AOL has added self-serve programmatic TV buying to its portfolio this week as part of an extension of its One by AOL TV managed module, in partnership with agency holding company Omnicom Media Group.
The expansion of the module, which first launched in 2014, allows marketers to gain a clearer insight into audience buying opportunities and to better manage their TV ad investments, using an approach to activating data and technology, according to AOL. The launch comes ahead of the 2016 TV Upfronts, events where TV network executives and major advertisers meet at the start of important advertising sales periods.
AOL’s programmatic advertising technology was one of the main selling points when Verizon decided to acquire the company last year for $4.4 billion, which can insert ads in the Go90 streaming service, linking them to a user’s location, preferences and behavior.
The new self-serve programmatic TV buying software says it comes with several beneficial features including transparency and control – in which advertisers can select audience targets, establish KPIs (key performance indicators), set campaign parameters, and then plan, purchase, and monitor performance. It boasts automated data exchanges which reduces time to market, and also allows access to data from AOL’s patented predictive targeting tools and third-party TV targeting segments. Access to premium inventory through partnerships with national broadcast and cable networks will be available in Q3 2016. Finally, the new service features what AOL calls holistic measurement, whereby it monitors the connection between TV ad airings and spikes in mobile, tablet, and desktop website visits.
To summarize, programmatic buying and selling allows automated bidding and dynamic pricing, so that budget and demographic decisions can be made with more up-to-date information, rather than the months in advance needed in the traditional upfront model – giving buyers and sellers more control over their inventory.
The AOL One platform is a fusion of its $405 million purchase of Adap.tv with its own programmatic division, based on the property acquired from the $60 million purchase of video syndicator startup 5Min back in 2010. This was also used to get AOL into video advertising in the first place. In addition, AOL spent $101 million on marketing analytics firm Convertro in May 2014, and $90 million on content personalization start up Gravity in January.
“Traditionally, TV has been purchased in silos and with broad demographics that lack the necessary targeting to drive deep relevancy. Today, we are maximizing the power of AOL’s patented first-party predictive targeting tools and putting insights and analytics directly in the hands of our buyers. Coupled with our end-to-end One by AOL platform, we are now able to offer advertisers a more holistic approach to campaigns across TV, mobile, and video,” said Dan Ackerman, SVP, Programmatic TV at AOL.
“This provides our clients the opportunity to begin to realize the benefits of advanced targeting in linear TV. It is a critical first step in our journey towards programmatic and, ultimately, household level addressability at scale in TV,” added John Swift, CEO, North America Investment at Omnicom Media Group.
AOL announced a deal with A+E Networks in December 2015 for A+E to use the AOL One programmatic advertising platform – which was the first for AOL. The deal involved upfront ad commitment to The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Moviefone, and Microsoft Xbox.
A recent report from Ooyala states that, effectively, programmatic buying is becoming a part of daily operations for publishers and broadcasters. Ooyala says that mobile video programmatic spend will grow to $3.8 billion in 2017 from $1.14 billion in 2015 and in APAC, 79% of ad professionals said they now use programmatic ad tech for video, and 90% say they now use it for mobile. eMarketer forecasts the global online programmatic buying market climbing by $5 billion to account for $14.88 billion of the $58.6 billion digital advertising pie this year. However, another recent report from Freewheel cites that programmatic ads still only account for 5% of content inventories.
European pay TV giant Sky invested $10 million in DataXu at the start of this year, a Boston-based provider of marketing analytics and data management software for programmatic advertising. The aim is to boost reach and accelerate take up of its emerging AdVance cross platform advertising system.
Although Sky is ahead of other major European operators in advanced advertising, it is slightly behind some of its US counterparts in terms of programmatic buying. One is DTH operator Dish Network, which introduced programmatic buying with real-time bidding for linear broadcast TV advertising spots late in 2015. However, Sky is closer to applying it across multiple platforms.
The Dish technique applies only to addressable advertising targeted at the household level via satellite, with the ads then stored in the DVR for insertion into live and recorded content to play during the breaks. They dynamically replace the advertisements originally broadcast in the usual way, with the difference being the process is fully automated. Comcast was perhaps the first major US pay TV operator to move into programmatic advertising through Freewheel in early 2014.