Page 50 - Adnews magazine Sep-Oct 2022

Meet the Team
SAMSUNG ADS
When Alex Spurzem, general manager of Samsung Ads in Australia, began the brand’s rollout here, CTV was still in its infancy.
“I’m pretty sure I was able to count the number of advertising partners that we had around a year ago on one hand,” said Spurzem
“That’s now grown tenfold and and we’re now working directly with a raft of advertisers in almost an always-on capacity.
“We’ve struck up a bunch of partnerships, working with the major holding companies, all the broadcasters, and we’ve expanded our con- nectivity through SSPs.
“Magnite has also recently come on board as a partner to add Samsung CTV inventory to their programmatic media buy, which includes Samsung TV Plus, our free, ad-supported television service that comes pre-installed on all Samsung TVs.”
Spurzem said the local team has grown from just himself to around 30 people. This expansion is made up of ad sales, data scientists, opera- tions, marketing and content acquisition related to Samsung TV Plus.
That partnership with Magnite adds to a growing list of partners for Samsung Ads, including Yahoo, PubMatic and Xandr amongst others.
“From our point of view, programmatic brings a degree of convenience and automation that previously wasn’t present and was an inevitable and natural evolution of giving buyers more control.
“The underlying infrastructure in terms of programmatic has been quite helpful to the industry, so we try to marry that with the best of both worlds. It’s an execution layer for us, but it’s not a substitute for being close advisors and partners to our customers.”
The future of Connected TV, from a Samsung Ads perspective, has them bullish on more advertising-supported services, whether that’s free ad supported television or advertising-supported video on demand (VOD).
“We have a lot of insight in terms of what happens on Samsung Smart TVs. One of the things we’ve seen, according to Roy Morgan, is that the average smart TV in Australia is subscribed to 2.7 sub- scription services.
AUSTRALIA
Samsung Ads, after a six-month soft launch near the end of 2020, officially opened in Australia at the end of March 2021.
amsung Ads’ advertising solu-
S
tions are built on a unique source of TV data from Samsung Smart TVs. Samsung Ads provides the opportunity to
connect linear, OTT, and gaming to help brands see the total advanced TV picture.
The managed service and pro- grammatic offerings help to achieve incremental reach, com- pliment linear TV campaigns, manage frequency, find diffi- cult-to-reach audiences and most importantly, measure outcomes.
WORDS BY
JASON POLLOCK