Publica to Provide CTV SSAI and Unified Auctions Services for Hearst Television

Publica, a leading Connected TV (CTV) ad platform owned by Integral Ad Science (Nasdaq: IAS), today announced a technology agreement with Hearst Television, enabling Hearst Television to enhance its streamed content with a traditional TV-like viewing experience, while maximizing Hearst’s CTV advertising revenue via the introduction of a programmatic unified auction.

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As a demand agnostic CTV Ad Server, Publica helps global publishers deliver a seamless ad experience via the introduction of Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), while also helping publishers maximize revenue by running a unified-auction between multiple SSPs and Ad Exchanges. 

Through this relationship with Publica, Hearst Television will provide advertisers with enhanced buying techniques similar to those of linear TV. This includes competitive separation, frequency management and the ability to purchase the first slot within ad pods – much like standard TV commercial breaks.

Key Publica technology features that Hearst Television has implemented include:

• Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) —  Gives Hearst Television the ability to deliver a seamless stream of CTV content and ads, with the granular controls to optimize each slot by revenue per second within the pod.
• Advanced Ad Pod Decisioning — Gives Hearst Television the ability to guarantee an advertiser first pod placement, and own a pod by brand category, helping with competitive separation and buy side frequency management.
• Unified Auction — Enables Hearst Television to run a controlled, unified auction of all demand sources to extract the highest yielding ad per slot in each streaming ad pod. Hearst Television is also using the Publica ‘Live Logs‘ feature to enable real time transparency into each of the programmatic auctions within which the company’s inventory is cleared; this permits Hearst Television to optimize yield and data strategies in real time to ensure it does not lose demand to supply path optimization (SPO).

Publica has been instrumental recently in helping the IAB Tech Lab to build out the new protocols that bring increased security and targeting to streaming ad breaks via the introduction of OpenRTB 2.6, and also ads.cert 2.0 that secures the practice of SSAI. In implementing Publica CTV ad decisioning technology, Hearst Television can ensure its CTV inventory is being targeted and served in the most secure way possible, providing its advertisers with the controls and transparency they require[TC1] .

“We’re excited to be collaborating with Hearst Television and providing them with the ad decisioning technology to grow their global advertising revenues, and empowering Hearst Television with the SSAI capabilities to improve their streamers’ viewing experiences on CTV,” said Ben Antier, Co-Founder & CEO, Publica.

“Publica’s SSAI and Unified Auction technology allows us to accomplish two critical objectives; to provide the best and most relevant experience for viewers, while enabling safe and efficient solutions for our advertisers,” said Jonathan Sumber, VP Digital Sales, Hearst Television.

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