The New TV
Twenty years across digital media, ad tech and now the new TV ecosystem. SVP Head of EMEA at Magnite, the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform, on the convergence of linear and streaming, why hyper-local data targeting is reshaping TV, and the role of marketplaces, curation and trust in a programmatic world.
“Only advertise if it is raining in Manchester.”
Julie Selman is SVP Head of EMEA at Magnite, the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform. Twenty years across digital media starting at Vibrant Media in Italy, through Taboola, StickyAds/FreeWheel and Magnite. A film and TV graduate (and a former soap-opera academic) who grew up with digital advertising and now works at the centre of the convergence between linear and streaming.
Julie studied film and TV (and briefly law), worked on film sets as a student, and was set on a media career after a school trip to Manhattan advertising agencies that left her thinking the industry looked glamorous and creative. She moved to London for a Master’s in Media and Sociology and (in her telling) needed a job, so she went on Gumtree and found a temp role at a young ad-tech start-up called Vibrant Media. The company grew up around her, and so did digital advertising.
From August 2005 to November 2008 Julie spent three years at Vibrant Media in Italy as Business Development Manager and then Head of Sales Italy. After an MBA at SDA Bocconi (2009–2010) with a summer associate role at Philips Consumer Lifestyle, she joined CHEP as Manager of Commercial Excellence and Customer Solutions for 17 months, then spent seven months at Qualifio as Country Manager UK. From April 2013 to December 2015 she ran media sales at Taboola during its early UK growth phase, then joined StickyAds in December 2015 as Sales Director EMEA. StickyAds became FreeWheel (a Comcast company) through acquisition; Julie continued there for almost three more years as Senior Regional Director Demand EMEA, then Senior Director Head of Demand Strategy for the UK and Northern Europe.
In January 2021 Julie joined Magnite as Managing Director UK and Nordics. Eleven months later she was promoted to SVP Head of EMEA, leading the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Magnite’s positioning sits at the centre of the new TV ecosystem: helping publishers and broadcasters package and monetise premium video inventory, and helping buyers reach audiences efficiently through curation, marketplaces and automation.
“More problems, better. No problems, no need for you.”
“Linear and streaming are complementary, not replacement. Both have a role.”
Linear TV (even running on a smart TV) still owns the moments the whole nation watches together: live sport, the Traitors, Bake Off, the World Cup, the Olympics. That collective audience moment is not going anywhere. Streaming layers data, targeting and flexibility on top of that and turns big-budget upfront commitments into precise, A/B-testable buys with no minimum spend. The interesting thing is the funny inversion underway: broadcasters now releasing whole series at once, and streamers releasing one episode a week. Format is shaping behaviour, behaviour is shaping format, and the truth at the bottom is that content is what people choose.
“Programmatic is not remnant inventory. Curation, data and transparency mean premium and automated coexist.”
A persistent myth is that programmatic equals cheap and remnant. Julie’s argument is that this confused the display market a few years ago and has not been true in CTV since the start. Curation has reshaped the sell side: marketplaces let publishers package premium inventory by content type, audience, signal or geography, and let buyers understand what they are getting with more transparency than ever. Hyper-local activation (only advertise to delivery service customers when it is raining in Manchester) is the kind of precision linear could never deliver. Premium is now a function of curation as much as content.
“Trust in media is low. Slop, fake content, AI-made imagery. Every transaction is built on trust.”
Trust in media is at a low ebb, and AI is making it worse on the content side (slop, fake imagery, the question of what is real) and on the trading side (less human interaction, more automation eroding the perception of trust if not the substance). Julie’s view is that the human stays central to the system: traders moving from sending faxes to running sophisticated tools is the same arc the next generation will repeat with agentic AI, but transactions still rest on humans trusting humans, brands trusting publishers and buyers trusting platforms. Get trust wrong once and the relationship is over.
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