Smart Screen

NEW YORK — The OpenAP platform developed by Fox Networks Group, Turner and Viacom has already yielded promising initial results after only a few months, according to executives from those three companies.

OpenAP launched in late September – “two days early” – and “close to 800 agency accounts have been set up to date” for the platform, Gabe Bevilacqua, SVP of product management, advanced advertising at Viacom, said at the Advanced Advertising Summit March 26. “We’re seeing really strong adoption from partners” so far, he said.

With OpenAP, “we feel we have an opportunity to craft a little bit of a voice in how the future could look and not just leave it up to chance,” Noah Levine, SVP of advertising data and technology solutions at Fox Networks Group, explained. He added: “As the sellers, we happen to be in the best position to actually know who advertiser A wants to target and advertiser B and C and D all the way down to Z. And only if we have some kind of idea of what their targets are can we find that optimal allocation of how to spread out our individual pieces of inventory to best satisfy those worlds. And so that’s a fundamental thing of what we’re trying to do.”

What “made it easy for us to form” the OpenAP consortium and “hopefully to grow” it is that “we recognize that we’re media companies, and what we do best is we tell stories, we deliver news, we deliver engaging experiences, and we attract audiences,” Levine went on to say. He added: “We’re not at our core tech giants. We’re not technology companies.” So, the three companies agreed there was “an opportunity to work together to better solve the technology and data challenges, so that we can compete against real big tech companies,” he said.

This is about “the data being highly democratized across the buying ecosystem,” Dan Aversano, SVP of ad innovation and programmatic solutions at Turner, told the summit. He added: “We want to enable the agency that just spent $200 million building and touting the proprietary data stack that they built … to be able to activate them in a consistent way across premium video.”

In announcing the creation of OpenAP in March 2017, the companies described it as the TV industry’s “first open platform for cross-publisher audience targeting and independent measurement.” In an open letter that was released to the public at the time by the companies, they said: “The evolution of television has brought new advances in audience targeting across premium publishers, which is enabling advertisers and agencies to drive more efficiency and more effectiveness with their TV budgets. 

“While demand for audience targeting has grown significantly, adoption has been limited by the fact that audience buying is not as transparent, as consistent and as easy as traditional guarantees. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. That changes today.” Noting that the platform was operated by a “leading independent auditor,” the companies said OpenAP would “deliver cross-publisher targeting and independent measurement for advanced audiences.”

That meant “consistently defined audience targets can be activated across any OpenAP member publisher,” and it also meant there would be “truly independent measurement and reporting by design, not just reactive third-party verification,” the companies said. The open platform supports “industry-standard measurement sources and data, not just proprietary, walled-garden, self-governed reporting,” they also noted.

The companies also promised that OpenAP would be a “single platform that agencies and advertisers can integrate with their own planning systems to activate advanced audience targeting and independent measurement within premium content.”

That premium content was already reaching 93% of all TV audiences at the time of the announcement, and the companies said at the time that they hoped OpenAP “will expand if additional publishers join OpenAP in the future,” adding the consortium was “a necessity to move our industry forward.”

The Fox, Turner and Viacom executives declined, during their March 26 panel session at the Advanced Advertising Summit, to say if they were close to signing on additional publishers for OpenAP.

Saying “we love the idea of what they’re doing” with OpenAP because it’s helping to move the industry away from legacy ad measurement systems, Mike Rosen, EVP of portfolio and strategy at Comcast’s NBC Universal division, told the 2017 Advanced Advertising Summit that his company was “offered the opportunity to be a part of OpenAP.” But “we already have scale as NBC Universal,” he said, noting his company had “90 percent plus of virtually every customer target segment that’s out there.”