Complete Coverage: NAB Show 2016
Las Vegas – Daniel Alegre, president of global partnerships at Google, announced the launch of DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion with initial distribution deals with Cablevision and Roku.
The news, which came during a wide-ranging keynote session at the NAB Show, is a step toward further injecting Google into the traditional TV ecosystem. Alegre also announced innovations in VR, cloud archiving and online listings, which will soon allow searchers to access streaming video directly from a listing.
The Dynamic Ad Insertion tool, Alegre said, “makes ads hyper-relevant for viewers across any screen they watch by creating individual viewer streams. Using server-side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today.”
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Google tested the tool earlier this year with broadcasts of the Rugby World Cup Finals on France’s TF1 and the Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News. Alegre noted that the tool enables programmatic buying. Due to concerns some in the industry have about controlling the programmatic ad experience, he said the programmatic element will be set up to enable close monitoring to avoid repeated ads within a pod or other glitches.
Picking up the theme of premature obituaries of TV that Disney-ABC’s Ben Sherwood explored in his Monday keynote, Alegre offered an array of stats pointing to the vitality of the medium thanks to technology. Among the most striking: TV viewership rose from 165 hours a month in 2012 to 177 hours in 2015; per Cisco, 80% of internet traffic will be video by 2018; around the world, 45 million new video-capable screens come online every month.
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The TV experience, he said, “is one that blurs the lines between online and off. TV isn’t dead, it’s being reborn.”
After his solo keynote speech, Alegre was joined onstage by Cablevision COO Kristin Dolan, who described the MVPD’s bid to become a “connections company” instead of a TV company. The embrace of the DoubleClick setup, she said, fits in with the overall innovation push at Cablevision, which just rolled out Hulu via the set-top box. “How do we allow people to not only experience when they want but also take advantage of the subscriptions they have to other things?”
She added, though, that 91% of viewing on Cablevision still happens live. “It shows that a lot of people still want to watch things as they happen, which should be good news for all the broadcasters in the room.”
