Austrian broadcasters are claiming a world first by using confirmed rather than forecast audiences to decide which ad campaigns should appear in broadcast linear TV commercial breaks. The ad breaks can be planned in real-time, harnessing second-by-second viewing data from HbbTV devices. This will result in more efficient matching of advertiser targets to actual audiences. The innovation is seen as a way to make classic broadcast TV more competitive versus global digital ad tech sales houses.
The broadcasters involved are all members of AGTT, the TELETEST Working Group that is helping to bring to market a new TV audience measurement system in Austria, called Teletest 2.0. They include ORF, Goldbach, ATV and ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4, among others.
Teletest 2.0 is a globally significant innovation itself, using the existing Teletest representative audience panel as training data to create a new 100,000-household ‘synthetic’ representative panel from homes with HbbTV devices, thanks to lookalike modelling. This new and expanded panel will use second-by-second return path data (RPD) from the HbbTV devices to provide live audience measurement.
Teletest 2.0 goes live in September and the technology for real-time ad break planning will be deployed at broadcasters from September 1. A joint venture company called TV-Insight was formed in 2021 between AGTT and Red Bull to oversee the real-time measurement of linear TV, and is another stakeholder in this initiative.
The live audience measurement data feeds into what the Austrian TV industry is calling TV-LOAD. The second component of TV-LOAD (alongside the Teletest 2.0 data input) is Media Manager – a technology from Virtual Minds that provides inventory and yield management, ad decisioning and ad break optimization. Virtual Minds is the ProSiebenSat.1 Media adtech subsidiary.
Media Manager already existed and is one of the solutions included in the ‘Adtech Made in Europe’ alliance between ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL. Media Manager is being used in Germany with forecast audience data (albeit forecasts that are updated in real-time). The key innovation in Austria is swapping real-time forecast updates for real-time audience confirmations, thanks to Teletest 2.0.
With traditional forecasting, an advertiser might expect a high youth audience in a particular programme, and a broadcaster could plan an ad break to include advertisers looking for a generally younger audience. But if the real-time HbbTV data from Teletest 2.0 shows that the audience is skewing older than expected, the ad break can be replanned so the ads better match the older audience.
Media Manager takes a holistic view of all the ad campaigns, their target audiences, reach goals and advertising rates, and makes decisions on whether, for example, ads planned for tomorrow should be brought forward to today to match the real audience opportunity (in this example, confirmed as being an older audience). The advertisers who wanted a younger audience will benefit when real audiences skew younger than expected, and so on.
This solution, harnessing Media Manager and Teletest 2.0 data within the TV-LOAD broadcaster offering, should not be confused with programmatic trading. For this Austrian broadcast TV deployment, all the ads are sold in advance. The real-time audiences are not being offered to advertisers in real-time, programmatically. It is the planning and curation of the ad break that is being conducted in real-time.
This is not addressable advertising for broadcast linear TV, either. The originally scheduled ads (based on the original forecasts) are being replaced in a kind of server-side ad insertion scenario, and individual ads can be replaced in a break, as well as entire ad breaks. However, all ads will be seen by everyone currently watching the programme. The targeting efficiency is achieved not by audience suppression but by inserting ads into shows that are confirmed (not just expected) to index highly against an audience target.
TV-LOAD, using Media Manager, is a solution for one-to-many advertising via classic, broadcast linear TV. The replanned ad breaks are inserted into the programme stream either during playout or immediately after playout, but before distribution, and the ad break is therefore embedded in the broadcast signal, which may then go over DTT, satellite, cable or IPTV. Devices receive the ads already in the programme.
Yet, without being programmatic or addressable, TV-LOAD does bring automated, data-driven, real-time capabilities to linear broadcast TV that have not been seen before. And the ads are sold based on a CPM model.
The workflow for TV-LOAD (harnessing Media Manager and Teletest 2.0) is:
- The broadcast playout system announces the next ad break to TV-Insight.
- TV-Insight pulls the real-time TV currency out of the Teletest 2.0 synthetic panel.
- TV-Insight sends an ad break planning request to Media Manager, merged with live data.
- Media Manager returns a recommendation for ad break composition.
- Media Manager orchestrates the ad break curation in broadcast playout.
- TV-Insight delivers real-time reconciliation of the break.
- Media Manager updates campaigns based on reconciliation.
This whole process takes less than five seconds but could be 30-seconds in a worst-case scenario, so the ad break replanning happens in the minute before the arrival of the ad break.
Austrian media agencies were fully involved in the development of Teletest 2.0 and it is expected they will benefit from more efficient advertising. It is hoped that broadcasters will increase revenues in the long-term, whether by growing yield or market share. TV-LOAD could be a major benefit to live linear TV.
“This alliance is a milestone for making advertising in linear TV even more effective and bringing the advantages of digital campaign management to the big screen,” declares Thomas Gruber (of ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4), Chairman of the TELETEST working group. “It is a pioneering achievement. It has potential to change the TV advertising market on a long-term basis.”
Tom Peruzzi, CTO of Virtual Minds, calls it a transformation of classic one-to-many advertising to digital logic and systematic principles. Sebastian Hinterstoisser, CEO at TV-Insight (main photo) says, “Our main aim was to enable local TV channels to hold their own in the increasingly challenging media market.”
Virtual Minds has a portfolio of adtech that includes an enterprise marketing platform, a data management platform, ad serving, an omnichannel DSP and an omnichannel SSP. The company has grown up in the DACH region but is looking to expand around Europe, with recent hires for France and the UK to sell the idea to broadcasters in those markets.
The roadmap for Media Manager envisions a holistic TV advertising engine that can converge planning, delivery, measurement and invoicing for all video inventory, and cover one-to-many (as seen in Austria) and one-to-one targeting (for addressable TV, connected TV and other online video). This product already integrates seamlessly into existing media tech systems.
Main photo shows Sebastian Hinterstoisser, CEO, TV-Insight.
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