IBC
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Justin Gupta joined Google in 2006 just a few months before
it acquired YouTube. “It was a super interesting time to join Google and it
looks like that was a good deal in hindsight,” he says with some
understatement.
Earlier this year YouTube overtook ITV to become the second
most-watched home service (after iPlayer) in the UK, according to Ofcom.
“YouTube has proven to be a great distribution platform for
content and a lot of the great video content that exists comes from traditional
broadcasters,” he says.
Already a seasoned executive working on interactive TV at
the BBC and Red Bee Media, Gupta has experienced 19 years at the heart of
Google working on everything from Google Maps and YouTube to broadcaster and
publisher monetisation products like AdSense, Google Ad Manager and Dynamic Ad
Insertion.
In this, his eighth visit to IBC, Google’s EMEA Head of
Broadcast and Video Ads is focussed on helping broadcasters to grow their
digital revenues.
“When a broadcaster adds a streaming service or wants to use
digital technology to enable linear addressable ads then my team help them work
on that. We also enable some broadcasters to sell their own media on YouTube
using Google Ad Manager.”
Speaking on the IBC Panel: Is this the end of advertising as we know it? New
models, new partnerships, new technologies, Gupta will deliver a
positive message for broadcasters making the move to streaming.
“The industry is at a really exciting tipping point since
every broadcaster is now a digital and a linear media owner.”
He cites data from Omdia revealing that UK broadcasters are
currently generating 28% of their revenues from digital. That’s ahead of other
major European markets Germany, Italy, France, and Spain which make about 10%
of revenues from digital. The direction of travel is nonetheless the same.
“The growth trend is clear. For example, Channel 4 in the UK
have stated they will be a digital first broadcaster by 2030.
The experience of Channel 4 is that distributing on YouTube has not
cannibalised their audience and in fact they are bringing new audiences back to
TV. What you want to do is make people aware of your content and bring people
back to your own platforms. Channel 4 have been the stars over the last couple
of years by really making a success of that.”
In tandem with this feedback loop to attract new audiences
the real push has to be to maximise digital revenues as people move from one to
many linear experiences to digital experiences, which are one-to-one.
The opportunity to be grasped is through programmatic
advertising. Gupta says this is crucial, bordering on existential, for
enhancing the value of their TV media.
“Broadcasters must maximize their digital revenues in the
face of increasing competition from global players. Programmatic advertising is
the essential path forward to do that.”
Programmatic TV advertising leverages automated technology
to facilitate the buying and selling of ad inventory in real-time while
enabling highly relevant, audience-first targeting across platforms
“If you think about it, Connected TV now facilitates
one-to-one advertising rather than one to many while programmatic advertising
improves the efficiency and effectiveness of TV trading. This combination
creates exciting opportunities to show new advertising formats on TV that
weren't previously possible.”
Enter SGAI
Gupta highlights emerging industry standards like Server
Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI), a hybrid method that combines client-side and
server-side ad insertion strengths. SGAI he says enables new addressable
formats, such as ads shown side by side with content in boxes or L-shaped
banner ads where the screen reduces as the advertising is shown. Picture in
Picture experiences are another possible format where the content continues in
a smaller window on screen.
“Because we can make these formats fully addressable, you
can now show different ad experiences to different viewers without disrupting
the viewer experience.”
Gupta says Google see most near-term opportunities for SGAI in live sports
where additional commercial opportunities can be added in a non-disruptive way
to highly engaged audiences - he will demo on stage. It has used the SGAI
approach with one of the largest sports leagues in the US.
“SGAI is still nascent so there are some wrinkles here and there but we're
seeing a lot of the innovation happening in the sports vertical,” he says.
“What I expect will happen is it will launch first at scale with sports and
then, over time, other broadcasters will be able to take advantage of this
technology. The brilliant thing is it's bringing different advertising formats
to TV that we've not had before. And they're also addressable and
programmatic.”
Programmatic TV is being promoted by a European consortia of
broadcasters, ad agencies and ad tech providers of which Google is one. The
European Programmatic TV Initiative aims to dismantle the barriers to
programmatic TV growth across measurement, currency and identity.
“We’re aligning on standardised approaches, removing
obstacles to address technical and operational hurdles and fostering better
collaboration to reduce buyer and seller misalignment,” Gupta explains. “As TV
advertising has developed uniquely in different countries the industry is now
working to harmonise approaches across the five largest European markets.”
The report for Stage One of the Initiative—A Roadmap for Programmatic TV in Europe—has
now been published (and can be downloaded here).
This set out a series of practical next steps to unlock the full potential of
programmatic TV in Europe to be taken forward in Stage Two.
Generative AI will
democratise advertising
The rise of Generative AI video might have sent shivers up
the collective spine of the traditional advertising community but Gupta points
out that AI and Machine Learning has been used to optimise ad placement for
years. He acknowledges that Gen AI has the potential to revolutionise
advertising workflows in the coming years but this will unlock huge potential.
“In the same way that YouTube democratised broadcasting, Gen AI video is going
to democratise content creation. In advertising that means it's going to become
easier to create high quality ad content at an affordable cost, and this
unlocks a significant new opportunity within digital advertising.”
He continues, “One promise of addressable advertising was
that every viewer could see a different version of the same ad, but in practice
the production workflows required you to bake addressability into the
production process if you wanted to create a thousand variants of your ad with
a different end segment for each town or city in your country. Now you can do
this on-the-fly. As these tools mature, you may even be able to create such
variants in real time in products like ours.”
Where does that leave the creative agency? Gupta thinks the smart ones will use
AI to make their creative better, more efficient and more cost effective so
that broadcast advertisers can gain the benefits.
“Ultimately, AI doesn't replace creativity. All it does is
speed up some of the execution,” he insists. “Generative AI can enable advertisers to
create high-quality creative assets at unprecedented scale supercharging the
creative process.”
For smaller advertisers who were priced out of advertising
on TV before, Generative AI video creation and adaptation tools are an enabler.
“They'll lower the cost of creating and reversioning video ads and that again
will enable small advertisers to create high quality ads.”
Making linear
experiences addressable
Since Dynamic Ad Insertion remains a big focus for the
broadcasters Google works with, Gupta outlines three main approaches to making
linear experiences addressable, supported with Google Ad Manager.
For example, in streaming, using Dynamic Ad Insertion - as
DAZN recently did for the FIFA Club World Cup, streaming 1:1 addressable ads to
over millions of concurrent viewers across the world. Watch out for a case
study that Google is launching on this with DAZN at IBC2025.
Second, in set-top-boxes with linear ads replaced with
digital ones during live viewing. Sky have been doing Dynamic Ad Replacement
successfully for around a decade using Sky AdSmart.
And thirdly, in Connected TVs around free-to-air
experiences, using technologies like HbbTV to essentially stream addressable ad
breaks ‘over the top’ of the TV content.
To underscore the importance of broadcasters leaning into programmatic advertising in TV, he highlighted that “TV advertising is funding a significant portion of the content we love. So, if you love TV, Ad Tech will continue to be a strategic enabler for the future of TV.”
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