Ep 3: Ad pods: why CTV can’t auction one slot at a time

Selling a TV break one slot at a time leaves seconds unsold.

An ad pod is a group of ads played back to back in one break.

Take a sixty-second break on stream TV.example. Sold slot by slot, slot one goes alone. A thirty-second car ad wins. Then slot two. The top bid is a rival car brand, which can’t run back to back. Next, a forty-five-second ad. Too long. Thirty seconds sit empty. OpenRTB two point six fixes this with pod bidding. One request carries the whole break. Each slot shares one pod ID, with a sixty-second pod duration, at most four ads, and a per-second floor. At fifty cents a second, a thirty-second ad must bid fifteen dollars CPM. Slot in pod can promise first position. The seller builds a set that fills all sixty.

Today, ask your SSP: do our CTV requests carry a pod ID?

Next: SSAI versus CSAI.