Advertising technology company Beachfront, working with Canoe Ventures, is enabling automated, real-time audience-based buying of video-on-demand inventory delivered by Canoe’s owners, Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Media.

Like streaming, traditional cable VOD usage has grown during the pandemic. Cable VOD also offers advertisers familiar brand-safe premium programming. 

Related: Canoe, AMC Go Addressable Across Comcast, Charter Homes

“Sophisticated, digital-oriented ad buyers understand impressions are way up across the convergent TV ecosystem in 2020, but they’ve historically lacked easy pathways to accessing TV Network’s ad inventory on MVPD’s VOD platforms,” said Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro. “We’ve spent the last several years tackling the technological hurdles to make it easy for any ad buyer to access these premium video impressions, while also laying the groundwork for future addressable-enabled solutions.”

Opening the door to programmatic buyers will help cable networks’ VOD inventory compete for ad dollars against streaming video and connected TV, whose technology was developed to provide targeted and addressable ad campaigns.

“We’re constantly seeking innovative ways to help complement our TV networks’ customers’ ad sales teams with new solutions to monetize the long-tail of their premium VOD inventory,” said Canoe CRO Ed Knudson. “Unlocking VOD inventory to a new class of ad buyers helps ensure networks get the most value out of their programming, which is particularly helpful at a time when on-demand viewing is on the rise.” 

Agencies, brands and demand-side platforms that utilize Beachfront can purchase VOD inventory from networks that can reach as many as 38 million VOD households. 

“Traditional TV inventory is still a big piece of the pie that many modern digital-oriented ad buyers don’t have access to,” said Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive, an enterprise software platform building tools to help buyers purchase digital TV inventory. “We’re excited to leverage our relationship with Beachfront to offer this unique set-top box VOD inventory to our ad buying partners.” 

The number of ad impressions in video-on-demand programming from cable operators working with Canoe jumped again in the third quarter.

Ads served in VOD programming generated 5.668 billion impressions in the third quarter, up 48% from 3.812 billion a year ago, the company said. Canoe serves 36 million households that subscribe to Charter, Comcast and Cox.

Canoe ran a total of 3,208 campaigns in the quarter, up 51% from 2,123 a year ago.

Related: Canoe Marks 100 Billion Spots Inserted in VOD Programming

VOD ads are becoming increasingly popular as viewing increases and as more networks enable dyanmic ad insertion technology, which allows advertisers to better target their commercials. Last year's totals were impacted by the election, which soaked up viewer attention.

About 24% of the Q3 campaigns were network tune-in campaigns. The others were for clients in a wide range of categories. The breakdown was similar last year.

So far this year, Canoe’s ads have generated 17.9 billion impressions, up from 12.8 billion at this point a year ago.

Related: Set-Top VOD Ads Must Evolve to Survive

Canoe said that 99% of the time consumers watch mid-roll ads to completion. In pre-roll the completion rate is 99.18% and it is 91.35% in post-roll breaks.

The bulk of Canoe’s ad impressions are created by mid-roll ads, which generated 4.684 billion impressions, compared with 896.7 million pre-roll impressions and 87.2 million post-roll impressions. 

Read more at broadcasatingcable.com.

NEW YORK — Though there’s some frustration about set-top box video-on-demand advertising being undervalued, the category must continue to evolve, or risk getting overrun by other, more agile platforms.

Cable VOD advertising needs to get better and faster, “or it will fall out of the mix,” Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president and general manager of advertising at Roku, warned at VideoNuze’s 2017 Online Video Advertising Summit here.

Related: Set-Top VOD Ad Views Surging

Set-top VOD can suffer from delays in reporting and from other shortcomings that aren’t present in the OTT advertising realm, he said.

Set-top-box VOD tends to focus on C3 and C7 ratings, but from days eight and beyond, “it’s feeling fragmented,” Maureen Bosetti, chief partnerships officer at media planning and buying company Initiative, said. “There’s an opportunity to get the measurement right.”

It’s also important to get the right creative for dynamically inserted ads, Pooja Midha, senior vice president of digital ad sales and operations at Disney/ABC Television Group, added. “It’s a different pitch process,” she said, noting that such inventory tends to get lumped in with traditional TV.

Although set-top VOD faces challenges ahead, it’s still a significant growth business. Canoe, the MSO-backed advanced ad joint venture, reported in April that VOD ad impressions reached 5 billion in the first quarter, a 21% jump. Canoe, now on track for more than 20 billion ad impressions for 2017, delivered a record 17.9 billion impressions in all of 2016.

However, in the digital advertising realm, there is an increasing pivot toward TV-connected devices. Last week, FreeWheel, the online ad-tech firm owned by Comcast, said Roku players and other TV-connected OTT devices toppled PCs/desktops to jump into the lead with respect to online ad view share in the first quarter of 2017.

Related: OTT Devices Gobbling Up Ad View Share: FreeWheel

“There’s incredible growth to be had there” when set-top VOD and OTT are combined, James Rooke, general manager, publisher platform at FreeWheel, said here as he presented those results.

“We’re very bullish on OTT,” Bosetti said. “The growth there is tremendous … but we need to plan for it appropriately.”

MOBILE MUST BE ‘AGNOSTIC’
A separate panel here focused on the evolution of advertising in another big growth area — mobile.

Mobile video advertising faces a significant challenge because it’s supporting a wide variety of short-form as well as premium, long-form TV content.

Mobile video must be approached as “agnostically as possible,” but the way the market is evolving also means one can’t put a 30- or 60-second spot in front of every piece of content heading to a smartphone, Mike Law, executive vice president and managing director of video investment at Dentsu Aegis Network U.S., pointed out. “I don’t know if we’ve completely solved for that.”

But what type of content is being viewed also matters. Shorter ads and smaller ad loads should be tied to shorter videos viewed on mobile devices, but not so with a show such as ABC’s Scandal, if it’s being viewed on a smartphone.

“That shouldn’t limit the [ad] supply,” Law said. “They’re still a viewer.”

For something like Scandal, those core metrics will be the same across multiple platforms, agreed Justin Fadgen, vice president of business development at Beachfront Media.

Spotify, the music streaming service that has expanded into video, is experimenting with ad models that use smaller loads in order to provide a better overall experience, Brian Danzis, head of global video monetization at Spotify, said.

Using TV-like ad loads on a mobile device can be “kind of annoying” to the viewer, he added.

Spotify has also created an ad matrix that delivers a certain ad format, depending on the device the consumer is using. “Fragmentation is a result of convergence,” Danzis said.