Media agency Havas Media North America said it selected FreeWheel, Comcast’s ad tech company, as its preferred platform to build programmatic advertising campaigns, particularly on connected TV.

FreeWheel will work with Havas and its clients to deliver video advertising in programmatic guaranteed, and private marketplace deals with programmers.

“In our selection of an SSP partner, we sought a company that understood and championed a better approach to driving innovation in the TV ad ecosystem, as well as our commitment to creating and driving meaningful media strategies for our brands in North America,” said Tom Grant, senior VP, group director, investment operations, Havas Media Group. 

Also Read: Fox Picks Comcast’s FreeWheel To Manage Ad Inventory Portfolio

“FreeWheel stood out as a leader in this respect, through its big-picture, future-minded approach in delivering on results via premium video inventory for marketers, streamlining the media supply chain and industry leading transparency. We are very much looking forward to working with them to advance programmatic CTV buying for our clients,” Grant said.

Also Read: FreeWheel Enhances Yield Capabilities for Networks

The agency said working with FreeWheel as its supply-side platform will provide direct access to premium CTV programmers and MVPDs, a commitment to fair auction mechanics and pricing structures and an optimized supply chain with high quality standards and fraud monitoring.

“This collaboration brings together two like-minded partners who recognize and deeply value the importance of solving for some of today’s most pressing industry needs, including driving greater scale and transparency, simplifying complexities and delivering for our clients,” said Katy Loria, Chief Revenue Officer at, FreeWheel. “We are thrilled to be working with Havas Media Group and look forward to collaborating to make the premium video ecosystem better.” ■

Streaming services, which offer the modern way of watching television, are using the modern way of media buying when promoting themselves to consumers.

According to a report from MediaRadar, streaming services spent more than $301 million on advertising to promote their services and programming between January and April, and 86% of that spending was placed programmatically.

So far this year, the top programmatic spenders among streaming services are HBO Max, Discovery Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus and Sling TV.  (HBO Max and Discovery Plus will both be owned by Discovery when AT&T’s proposal to spin off WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery is completed.)

HBO Max was the top programmatic spender each month.

Those top five spenders represented 62% of the programmatic investment from streaming companies, MediaRadar said.

Programmatic spending has more than doubled year over year in each month so far this year. In January, when Discovery Plus launched, spending jumped 184%. It was up 128% in February, 138% in March and 124% in April.

“Each streaming service has its own branding strategy—niche content, kids programming, sports, live TV, ad-supported tiers and so on—but no matter the approach, each service needs to build awareness via advertising,” MediaRadar noted. “To stay top of mind with consumers, many are turning to programmatic advertising.”

The Association of National Advertisers said it is hiring a consultant to launch a study of programmatic buying, a practice that it says may cost advertisers billions of dollars in waste.

According to a request for proposal issued by the group, programmatic ad spending is expected to top $200 billion, but that “only 40% to 60% of digital dollars invested by advertisers find their way to publishers.”

The ANA said the way programmatic buying is done now is too complex, offers little accountability and not enough transparency.

“Marketers do not have a fully transparent line of sight into their programmatic supply chains,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice. “The lack of full transparency for ad delivery and ad quality is diminishing marketers’ ability to fully optimize investments and drive greater business growth. We believe this lack of transparency is costing advertisers billions of dollars in waste.”

The ANA said the goals of its study is to make the digital media supply chain understandable, highly transparent and analytically rich, institute corrective solutions and industry standards and determine whether industry oversight bodies are needed to ensure the integrity of the programmatic ecosystem.

The RFP submissions will be due by early June, and a shortlist of candidates will later be invited to make formal presentations, the ANA said. A winner will be selected over the summer when fieldwork on the study will commence.

Addressable advertising is coming to linear TV slowly because it’s hard to do, especially within the cable environment.

Putting relevant commercials in front of the right viewers requires getting legacy insertion equipment and set-top boxes to communicate with newfangled ad-management platforms. And if you want to do it programmatically — the way an increasing amount of ad dollars are coming into the market — a lot has to happen fast. That’s not easy to do, either.

That’s where Beachfront Media is staking its claim. The industry is clamoring for more inventory to be addressable and for that inventory to be available however buyers and clients want to transact.

While lots of companies jump into connected TV because it is growing fast and the digital architecture lends itself to addressability, Beachfront sees opportunity in the still-large number of cable subscribers and the fact that linear continues to draw the majority of ad spending.

Even if cord-cutting continues, “there’s going to be 20 to 30 million set-top boxes in homes for the foreseeable future,” Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro said. “Building that interactivity is going to be important for at least the next decade.”

Spotted Need for Enablement

Beachfront started out in the supply-side platform business but has been pivoting from competing against larger ad networks into providing enablement technology. 

“We’re a technology company, not a sales company,” Maccaro said, noting that Beachfront employs engineers rather than salespeople. 

“Getting those systems to speak the same language is hard, and getting those systems to transact in anything close to real time is super-difficult, because it’s not how those systems were made to transact,” he said.

Beachfront works with multichannel video programming distributors in the U.S., including Frontier Communications, and abroad.

For its enablement work, Beachfront gets paid every time its system delivers an ad. To get to scale quickly, Beachfront also found opportunities to work with outfits with technology used by large portions of the industry, Canoe Ventures and SeaChange International.

SeaChange servers are used by cable operators around the world to insert addressable ads down to the ZIP code level. When Beachfront figured out how to get those SeaChange servers to respond to requests from programmatic buyers, MVPDs saw increased demand and revenue for their local ads.

Similarly, Beachfront developed a programmatic module to connect buyers to Canoe’s video-on-demand inventory from networks using Google Ad Manager or Canoe’s own ad management platform.

“We like them because they are real and they actually do real work,” Canoe Ventures senior VP of global sales and marketing Chris Pizzurro said of working with Beachfront. “And their stuff works.”

What makes Beachfront unique is its familiarity with cable plants. Canoe saw what Beachfront had done for Frontier and felt reasonably sure that something similar would work for Canoe. “They had already built something for this purpose,” Pizzurro said. “It was really about how they make their peanut butter talk to our jelly.”

Canoe is working with Beachfront to integrate systems as it moves into international markets including Latin America and India, Pizzurro said.

Pizzurro said the communication that goes on to collect programmatic bids and insert the right ad into the right program must happen in milliseconds. If it’s just a bit slow, the program will run without the ad and revenue is lost. 

But when it works, “the national guys are happy and the local guys are happy because everyone has more ad impressions to sell,” Pizzuro said.

Amobee, which starts its cross-platform campaigns for clients with linear, likes working with Beachfront. 

“What was appealing to us is they are in the linear space through video-on-demand and addressable set-top box inventory,” Amobee chief commercial officer Jack Bamberger said. “This was a perfect marriage between what they do and what we do as a technology provider, meeting our clients’ unmet needs.” 

Competition Is Gearing Up

Beachfront certainly has competitors. First of all, there’s Comcast owned FreeWheel, which so far has largely focused on inserting ads based on direct sales, as opposed to programmatically. 

Roku last month agreed to buy dynamic ad-insertion technology and the patents it is based on from Nielsen, which had been in testing mode.

And the large media companies — NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co, WarnerMedia — might all at some point decide to either build technology or bring it in-house as they build their advanced advertising and direct-to-consumer functions.

Despite the challenges, Maccaro said he thinks the Beachfront strategy is sound because building this technology is hard. “If you try to do it in a siloed approach, you miss the scale opportunity,” he said.

Maccaro said Beachfront is working on ways to address measurement and attribution. One key to its approach will be speed. 

Traditionally, the turnaround on letting buyers know when ads ran and what impact they had was measured in months. Beachfront already has it down to a week and is aiming to do it within an hour. 

“What we’re trying to do on linear is get our ducks in a row to make sure we give the demand side everything that they get today in a time that’s exponentially faster than they get it through a manual process,” Maccaro said. “The goal is to get them the data in real time so they can make optimization decisions in real time.”

Cable operators will be able to dive into the linear TV programmatic ad pool thanks to technology created jointly by Beachfront Media and SeaChange International.

The technology, already being used in the U.S. by a global operator and a regional cable company — both unidentified — will enable multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to tap into hundreds of millions of dollars being spent over automated platforms.

“Linear TV inventory has long been excluded from programmatic marketplaces due to technical limitations and infrastructural challenges,” SeaChange president and CEO Yossi Aloni said. “In partnership with Beachfront, we’ve completed the difficult work of connecting modern, digital-oriented ad buyers to linear TV inventory. This is a major milestone for the media and advertising industry, which we expect will serve as a major catalyst for improving the CPMs for our cable operator and media owner partners.” 

ALSO READ: AMC Networks Moves Ad Tech to FreeWheel

The companies say their combined technology can also help direct-to-consumer and over-the-top video services sell their advertising without going through a middleman.

Beachfront has been building advertising technology that works with the set-top boxes employed by cable operators. Last year, Beachfront enabled the programmatic buying of commercials in set-top-box video-on-demand programming. The new technology extends that to linear TV.

Beachfront’s technology will interface with buyers and demand side platforms. Advertisers can activate this linear TV ad inventory — along with VOD, connected TV, mobile and desktop inventory — much faster than traditional direct buys through the use of real-time bidding.  Beachfront will connect with VOD vendor SeaChange’s equipment, which provide information about available advertising, handles insertions and sends invoices. SeaChange also has the data about viewers needed to create targeted campaigns.

Despite the changes in TV viewing, linear TV is not going away. In fact, Aloni points out ad-supported on-demand streaming services are creating linear channels so people can continue to be couch potatoes.

The problem is that a lot of linear inventory remains unsold. On top of that, for many MVPDs, their sales units are old and expensive.

“These guys are actually using phones, and they’re calling customers and they have a cutoff date for commercials that’s three days ahead of when they go on-air,” Aloni said. “We are moving them into the 21st century. Not only are we enabling them to monetize their inventory, we are also enabling them to reduce their costs.”

The companies said the technology has already been tested with public service announcements, and some real clients have put real money through the system to prove the concept works.

ALSO READ: NBCU Opens Digital Ad Inventory to Local Business

“It will start generating very meaningful revenues in the next few months,” Aloni said, first internationally, then increasingly in the United States.

Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro said what’s holding back programmatic buying for traditional TV is “a bunch of legacy executives who want to protect the way things have been done for a long time. I think you’re starting to see a transformation and consolidation on the agency side where teams are collaborating holistically on where budgets are going.”

Maccaro said Beachfront and SeaChange are giving buyers a lot of new flexibility. Instead of needing days to mount a campaign, “you can get a campaign live and buy it today.”

“What will accelerate the growth of this programmatic capability is how quick the inventory can be used in addressable campaigns,” Maccaro said.

“The quicker we get to addressability for this supply — whether it’s linear or VOD or even [connected] TV, which generally is addressable — and the more it looks familiar to how [demand side platforms] buy it, then demand starts flying into these channels,”
he said. 

While millions of Americans got ready to watch the Super Bowl this past weekend, Dish Network was selling commercials programmatically in the programming on its Sling TV streaming platform leading up to and providing postgame analysis after the clash between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Related: Super Bowl OTT Feeds Don’t Go Off Glitch-Free

Through a closed, contextual auction, advertisers using a large number of demand-side platforms bid for ads in real time during shows on ESPN, FS1 and other networks, along with some Spanish-language coverage of the game. For winning bidders, ads aired instantaneously.

Sling has been running contextual auctions — automated sales of thematically related programming — since last year’s March Madness.

After the Super Bowl, Dish will offer similar auctions of programming related to the Winter Olympics, followed by another NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship sale.

“The ecosystem is changing quickly, and I can tell you with certainty how quickly we’ve grown this space and set up different ad capabilities,” Adam Lowy, director of advanced TV and digital sales at Dish, said.

For Sling, contextual auctions are going on constantly. There are auctions for kids programming and general entertainment as well as sports.

Bowl-ing for Dollars
Lowy declined to estimate sales volume for Sling’s auction of programming surrounding the NFL title game, but expected it to be super.

“If you have a TV, you’re going to be watching,” Lowy said. “It’s definitely a big weekend in terms of viewing, definitely a big weekend for us. It will be a really good test of the connected TV space as over-the-top continues to grow.”

Lowy said a large number of demand-side platforms (DSPs) representing thousands of advertisers expressed interest in the auctions of programming surrounding the Super Bowl. A couple of agencies planned to participate as well.

Fortunately for the people who work at Sling, they won’t have to spend the weekend fielding calls and booking spot sales.

“The beauty of programmatic is no, we don’t necessarily have to have a staff sitting here monitoring,” Lowy said. “It’s almost like a set-it-and-forget-it mentality.”

After the Super Bowl, Sling TV will move on to the Olympics. Sling can insert ads into the coverage of the Winter Games from South Korea on the NBCUniversal cable networks and other channels.

“Some advertisers don’t want to wait for the auctions and are buying time in Olympic programming early, in the old-fashioned way,” Lowy said. “We’ll save some inventory for some private auctions.”

Last year, Sling sold March Madness inventory programmatically. The auction drew 90 new advertisers, and sales were up 51%.

This year’s auctions of programming around the basketball tournament will be similar to last year’s.

“The first thing that’s going to be different is we expect a lot more advertisers in there because we have a lot more DSPs now in the space than we did last year at this time,” Lowy said.

“That’s great,” he continued. “So we expect a lot more demand, which in turn in the private auction concept, we believe should even up for higher pricing because you’ve got more people bidding into those slots.”

Lowy said Sling will take what it learned from last year and be ready for what he expects could be between three or four times to five or six times more DSPs making bids.

Sizing Up Buying Options
One benefit from the March Madness auction is that it allows smaller advertisers to wander in and buy sports-related programming.

Lowy said selling ad inventory in auctions is a good thing for Sling, particularly when high-profile events spike viewership. “I have X amount of avails, and I have thousands of advertisers. Who wants in?” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

The auctions work out for clients as well. Some advertisers don’t want to spend enough to get a traditional package of spots associated with March Madness; others only need a handful of impressions.

“We can put you in the auction and try to get you what you need,” Lowy said.

To create contextual auctions, Sling checks program guides and other sources to find shows about the Super Bowl or March Madness.

“We package it all together, and we set our dynamic ad insertion system … so we’re only serving ads during those times on those networks,” Lowy said.

To buy in, advertisers have to meet a minimum cost per thousand views (CPM) with their bids.

Some advertisers may choose to be more specific about what they’re buying, perhaps applying more sophisticated data.

“If somebody says, ‘I only want men 25-64 that are watching those programs,’ we can put that parameter in there,” Lowy said. “And we could put in any type of layering, data or segments we want on there. Some people want that, some people don’t. That may affect your bid price, and it may affect how much of it you might air.”

It was one of those “Ah-ha” moments. It then turned quickly into an out-loud “What!!!???” moment.

The San Francisco Bay Area’s KGO radio station was talking over-the-air with an anonymous technology editor, labeled an “expert” on the topic of advertising. It was mid-afternoon last Friday, Sept. 18.

The topic was ad-blocking, specifically a new ad-blocking application offered on various devices, which was showing itself, at least on a short-term basis, to be rather popular.

Inaccurate Opinion

Unfortunately, at a point near the conclusion of the segment, the announcer gave the expert a chance to answer the question of what is ahead for ad-blocking. At that point, frankly, I believe the expert completely fumbled that opportunistic hand-off.

The expert tech editor’s view was that consumers will not like ads that are specifically aimed at them and their interests and passions, also known as programmatic media, programmatic marketing and programmatic advertising.

His words were along the lines of, “Folks are saying they don’t want [targeted ads].” And our expert said this in an unqualified way, not using any qualifier words, which we learned long ago in school were so important. Indeed, rhetoric 101 says that if you are not 100% sure, you should rarely state things inflexibly, as absolutes.

This is especially the case when it comes to the future of something as chaotic as today’s TV and radio.

Another Critical Option

Having written two telecom and media books deeply involved with the advertising business -- especially what advertising means for and to consumers (Digital Signage and Digital Video Recorders: Changing TV and Advertising Forever), the gentleman’s unqualified and unequivocal statement floored me. Here’s why.

To start with, this question of the future of advertising, which is a very important and ultimate future of all content, as noted above, just cannot be stated in absolute terms … by anybody. There are still too many unknowns and untesteds.

Thus, that ultimate answer cannot be, “They will like this type of content, they will not like this.” Rather, the real answer is much more nuanced.

The real point is: Consumers can be encouraged and even enticed, into watching just about anything. Yet, to do so, a content maker has to first make that content relevant, and then, perhaps, second, make it entertaining or intellectually satisfying.

In short, just one of the other options this tech editor left out was that of relevant advertisements.

In my opinion, that is the truest answer to the future of advertising, the world over.

The Future of Advertising

Relevant advertising works. What are now the concepts of “programmatic” and targeted ads are the first steps toward that mantra.

Indeed, in my opinion, they are the first steps toward what will work, and I say that very nearly unequivocally.

Combining intensive and even more sophisticated data analytics with the modeling of consumer behavior brings relevant advertising even to the most advertising- resistant video viewers.

Why is that? That is because everybody, yes an unqualified everybody, has something they are interested in, and most have lots of things they are passionate about. Indeed, this is one of the few places I am willing to stick my head out toward something like an absolute.

Relevant and entertaining and intellectually-stimulating content, including advertising, that captures each individual person’s passion, and tells them something about that topic that they want and are welcome to … well, that is what gets to that Holy Grail of Sales, i.e., the advertising that works.

And it is important to remember the importance of advertising in the world of marketing goods and products. In the content world, ads ensure those who do the work and the creating get rewarded for their efforts. Without that payment, the entire system breaks down, under any model. People rarely work for free.

In summary, advertising that works -- i.e., relevant ads that people will watch -- is coming, I say to all the tech editors of the world; indeed, to everyone I say: Relevant Ads Are Coming! To see that perspective, you just have to open your perspective a bit, and take in some other views. Relevant ads should be one of them.

P.S.: Perhaps recognizing the importance of respecting that ultimate ad model, the developers of the ad blocking app, “Peace,” withdrew its iOS app from the App Store over the weekend. It, too, will seek out those other perspectives to try to find the true balance between no ads at all and those that work!

Jimmy Schaeffler is chairman and CSO ofThe Carmel Group, astreaming/broadband, broadcast and pay TV/video consultancy based in Carmel by the Sea, Calif.; he writes about telecommunications and media.

Programmatic advertising may be the future, but the extension of automated processes to the premium digital video world, including video delivered over the top, continues to lag well behind the digital display advertising industry.

That’s the consensus from a fresh PricewaterhouseCoopers study on the topic, sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The study, which based its findings on a mix of survey results, corporate and industry data and interviews with senior ad executives, found that programmatic revenues reached $10.1 billion in 2014, and comprised about 20% of total Internet advertising revenues ($49.5 billion), a figure that factored in mobile-related advertising.

Programmatic revenues made up about 52% of display ads ($19.6 billion) last year, outpacing nonprogrammatic display-related revenues. The majority (70%) of programmatic inventory was bought and sold through “Open Auctions,” though PwC expects other types of approaches, including private auctions, unreserved fixed rate and automated guaranteed, to absorb more share in the next few years.

Broken down further, programmatic revenues from ad tech companies (55%) outweighed those from the publishers themselves. Display banner ads made up about 80% of programmatic revenues in 2014, but more advertisers and publishers are expected to shift their budgets and inventory toward mobile and OTT/digital video formats over time.

Programmatic video advertising remains a small-but-growing sector as more viewing occurs on mobile and other IP-connected devices.

“[T]he adoption of programmatic video in 2014 was hindered partly due to the scarcity of available premium-video inventory,” PwC noted. “As eyeballs have shifted away from traditional TV viewing to newer forms of video consumption, including online and mobile devices, brands want to connect with their audiences at the right time and right place. For video that often means through premium publisher inventory, but it is often not available for advertisers via programmatic channels.”

However, what little premium video inventory there is tends to sell out through more traditional digital direct sales channels.

“As a result of this demand, premium video publishers are able to sell their inventory directly and can negotiate deals with advertisers at a premium price. Inventory that goes unsold (remnant) on premium video publishers, which is often less valuable, is then pushed to the programmatic channels,” PwC said.

The study also took a stab at the somewhat controversial definition of the programmatic term itself, centering it on “machine based buying and selling of digital media, including auction based methods like RTB [real- time bidding] and private marketplaces, as well as the automation of direct sales, sometimes called programmatic direct.”