As a busy fall sports season kicks off with the NFL’s opening weekend, two key questions are growing increasingly important for TV advertisers: What role will programmatic play across the major sports leagues? And how will they maximize the impact of their programmatic transactions?
With NBCU riding the success of last year’s first programmatic Olympics to a new NBA deal, Disney making its vast live sports inventory available for programmatic buying, and the NFL and others adding more streaming games and events, it’s clear that the apex of programmatic advertising in live sports is coming into focus.
Programmatic empowers buyers to precisely target hard-to-reach viewers and measure their behavioral outcomes. Live sports adds in TV’s largest and most engaged audiences. Combine them, and you have what NBCU’s Alison Levin calls “the ultimate ad product.”
Regardless of how much live sports inventory is ultimately sold programmatically this season, marketers can drive results now and prepare for a programmatic future by implementing best practices that set them up for long-term success.
Programmatic TV requires great tech and a streamlined supply path
The “live” aspect of live sports puts stress on programmatic technology, which requires both sides of the transaction to have a robust, streamlined tech stack.
After that whistle blows, you have a two-minute window to buy and sell high-value media. In this environment, every millisecond counts when it comes to the data flowing through your programmatic pipes. No one is willing to see these premium ad slots go unfulfilled due to technical hiccups.
That’s why you need a robust programmatic tech stack and the most direct paths to your trading partners as possible — unnecessary complexity in your workflow and supply chain will cost you in missed opportunities. To this end, our partners at Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk have each innovated notably this year.
Amazon recently launched Complete TV – an AI-powered solution within the DSP that automates TV campaign management across linear and streaming. As Amazon’s Kelly MacLean put it, “Advertisers deserve easier ways to plan and manage their streaming TV spend.” It’s that proverbial “Easy Button.” Moreover, integrations with Roku and Disney’s DRAX allow Amazon DSP buyers to target and engage over 80% of US TV households via premium supply like Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu. No wonder Amazon Ads recently closed another great upfront.
Meanwhile, The Trade Desk has built a live sports–friendly supply path to improve transparency and reduce all those excess hops that cost you game-breaking milliseconds. Describing the transformative impact of OpenPath’s adoption, TTD's Jeff Green said publicly, “As a result, advertisers are getting clearer line-of-sight into exactly what they are buying. And it also provides publishers with a much clearer view of what advertisers are willing to pay.” Jeff’s vision reminds me a lot of how, decades ago, the Bloomberg Terminal suddenly created transparency for bond prices, crushing the inefficiency of wide bid-ask spreads and sparking a golden era of abundance for credit markets.
Creative quality counts for buyers, and sellers need yield management tools.
Live sports are a premium advertising environment, so buyers and sellers must maintain a very high bar of quality and performance.
For buyers, this means putting your best creative foot forward. Just because you can target precision audiences in a highly engaging environment doesn’t erase the need for great creative.
For sellers, it means implementing a sophisticated yield management system that ensures your most valuable inventory returns satisfactory results. You paid a huge premium for those live sports rights — the last thing you want is to sell those fleeting ad breaks for less than what you’d get traditionally.
Programmatic is all about fair value — expected outcomes data is how you find it
The final piece of the puzzle? Having the right data to evaluate your media transactions.
The beauty of programmatic is that it helps buyers and sellers maximize the efficacy and efficiency of their convergent TV media transactions. But the whole thing falls apart when you don’t know the expected value that an impression should drive.
Some live sports inventory might carry a high CPM, but advertisers will still come out ahead if it’s extremely likely to drive purchase consideration among their target viewers. Other inventory might appear to have a tantalizingly affordable price tag — reach at the lowest CPM is how we’ve been doing business for some time — but it’s less impressive when you take a look at the expected outcomes.
Whether you’re buying impressions or investing in media rights, the programmatic marketplace enables you to get what you pay for. But it’s expected outcomes data that helps you understand what you should be willing to pay for what you’re actually getting.