LOS ANGELES – When there was just linear television, delivering the commercials—i.e. the creative—to TV stations was a fairly standard if not boring process. But with the explosion of viewing across screens and instantaneous delivery of creative, it’s a whole new ballgame.
The “dirty little secret” that much of the industry is either unaware of or doesn’t want to acknowledge is the complexity and inefficiency of today’s creative delivery.
“The fulfillment of the creative, the actual message that the consumer sees, is burdened in these complicated workflows,” Dan Brackett, the CTO & Co-Founder of Extreme Reach, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
That workflow is characterized by endless and needless FTP’s back and forth between creative agencies and media agencies.
“What used to be a fairly well-defined, simple, streamlined process has now become quite convoluted,” Brackett says. “Especially in the ad ops world, and you see many different workflow steps required to execute what should be a very simple process.”
Extreme Reach began life in 2008 when traditional linear TV was the norm. But it envisioned a future of multiple screens and constant creative decisioning so the company pioneered software-based delivery of creative over the Internet.
Needless complexity is “that dirty background secret that nobody is really aware of that essentially supports all online video right now,” Bracket says. “And it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Extreme Reach stores all creative assets in its ad cloud, incorporating ad serving, video ad streaming and talent and rights management.
“When these commercials get used across different screens there are different implications for rights holders,” he adds. Get something wrong and agencies and brands pay the price.
“In 2008, we envisioned a future where video ads would appear across a variety of screens,” says Bracket. “It’s the reality that’s here today.”
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
