re focused on.”

“Similar to how all TV in OTT is addressable, inherently all TV and all video buying in OTT has the ability to be programmatic,” Mike Fisher, VP of product strategy and business development at interactive ad company BrightLine, said. “From BrightLine’s perspective, we aren’t there yet,” he said, adding: “We still have that manual process involving the building of the actual creative. But from our media partners’ perspectives, to be able to pass an inventory element through a programmatic exchange that’s BrightLine-enabled or interactivity-enabled is something that everyone’s really excited about.”

WideOrbit hopes that, through partners like VideoAmp, the industry “can bust out of these silos of TV being bought very differently from digital” advertising,” Ian Ferreira, EVP of programmatic at WideOrbit, said. “If you take … digital DNA and apply it to the effectiveness of TV I think great things will come from that,” he said.

“Reaching frequency” with a marketing message is important, Oleg Korenfeld, EVP of ad tech and platforms at Mediavest/Spark, said. Historically, advertisers went after specific “buckets” of viewers, he said, explaining: “We went after a bucket and we tried to find all the people in that bucket and then 10 other buckets” and sent them whatever message the company was trying to send. Using a cross-platform solution now “allows us to understand what is the true reach” of a message being sent to viewers, he said.

Sequential messaging is another important tool for advertisers, White said. “From a creative perspective it’s all about the storytelling.

So if you’re reaching that person at the right time and the right place and the right platform, and you’re building upon that story that they’re seeing everywhere it can have a big brand impact,” she said.

With OTT services, advertisers should use the same spot they are using on linear TV, Fisher said.

But instead, because of the way ad networks have been built, a viewer will be watching a TV show on a Roku streaming device in high-quality and with a full screen, and it suddenly “flips over to an ad being served by a digital ad network,” he said. “You’re seeing Web content, you’re seeing grainy ads, you’re seeing stuff that doesn’t load completely. That’s not Roku’s fault. That’s not the hardware’s fault.

That’s the fault of the media buyers not telling their people selling the media what spot to use and that’s the fault of the ad network model not moving quickly enough to TV,” he said.

Cross-platform standards will help move the industry forward, Korenfeld said. “In anything of scale you want to do, you need some kind of baseline. We’ll see what we end up with,” he said.

Although cross-platform measurement is improving, work is clearly still needed. For one thing, White said, “We need to figure out how to measure mobile accurately. That is the biggest one.” But she conceded: “It’s going to be complicated. We live in a world of walled gardens” set up by many different companies including Facebook and Google.

Mobile are the hardest platforms to measure and many niche products exist for measurement across multiple devices, she said, adding: “Right now, we’re still kind of piece-mealing things. So finding a solution that’s going to be end-to-end would be like the silver bullet.

Nielsen, meanwhile, is “a couple of years late to the party” with OTT, Fisher said. But as long as TV sellers – the people who sell the media — are thinking with a “TV mentality,” Nielsen will remain the main measurement currency, he said. “That’s a big problem,” replied Korenfeld.

Korenfeld also complained that the proliferation of standalone OTT services will only make TV services more expensive for viewers. “Your monthly bill will still be just as big or bigger, so exactly what are you getting?” he asked, pointing to the growing need to pay individually for broadband and services including ESPN, Hulu and Netflix if you cut the cord.

Fisher predicted Netflix will start promoting its own original series more aggressively and eventually start running ads with their streamed content.

Closing out the discussion, the panelists predicted that improvements will have been made one year from now in terms of cross-platform advertising. It’s important to convince media partners that they can gain from making their inventory available programmatically, Fisher said. “Anything that makes it harder, or anything that could be viewed as taking money out of a sales guy [or] a network’s hands, is not going to be met well. But when you back it up with data, when you back it up with addressability, when you back it up with dynamic, it opens many doors,” he said.