AOL’s Programmatic TV Offering. Interview with Amanda Powter

Amanda Powter, VP, Product for ONE by AOL: TV, studied library and information sciences which she applied to building and launching software products. She has focused her career on building innovative products with different kinds of data and sophisticated software and technology.

Starting first at Amazon.com, she created data-driven and analytics features for both buyers and sellers. Then, at PrecisionDemand, she led a team that built software for targeting and measuring the impact of television advertising. “We were acquired by AOL in 2014 to expand upon Adap.tv’s offering in digital video with linear TV. I love being able to combine my technical knowledge with experience in TV advertising to create a product that understands TV from the ground up and brings it into a powerful cross-channel solution in ONE by AOL,” she says.

Charlene Weisler: What is ONE by AOL?

Amanda Powter: It is our flagship programmatic platform for both advertisers and publishers.  On the buy side, ONE by AOL enables brands and marketers to optimize their campaigns across all screens, formats, channels, and inventory types. On the sell side, we support publishers, helping them maximize their inventory and drive meaningful monetization across every format and channel. ONE by AOL is a complete end-to-end stack, increasing efficiency, reducing waste, and improving performance. We give both advertisers and publishers full control of their own data, choice of tools, and media. And we offer a powerful analytics engine at the core of the technology, driving actionable results with real-time audience data and cross-channel insights.

Charlene Weisler: What is the overall 'elevator pitch' for its new self serve initiative for ONE by AOL:TV? How does data play a role?

Amanda Powter: We expanded our flagship ONE by AOL Platform to include a self-service programmatic TV buying module. It brings national TV network inventory – premium broadcast and cable with audience scale to match – into a self-service, data-driven, and interactive planning and buying platform. Traditionally, linear TV inventory has been bought using broad demographics that lack the necessary targeting to drive deep relevancy.

We have applied real-time planning and intelligent automation to core parts of the workflow, which allows marketers to take full advantage of rich data capabilities quickly and easily while still interfacing seamlessly into existing TV systems and processes. With our new self-serve programmatic TV module, we put advanced data capabilities and precision in the hands of buyers. We believe it will advance the way TV media is valued, bought, and sold.

Charlene Weisler: Tell me the specifics as to how it works and can it be cross platform?

Amanda Powter: Advertisers can take campaign buying and targeting into their own hands. They can go into the platform and with just a few clicks, generate a TV media plan – selecting audience targets, establishing KPIs, and setting campaign parameters – interactively on top of real-time services with the most timely inventory and audience data available.

Marketers build plans against national broadcast and cable TV inventory leveraging their own rich first-party data or proxy targets built from hundreds of attributes, and our proprietary TV viewership scoring metric, to understand how these plans will deliver against their specific targets. Once they have generated the plan that meets their goals, they can submit the order directly to the networks from within the platform through a fully automated integration directly with our network partners. With our platform, advertisers purchase inventory and measure campaign performance with complete supply and pricing transparency, transacting highly targeted programmatic buys alongside their existing buys.

We have also made it possible for TV media plans to be influenced, in real-time, by granular campaign learnings. Through use of our Convertro measurement and attribution offering, advertisers that execute TV media plans may also have access to distinct, data-driven insights into their campaign impact through built-in multi-touch attribution spanning linear TV, mobile, and digital. For instance, advertisers can correlate a television ad’s influence on mobile site traffic or digital video viewership. This allows advertisers to develop “smart campaigns” that can pivot as needed, based on attribution learnings.

Charlene Weisler: What datasets are used?

Amanda Powter: We leverage rich first-party advertiser customer data – such as advertiser CRM data – or proxy targets built by selecting from hundreds of attributes, which are then analyzed through our patented predictive targeting tools. This is integrated into the self-service module where the most up-to-date inventory is scored in real time as a user is interactively planning their campaign.  Through third-party audience data partnerships in place with the industry’s top automotive, in-store shopping, demographic and TV viewing data companies, including Experian, Acxiom Personicx, MRI, IHS Automotive, Shopcom, and Rentrak, we also are able to enable these TV targeting segments within our self-serve module. Combined, we are bringing marketers the most extensive data and targeting solutions for TV, allowing them to make more effective media buys that are driven by person-level data and proprietary predictive audience targeting.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com