We aim to be the No. 1 ad tech solution for brands & agencies: Peachâ€™s Andy Gilroy

Peach, a global video ad management platform, manages the advertising content, making it easy for brands, agencies, and media owners to collaborate globally. Broadcasters around the globe rely on Peach every day. The Peach technology operates across over 100 countries worldwide and has revolutionised the ad industry workflows, replacing laborious manual tasks with automated processes and offering efficiency, visibility, and security.

In this interview with Adgully, Andy Gilroy, VP APAC, Peach, talks about Peach’s journey since inception, services/ solutions, some of its recent works and clients, plans for the Indian market, and much more. Excerpts:

Could you walk us through Peach’s journey since its inception?

Since the company’s genesis in 1996, Peach has been helping advertisers get their ads to the right place, on time with full traceability through automation. In that time, we have helped to fundamentally transform the industry, moving it away from physical asset management and non-existent use of tech and into automation, collaboration, and speed.

What are the various services/ solutions provided by Peach?

Peach provides multiple technology platforms that streamline many of the complex workflows in ad content management. Peach’s suite of platforms automate many of the costly and mundane tasks of creating and publishing ad content. Peach delivers significant benefits to all stakeholders on the buy and sell side across the advertising ecosystem.

How is the company simplifying the process of ad land – from TV to digital, OTT, banner and server?

Peach enables the creative side to automate all creative outputs for all platforms (whether that be DSPs, Adservers/ OTTV or social) from a single master file. We then enable trafficking of those assets either directly to the platform or to the individual or agency that is required to upload content.

Peach provides a central repository and reporting framework for clients and agencies to track and store all creative in one place.

What are some of the recent works and some key clients?

L’Oreal and ANZ have recently halved the workflow elements that existed between the brand, production and media agencies in handling and serving video content globally.

What are the company’s plans for the Indian market?

We launched Ebus in India over 10 years ago, and used the technology here first that would go on to change the global TV delivery market. We are now doing the same for an even greater problem in digital.

We aim to become the number one ad technology solution for all brands and agencies, both creative and media to enable streamlined digital creative processes, deliver better quality content and connect the complex and disconnected ecosystem.

Please shed some light on the recently launched report on video asset management. What is the state of Indian video advertising? What is unique about the Indian market?

Peach had commissioned Kantar India to take on a qualitative study of marketers and agencies to identify the key pain points of creative management from creation of assets right through to getting campaigns activated and live.

Our study confirms that India endures challenges in digital content management that is consistent with other markets. Kantar identified five specific areas that cause consistent stress and inefficiencies, they are:

Complex Workflows
Stakeholder Collaboration
Asset Management
Performance Management
Consolidated Reporting

India still has a strong traditional media share (Linear TV is growing unlike in other markets). However, the growth of digital is consistent around the world. The complexity from diversity in things like language requirements amplifies the challenges in India compared to other markets.

How have the acquisitions been instrumental in helping advertisers to not only get their ads out on time, but to keep up with the ever-changing ad formats?

One of the biggest challenges is managing the ever changing ad formats. In TV and video, we have taken that problem away. We automate it all in the background through Peach.

For social and display, we looked to see who was solving the challenges best from a product point of view and acquired a pioneering company called Cape that was at the cutting edge of digital campaign automation. An end-to-end platform that enables the creation at scale of display, social and video ads. It integrates with feeds and publishes directly into required platforms. As well as this, Cape provides asset management and campaign reporting across all platforms used.

Finally, Peach also has a product called Advalidation, which allows advertisers and publishers to ensure all tags are compliant, which means that we are solving issues at source, enabling campaigns to go live on time and without problems.