Self-serve will help TV take ad budgets from TikTok and Meta, says RTL AdAlliance
RTL AdAlliance believes its new AdManager self-serve platform will benefit advertisers of all sizes, lowering the barriers to TV advertising for small and medium companies and making it easier for international brands to run large-scale campaigns across multiple European markets.
In both cases, the ambition is to take budget from the likes of YouTube, TikTok and Meta. AdManager is a good example of how the TV industry is trying to make TV simpler to use for buyers.
AdManager provides access to broadcast linear inventory, broadcaster VOD (BVOD), other premium connected TV and video on premium websites from RTL AdAlliance media partners.
It offers pre-curated audience targets and enables buyers to create, monitor and optimise campaigns in real time. Special occasions, world-class sports events, cultural moments and festivities are some of the compelling opportunities for pan-European buys.
AdManager is an example of how broadcaster collaboration could make TV more competitive against tech platforms.
“We are frequently asked by brands to give them an alternative to the global tech platforms,” Nicole Haman, vice-president of digital sales at RTL AdAlliance, tells The Media Leader.
“I strongly believe TV can take budget out of social and video-sharing platforms because buyers want more than just reach — they want attention and mental availability in a trusted, brand-safe environment that will work for them.”
In the case of international brands, spanning verticals from travel to online services, Haman sees an opportunity to compete harder for centralised global budgets that tech platforms are successfully tapping but which TV has largely missed.
This is because AdManager makes it easier to run a multi-market campaign via a single buying point. She offers the example of an airline using AdManager to plan and execute across local European markets.
“We help buyers reach premium inventory that is locally produced, with campaigns that are executed locally,” she explains.
Local remains key
“Local” remains key for RTL AdAlliance. Haman points out that broadcasters such as RTL were built locally, from the bottom up, and are still locally rooted.
“The US tech platforms developed from the top down, going to market with [global] scale,” she continues. “This is our answer to that. We do not touch the local budget [where buyers go to broadcasters in their individual markets], but this is a way to address budgets that are more and more centralised.”
Haman is keen to contrast the TV and TV-like ad environments available through AdManager to most of the content on video-sharing platforms and social video. The message is that AdManager provides more effective reach than tech platforms while also making it easy, automated and scaled.
The company is also happy to beat the European drum and characterises AdManager as a European alternative to US big tech and a simple gateway to European media.
RTL AdAlliance is the multi-publisher European sales house operated by RTL Group bringing together broadcasters (including RTL, M6, ITV and Rai), studio/channel groups (such as Disney and Warner Bros Discovery) and leading streaming services.
AdManager is already live internationally, including in Germany, Finland and Italy. It has been running in beta since the start of the year.
Haman expects inventory from all the key partners to become available via AdManager over time. “We intend to roll this out across the entire portfolio because our partners also want to take advantage of the advertiser demand out there,” she notes.
Boost in transparency
AdManager has access to audiences via 77m active smart TV sets, 40m monthly BVOD users and over 5,000 web properties.
In practice, the majority of the inventory being planned via AdManager today is linear broadcast and BVOD, but this will be complemented with other high-quality connected TV. The main focus is on big-screen viewing, but audience extension is possible via premium mobile video and using video inventory embedded in website pages of high-quality print/magazine publishers.
This solution provides a unified view of reach and frequency across all video sources used, so planners can optimise the campaign as they go. If the campaign is falling short of their target audience expectation in Italy, for example, a buyer can plan more inventory there. Haman points out that there is full transparency for buyers: “You see the delivery — where your ads go.”
AdManager can cater for low-commitment TV buying for advertisers with low or unreliable budget. You can literally buy some TV for a day, if you want. This platform can be used for mass-market reach-all campaigns or for targeting, starting with age, gender and the country where an ad should be seen.
Pre-curated audience targets
The pre-curated audience targets include Smart Audiences, which are specially chosen segments based on behaviour, lifestyle and life stage, rather than just demographics or geography.
One example is “Luxe Maven”, which refers to people interested in high fashion and jewellery, and who enjoy a luxurious lifestyle. Another is “Sports Fan”, summarised as a well-informed and emotionally invested supporter who actively follows live games and related news, and also buys merchandise or subscribes to sports media.
Importantly, these audience definitions have been harmonised across all RTL AdAlliance partners, so a Luxe Maven found via RTL inventory in Germany will have the same characteristics as a Luxe Maven found via Viaplay inventory in the Nordics.
The determination on which households fit within different Smart Audiences is based on a GDPR-compliant understanding of their consumption habits across video and other media.
“You can buy the same target segment, regardless of the content, in the same way you can with big tech platforms,” Haman says.
Targeting is possible on linear broadcast TV (as well as streaming). Depending on the country, addressable ad formats include tune-in, where an addressable ad is served when an in-target viewer changes channel, and L-Shape, where brand messages are wrapped around a slightly reduced video frame.
Using AdManager, viewers can be retargeted based on whether they saw or did not see an ad campaign, or based on whether they watched certain programming (for example, Formula 1).
RTL AdAlliance also offers custom targeting capabilities via the sales team that are not currently available via AdManager, like helping a car maker find families who are in market for an SUV.
Haman suggests that the targeting options within AdManager may well expand over time, but for now the focus is on the pre-curated segments.
Agencies looking for efficiencies
Discussing AdManager and its impact generally, she says: “There is strong interest from agencies who are looking for efficiencies and want to be faster on their feet when launching a multi-market campaign.
“They know we are simplifying and harmonising access to the relevant target groups in different countries. International brands looking to advertise in different markets have been keen to know more too.”
The entire buying process with AdManager is automated using an integration with the SmartX ad server from Smartclip (the adtech business that is part of RTL). The platform was also developed with DanAds, which provides customisable and scalable self-serve adtech infrastructure.
Returning to the core proposition of AdManager, Haman concludes: “We do need to simplify television as a media buy and our role is to make it easier to access.”