In this excerpt from our Special Report, FASTs Are The New Cable, Part 2: Advertising, Pluto TV’s Christo Owen explains how EyeQ helps ad buyers take advantage of streaming inventory across the entire Paramount ecosystem, from Pluto TV to Paramount+.

“In order to make it easy for advertisers to buy across the entire Paramount streaming universe, we created EyeQ, which is our premium video advertising platform,” explains Christo Owen, SVP, Advertising Business Development & Programmatic at Pluto TV.  “With EyeQ, we have over 80 million monthly active users in the US alone, and 90 percent of that consumption happens on TV screens, which is a great value proposition for advertisers.” 

ALAN WOLK: Where does Pluto TV sit inside the greater Paramount ad sales universe and how does that benefit buyers?

CHRISTO OWEN: Paramount Global is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. We have CBS, the most watched network for 14 consecutive seasons, our leading cable networks, including MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, BET and Paramount Network, and our popular streaming services consisting of Pluto TV and Paramount+. 

Pluto TV is the largest FAST platform globally and the only FAST to make it onto Nielsen’s The Gauge as one of the most viewed streaming platforms of any kind, and when you combine that with Paramount+ which is our global subscription streaming platform featuring Paramount movie collections plus live sports plus the current season stacks of our broadcast CBS shows and more—you have a very compelling offering for advertisers.

In order to make it easy for advertisers to buy across the entire Paramount streaming universe, we created  EyeQ, which is our direct sales product.

While Pluto TV is not sold as a standalone product on EyeQ, it's a big piece of the overall pie. Within EyeQ, buyers can use Pluto TV to provide greater incrementality and the ability to target very specific audiences. That sort of multidimensional approach, where we have paired paid services like Paramount+ with a FAST like Pluto TV, allows us to give advertisers a very attractive holistic offering. 

ALAN WOLK: For a lot of buyers who have traditionally worked in TV, the word “programmatic” can conjure up all sorts of scary images. What is Pluto TV doing to help reassure them?

CHRISTO OWEN:  Our goal is to try to normalize everything, to make it simple to understand and simple to buy. And to do so in a way where the total is greater than the sum of its parts. 

“Programmatic” is just a transaction type.  At Pluto TV, we have the ability to do it through a traditional programmatic guaranteed model, which is just executing on an IO  – insertion order –based deal through programmatic execution. Or if you do want decisioning, we can do that too.

We've really embraced programmatic and doubled down on it internally. We have our group, which works with all of the various platform partners, SSPs and DSPs to set up best practices and approaches for our entire sales team. 

Separately, we have teams that are specialists in programmatic who work very closely with our traditional direct sales team. So I think a lot of it is education, internal and external, to continue to pivot to the longer term. 

We want to be advisors to our clients, and I think that there are still pieces within agencies where there are direct investment leads versus programmatic leads, but we're seeing those two areas come together very quickly. Ultimately,  that's the goal—to convey that programmatic is not a scary thing, but rather,  a simple and straightforward next conversation.

ALAN WOLK: What was involved in creating the tech stack for EyeQ?

CHRISTO OWEN: We took two years to really pull together the entire EyeQ tech stack. Before the merger between Viacom and CBS, we had three different tech stacks running—a CBS tech stack, a Viacom tech stack and a Pluto TV tech stack. So we had to RFP the world, we had to bring it back together and we had to basically say, “alright, well, what are we going to do?” 

The answer was a combination of building a backbone on a partner of ours, which provided an SSP and a DSN, and an ad serving technology’s third party license. Then, on top of that, we built a lot of bespoke customized tech that we own and operate. Together, that really is what we believe is the best in market tech stack, where we can control certain things on our side, have backups, quarantines, and best practices around what we want to do. 

In order to guarantee the best of TV on streaming, and have all that “real timeness” that streaming provides, we had to make sure that every DSP was able to work with that tech stack. That took some time, but we've basically checked off every major DSP and we continue to work with others to get them certified.

It's a process for sure, and we have to check up on things like are you meeting our creative quality standards? Are you passing us all the RTB protocols? Are we doing all the things we need to do so that we're not going to have a crappy user experience?

But in the end, we really believe it will be worth it.

ALAN WOLK: What are you doing to prevent overfrequency, which has been a huge problem in streaming?

CHRISTO: We have the ability to prevent overfrequency for our advertising partners because of that centralized brain we have through EyeQ.

Let's say that we have a large CPG brand that has a multidimensional execution. They want to run programmatic with us directly through PMPs, and they also want to give us a direct managed service IO. 

What we've done is we've taken the “central brain” of EyeQ and configured it in a way so that multiple lanes can come in together. Because of those protocols that we require through that unique tech stack, in addition to the managed service IO, we're never going to have breakage in terms of overfrequency. So we will never allow the same CPG ad to run, no matter what lane it’s coming through. That’s because we've integrated everything together so that we can control frequency management and we can control user experience.

This has been a massive, massive feat for us. I think a lot of programmers struggle with it. 

But we have the backing of a massive media company willing to invest time and resources to fix this. It also did not happen overnight. It happened over about 18 months. But now we feel like we're in a very good position.

Regardless of how something comes in, user experience is of the utmost concern to us and preventing overfrequency is a big part of the user experience.