Event Video
Navigating The Programmatic TV Landscape
Earlier this year, at ATS New York, just weeks after Dish announced they are to offer a programmatic exchange for TV advertisers, Brian Stempeck, chief client officer at The Trade Desk gave a keynote presentation about how marketers should be navigating the programmatic TV landscape and how to understand the synergy between online and linear TV.
It has been a fascinating year for television with major changes in the ecosystem at a macro level, changes that have created an opportunity for programmatic to solve some of the technology fragmentation issues that have plagued the industry of late.
According to Nielsen, last year there was a 60% increase in content streaming and a 4% decrease in consumption of linear TV. Intuitively this is a trend that many people in the online advertising industry are aware of from their own content consumption behaviour. Another big trend is people reducing their subscription to cable-type TV, every year for the past 5 or ten years these subscriptions have declined, which points to a need for delivery to change.
At the same time as people are moving away from cable-type TV subscriptions, media consumption across desktop, mobile and connected TV is rising. TV is not dying, it’s just shifting to new devices.
These changes are causing huge impacts on the TV industry, for example, ESPN laid off staff earlier this year. Given that ESPN’s costs were increasing (rights to sports events cost more than they used to) and at the same their subscriber pool was decreasing (ESPN was the single most expensive part of US cable subscription packages, therefore, was often the first part of a package to be cut) the staff cuts didn’t come as a surprise.
There is also a problem with measurement in TV for example, Comedy Central have made it really easy to watch their content on demand, however this is not reflected in the measurement of their audience. Nielsen standard ratings could be under-estimating the popularity of ‘Broad City’ by up to 95% as the majority of viewers stream the content rather than watch it on linear TV.
ComScore and Rentrack merged earlier this year to try to challenge Nielsen and disrupt the use of GRP as the gold standard for measuring TV. Nielsen has countered saying they are going to try to match the new partnership and develop new measurement methodologies. The mere fact that two behemoths of audience measurement are making such drastic changes to the way they operate is the only indicator you need to know that major changes are coming.
In this TraderTalk TV, filmed at ATS NYC, Stempeck discusses what to do if as a marketer you’re thinking of buying TV from a DSP or other technology platform including:
– How programmatic solves TV’s fragmentation problem
– What are the questions you should be asking about programmatic TV?
– The difference between the vendor’s PowerPoint and reality
– Are you buying self serve or IO?
– Who’s making the margin?
– What type of video inventory are you buying?
– Who is selling the inventory?
– How addressable is TV inventory?
– What audience data can be bought to the table?
– How are you thinking about cross device targeting?
– Are you buying upfront or on the spot?
