Google Ad Manager launches DAI Prefetch for live events

Google last week launched DAI Prefetch for live events, a new product from Google Ad Manager designed OTT publishers. Google is now able to fetch the subsequent ads based on information such as ad break duration.

Live events are challenging for programmatic digital ads. Live events have millions of concurrent viewers, unknown commercial break times, and ad request spikes that occur simultaneously. DAI (Dynamic Ad Insertion) is a server-side ad insertion platform that maintains the TV-like experience.

DAI is used for linear video, live events, and video-on-demand programming.

Peentoo Patel, Group Product Manager - Google Ad Manager at Google wrote that "DAI Prefetch for live events uses a 2-staged approach, first allowing partners to prefetch a portion of their next ad break, say the first ad for each viewer, at the end of the prior ad break. Then, when the ad break begins, Ad Manager serves the first ad that was prefetched and in parallel fetches the subsequent ads based on information such as ad break duration or custom parameters related to events in a game like a goal or a touchdown."

According to Google, DAI Prefetch distributes ad requests more evenly and accommodates longer ad decisioning times, which helps solve for surges in traffic during live events.

Google says sports publishers like SonyLiv, World Surf League, and ABC TV (JP) are using Dynamic Ad Insertion with prefetch to monetize their live events. SonyLiv uses DAI to deliver ads to its live stream viewers across screens, including for its India tour of West Indies 2019 cricket match. World Surf League uses DAI Prefetch to deliver ad experiences for its live surfing events. And ABC TV uses DAI and DAI Prefetch to power ads for live stream events, including their Japanese National High School Baseball Championship Tournament known as Summer Koshien.

“We were able to use DAI to provide a quality user experience and absolutely no buffering—even with sudden traffic spikes during the live event,” says Yasuharu Ikeda, Section Chief of Content Strategy Department, General Programming Division at ABC TV.