Understanding the live event ad serving process
Live events—like sports finals, big awards shows, or presidential debates—make for a complex and high-stakes advertising process in streaming TV, with sometimes millions of viewers simultaneously receiving personalized ads at every break.
This is some of the most valuable programming in television, and there’s an exciting opportunity to combine the high relevancy of programmatic advertising with the dynamic experience of live TV. However, this new landscape presents unique challenges.
Let’s walk through how live event advertising in streaming TV actually works.
Before we start, it’s important to understand that programmatic advertising allows for real-time ad selection, meaning the system picks the perfect ad for each viewer at the exact moment it’s needed, which creates new complexities with live streaming versus on-demand viewing.
The key difference is concurrency. For on-demand content, viewers tune in at different times, spreading out the demand for ads. Live events, on the other hand, have mandatory commercial breaks, and viewers are all tuning in at the exact same time. When an ad break occurs, hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of viewers generate simultaneous requests for ads.
With certain events, there may also be unplanned ad breaks, say when an athlete is injured on the field or a timeout is called. Both of these possibilities trigger a spike in bid requests that flood programmatic pipes in an instant.
How live event ad serving works in streaming TV
Let’s look at how the live event ad serving process works step by step.
- Imagine a field-level film crew documenting a big sports championship. This audio and video content is sent to the broadcast control center where the feeds are mixed in real time and encoded into a digital format before being transmitted to viewers. When a producer decides to inject an ad break, they’ll place a SCTE 35 marker into the feed, initiating the ad serving process.
- Broadcasters use what’s called server-side ad insertion technology, or SSAI, to seamlessly integrate ads into the live stream. When an ad break is triggered, the SSAI requests ads from the broadcaster’s ad server.
- The ad server then communicates with the SSPs it’s connected to. SSPs will use their understanding of the preferred structure for that particular ad pod, like the total time to fill and the minimum and maximum allowed duration of ads, to request bids from DSPs. These details are referred to as the ad pod geometry.
- Then, DSPs evaluate a number of bid request signals in real time and return bids for the impression opportunities that meet buyers’ parameters.
- Once the SSP collects the bids and excludes any that may be ineligible or duplicative, it returns the bids and corresponding creatives back to the ad server for consideration in the final construction.
- The ad server constructs an ad pod that complies with the broadcaster’s guidelines, including ad length and competitive separation, as well as optimizes for both viewer experience and revenue.
- It then returns the constructed ad pod to the SSAI, which stitches it into the live stream, ensuring a smooth playback experience for the viewer.
The entire process—from request to ad delivery—happens within milliseconds, even during high-concurrency spikes, making it possible for millions of viewers to see relevant ads without interruptions.
Challenges with live event ad serving
While live event ad serving follows a similar process as other streaming opportunities, the complexity and scale of live events introduces a number of challenges broadcasters, marketers, and ad tech platforms must overcome to ensure a seamless experience.
With live events, broadcasters want to keep their streams as close to real time as possible to protect the viewer experience—if there’s any delay in the stream, viewers might hear about a big moment before they see it on their screens. This commitment to low latency means that ad requests must be processed almost instantly, leaving very little room for error.
The stakes are incredibly high. Even small delays or failures in the ad-serving process can disrupt the entire stream. Slow responses, timeouts, or missing creative files can cause streams to crash or default to a slate, which is a placeholder screen shown when no ads are available.
In the worst-case scenario, latency in the ad tech stack can cause the entire SSAI system to fail, leading to a complete breakdown of the broadcast.
Another challenge is creative readiness. Ads must be adapted to suit a variety of devices—like smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs—as well as different internet connection speeds. Ensuring that every ad looks great, no matter how or where it’s viewed, adds another layer of complexity.
Lastly, there’s the issue of signaling, a manual process in which media owners may struggle to clearly alert buyers about a live event opportunity and when exactly it’s happening.
This means that buyers may not be aware of the schedule of live events in advance, missing out on the opportunity to have their campaigns ready to air during a high value event. The lack of transparent signaling also makes it much more difficult for buyers to accurately identify live events in the bidstream.
New solutions for live event advertising
The ad tech industry is developing new solutions to address the challenges of live event advertising, focusing on improving efficiency and reliability. Some of these solutions include:
- Creative pre-ingestion, where ads are prepared in advance to ensure they’re ready for immediate deployment during an ad break
- Enhanced signaling and collaboration between media buyers and sellers, including a new content attribute to signal live events in the bidstream as well as pre-sharing event schedules and audience details to help buyers plan campaigns more effectively
- Staggered and pre-fetched bid requests, which help prevent server overload by more evenly distributing requests over time to mitigate spikes
- Near-real-time viewership data, which can allow broadcasters and ad tech providers to dynamically scale their compute resources during events, ensuring smooth streaming and maximized ad opportunities during key moments
These innovations are still evolving but promise to revolutionize live event advertising in streaming TV.
Our industry continues to collaborate to improve communication, preparation, and dynamic resource management, paving the way for greater reliability, efficiency, and profitability in programmatic ad delivery for live events.
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