‘An interesting time for the market’: Google adtech partners share top priorities

Partner content

Context and user experience are key priorities for two adtech companies that have signed partnerships with Google to support broadcasters’ digital transformation journeys.

For Samba TV, its partnership involves analysing videos to create new forms of metadata to describe the content that will appeal to advertisers.

Essentially, it’s about finding a “better home, better experience” for brands, according to Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO of Samba TV.

It is well-known that when consumers don’t like the frequency or relevance of ad messaging, they can turn away. While broadcasters have traditionally managed the balance well, the advent of biddable, programmatic advertising has exacerbated the problem, Navin warned.

As he explained: “We’d like to bring the programmatic world into the best practices and best experiences of advertising that we’ve seen over the last 70-plus years.”

The key is context, Navin continued, suggesting advertisers want to “find the context that matters for their brands, all the while leveraging the scalability and biddable universe that’s already in place”.

Meanwhile, Simplestream’s partnership with Google, via Ad Manager and Video Stitcher, helps broadcasters monetise their live linear feed with server-side ad insertion (SSAI, also known as dynamic ad insertion).

For the business, which signed a deal with Virgin Media in Ireland last year along with Google, there are four ingredients in SSAI: the end user, the ad partner, the broadcaster/content owner and Video Stitcher.

“They have to work in harmony,” highlighted Dan Finch, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Simplestream.

Whereas traditional broadcasting, as a one-to-many medium, provides limited information to advertisers about their audience, the technology now offers them a much deeper understanding, Finch explained.

Ultimately, it comes down creating a seamless experience for the end user. “It’s an interesting time for the market, for the consumer, for the content owner,” he said. “Because they’ve now got huge scale and they can do some clever ad insertion.”

The interviews were conducted at the Google Ad Manager Innovation Showcase in September 2024.