How Programmatic Can Shift Ad Dollars From the Duopoly Back to TV

While many TV businesses eye programmatic with caution, it may just be the key to keeping advertising dollars from shifting deeper into digital in the long run.

eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher recently spoke with Lorne Brown, CEO of advanced TV advertising solutions firm Operative about how TV businesses are looking at programmatic as a way to win some digital ad dollars from the Facebook-Google duopoly.

eMarketer:

What’s driving interest in programmatic for linear TV advertising?

Lorne Brown:

Businesses are all at-risk because of fragmentation and consumers shifting how they consume content. As those audiences splinter, it creates opportunities for other media companies and large digital giants to take a piece of that pie. You see Facebook and Google coming in. They’re talking a little TV, a little out-of-home (OOH), a little bit of everything. They’ve eaten the print business up almost completely.

If you’re a TV company, you’re not just trying to hold onto your branding dollars; you’re trying to figure out ways to grow. The way you do that is by going after the direct-response bucket. The direct-response bucket is primarily the $100 billion-plus market that spends inside of Facebook and Google. And the allure there is they can buy simply, programmatically and in a very automated fashion. They can get a lot of audience on video and measure it easily. TV companies are trying to line up and take that money."

Interview conducted on July 26, 2018

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