Posts for 'SpotX'

IRIS.TV and SpotX (part of Magnite) announced this morning they’re partnering to offer industry-standard contextual targeting segments to SpotX’s video ad supply. The move will give ad buyers the ability to target and verify the category of video on all screens.

SpotX will be able to give ad buyers access to video-level metadata that has been “IRIS-enabled” for targeting in CTV and digital video, driving more value for content owners, especially in in brand-safe CTV where viewership is soaring and ad performance is superior.

Noting the challenges the partnership will overcome, SpotX’s SVP of Strategic Partnerships Kristen William said, “Our clients have been demanding increased visibility into the content they are advertising in, but access to contextual data is extremely complicated as it comes in a variety of formats as well as being locked behind content management systems and video players.”

For more on how IRIS.TV enables video data for contextual segmentation to create more value for both ad buyers and content owners, see my interview below with VP of Publisher Partnerships Lauren Gabriele. Lauren will also be moderating a session at this week’s VideoNuze Connected TV Ad Summit virtual “Targeting in CTV: The New Data Paradigm,” with Xumo, Index Exchange and Icon Media Direct.

continue reading

Ad spending on SpotX’s platform increased by 42% in 2020 vs. 2019, driven mainly by over-the-top/connected TV clients who now comprise almost 70% of overall ad spending on the platform. SpotX said that after a Covid-driven pullback in Q2, platform spending globally grew 70% in Q4 ’20 vs. Q4 ’19. North America is still the dominant territory for SpotX, accounting for 88% of ad spending in 2020, though EMEA and APAC grew by 107% and 66% respectively in 2020 vs. 2019.

continue reading

Crackle Plus is expanding its relationship with video supply-side platform SpotX to help monetize new distribution across a variety of free ad-supported streaming TV (“FAST”) services, the companies announced this morning. Crackle Plus is now available on 29 devices and services and has announced deals with fuboTV, Philo, VIDAA, VIZIO and Xumo which it estimates will expose Crackle Plus networks to over 60 million new viewers in 2021.

continue reading

Last Friday’s announcement that Magnite is acquiring SpotX from RTL Group for almost $1.2 billion was further evidence of connected TV advertising’s momentum and the combined company’s market opportunity. Considering Magnite’s pro forma financial results with eMarketer’s forecast of CTV ad revenue shows how much potential growth lies ahead for the combined company.

In its release, Magnite said the combined company would have $42 million of pro forma CTV ad revenue ($15.3 million from Magnite and around $27 million from SpotX) in Q4 ’20. Magnite also said the $42 million would have represented around 34% of Q4’s revenue for the combined company. It further said the combined company would have had pro forma revenue for 2020 of $350 million, so applying the same 34% proportion, the combined company would have had approximately $119 million in CTV revenue in 2020.

continue reading

Video advertising platform SpotX has released a new report detailing seven global video ad trends and predictions for 2021. Overall, the report points to a continued shift in video ad spending to data-centric, highly-measurable campaigns reaching viewers through connected devices. SpotX considers 2020 to have been the start of the “connected decade.” SpotX included insights from executives at Acxiom, AMC Networks, CCI, Discovery, DISH Media, GroupM, Samsung Ads, The Trade Desk and TransUnion in its report.

Following is a summary of SpotX’s seven predictions:

continue reading

Video ad platform SpotX has made an undisclosed investment in SpringServe, an independent OTT and connected TV ad server, extending an existing partnership. SpotX is owned by RTL Group; it says it reaches 50 million CTV households per month and it acquired server-side ad insertion provider Yospace last year. SpringServe was founded in 2015 and serves publishers and content owners.

The deal underscores how viewership is moving to OTT and CTV, driving publishers and content owners to seek stronger monetization of every view and manage their inventory in more sophisticated ways across programmatic and direct sold. I reached out to both companies for more details on what the deal will mean for them, the broader market and their respective roadmaps going forward as viewership of OTT and CTV accelerates. Below is what they shared with me:

continue reading

SpotX has released new research highlighting how use of connected TV has become mainstream behavior, with 40% of U.S. adults using CTV, for an estimated reach of 100 million 18+ adults. Among CTV viewers 63% watch daily and 94% watch weekly. CTV users watch an average of 3 hours per day (pre-Covid when SpotX fielded its survey). CTV viewers are quite evenly distributed by age group; 18-24 year-olds represent 21%, 24-34 year-olds (24%), 35-54 year-olds (27%) and 55+ (29%).

These findings and others are included in SpotX’s new paper, “CTV is for Everyone: An In-Depth Look at Connected TV Viewership in the U.S.”

continue reading

Hershey’s, the iconic chocolate and candy maker, is going all in on Connected TV (CTV) and OTT (Over the Top), planning to increase its ad spending by 9x in 2020 vs its 2019. To do so it is partnering with SpotX as one of its media buying and demand facilitation partners. To learn more about Hershey’s 2020 CTV/OTT strategy I interviewed Vinny Rinaldi, Head of Addressable Media and Technology for Hershey’s and Cassidy Diamond, VP, Brand Partnerships for SpotX. Following is a slightly edited transcript.

VideoNuze: Hershey’s is going “all in” on Over-the-Top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV) advertising, intending to grow spending in these categories by 9x in 2020, compared to 2019. Why is Hershey’s making this big shift?

continue reading

Virtual pay-TV (or “vMVPDs”) providers already deliver live, linear and on-demand programming to millions of subscribers, creating a rich new source of targetable premium video ad inventory, often on connected TVs. But virtual pay-TV is itself in a state of flux, with providers revamping packages, evolving their marketing and raising their prices.

At the recent Video Ad Summit we discussed these dynamics on a session I moderated that included Hannah Brown (Chief Strategy Officer, fuboTV), Chris Maccaro (CEO, Beachfront Media), Matt McLeggon (Senior Director, Advanced TV Growth, SpotX) and
Beth Weeks (VP, Director Media, Digitas North America).

Some of the key takeaways included that virtual pay-TV operators are seeking more scale, especially to help educate ad buyers about why the opportunity is compelling (buy side education and overcoming fragmentation was a big theme), how important automation, content discoverability and viewer experiences will be for virtual pay-TV and how linear/sports remain an important part of virtual pay-TV’s appeal.

Watch the video now!

SpotX has released its “2019 Video Advertising Trends” report, highlighting 4 key trends:

1. New offerings will come into play for OTT video services.
2. Traditional TV will continue to transform for today’s digital landscape.
3. Shifting consumer expectations of ad experiences and personal data usage will drive innovations in ad transactions and delivery.
4. Industry-wide transparency efforts and regulation will spur larger investments in data management.

The report offers numerous insights about each of these 4 trends (and others). The report’s discussion of the latter two are especially relevant and thought-provoking.

continue reading

While the “Mad Men” era of TV advertising was characterized by three-martini lunches, the current era is characterized by the push toward efficiency, most notably programmatic transactions that are data-enabled with increased automation. For many, these trends raise the prospect of a future of machine-to-machine only interactions, with minimal human involvement.

But, attending the SpotX Connect half-day breakfast event in NYC yesterday, I heard a very different message from participants on one session after another: contrary to the “automation-is-king” mythology, human relationships and engagement are actually still very much at the core of how things work in today’s video ad business.

continue reading

SpotX and Tru Optik have announced a partnership that enables video content providers to pre-segment and validate their ad inventory, so that buyers are able to create targeted, audience-based connected TV and OTT ad campaigns. Under the partnership, SpotX’s Audience Management Engine has been integrated with Tru Optik’s OTT Data Marketplace.

In addition, advertisers and content providers will gain access to Tru Optik’s Cross Screen Audience Validation (CAV), which provides deduped household reach, frequency, in-target percentage rates, device delivery confirmation and reporting.

continue reading

Video ad tech provider SpotX has announced that it has achieved 100% compliance with the IAB’s ads.txt specification version 1.0.1. ads.txt, which was announced by IAB in May, 2017, is a way of preventing the sale of fraudulent or counterfeit ad inventory. Fraudulent ad inventory have been a constant source of consternation in the video ad business because it undermines the marketplace’s integrity, especially for programmatic, and causes spending waste.

continue reading

In another sign of how important connected TVs are becoming for ad-supported content, supply-side platform SpotX announced this morning that it is offering advertisers enhanced audience measurement for ad campaigns on connected TV devices using Nielsen data.

Advertisers will be able to measure the unduplicated and incremental reach of their campaigns across SpotX campaigns on CTV alongside their traditional linear TV ads. Campaign measurement will include data on reach, frequency and GRPs of CTV ads. The Nielsen data will also be used for insights on CTV ads relative to desktop and mobile ads as well as linear TV.

continue reading

JW Player and SpotX recently announced a new header bidding solution to drive improved video ad monetization across JW’s huge base of content publishers. Dubbed “Video Player Bidding,” the solution is meant to radically simplify and accelerate JW publishers’ implementation of header bidding, while exposing their inventory to SpotX’s deep pool of demand sources. I caught up with JW’s co-founder and SVP, Strategic Partnerships Brian Rifkin and SpotX’s CRO Sean Buckley, to learn more.

For those not familiar, header bidding is a way for publishers to increase yield on their ad inventory, by simultaneously accepting bids from various demand sources, with the highest bid winning. The approach contrasts with the traditional “waterfall” model, whereby bids are sequentially evaluated. As programmatic buying has gained in display ads, header bidding has become widely used.

continue reading

New research from SpotX reveals an expected shift in advertising spending from TV to OTT over the next 2 years. The research was conducted by Kagan among 41 U.S. pay-TV operators, OTT providers, content owner and advertisers. Just 11% of advertisers reported spending 21%-40% of their budgets on OTT today, but that’s expected to rise to 67% doing so in 2 years. Meanwhile, 33% said they currently spend 21%-40% on TV, but that’s expected to drop to 22% in the same time frame.

continue reading on VideoNuze iQ

Video ad tech provider SpotX has announced server-side ad insertion interoperability with Amazon Web Services’ Elemental MediaTailor service. This means that content providers which are joint customers of SpotX and AWS Elemental MediaTailor are able to use SpotX’s ad decisioning capabilities to dynamically serve targeted ads, using server-side ad insertion.

With server-side ad insertion (“SSAI”), which is also known as ad stitching, relevant ads are integrated with the content at the server level, providing a better viewer experience as compared with when ads are inserted by the player on the user's device. The latter model often results in buffering as the player transitions between content and ads and vice versa. Buffering is major challenge for content providers because it is the leading cause of abandonment, which in turn diminishes monetization.

continue reading

SpotX has revealed that ad spending on its platform for OTT inventory increased by 18x for the 12 months ending October 2017. SpotX defines OTT inventory as including broadcast-quality inventory from TV networks, pay-TV operators and other live, linear and VOD streaming services delivered via connected TVs, desktop and mobile. SpotX said the portion of ad budgets spent on OTT inventory increased from 8% in Oct. ’16 to 26% in Oct. ’17, with 30% expected by end of the year.

continue reading