Digiday connected with Frank Puma, Managing Director, Digital Investment Lead, New York, to talk about the opportunities and challenges for Twitch as they expand their advertising opportunities.
Excerpt: Here’s where Amazon comes in. Amazon has been bundling Twitch’s inventory with Amazon’s other owned-and-operated inventory and letting advertisers see in their campaign reports how their ads performed on Twitch specifically.
“If you are a CPG [advertiser] or someone that’s already advertising aggressively on Amazon and you have these general audiences, they’re making it easier to dip your toes into Twitch so that all the buys count to your overarching commitment,” said Puma.
Another challenge for Twitch is that it doesn’t control all of its video inventory. For e-sports events broadcast on Twitch, the game makers and e-sports leagues typically control the commercial loads and split that revenue with Twitch, said Puma. And individual creators who stream on Twitch can disable advertising on their channels. So far these issues have not bubbled up to the point that Twitch has had to tell advertisers that it could not serve as many ad impressions as originally agreed upon.
Twitch is being proactive about the issue. Removing the ad free option move will open up more inventory when it takes effect next month and will make it easier for Twitch to project how much inventory it will have to sell.
“I think that’s why you’re seeing them become more aggressive in programmatic and PMP because they actually have guaranteed inventory that they know exists, that they can push out there and sell,” said Puma.
Read the full piece on Digiday here.
