COLOGNE – Sky TV is developing a portal for advertisers to plan their addressable television campaigns. Just don’t say it’s about “biddable” inventory.
To Jamie West, Group Director of Advanced Advertising at Sky, programmatic transactions in the broadcast world are about automation. The notion of biddable inventory is not “particularly relevant for a broadcast world,” West says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.
Like other traditional broadcasters, Sky has made a big push to enable advertisers to do business with its various platforms via whichever means they desire. Hence the continued evolution of its AdSmart addressable platform, Sky Advance cross-screen offering and Sky Analytics media planning and transaction tools.
With AdSmart, current efforts involve building out the reach and targeting capability and easing the friction in the transaction funnel. “The feedback from the market has been ‘you’ve got to make it easy and transparent for the market to use.’ That’s one of the things that we’ve been focusing on for the last few months,” says West.
In the cross-screen realm, Sky Advance is designed to bring down “the barriers between TV and digital so that we can serve sequential campaigns across TV and digital.”
The next big phase at Sky is around analytics tools, including launching the ability for advertisers and agencies to plan addressable TV campaigns on a portal so they can then “push a button and get that integrated into our booking systems.”
Sky believes that TV campaigns “will still be traded in a truly linear way, much in the same way as they are today through direct buys.” Nonetheless, “It’s important to enable brands and agencies to transact however they so wish with Sky, and that’s what our partnerships with the likes of Videology and Comcast are all about.”
Like their U.S. broadcast counterparts, Sky is trying to determine the appropriate commercial load and lengths for TV and digital viewing. In linear TV, the U.K. tends to have about nine minutes of commercial time per programming hour, “which is substantially less than the U.S. model,” says West.
In digital, “We tend to have a relatively clean environment,” with perhaps two or three pre-roll ads and two or three mid-roll positions.
Asked if Sky would offer six-second ads as do some U.S. broadcasters, West said that while “we tend to operate on metric lengths” of possibly five, 10, 15 or 20 seconds, if the market wants six-second spots Sky will oblige.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
