Foxtel’s sales arm Multi Channel Network (MCN) has reached a target to dynamically trade 60% of Foxtel’s advertising campaigns months ahead of schedule. This means the market is rapidly buying into a TV trading model that focuses on delivering an audience across the Foxtel platform as opposed to traditional fixed spot buying.
From January to September 2016 inclusive, MCN delivered for 329 different advertisers, 994 different products, 4607 campaigns, all traded against 42 different demographics.
The other 40% of trading comprised a mixture of high-end premium brand partnerships, such as sponsorships of integration, and highly-targeted premium spot where clients have tight program sets they want to be placed in.
Some brands, such as Apple and automotive brands, prefer placing ads against specific shows. But increasingly advertisers are seeing the benefits of MCN’s Dynamic Scheduling system.
MCN chief sales and marketing officer Mark Frain tells AdNews a major outcome of dynamic trading is more precise audience delivery in the sometimes unpredictable world of TV ratings.
“Around 95% of all campaigns are delivered within a +/- 5% tolerance. In an increasingly fragmented media market, being able to deliver on those campaigns is a key point of difference,” he says.
“It really starts to challenge the way television has been traded in comparison to the way digital is bought and sold. It’s a big part of brining guaranteed audience delivery to the television platform.
“Audience-based buying and a level of automation that sits behind that is unquestionably where the industry is heading. All of the television networks in the UK use the Landmark system and work on this model of optimisation sophistication.”
Frain says many advertisers have now bought into the dynamic trading model on the back of consistent campaign delivery. Another aspect that is appealing is the ability to optimise results and audience loadings through specific points within the campaign.
“Clients build very diligent weights of advertising to hit their own marketing objectives,” Frain says. “To give you an example, there may be a campaign that’s running 30% in week one, 30% in week two and then 20% for the final two weeks; the Landmark dynamic trading system optimises to deliver on those splits. It gives them weight of advertising as they planned it to be.”
Optimisation includes choosing the channels advertisers want included, weekly strike weights and even some daily tweaks.
MCN is the sales house for Foxtel and Ten Network and this month is testing dynamic trading across Ten’s inventory with the aim to run dynamic campaigns across the network early next year.
“Many of the clients are the same as with Foxtel. The industry desire, based on what we’ve shown on Foxtel is around how fast can you adopt that technology on Channel Ten. The uptake will be rapid,” he says.
To begin with MCN will dynamically trade Ten inventory separately to Foxtel, but down the track it is feasible they will dynamically trade across both. The next step after bedding in Ten will be programmatic TV.
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