There’s lot of hype and column inches right now around the evolution of television buying and conjecture about how it might look in the future.
My view of programmatic TV combines technology, automation and data to provide operational efficiencies, whilst achieving audience led data driven television. Based on this view we have been doing elements of it for some time, using automation and technology to decrease operational burdens.
However, as the market continues to become increasingly complex, a revolutionary leap forward is needed in order to ensure TV continues to be innovative and progressive.
Let’s take a step back to 10 years ago. There were five free to air (FTA) channels and 32 subscription TV (STV) channels, the average volume of spots transacted was almost 20 million across TV as a medium.
Although a lot of broadcast and agency systems have been criticised for their lack of progression and innovation, we must recognise and remember that these legacy systems have proven to be robust and reliable.
They have been able to handle growing spot volumes, which have increased by over 300 per cent in the past ten years to just over 80 million spots transacted across 16 FTA channels and over 100 STV channels.
E-trading introduced a technological step change, connecting agencies and broadcasters to automate manual trading processes with the introduction of file based technology such as; e-proposals, e-booking requests, electronic avails and holdings.
This all meant that sales and agency buyers could no longer die a slow and painful death by paper cut from their pre-times, NA replacement forms, booking confirms and avail reports.
The benefits were clearly tangible: e-booking requests reduced booking turnaround times by more than fifty percent, whilst holdings allowed agencies and broadcasters time to ensure both systems were reconciled on a daily basis leading to a reduction in account queries.
As the TV landscape continued to become more complex, with an increase in channels and inventory, agencies and broadcasters soon re-engineered some of their existing processes and systems to deploy step optimisers. This further halved the time it took to create TV schedules whilst returning better yielding schedules.
Over the past five years we have experienced more seismic change in the TV industry than we have in the past fifty, as TV remains an incredibly powerful medium – the latest Australian Multi-Screen report shows that 88.4% of all viewing takes place on the TV set.
However, there are increasing pressures, based on the growing complexity of the landscape for TV to continuously demonstrate innovation and to continue to provide solutions that build greater efficiencies and reductions in operational burdens.
Nobody said it was going to be easy…no doubt it will be disruptive, because it’s new.
Programmatic TV will be a trigger for change, causing current processes to be revaluated and re-engineered. However, by collaborating with the market, adding agnostic layers of technology through open APIs and integrating information between disparate systems, we will jump feet first into a world where a combination of real time workflow automation, ad decisioning and data-driven television actually exists.
In Australia we have taken on the challenges we’ve been experiencing in market head on. Using best of breed technology and working with a highly innovative partner, we have collaboratively launched a new programmatic TV platform.
In the process we’ve achieved an revolutionary step - a private marketplace in the arena of TV automation with ONE TV by AOL Platforms and MCN. All eyes are now on the Aussie market to see how effective buying and selling programmatic TV is within a private marketplace.
I for one am incredibly excited to be a part of the next revolutionary leap in our race towards the future of TV buying.