• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, February 19, 2020

Canoe Ventures has reported that ad impressions in cable video-on-demand programming increased 4%, to 27.3 billion, last year.

But the ad tech-company, which enables dynamic ad insertion in national television network programming, said that growth rate was actually lower than in previous years, because networks are maxing out their available inventory for insertions. In 2018, impressions rose 12%, to 26 billion, and in 2017, impressions rose by a full 30%, to 23.3 billion.

The portion of Canoe’s impressions coming from devices other than set-top-boxes rose to 21%, from 19% in 2018.

The company, owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox, reported running 10,071 campaigns last year (up from 7,476 in 2018), and 86% of those were for external advertisers (up from 82% in 2018), versus 14% for internal cable network promotion purposes.

Just 7% of external campaigns were sold through programmatic PMPs, versus 93% sold directly.

Average opportunities per mid-roll break in VOD programming ticked up to 4, from 1.36.

Most advertisers employ Canoe’s ad frequency capping, which results in about half (56%) of viewers seeing an ad once, 10% twice and 5% five times.