The CBC announced today that it would become the first Canadian publisher to integrate header bidding for preroll video through Index Exchange, with the goal of providing more inventory visibility to buyers while increasing the value of their private marketplace.
The initiative follows a successful relationship between the two companies that began in 2013, when Index Exchange helped develop the CBC’s private exchange and programmatic strategy. Header bidding, also known as advance bidding or pre-bidding, is an advanced programmatic technique wherein publishers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making calls to their ad servers (mostly DoubleClick for Publishers). The idea is that by letting multiple demand sources bid on the same inventory at the same time, publishers increase their yield and make more money.
“The feedback and response that we received on header bidding, from a display point of view, has been quite strong, and we’ve seen the adoption rates continue to just explode over the last 18 to 24 months,” said Brad Jeffrey, the senior director of strategic partnerships for Index Exchange Canada “Publishers are asking for this for in video as well, and so it’s exciting now that we’re starting to see the adoption pick up for video in Canada.”
The premium video market is particularly ripe for this sort of innovation, explains Jeffrey, because of the lack of supply in the Canadian market.
“When we’re talking about broadcast-quality, professionally produced video supply, there’s certainly supply constraint in the industry, because a lot of that inventory is sold upfront,” he said. “Publishers might be selling 80 or 90%, depending on the time of year, of their video supply. That’s certainly not the case in display where a lot more goes unsold.”
Instead of only having access to what remains of a publisher’s video supply after direct sales, buyers can now gain access to the CBC’s entire audience.
“The vast majority of inventory is monetized by direct sales and by the time programmatic becomes enabled, the majority of data rich users are gone. By enabling header bidding for video, buyers now have exposure to our video inventory at the top of our ad stack and are able to see their audiences,” said Jeff MacPherson, the director of monetization platform and services at CBC, in a press release. “It has been well documented that video supply is constrained in this market and we are excited to be partnering with Index Exchange to change that.”
The most significant downside to header bidding has traditionally been its impact on publisher page load times, but Jeffrey believes latency issues won’t be as prominent with Index Exchange’s platform.
“We’ve invested tremendously in our infrastructure in order to be incredibly fast, because we know that if we are going to be latent, because we are going to be contributing to discrepancies, that’s not going to prove to be successful,” he said. “The feedback we’ve received from publishers, as well as in our research, supports the fact that this is actually a faster means of transacting programmatically than the historical standard text.”
As a result, Jeffrey believes that header bidding for video has the potential to be even more successful than it has been for display.
“Generally speaking, this is in many ways a unification of direct demand and programmatic demand,” he said. “Index’s belief is that we’re going to see even more of an impact from header bidding in video than what we’ve seen in display.”
