Why TV’s real challenge is simplicity, not brand safety – Synamedia at Cannes

Partner content

Television advertising has built a compelling case for itself over many years. The arguments for brand safety, transparency and editorial quality are well rehearsed. However, Guy Southam, senior product director of advanced advertising at Synamedia, believes the industry may have been focusing on the wrong problem.

Listen in full here:

“I think the challenge that TV’s had is that we’ve made a lot of arguments for a long time about trust, about brand safety, about transparency,” he tells The Media Leader’s Jack Benjamin at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. “But the challenge actually does seem to be more on that simplicity side of things. It’s all very well saying, “Well, it’s better, and it does more.” But if it’s too difficult for me to get onto the service, if it’s too hard for you to accept my spend, then it almost doesn’t matter.”

The concept of an “easy button” for TV buying, a phrase Southam attributes to Comcast, gained traction at this year’s Cannes.

Universal Ads, launched at the festival, represents one response. Synamedia’s response is Iris: a unified addressable television platform, originally developed in partnership with Sky on AdSmart, now a modular cloud-based SaaS product that manages campaign delivery across linear, CTV, and OTT environments.

Frequency capping across platforms was among the most discussed topics at Cannes this year. Southam frames it as a viewer problem rather than an ad server one: managing frequency within a single environment solves only part of the challenge. “Honest conversations about the problems that do exist give us a better chance of solving them,” he says.

Despite strong industry interest in CTV, Southam argues that linear addressability should not be overlooked.

Synamedia’s work with OSN in the Middle East, extending its CTV infrastructure into a linear environment, significantly expanded the volume of available advertising opportunities. The viewing volume and inventory consistency that linear offers remains a powerful argument for keeping it central to any addressable strategy.

On AI, Southam is focused on operational reality. Ad ops teams are handling significantly higher campaign volumes as automated buying routes attract smaller advertisers, without a proportional increase in headcount. Synamedia’s agentic AI tool uses a natural language interface to surface at-risk campaigns. “A straightforward prompt will return any and all campaigns that need some intervention and attention based on increased contention for the segment in question,” he says. For now, humans make the final call, with the model gaining greater autonomy as confidence grows.

His challenge to the industry for H2 is straightforward: make the positive case for television while genuinely removing the barriers to accessing it.

“TV is this incredible vehicle for entertaining and informing a population and does amazing things from an advertising perspective,” he says.

With social media regulation developing in the UK and scrutiny of larger platforms increasing, the opportunity for television to position itself as the responsible alternative is considerable. The easy button just needs to work.

This podcast was recorded at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in partnership with Synamedia.