What do we want? More live ad capabilities! When do we want it? Now!
Live ads and buy-side interoperability were top of mind for streamers at The Trade Desk’s Fwd25 event in New York on Thursday. Execs from NBCU, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Disney were among those who showed up to discuss their offerings for advertisers this year.
What a time to be (a)live: Last summer’s Paris Olympics proved to be “the best testing ground on what we’re going to do for the future” for NBCU’s live programmatic ad capabilities, Alison Levin, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships, said onstage. Ahead of the Olympics, NBCU inked a partnership with The Trade Desk to make Peacock ad inventory available on the platform. It seemed to be a success: “90% of the advertisers who programmatically activated with The Trade Desk with the Olympics [had] never activated for the Olympics before that,” she said.
Programmatic has also helped NBCU understand performance more quickly at a more granular level, she said, rather than waiting for advertisers’ sales data to measure campaign success. For example, programmatic data revealed that about 95% of the consumers reached by two Olympics advertisers were “unreachable on other AVOD and streaming platform,” she said
WBD’s US ad sales co-president Ryan Gould was high on the promise of live ad offerings in sports.
“The promise of large-scale live sports events in connected-TV environments makes everyone here super excited to be able to send addressable messages to sports fans,” he said. “I don’t think we’re there yet as an industry, but I think that’s definitely a way to drive more performance in streaming.”
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Working together: Another priority marketers cited at Fwd25 is the need for increased buy-side infrastructure support and overall interoperability with advertisers’ ad tech. Disney Advertising’s addressable sales SVP Jamie Power cited BridgeID, a solution it debuted in June, which aligns signals from advertisers with Disney’s ad tech to match data.
Over at WBD, CNN is kicking off a partnership with The Trade Desk’s OpenPath tool, Gould said. OpenPath connects advertisers directly to publishers and Gould said the aim is to offer increased transparency for advertisers.
“From a B2B perspective, transparency means premium in advertising. It’s amazing how much CTV has grown in the past five years,” he said. “I personally believe that CTV transactions are commoditized. For someone that works for a company that invests billions of dollars in content, five years ago I was scared to give the signals to buyers. In order to decommoditize our content in this ecosystem, we have to provide the buy side [with] insights.”
John Halley, president of Paramount Advertising, which is investing in commerce media and data partnerships around optimization, echoed similar sentiments.
“Flexing into buy-side infrastructure is a way to immediately solve the challenges of fragmentation, particularly in a world that increasingly prioritizes transparency, flexibility, and cross-channel measurement,” he told the audience. “There is no one-size-fits-all here.”
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