Fifteen or 20 years ago, a TV advertising sale was simply that: the sale of advertising units from a seller to an agency or advertiser. The deal was done, handshakes were made, spreadsheets were completed, and invoices were sent. If it didn’t run to the advertiser’s liking, calls were made and makegoods were provided.
Of course, that’s nothing like it is today, when the amount of work that happens behind the scenes of an ad sale is enough to make your head spin.
What’s the solution to make this less mysterious -- more turnkey, more efficient, quicker -- while still maintaining accuracy? Good talent helps. Differentiated product and technology helps too (how many times have you heard the term “must buy”?).
But, the work between the ad sale and the invoice is really where the answer lies. This area is what I like to call “the engine room.” As the name suggests, it’s the human and automated mechanisms that make advertising happen. It’s the pricing, the forecasting, the creative, the fulfillment, the targeting, the pacing adjustments, and the data, the data, the data. And it’s ready for an upgrade.
How to Make the Engine Room Run Smoothly
An engine room must be capable of meeting the needs of advertising today and beyond. The reality is that many sellers need an engine room upgrade because the old one was built for a past era. Today, it is increasingly responsible for things that didn’t even exist fully in the advertising lexicon 15 years ago: first-party data, streaming services, inventory fraud, addressability, dynamic ad decisioning, player profiles, programmatic and viewability, just to name a few.
Updating the engine room is no easy feat, but if you’re a buyer of media (an agency or an advertiser), it’s critical to ensure you’re having the right conversations with your supply partners about how they’re putting the focus and investment into building out an engine room that supports not just today, but tomorrow. After all, it’s no longer about simply flipping a switch the day your campaign goes live; there should be a fully integrated team with expertise in data, yield, pricing, targeting, forecasting, optimization, and cross-screen attribution.
Now, that’s a lot to upgrade and in a world where traditional TV and digital continue to converge. Building the engine room of the future will be an evolution, but one that has to be very deliberate. This means prioritizing in a way that delivers incremental value today, while being disciplined about investing in the new building blocks that will unlock future value for advertisers. TV will not be digital, and digital will not be TV; we need to bring together the best of both.
A Peek into the Engine Room
The engine room used to work in the shadows of advertising, regarded as “back office” or “behind the scenes.” But as TV advertising has spread out across endpoints, its complexity has increased. This has created the need for both the buy side and sell side to increase transparency on the engine room to build trust and confidence for advertiser success and outcomes.
By having more open conversations about the complexities under the hood, the buy-side and sell-side can work together to optimize against campaign goals…together. Publishers that do this will build that trust and confidence against the backdrop of increased complexity, in particular as linear and streaming supply is increasingly managed as a single pool, as advertising becomes more audience-based and more addressable, and as brand and performance marketing continue to work together in more intelligent ways with increased volume executed through programmatic pipes.
Advertisers should also understand what elements of the advertising process will ultimately be self-service options, whether that be the ability to take action themselves or get visibility into what’s happening in the engine room. This is particularly important as use of first-party data becomes more prevalent, third-party cookies begin to gradually phase out, and advertisers and publishers are more interested in privacy safe data enablement. More exposure to how the engine room works should build trust and put advertisers at ease by providing insight into what audiences advertisers are reaching, and what screens their campaigns are running on. It also gives them the ability to tweak campaigns mid-flight if it isn’t going to plan – an advantage of automated buying.
The Path to Clarity
As the engine rooms of sellers across around the globe adapt to the changing needs of today’s complex advertising ecosystem, advertisers will benefit from having a sense of what is happening there and working together with suppliers on making it run more smoothly to achieve shared goals. By paying attention to the once-hidden engine room, the industry can build seamless and less time-consuming processes, even as data and automation continue to grow in importance. Patience will be important because the engine rooms won’t change overnight. In the meantime, be sure you know what’s happening in the engine rooms, whether you’re a buyer or a seller. This is the path to clarity. ■
