Viewers are increasingly turning to OTT/CTV to satisfy their content cravings. This behavior accelerated during the pandemic as more time spent at home translated into a heightened search for quality entertainment. The expansion of choice is great for consumers but a challenge for advertisers, especially smaller ones. How can they maximize their ever shrinking budgets as fragmentation makes viewers more elusive than ever?
The Current TV Marketplace
When we look at the current TV marketplace and how it has evolved over the past couple of years, “there are a few areas of priority and they have had ripple effects, explained Mark McKee, FreeWheel’s U.S. Chief Revenue Officer with audience and automation getting the greatest amount of focus. He added that connected TV and the rise of direct-to-consumer offerings over the last two years, “has really catapulted adoption of new forms of TV and has given rise to more fragmentation so the need for standardization, how people buy and sell is something of great importance.” Data has also been a top priority for the TV industry in all of its forms as well as consumer privacy. “These are all paramount topics for the industry,” he noted, as well as for, “marketers and how they use data to craft the audiences beyond just using content as that proxy for audience.”
For Simplif.fi’s CEO and Co-Founder Frost Prioleau, “The biggest difference we’ve seen from a programmatic CTV advertising provider is the increase in inventory. We were starting to see increased inventory before the pandemic but in many cases TV advertisers were hesitant to advertise on purely connected TV because they felt it there wasn’t enough scale. Clearly the pandemic with people staying inside drove strong adoption of streaming television including advertising supported video on demand. Today there is very high quality scale available and the ability to target audiences.”
FreeWheel and Simplif.fi Partnership
With all of this expansion, opportunity and enthusiasm, FreeWheel and Simplif.fi, have teamed up to offer FreeWheel’s agencies the ability to buy OTT addressable programmatically the same way they buy digital media. Advertisers can access the full OTT marketplace through exchanges and direct premium publisher integrations, ending the need for minimum spend levels and simplifying the management of multiple campaigns across different vendors and geographies, even on the local level.
For McKee, the importance of this partnership is clear. “The Strata platform has about 1200 agencies, largely local agencies that transact across all formats from print to TV to digital. With all of this fragmentation, we focused on how we could make this process easier for those who use this Strata platform,” he explained and added, “One of the great partners that we identified and are working with is Simplif.fi. Just given the role that they play and the offerings that they bring to this very tailored group of buyers and agencies and the local markets.”
McKee noted that the offer enables small and local advertisers, ”To look at their audiences in a much more holistic or converged fashion and plan and execute against them.” He added that, “From a measurement and data perspective, the Simplif.fi product does a nice job of automating the buying and execution process as well as the management of that. The partnership also enables the ability to form a proprietary integration of FreeWheel’s mini-market of unique inventory packages automated through SImplif.fi from planning to execution and reconciliation.
Prioleau added, “The agencies that Strata serves, which overlap highly with the types of agencies that (we) serve, need tools to be more effective and efficient. Strata does a great job across many of the pieces and we look to extending that into their programmatic buying across CTV and into their workflow similar to how they buy linear TV and across other digital formats.”
The reception from the marketplace has been impressive. “We have more than 200 clients that have taken advantage of this unique integration working with Simplif.fi,” McKee stated.
Looking into the Future
When I asked both McKee and Frost about what the future might bring, both were circumspect. “Three to five years is a long time,” Frost quipped and then predicted, “I see more and more of the viewership will be on streaming TV, but not all. There will still be a split there. I think it will be all about the tools that help buyers buy seamlessly across all TV formats whether that’s streaming, live linear or some other format and being able to not only target consistent audience across all those but also buy frequency caps as well as measure and deliver attribution across all TV types.”
For McKee, “The growth of addressability both on linear and in digital is going to fundamentally change the way TV is bought and sold. This will require a lot of creative development and innovation because it’s really changing the workflow that everyone currently has whether it is the home grown systems that everyone has developed or the technology solutions that they use today. It will make a lot of the convergence components that Frost mentions much more automated.” This is vital because without the fuller roll-out of automation, according to McKee, addressability won’t scale. “The ability to understand, ‘I reached this audience and it converted or drove the ROI that I wanted’ will soon become easier in the next two to five years,” he concluded.
This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
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