NEW YORK—The connected TV ad platform Publica has announced a technology agreement with Hearst Television that will help Hearst Television to enhance its streamed content with a traditional TV-like viewing experience, while maximizing Hearst's CTV advertising revenue.
As part of the agreement, Publica will help Hearst deliver a seamless ad experience via the introduction of Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) and help Hearst maximize revenue by running a unified-auction between multiple SSPs and Ad Exchanges.
"Publica's SSAI and Unified Auction technology allows us to accomplish two critical objectives; to provide the best and most relevant experience for viewers, while enabling safe and efficient solutions for our advertisers," said Jonathan Sumber, vice president of digital sales, Hearst Television.
Key Publica technology features that Hearst Television has implemented include:
- Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) — Gives Hearst Television the ability to deliver a seamless stream of CTV content and ads, with the granular controls to optimize each slot by revenue per second within the pod.
- Advanced Ad Pod Decisioning — Gives Hearst Television the ability to guarantee an advertiser first pod placement, and own a pod by brand category, helping with competitive separation and buy side frequency management.
- Unified Auction — Enables Hearst Television to run a controlled, unified auction of all demand sources to extract the highest yielding ad per slot in each streaming ad pod. Hearst Television is also using the Publica 'Live Logs' feature to enable real time transparency into each of the programmatic auctions within which the company's inventory is cleared; this permits Hearst Television to optimize yield and data strategies in real time to ensure it does not lose demand to supply path optimization (SPO).
Publica has been instrumental recently in helping the IAB Tech Lab to build out the new protocols that bring increased security and targeting to streaming ad breaks via the introduction of OpenRTB 2.6, and also ads.cert 2.0 that secures the practice of SSAI. In implementing Publica CTV ad decisioning technology, Hearst Television can ensure its CTV inventory is being targeted and served in the most secure way possible, providing its advertisers with the controls and transparency they require, the companies said.
"We're excited to be collaborating with Hearst Television and providing them with the ad decisioning technology to grow their global advertising revenues, and empowering Hearst Television with the SSAI capabilities to improve their streamers' viewing experiences on CTV," said Ben Antier, co-founder and CEO, Publica.
