Advertising software company Videology said it is launching a new product that enables automated audience buying and will let advertisers and media agencies use it for free.
Scott Ferber, founder and CEO of Videology, said he is providing access to the data-enabled TV software—called DETVGo—without charge in order to accelerate the industry’s shift to advanced advertising.
“The whole concept here is, we want to remove the barriers to entry and execution of advanced advertising and programmatic TV,” Ferber said.
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TV’s status as the most powerful advertising medium has been challenged by new digital platforms. To compete, TV networks have tried to make their advertising more targeted and more accountable by using data to guide campaigns.
Data has become a buzzword in TV advertising circles with companies like NBCUniversal pushing advanced advertising products and Viacom, Fox and Turner banding together to create Open AP, a consortium that aims to standardize the target audiences needed for precision advertising.
Ferber said that while there is interest in advanced advertising, it needs to be adopted by the TV industry faster.
“What we don’t want to have happen to the traditional ecosystem of advertisers and media companies is to have the rules written by someone else,” meaning tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, each of which already dominate a sector of digital marketing and have eyes on the TV business.
DETVGo is built on top of Videology’s current advertising management platform. It lets advertisers choose specific target audiences for campaigsn with more than 60,000 available data segments. DETVGo generates plans for linear TV using real time avails and pricing. And it optimizes plans according to the clients’ key performance indicators, or KPIs. Then it can execute the campaign.
Ferber said DETVGo provides access to inventory to all major networks at scale, and provides data and technology to the supply side.
“This is an enabling capability," he said. "We’re enabling the traditional ecosystem, not disrupting it."
Videology will collect some fees if transactions are executed using DETVGo. “There’s a cost associated with some of the data and a cost associated with some of the media, and we get a piece of that,” he said.
Ferber said using DETVGo will enable advertisers the ability to experiment with advanced advertising without licensing enterprise software. Selling enterprise software is a long, time-consuming process, he adds.
“For us, the opportunity is to make the market and get it to move more rapidly,” he said. “Consider this a kind of gateway solution to getting people on board. What we’re finding on our belief is, we can make the market move quicker if we just remove as many barriers as possible to doing advanced programmatic TV.”
Videology views its software as a complement to Open AP, which opened for business this month and is similarly designed to make it easier for marketers to use the more effective and efficient forms of automated advanced advertising.
“We work with them,” said Videology's Stacy Daft, GM, enterprise business development. “Open AP is focused on utilizing a common data set across the consortium members. We’re offering similar capabilities with regard to data and optimization, but Videology has access to a full set of national networks.”
Daft said DETVGo integrates into the current inventory management systems of the networks it works with. Advertisers can configure audience segments based on Videology data sets or on whatever first-party data they want to use.
The schedules can be optimized for different KPIs, such as maximum reach or audience concentration, and standard campaign parameters and restrictions can be applied, including putting certain shows on a do not air list, she sayid.
Ferber said that DETVGo gives Videology’s current clients additional capabilities.
“But it doesn’t replace what they’re currently doing. We’re not replacing the functionality they ge," he said. "We’re extending it in this particular fashion."
Videology is a privately held company whose investors include Catalyst Investors, Comcast Ventures, NEA, Pinnacle Ventures and Valhalla Partners.
