Display & Video 360 tools to navigate the TV streaming boom

Over the past few months, people have spent a remarkable amount of time watching connected TV at home. As a result, Display & Video 360's connected TV available inventory surged by 75 percent in April 2020 from the previous year. And this doesn’t include YouTube and YouTube TV, which over 100 million people watch on their TV screens each month in the U.S. Even now, as stay-at-home restrictions are being lifted, connected TV usage remains well above pre-COVID-19 levels.

The disruption of TV upfronts and suspension of live sports are also encouraging advertisers to shift to the more flexible and on-demand ad strategies that connected TV offers. As a consequence, we’ve heard from many advertisers that they are accelerating their move to video streaming advertising. To support them in this process, we are introducing a series of tools in Display & Video 360 that make it easy for digital media buyers to discover and secure ad inventory on high-quality streaming content.

Easy inventory discovery with TV in Marketplace

As more premium streaming content is made accessible to programmatic buyers via deals, it can be hard to keep up with the flurry of options available, especially when these deals are documented offline and shared over email from many different media sales teams.

To help marketers easily find the deals that best match their campaign objectives, we’ve created a dedicated TV section in Marketplace specifically for publishers and inventory that let you reach TV audiences across devices. For instance, this is where you can find deals for the Disney Media Networks: ABC, ESPN, Freeform, FX, Hulu and National Geographic.

The TV section in Marketplace simplifies the process of finding and securing premium streaming inventory. Available publisher inventory is displayed graphically so that you can easily discover and negotiate your deals. Additional filter options let you search by geo or streaming device type to quickly find the right partner for your campaigns. You can also deep dive on a specific publisher profile to explore more data around performance, audience and inventory volume. Finally, you can send requests for proposals (RFP) to publishers directly from this dedicated space.

We’ll be rolling out this new interface throughout the next few weeks. In the future we will also be adding national linear TV broadcast and cable networks as well as local TV stations to this section in Marketplace.

High-quality inventory that’s already packaged

Because time is an especially constrained resource at the moment, we’ve introduced two new ‘ready-to-buy’ options that further accelerate the process of finding the right inventory for your campaign.

First, for marketers who want to skip the negotiation process, we’ve worked closely with exchange partners such as Google Ad Manager, FreeWheel and SpotX to bundle inventory from top publishers, along with broadcast and cable networks, into ready-to-execute deals. These deals, known as auction packages, are available to all Display & Video 360 users in Marketplace. Auction packages allow you to easily select inventory that’s already assembled by publishers based on genres, popularity, seasonality, formats or audiences. For example, you can easily add available themed packages from publishers, such as "Hulu - Parents", or from exchanges, like Telaria's "Cord Cutters" bundle. In addition to being a convenient and fast way to access pre-packaged inventory, auction packages are also a great way to harness publishers’ data to reach the right people in the right context.

Second, we’re making YouTube Select’s dedicated streaming TV lineup available to Display & Video 360 buyers in the U.S. YouTube watch time on TV screens jumped 80 percent year over year in March 2020 and this new streaming TV lineup will help you reach the growing number of people watching YouTube on the biggest screens in their homes.

Streamlined buying experience

Once you have secured your deals, you need a place to set up and optimize your TV ad campaign. That’s why this month we’re adding the “OTT line item”, a new workflow in Display & Video 360 tailored for buying TV ads across screens. To avoid configuration errors, this streamlined buying experience only features options that are relevant for connected TV ads, with appropriate configurations selected by default.

This line item also automatically picks inventory from connected TV apps. If the content on these apps can be viewed on other devices too, the new line item will seamlessly include these environments. For example, this means you can easily buy video ads from Disney Media Networks across connected TV, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

If you’re exploring options to harness the streaming boom and seamlessly add connected TV ads to your video strategy, reach out to your Google account executive today.