Commentary

Video Dominates Talk At AOL's Programmatic Upfront

Video was the name of the game at last night’s Programmatic Upfront event hosted by AOL, which I guess should be expected from an event with the word “Upfront” in it. But it wasn’t just digital video: AOL was also plugging linear TV.

In addition to launching a data management platform (DMP), AOL also unveiled some TV ad-targeting tools and expanded its partnership with Havas’ trading desk, Affiperf, to include the programmatic buying of linear television.

TV and video wasn’t simply the event's favorite topic of conversation, but video also dominated the actual presentation of the event. And by that I mean that each speaker, it seemed, had a video to play for the audience.

Whether it was video showing examples of creative -- which is what Amy Peet, senior digital marketing manager at Chrysler, showed the audience -- or a video of a Rube Goldberg machine, depicting a simple task being completed in the most complex of ways -- which is what AOL Platform’s CTO Seth Demsey showed -- “sight, sound and motion” told much of the story last night while simultaneously being the story.

Peet told the audience about how Chrysler “primed” its target audience with digital advertising -- which it bought via programmatic -- before running the campaigns on television. By the time the campaign came to TV, Peet said the consumers felt like they already “knew” the characters portrayed in the advertisements. She said Chrysler then retargeted the same audience online to complete the cycle. (Can we coin this strategy the “television sandwich”?)

There were other videos, including one that featured Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” music playing in the background (Funny aside: I saw an attendee take out his phone and “Shazam” the music, so I clearly wasn’t the only one that noticed the music … perhaps moreso than the video itself.) The video was about, well, video. It featured a bunch of consumers watching a bunch of video a bunch of different ways.

The message was clear: “You can reach your audience regardless of where they are."

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