2nd October 2020
POV: Samsung Launches Self-Serve Ad Platform
Background:
Samsung has announced the launch of a self-serve advertising platform that offers advertisers the opportunity to place ads into its growing Samsung TV Plus ad supported streaming TV offering.
Details and Implications:
Samsung has said that the new DSP will give access to Samsung Ads proprietary inventory along with customizable audiences and data from across 45 million households and will include video campaigns on Samsung TV Plus, the Samsung Content Network and more connected TV inventory available from publishers.
Samsung began serving ads to connect TVs five years ago, albeit with custom made campaigns. That offering developed into a programmatic one over time, but this new announcement takes it into self-serve territory.
The new service will allow advertisers to: target households that were exposed or unexposed to linear ad creative (cable/satellite/antenna); incorporate linear ad exposure into household frequency cap to manage frequency across all ad formats; understand which audiences are being reached by device or platform, like linear TV, OTT or mobile/desktop and will leverage Samsung Ads proprietary data to find and segment audiences across the Samsung household universe.
The Samsung DSP launch follows the extension of the reach of the Samsung TV Plus, which since September 23rd has been available in the Galaxy Store and Google Play for select Galaxy smartphones including the Galaxy Note20, Galaxy S20, Galaxy Note10 or Galaxy S10 series.
Whilst Samsung is nowhere near comparable in size to the larger reach of other advertising platforms, the launch of a self-serve platform for a connected TV hardware manufacturer is an interesting dynamic for the market.
Increasingly, connected TVs are becoming the place where people are accessing their streaming services, as well as via mobile devices or through OTT services such as Apple TV, Amazon Fire Sticks or Roku devices. This gives Samsung a unique opportunity to develop its own streaming content services and also advertising proposition alongside this trend.
Samsung doesn’t break out ad revenue in its quarterly results, but beyond inventory in its own content service it generates ad dollars through ad deals for inventory inside the apps with which it has shared inventory agreements.
Summary:
Samsung won’t be challenging the major digital advertising platforms like Google and Facebook anytime soon, but the concept of the platform-based approach to the advertising world, powered by data collected inside that ecosystem and enhanced by other data sources from outside it, continues to grow apace. Samsung’s challenge will be to prove that its platform has the ability to deliver the scale and value that advertisers demand.