Ad Buys: StackAdapt, Disney, and Bell Target SMB
StackAdapt recently announced they are working with Disney and Bell Media to provide their demand-side platform for agencies to access inventory programmatically.
“Our relationship with Disney allows us to offer a unique combination of premium inventory and data-driven targeting for our advertisers,” says Greg Joseph, VP of Inventory Development, StackAdapt. In January, at CES, Disney announced their new self-serve platform for small and medium businesses (SMB). StackAdapt works in collaboration with this.
“We do a very good job partnering with Disney to solve for the things that they cannot do today. Disney has a smaller sales team that can only speak to a finite number of clients,” Joseph explains. “Our partnership has been meaningful to them because they find differentiated demand. We can complement their business; they’re speaking to the P&Gs and the Fords of the world, we can bring other clients.”
DSPs like StackAdapt provide targeted audience in the US and Canada for their customers. In Europe with GDPR they focus more on contextual targeting. The company has an omnichannel approach which will follow a viewer from livingroom or mobile device to the airport or another public location where content is streaming, which is why if you were seeing a car ad before you left home, you may see an ad for the same company once you get to the airport.
Most key publishers speak to 10–20 agencies, says Joseph, while they say they have 2,000–3,000 agencies on their platform on an any given day. “It’s very rare they run into a platform that has 2,000–3,000 agencies,” he says. “I think the easiest way to understand [the problem we are solving is], when watching ESPN content, you’d constantly see a house ad playing after seeing one commercial, which is not a great experience.”
At the same time SMB has been identified by most media companies as an untapped advertising market and enough digital pennies can add up to digital dollars. “We have some SMBs spending tens of millions, 50 million plus a year,” says Joseph. “We have others spending just a million. You have enough of these agencies spending tens of millions, and for us it's several thousand, that obviously adds up.”
Joseph says StackAdapt has more than 300 salespeople focused on SMB clients. “That helps Disney out a lot with the ability to penetrate some of these agencies. While they spend tens of millions of dollars a year, it’s not the same level as a Nike or P&G or Ford who’s spending hundreds, probably billions of dollars a year.”
Ad Business Rules
“On the TV side, the most important thing to solve for is competitive separation. If you think about NBC Peacock or Paramount with Paramount+, the key thing that matters to them is that they don’t have competitive ads playing in a stream of content,” Joseph says.
In other words, no beer company wants their ad next to their competitor’s beer ad. Not showing a competitive ad for the next two hours is very difficult for a TV programmer to manage, they need to have a wide range of diverse ad buyers to accommodate this. “Historically, a lot of TV programs have not been able to get [enough inventory to manage this],” says Joseph. “What we’ve given them now is the ability to fill in a two-minute commercial break with ads versus having to run house ads instead.”
Bell had a similar problem. “This partnership with StackAdapt marks a strategic step forward in aligning Bell Media’s premium CTV and digital inventory with the evolving needs of advertisers in Canada and beyond,” says Sabrina Segal, Director of Advanced Advertising and National Sales at Bell Media. “With a projected 350% increase in our CTV inventory by 2025, far outpacing the industry, this collaboration ensures our advertising clients can effectively leverage our expansive portfolio of assets to make a strong impact in a highly competitive digital landscape.”
Segal explains, “When we think about Bell from an inventory or TV inventory perspective, they’re one of the biggest in Canada. Our partnership means a lot, because one of the things that Bell has started to do is make inventory more available, especially programmatically. Historically, they’ve reserved a lot of their inventory for direct [insertion orders], but now opening that up to more clients allows them to get much more and [better] differentiated demand.”
FAST But Not Least
“FAST is extremely important to us,” says Joseph. “When you think about premium supply, that is finite—there’s not an unlimited amount of commercial breaks that exist. You need more players in the space that have premium supply to drive scale for buyers.”
An example he outlines is, if a buyer has $10 million budget, they need to exhaust in two weeks, you can’t do that on Disney as a standalone because Disney just does not have enough scale. “When you go to FAST players like Xumo and Pluto,” Joseph says, “what we get there is the scale needed to facilitate budgets being spent versus running into issues with not fulfilling some of the budget requirements from our agencies.”
StackAdapt has about 1,400 people globally focused on activation for buyers. Digital video content is about half of their business.
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