Live TV events such as sporting events and breaking news generate huge audiences. But while they represent great opportunities for advertisers to achieve wide reach, programmatic advertising systems that bid for these ad spaces in real time struggle to keep up.

This is what Alex Groysman, vice president of advertising product development at cable television provider Spectrum Reach, says.

“For example, if we look at the ratings during prime time, we see that our offering grows almost exponentially during low-viewing periods because people watch TV as families and communities,” Groysman says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“In the programmatic space, we often see a plateau effect. Buyers can’t always keep up, or rather, the systems that buyers use can’t always keep up with the growing supply.”

Lagging behind live

According to Groysman, the problem could lie either with demand-side platforms (DSPs), which bid for ad inventory in automated auctions, or with data management platforms (DMPs), which are used for ad targeting, measurement and attribution.

“We see that there is simply not enough scale yet for everyone in the ecosystem to keep up with peak concurrent viewership, especially when we look at things like the Olympics and live sports,” he says.

“The DSPs are watching how much inventory is presented to them and they’re matching that with the budgets they have to spend over the course of a day. They might only update that data hourly. It’s not really real-time optimization.”

Growing pains

Groysman refers to a study by FreeWheel, which shows that live TV is programmatic in 38% of cases.

He says the two main factors that determine how much of a publisher’s inventory is sold programmatically are “the match between supply and demand and the associated yield.”

“With programmatic demand, we often have to either accept or reject the offer,” explains Groysman. “With direct sales, we have more control and flexibility in distributing that demand across our offer.”

Room for improvement

Groysman wants to see more alignment in the industry. “I think we have already come a long way as an industry,” he says, recalling a live sports test from his earlier career at FreeWheel.

“There is still a lot we can improve, whether it is operationally by making sure all teams, whether on the content or marketer side, are prepared for these simultaneous live spike events, or technologically by making sure taxonomies are aligned and the right content and data signals are being passed along to make these decisions.”