Chris Locke, UK trading director of Starcom MediaVest Group and Scott Moorhead, digital trading director of Havas, agency representatives on How Will Programmatic TV Change the TV Landscape? at Ad Week 2015 yesterday, were two men in a hurry.
Moorhead was quite candid about the next few years: “We want to buy all of linear TV programmatically,” he said. “That won’t happen, but which of the broadcasters will be bravest to support this?”
Meanwhile, Locke said he felt “premium, walled-garden programmatic with transparency” was the future for broadcasters.
But they were willing to be pragmatic too – Locke commented that Channel 4 “needs a bit more work” to have a programmatic VOD offering; and that ITV had at least made a start; “it’s just employed a data person.”
Last week Channel 4 announced that it has signed Dentsu Aegis Network as the first agency group to buy advertising programmatically on its soon-to-launch digital TV service, All 4, which replaces 4oD this year.
Through an exclusive partnership with Freewheel for 2015, Channel 4 is the first broadcaster in Europe to have developed a programmatic trading platform for its TV on-demand service that offers agencies and advertisers the opportunity to buy ads in real-time, as well as giving access to its first party viewer data.
However, a linear programmatic offering – as pointed out during Monday’s session by Jonathan Lewis, head of digital & partnership innovation at Channel 4 – was a long way off yet.
“It requires set-top-box technology,” Lewis argued, whilst noting that the future could become quite fragmented in terms of the various offerings.
More immediately, over the next year the panel said we can expect Channel 4 to make greater use of the data around its 12 million registered users and to dynamically insert advertisements in simulcast streams from April.
The panel also expects clients to be paying more for smarter – more targeted and transparent – planning; video-first campaigns amongst younger demographics and more data skills being added to buying departments.
David Fisher, head of futures at Sky Media, also added that within 18 months Sky Go would be selling mostly programmatically.
