SAS announces AVOD ad management platform

Multinational analytics provider SAS has launched SAS 360 Match, a first-party sell-side advertising video on demand (AVOD) platform, that also serves ads across a range of additional channels, including web, as well as those subscription video on demand (SVOD) channels that also carry some advertising.

This was the leading announcement from SAS’s marketing and advertising solutions group at a virtual media briefing today. SAS also announced enhancements to its cloud-based analytics platform and a number of new partnerships.

What it does. “360 Match is an end-to-end digital advertising solution,” said Jonathan Moran, head of martech solutions marketing, in the briefing. “It allows brands to serve dynamic ad creative in real-time.” It allows brands to schedule display ads or format and deliver an “entire broadcast break.”

There’s a benefit to the streaming service too. “These streaming service providers don’t want to serve their consumers irrelevant ads,” he said. “They want to serve them ads that are optimized, personalized and make sense to them. They want to deliver a great customer experience even if it does include advertising.”

Dig deeper: AVOD, cookieless identity resolution, give CTV advertisers more options

Combatting subscription fatigue. The context for the 360 Match announcement is the slowdown in demand for SVOD services, reflected for example in Netflix’s shrinking subscriber base. To the extent that tight household budgets are causing subscription cancellations, free service supported by advertising might help reverse the trend.

Match 360 is cloud-based, scales in real-time to adjust to audience fluctuations, and is a neutral offering from an independent technology vendor that is not competing for advertising revenue.

Integrations with other SAS solutions. 360 Match sits within SAS’s suite of marketing and advertising solutions, and integrates with SAS CDP capabilities, its customer journey orchestration solution and marketingplanning and strategy tools.

Why we care. It seems like, in just a couple of years, we’ve moved from a cheerful embrace of on demand video — especially when we were spending a lot of time at home — to a situation where there’s too much content, the content we want to watch is hard to discover, and we can’t keep track of multiple paid and free subscriptions. The easy thing to do is just cancel — after all, re-subscribing is easy if something comes along that we want to see.

And so the pendulum may swing again, back to TV that is on demand but that is supported by commercial breaks — commercial breaks that have a chance to be targeted and relevant based on the first-party data subscribers give up. SAS sees an opportunity here. It’s also a reminder that, while SAS may lead with cloud-first analytics services, it’s playing i the martech space too.

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