Google has been coveting lucrative TV ad budgets for more than a decade. But despite stats showing that an increasing amount of YouTube viewing takes place on TV sets in the living room, its ad sellers faced a hurdle. Many advertisers and agencies classified YouTube as "online video" or "social media," treating it as a separate part of the media plan from TV.
Brands and media agencies rely on Google's Ad Exchange (AdX) unit to buy programmatic ads from a wide range of publishers. But they've never had much luck negotiating the rates on that ad inventory. Given AdX's dominant position in the marketplace, they might as well have been talking to a brick wall. Earlier this year, AdX execs opened a gap in that wall for the first time.