Looking to bring the technology that is making national TV commercials more targeted, Viamedia will introduce two new products to take advantage of advanced television technology.
The company — which manages ad sales for more than 65 cable operators and telecommunications service providers, including ones attending The Independent Show this week — has unveiled placeLocal, a simple targeting and advertising platform that enables Viamedia sales executives to automatically generate TV ad campaigns based on budget, geography and target audience definitions.
A second product, SpotHop, is designed to help allow the company to manage and automate impression based selling on Google Fiber systems for Viamedia account executives. Viamedia sells local TV advertising on behalf of Google Fiber.
“The common denominator is that we have developed friendly user interfaces for the selling of both linear and impression-based local cable-TV advertising, a significant step,” Viamedia president and CEO Mark Lieberman said.
With placeLocal, “our local AEs can, in just seconds, help deliver an entire media plan and allow the advertiser to react and adjust the plan with our team in one conversation,” Lieberman said.
Though it employs automation, the system is not a programmatic solution, because the client and Viamedia sales executives still get together to discuss a campaign’s goals.
SpotHop helps Viamedia account executives deliver audience-based TV campaigns, offering clients the attributes of a digital media campaign.
Google is a force in ad sales, and has made attempts at getting into the TV advertising technology business but Google Fiber does not sell its own ads and has hired Viamedia to handle those chores.
While SpotHop is now being used for Google Fiber systems, “as we continue to roll out other digital television solutions, we’ll have the ability to roll them out even faster on behalf of our MVPD partners,” Lieberman said.
Viamedia is not just investing in technology, he added:
“We’re training the local sellers on how to use these more advanced features as well as the local advertisers,” he said. “Much of the investment has been at the national level for national advertisers for either national broadcast or national cable. And what we’re doing is really accelerating this at the local level.”
The new ad platforms were developed in-house by Viamedia.
“We don’t currently have any intention of licensing this platform out,” Lieberman said. “It really is just to be able to increase the amount of revenues that we can produce on behalf of our MVPDs, whose local ad sales we run.”
