LONDON, UK — If TV is going to adopt “programmatic” software for selling ad inventory, it’s going to take time, education and provable results.

Steph Miller knows the playbook from stints at previous programmatic tech vendors.

Now Miller, the new Commercial Director, EMEA, for connected TV (CTV) ad server provider Publica, says she is ready to help TV execs in the region better understand the potential.

Grow understanding

“We’ve got a really good opportunity to learn from the mistakes that were made over the years in (programmatic) digital advertising and try and not make those again in CTV,” Miller told me during Beet.TV’s London summit in December.

But Miller said many TV executives are still debating the definition of “programmatic”, which is a series of software practices that can automate or otherwise provide digital-style capabilities for ad trading.

“There’s a lot of acronyms, there’s a lot of abbreviations used within CTV (connected TV) at the moment, and I think there’s a really varied amount of knowledge within the space as well,” Miller said.

Tech set-up

Having joined in October 2022, from ad-tech firm Adnami, Miller says the prospect of programmatic TV in the EMEA region is still pretty nascent.

“Companies’ infrastructure isn’t quite set up for programmatic necessarily yet,” she said.

“Some technology-first companies are doing it very, very well. Other more established legacy broadcasters don’t know whether to have their programmatic teams on the programmatic team for CTV, or whether to have their TV buyers and sellers working on it.”

And she said the fact that countries in the region are themselves fragmented isn’t helping: “The different countries are leaning in at different paces. They’ve got different approaches to programmatic as well to CTV.”

Broadcaster control

So Miller wants to educate the industry.

For starters, programmatic firms want broadcasters to understand that adopting the tech doesn’t have to mean giving their precious inventory over to auctions and automated networks, without a say in what gets aired. Rather, they have control.

“If it’s that you just want the highest bid, then that’s what will win,” Miller says. “If you want to make sure that your direct IOs (insertion orders) are listened to first and then you’ve got everything into an auction underneath that, so be it.”

Your rules

Publica is a connected TV ad-serving company.

It employs server-side ad insertion, as oppose to playing out ads from client devices themselves.

Miller says broadcasters can also make headway with programmatic without having to hitch their inventory to any specific demand sources.

“We’re not affiliated to any particular SSP or DSP,” she says. “We can plug into pretty much any setup that a publisher has – when we’re running the auction for that ad break, there’s no preset reason as to why we would prefer a particular SSP over an over another one.

“As a publisher that uses our technology, you know that your rules are being listened to.”

You’re watching “Looking Ahead: TV in Europe 2025” a Beet.TV Leadership Summit presented by Magnite & Publica, in partnership with egta. All videos were filmed on-site at our event at London’s Soho Hotel. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. 

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews