• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, January 29, 2016

Programmatic TV will definitely play a part in AOL's future, according to Marta Martinez, SVP, AOL Advertising. Martinez was interviewed at length by Real-Time Daily's editor Tobi Elkin for a post that was published previously in RTBlog.

Here are the relevant parts of the Q&A:

Real-Time Daily: What’s AOL’s fastest growing programmatic advertising segment: mobile, video, TV, etc.?

Martinez: Mobile will have the fastest revenue growth for us in 2016. I can’t say what percentage growth it will represent. Programmatic video would come next. I think video is different from programmatic TV -- though to the consumer, it doesn’t matter. Video is video. Programmatic TV represents less of our growth than mobile -- but over the long term, and I can’t say how many years, it will represent a larger percentage of our revenue.

We’ve done a phenomenal job of laying down the plumbing, but we’re still trying to understand the data that comes from the infrastructure in terms of programmatic TV.

One challenge is that programmatic TV can’t leverage digital data at scale yet. Data on TV still only goes in one direction. The ability to collect and leverage data is a lot more limited with traditional TV.

Real-Time Daily: Can you offer an example of what AOL is doing in programmatic TV?

Martinez: We have a programmatic initiative in Australia with our partner MultiChannelNetwork (MCN). The company represents about 85% of the pay TV inventory in the country. In terms of growth, MCN saw revenue attributed to programmatic TV move from 1% in its launch month (May 2015) to 5% by the end of the year. In terms of what's next, we are exploring how digital video and TV are traded closer together, eventually combining those two execution layers into the same platform.