Publica, a global CTV Ad Server owned by Integral Ad Science, released Platform Connect today; a new feature that will enable existing streaming publishers on the Publica platform to extend their audiences within a transparent and controlled ecosystem of trusted connected TV (CTV) publishers.

CTV ad spend grew to $15.2 billion in 2021—a 57% increase from 2020 and is projected to expand another 39% in 2022—hitting $21.2 billion. According to the IAB 2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook report, 76% of video buyers called CTV a “must-buy” in their media planning budgets .

The managed platform connection within the Publica CTV Ad Server now enables streaming publishers to deploy audience extension strategies at scale and without the need of individual buyer and seller contracts. A streaming publisher working with Publica can now have a single contract to access many buyers, or become a buyer, and source scaled access to trusted sellers, all enabled seamlessly within the Publica UI.

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Publica now serves over 6 billion ads on CTV every month, delivering quality ad experiences for global streaming publishers and smart TV manufacturers such as Philo, AMC, Hearst TV, MLB, Paramount, Fox, XUMO, and Samsung. Platform Connect will empower any publisher to become either a buyer or seller within the Publica ecosystem, enabling greater levels of accuracy around forecasting and audience segmentation for the curation of buy side programmatic deals.

“Publica was built from the ground up to support the needs of streaming publishers and as more advertising budgets enter the addressable TV ecosystem, more of the publishers we are working with have been trying to navigate audience extension strategies so we wanted to make this process as easy, transparent and secure for them as possible,” said Ben Antier, Co-Founder and CEO, Publica.

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Publica will not be charging a percentage of media fee for Platform Connect to either buy or sell sides and will remain demand agnostic when it comes to media activation within CTV ad pods. Instead, Publica will act as the neutral clearing house collecting fees from buyers within the Publica ecosystem and then distributing them to the publishers who have opted into selling streaming inventory via Platform Connect.

Publica was recently shortlisted by Adweek in their readers’ choice Best of Technology Awards for best CTV Ad Server and is currently expanding in both EMEA and APAC markets to support the growing AVOD and FAST ecosystem on connected televisions.