RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. – Premium connected television inventory, especially live sports, is poised for a programmatic overhaul, but technological hurdles and a need for clearer metrics are holding back a full transition, said Jean Fitzpatrick, executive vice president of commercial strategy at IPG Mediabrands.
Speaking at the Beet Retreat LA to Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan, Fitzpatrick dissected the supply- and demand-side challenges preventing premium CTV from moving away from traditional direct Insertion Orders (IOs).
‘Tsunami’ of live sports
Fitzpatrick highlighted a key technological friction point: the sheer volume of real-time activity generated by a live, high-tune-in event.
“You have technology that wasn’t really built for this tsunami of bid requests at one moment,” she said. Traditional algorithms, designed to manage daily consumption patterns, often struggle with the sudden, massive query load of a live sports broadcast. This overload can confuse platforms, leading to:
- Misidentification of the traffic, often flagging it as inbound fraud.
- Pressure on platforms to unnecessarily throttle away good inventory.
Forecasting: Biggest barrier from the buy side
When asked to identify the most critical issue among pricing protection, accurate forecasting and fast ad serving, Fitzpatrick decisively chose accurate forecasting.
From the agency’s perspective, without reliable forecasting, it becomes nearly impossible to justify and allocate significant client dollars to premium CTV inventory.
“The thing that we struggle with the most is if we can’t get that forecasting and we don’t understand the currency that we’re buying in… then it’s gonna be very difficult to allocate dollars to that,” Fitzpatrick said.
She emphasized that inaccurate forecasting disrupts the entire marketing campaign, forcing advertisers to make unplanned budgetary choices. Establishing clear, high-quality forecasting is the “baseline” that allows the rest of the programmatic value chain, including ad serving quality and predictable pricing, to fall into place.
Programmatic consistently delivers better KPIs
Despite the transactional challenges, Fitzpatrick offered an encouraging view of programmatic’s performance for premium inventory.
“When we take CTV into a programmatic ecosystem, we consistently see better KPIs,” she said, calling the results “exhilarating.”
She noted that moving a marketer’s premium CTV spend into a programmatic activation has, in her experience, never seen performance go down, only increasing it, sometimes “tenfold.” This lift comes from the ability to reach an audience that has been pre-qualified to engage with the brand.
Publishers: Overcoming the fear of commoditization
The executive addressed the long-standing fear among publishers that programmatic will inevitably lead to the commoditization of their premium inventory, driving down CPMs, a pattern seen in display and print.
Fitzpatrick believes that the CTV market is “pretty unique” in this regard. The growing number of publishers moving into programmatic suggests they are recognizing the value without experiencing commoditization.
The key to maintaining high value, she said, is avoiding the “open exchange situation” and rewriting what programmatic means. She foresees a future where hybrid platforms connect the direct sales space with the programmatic space through better measurement and audience data. This approach allows publishers to maintain control over their most premium inventory while still enjoying the efficiency and targeting benefits of automation.
Hybrid future: No single buying model
Looking ahead, Fitzpatrick does not foresee a complete convergence to a single, dominant buying model.
“We’ll always have a couple of different models,” she predicted, driven by the varying nature of the inventory and the marketer’s objective. A large-scale branding campaign aimed at consumers in an “emotional space” during a live event requires a different model than a campaign targeting highly specific audiences with niche product details.
Ultimately, the commercial models will remain different because the marketing conversation itself is different in those moments, allowing for a hybrid environment where both direct and programmatic coexist to serve distinct advertiser needs.
