With advertisers still in the “test and learn phase” with advanced targeting of television audiences, NBCUniversal joining the OpenAP consortium “will really move OpenAP’s momentum forward towards a more usable tool that advertisers will want a part of,” says Julie Anson, Associate Director, Partner Innovation, Advanced TV MAGNA Global.
Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”
Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.
“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.
As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.
“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?
“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”
At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.
“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”
OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”
When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”
That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
