LONDON — It may often be analog and it certainly doesn’t have the luxury of advanced foresight through on-demand – but that doesn’t mean live, linear television can’t benefit from the same kind of automations that have also come to programmatic VOD.

That is the view of one exec who spent two decades in ad agencies and who now helps run programmatic TV operations at one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adobe director of programmatic TV Todd Gordon talks about how even more traditional TV can help satisfy ad buyers with a thirst to do more.

“Clients know a lot more about who their customers are,” Gordon says. “They have much more granular sources of data.

“If you want to apply that data at scale into TV, traditional panel based measurement breaks down. When you want to know how a very precise audience is behaving, you need more granular viewing data.”

But Gordon says that data has come on-stream. Adobe has this year announced a API partnership with NBC Universal to aggregate inventory in its own demand platform.

“You can actually log into our platform right now, see what NBCU has available for sale across all their linear networks,” he says. “You can optimize in platform, pass the order in platform. NBC on their side can approve or reject that order in platform.

“It’s actually getting a lot more automated, and a lot more programmatic.”

All of which can make for faster delivery and performance metrics tracking,” Gordon adds.

He also says that, despite ongoing chatter about distintermediation of ad agencies, as more brands use tech to take on more duties for themselves, TV is still largely transacted through agencies.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.