The Revisionists: Beachfront’s Automated Buying Helps Advertisers Reach Consumers Across End-Points In Real Time

The following is a selection from our latest report, “Local OTT: What You Need to Know.” Use the discount code [tvrev25] for $25 off when you purchase today.

"Local television often has many different endpoints and while consumers may not see a difference, most current ad buying systems do. That’s a mistake," says Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro, because “if a consumer is watching the local news in the morning, they may watch it on their television via YouTube TV. But they’ll also watch that news show on their phone, and on their laptop too. Those are all different endpoints for the same user, and we need to help brands reach that consumer on all those different endpoints while being able to keep a handle on frequency.”

Q: Why do advertisers still care so much about local, given that so much of our current media ecosystem is national?

A: It’s a big country and marketing efforts are rarely 100% national. National brands still need to support their national efforts in regions where they’re strong and shore up in markets where they have challenges. The other reason I think there is renewed attention to local is that there are so many more opportunities to run addressable advertising and that capacity is only going to expand. And I think that’s getting a lot of people excited because it’s changing the way local is bought and sold. We’re starting to see a proliferation of local inventory that’s available on OTT that’s aimed at an audience advertisers are missing on linear because those viewers are no longer watching linear TV.

Q: Do you think that’s encouraging more brands to try out TV?

A: I definitely think that the availability of premium OTT inventory that can be targeted to a local audience is bringing more brands to TV. Many of them are used to digital and the sorts of metrics and programmatic buying opportunities they have on digital and so when they can find those opportunities on TV, they’re all in, because they get that television, with its sight and sound and storytelling abilities, offers a greater emotional connection for their consumers.

Q: Can you tell me a little about Beachfront’s role in growing the local OTT market?

A: We’re doing a lot on the local front. Broadcasters are excited to be able to add local OTT inventory to their offerings because really it puts a lot more control back in the hands of the broadcaster. This is particularly true when you look at how they’ve been working with many of the MVPDs. They don’t have much addressable inventory because they don’t typically get the data passthrough. Yes, they can still sell their local audiences, but they can’t create segments out of those local audiences the way you can on OTT.

Q: How are you thinking about OTT, what are you doing to make it more attractive to advertisers, advertisers who want to reach local audiences in particular?

(to read more of this interview, buy our latest report on local OTT)