Presenting The Road to Total Video to our most important audience — our clients

Before announcing The Road to Total Video initiative to the wider industry, we shared the journey with some of the people closest to our business: our clients and partners at smartclip’s Product Advisory Board (PAB).

Together, Tim Nieland, General Director Product, Data & Transformation at Ad Alliance Germany, and Gloria Eichler, CPO at smartclip, presented the vision behind one of the most important transformation projects underway across our businesses — and, crucially, what it will take to turn that vision into reality.

The ambition is to bring the strengths of linear TV and digital video together: the scale, premium content, and impact of linear, combined with the addressability, targeting, and optimisation capabilities of digital. The goal is a Total Video offering spanning Linear TV, ATV, CTV and online video, supported by a holistic technology environment that connects the customer journey from planning and booking through to optimisation, reporting, and invoicing.

The session also gave our clients a closer look at some of the key challenges and opportunities we’re addressing along the way. Among the topics discussed were:

• One Total Video offering: Bringing linear and digital video inventory together into a single proposition across screens and devices.
• Simpler workflows: Moving towards a more seamless process from planning and booking to campaign delivery, optimisation, reporting and invoicing.
• Cross-video optimisation: Exploring how campaigns can be managed and optimised across linear and digital inventory rather than within separate silos.
• Greater comparability and transparency: Working towards more consistent metrics and reporting across video environments, with better visibility into campaign performance and impact.
• The technology behind the vision: Looking at how existing smartclip capabilities can evolve to help manage, deliver and report linear and digital advertising as one.

Importantly, the conversation wasn’t about presenting a finished product. It was about showing where we are heading, what we can already build on, and the work still required to bring these historically separate worlds together.

There is still plenty of road ahead. And that is exactly the point of The Road to Total Video: to share the progress, challenges, and learnings along the way.