• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, December 3, 2020

Crackle Plus, the company behind the Crackle and Popcornflix advertising-supported video-on-demand streaming services, is employing television content reporting through supply-side ad platform Magnite to share show- and episode-level and other metadata with advertisers.

The content capabilities, now being used by several Magnite publisher clients, let buyers measure delivery by show, genre and TV rating, providing insights similar to those available through linear TV transactions.

The metadata supplied is determined on a deal-by-deal basis.

Crackle Plus, owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, says the capability helps it better understand ad bidding and buying behavior in real time, based on supply attributes including duration and content categories.

“Enabling brands to buy and report on the premium environments they’ve paid for reinforces our value proposition,” said Tim Ware, executive director of programmatic at Crackle Plus. “Our demand partners are asking for this kind of transparency as they invest more in premium CTV content.”

“We don’t anticipate this as necessarily being widely practiced in the immediate future for programmatic video buyers,” Ware told Digital News Daily, adding that there are currently technical limitations on the buy and sell sides. “But it’s how linear TV [advertising] is purchased, and in my opinion will become a requirement in the next couple of years as more TV dollars find a home in CTV.”

At this stage, however, major media companies aren’t willing to provide more granular content metadata due to “technical and business challenges, on top of the fact that they don’t have to do this at this stage, since they continue to capture the spend through legacy TV negotiations”; and some smaller publishers that “inflate supply with longer-tail audience extensions” fear that such data would call content quality into question, Ware asserts.

Asked if the content-reporting capability can be used in conjunction with more standard buying/measurement criteria, Ware said it can be, although buying KPIs and measurement can be bifurcated.

“Crackle has a ‘preferred’ pool of supply available via The Trade Desk, which constitutes a target unto itself,” he explains. “For a buyer looking for ‘auto intenders,’ the content reporting may be secondary, whereas in ‘preferred’ deals, exclusive original content could be a primary KPI.

Incremental reach results can sometimes be enhanced by running in such content, according to Ware.

“Some brand marketers are beginning to determine how content genre can positively drive business outcomes,” he says, although such insights won’t be readily available until programmatic information sharing is more widely practiced.