Hulu is implementing a programmatic advertising solution powered by LiveRail and supported by Oracle, marking its first foray into the automated ad buying and selling marketplace. The mixed subscription-and-ad-supported provider is making its premium ad inventory available across its desktop, mobile and connected TV platforms.
The platform uses Facebook-owned LiveRail's Video Private Exchange (VPX), which enables Hulu to automatically broker deals with marketers and calculate the value of ad impressions "on the fly," according to Variety. Oracle's Data Management Platform, part of its cloud solution, will help Hulu with scale, reach and efficiency of ad delivery while providing another layer of metrics.
"With this new offering, Hulu is at the forefront of defining 'programmatic' for the digital video ecosystem and will increase efficiency and ROI for marketers," said Peter Naylor, SVP of advertising for Hulu, in a blog post on the company website.
Hulu enumerated other benefits to its programmatic offering in the post, noting that the current commercial load is lighter than that of television, "resulting in higher brand recall," and that ads are unskippable and targeted to more specific audiences. Hulu also said that marketers will only be charged for ads that are viewed to 100 percent completion -- a move to reassure brand advertisers in a programmatic market where what counts as a view for video ads can be as short as 2 seconds.
"Despite going 'programmatic,' Hulu is retaining a certain level of control over its sales structure," a Mediapost article said. "By creating a private marketplace with LiveRail -- rather than an open marketplace -- Hulu can still pull the levers when it comes to which advertisers have access to its inventory."
For more:
- see this blog post
- see this Mediapost article
- see this Variety article
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