Programmatic Potential Includes Ad Targeting

In addition to facilitating advertising sales and expanding the potential market of buyers, programmatic or automated selling platforms will allow broadcasters to offer advertisers a better chance of reaching particular consumers, according to programmatic experts.

“There are platforms that will allow people to target down to particular households,” says, Seth Haberman, co-founder-CEO of Visible World, a sell-side platform vendor. That is what advertisers, who increasingly want to reach consumer subsets, want, he says.

“That kind of targeting, I believe is valuable, and will become more and more of the television ecosystem,” he says.

Haberman’s comments were part of a larger discussion about programmatic, or automated, ad sales, and how it can benefit local TV, at last Thursday’s annual TVB Forward conference in New York last Thursay.

Panelists, addressed a range of issues broadcasters are grappling with as they incorporate programmatic ad sales, including targeting, aggregating platforms to broaden reach and how programmatic meshes with traditional sales.

In the programmatic world, local TV  is playing catch up with digital media.

But individuals who work on both the sell and buy sides say its crucial that local broadcasters provide a means for advertisers to reach niche audiences and brace for the future.

“This is a marketplace that’s in transition,” says Mark Mitchell, chief relationship officer of Clypd, which makes a programmatic ad sales platform. “As things change we have to have technology that’s going to evolve with it.”

Joy Baer, president of the media buying software company STRATA, says TV sales teams are in different stages of implementing automated advertising, and ways of using it.

“There’s a bunch of experimentation going on and trying things out,” Baer says.

 Saying a “force of change” is underway, Baer says automated advertising “is great news for what we’re bringing to the market,” and will help stave off a decline in TV’s advertising revenue.

“We recognize the need, we know what’s happening with television, and we’re trying to provide solutions to going after the problem,” she says.

Yet there are downsides to automated ad sales, panelists say.

While automated systems make targeting specific consumers possible, the idea of conflicts with TV as a mass medium,  Haberman says. “Reach is the most powerful thing,” he said. 

“Television is priced by the number of houses you reach and, as everyone knows, there is exponential growth. The bigger your reach, the higher your prices,” he says.

“The whole strategy behind audience targeting is a procurement strategy. It’s not a money making strategy.”

TV stations need to sell inventory across platforms to reach more consumers, says Brandon Condon, CEO of Media Properties Holding, which owns the buy-side platform AdMore.

“You have incredibly valuable audiences that individually are just not scalable,” Condon said. “You have to aggregate them.”

Eric Mathewson, founder-CEO of WideOrbit, a traffic management platform well a sell-side programmatic platform,  says automated ad selling is just one way of conducting business, and will remain so as other systems come and go.

“Its important to allow buyers to buy how they want to and sellers to sell how they want to,” he says. “We have to be flexible.”