StackAdapt Ups Programmatic Sports Game

At the same time more sports programming is shifting to streaming, more sports commercial inventory is being made available to programmatic buyers.

This opens the door to smaller advertisers, sponsors that want to focus on specific target audiences and last-minute buyers.

Buying sports inventory is not what most programmatic platforms were built to do, so StackAdapt says it has launched a Live Events campaign workflow designed to help advertisers activate and manage live sports campaigns on connected TV.

Greg Joseph, VP of inventory development at StackAdapt, told The Measure that the volume of sports inventory being bought on the StackAdapt platform has increased more than 1,000% year-over-year. 

“Sports offers this kind of unique opportunity to reach someone, not only at the right moment, but when they are most engaged,” Joseph said. “We've built tools that others have not built yet, because we focus on product nimbleness where we build products very, very quickly.”

StackAdapt has direct access to sports inventory from major programmers, including NBCUniversal, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, plus international programmers like Channel 4 and Sky. It was one of the platforms NBCU worked with to sell Olympic inventory during the winter games, and the company is looking forward to handling inventory for the upcoming World Cup.

Handling live events, particularly sports, requires special capabilities that traditional programming platforms usually can’t manage, Joseph said.

For one thing, most demand-side platforms are not designed to exhaust large budgets over a fleeting period of time, such as the three-hour duration of a football game. StackAdapt’s Live Events workflow has pacing settings to ensure campaign spend effectively during events with unpredictable traffic spikes.

It also features an event-based planning hub and calendar that helps advertisers discover upcoming sports moments. 

“Buyers can select individual leagues and individual games,” Joseph said, a capability that was available during the Olympics and will be offered again during the World Cup.

The sudden influx of traffic that happens during a game is something some DSPs have difficulty handling. “We’ve built what we call elastic servers to manage the influx of traffic so buyer can feel 100% confident that they will have the ability to serve ads to every user possible,” he said.

While StackAdapt is building its technical capabilities, it also has a team of humans helping clients develop strategies and select sports programming that fits their marketing goals. The team also works to get the best access from programmers for the agencies it works with. 

“Our tools are meant to be executional, and that's the focus, but a lot of what my team does today is the strategic component,” Joseph said. “We do have AI tools within our platform and give recommendations to them as well, so they can give historical recommendations about what's performed well and what may perform well for the individual verticals, which creates a ton of value for buyers.”

StackAdapt also has relationships with a number of data providers so that its platform can identify and reach only the viewers within their target audience that are watching a game. 

“We're buying people, so the value of programmatic is being able to find the right user at the right time, and the legacy world of buying inventory in bulk is not something we want to focus on for this use case,” he said. 

According to Joseph, the Live Events workflow lets buyers “layer in whatever audiences you want using essentially any data that exists. We can match in real time against the supply that we get across the NBA season that just ended, the MLB season, the Masters. So, we're adding a ton of optionality to how buyers are able to use our platform.”

That makes advertising in sports more accessible for large advertisers looking to reach audiences they haven’t reached in the past, or for a mom-and-pop shop in Texas that wants to reach consumers in its neighborhood.

StackAdapt can also help advertisers find sports viewers after the game ends in other programming and via other media, including podcasts and digital out of home. 

As sports become more accessible by programmatic buyers, demand will grow.

“I think larger shares of budgets will go to sports,” Joseph said. “But I would caveat that premium content is still very, very important.” 

# # # 

Philo said it picked Realgood to provide content metadata that will enable Philo to make its streaming service more personalized and offer better recommendations to subscribers.

Philo also gets access to Reelgood's cross-platform content intelligence, providing real-time visibility into which titles and genres are resonating across the streaming ecosystem. 

Realgood tracks more than 300 streaming services and has a database of 4 million titles that is refreshed daily.

"We needed a metadata partner that could support our machine learning work at the level of quality and coverage it requires. We chose Reelgood because of the depth of its metadata infrastructure, which is central to how we build content understanding and a recommendation system,” said Sai Vuppalapati, lead product manager, data and machine learning at Philo. “We love that its cross-platform signals give us a meaningful view into what's trending outside our own network."

Reelgood's metadata platform is being integrated into Philo's machine learning infrastructure.

“Philo's experienced teams understand that any recommendation engine is only as good as the metadata feeding it,” said Realgood CEO David Sanderson. “They came to us for complete, deduplicated coverage refreshed daily. And its content team came for the historical availability for every show and movie, so it can make licensing decisions based on evidence, not guesswork. We're seeing more teams reach the same conclusion."

In addition, Reelgood will provide Philo with current and historical title availability across more than 300 streaming services, with records dating back to 2019. The data enables Philo’s content and licensing execs to know where a title has been available and during which windows when making program acquisition choices.

# # # 

Roberto Ruiz was named head of measurement science at Nielsen. Ruiz had previously been executive VP and chief research officer at TelevisaUnivision. Kelly Dixon has been serving as interim measurement science lead.

Ruiz will report to Nielsen Chief Information and Data Officer Russ Soper and focus on rolling out new products, technologies and capabilities.