Advertising technology company Beachfront, working with Canoe Ventures, is enabling automated, real-time audience-based buying of video-on-demand inventory delivered by Canoe’s owners, Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Media.
Like streaming, traditional cable VOD usage has grown during the pandemic. Cable VOD also offers advertisers familiar brand-safe premium programming.
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“Sophisticated, digital-oriented ad buyers understand impressions are way up across the convergent TV ecosystem in 2020, but they’ve historically lacked easy pathways to accessing TV Network’s ad inventory on MVPD’s VOD platforms,” said Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro. “We’ve spent the last several years tackling the technological hurdles to make it easy for any ad buyer to access these premium video impressions, while also laying the groundwork for future addressable-enabled solutions.”
Opening the door to programmatic buyers will help cable networks’ VOD inventory compete for ad dollars against streaming video and connected TV, whose technology was developed to provide targeted and addressable ad campaigns.
“We’re constantly seeking innovative ways to help complement our TV networks’ customers’ ad sales teams with new solutions to monetize the long-tail of their premium VOD inventory,” said Canoe CRO Ed Knudson. “Unlocking VOD inventory to a new class of ad buyers helps ensure networks get the most value out of their programming, which is particularly helpful at a time when on-demand viewing is on the rise.”
Agencies, brands and demand-side platforms that utilize Beachfront can purchase VOD inventory from networks that can reach as many as 38 million VOD households.
“Traditional TV inventory is still a big piece of the pie that many modern digital-oriented ad buyers don’t have access to,” said Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive, an enterprise software platform building tools to help buyers purchase digital TV inventory. “We’re excited to leverage our relationship with Beachfront to offer this unique set-top box VOD inventory to our ad buying partners.”
