But how prevalent does data-driven buying need to be in the new-look TV, and how are different agencies finding value?

That is what eight executives discussed during Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next, a recently-wrapped Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. Here are the highlights.

1. Spend can be reallocated to incremental audiences

Amobee chief commercial officer Jack Bamberger says his new product CTV Allocator forecasts incremental reach to a linear TV schedule across the ecosystem’s CTV supply space

“We’re able to see a desired reach against strategic audience of 14% less cost for a brand. We were able to put that back into the platform and reallocate those funds to target incremental audiences on behalf of the brand.”

Amobee to “Optimize” The Buy and Sell Side with Tim Spengler and Valerie Bischak

2. Business easy as ACBC

Paul Woolmington, CEO of independent ad agency Canvas Worldwide, says he is heeding what he calls his law of “Accelerated COVID Behaviour Change,” ACBC.

“With a lot of change that we’ve seen in our industry over the decades, you don’t actually viscerally see it. But I think we’re seeing it viscerally in the last 12 months. We need a greater degree of unification … and alignment behind incumbents versus challengers.”

Omnichannel Strategy Demands Agency Integration: Canvas’s Paul Woolmington

3. Alcohol agents look to CTV

Amy D’Souza, Senior Director, Media & Digital Marketing at Constellation Brands, an agency representing beer, wine and spirit brands, says breweries hope connected TV can help make up for declining linear TV audiences.

“Linear TV has played an important role for broad-reach brands like Corona and Modelo in the past. We continue to increase our investment and our overall share towards streaming platforms to really help continue to deliver that broad reach and scale.”

Alcohol Brands Tap CTV To Find Lost Linear Viewers: Constellation’s D’Souza

4. Beer makers double-down on loyal drinkers

Brad Feinberg, North America vice president of media and consumer engagement at Molson Coors, says challenges with audience-based targeting mean he is now using more first-party data from the most loyal audiences.

“We are really ramping up our ability to have a view of consumers that have raised their hand that want to know about our brand (and understanding their) key behaviours or attitudes, then kind of going out and finding them.”

‘We’ll Look for Flexibility at Ad Upfronts’: Molson Coors’ Brad Feinberg

5. Upfront season is evergreen

Despite industry shifts, Dani Benowitz, president of U.S. at Interpublic Group’s Magna Global, says the traditional upfront TV ad sales season is “still an important part of a video mix”.

“We’re a big proponent of the calendar year. Flexibility still remains to be very important to our clients, (but) you’ll see people come back to the upfront as the world is opening up and budgets are becoming more sound.”

Ad Spend Will Diversify During Upfront Sales Season: Magna’s Dani Benowitz

6. Agency data must branch out

Ed Davis, chief product officer of OpenAP, says, whilst media agencies have invested in building their own audience data platforms, they cannot stand alone.

“Breaking that sophisticated knowledge out of their walls and turning it into something that can be actioned on with publishers or with buying systems, that’s always been the friction point.”

Identity Graphs Are Learning To Talk To Each Other: OpenAP’s Davis

7. TV’s ‘monster evolution’

Jay Askinasi, Chief Growth Officer, Publicis Groupe United States, says TV ad planning now has many more buying cues than just date and time.

“The way that inventory is being packaged, the way that you can access it, the channels with which you can access it through and even the definitions of the media types… in the upfront process, you’ll see more so than ever before those worlds coming together a little bit more.”

Endless Endpoints: Finding & Overcoming CTV Ad Complexity With Publicis’ Askinasi

8. Disney’s data builds a broad platform

Lisa Valentino, executive Vice President, Client Solutions & Addressable Enablement, Disney Advertising Sales, says Disney is selling its footprint using data.

“We’ve unified eight networks and many ad-supported addressable platform, Hulu being one of them – which is no easy feat, but it has given us, I think, a great ground to grow and build a future model.”

Rebooting Reach: Disney’s Valentino Combines Scale With Smarts

In the latest example, VideoAmp has extended a deal through which it uses data from 18 million VIZIO smart TVs for planning, measurement and TV ad sales.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp chief strategy officer Nick Chakalos explains why this kind of collaboration is the way forward.

We are thrilled to announce our renewed partnership with @VIZIO, where we will maintain access to their Inscape ACR data for planning, measurement and TV ad sales use cases. Check out the full story here: https://t.co/DXY9O0zVvX pic.twitter.com/7VjajdABOP

— VideoAmp (@Video_Amp) October 6, 2021

Actual viewing behavior

“We gain access to a world-class data set that really helps us bring to market a new currency and a new data set that can be utilized by buyers and sellers to transact in whatever means they want to and whatever KPI or performance indicator that they want to – whether that’s on a basic demo(graphic), an advanced audience, or on something more sophisticated like attribution,” Chakalos says.

The deal, announced this month, is an extension of VideoAmp’s existing use of VIZIO’s Inscape automatic content recognition (ACR) data, which takes viewing behavior from VIZIO smart TV owners, which had been due to expire at the end of 2021.

Now the deal runs to the end of 2025, with an option for VideoAmp to extend.

VideoAmp’s platform enables audience data, ad insight reports and investment activation for new TV ad buyers.

ViacomCBS Teams With VideoAmp To Explore Alternative TV Ad Currency – Deadline https://t.co/xZKLEUPa9i

— Nick Chakalos (@NickChakalos) October 5, 2021

Join the dots

For Chakalos, it is all about collaboration the industry needs to connect up disparate systems.

“We certainly are looking at this from the standpoint of having a data set that can enable measurement that’s required across OTT, across linear TV, across social and other forms of media consumption,” he explains.

“We’re headed towards a place that’s fairly exciting. It’s about ensuring that TV ad spend is accurately measured and that publishers can understand their yield a bit better and gain credit for the audiences that they have.

“We are proceeding collaboratively towards that.”

For some in the industry, that is a blessing but also a curse.

In this video interview with editorial advisor Jon Watts for Beet.TV, Comcast Technology Solutions’ VP and GM Richard Nunn explains why current systems need to connect up to manage the coming expansion.

Ad expansion coming

“What we’re seeing from a numbers perspective is, over the next three to five years, about a 7X increase in ad volume, driven by obviously a lot of the emerging channels that we’re now seeing, OTT and CTV and addressability,” Nunn says.

“If you throw on personalization on top of that, those numbers get very, very large indeed. The current manual processes that you allude to really are struggling to deal with that scale.

“That challenge of scale, which is a challenge that the industry has to face and become a lot more standardised.”

Changing it up

Comcast’s footprint includes NBC and Sky, a cable division and ad-tech including FreeWheel.

The division offers a host of solutions to bring infrastructure to the digital TV world.

Comcast Technology Solutions recently published a report, What’s Next For TV Advertising?, detailing four changes that will happen in the next five years:

1. Addressable becomes a reality
2. Workflows get automated
3. Standards are helped to scale
4. Data will differentiate measurement abilities

The world of TV advertising is changing quickly, and businesses must adapt to keep up. explore the major drivers behind the changes: https://t.co/w8V9CA0Geb #TVAdvertising pic.twitter.com/VWILtW09dd

— Comcast Technology Solutions (@ComcastTechSoln) August 19, 2021

Thirst for scale

“Today it’s very siloed where you have linear and digital technology,” Nunn continues. “You can start to bridge that divide for sure.

“But the opportunities really are about the automation that will drive the solutions to deal with that advertiser volume, as well as advertiser scale as well, and bringing together a lot of these point-based solutions in an aggregated platform that gives you complete transparency around where and what an asset has done, where it’s landed.

“It really helps solve that challenge of scale, which the industry has to face and become a lot more standardized.”

You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.

This month, Yahoo announced Tubi is extending its use of Yahoo’s supply-side ad software (SSP) to also connect with its demand-side platform (DSP).

As Iván Markman, chief business officer of Yahoo, explains in this video interview with Beet.TV, that means Yahoo ad buyers now have access to one of the biggest connected TV destinations.

Expanded partnership

“They’ve been leveraging our SSP for about three years,” Markman says.

“Advertisers and agencies can now access the high-growth inventory and engagement opportunities that Tubi has to offer in those ways, above and beyond the ways that they have been able to access them in our exchange.

“We are lighting up a unique set of capabilities in our DSP to enable advertisers and agencies to access supply in unique ways and better ways.

“Programmatic guaranteed deals reporting and planning gets amplified within the DSP.

“A result of that for Tubi is to drive greater growth as they can transact.”

From cathode-ray to Tubi

Now owned by Fox, Tubi has been on a tear.

Reportedly, usage has doubled in the last year, whilst upfront commitments have tripled.

Now Fox wants to spend even more on streaming TV.

Fox Corp.’s streamers will get a cash boost in the coming year as the media company looks to lean further into its growing portfolio of ad-supported and subscription streaming services like Tubi. https://t.co/nmCvI5T1UQ

— Adweek (@Adweek) August 4, 2021

Creative canvas

Markman is clear why he thinks Tubi is growing.

“There’s quality content that is very relevant ,” he says.

“(It is) a great kind of creative canvas, if you will, when it comes to the consumer experience.

“When you think about upfronts as an example, it really helps everyone participate in those opportunities in much more valuable ways.”

Not only do ad agencies have to get their own corporate practices straight, they also have to represent wider society in the work that they bring to the world.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine Group CEO Kasha Cacy explains what her company is doing and why it matters.

Diversity drives innovation

“There’s a business advantage to diversity,” says Cacy. “The reason Florence flourished was the Medici family brought in so many different kinds of people, artists and scientists and philosophers.

“That cross-section and that intermingling of ideas is what drives innovation.

“If we don’t have a company that represents the US, then there’s no way we can market effectively to the US.

“The history is that many, many, many agencies have not had representation in terms of women, not had representation in terms of black and brown people.”

"If you step back, it’s easy to understand why emotion matters. Brands that connect emotionally are humanized – classified differently," states Jim Nelson, SVP at @ENGINEInsight. Explore his blog on how brands can succeed in a post-COVID world. https://t.co/EweWy4fba1

— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) July 7, 2021

Equality on the agenda

Over the last year, the industry has stepped up initiatives to enhance diversity.

• Dentsu UK launched Dentsu Together, a scheme to better reach underrepresented communities using contextual and geo-targeting tools.
• GroupM has said it is creating “inclusion PMPs (private marketplaces)”, directly aimed at putting money back into the hands of underrepresented voices like LGBTQ+ and black groups.
• Disney’s Hulu launched Onyx Collective, a content brand for people of color; announced an ABC News strand called Voices Of Change and pitched The Undefeated, a news site covering race and sport.

Of course, doing so isn’t just a nice-to-have. Cacy’s view is that speaking better to distinct communities can enhance results, too.

We are proud to partner with @NYWICI to conduct a national research study (https://t.co/kptrcYKxeT) to understand how COVID-19 has affected women across all demographics in the field of communications. Participate in the study at the link. https://t.co/kptrcYKxeT #WomenHeard pic.twitter.com/NVzldlx0Px

— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 20, 2021

Everlasting diversity quest

But Engine’s CEO has had to make internal changes to get there.

“What we’ve been doing over the past year is really pushing our employees to understand the core issues of equity and systemic racism,” she explains.

“So we’ve had lots of really tough conversations facilitated by some great folks in the company, things around the historic inequity in terms of housing and mortgages and financing of housing and how that affects wealth over generations.”

For Cacy, diversity is not just a one-and-done, box-ticking exercise.

“In years past what I’ve seen is we do unconscious bias training once a year, and then it’d be one and done and you’d go off and focus on other things,” she says. “This is something that we’re talking about if not monthly, more frequently

“It really takes that kind of consistency and persistence to see those changes happen.”

You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.

Google may have delayed its switch-off for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome until 2023.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Yieldmo’s CEO Mike Yavonditte says the erosion of targetability presents a problem that must be addressed.

Missing address

“Right now, only about half of all inventory is addressable using a cookie … merely half of all adults,” Yavonditte says.

“A lot of the people that use iPhones, for instance, are not in that target set. They tend to be among the most coveted from a demographic standpoint, yet most, most marketers can’t reach them.”

He says that will get worse when Google switches off cookies. “Addressability will go from 50-50 to about 20%,” he adds. “Brands and agencies and advertisers are going to have to start testing and experimenting with other types of systems.”

After cookies

Did somebody say pumpkin spice? Let Yieldmo's custom Halloween deals help you deliver stronger campaign results with less hassle, all while maintaining access to a quality, safe supply. Learn more: https://t.co/oyFwqK6ptJ pic.twitter.com/M8Sa8HbtyY

— Yieldmo (@Yieldmo) September 15, 2021

Yavonditte says potential alternatives include privacy compliance systems and alternative identifiers.

The industry has been racing to plug the addressability gap left by the wave of pro-privacy measures, with a plethora of candidates more diverse than traditional cookies.

Yavonditte’s own company, Yieldmo, which powers an ad marketplace, thinks it has a unique take.

It has a supply-side platform (SSP) technology with an opinion.

The data difference

“Most SSPs do not do not provide targeting and optimization because most of their customers come with their own form of targeting, but we decided to invest in it,” Yavonditte says.

“We spent about $25 million in the last six years, just on the infrastructure required to collect trillions and trillions of the data events every month.

“We take the entire open web… We collect a bunch of information that a lot of other companies like motor IAS or DV360 collect but we also collect dozens and dozens of different kinds of events, every 200 milliseconds, that we believe no one else in the world collects.

“All that data gets organised in very interesting ways, and then gets fed into machine learning models that best correlate to the KPIs of all advertisers that spend money in this marketplace.”

Performance and growth

Faced with ad fatigue and new #privacy laws, #marketers relying on #personalization might need a new plan. Thankfully, Yieldmo has the plan.

Our GM of Analytics, Lisa @lisabradner shares more here and on @IHAForum blog: https://t.co/16QCEECJSQ

— Yieldmo (@Yieldmo) September 21, 2021

Yavonditte hopes that tech will help Yieldmo build self-service tools that can increase advertiser performance by 80% to 100%.

The company has been hiring hard over the last year and recently announced integration with LiveRamps Authenticated Traffic Solution.

The company raised a further $2 million in Series C money in mid-2020.

You’re watching “Diversifying Spend: Buying Beyond Audiences” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Yieldmo. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

The chief marketing officer of Mastercard’s health business says the quest for user privacy is right-on.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rajamannar explains which replacements may work best, and how advertisers should respond.

Privacy is right

“I completely agree with a statement which Tim Cook had made brilliantly, ‘Privacy is a fundamental right’,” he says.

“There are so many data breaches that are happening. If you guys don’t know how to protect my data, you have no business collecting my data.

“As a marketer, I have to behave in a very responsible way to my consumers.

“I think it’s a good decision that they have taken, but we need to find solutions.”

Congratulations to Mastercard CMO @RajaRajamannar for on not only being awarded the @Adweek Brand Genius Award, but also being recognized as the Grand Brand Genius for your creativity, leadership & #marketing innovation. https://t.co/VIWHgTy8jy

— Mastercard News (@MastercardNews) September 27, 2021

Safety in numbers

Vendors across the industry are racing to cook-up alternatives to third-party tracking cookies – not only as Apple has reduced its own identify offering but with Google’s deprecation of Chrome cookies now looming by 2023.

Rajamannar sees three categories of replacement emerging:

Cohorts – “It is one step better than blindly bombarding all consumers with all kinds of ads. It’s a step better, but still not good”

Vendor-specific alternatives – “You’ve got companies like Trade Desk, LiveRamp and a whole bunch of other companies out there, they’re coming with their own solutions, which we need to see how they are.”

Broad-based initiatives – “ANA is working on some solutions at the industry level, which I think is the smartest way to do, taking advantage of the scale that all of us collectively bring to the table.”

I am excited that my book, Quantum Marketing, is now published in Korean, and reaching more people as we head into this next paradigm of marketing! pic.twitter.com/LrI3khvVHl

— Raja Rajamannar (@RajaRajamannar) September 7, 2021

How to act

Regardless of what comes after the cookie, the Mastercard CMO thinks brands don’t have to wait; they can take two key steps now:

1. Minimise the collection of data

“What information do you really need to know about the consumer? Do you really need to know all this stuff? Or can you actually come up with the same decision, with the same precision, knowing a lot less data?”

2. Reach the user right

“How do you then track the consumer, or how do you contextually serve the right advertisement in a non-intrusive non-repetitive fashion that makes sense to the consumer?”

Production Notes:   This video is an except from an extended conversation which will be published 10.11 on the BeetCast, the podcast. The BeetCast is sponsored by TransUnion.

Many who have dabbled with advertising through streaming TV services know that its lack of cookie identifiers has historically been a problem. But the deprecation of third-party cookies in web browsers is proving to be a great leveller.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Michael Zacharski, CEO of ENGINE Media Exchange (EMX), the supply-side platform linked with Engine Group, says he is betting his company on CTV being the fulcrum for the advertising future.

CTV for cookie-less

“We went completely cookie-less in the top of 2021, and we were still testing both a cookie and non-cookie model back in the middle of 2020,” Zacharski says. “And so we’ve tested both and we found that we liked the cookie-less future.

“We found that solutions that work in CTV can be extensible to their environments. And we’re big believers that the TV is going to continue to be the centrepiece of the household, the primary medium around which families gathered together

“So we’re centering our offerings around that premise and making sure that we can deliver in CTV and omni-channel media.”

The new stack

EMX’s platforms include:

• RTBx, a real-time bidding exchange.
• BiddR°360, a header bidding wrapper for publishers.
• Exchange BI, a campaign reporting and insights dashboard.
• Local Marketing Cloud, for brands with a lot of brick-and-mortar retail locations.

In February, it also launched Device Graph+, an offering supporting CTV and omnichannel media placement using data from EMX, Engine Insights and data partners bringing ACR, cross-device data, location data and identity resolution.

“We found we are able to not only deliver audiences and even hard to reach audiences and tough DMAs in CTV, but we can also target those same households and create meaningful omni-channel campaigns for clients who are looking to reach the household,” Zacharski adds.

Quest for identity

EMX is a member of prebid.org, contributor to swan.community, testers of Flock and has dozens of different identifiers that are passed through the UID field, through the OpenRTB protocol.

That is testament to show companies are trying out many options for post-cookie identity.

“There’s a need to understand that change is happening and innovation is happening,” he says. “We want to be prepared to look at any new technology, make sure that as our partners look at new solutions, we have the engineering and tech teams on standby and ready to go.”

Re-tooling for tomorrow

But, for Zacharski, moving fast is not only about pivoting toward new integration partners.

Zacharski says agility has had to be internal, too.

“We actually rebuilt our entire ad tech stack,” he says. “We started back in 2018, built prototypes 2018 and 2019. And we moved our entire business to a modern infrastructure thinking about things like making sure that we’re prepared for CTV and even things like 5G where consumer latency expectations are going to continue to be such that things need to load fast and increasingly faster while as things are loading faster.

“Now there’s more signals that everyone has to sort through.”

You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.

But now, new techniques offered by connected TV platforms promise a lot more.

In Elevated Video, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by TripleLift, eight executives explored what that opportunity looks like.

1. Content ad insertions lighten the load

At TripleLift, the native ad company that has launched a connected TV offering in beta, advanced advertising GM Michael Shields says formats like ad insertions into TV shows, split-screen ads and other overlays “allows publishers to lower ad loads”.

“Unscripted, lighthearted comedies… you’ve probably seen our units in a lot of cooking shows – we think that that’s going to be the future ad model for a certain kind of programming.”

Native Advertising Has Key Role in Future of Ad-Supported TV: TripleLift’s Michael Shields

2. Post-cookie, context soars on data

At Havas’ Media Group’s health practice, managing partner Peter Sedlarcik welcomes the greater finesse available in contextual ad data.

“Contextual has really had a renaissance. We’re using more contextual data streams in order to inform strategy. There’s more of a balance now between purchased based data sets that have been kind of pre-eminent in a lot of the planning that we’ve been doing as an agency.”

Havas’ Sedlarcik Goes Long On Short-Form Ads

3. Dentsu’s quest to demystify media

Dentsu Media U.S. media partnerships EVP Sarah Stringer says buying connected TV is still “very convoluted”.

“A lot of different people sell a lot of the same channels, which means that we’re not getting that single point of view. You’re not getting the efficiencies that you want. How do we demystify the marketplace?”

Immersive Ad Experiences Promise Optimized Results: Dentsu’s Sarah Stringer

4. Tastemade’s Imberman likes CTV’s flavors

At cooking video producer Tastemade, Jeff Imberman, head of sales and brand partnerships, says connected TV manages to combine the best qualities of TV and digital.

“It’s traditional yet progressive all at the same time. You’re still able to serve 15 and 30-second ads the way a linear network can – but what makes it really compelling is it’s delivered in a digital format across digital pipes, so it allows for very unique targeting, contextual especially.”

Tastemade’s Imberman Feasts On A Full Menu Of Ad Options

5. Brand insertions bring viewers organic delight

For Team Whistle, a digital sports content producer, Anthony Susi, vice president of over-the-top sales, says audiences give positive feedback to brand partnerships in its content.

“Picture Bear Grylls wading through the water with a Powerade ad behind it, things like that. We do it in an organic way and not really force down your throat.”

Branded Content Helps to Engage Younger Audiences: Team Whistle’s Anthony Susi

6. Brands pick from new-wave measurement menu

MediaScience CEO Duane Varan says the advertising world is no longer about everyone using a “one-size-fits-all” paradigm of buying 30-second ads using traditional currencies.

“That model is flawed in a lot of ways. All brands are not the same. All categories are not the same. Our objectives are not the same. Every brand needs to discover the best in class measures delivering against those specific communication objectives.”

‘There’s a New Paradigm for Brand Integrations on TV’: MediaScience’s Duane Varan

7. Native can solve ad load aversion

Srinivasan KA of Amagi, a company that helps enable linear ad-supported streaming channels, says changing consumption patterns mean media must change.

“Nobody just has the patience for sitting through 10 minutes of advertising on a per hour basis. You’re going to have much more integrated ad formats. Native advertising on connected TV would kind of blend both content and advertising in a seamless fashion.”

FAST Must Fight Ad Fatigue: Amagi’s Srinivasan KA

8. CTV can kick-start the sequence

Liza Davidian, EVP of investment and activation at GroupM, says connected TV can be the start of a sequenced conversation with consumers.

“If it speaks to me again on a more personalised device like your Instagram or any type of social media on my phone, I applaud an advertiser who further digs deeper into the funnel and makes their message a little bit more customised.”

Customized Ads at Scale Are Key to Optimized Video Campaigns: GroupM’s Liza Davidian

But now the set of capabilities and consequences produced by that data is changing shape.

What will the future look like? That is what “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” our recent Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio, set out to uncover.

In these highlights, hear the takes of nine advertising executives on the issue.

1. Mobile brings a TV boost

Joao Machado, marketing SVP at Sabio, a company which powers connected TV ads using mobile data, says the combination is a win.

“The mobile device is the perfect mirror of a person’s affinities, their likes, where they are in their life stages,” Machado says. He wants to “couple it with the promise of what CTV digital television offers”.

Reborn, QR Codes Are The Glue Between Mobile & TV: Sabio’s Machado

2. TV is getting richer

When it comes to new-wave TV, AJ Kinter, head of advanced video strategy at Publicis Media Exchange (PMX), says the opportunities are burgeoning.

Kinter draws a distinction between “programmatic CTV” and “direct CTV”. “Since the CPMs have started to become much closer to programmatic CTV, you now have a linear, addressable TV and programmatic CTV kind of range in the same type of CPM,” he says.

Data Tell Story of Changing Viewership Habits: PMX’s AJ Kintner

3. Fusing media and mobile

Device data needs to inform media buys. That is why Aziz Rahim, Sabio CEO, says his company also started an app analytics division.

“Sabio is focusing on the media aspect of the industry, providing a deeper, unique targeting, reach and capabilities, and then along with creative capabilities,” he says. “The App Science side is to provide agnostic analytics and insights on CTV and OTT, along with mobile campaigns.”

After IDFA, Mobile Is Identity Gold For CTV: Sabio & App Science’s Rahim

4. Double-down on de-duplication

Ad buyers need to avoid exposing consumers to the same ad across multiple devices, says Dave Kersey, executive media director at GSD&M.

“Duplication is certainly a challenge in the industry,” Kersey says. “(We need to be) understanding the entire consumer journey across all video platforms.”

Mobile Data Help to Avoid Ad Duplication: GSD&M’s Dave Kersey

5. Data helps post-pandemic ad recovery

At MBuy, a unit of Mediaocean, media strategy and operations SVP Michael Parent is using data to welcome back travel brands that want to resume spending.

“We’re taking the data that we’re getting — everything from geography to programming to dayparts to the response that we’re getting,” Parent says.

CTV Data Provide More Insights for Ad Targeting: MBuy’s Michael Parent

6. Real-time duplication monitoring

At Sabio’s App Science, EVP Helen Lum says ad duplication is starting to worry more ad buyers.

“I think a good way to solve for that is actually to track and reduce that duplication and monitor that reach and frequency across partners and publishers, so that advertisers can reinvest those wasted dollars in real-time for their buys,” Lum says.

CTV Offers Faster Data Insights Than Linear TV: App Science’s Helen Lum

7. Mobile is the key to e-commerce

Mobile is evolving toward becoming an e-commerce driver for TV ads, says Jeff Liang, head of digital product at WPP’s MediaCom.

“We’ll eventually get to a point where we’ll be able to allow for comparison shopping on CTV and give consumers the ability to transact within that single remote device rather than driving people to their mobile phones,” Liang predicts.

Mobile Data Enable Audience Targeting on CTV: MediaCom’s Jeff Liang

8. Understand TV & mobile together

It’s no longer an “either-or”. Kelly Metz, managing director of linear activation at Omnicom Media Group, says ad planners must understand how consumers use mobile and TV in tandem.

“The way we choose to manage that or support that from a planning perspective is by emphasizing holistic campaign planning and holistic campaign measurement,” she says.

Mobile, TV Data Provide Holistic Audience Insights: Omnicom Media Group’s Kelly Metz

9. TV can target the right patient

The ability to target TV ads can revolutionise healthcare advertising, according to Starcom’s EVP Melissa Gordon-Ring.

“We can double-down on things like connected television or addressable television, and have a higher likelihood of reaching our patient in their household, versus hoping that this is the right target audience for us to be purchasing against,” she says.

Mobile Data Support Personalized Healthcare Marketing: Starcom’s Melissa Gordon-Ring

How can they best respond? By uniting their previously disparate business strategies and thinking on their feet, according to one veteran marketing agency leader.

In this video interview with Engine Group’s global chief commercial officer Scott Schiller for Beet.TV, Carl Fremont, CEO of marketing agency Quigley-Simpson, opens up.

Unite the silos

Fremont says it is a problem that most marketers’ are set up to address distinct parts of the traditional marketing funnel, often in blissful isolation.

“There are certain teams that focus just on acquisition and teams that focus on CRM, building that relationship with that customer over time – that needs to be all united,” he says.

“There are separate teams that don’t necessarily share the same objective and they work independently.

“You’re not developing a single consumer experience and it could impact each of their KPIs.

“It’s most important that we look at the value of a customer over time, it’s lifetime value. If you’re only looking at it from the front end, in terms of the initial acquisition and the initial revenue opportunity, you’re not looking at what’s the potential of that customer over time.”

Celebrating our 19th anniversary! Much thanks to all our clients, employees and partners for helping us grow from a few people to a team of over 150. pic.twitter.com/wPPj4gFalQ

— Quigley-Simpson (@Quigley_Simpson) September 3, 2021

Reading the past

Quigley-Simpson’s recent client work credits include United, The Art of Shaving and LAPD.

The agency’s thesis is “the unification of brand and demand” – in other words, helping marketers get to results quicker, using media, technology, data, insights and creative content.

Tracee Ellis Ross AND A World Of New Cardmembers

Fremont was a long-time Wunderman executive who has since held several further agency positions and board roles and who believes in embracing the future with learnings from the past.

That is why he sees 2021 as being so instructive.

In this interview, Engine Group’s Schiller says major events had been bellwethers for media consumption:

• Fractured audiences have shown the difficulty in bringing messages together.
• The pandemic which exacerbated media trends.
• Streaming is disrupting both the revenue models, subscriptions and advertising, as well as the way consumers consume media.

Flexible future

Fremont sees the moment.

“There’s one word to describe it and that’s ‘flexibility’,” he says.

“We need to, as marketers, be flexible in terms of how we’re engaging consumers – looking at it from cross-platform, looking at it from inventory sources – because nothing is exactly predictable the way we would like it to be.

“We have to have contingency planning … not only from the marketing side, but from the media side as well, because we’re in such a state of flux.”

The new pandemic had startled brands, causing many to press the pause button on ad spending – particularly upfront ad buys.

Fast-forward, however, and Michael Falco doesn’t think the upfronts are dying. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief revenue officer at Fox Corporation says they have learned new tricks – and Fox has seen an “influx” of buyers back to upfront sales over the last year.

Upfronts reborn?

Falco offers two reasons why:

1. Evolution, not revolution

“There’s still the need for a futures market,” he says. “In reality, what the last year and a half taught us was not that we needed to get away from the upfront, but that the upfront needed to evolve.”

2. Upfronts for streaming

“This notion that the upfront is just a linear television event is completely, completely wrong,” Falco argues. “Case in point for Tubi – we nearly tripled our revenue year-over-year in the upfront for TV, and we almost doubled our clients year to year.”

Pandemic panic

Falco isn’t ignorant of the effect the pandemic did have on upfront ad sales.

He says Fox had to figure out how to present its programming and ad products at a time when most potential customers would have been gathering in New York to hear its pitch.

But ad buyers, he says, fell into three camps:

1. Those which had to bail on upfront commitments.
2. Those which had products useful during a pandemic, which continued.
3. Those which flexibly stepped back with a view to later going after targeted media.

Tubi lights the way

Fox acquired Tubi, an ad-supported streaming TV service, for $440 million just as the pandemic panic was kicking off in early 2020.

Having Tubi in the stable has enabled Fox to make the kind of offering that ad buyers – during the pandemic or otherwise – were gravitating toward, namely choice, flexibility and audience targeting.

Tubi made more than $100 in ad revenue in the last quarter, more than $400 million over the year, according to its latest filing.

Data-driven TV

Falco says data-driven TV ad targeting is key. Fox has wrapped together its offerings under banners called “One Fox” and “Fox Next“.

“It’s going to allow us to move into that more audience-based selling, which I think is something that we’ve been looking forward to for quite some time,” Falco adds.

“Now that we have Tubi in the fold, it’s really going to give us the wherewithal to do that.”

You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.

That is why the company is becoming so interested in advertising through connected TV (CTV) channels.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, JPMorgan Chase’s chief media officer Tracy-Ann Lim explains why she can bank on the new medium.

Targeting the under-served

As more ad buyers switch on to the targeting capabilities in CTV, Lim is one who believes that power can help target specific cultural groups.

“We do love the idea of being able to tailor  our messages, access newer audiences with different types of ads that we may have traditionally only caught through social or other digital locations,” Lim says.

“So this is a really interesting opportunity for us, especially as I start to think about our D&I goals and reaching the underserved communities and bringing new products and services to those groups. I think that this is a really great tie in to those strategies.

Impact from clarity

Lim, who once bought TV ads in an agency role herself, has been with JPMorgan Chase since 2019.

She recognizes that consumes are flocking to CTV partly for choice and a reduced ad load. But that, Lim thinks, can work to her advantage.

“It’s done with less ad clutter, it’s not as noisy,” she says. “People are more engaged and there will be more recall.

“The combination, that one-two punch of recall and engagement, should result in stronger business outcomes.

“We hope to see that shake out as we continue to study market by market audience, by audience, and really start to see that outcome.”

You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.

Amagi, which helps bring streaming channels to CTV platforms, is partnering with IRIS.tv, whose technology mines video for data that can be passed as ad targeting signals, to enable contextual targeting for some of its channel partners.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, IRIS.tv co-founder Richie Hyden explains what is happening, and what they future looks like.

Excited to work with @amagicorp to provide streaming TV with seamless onboarding of their video data, so it can be activated for contextual targeting across connected devices and smart TVs. #connectedtv #programmatic #adtech #contextualadvertising https://t.co/yt37w2JhKY

— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) September 9, 2021

Enabling contextual CTV

“The partnership is built to enable transparency between both buyers and sellers, simply as to the content that a consumer is watching on a connected TV device, and most importantly, what they’re watching at the time in which an advertisement is shown to that consumer,” Hyden says.

The deal means Amagi channel partners – which currently include the likes of Vice Media, Bein Sports and Fremantle – will get to use IRIS.tv to pull out video-level contextual and brand safety signals, information that describes the inner meaning of their content. (Announcement).

This can then be activated through the streams enabled by Amagi, which delivers to like destinations like Samsung, Roku, Vizio, Xumo and Pluto TV, plugging in SSPs and DSPs to enable programmatic advertising.

In other words, it enables contextual advertising for linear and on-demand TV play-out over connected TV.

Inside video

Amagi recently raised $100 million in new funding.

IRIS.tv is all about peering into the inner meaning of videos, pulling out contextual labels that describe the content and making them available as signals for ad buyers and platforms.

It uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.

Hyden says information about videos typically lives in a publisher’s content management system. He aims to make meaning of it, and help distribute that information to ad-tech systems.

Tune into the webinar, 'Instant gratification: The exploding opportunity of FAST TV' to learn how content brands & platforms are working on growing their audience base & ad revenues in Free Ad Supported Streaming TV!https://t.co/fgpW0PkSOt#Amagi #OTT #Cloud #FAST #AVOD #CTV

— Amagi (@AmagiCorp) September 15, 2021

IRIS.tv’s roadmap

Usually, these kinds of innovations are offered to sell-side operators. But Hyden’s says IRIS.tv’s roadmap involves embracing ad buyers, too.

“We’ll be expanding that to the buy side, leveraging our persistent ID that we call the IRIS ID,” he says.

“That will enable brands and agencies to enable traditional pre-bid targeting out of their DSP of choice in a very similar way that’s done for page-level analysis and targeting based on text on the page.

“You’ll see more announcements for us working with our DSP partners there, and then also enabling the data to be used for post-campaign reporting and verification, something that we know is really important to the brands and agencies.”

In this video interview with Beet.TV, TransUnion’s EVP of marketing solutions and media vertical Matt Spiegel explains why his company is making the move for one of the major ad data providers.

November 2020:
Experian + Tapad: $280 million

September 2021:
TransUnion + Neustar: $3.1 billion

Identity is becoming expensive.https://t.co/4VZjixO3s4

— Giulio S. (@astaniscia86) September 13, 2021

Why buy?

“We’ve seen a really good complimentary set of capabilities – at the core mission, they really fit nicely,” Spiegel says.

“They built up what they call their OneID technology platform, a great cloud-based, AI-integrated, well-connected technology platform for resolving identity in real-time.

“They’ve got a clearly market-leading suite of measurement solutions, very importantly, focused on marketing performance measurement versus other types of measurement.”

Spiegel says TransUnion, which has a $23 billion market cap, is buying Neustar’s risk, communications and marketing solutions offerings, but not its security business.

TransUnion's acquisition of Neustar is a game changer in the MarTech sector. @mspiegel and team have executed on a killer identity strategy! https://t.co/HjwV9vFJ6l pic.twitter.com/XUjYC3od3T

— Terence Kawaja (@tkawaja) September 13, 2021

From information to identity

To many, TransUnion may be best known as a provider of consumer credit information.

Under Spiegel, TransUnion has been making in-roads becoming an audience data provider.

Neustar would be its latest acquisition in that space after TruSignal (2019), Signal (2020) and TruOptik (2020).

$3.1 billion — that is what your data is worth https://t.co/TBMmAEj9SB

— Josh Sternberg (@joshsternberg) September 13, 2021

Making complex simple

“We feel strongly that the era of identity (will) underpin marketing ecosystem, one that’s focused on enabling personalised marketing in both the household and individual level,” Spiegel adds.

He says the death of the cookie, the lack of mobile IDs, the increasing of streaming and the digitization of the world has made the ecosystem increasingly complex.

“In a world of multiple digital identity signals, multiple different touch points of consumers and worlds, where there are “walled gardens”, there isn’t just open access to all data.

“To have the accurate underpinning of identity is a complex data science problem

“The more technology you put behind there, the more data sourcing rules and regulations you put behind there, the more data governance you put behind there … all those things really create the ecosystem that allows you to build from a strong foundation.”

That is the view of Andy Davidson, head of analytics and data strategy at Engine Group, a company that uses audience data that helps advertisers reach their targets.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Davidson, who previously worked at GfK Group and Bank Of America, explains the industry transformation as he sees it.

Changes

Davidson says change has been driven by three main factors:

1. Deeper data

“Sources of data that are available on individuals in the programmatic ecosystem are much richer than they’ve ever been before – to the point where we’re able to evaluate interests and sentiments and behaviours based on what people consume online,” he says.

2. Analyze this

“With the improvement in the quality of the data through digitization, have come a lot of innovations in terms of the analytics,” Davidson adds. “We’re now able these days to harness datasets in ways that we really never could in the past.”

3. Tech-driven scale

“The technology, whether it’s software or storage or other platforms, enables us to make quick decisions at scale, which is really, really critically important as you’re attempting to deliver media. ”

Deliver the right message to the right audience, at the right time. Learn how ENGINE's Audience Intelligence platform has the audience data and insights you need to reach and understand your target audiences. https://t.co/NBOl93SCxL #audiencetargeting #consumerinsights pic.twitter.com/A8uJ3heWlD

— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 31, 2021

Challenges

Even so, Davidson says there are “a few things getting in the way” of even faster reform.

1. Identity crisis

“The reality of things like privacy protections such as CCPA and GDPR (is) that it becomes quite a bit more difficult to qualify impressions in an impactful way,” he says.

2. Poor data interrogation

“Oftentimes, while there is tremendous opportunity with data, a lot is often asked of data and the wrong things are asked of data. Decisions around where to deliver impressions sometimes falter simply because of those choices.”

Engine revs up

“There’s something uniting about football – and the country is in desperate need of that now.” Eric Corliss, Manager at ENGINE Insights, dives into how NFL fans are feeling about the upcoming season, even if it still may feel a bit different than “normal”. https://t.co/cNAY3kxWEu

— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 30, 2021

Engine Group had previously grown with an assortment of agencies under its wing, including operating in programmatic.

But, under CEO Kasha Cacy’s leadership, the group has consolidated it all under the Engine brand.

The group offers data and insights, digital transformation, innovation, integrated advertising and public relations.

sdf

“In the past, it was really more about what I like to refer to as ‘audience intelligence’ or ‘audience analytics’, where publishers would provide information on the profile of the individuals who were visiting their platforms, their publications,” Davidson adds.

“What’s changed really in the last few years … is the opportunity to make that fit between media delivery and the individual that you’re delivering to much more precise and personalised.

“The access to data and rich data signals is really unprecedented these days. We’re able to make judgments about the relevance of particular campaigns and particular products and services in ways that we never were in the past.”

New limits from privacy regulation and shifts in consumer behavior provoked by the rise in ad-free media are redefining advertising.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Peter Sedlarcik, managing partner for Havas’ Media Group’s health practice, explains how things are changing.

Ads are getting shorter

“The form factor and the format of the ads, particularly from a TV and video perspective, has finally caught up to what consumer expectation is and what the market needs,” Sedlarcik says.

“I think for a long time, we’ve talked about 30-second (ads)… in healthcare, often 60-second or longer ads. We’re starting to see more of an embracement of shorter length units.

“As we’ve seen in the Olympics, for example, there were a lot more kind of interstitial, quick-hit, short-form ads that were inserted, not necessarily within a traditional commercial break. I think that there’s going to be more of that coming forward, not only in the linear TV platforms, but certainly in the CTV and other video platforms that are more consumer-controlled and on-demand.

Our latest @prosumer_report, ‘Health and Hygiene in the Post-COVID-19 Era,’ provides a cross-cultural perspective on reactions to the pandemic and explores the new expectations of Prosumers regarding #health, the medical community, and #brands. https://t.co/HUpvZF4p1j

— Havas Group (@HavasGroup) April 29, 2021

Custom ads growing

Sedlarcik also says ad creative is more likely to be produced to match the delivery channel.

In other words, the age of shovelware may be drawing to a close.

“I think we’re starting to see more adaptation of creative so that it can be relevant for the platform on which it’s being delivered, and also that it’s very relevant for the audiences that it’s being targeted at,” he says.

Jerlyn Thomas, VP, Design Director, @HavasHealthPlus explains the #HumanPurpose that drives her work in #InclusiveDesign. Havas Health & You is made of over 4,500 individuals, each intrinsically motivated by the change they want to see in the world. #HumanPurposeFriday pic.twitter.com/EtGyNnMLTs

— Havas Health & You (@HavasHealthYou) April 9, 2021

Creating more context

Havas relaunched its business serving health ad clients back in 2017 as Havas Health & You, uniting Havas Life, Health4Brands (H4B), Havas Lynx and Havas Life PR.

The agency has also responded to COVID-19 by seeking to become more agile. CEO Donna Murphy previously told MM+M: “Our business is moving into short snippets of content and movement so we have folks end-to-end going from writing, creative, shooting — delivering straight across. As we move forward the model will change quite dramatically.”

For Sedlarcik, the privacy wave also means an emergence from reliance on off-the-shelf consumer datasets.

“There’s more of a balance now between purchased based data sets that have been kind of preeminent in a lot of the planning that we’ve been doing as an agency… (and) contextual data sets,” he says. “Some of the partners that are really building out those assets are increasingly part of the conversation.

But, through her agency Engine Group, Cacy wants to help brands get the best of both worlds.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine’s CEO describes how she wants to connect the dots for clients.

TV plus digital

Cacy, who joined Engine in 2018 from Universal McCann, says connected TV (CTV) advertising is one of the hottest opportunities for brands.

“Having grown up in a media agency, I know the clients like TV,” she says. “It’s scalable, you get big reach, there’s sight, sound, and motion in terms of the messaging.

“It had been, in years past, a little hard to target. And so, you ended up with a lot of waste and you ended up having to sort of be in front of consumers that maybe weren’t the consumers you’d necessarily wanted to be in.

“I think the promise of CTV and applying data to CTV is really that you can get the best of both worlds. You can get the impact of TV advertising with the targetability, the measurement, the ability to look cross-screen and really design much more nuanced and strategic advertising programmes basically.”

Digital for brand-building

But, whilst connected TV is a best-of-both situation, Engine’s Cacy is still trying to push digital advertising to be as effective as linear for certain clients and certain goals – namely, brand-building.

She says digital’s habit of leaning on behavioral data does not necessarily fit that goal.

“The problem is, a lot of my clients have segments that aren’t behavior based.,” Cacy says. “They’re attitudinal based, they’re emotional based, they’re based on their feelings about a brand. It’s been hard to make those connection points.

“A lot of the clients I’ve had in the past  … are looking for a change of attitude or a brand lift. They’re trying to reach a target that doesn’t have an affinity for their brand or they’re trying to reach a target that has a specific attitude. It’s been hard to do that in digital.”

So Engine Group has been trying to combine measurement and data capabilities with a brand-building mindset in a programmatic environment.

Transparent engine

Engine Group had previously grown with an assortment of agencies under its wing, including operating in programmatic.

But, under Cacy’s leadership, the group has consolidated it all under the Engine brand.

Cacy last year was recognized as one of the Workings Mothers of the Year by She Runs It, an industry organization.

She says she was as frustrated as many agency clients were about how opaque the inner workings of digital advertising had become – something she has sought to make more transparent through Engine.

You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.

This year, a glut of companies have gone public or otherwise raised new money, thanks to a combination of private equity enthusiasm and the new trend in Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), essentially a shell company set up by investors with the sole purpose of raising money through an IPO to eventually acquire another company.

In the last few weeks, Beet.TV’s leadership series “Innovation, Leadership, and Value Creation: Strategies Explored,” presented by Progress Partners, has heard several executives’ views and advice on contemporary ad-tech fundraising.

In this final post in the series, we wrap together many of those viewpoints with our series highlights video. If you only watch one video in the series, make it this one.

1. Taboola relishes public pressure

Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of native advertising and content discovery platform Taboola, said the mechanism of market listing isn’t as important as the rationale.

His company joined the Nasdaq in June after merging with ION Acquisition Corp 1, a SPAC.

Taboola’s Debut As Publicly Traded Company Fulfills Long-Term Goal: Founder Adam Singolda

“It doesn’t matter how you become public,” Singolda said. “The bigger decision, as management and as a board you have to make, is ‘Are you ready and how much you want to be a public company?’

“We’ve been wanting to be a public company for a while. Last year was $1.2 billion in revenue. It’s a $60-plus billion market as an alternative to the walled gardens, but there’s no Shopify for advertising. There’s no company that’s just there rooting for the open web in a win-win way of doing it. So we wanted to be that company. We want to be that company.”

2. Mediaocean sees lively finance options

Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise said running a company is neither a marathon nor a sprint, it’s a relay race. In other words, entrepreneurs need to know when to hand over to someone else. He said that places serial leaders at an advantage.

Vista Partners’ majority stake in Mediaocean was last month sold to two other private equity firms, after Mediaocean acquired Flashtalking.

Mediaocean Plans “Aggressive” Growth with New PE Investment

“There has never been more opportunity for entrepreneurs and figuring out that relay race to get your company from initial idea to product launch, to go-to-market, to start generating revenue, to start scaling the company,” Wise said.

“Right now there’s so much opportunities Private equity firms, venture capitalist. There’s so much wealth being created in big tech. There’s a lot of people now, entrepreneurs turning into investors that want to live vicariously through those investments. So you have a lot of individual investors, you have SPACs, you have IPOs. It’s very dynamic market right now.”

3. Tubi followed an unexpected exit

Streaming TV service Tubi may have sold to Fox for $440 million in 2020 – but founder and CEO Farhad Massoudi said he didn’t set out to exit that way.

Tubi was planning on going public when the idea of a sale was mooted.

VCs Are Looking for Entrepreneurs With Big Ideas: Tubi’s Farhad Massoudi

“We were actively working on getting Tubi ready to go public, and we were raising around and financing,” Massoudi said. “I started talking to Fox and just stars aligned. We had similar visions, they were very supportive, they have been very supportive post-acquisition, and it made a lot of sense for us to use the muscle and the power of a large media company

“In terms of the exit opportunities, there is no right way to do it. Sometimes when the opportunity knocks, you have to either take a serious look at it and if it makes sense, execute on it, which is what we did.”

4. Simpli.fi grew thanks to partner input

Simpli.fi CEO Frost Priloeau said the right early-stage partners  can be transformational for a tech company.

Simpli.fi took another private equity investment from Blackstone Group in June, valuing it at $1.5 billion.

Blackstone’s Investment in Simpli.fi Marks Latest Stage of Private Equity Funding

“About three years in, we raised a growth capital round and a company called Frontier Growth down in Charlotte came in,” he said. “(It was) really a fantastic growth investor for us, made us focus on some metrics that we weren’t necessarily focused on really – SaaS-type metrics like net recurring revenue, as well as our NPS score and really set us up for the next stage.

“Then in 2017, the growth investors had seen a good return and they wanted to monetize that return. So we went out and looked at sort of who would be the right owner of the company going forward.

“We talked to strategics, but we really hit a great place where we were introduced to a private equity firm named GTCR out of Chicago. They acquired the company along with management in 2017, and they have been really a fantastic partner for us, really helping us build the foundation to grow the company to the next stage.”

5. Innovid keeps focus through finance

Connected TV enabler Innovid’s CEO Zvika Netter said his company has benefitted from finance partners including Genesis, Sequoia, New Spring and Goldman Sachs. But making it through is about a consistent vision, he said.

Innovid recently said it plans to go public to raise $403 million in a deal valuing the business at $1.3 billion.

‘Here To Stay’: Innovid CEO Netter Does IPO To Put CTV Vision In Public Gaze

“You need to have vision, you have passion and it’s about delivering,” Netter said. “So the vision is – it was always the same – we’re here to change the future of TV advertising.

“Obviously, when you raise money in 2008, ’10, ’12, ’17, and the latest one was 2019, the vision stayed the same, reality keeps changing. So you have to keep adjusting to where reality is right now.”

6. Progress Partners sees PE beat SPAC

Progress Partners founder Nick MacShane said it is important companies think of SPAC as just one path, not the only path, to exit.

Progress Partners, an M&A advisory, has been advising a wave of ad-tech companies lately and recently closed a venture round of its own.

Ad-Tech M&A Is Back, Thanks To SPAC: Progress Partners’ MacShane

“The financial buyers are actually looking much more competitive than some of the larger strategics right now,” MacShane said.

“Coming out of COVID, some of the large companies are still struggling with their own businesses and restarting their engines, whereas the private equity is poised and ready to jump in, so you’ve seen some of the larger deals that people thought were going to SPAC have now turned over into private equity.”

7. PubMatic warns against over-financing

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel said it is important for companies not to raise more money than is needed.

PubMatic had raised around $16 million before its IPO in December, when it jumped 50% in value.

VC Relationships Are Formed With People, Not Firms: PubMatic’s Rajeev Goel

“You see these huge raises of $200, $300, $400 million,” Goel said. “Sometimes they’re warranted, but in many cases it’s before the company has figured out its core unit economics and things like that.

“That’s a real danger because, if you don’t grow into that valuation that’s implied by that level of fundraise … that can be a real handicap where now a company may not be able to raise any more money. That’s the kind of thing that can put you out of business.”

8. DoubleVerify’s IPO is not the end

Although an IPO is an “exit”, DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski said it should not be viewed as the end point but, rather, part of the journey.

DoubleVerify listed in the stock market in April, raising $360 million, with shares jumping at open.

Investors That Offer Strategic Advice Are Best Partners: DoubleVerify’s Mark Zagorski

“The IPO provided us with lots of capital that we can continue to use to invest and grow on our mission to create a stronger, safer and more secure digital advertising ecosystem,” Zagorski said.

“IPO was a pretty obvious route for us because of what that mission is all about, and that mission is driven by a drive to create greater transparency in the ecosystem. What better way to represent transparency is to go public and make ourselves transparent?”

VideoAmp will work with Snowflake, a cloud data storage company, to offer “multi-party cloud environments” for data collaboration – effectively, a way of pooling audience data with rules and privacy baked in.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp CEO and co-founder Ross McCray explains how it works, and why.

The trouble with agreements

“In today’s best practice and approach, what we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of contractual commitments in trust-based systems, where you sign a DocuSign, you’re saying, ‘I won’t do this. I won’t do that with your data’,” McCray says.

“(You) send it to some third-party identity partner who is a trusted source to get all the raw data to create these anonymous based systems and send it back across the wire.

“We don’t believe that’s putting the consumer first. There’s a lot of holes with that approach.”

Holistic, safe data view

VideoAmp has already been using multi-national Snowflake for more than three years to run analysis.

Now it is joining Powered by Snowflake, a partner program, which will see it use the cloud computing resources to change the way data expectations are forged,

“A lot of the legacy measurement systems haven’t been able to really accurately count in those more modern ways of digital and streaming,” McCray says, “and to look at it in a more holistic view, which should increase their yield and opportunity for where their audiences are going.”

He adds: “The way that we’ve architected this system with Snowflake is that we’re able to do a multi-party computing join – there’s never a circumstance where the data that’s owned by the publishers has to be shared with someone else.

“We’re unable to ever process the individual-level data, but we’re able to get much more accurate in terms of how we’re doing the identity resolution.

“(That) allows for advertisers and agencies and media owners to process secure data in a way that allows us to get access to things that you wouldn’t have in more of a trust-based system.”

‘No quick bucks’

Seven-year-old VideoAmp’s platform offers software and more for linear TV, over-the-top and digital video, including TV viewership data, campaign performance insights and buy optimization.

This year, the company raised up to $75 million from Capital IP, comprised of $50 milli0n in debt with an option on a further $25 million.

Although its valuation is now increasing, McCray says he has no intention to join the latest wave of ad-tech sales.

“We’ve seen a lot of companies sell early and cut themselves too short,” he says. “We really want to be able to create a long-term vision of creating a new system and alternative currency of how media is bought, sold and valued.

“We’ve been approached over the years, many times for acquisitions, but it just doesn’t make any sense. We really want to win, and we want others to be able to count on us for that long-term vision.”

The company had acquired Tru Optik, Signal Digital and TruSignal, as it built out its own ambition to provide consumer and household data to power ad targeting. Now it is bundling them into a single suite, TruAudience.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, EVP Marketing Solutions, Head of Media Vertical at TransUnion, explains the rationale.

Triple whammy

TruAudience has three legs:

• TruAudience Identity: With data on individuals, devices and homes
• TruAudience Data Marketplace, formerly Tru Optik: Features audience segments from dozens of partners including Kantar, Comscore, IHS Market, Lotame, and NCSolutions.
• TruAudience Platform: Dubbed “a rapid audience creation and management system leveraging multikey matching and machine learning to onboard first-party data and model audiences”.

Post-cookie readiness

“Our focus has been on really making sure we’re ready for the next wave of personalization underpinned by an accurate view of identity that was fundamentally fundamentally built in a post cookie world,” Spiegel says.

“It’s not just about individuals. It’s not just about devices or just about households. It’s actually fundamentally about all three.”

On TruAudience Data Marketplace, specifically, Spiegel says: “Now, whether you want to use TransUnion data or comScore data or IHS data or Kantar data, it’s, it’s a marketplace available right now to connect you to get to 80 million connected homes.

“That’s a higher match rate, more accuracy than a lot of the other solutions available on market for all that money being spent in streaming media.”

Building up

Under Spiegel, TransUnion has been making in-roads becoming an audience data provider, not just a consumer credit information provider.

It recently began powering OpenAP’s identity solution and began injecting identity into Blockgraph, a TV industry initiative.

According to Spiegel in TransUnion’s product announcement: “The marketing and advertising sector is on the precipice of reinvention with the demise of third-party cookies, the rise of privacy-centric solutions and the overarching need for brands to break down silos and communicate to consumers across channels — from connected TV and audio, to direct mail and linear TV.”

But, whilst CTV purports to enhance reach and control the frequency of ad exposure, what is the reality?

That is the question CTV ad software supplier Innovid set out to answer when it undertook research into the area, conducted with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

Research highlights

The resulting output, a report called Decoding CTV Measurement, tells the story.

Introducing "Decoding CTV Measurement" In partnership w/ @ANAmarketers, we conducted an unprecedented study across 20 leading advertisers to uncover the truth behind reach, frequency, and ROI. Here's what we found: https://t.co/ItOgGgVW9g pic.twitter.com/CWiAXY1K4J

— Innovid (@innovid) July 20, 2021

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin summarises the results from a study that heard from 20 brands with a total of $35 million in spending.

“We wanted to go out to the market and learn, what is the optimal reach and frequency?,” Chalozin says. “And even more than that is that, ‘when you buy media right now, what are you actually getting?’ ‘What’s the real duplication in the market right now?'”

According to the study:

• “Across our study, the average campaign reached only 13% of the available U.S. CTV households, indicating that we’re only scratching the surface of unique reach.”
• “Average frequency was just 4.6 across all campaigns. While high levels of frequency can exist in pockets, frequency is not universally high in CTV.”
• “The average eCPM of the campaigns in our study was $23, which sits between the average CPM for U.S. primetime TV ads for broadcast and cable ($36 and $19, respectively, according to eMarketer).”

Avoid overlap

Chalozin opened up on other findings.

“When you buy media from multiple media companies, we’ve seen that the average overlap between two media companies is 33%,” he says.

So, what’s the takeaway?

“Yes, people are tuning into streaming, cutting the cord, it’s definitely a tremendous transition,” Chalozin notes. “However, with the help of technology, you can do a much better job on making your money work harder.”

Brand safety concerns once plagued digital display and online video inventory. They have been somewhat soothed by brand safety software.

But, as conected TV rises, some of the same concerns are arriving on TV now.

CTV hits prime-time

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Duffy of Pixability, a vendor of brand safety tooling for YouTube and other platforms, describes how the category is evolving.

Duffy points to a study from Global Alliance for Responsible Media and data from Comscore showing how comfortable advertisers have become with those channels.

“It showed (that) YouTube is now over 99% brand-safe for advertisers,” he says. “According to Comscore, over 40% of CTV watch time is YouTube.”

And Pixability just commissioned its own survey of ad buyer attitudes to brand safety in connected TV.

Duffy summarized some of the results.

Buyers look beyond

“(Respondents) don’t see CTV as a brand suitability threat or safety threat … Their concern is reach and driving full-funnel results on CTV,” he explains.

But Duffy says it’s not that simple – “safety” may be built-in, but “suitability” of content is a different matter.

“CTV content sometimes may have nudity or violence and so forth,” he says. “And it may also express certain opinions that a brand may not want to be aligned with.

“Although YouTube is safe, there are specific suitability issues that some of your advertisers may have with.”

From threat to opportunity

Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well,

Duffy says the same kind of vendors that offer “brand safety” technology can also help out with “suitability”, the alignment of ads to inventory in an expanding CTV universe. “No-one wants one and not the other,” he says.

In fact, Duffy thinks the ‘brand safety” threat has reached the point of becoming an opportunity.

“Suitability has always been a little bit about defence and avoiding content you don’t want,” he says. “(But) it can be also thought of as an offensive measure – go on the offence and find content that performs well.

“We’re seeing a great trend towards agencies and brands embracing that and saying, ‘Yes, it’s not as much about avoiding content as it is about finding content that helps us perform better’.

Defense to offense

Companies like Pixability aim to turn video content into metadata signals, surfaced in buying platforms, that ad buyers can leverage or swerve. They are enabling the new wave of “contextual” video ad targeting.

Previously, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs.

“We’ve created curated lists around different causes that people want to support or types of creators that people want to support,” Duffy adds. “We have LGBTQ creator lists, we have black and Asian creator lists, et cetera.

“So it’s a really nice trend to see suitability, not just as a preventative measure, but as a way to connect with creators that you want to support.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are becoming a popular way to do an IPO. It is “essentially a shell company set up by investors with the sole purpose of raising money through an IPO to eventually acquire another company”, reports CNBC.

It’s how Taboola finally went public this summer, and how AdTheorent went to market in a deal valuing it at $1 billion.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nick MacShane, senior managing director at M&A advisory Progress Partners, explains why the route is becoming so popular.

A bigger story

“That is presenting a number of other companies that might not feel they have all the juice to go public a second option to get into the public market,” says MacShane, whose Progress Partners advised on deals including Signal’s sale to TransUnion and RTK’s to Rubicon Project.

In a SPAC, a company merges with an existing entity in a capital plan to grow the return on floatation, aiming to fund future M&A.

What is a SPAC? Explaining one of Wall Street’s hottest trends (via @CNBCMakeIt) https://t.co/KVSlKFwnGQ

— CNBC (@CNBC) January 30, 2021

MacShane says of ad-tech’s public-markets aspirants aspirants: “They may have flattened out, in terms of their growth. They may not have quite the story, the future story that the public market is looking for.

“You’re starting to see some of those companies now poke around and look for add on companies to merge with them, to then bring to market a better story.

“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of activity there with companies really looking for partners.”

M&A is back

All of which is putting ad-tech M&A back on the map.

In recent weeks, Beet.TV alone has written about IAS buying Publica and Mediaocean buying Flashtalking.

The bounce-back was happening before SPAC’s became fashionable.

Even so, it seems the days of investors burned by failed ad-tech IPOs are behind us.

Agile money fuelling M&A

“In the last year or so we’ve had about 10 to 15 companies meaningfully move into the public market,” says Progress Partners’ MacShane.

“What that’s doing is creating a bunch of liquidity, which is giving opportunities for those companies once they go public to think about where they may want to go further to continue to maintain their strength as a public company,” he says. “That’s fueling some acquisitions.”

He credits private equity firms as being more agile and willing to put money into ad-tech than larger institutional buyers, who are “struggling restarting their engines” after COVID-19.

Twelve-year-old Progress Partners has also closed a venture round of its own, having previously invested in the  likes of MediaMath and Simpli.fi.

You are watching “Innovation, Leadership, and Value Creation: Strategies Explored,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Progress Partners. For more videos, please visit this page.

IAS announced it had acquired Publica, a CTV ads server platform, for $220 million in cash and stock.

Now it plans to launch “a comprehensive brand safety and suitability solution for CTV advertisers and publishers in the coming months”.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, IAS CEO Lisa Utzschneider explains why her company is following the road to connected TV ad verification.

The four reasons

Utzschneider explained four reasons IAS is acquiring Publica.

1. The M&A template works

“We have a successful formula in place when it comes to acquisitions. We’ve done this already two times while I’ve been at IAS.”

2. Leaning in to CTV

“It’s the first inning of a long game with CTV. And, given that Publica has a leading CTV classification platform, (it) is just such opportunity for IAS.”

3. Spreading to the sell-side

“They have deep strategic integrated partnerships with some of the leading video publishers. Publishers, like Samsung, Philo, Fox. The majority of our business is with advertiser-direct. The combination of bringing together a robust buy-side and sell-side, there’s just so much opportunity to innovate together.”

4. Team talent

“The exceptional talent at Publica. They have a really strong engineering organisation and a really strong leadership team.”

Publica’s stack

Publica is a five-year-old connected TV ad-serving company that has grown to have employees in LA, New York, London and Paris.

It employs server-side ad insertion, as oppose to playing out ads from client devices themselves.

It built its technology with header bidding from the start. That is the technology that lets publishers entertain bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, rather than in a “waterfall” fashion, thereby reaping a better yield from a larger auction.

It also unifies bidding via direct sales and programmatic sources.

The CTV odyssey

Today we acquired @getpublica for $220M as IAS continues to transform the future of CTV advertising. It’s the first inning of a long game in CTV. Where the consumers go, the marketers go…it just enables us to really accelerate that CTV opportunity. https://t.co/SsGeDE8xsM pic.twitter.com/TnSeuX0ym9

— Lisa Utzschneider (@Lisa_Utz) August 10, 2021

Utzschneider says IAS – which helps ad buyers around ad fraud, brand safety and suitability, contextual targeting and viewability – is growing fast.

“We are seeing lots of interest in demand from global marketers to partner with IAS, and we’re signing agreements that are two to three years long with some of the major global iconic marketers like Coke, and Nestle, and GSK, Adidas,” she says.

EMarketer estimates that advertisers will invest over $13.4 billion into CTV this year, growing to surpass $24.7 billion by 2024.

Utzschneider says Publica reports publishers using its platform have seen on average a 30% lift in yield for their CTV inventory.

The buy gives IAS access to Publica’s unified auction, over-the-top (OTT) header bidding for programmatic buying, audience management, campaign management, server-side ad insertion (SSAI), ad pod automation, and advanced analytics.

IAS’ feature set already includes a verification solution for global invalid traffic (IVT) and viewability across programmatic.