Why Programmatic Buying Dominates CTV

Associate Vice President of North America at Lemma, Angelina Marmorato, delves into the dominance of programmatic buying in CTV. Discover how Lemma, a leading omnichannel SSP, revolutionizes supply curation for emerging formats with a privacy-first approach and dynamic creative. Explore how Lemma empowers agencies and brands with unprecedented control over inventory lifecycle and audience targeting, ensuring relevance and precision in advertising. Show NotesConnect With: Angelina Marmorato: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to talk a little bit about programmatic buying, media, streaming, all the things with your television infrastructure, all of the programmatic things that you're interested in. Joining me today is Angelina Marmorato, who is the Associate Vice President of North America at Lemma, which specializes in emerging formats, connected TV media, helping agencies and brands streamline supply with a privacy-first approach and dynamic creative, providing unprecedented control of their media inventory. I want to move on to our second topic today, which is why programmatic media buying is dominating CTV.

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  So, Angelina, give me the word that describes where we are in the life cycle of media buying for streaming TV.

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  We're still in the early parts. If tennis were a fully mature ecosystem, I still think we're like at a three, if that makes sense.

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  Infancy toddler?

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  It's still early. There's still a lot to figure out. There's so much fragmentation that there's actually going to be some consolidation, more standards. All the above will help media buyers make them easier for their life.

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  So there's basically a turf war that's happening in my area of expertise, this whole new media podcast space, where it seems like the original OG podcasters came in and said, "Hey, let's just do host read ads. Let's bake all of the influence we get from being the content creators into the advertising methodology." And then there's, let's call them gray hair, radio folks that came in and said, "No, there's a better way to do this. We're going to start building in programmatic media and dropping radio-style ad spots with third-party voices into your audio podcasts." I am very strongly in the camp of host read advertising and the inferred credibility

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  of the host, talking about their sponsors is a better experience for the sponsor and for the listener, hopefully for the host because they're selling directly, than doing programmatic media. Now, it seems that in CTV, it's a drastically different landscape, where everything is third-party advertising, no integration into the content. Why did that happen? And is it the right thing?

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  So a funny thing about television advertising in general is actually, when it first started, that's the way that it worked. It was sponsored. "I'm going to sponsor The Johnny Carson Show tonight," kind of thing. And it wasn't until about 10 years later that they came up with this concept of spot advertising, which is where you go and fill spots, instead of it being more of a host read kind of sponsored experience. So television has made that kind of evolution as well. It just kind of happened a long time ago. So the consumer expects to see ads that way. The consumer that is watching, let's say, Amazon Prime, they expect for there to be three ads in a row in the middle, or the beginning, or end of their programming. In terms of podcasts, I do agree with you. I think it's a bit awkward to have-

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  Programmatic ads, potentially the place for them is large libraries and kind of past shows, if you will, to where there's some inventory error that can be used that's not right now, that maybe there wasn't a host read for. But obviously, I think podcasts, it feels authentic. It feels like you're close to the host. You get to know them. It's more of a relationship than I would say than just watching a TV program to where I do think there is authenticity and value in the host write ads.

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  Let's move on to a gimmick we like to call buy or sell. Are you buying or selling that programmatic media is the best way to buy media across any channel?

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  You're saying any channel. So we'll pause there because we did just have the conversation about podcasts where that may or may not be true. However, I do think for CTV, for display, for open web, programmatic is absolutely the best way to buy and sell, and it's reached kind of a mature point. And so what we're seeing now with CTV is we're in the middle of that maturity. And so there's some growing pains that we're dealing with right now.

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  I have mixed emotions here where programmatic media is something that can be very effective from a performance standpoint. Debate this with me because I understand why in television programmatic works because the consumers are trained to see ad breaks. But nobody likes the commercials unless we're watching the Super Bowl. So is integrated advertising into content more effective? I would make the argument that yes, it's just not very common in television. And so it is the standard, but not necessarily the most effective placement, in my opinion. Go back and forth here with me.

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  I guess the best example of that would be something like product placement. Somebody's drinking a Coke in a TV show that you like watching. Cool. That's a brand promotion opportunity for that specific brand.

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  Did you watch the show Billions?

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  I haven't seen it, actually.

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  Oh, God. Like the most product placement horrid show. I loved the show, but it's like, we're going to go to this special bar and I'm going to bring up a Michter's bourbon. Here's a bottle of Michter's.

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  So obvious.

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  And they had scenes related to it. It was, it was everywhere.

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  You're like, is that necessary? Is it a good storyline? Probably not. To your point, that can also feel inauthentic. But yeah. Yes, I think for TV for so long, we've been trained for ad breaks. That's currently the most effective. I think what really needs to change a lot from the advertiser perspective is how you think about making your advertisement more relevant to the user and to the content it surrounds. So there's no reason today that you can't have a sports themed ad around sports content, but we don't see that. We see the same ad 100 times from the same advertiser. And so that's kind of like my point of frustration.

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  That's inherently the problem with programmatic advertising. Even if you're buying sports, there's such a huge landscape within sports, right? I could be watching the World Series of Poker. I could be watching the NBA playoffs. I could be watching women's basketball. Those are totally different audiences. And that's why I make the argument, don't get me wrong, programmatic advertising and television, like the ship has sailed, right? And I understand why that medium dominates because we're moving from the linear television where people were using to buying channels and spots. And now you can get a little bit more granular. So the media buying is wonderful as an experience, but we just don't see a lot of product placement and integration because the medium was linear. We easily could do more integration.

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  We just don't at this point.

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  That's a frustration point for me. As a company that works on the supply side directly with publishers, there's a genuine frustration from the buy side that it's hard to even get what genre is the show that you're serving around? What is much less like what actual television show did my ad serve as part of? I think the entire industry needs to move more and more towards that because yeah, right now it's too broad. Yes, you could get closer, but not close enough to where it feels like a good experience.

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  So I want you to do something for us here. I want you to walk us behind the curtain. You work as a programmatic media buyer and art expert. There's lots of media buyers that are out there that are saying, I already know programmatic works. There's probably some in-house marketers who are saying, I'm not sure about television. It's not direct response. What's the way to make the channel work? What's the secret sauce that you're doing at Leva?

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  For anybody that's new to connected television, we always recommend a multi-creative approach. So you first want to take a creative that's more of, like I said, that kind of brand awareness messaging. You want to have like, say, a 30 second and a 15 second, and then you want to have a 15 and a 30 second for more of a call to action type of creative, like, hey, go to our website, buy this now, or there's a sale today, kind of thing. You want to kind of throw that out there, honestly, for a few weeks and see when and where it translates. You know, I'm a big fan of test and learn. So initially, a lot of times I say, hey, don't put that many targeting restrictions on your campaign. Let the campaign run and see what's actually giving you results. So that's the way that I recommend to step in. There's so much that you can learn from running a programmatic campaign that there's really no excuse not to test and learn.

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  Talk to me a little bit about that. What I'm hearing is start with a small budget and then get a bunch of data, learn and refine. What's the methodology and what are you looking at? And I can give you an example if you want to know before we said a mid-market brand, but let's say an e-commerce product focused on males in their 40s, right? I'm running a campaign selling a new version of light beer, and I want to target sports because, guys, sports beer, there's a clear correlation here.

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  Yeah, this is a good example because it brings in a factor we haven't really discussed yet, which is price point. And programmatic, that's cost per thousand typically. And so, like you're saying, a lot of sports content, or if I'm going to go buy a specific inventory on, let's say, Fox Sports, that's going to come at a much higher CPM than if I just generally target sports content. Like you said, those are two various types of quality. We could be watching World Poker Tour versus the actual football that you're trying to get in front of. But again, it's something worth testing to see if it does paying a lot more for Fox Sports really drive the actions of the consumer that I want. Like, are they really going to my website more often and buying this product? Or is my cost per acquisition or cost per site visit,

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  is it better if I'm a little bit more broad in my targeting? And so those are the kind of things you can look at.

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  We use a lot of programmatic advertising to build the Martech podcast audience. We're constantly advertising and trying to get people to understand the podcast is there. And then we're always looking at different channels to understand what's our most effective media buying source. And to me, it is conversions, but you're looking at the media source first and then getting into demographics and some of the other data points that you can. When you're buying, are you looking at things like what's the channel? What's the show? What's the broadcast? Or are you looking at like white male, mid 40s, urban market, your demographic information?

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  That depends a lot on which buying platform you're using. Some offer the level of audience insights that you mentioned and some don't. In nearly every case, you can sort through kind of by inventory. There is still a major challenge in connected TV to where, like I said, it's not very often that you get show level information. And even if you do, it can look very different from impression level reporting. So it's hard for even the reporting system itself to kind of collate that in a meaningful way. But that's a benefit of working with an SSP like us is we can help you get the level of metadata that you need and kind of help you get your reporting in a place where it's more meaningful.

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  I want to move on to our shout outs and call outs. We have a comment here from, do you know Nick Frankel?

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  Yes, I do.

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  Nick Frankel says, "That's not the fault of programmatic though," which I think is probably related to me saying, "Hey, I think that baked in advertising where you're getting host integrated is more powerful. That leads into podcast host right advertising." Also influencer campaigns. Sounds like Nick is in disagreement if I'm getting at any comments on Nick's thoughts.

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  I think he's just, yeah, advocating for programmatic and that. And I think kind of going back to your point, the world is changing. Like AI is becoming a lot bigger part of what we do. Maybe you're an AI, learn your voice. And maybe all the programmatic thing does is insert a few words to where then it is something to where you can make it a bit more programmatic.

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  In reference to streaming partners not giving enough options.

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  That is true. And to be fair, even if you buy direct from a lot of these partners, they still won't give you that information. So it's not just programmatic that that occurs

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  In general, it's my biggest concern about programmatic advertising with CCTV. There is so much bifurcation, let's call it your different channels, different apps, different supply-side vendor. It's so hard to find the secret sauce and understand what's working. I truly believe you need a really good media buyer if you're going down this road. It's really hard as a channel to implement if you're buying directly and you don't have someone who is constantly buying this type of media. It's why we work with third-party vendors to help us put our programmatic ad buys together for the Martech podcasts. I know I said that we were going to move on to shout-outs and call-outs. Give me a couple shout-outs, call-outs, people that you think are innovating in the space, anybody

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  that you want to mention, anything you want to promote.

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  I think it's cool to see that even some of the big players like Netflix and Disney are experimenting with that more linear style TV experience. So like we talked about earlier, those are traditionally like video on demand. So you log in and you get to go pick what you watch. Even what we would call most premium players are experiencing more and more with the linear experience to where you just hop right in to something that's playing. I think the reason for that, too, is there's this decision fatigue that happens a lot with streaming platforms, too, to where it just becomes overwhelming to choose from all the selections. Like sometimes people just want to turn on the TV, have something to watch in the background. And so that's, I think, another strength of fast channels and the linear experience in general. So I think that's the strength of the fast programmers

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  like Samsung, Fubo, Plex, et cetera. There's a bunch of them.

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  So for the sake of the podcast, give me the definition of supply-side buyer for everybody that's not already in programmatic, so they kind of have an understanding of the difference.

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  An SSP is a supply-side platform. That means that we are the platform kind of working on behalf of the publishers, the content creators, the media companies. So that would be A&E or AMC. And sometimes it's like Fubo as well. So basically what we do is we plug directly into those partners. We help them with yield optimization, pricing, auction dynamics, basically helping them get the most money and most value that they can from the buy side. That's kind of our day-to-day what we do, but there's more and more kind of disintermediation happening. And working directly with buyers, we've found that we can accomplish them stuff, too. That's super helpful for them.

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  For everyone that is new to programmatic advertising, an SSP is essentially the company that goes around and gobbles up the hole in the inventory. And that's the place where you are able to place your ad and then you buy through a buy-side platform. So give me an example of if Lemma is on the supply side, who are some of the providers that media buyers go to to place the buys?

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  That's a demand-side platform. So it could be, you know, hands-on keyboard in there. So it could be the Trade Desk, it could be Google's TV360 product, could be somebody like Stack Adapt. And then there's also kind of platforms that are built on top of TSP. So if you think of something like a mountain, Ryan Reynolds company.

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  Ryan Reynolds and programmatic advertising, what does that guy not do?

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  Seriously. That makes it easy for somebody to just go into the system and pick what they want and set up a campaign really easily without having to be kind of that advanced level of programmatic trader that we were talking about earlier.

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  Anything else you want to add, anything that we should talk about before we let everybody go?

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  Just shout out to Lemma. I think what we're doing is super interesting. As a supply-side partner, there are some additional advantages that we can offer to any type of programmatic buyer when it comes to sorting through inventory and connected television. So if you are a programmatic buyer, don't forget about the SSPs because we do have a unique offering when it comes to helping you go from intermediate to advanced in terms of the type of targeting you're doing.

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  We got another comment here from our good friend Sarah Condeff, formerly of Pod Sites, now I believe at Spotify. Sarah, great to see you. Thanks for joining in and watching the show. I want to wrap up here by talking about something that you said that I think is really important, decision fatigue. I see this all of the time with programmatic advertising. It's really hard to figure out the right mix, the right blend. And to me, that's why as an in-house marketer promoting different media brands that we built that are podcasts or sort of omnichannel content, when we think about programmatic advertising, I'm like, hey, I need a media buyer, I need somebody else to handle this

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  for me. And we're not doing OTT, which is even more fragmented than the media space that I work in. I very much believe- Believe that with programmatic media, it is somewhat dangerous to try to do this channel at first on your own. It's one of the spaces where I think you need an expert. You need someone who can start your campaign so you can start to learn, have them educate you. And then you decide if you get the channel working, then you can start to pull and build some of this stuff out. It's one of those where it's better to pay a professional to help you get off the ground than it is to try to experiment and figure it out yourself. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Angelina Mar Marado,

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  the Associate Vice President of North America at Lemma for joining us. If you'd like to learn more about Angelina, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit her company's website, which is lemmamedia.com, L E M M A M E D I A dot com. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you're listening to this on the live stream, by all means, feel free to comment, even though it's after the fact, we will still respond to you. We just got another comment here. Best wishes to the Martech Pod. Good to see you in August. What a wonderful comment. Thank you very much. If you're listening on the podcast and you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening, head over to martechpod.com. We have summaries of all of our episodes. You can get contact information

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  for our guests. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter and then you can even apply to be a guest speaker on the Martech Podcast. And of course, you can always reach out to us on social media. This live stream was published on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn as well. You can reach out to me there. My handle is Ben J. Schapp. You can also find our content at Martech Pod. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we publish episodes every day during the work week. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.