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Originally founded as a premium video SSP in 2005, Telaria styles itself as ‘the complete software platform to manage premium video advertising’. Headquartered in New York and operating out of 13 offices worldwide, WNIP caught up with Bill Swanson, Telaria’s VP EMEA, to find out more…
Can you give us more background about Telaria?
We are an integrated and complete software platform that optimises ad yield for leading video and OTT publishers, enabling the most effective advertising experiences across desktop, mobile and OTT.
We are listed on the NYSE. In August 2019 our latest earnings results show that revenue grew 47% year on year to $18.2 million in Q2 2019, with our CTV revenue increasing 133% to $7.1 million, which is 39% of the total revenue.
What business problem is your company addressing?
In all the conversations we have with publishers, they tell us they want fewer but better, and more transparent, tools to be able to monetise and manage their video inventory. If you look at the current ad tech landscape, it’s hard to find a streamlined transparent management platform that combines the controls and functionality of an ad server built for connected TV (CTV) with the data and analytics to help publishers optimise their monetisation and user experience.
So, in many ways we are simply responding to an increasingly vocalised market need and using our learnings from the desktop and mobile world as it has been ‘programmatised’, and finally introducing technological ‘best practice.’
The recent IPA Bellwether Report for Q2 2019, for example, showed growth in main media advertising – including TV, mobile, and the internet – with spend in this area the strongest it’s been for two years. However, the Digital Publishers Revenue Index (DPRI), a quarterly report on UK publishing from the Association for Online Publishing (AOP) and Deloitte, indicated that digital publisher revenues decreased by 1.2% on a 12-month rolling basis to March 2019. Proportionally, the largest drop in revenue came from video, which fell by 10%.
These two reports highlight the biggest immediate issue our industry faces; the gap between strong growth and spend, but weak revenues. This is something Telaria’s platform can help with, by boosting the monetisation and value of publishers’ video content.
What is your core product addressing this problem?
We understand that global publishers require total command of their business and our solution empowers them to have this control, based on up-to-date, precise knowledge. As a SaaS operation, the Telaria Video Management Platform (VMP) offers the most robust suite of analytics, automated unbiased decisioning, and integrated programmatic and direct monetisation tools for the best revenue outcomes.
What this means in practical terms for the publisher is unrivalled quick responses when trouble-shooting, precise reporting that can be backdated to the second, and real-time identification of factors that could be limiting revenue growth throughout the day. These can range from technical errors to recommended adjustments to the floor price, for example, where you can reduce your floor price to actually yield better results. Ops teams can make real-time decisions throughout the day based on live data which helps them optimize the value of their inventory.
Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?
Our partnership with Netmums in the UK is a great example of how Telaria guided a publisher through the video advertising landscape and developed its relationship with demand partners, to bring better-targeted content to its users and in return improve monetisation.
Netmums is the UK’s largest parenting website, attracting 30 million monthly page views and a highly engaged community; it boasts 2.7 million people who actively post on the forum and 132 million posts and engagements on Facebook annually. Having seen video’s rapid growth, Netmums’ programmatic team realised their need for a technology partner who could share their deep video expertise and guide them through the opportunities available.
They felt that Telaria offered these skills and our partnership was established to successfully maximise the use and revenue from video advertising. As its first video SSP partner, Telaria’s VMP gave Netmums better control over monetisation through real-time reporting and troubleshooting capabilities. In addition, the partnership with Telaria helped the publisher to set up its first Automated Guaranteed campaign. The results of this were immediately clear, with Netmums seeing a 275% increase in eCPMs.
Pricing?
We work with each publisher to determine their needs and structure a contract that is mutually agreeable.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
We often see publishers working with technology platforms that have been built for the desktop and mobile experience and are not really capable of the complex needs of both video and CTV. Yet they’re still trying to take advantage of this revenue opportunity with their existing client base, even though their technology has not been built to deal with this media and medium.
The prevalence of fragmented tech stacks means the publishers who are working with other providers don’t always receive granular and robust reporting to help them pinpoint what’s happening on their platforms. Moreover, many of their partners often have them stuck in short-term strategies that rely on header bidding and first-price auctions. Unlike our VMP, these platforms can’t deliver real-time diagnostics to give publishers the facts and agility to respond to immediate issues affecting demand and revenue.
How you do view the future?
Over the last six months we have ramped up our efforts to realise our vision of an end-to-end video management solution. Built from the ground up, it solves the most complex problems that exist today in video and CTV ad serving. This gives us a huge advantage over others who have legacy technology or even those that are trying to bolt new tech onto old. We expect the process of making our platform better to continue as we iterate new functionality and stay ahead of industry trends.
As a company we have immense global knowledge and we understand how individual markets are developing. For example, in the UK we’re aware of a reluctance from buyers to invest in in-app inventory, when in fact high mobile penetration rates and app usage here means it has huge growth potential. We’re perfectly positioned to advise on the current industry – and how to increase value from this – while also looking at global trends and helping publishers plan for future developments to continue maximising monetisation.
Thank you.
Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
