Independent players can exist outside Google and Facebook duopoly: MCN

As the debate over the value proposition of programmatic continues, MCN’s chief sales & marketing officer Mark Frain and chief data officer Mark Brandon believe that programmatic TV will outperform traditional formats. They insist that this will be possible due to better automation, segmentation, dynamic spot placement, data stacks, the world's first combined linear and digital video trading and now PTV and addressable.

Frain and Brandon, who spoke to Campaign Asia-Pacific at the ATS ExchangeWire conference 2017 in Singapore, said that MCN's move towards the world’s first linear broadcast programmatic platform allows media agencies to buy traditional linear TV advertising spots through a private exchange, just like they would buy online video advertising spots.

“I think what we're doing is genuinely innovative," Brandon said. "it's genuinely at the edge of what organizations like MCN around the world are currently doing. I think that it's something we have to do. This is about moving forward and innovating at a pace that businesses want us to innovate. It's something that our customers demand of us and we've got a unique set of opportunities in the Australian market born of the uniqueness of our model and our ownership. You know there are things in the Australian market that make MCN very different."

MCN is both a platform operator and also a broadcaster, and that gives them the opportunity to play the two sides.

"Marketers, like the advertising market, need leaders to lead and that's what we are trying to do... in data," Brandon added. "Now it's about building on that lead in data and applying that data lead to everything we do."

That means more than just TV.

For big and small players such as MCN, a prevailing challenge permeates from the free pass that the digital majors get in viewability standards, which is bringing chaos to the programmatic advertising ecosystem, Brandon explained.

He went on to say that the publishing industry continues to feel the material impact of the duopoly known as Google and Facebook. Both have affected the content economics from titans in technology, advertising technology, and the broader digital media supply chain.

The big lesson right now is for the multiplatform TV sectors to not fall into the same traps we’ve seen happen in publishing, Brandon added.