One of the complications of digital video and TV convergence is the arduous process of marrying the right creative with the right medium.
Extreme Reach on Monday rolled out a platform promising advertisers up to a 50% reduction in that tedious workflow by enabling them to traffic creative, secure rights and measure the effects of their video and television campaigns from one spot.
The traditional process, when an advertiser wants to digitize a television ad, involves finding the agency that produced the commercial, which can be a pain, said John Roland, CEO of Extreme Reach. “And you may have 30 versions of the same commercial.”
It gets worse. Before uploading a commercial to a digital property, one must confirm talent rights have been paid, then enter an even lengthier transcoding process. Extreme Reach claims it bypasses all of these steps via direct partnerships with post houses, the boutique production houses agencies rely on to tighten up 30-second spots and add voiceovers and music to commercials.
“There are 3,000 post houses nationwide and every one is easily connected to Extreme Reach,” Roland said. “We ingest 5,000 commercials every single day, so we have this massive volume that’s about an 85% market share in the TV business.” On the TV side, Extreme Reach works with 7,000 local and national stations, cable MSOs and networks like NBC and ESPN.
Extreme Reach’s cloud platform pipes in creative from the post house or content/rightsholder and automatically preps that for delivery or ad serves. After the campaign runs, the platform allows you to see where the commercial is airing both on television and digitally. From there, the marketer’s able to drill down into engagement, viewability, and run safety scores for optimal placement.
Since its incorporation in 2008, Roland said the company strategically planned for the future disruption of a $70 billion market. It spent nearly half a billion on DG’s (now Sizmek’s) TV ads business and acquired digital video measurement and brand safety firm BrandAds. Roland said he feels Extreme Reach is in a position now to enable advertisers to affect campaigns across any screen from one portal.
“If you have an ad network or exchange, you’re aggregating inventory and trying to get the best possible price for that inventory and the only time the creative gets involved is at that last minute and they go get whatever that TV commercial was, and run that,” Roland said. “That’s all based on inventory and pricing. There’s nothing to do with creative. But now you can bring the creative quality of TV to enhance the ROI of the digital space.”
