Takeways From the Programmatic TV Summit

“It’s TV but not quite TV anymore,” posited Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO, Vetere Group. Randi Schatz, VP, Market Leader of Media Entertainment, Future plc, called it, “the most transformational topic in media today with rapidly changing developments offering a myriad of opportunity and challenges to TVs technological future.”

Arguably one of the fastest growing and increasingly morphing movements in media today is in programmatic. From its early years of automatic buying and real time bidding, today’s programmatic has been both humanized and computerized in a way that lends itself to all platforms of media buying and selling. How is the industry handling yet another area of transformative change?
Here are the takeaways from the recent Programmatic TV Summit held in NYC:

• Programmatic TV is expanding into more areas of television and spending is on a steady rise according to eMarketer, offering opportunities even in linear avails. The whole nature of programmatic has evolved. Will Offeman, Chief Product Officer, WideOrbit, noted that, “now there is programmatic against premium inventory.”

• But legacy systems and protocols are slowing down progress. As Gerard Broussard, Principal, Premeditated Media, pointed out, linear TV currently lacks the technological bones for exact digital-like programmatic and older systems are slowing down the roll-out. But there are industry initiatives likeTIP (Television Interface Practices) that are tackling the obstacles.

• Creative is innovating so as to take advantage of the flexibility of formats, messaging and pod lengths that are enabled by the various device platforms. Xandr has “a brand new user interface with a suite of products to expand creative formats and a powerful optimization engine with a new user interface that can activate on these different formats,” according to Lindsey Van Kirk, Vice President of Product Management.

• Consumer opportunities are expanding. Technological innovations like driverless cars (where consumers will have uninterrupted travel time, ripe for messaging) and smart products (like dog collars that indicate when to feed and when to walk the dog) are creating new advertising opportunities coupled with new data streams.

• Technology is streamlining and improving the business. Joan Fitzgerald, SVP Advanced TV Global Partnerships, PremiumMedia360, explained that A.I. is enabling clients to, “figure out media in advance along with stewardship, reconciliation and payments.” Adam Lowy, Chief Commercial Officer, Telaria, noted that “There is traction. In OTT the supply is growing and more facets of the inventory is being realized. More people experimenting with programmatic to target smarter.” Programmatic, according to Lowy, “is more of a core part of businesses.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Takeaways From the 2018 TV Data Summit: “The Audience Is Now in Charge”

As Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO at the Vertere Group, explained at the 2018 TV Data Summit, the media business is going through a transformative time. TV grapples with data as tech navigates strategies and solutions. “It is revenge of the nerds,” he concluded, “leading to an amazing future of data and targeting.”

Panelists at the NYC Television Week event offered their insights:

Data Changes Everything

Data is taking on greater importance from content creation to campaign deliveries. More aspects of the business are touched by data through machine learning and artificial intelligence. As technology advances, it’s possible to dynamically insert different advertising messages to individual households based on audience profiles and viewing behaviors.

“Data is everything,” stated Eric Schenk, a technical director at Google Cloud. But data is often fragmented, clustered in silos and walled gardens. Analysis, depending on data sets, algorithms, and applications, often leads to different results and conclusions. Machine learning’s capabilities help address these challenges. These capabilities include video intelligence (enabling better viewer content identification and curation), translation (allowing for fast global expansion of content offerings), and custom data extensions (offering new ways to analyze and gain insights from data sets).

Business Pivots

Previously, “Sales used to be the last mile, but now it’s content,” Hanlon warned. Schenk added, “Audience is king,” requiring a pivot to audiences and what they want in content.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.