Specific Media jumped into the programmatic video advertising fray today, with a new offering called "Programmatic from Specific Media" that includes real-time bidding. According to Bill Schild, SVP, Global Marketing for Specific, one of the key differentiators is viewability ratings on all inventory, powered by Vindico's Adtricity technology (Vindico is a sister company to Specific, with both owned by Interactive Media Holdings).

With Adtricity, advertisers and agencies using Programmatic from Specific Media will see A-F ratings for all available inventory, which guarantee viewability and will inform their buying decisions. While viewability metrics are still evolving, Bill stressed the comprehensiveness of Adtrcitiy's approach, which inspects video ads both inside and outside of IFrames, and uses 100 different criteria to determine the grade.

Specific surveyed agencies to learn where there were potential opportunities to add value to current programmatic offerings.  Bill said that viewability and transparency were consistently cited. In addition, Programmatic from Specific Media is available across desktop, smartphone, mobile and connected TV, and also for video, display and audio content types. Targeting is via Specific's own first party data, including MySpace, and from all major 3rd-party sources.

Separately, Vindico provides Adtricity viewability ratings to VivaKi for Publicis agencies to use. So one question is whether Vindico would license Adtricity to other programmatic solutions. Though Bill thinks this is unlikely, if it did, that would diminish some of Specific's programmatic differentiation.