Games On! Programmatic Ads Compete for Eyeballs at the Olympics
FreeWheel is ready to support a streaming marathon for this summer’s Paris Olympics, enabling programmatic buying for the first time for targeted ad-serving. There are several points of interest here:
- more content
- more ways to view this content
- more available ad inventory
- better targeting on these ads
- and finally, the ability to buy ads programmatically.
More Advertising Inventory
From the traditional ancient Greek stadion race into the stadium with the torch, all the way until final closing ceremonies, there’s now an extensive amount of content to be monetized. This includes not only live and VOD, but even multiple camera feeds. “It's getting easier for you to access and engage with the Olympics the way you want to,” says David Dworin, CPO FreeWheel. “We’ve seen this gradual change, over the past few Olympics, where more and more content is available through different services.”
Previous advertising opportunities were constrained by the number of networks and even broadcast times (or timezones), says Dworin. “Now, so much is available; live, digitally, through platforms like Peacock, or other streaming services and through both VOD and live linear.”
“When you’re freed from the linear feed, you can structure ad breaks in the way that makes sense for that game or competition,” he says. “With digital, you get flexibility. If an event is unexpectedly popular—whether because it’s new or because there's a great story surrounding it—there are many more impressions and you can choose how you allocate them out.”
“The Olympics is expected to be a record-breaking event, with 7,000 hours of content over two weeks being made available to U.S. audiences,” said James Rooke, President, Comcast Advertising. “This is a new way for advertisers to reach engaged fans and viewers of the Games, ultimately putting their brand alongside a must-watch moment in history.”
NBCUniversal and Comcast Advertising created the opportunity for brands to be promoted alongside NBC’s coverage of Olympic Games Paris 2024. It’s the first time brands can be featured through the user interfaces on Xfinity X1, Xfinity’s Xumo Stream Box, and Xfinity Flex (home screen and channel guide).
Go, Programmatic!
“Most programmers, understandably, took a walk, jog, run approach” towards programmatic, says Mark McKee, General Manager, FreeWheel. “Now, with advanced ad technologies, proven business models, and unprecedented scale of streaming audiences, we’re at a new stage in the programmatic evolution. There are still different approaches for different events, but publishers interested in opening their premier inventory to automated trading can do so.”
According to FreeWheel research, US programmatic buying reached 87% on connected TVs, while in Europe programmatic leans towards mobile at 60%. Live viewing times are 22% longer than VOD, and live is 17% more likely to be viewed by multiple people in a household. More than half of marketers say advertising during live events is “very important” or “extremely important.”
“At FreeWheel we do a couple of things: We power ad decisioning and all of the dynamically inserted parts of the Olympics,” says Dworin. “We help [NBC and worldwide partners] run the monetization of that inventory through our buying platform and we make it easier for advertisers to get access to that inventory.”
“We are seeing programmatic happening within the Olympics this year, which is really exciting because it’s going to open it up to more advertisers,” he says. Last month, FreeWheel announced a new set of tools to better enable programmatic transactions of live events including the Olympics. Some new features include the following:
- Expedited programmatic activation via creative pre-approvals and transcoding to minimize latency
- Increased inventory opportunities for more advertisers
- Anticipation of real-time surges in live viewership to properly scale server capacity
- Adjustment of campaign pacing to account for high viewership to maintain seamless ad experience
“As [viewing] moves into digital, more and more advertisers can take part because you've got room... You can allow hundreds or thousands more advertisers to participate,” says Dworin. “We’re seeing more [activity] through direct relationships with the broadcasters or through programmatic pipes that allow them to bid on the inventory in the audiences that are most relevant for them.”
The Publisher Problem
“If there are 20 million people watching—this is a hypothetical—we will run 20 million ad decisions for that next break in a few seconds,” says Dworin. “For every single person watching the Olympics, for every single ad that they see, we are running a separate ad decision.”
For live events with millions of concurrent viewers, Dworin explains, this approach “creates three really big problems for publishers that make them hesitant to use dynamic ads and advanced advertising.”
First, there’s the spend. “Millions of dollars are gone if you make a mistake, so it'’ very high risk,” he says. “You can’t have your servers time out. That creates a bad experience for the user, and you lose the money.”
He goes on to say that FreeWheel has programmatic controls to prevent a $10,000 budget from becoming “a $20,000 bill.” (Shouldn’t that be table stakes?)
Next up is repelling fraud. Normally, millions of simultaneous requests raise red flags about fraud. Dworin says Freewheel has worked with their partners to solve for this.
Finally, Dworin says Freewheel has resolved the problem every consumer complains about: frequency capping, which keeps viewers from seeing the same ads again and again. “We’ve put in place the ability to frequency cap against a brand, within and across publishers. So even if that same brand is buying some through direct sales—maybe they have a sponsorship, but they also are doing some programmatically—we can make sure that a viewer doesn’t see the same ads back to back, even coming in through different channels,” says Dworin.
The Ad Experience
As for how Freewheel will handle ad targeting for Olympics content, Dworin explains, “It uses whatever targeting is available in that medium, whether it’s targeted based on audience or targeted based on the content. We know something about the type of people who view this content generally, or we know something about the individual who is viewing this content. We’re seeing more and more the combination of context, audience and targeting.”
In other words, they’re targeting on look-a-like audiences, or personal anonymous data or on content context. “What we are seeing generally across the industry, not specific to the Olympics, is the growth in audience-based targeting.”
And what about traditional 15s and 30s? Are they still the dominant format?
“I think of the 15- and 30-second spots as the shipping containers of the industry,” says Dworin. Using that common format means it’s going to work everywhere, without any special technology, and it will just fit in everything from a broadcast feed into a web video player. “That standardization helps us to move them around the world, but you can put whatever you want in it, and that's where all of the innovation comes from.
“You can take that 15 or 30 and you can add interactivity to it through a QR code that allows you to go to a second screen,” he continues. “Or you can help to customize it and you might have different 30-second spots for people in different parts of the country, or you might try out different messages on them.”
Go Team
NBCUniversal reported in their trials that they saw a double-digit increase in off the floor pricing for Olympics inventory, speaking to the competition to advertise on this content. Additionally, nearly every advertiser signed via programmatic for the trials was new to the Olympics.
So, to summarize, streaming the 2024 Paris Olympics means more content, more access, more ad targeting, and more programmatic buying. The new programmatic capabilities FreeWheel is promoting promise to do the following:
- Increase reliability and confidence that ads will run as planned
- Enhance fill rates and monetization for publishers
- Provide greater access for new advertisers who leverage programmatic as a primary buying strategy
- Enable a more personalized ad experience for viewers with fewer repetitive ads.
When the Olympics wraps, we can see if FreeWheel wins gold for their new programmatic offerings.
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