How Beachfront’s ad server helps advertisers succeed across streaming and traditional channels

As advertisers seek new ways to craft engaging CTV and linear campaigns, many are finding it challenging to manage ads across increasingly disparate channels. Without technologies that adequately adapt advertising across these environments, brands in both arenas risk alienating audiences via disjointed customer experiences.  

“When we looked at television five years ago, we asked where the problems we believed would persist as streaming evolves,” said Maccaro. “One of the things we believed at the time was that traditional TV was going away. We had a monetization platform [SSP] that could help streaming companies monetize their supply, but we saw a bigger problem on the horizon for these companies — and an even larger problem for the traditional TV space.”

Beachfront’s CEO, Chris Maccaro, recently spoke with Mike Shields, co-founder of Marketecture Media and host of the ‘Next in Marketing’ podcast, about how advertisers are using innovative ad server solutions that bridge the gap between connected TV and traditional TV linear channels. 

As CTV and linear create options, interoperability has become a key challenge

Advertisers in the CTV space have had difficulty finding technologies that can handle the complexities of streaming, enable marketing teams to optimize yield management and address user-experience issues such as ad duplication and content rights. 

Another challenge companies face is how to deploy creative across both CTV and linear channels effectively and identify the technology that successfully connects their creative to each environment. 

“Forty to 50 million households still use traditional television,” Maccaro said. “We may get to full streaming at some point, but it’s not going to be anytime soon. And in the meantime, there’s a tremendous issue of inoperability. If you’re a brand today and you want to try to deliver an ad across a network and buy that inventory through one channel, no one else has built that interoperability on the supply side.”

In response, Beachfront has focused on solving ad server incompatibility, working to change that scenario and distributing clients’ ad campaigns across disparate channels.

“What [programmers and distributors] are looking for is a platform that can not only handle ad serving across disparate environments, but one unified solution that can handle programmatic and streaming monetization across all their distribution endpoints,” Maccaro said.

Meanwhile, according to Maccaro, Beachfront’s ad server solution isn’t designed to replace Google or other ad platforms. Instead, it’s built to fit ahead of the advertiser’s stack and serve as a mediator between buyers and sellers.

“The demand that comes through our pipes is from some of the largest sources in the industry, whether that’s Trade Desk, Google, Amazon or Verison,” he said. “We’re focused on this concept of convergence; some in the space are more focused on the streaming side of the business.”

Advertising and marketing professionals that are benefiting from CTV/linear interoperability

As marketers and advertisers activate ad campaigns across linear and connected TV, ad operations teams — especially programmers and distributors — stand the most to gain from these technologies.

“Ad operations teams are using the platform to extract the greatest yield from the available inventory,” said Maccaro. “They’re also using the platform to create a safe environment for consumers, implement block lists and categories across different types of ads and troubleshoot the connections between buyers and sellers.”

Media professionals of all stripes are using these technologies to work more effectively with sales and other departments to create seamless ad experiences for both traditional and connected TV viewers. Beachfront plans to be a part of that progress.

“Our product roadmap is continuing to build tools to enable programmers to maximize the value of their inventory and create a pristine consumer experience,” said Maccaro. “We’re doing a lot of work around revenue analytics and continuing to get a better context of the content of the ads. We’re looking at how we’re building the consumer experience.”
To learn more about clean rooms and identity resolution technologies, listen to more of the conversation between Marketecture and Chris Maccaro here.