Online video advertising platform Adap.tv has a distinct goal in mind for its new App Center: to bring buyers, sellers and vendors that serve each into a single video marketplace for brand advertisers that will eventually include TV ad inventory.
The thinking, Teg Grenager, Adap.tv co-founder and VP, told AdExchanger, is that as TV buying and selling is increasingly handled by the same groups on both sides of the purchase, “There is need is for a platform that aggregates all the best brand technologies and provides automated tools to manage them.”
In other words, as all brand advertising becomes more “real-time” oriented, a company that’s able to serve as a larger hub for buyers, sellers and, most importantly, vendors that support audience measurement, brand measurement, ad formats, audience targeting data, contextual targeting data, ad verification, ad compliance, can sit at the center of the billions of dollars that move through the web and broadcast and cable.
Adap.tv’s App Center is an extension of the San Mateo, CA.-based company’s Upfront Marketplace that was set up in partnership with media buyer Horizon Media to automate much of the buying and selling process and provide a foundation for cross-platform TV/online video ad sales.
In the App Center, Adap.tv is partnering with a long list of companies, beginning with ad tech firm Innovid, as well as BlueKai, eXelate, audience data targeting providers Datalogix, AdAdvisor by TargusInfo and others. Within 30 days Adap.tv expects to launch Audience Measurement and Ad Verification apps from major providers.
“When we started Adap.tv, we had been trying to provide all the services buyers and sellers need, but we quickly found that handling all aspects of video buys is bigger than what any one company can do on its own,” Grenager said. “Although there was an expectation that there would be a great consolidation of the Luma Slide for display ad players, the number of providers is still expanding. So it makes sense that platforms like ours open up to include those players and match them with buyers and sellers.”
The app model for display ad sales has been opening up over the past few months, as AdExchanger has noted, with companies as different as Flite, AppNexus, Adzerk, PubMatic and others increasingly forging platforms that include outside parties in an app environment. Even for companies that haven’t employed the “app” term, have nevertheless signed up dozens of partners such as MediaMath, Turn and x+1.
For Adap.tv, the notion of using programmatic buying formats as a deeper entry into the TV world makes sense. And while the App Center could serve as an offering to get into wider display sales – of which online video is a segment of – is a theoretical possibility, Grenager said that the company is sticking with video. “We feel there’s enough work to do with video, we don’t see a need to blur that image by going into other areas at this time,” he said.
By David Kaplan
