SAN FRANCISCO — Brands are rushing to spend on advertising in connected TV platforms – and agencies remain important to helping them do so.

That is the view of one of the leading ad-tech platforms helping to inject ever-more video in to its historic programmatic operations.

“Connected television spend on our platform from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017 grew over 500%,”The Trade Desk inventory partnerships SVP Tim Sims tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Now, we’re starting to get into a territory of real dollars moving into the connected television channel in programmatic, which is really exciting as we look forward in the 2018, 2019 and beyond.

“Brands are starting to recognize the opportunity here where there is a gap of people that are just not able to reach on linear television anymore and connected television helps fill in that gap.”

In ad land for the last couple of years, much of the chatter has been about the risk that media agencies, which help brands develop plans for buying the right inventory at the right time, will be disintermediated. In other words, the new wave of programmatic platforms allow brands to operate their media-buying strategy all by themselves.

But, whilst Sims’ platform serves many brands directly, he doesn’t quite see it that way.

“We work with both agencies and marketers,” he says. “But, when we do work with the marketer, we (also) work with their agency. It’s become a really powerful kind of triumvirate of expertise when it comes to the programmatic channel.

“As programmatic continues to grow, it becomes a much more important strategy for everyone to understand how they execute the media dollar inside of the programmatic channel.”

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.