With Turner pulling out in the wake of AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner, advertising technology consortium OpenAP has been reconstituted, with NBCUniversal, Fox and Viacom unveiling version 2.0.
The three companies will take part in the platform, which features advanced audience targeting tools and a centralized system for sharing data. Accenture and FreeWheel are also partners on the tech side. The newly reconstituted venture will go live in time for fall 2019 ad campaigns, the companies said. The initial version of OpenAP debuted in 2017.
Meredith Brace, EVP of Client Solutions and Portfolio Marketing at Fox; Krishan Bhatia, EVP of Business Operations and Strategy at NBCUniversal; and John Halley, EVP and COO of Ad Solutions at Viacom issued a joint statement. The initiative “fundamentally transforms the way that advertisers can transact to deliver holistic advanced audience campaigns from start to finish on both linear and long-form digital platforms,” the statement said. “OpenAP was the TV industry’s first open platform for cross-publisher audience targeting and independent third-party posting, and this is a major step in furthering our mission to bring the industry together to make audience buying more transparent, consistent, and effective.”
OpenAP seeks to surmount the competitive intensity in the ad game that can sometimes make the process of reaching customers a challenge for advertisers. The new version promises buyers the ability to build consistent, cross-publisher audience segments for both national linear and long-form digital video, with orders centralized through a cross-publisher marketplace.
“Advanced targeting, transparency and simplicity are critical to our clients. OpenAP enables advertisers access to advanced audiences at scale with the highest quality TV content available across screens,” Fox ad sales president Marianne Gambelli said. “Fox and the other members of OpenAP are committed to driving open standards that are essential to the success of our brand and agency partners.”
“With competition rising in every industry, marketers need new ways to define their audience and engage viewers across all platforms. Expanding OpenAP can help turn that vision into a reality. Krishan Bhatia and a group of industry leaders are creating solutions that will benefit the entire advertising ecosystem, and that should be commended,” NBCU Chairman of Advertising and Client Partnerships Linda Yaccarino said.
“We’re incredibly proud of the pioneering work that our team and OpenAP partners have accomplished in unifying and standardizing the television business. OpenAP’s evolution into a transactional platform is intended to simplify activation for our brand and agency partners, which we believe will significantly impact the scale of advanced advertising moving forward. We couldn’t be more excited,” said Sean Moran, Head of Ad Solutions, Viacom.
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