TubeMogul: A UK advertisers guide to programmatic TV

To brand marketers, TV is the original brand-building medium — the largest screen in the house that rightly commands the lion’s share of their ad pounds and pence.

TV ad buying is also one of the last frontiers largely untouched by buying automation – where billions of pounds are spent largely based on methods that have changed little over the past 30 years and targeting that is limited to age, gender and socio-economic demographic classifications. But that is starting to change.

This introductory guide is designed to serve as a roadmap for marketers on TV’s past, present and future.

At the outset, we should define what ‘programmatic TV’ means. In eMarketer’s whitepaper on the subject, programmatic TV is defined as ‘an automated, technology-driven method of buying and delivering linear TV ads.’ This guide takes a broader definition by including video on demand (VOD) and addressable TV.

Of course, to consumers, all of these distinctions are nonsense – we live in a world where viewers move seamlessly between devices and platforms. The primary goal for any advertiser is to mimic this behaviour in their ad buying, moving toward a centralised approach that is agnostic about how or where an ad gets watched.