Magnite’s Ryan Kenney On Why FAST Feels More Like “TV” Again.
In the third and final of our Innovator Spotlight interviews from our new Special Report, “All Grown Up: FAST Comes Of Age”, we sat down with Magnite’s Ryan Kenney to talk about how he sees the challenges around fill rates, transparency and scale and why FAST continues to grow despite all that. Check it out and download the free report.
'I do think FAST is starting to stabilize, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a challenge or at the performance level anyone wants," notes Ryan Kenney, Senior Vice President, Revenue, SpringServe at Magnite. "It’s still a really competitive environment for everyone from the FAST services to the platforms that work with them.'
ALAN WOLK (AW): When I talk to FAST channel owners, fill rates are always the first thing they complain about. Are things finally stabilizing, or is it still a major headache?
RYAN KENNEY (RK): I do think it’s starting to stabilize, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a challenge or at the performance level anyone wants. There’s still room for improvement. That’s true for the FAST services themselves, for Magnite, and for the platforms that work with them.
You’ve got different tiers of publishers and different levels of quality. The space is still dominated by the bigger players that have been around the longest, plus the standalone services that have been acquired by programmers, broadcasters, OEMs and their services. Then there are a lot of other publishers trying to get their content into a consumable streaming environment, and they’re really running into challenges.
AW: FAST services do not give buyers the sort of show-level reporting they get from linear. Have most advertisers made peace with that, or is transparency still a sticking point?
RK: I think a lot of them have come around to what FAST actually is and they weigh the benefits against the drawbacks. The benefits are ease of execution, ease of budget allocation, better pricing efficiencies.
They’re also getting more comfortable with a different kind of transparency. Instead of show titles, they’re looking at contextual signals around the inventory, and at identifiers like OEM first-party data or ACR data. Those are big education points, but they give you a different kind of visibility into users, households, audiences, genres.
There’s still a gap versus classic show-level linear buys. So part of the work is: what can we do to help identify the household or the audience, the genre, and what’s in that genre mix so that at least it’s representative and understandable?
AW: Are you seeing any real differences between how the various FAST services are selling their linear and VOD inventory?
RK: There are definitely differences. The linear FAST side behaves more like traditional TV — when the goal is reach and frequency, you see investment align with those linear-style channels. VOD has historically sat higher in the hierarchy. Advertisers are more flexible about paying higher CPMs because the content can often be pinpointed as more premium.
That also flows through to reporting and transparency. Publishers are willing to structure that differently for a linear feed versus VOD, which influences how dollars get allocated between the two.
AW: How are advertisers actually using FAST today — is it just broad incremental reach, or do you see more strategic use cases emerging?
RK: It really depends on the advertiser and what their historical relationships are with the streamers.
There’s absolutely a broad incremental reach play. A lot of younger viewers start in FAST environments — that’s where they consume TV — and those environments compete head-to-head with places like YouTube in terms of attention. Advertisers know they need a healthy mix if they want “total TV” reach. Different audiences consume content in different ways and go to different places, even within the same app or product.
At the same time, you’re seeing more strategic use: working specific genres, specific environments, thinking about how FAST fits alongside premium SVOD, social video, and so on. But that broad incremental-reach role is still a big part of the value proposition.
AW: Where are we with contextual targeting—are you seeing it start to gain scale?
RK: I’m a big believer in contextual. It makes all the sense in the world given the lack of other identifiers and the changing regulatory landscape. It’s a great way to improve transparency and targeting.
The challenge is that it requires a ton of education. That’s been our experience. There’s more operational work than people expect. You have specialized setups and not every contextual taxonomy is ubiquitous. Programmatic buyers often come in with the expectation that everything should be easy, and contextual isn’t “set it and forget it” yet. That’s impacted adoption.
In terms of flavors, genre-level contextual is still winning out because of immediate scale. Some of the more advanced approaches — different emotional taxonomies, very granular signals — are really cool and innovative, but so far the scale equation has favored broader genre constructs.
AW: Home-screen inventory used to be mostly endemic, e.g. media brands. Are you seeing it expand out to other brands?
RK: We’ve seen a big uptick in non-endemic advertisers on home screens.
On the buy-side, we’re now integrated with a broad mix of DSPs — including some very performance-focused ones — which makes it much easier to transact programmatically in those environments. That alone opens the door to more categories.
Recently, we’ve seen pharma, medical and wellness services, food delivery and QSR-type advertisers, plus banks and financial services. One interesting example was a very hyper-local credit union campaign. That kind of targeting makes a lot of sense on a home screen.
So it’s a healthy mix now, not just media companies promoting their own apps. As more pipes get built out and buyers get comfortable with the formats, you’re going to see even more variety.
AW: We’re seeing more YouTube-style creator content show up on FAST. Does the “rougher” production value scare brands off, or do the passionate fan bases outweigh that?
RK: It’s both. Those audiences are highly engaged and passionate — similar to what we saw around gaming and Twitch a few years back. That’s a huge draw.
The trade-off is whether it feels like unmanaged UGC. Buyers worry about brand safety and about content taking a weird turn mid-stream and putting them next to something they don’t want to be associated with. So they’re interested and they’re leaning in, but they’re going to be very focused on monitoring, brand safety controls, and making sure the environments line up with what the brand stands for.
At the end of the day, that’s how a lot of younger viewers define “TV” now, so advertisers know they need to engage there — they just want confidence in how it’s curated and controlled.
AW: When we talk about sports on FAST, are we mainly looking at niche leagues and shoulder content, or are buyers using it more broadly?
RK: It’s a mix, but in pure FAST environments it’s mostly lesser-known leagues, lower divisions, and a lot of shoulder content. If you still want the sports audience that cares and is engaged, you can absolutely reach them around shoulder programming, and that’s where contextual and content targeting really help.
The key is education and clear labeling. Streamers and publishers need to do right by the advertiser: if it’s live, it should actually be live and declared as such; if it’s a mix of live and shoulder, that should be clear; if it’s just shoulder, that should line up with the targeting criteria and price point.
