Back to the future

Speaking on a programmatic panel yesterday at the packed Future of TV Advertising forum, Nine's Digital Commercial Director Nick Young was scathing on how premium broadcaster video content was increasingly being gamed by online exchanges and DSPs. He said it's on the verge of being commoditised by buyers in online trading exchanges and ultimately valued like lower grade video ad inventory – often on dubious sites or second tier publishers. 

“We have sacrificed long-term control for short-term revenue gain," Young said. "We have to join together and collaborate with products and services, join together on tech and data – but compete on content – in order to brace ourselves for that [incoming] tsunami. “There’s a lot of hands in that [adtech] till."

Former Nine exec, now News Corp CEO of Free News & Lifestyle, Pippa Leary, who was involved in the deal to represent North America's second biggest streaming service, Tubi, in Australia had just warned of the decimation of premium publisher display inventory by online exchanges, led by Google's control of the world's largest auction-based advertising platform. Leary at Nine was part of a group who devised the term BVOD [broadcaster video on demand] to differentiate premium long-form video from the endless supply of lower grade short-form and user-generated video advertising in the open market. 

"We needed to tell the market it was different. We didn't want these long-form, full screen, high quality, unskippable, sound-on, addressable ad units to get rolled up in the long tail," said Leary.

She added it remains paramount to keep broadcast quality video out of open exchanges, where the "bad actors, lots of arbitrage, lots of shitty third party data" is rife.

Young agreed that BVOD has to remain in control of its own destiny.

"There is a whole world out there of self-interest that is trying to come to us and get us to homogenise our inventory, sign up to products that we don't agree with … but we are dangling short-term little revenue gifts for long-term pain,” he acknowledged.

While lauding the arrival of streaming giants in the past 18 months with their subscription ad tiers because it is helping to differentiate quality long form professional video ad inventory from cheap and often dubious open web options, Young was adamant broadcasters needed to take full control of their inventory in the programmatic supply chain.

Attitude adjuster

Seven's Chief Commercial Officer, Henry Tajer, is known to be agitating for combined market-facing initiatives with Nine and Paramount's Ten in a reversal of former CEO James Warburton long-held preference to compete alone. Seven and Nine CEOs Jeff Howard and Matt Stanton have both publicly supported closer ties. Paramount-Ten's Beverley McGarvey yesterday at the Future of TV forum also publicly confirmed the US-owned Australian network wanted closer collaboration with commercial rivals, though was scant on details. 

Broadcasters last got serious eight years ago about building industry wide scale together to compete against the global tech operatives when they funded industry group ThinkTV, which has since died because of competing self-interest. It finally appears to be urgent as even some of broadcaster allies say within three years their commercial viability is threatened by trying to compete and create local content for local markets that streamers can amortise across multiple global markets.   

Nine and Seven execs are privately acknowledging the appetite top down for the need to move with urgency and Young's comments are likely aligned to the emerging intent. 

Seven’s Digital Strategy Director Jordan King – who recently joined from Nine – was more guarded on the panel than Young, likely mindful of jumping ahead of Seven's new senior executive regime.

He agreed streamers coming to the market had been a net positive for the TV networks, “maybe with the exception of Amazon”, which is now wielding increasing influence on the BVOD market via its demand-side platform via which it can link ads served to sales on amazon.com. As a result, more advertisers are using Amazon’s DSP for all of their BVOD buys, though King suggested that the platform had initially suffered glitches. He stopped short of backing a push for a combined BVOD-streaming marketplace proper.

Per King: “A concentration on premium video is fantastic, because it changes conversations, it puts money in [to the market]. But as a competitor, [only] if they don't control attribution, if they don't control analytics, if they don't control the major buying platform, the major selling platform and the major ad server. As a competitor, that's much more appealing because it feels like a much fairer buy – and that's what we want. Ultimately, that's the point of Voz Streaming.”

Young was unfazed, punching home repeatedly BVOD and ad-funded SVOD risks the same fate as programmatic display – with rapid declines in price, quality and results for marketers due to the disintermediation of buyers and sellers by a sprawling supply chain packaging up poor grade inventory as premium. He resurrected the possibility of making Voz Streaming the broader marketplace it was originally intended to be – before networks got spooked and re-scoped it. Per Young, the ad-funded streamers would also be welcome to join.

Voz Streaming – which allows advertisers to buy across Seven, Nine, Ten (and soon SBS) using the OzTam identifier to enable frequency capping and targeting while de-duplicating reach – is “very good,” said Young. “But it is a watered down version of how hard we wanted to go because it rubbed up against certain kinds of models”.

It’s understood that dilution down came about because one network and OzTam shareholder had been spooked by talk of a marketplace for BVOD buys, given its relationships with adtech players in other markets – hence the original plan being pared back to an API-based tool rather than, in effect, a walled garden for broadcast video on demand intended to give TV networks better control of their inventory.

Young was reluctant to frame any renewed marketplace initiative as a walled garden, though acknowledged the merits of some walled garden approaches.

“I think it's about providing solutions for clients that are meaningful at scale in a combined ecosystem that can be judged in its own merit,” he said.

The CEO’s of both Seven and Nine have been increasingly vocal about collaborating on back-end tech as well as potentially on market-facing initiatives. “If there are opportunities to come together and scale, we will and should explore that,’ Nine CEO Matt Stanton told Mi3 in February.

But the buy-side was less convinced of the plan to resuscitate a BVOD marketplace, streamers included or otherwise. Jade Watson, Group M's National Head of Programatic Operations, gave it a lukewarm response.

"I would say that is quite challenging [the networks] coming together now. I feel it would be very meaningful if they were the only provider for the video market. We're coming into such fragmentation that is needs to encompass a lot more than premium providers," she suggested.

Streamers welcome

Nine's Young said that the global ad-funded streamers would likewise be welcome to join an expanded BVOD-SVOD marketplace initiative.

“Like-minded inventory sources should come together to create fair exchange of value for what they are, and, more importantly, fair measurement. How do you know how well premium content does if we're bundled in with loads of other cheaper inventory sources? You can't judge our effectiveness when you are bundling our inventory,” he said.

“So we need to come together and be confident of the fact that our premium inventory drives a better result and therefore deserves a higher value – a fair value – as a result. We need to provide products and services that ensure that inventory can be measured effectively,” per Young. “I'm not saying that it has to be OzTam.”

Mixed signals

The open call was met with mixed response from fellow Future of TV panellists. LG’s Alex Blundell Jones pointed to the success of ITV in the UK, which built and launched its own DSP in late 2020 (and through which 99 per cent of its digital inventory is now traded via self-serve) as model TV networks could adopt singularly or collectively.

“I think the goal of that initially was a bit of a 'screw you' to the walled gardens to say, ‘you can buy our inventory via programmatic means, but you do so on our terms’. But I think a view of that is potentially to work with other broadcasters in the future – time will tell,” per Blundell Jones.

News Corp’s Pippa Leary indicated free streamer Tubi intends to join Voz Streaming in its current guise, and more broadly urged media buyers to become “more sophisticated” not just in understanding that all reach and impressions “are not equal”, but the nuances of device and environment.

“[If] you think you can go and just buy a lot of cheap reach with some unknown data attached to it, that's not going to work out well in the long run,” per Leary. “There is now a continuum [of video types]; they play different roles. Trying to mix them all up together is not going to work.”

Regardless of any pan-streaming marketplaces getting off the ground or otherwise, Leary said News has no issue with programmatic guaranteed trading, and aims to ensure the bulk of Tubi’s programmatic ad sales are conducted in that manner.

“If I'm sitting up here in a year's time and 50 per cent of Tubi is ending up in the open exchanges, I haven't done my job,” she said. “I deserve to be fired.”

Build template

If the TV networks and streamers are serious about putting together a combined buying platform, Mark McKee, GM at Comcast-owned adtech firm FreeWheel, suggested they could do worse than look at what the big networks and streamers are doing collaboratively in the US.

"As an industry, we are at a crossroads – there is no question about it," McKee told delegates. "You have some choices. Do you continue to go down that path of embracing what we've already been doing, which could lead to loss of control, perhaps that race to the bottom ... allow platforms and intermediaries to interfere with that relationship between your customer, your viewer, and your business? 

"We also have another opportunity. Do we reset the playbook for how and what TV will look like in the future, reclaim control, but also start to add sustainable value back to your business, as well as your clients?"

He said TV "needs an easy button" to remove barriers to entry and start scooping up more advertisers, in much the same way as the platforms have done with simple self-serve systems.

He pointed to Comcast's launch of Universal Ads as a template.

"Universal Ads is a self-service platform, in conjunction with NBC, Paramount, Fox, Warner Brothers Discovery, AMC Networks and many others, where we're pooling the inventory and creating a self-service platform bespoke to TV, but has the simplicity and ease of what brands have expected from social," said McKee.

"We need to partner wisely. We need to ensure that we are maintaining the connection between the buyer and the seller and our audiences, and we also need to make sure that the right motivations of those partners is aligned with ours."

This story is part of Mi3’s full collection of industry trends, debate and developments from Future of TV Advertising ’25 which will roll out over the coming week in our editorial series here.