CANNES — BBC Worldwide is working with Google’s advertising divisions as they try to amalgamate how the publisher sells its TV and digital video ad inventory.

“Quite a lot of our best customers are buying on television and buying online – linear and digital,” BBC Worldwide’s global strategy and sales VP Tom Bowman tells Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser in this program about the future of television advertising.

“We are interested in seeing whether or not you can get any conjunction going on  between those two things.

“The more we can automate, the less people I have doing it, the fewer systems we have… that’s where the money will come from. We’re very keen to see whether we can piece these things together.”

Bowman complains that digital advertising background operations “cost five times as much as television operations” because programmatic techniques “have thrown us back many, many years”, so he is keen to cut costs by rationalizing duplicated operational spend.

Bowman’s comments about the work with Google begins at 3:00

More on Google’s new efforts around programmatic services for broadcasters and publishers can be found in our recent interview with Jay VanDerzee.

He was speaking at a Beet.TV leadership event during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.  The program was presented by Simulmedia and Videology.  You can find more clips from the summit here.