ESPN UK ‘nervous’ and ‘sceptical’ about programmatic, admits head of programmatic trading Carl Huber-D’Cruze
ESPN UK is “nervous” and “sceptical” about the use of programmatic, the sports publishing giant’s UK head of programmatic trading Carl Huber-D’Cruze has revealed.
Speaking on a panel at the Real Time Advertising Summit in London, for which The Drum is media partner, Huber-D’Cruze said that programmatic is a new area that ESPN UK is “trying to embrace” but the publisher is entering the space with caution.
“Programmatic is something that ESPN are nervous about if I’m honest,” he commented. “It’s something that we are sceptical about, it’s something that we take a lot of time and effort thinking about before we make any decisions, and that’s partly down to the fact that we are part of the Disney company and we have to think very much about our users and policies and data, so we’re very cautious in this area but trying to embrace it.”
Also speaking on the panel was Andy Bush, senior vice president of global accounts at Time Inc, who divulged a different stance, and hailed programmatic as a “significant opportunity” to the New York-based publisher of brands such as InStyle and People, given that its digital audience across 45 global websites has overtaken its print readers.
“We own 90 brands and 45 global websites and we view programmatic as a very significant opportunity. I agree there are challenges, but we’re embracing that.” Bush added that scale is a “massive” issue for Time and revealed that the publisher has recently launched a global Google ad exchange in a bid to escalate it.
When asked what message publishers would like to send to an agency or a trading desk in terms of how they can work differently to provide a better understanding, Gordon White, programmatic and data director, Time Out commented that “in most cases, especially when you talk to the desk guys, you’re pushing on an open door.”
“There is definitely some internal work that needs to be done on an account by account basis,” he continued. “To make sure that the different ways that media has been bought [is communicated] and I think that’s something that the client needs to push, to ask, ‘how often do you sit down with trading desks and direct guys’ and talk about the tech plan.”
Regarding mobile programmatic advertising Huber-D’Cruze said that despite the mass migration of audience to the platform from desktop there are still relatively little mobile programmatic solutions to invest in.
“The thing with mobile is - are there enough solutions and enough advertising opportunities? What is there out there?’. There’s very few opportunities programmatically and what we’re trying to discuss with our partners is potential native solutions; how can we work with a native supplier that can give us something different?”
Huber-D’Cruze added that matching native and programmatic together “is quite tricky”, calling “native an art and programmatic a science” and continued “at the moment there isn’t enough in the mobile space for the amount of impressions that are going there.”
Bush agreed, and admitted that should Time’s advertising revenues match its audience consumption around video on mobile the publisher would be “a transformed business”.
“I only wish that our advertising revenues were matching our audience consumption around video,” he revealed “because we’d be a transformed business by now but we’re not. The honest truth is, again, we need to understand consumption habits around this space and for those of you in the room with increasingly cool video technology, keep bringing it to us publishers please because that’s the stuff that will change the industry.
“It's an ongoing wild west, I understand [that], but we as a company are consistently looking at new opportunities around video because we’re betting on that for the future and that’s a key area for us.”