NEW YORK – AOL is expanding its television efforts with the launch of self-serve TV ad-buying as part of its One by AOL platform. AOL rolled out the programmatic self-serve platform for TV buyers and Omnicom Group is the first agency partner to test-drive it.
AOL first announced its programmatic TV offering in 2014, allowing marketers to buy TV ads through AOL’s online system. As explained by Dan Ackerman, the company’s senior vice president of programmatic TV, AOL could already “crunch data and provide a tailored plan for the client,” but the actual ad buying process remained “largely manual” until now.
While some competing solutions only enable planning, AOL said its platform also handles execution and reporting. AOL thinks its developing device graph under Verizon gives it a competitive advantage in omnichannel media mix planning.
“We have access to a high volume of consumer transactions across desktop and mobile,” said Ackerman. “When tools go from managed service to self-service, it’s an indication that ad buyers are becoming much more sophisticated and going beyond the testing phase. In the U.S., I would still call it early days for programmatic TV, with greater adoption forthcoming as buyers grow familiar with the benefits.”
What about outside the United States? Ackerman pointed to Australia, where AOL is working with TV ad company MCN, and where he said the amount of TV ad revenue sold through online systems in an automated, data-driven way grew from 1 to 5 percent over the course of last year.
As for where these programmatic ads will actually be placed, Ackerman said AOL is working with “dozens” of national broadcast and cable TV networks to plug into their ad inventory. He suggested that a number of networks will be announcing programmatic capabilities soon.
AOL’s self-serve platform lets buyers set their campaign flight dates, spot lengths, budgets, targeting parameters and programming selections (e.g., pull back on networks where an advertiser already has an upfront sponsorship).
Then, through Acxiom’s safe haven technology (which facilitates a blind match based on a common identifier), AOL can enrich hashed IDs with behavioral or psychographic data, as well as set-top box data from two million homes through TV data platform FourthWall Media.
“The transaction between the buyer and seller can be guaranteed based on Nielsen demographics or non-guaranteed where the transaction currency is spot-based,” Ackerman said. “An advertiser can build custom segments based on its own first-party data and we can append Nielsen and custom Rentrak, Polk, Shopcom, MRI Fusion [and] Acxiom Personicx segments.”
The self-serve programmatic TV tool can be used now for planning and purchasing media against new fall programming in the third quarter.
AOL is not naming any supply-side sources yet, though the company claims advertisers can access national broadcast network inventory, not merely MVPD or local-network inventory.
Omnicom saw the platform as a way to bring advances in data targeting and household level addressability to linear TV, said John Swift, CEO of North America investment at the holding company.
AOL uses Acxiom and Experian to onboard TV data segments. The two data marketing firms facilitate blind matches against supplier or advertiser data so AOL can avoid using personally identifiable information.
