Programmatic advertising is a small but growing piece of the TV ad pie. And it’s only going to get bigger.
“It’s not here today and gone tomorrow; it’s here for good,” David Kline, the new president and COO of ad tech company Visible World, told Mutichannel News in an interview. “There’s not an advertiser out there that doesn’t want to be able to target their audience more finitely.”
Given that as the set-up, it’s little surprise that expanding Visible World’s programmatic business is a top priority for Kline, a former Cablevision Systems and Ensequence exec who came on board soon after Comcast acquired Visible World.
But he’s pretty familiar with the company, as he helped to put together Visible World’s programmatic ad arm, AudienceXpress, as a consultant, and has been serving as a company director.
Kline said he’s now tasked with launching more products and getting Visible World’s programmatic business “super-charged, as we get more distributor partner and more advertiser partners.”
AudienceXpress, Kline said, is already working with several MVPDs, including Charter Communications, Comcast, Cablevision Systems and Cox Communications, and has a distribution footprint of about 75 million homes.
These days, the Visible World unit is buying inventory from them and using its programmatic platform to make more than they can selling ads locally, and “making those 30-second spots work harder.”
Kline acknowledges that programmatic represents a small piece of the broader landscape but it’s expanding rapidly. “We think we can be on the forefront of that growth,” he said.
As for next steps, the company is also developing software that will enable MVPDs, networks and local broadcasters sell their own inventory on a programmatic basis.
