Phil Voelker
The story of advertising in today’s world is a tale of incomprehensible and increasing complexity. We can look back with nostalgia at the time when ad spots were all the same size, the same length, the same broadcast format; but in today’s world of real-time media placements and creative optimization, brands need a complete end-to-end approach not just to reach the world, but also to understand, what’s working and what’s not.
“Advertising has always been an art that merges creativity – pretty much in all forms – with actionable business results,” explains Kevin Lemberg, head of advertising technology partnerships for Comcast Technology Solutions. “It’s this basic definition of what an advertiser does that drives the need for a technology model with end-to-end interoperability. To face the truth that there is no single way that platforms and systems exchange information is to acknowledge that you’ve got to find a way to create that unified workflow yourself.”
Look at the advertiser’s challenges like this:
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Great creative work relies on the ability to understand and respond to data from a complex sea of devices.
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Media buys and ad placements, across this planet full of screens, rely on the ability of the advertiser to communicate with every ad platform and content destination – often in real time.
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Policies, rules, and rights follow every piece of ad creative – ensuring that international business is transacted properly, and contracts are honored.
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Optimization of every subsequent advertising effort relies on the advertiser’s ability to see and understand today’s performance across all end-points.
Strong partners are the backbone of today’s ad operations by solving for all these layers of complexity, allowing advertisers to stay focused on creative development and campaign performance – the reasons they got into the business to begin with.
DISPARATE PARTNERSHIPS, OR API-INTEGRATED ALLIANCES?
“Our partnership strategy has really evolved in response to the way the industry has changed to meet the needs of modern media,” explains Lemberg. “Things have moved so fast that advertisers had to reach out to multiple vendors and then figure out how to get them all to work together, with varying degrees of success. We’ve taken a more organic approach with an emphasis on integration and seamless data sharing.”
This new model pulls together specialized areas of expertise into an organizational body that benefits every partner, and every client. There’s a “steering wheel” – our Ad Management Platform, that communicates out to the rest of the global advertising vehicle to execute on campaigns, guide personalization efforts, and bring back valuable performance data. To touch on just a few of these partnerships:
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Peach is our premier partner for global advertising. “Advertising is different in every country from multiple standpoints: geographical, technical, legislative,” says Lemberg. “Our fully integrated partnership with Peach results in a workflow that’s got localized expertise in the regions, cultures, ad ecosystems of over 100 countries – Europe, South America, EMEA regions, and more. On top of that is connected data – unified reporting and performance tools that follow your activity from country to country. We’re both in the business of continuous innovation, which keeps the technology on top so advertisers can apply more resources to creative development and strategy.”
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We’ve also developed a deep partnership with Flashtalking that provides advertisers more effective ways to personalize ad content delivery, and brings fragmented data together from across the entirety of an advertiser’s omniplatform campaign efforts. Media buy systems, creative asset libraries rights management, ad traffic/delivery engines – all combined into a single platform.
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Innovid bridges a specific gap for advertisers, bringing crucial performance data from linear television and digital campaigns into a singular, more cohesive view of campaign activity. Linear TV assets are brought into the unified system through Innovid’s Bridge API integration to ensure that ads are served in the highest quality, no matter the destination.
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Video On Demand (VOD) is a prominent part of viewing habits for set-top-box video subscribers, but advertising served to on demand content has been a much different workflow than live programmatic advertising. We recently partnered with Freewheel (a Comcast company) on a groundbreaking set-top-box VOD Marketplace where both buy-side and sell-side parties can do business seamlessly – creating a new TV advertising ecosystem.
There are many more, but these recent partnerships underscore the basic thesis that advertisers needed a better, more collaborative way to solve for layers upon layers of complexity, and capitalize on the opportunities provided by a connected, multi-screen world.
