Brightline Debuts New Connected TV Ad Offerings in Rebranded Suite

Connected TV technology company Brightline wants to overhaul its streaming ad suite, and it’s starting with a slew of CTV advertising products. The product suite is getting a shiny new name, rebranding to OTT Accelerator from Brightline Ad Impressions. OTT Accelerator has been in the making for 18 months after streaming saw a viewership boost following the onset of the pandemic. “Ad dollars followed and along with the ad dollars came the appetite for an ad experience that was above and beyond just a 30-second commercial,” said Mike Bologna, chief accelerator at Brightline. “Once we saw that, we put our foot on the gas, we got the engineers working and we created the four pillars of Accelerator in reaction to the market demand.” Brightline works with the majority of the streaming industry, including NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and OTT platforms like Roku and Amazon. Last month, Brightline and Warner Bros. Discovery teamed up to create two new ad formats for Discovery+ that will be offered to clients in this year’s upfront. OTT Accelerator's first component is Brightline’s CTV ad units, which Bologna described as the core of the company. The group made wholesale improvements to its In-Stream Interactive and Click-To-Expand units. The Personalized Creative unit can now be customized to feature locally tailored deals, messaging and imagery on a one-to-one household level. Warner Bros. Discovery and Brightline Create 2 New Streaming Ad Formats for Upfront On the shoppability side, QR codes are now merged with scrollable catalog units, which the company said enables both deeper engagement with product catalogs and the closed loop feature of a QR code. “We have scaled it across the largest DTC streamers across the country, that didn’t exist a year ago,” said Bologona. “Every major streamer now has the ability to offer all of our dynamic ad units to our clients." Simplifying CTV ad implementation The second piece is Automatic Accelerator, which is a new offering that simplifies CTV ad implementation through enhanced automation in addition to the standard direct-to-publisher method. Essentially, in partnership with Magnite, buyers and sellers can trade advanced CTV advertising programmatically. Those clients include 72 of the top 100 advertisers, including brands like American Express, BMW, Coca-Cola and more. “You have to offer the agencies the option to buy direct-to-publisher and incorporate your product, and you have to give them the option to do it programmatically. Simply because otherwise, you're limited to upfront dollars, or you're limited to scattered dollars. You're limited to linear buyers, or you’re limited to digital buyers,” said Bologna. Household Intelligence Engine is a built-in engine that works to bolster the value of engagement and attention metrics by adding deduplicated household reach and frequency analytics. Basically, media owners will be able to show household incrementality of ad experiences across properties. “We talk a lot in the industry about graphs and identity and all that's fantastic,” said Bologna. “But the industry has yet to produce data specifically focused on CTV that deduplicates household reach and frequency. Our Household Intelligence Engine will help all of our clients understand unduplicated reach, frequency and improve the analytics across their CTV buys.” The final piece is verification. Brightline’s client-side renderer verifies an ad is being delivered to the right app on the right device, and then delivery is directly verified by third-party technology embedded in the app. “Because our code is installed into all of these apps, there’s not a single bit of fraud, we verify all of that,” said Bologna. “That's the gold standard for verification in CTV advertising. And that's how all of our ads are rendered.”