Q&A with The Athletic's Sebastian Tomich and pod bidding

In a recent Media Briefing:

In a recent Future of TV Briefing:

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Media Briefing: How The Athletic used the World Cup as a kick off for its advertising business

By Kayleigh Barber

The Athletic launched its advertising business right in time for many sporting tentpoles, including the World Cup, posing a real opportunity for The New York Times-owned sports brand to compete for ad dollars.

But what Sebastian Tomich, chief commercial officer of The Athletic, found was that many top spenders around marquee events like the World Cup had already pre-planned those budgets years before the Times even made a motion to purchase the sports brand. While there were some remaining dollars to campaign for, he said the real benefit to his sales team was being able to get the ball rolling on large campaigns tied to tentpoles next year, like the Super Bowl and Women’s World Cup, and even the World Cup in 2026.

The Athletic’s ad revenue is not relying solely on future campaigns, however, especially during an economic downturn. Instead, Tomich’s team is continuing to pursue as many prospective advertisers as possible, while also turning on the programmatic spigot — something he was hesitant to use back when advertising first appeared on The Athletic’s website.

“Never say never, particularly when it comes to open market programmatic. It’s not on the cards now, but if we do make that move to open market programmatic it will be because we need to,” Tomich told Digiday in September.

Future of TV Briefing: How pod bidding can help to solve streaming's ad load issue

By Tim Peterson

Seventy-four pages into IAB Tech Lab’s OpenRTB 2.6 document lies buried a potential solution to the streaming advertising market’s emerging ad load problem.

Once implemented by streaming services, adopted by advertisers and supported by demand- and supply-side platforms, this fix could thread the needle between maximizing ad revenue and minimizing ad exposures at a time when the economics of streaming is pressing services to reconsider their low ad loads that have helped them to attract ad-supported audiences but capped their ad revenue.

“It’s going to provide a lever to get that nice balance between monetization and engagement of content upfront,” said Adam Markey, director of product management at Roku.

In April, IAB Tech Lab released an updated version of its OpenRTB protocol governing the processes for the programmatic buying and selling of ads. As incremental as a x.6 update typically is, this one included support for pod bidding. As detailed in the explainer video below, pod bidding would not only permit advertisers to bid to have the first or last ads airing in an multi-ad break (called a “pod”) but also would allow streaming services to dynamically divvy up their ad breaks in a way that could enable them to maximize ad revenue without expanding ad volume.

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