Expert plea for a walled garden exchange
Premium Australian video and audio ads should only be sold within a walled-garden exchange, according to an industry expert who has pointed to intermediary fees and subprime bundling as evils that must be fixed.
Former Dentsu investment executive and Schwartz Media CEO Ben Shepherd wrote on Linkedin that because ad platforms and aggregators were incentivised to maximise volume, their interests were not aligned with media networks.
Ben Shepherd
“[The aggregator and platform] goal is more inventory, selling more units, taking more clips. This is incongruent with networks looking to maximise yield. We have already seen this happen multiple times. Programmatic display is one area. Never does it realise more revenue or yield for the incumbent,” he wrote.
In the post, Shepherd called for the current Voz streaming product – which allows advertisers to buy across Seven, Nine, Ten and SBS – to be made exclusive and to include premium audio.
“My take is VOZ streaming needs to be the only place the inventory can be bought. It needs to be a walled garden just like the walled gardens it competes against.”
He said audio advertising should also be included because it is experiencing the same dilution through aggregation.
“There are audio roll ups that claim to be full of the top podcasts in Australia, but are mainly full of exchange based podcast inventory from overseas sources.”
Last week Nine’s digital commercial director Nick Young called for collaboration on a premium ad exchange, but stopped short of advocating for an exclusive marketplace.
“We have sacrificed long-term control for short-term revenue gain,” Young said at the Future of TV Advertising conference. “We have to join together and collaborate with products and services, join together on tech and data, but compete on content.”
Ten/Paramount ANZ boss Bev McGarvey called for greater collaboration between Australian media at the conference, and News Corp exec Pippa Leary – who runs free content at News, including ad-supported streamer Tubi – is also a strong advocate for a local premium exchange.
With signs of detente between Seven and Nine under new CEOs Jeff Howard and Matt Stanton, Shepherd indicated the biggest remaining obstacle to building a strong Australian premium exchange was short-term thinking in the current difficult market.
“The biggest blocker to this isn’t technical or logistics. It’s a relentless focus on the current reporting period.”
See also: ThinkTV in freefall.
This guy needs to get outside.
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