Jason Manningham, CEO of TV ad tech and identity resolution provider Blockgraph, is a glass-half-full kind of guy.
TV is a massive market, and time spent with CTV and linear is undermonetized, Manningham says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks, the first episode of the new year.
“If I’m wearing my optimist hat, I’d say attention should ultimately drive ad spend, as long as the same attention can be monetized between different platforms,” he says.
There’s also a big opportunity to apply data more intelligently in television, rather than relying on brand safety and reach.
Historically, “desktop and mobile had better data and they had a better ability to harness that data for targeting and measurement,” Manningham says. Ad budgets naturally followed. TV players could take a page out of that same playbook.
But – there’s always a but – the scope of the opportunity depends on how one defines “TV.”
Many Big Tech companies have licensed premium content (and produced their own movies and shows), as well as launched their own streaming services. And to them will go the spoils.
“Notice that I didn’t say that the traditional players would all be super successful in this future,” Manningham says. “In many ways, tech became media faster than media became tech.”
Just because there’s an opportunity to better monetize the time people spend watching TV and video, “it’s not a given that the traditional players will be the ones who do monetize it.”
Also in this episode: Why Manningham is bullish on MVPDs and internet service providers, the impact of privacy regulations on television, the challenge of “identifier fragmentation” in TV and where to get the best poutine (in Canada, obviously).
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