This Future of TV Briefing covers the latest in streaming and TV for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how ad tech companies including Comcast’s FreeWheel, Index Exchange and The Trade Desk are preparing CTV’s programmatic supply chain for upgraded auction dynamics amid an influx of live sports ad inventory.
Mark your calendars for Aug. 31. That’s the target date for streaming ad tech’s next step toward realizing its promise of evolving the traditional TV ad model.
Why Aug. 31? Because that’s when The Trade Desk expects to have transitioned the demand-side platform’s entire publisher supply path to support pod bidding, a newish standard for programmatically selling multi-ad commercial breaks, or ad pods (like pea pods), according to Rob Hazan, gm of product management at The Trade Desk.
“We’d like to receive all long-form video ad break signals to us via pods,” Hazan said.
I say newish because the pod bidding standard was actually introduced in 2022. Four years later, major players across the programmatic supply chain — including supply-side platform Index Exchange and Comcast-owned publisher ad server FreeWheel — have begun to support it. And now the puzzle pieces on the demand side are being put in place with The Trade Desk and StackAdapt being among the DSPs adding support.
