COLOGNE — Over the last couple of years, we have all become familiar with the possibility that media agencies could be “disintermediated” as ad buyers pull certain key functions in-house in a quest for transparency and control.

But could the same happen on the sell side, and why?

VideoAmp chief strategy officer Jay Prasad thinks it could, prompted by the looming demands of new privacy legislation.

“We’re seeing media companies want to have a lot more ownership of how that content is accessed, and what kind of targeting and contextual capabilities they enable around that content,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Being GDPR compliant and soon ePrivacy compliant is pretty obviously more than important. It’s a requirement.

“And one of the only ways that they’re going to be able to really execute at scale with both those regulatory frameworks in mind, as well as to create this premium TV environment, means that they have to bring some of these platforms in-house and run them as an agency might do so.”

GDPR came in to force in May, bringing new requirements on how companies should collect and process European consumers’ personal data. The ePrivacy Directive will come with additional compliances.

Prasad thinks that will change things for broadcasters.

“They will still do commercial deals and trade with the agencies,” he says. “They may give agencies self service access to these platforms, but it’s becoming a part of a media company’s operation, and that’s a pretty new phenomenon.”

Founded four years ago, Prasad’s VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.

Earlier this year, the output has acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data for eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data, to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes.

It is creating a custom buying platform for RTL in the Netherlands so it can start to create its own packaging of very premium, on demand content.

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.