ExchangeWire spoke to Mark Frain, national sales director at Multichannel Network Australia (MCN), about last week's announcement to partner with AOL/Adap.tv to pilot the media industry’s first integrated programmatic private marketplace for television.  

The offering promises to enable advertisers and agencies to perform targeted, data-driven, audience buying, and deliver real consumer led analytics and insights for dynamic campaign optimisation. MCN is a joint venture between Foxtel and Fox Sports. Foxtel is Australia’s dominant subscription TV provider.

It’s estimated that MCN represents about 90% of Australia’s subscription TV advertising sales inventory, across the 70 subscription television channels it represents from Foxtel, FOX SPORTS, BBC, Discovery, NBCUniversal, FOX International Channels, Viacom, Sky News and many others.

The key to the PMP’s success according to Frain is MCN’s proprietary Multiview product.  Looking for deeper insights into the pay TV audience, MCN started building Multiview in 2010 with a 10,000 strong sample via survey using Kantar (compared to the official ratings panel from OzTam that includes 1,200 households).

In late 2013, MCN added incremental reach using Quantium to access another 100,000 of the 400,000 Foxtel IQ IP-enabled set-top boxes (by inserting code into the box). This collects data on the actual viewing activity of those households.

According to Frain, this now gives credence to MCN’s long held claim that Foxtel viewers are more valuable – MCN can now definitively say those audiences spend 25% more on groceries than non-Foxtel homes. Beyond FMCG, it’s expected to also appeal to the auto and travel categories for similar reasons.

According to the press release, the move is designed to greatly advance the $4bn TV industry in Australia towards unified ad sales across TV and digital screens. Long known as one of the most expensive markets in the world for digital video inventory, this product is the first time Australian media buyers will be able to buy linear TV using actual data sets beyond the typical TV demographics.

Frain’s hope is that being first to add the data layer to linear TV will attract investment away from both free-to-air and other digital options such as YouTube. This is likely to be the first time any significant video inventory has been available via private marketplaces in Australia. Until now, video has mainly been sold up-front as part of annual deals. It’s expected this layer will also justify the higher price for digital video over TV.

Dan Ackerman, head of programmatic TV at AOL Platforms is excited to be pioneering new ground in cross-platform video. A market like Australia with one dominant subscription TV service is the perfect environment to test the waters. This product enables media planners to identify a segment to target, activate the campaign across screens and report in aggregate. It’s not though a real-time decisioning tool, as that’s not yet possible in linear TV. This is further explained by Adap.tv head of international, Phil Duffield in TraderTalk TV.

The product will also be used by MCN to improve targeting for on-air promotions and eventually, scheduling for channels. Expected to start in February/March 2015, an extensive education campaign may be required to educate TV buyers around programmatic, data and private marketplaces.

This announcement differs to last weeks announcement by TubeMogul that Foxtel will be using their software to drive sales and optimise its branding efforts. According to that release, the move will involve Foxtel taking its programmatic video advertising buying operations in-house, as it aims to secure control of data and increase visibility and transparency in its online branding operations.

It’s also different to Datalicious’ announcement last week that they will launch the OptimaHub data management platform with Foxtel, which will deliver personalised content and improved online customer analytics. According to that press release, the OptimaHub will be built on the Krux cloud-based DMP and powered by Datalicious products DataCollector, for big data collection, and DataExchange. The DataExchange will allow Foxtel to persist customer and user IDs across their entire digital asset-base.

ExchangeWire will report further on Foxtel’s brand trading desk and tech stack over the coming weeks.