Dive Brief:
- A panel hosted by trade publication Videonuze agreed the term "programmatic TV" should be dropped since "it’s not a real thing," per a report from the Wall Street Journal.
- One strong data point is the U.S. TV marketplace is at $70 billion and programmatic TV accounts for slightly less than $1 billion of that total, according to International Data Corporation.
- At the same time, a majority of marketers are buying programmatically for display, rich media and video in-stream, which might indicate a technology issue with programmatic TV ad sales.
Dive Insight:
Long Ellis, president of Longview Media Consulting, told the Wall Street Journal the issue might run deeper than technology, saying, "There is a lot of smoke of mirrors out there. None of the TV networks want to put their inventory into anything that will be commoditized. That scares the hell out of them."
Another issue according to Randy Cooke, vice president of SpotX, is that compared to digital advertising, TV ads simply aren’t hard to buy.
One barrier to programmatic TV ads is so far the status quo has been very successful for TV networks and there’s not a strong incentive to break up that model. Meanwhile, some of the alternatives, such as apps and streaming media, are still a relatively small sub-category – and in the case of Netflix and Amazon for streaming TV, there’s no option to even buy ads.
"It’s just not simple," Jonathan Bokor, senior vice president and director of advanced media at MediaVest, told the Journal. "There are groups with competing interests. You have the [pay TV providers.] You have networks who are trying to offer their own solutions. And you have buyers who aren’t’ necessarily aligned with the way that networks want to do things."