How to make the most of programmatic buying on the open internet

To understand the marketing opportunity at hand, you must first consider what the premium internet is. It’s the answers to those common lunch break questions like: Have you started the new season of “The White Lotus” on Max? Got any Spotify podcast recommendations? Did you read that New York Times story about how Eagles fans took over New Orleans after their Super Bowl win?

So much of what makes the open internet great is made up of what’s most-watched, listened to, and read. The good news is that the rise of the premium internet can be attributed to all that content becoming biddable, targetable, and measurable.

Our platform solutions, like the Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace, give you access to a collection of top-quality inventory sources made up of curated, premium publishers and placements. And our Sellers and Publishers Report examines why and how advertisers are gravitating to the best of the open internet.

Watch our chief commercial officer, Tim Sims, describe how you can connect with the most premium supply to drive growth.

Our platform gives advertisers access to the best of the open internet, where consumers are most engaged. Consider the massive advertising opportunity of digital audio, where consumers spent an average of 20% of their media consumption time.²

Spotify boasts 675 million platform users globally who use the platform for 2.5 hours daily on average, according to the audio streamer’s global head of content and advertising business development, Emma Vaughn. She attributes the growth for both the Spotify platform and the ad opportunity to the “combination of editorial and machine learning to kind of get [users] that very unique experience that is very personalized to [them], but also taps into the bigger cultural phenomena.”

One of the key digital audio differentiators is being with the consumer — at times — in the absence of a screen. Media buyers can target not only music genres and podcasts, but also contextually target when listeners are driving or exercising.

Watch Emma and our SVP of inventory development, Will Doherty, discuss how Spotify is helping to shape the future of omnichannel advertising.

Forget the doom, gloom, and what’s breaking — although there is a heavily engaged audience for that content — news is so much more. It can be easy to forget that publishers like The New York Times (which has more than 150 million registered users globally) produce content across categories like sports, entertainment, culinary, lifestyle, and more. A perfect opportunity to reach audiences as they discover what to watch, what to cook, and what to buy.

There’s a myth that news content across the board is not brand-safe, but keep in mind the depth and breadth of offerings by publishers like The New York Times, which has curated a wide range of content consumed by millions of engaged audiences. Joy Robbins, global chief advertising officer at The New York Times, wants more advertisers to tap in, noting: “What we hope we can really help drive within the industry is to allow the ‘never newsers’ to take a step in the direction of recognizing that just because you might run with a news publisher doesn’t mean you have to run in some of the places that may concern you with brand suitability.”

Watch Joy and our chief marketing officer, Ian Colley, highlight the opportunity to connect with news publisher audiences and why advertising matters.

True omnichannel marketing, an audience-first strategy uniting three or more digital channels in a connected campaign, can drive full-funnel results. Still, consumer journeys are fluid; therefore reaching them at the right moments across CTV, digital audio, display, etc., requires a strong identity strategy.

As John Halley, president of Paramount Advertising puts it, “None of these [channels] can be looked at in isolation. We have to be interoperable with the buy-side systems and partners’ data preferences. Omnichannel is dependent on an incredibly robust identity structure.”

So just how can you aim to strengthen your identity foundation for winning omnichannel campaigns? It typically starts with a well-defined audience base or a unified view of your ideal customer. You can enhance this foundation by layering durable IDs (like Unified ID 2.0) onto your audiences to stabilize the identity framework a campaign needs to run. Then, appending the right set of KPIs, testing, measuring, and optimizing along the way is often the right path forward.

Watch a conversation between John and our chief strategy officer and EVP, Samantha Jacobson, on Paramount’s commitment to performance with CTV.

Biddable live video content is having a moment. The Walt Disney Company’s SVP of addressable sales, Jamie Power, described how different their media business looked this year versus last year. “It’s totally different. It’s majority biddable. And then more interesting when you’re looking in the biddable channel, 70% of biddable spend is upfront commitments.”

What’s more? Access to some of the biggest viewing events in sports and culture globally is getting democratized as inventory goes programmatic. According to Alison Levin, president of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, “70% of our hours across [NBCUniversal properties] are live moments.” More advertisers are getting access to more moments like The Today Show and Sunday Night Football, as well as massive ones like the Olympic Games. In 2024, NBCUniversal (which owns U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games) partnered with us to offer advertisers private marketplace (PMP) biddable access to all the action for the first time.

Viewership for live events is growing, and so, too, are the ways audiences tune in. Take the Super Bowl LIX, for instance, which was broadcast nationally in the U.S. on Fox as well as (for the first time) on the free, ad-supported streaming platform Tubi. Tubi’s CEO, Anjali Sud, shared that Tubi saw more than 15 million concurrent peak viewers during the game. And as for the ad experience, she noted the impact of the positive, low latency user experience the platform was able to pull off. “If your brand is associated with delight and ease and joy, [advertising] doesn’t work if you’re in an experience that feels frustrating.”

Watch Anjali and Tim’s discussion on the new streaming game plan.

The industry has room for improvement when it comes to the open internet’s supply chain. As Tim put it, “Our aim is to power innovation, not to extract value.” And if the industry gets this right, he adds: “We get a transparent, well-lit supply chain to power the open internet and help [advertisers and publishers] unlock value.”

The ecosystem as a whole benefits from an efficient supply chain and right now, as Mike O’Sullivan, GM of product and co-founder of Sincera, notes, “There is an opportunity to reward great publishers and for buyers to have high-performing campaigns.”

For publishers who want to maximize advertiser demand, OpenPath enables direct connections between advertisers and a publisher’s ad server. Various publishers who have integrated OpenPath are seeing higher bid volume, true price discovery, and operational efficiencies. For Spotify’s Emma Vaughn, OpenPath is unlocking value in new ways. “For the first time, enabling things like OpenPath allows us to take our huge logged-in user base and apply attention and attribution that you can’t in any other way. It’s a real game changer.”

On the buy side, many advertisers benefit from higher win rates (with some three times higher, according to our platform data) and cost-efficiencies for their campaigns.³ Get to know the buy- and sell-side benefits of OpenPath and how to get started here.

Watch Mike O’Sullivan’s presentation on why advertisers and publishers alike should care about the supply chain.