“Interestingly, we have been working with the streaming television publishers and partners to bring it more and more into a performance play for our clients,” Minnie Dimesa, executive vice president of advanced media and marketing at Icon Media Direct, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “All the media dollars that we invest and we spend on their behalf have to have a return on investment.”

Metrics like cost per order and cost per acquisition are more feasible with CTV and over-the-top (OTT) channels. As a result, Dimesa has seen some advertisers move their television budgets entirely into streaming video.

“In the last three years, this area has exploded, especially for performance marketers as measurement capabilities have come into place,” she said. “We are now at the point where many of our clients have integrated streaming TV into their evergreen strategy.”

Pixel-Based Measurability

Tracking pixels are a key part of measuring ad campaigns on streaming video, similar to digital platforms that rely on the technology to measure when a view takes an action in response to a marketing message. Streaming video also provides marketers with the ability to deliver richer media experiences to consumers on the biggest screen in their households.

“It is pixel-based, which is beautiful because it’s one-to-one, so very much like digital where you understand exactly who and where your ad impressions are being served to,” Dimesa said. “I always like to refer to streaming television as the beautiful intersection of linear television and digital advertising.”

Alternative to Social Media

As advertisers seek greater efficiencies in their media spending and broader reach, some are supplementing their social media campaigns on streaming platforms or looking for other options, Dimesa said.

“We do have quite a number of our clients who have come to us because…Facebook isn’t working for them anymore, or it’s gotten cost-prohibitive or maybe they’ve hit their cap on how much they can scale on Facebook,” she said. “Now, they’re looking for an alternate channel. We do see some of our clients actually diverting funds from, say, what would traditionally be a Facebook budget to a connected TV, streaming TV channel.”

Source: eMarketer/Insider Intelligence

Paid search advertising will continue to remain viable as a way to engage consumers in the lower part of the purchase funnel.

“When your consumers are now searching for your brand, you’re there to be found, and you’re essentially answering their call,” Dimesa said.

Like digital platforms, streaming video offers greater flexibility in automated media buys. Marketers can choose from private marketplaces (PMPs) with a curated selection of media outlets, or try different strategies to get the right inventory most efficiently through demand-side platforms (DSPs).

“The beauty of DSP/programmatic platforms like Roku is that it gives you access to pretty much all the publishers out there,” Dimes said. “How you’re purchasing that inventory could be different.”

She recommends testing platforms to find the best method to reach audiences and possibly generate a response if that’s the goal. because you’re now then beholden to a certain spend amount, or you’re not having to commit to four weeks

“DSP/programmatic platforms allow you to do that in a low-risk situation,” Dimesa said. “Rigorous testing and continuous testing is very critical in terms of being able to find success within the streaming TV platforms.”

You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.

“A lot of people use the data that the OEMs have in their measurement,” Cara Lewis, executive vice president and head of U.S. investment, Dentsu at Amplifi USA, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Measurement is such a key talking point now in television in general. It’s important to have the data that the OEMs have, and to be partners with them.”

Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence

Her agency has developed a CTV Playbook to provide a deeper look at ad inventories among different video channels. The goal is to avoid overexposing audiences to the same commercials, which is negative for consumer experience.

“Our approach is to be screen-agnostic, to make sure that we are building in and layering where frequency capping is happening,” Lewis said. “We’ve done an amazing analysis, our team, in terms of an overlay of who’s selling whose inventory.”

Combining the CTV Playbook with its Ampower optimization platform helps to see a more complete view of the television landscape and find the right balance between traditional linear TV and CTV for advertisers.

“We want to make sure that every impression that we’re landing is getting to that, meaning identity and getting to the root of who the consumer is and what they want to see,” Lewis said.

You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.

“The goal of the product would be to drive higher conversions at a lower total campaign cost,” Ryan Horn, senior vice president of marketing at Simpli.fi, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We look at this as being able to go after that upper funnel – the awareness and the branding – with the CTV ads, and then hammer that lower funnel in conversion with a variety of the other creative types.”

The streaming audience has grown in the past year with more than three quarters (82%) of U.S. TV households owning at least one CTV device. Amid growing demand for CTV ad placements, Simpli.fi this year has run more than 32,000 CTV campaigns for more than 8,200 unique advertisers, according to the company.

The addition of its retargeting product comes as Simpli.fi continues to grow with the backing of private-equity firms. Blackstone Group in June announced an investment in Simpli.fi that valued the adtech startup at $1.5 billion. Blackstone joined private-equity firm GTCR as majority shareholders in Simpli.fi.

With the approach of the holiday shopping season, Horn foresees retailers using retargeting strategies to lead consumers toward buying gifts online or at brick-and-mortar stores.

“It’s an automated process to nurture leads throughout the funnel,” he said.

Amid these changes, brands want to see more indications that their campaigns are producing results. That means looking beyond digital outcomes like cost per click, cost per landing page view and cost per completed view.

“When we talk about outcomes, we talk about real-world outcomes,” Simon Stone, general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa for ad-tech startup LoopMe, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Those outcomes include brand awareness, purchase intent, store visits and physical, offline sales.”

Measuring Brand Lift

LoopMe last week introduced PurchaseLoop Measurement to provide real-time measurement of consumer brand lift and other analytics. The tool is aimed at ad agencies, brands and publishers to measure media effectiveness and to help make quicker adjustments to campaigns while they’re in flight.

“We’re giving the ability for clients to look at all the partners on their plan and assess how they’re performing,” Stone said. “We’re able to measure across multiple screens. That includes mobile, desktop, audio and now connected TV. We’re also looking at multiformat as well, that could be video, rich media or display.”

LoopMe is working with major agency groups and brads to adopt its artificial intelligene (AI) technology with the goal of becoming the industry standard in brand measurement.

“In digital, it’s shifting away from being predominantly performance, and we’re finding a lot more dollars are being invested into brand advertising,” Stone said. “Now, there’s that full-funnel approach where it’s not just purely for the lower-funnel conversions. You can actually build a brand online with the formats of video and rich media.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“Contextual advertising feels a lot like ‘back to the future’ in the sense that we have been talking about it forever,” Joshua Lowcock, executive vice president and chief digital officer of UM Worldwide, said in this interview Beet.TV. “We pivoted to data-driven advertising and somewhat forgot about contextual until brand safety emerged as a challenge.”

He is optimistic that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will improve contextual targeting while also respecting consumer privacy.

“My biggest hope for contextual is that it opens the door to people thinking more intelligently about the mindset certain people are in when they’re consuming certain kinds of content,” Lowcock said.

Power of Publishers’ First-Party Data

Lowcock recommends that publishers harness the first-party data collected directly from their audiences to boost the value of their advertising inventories by helping marketers reach targeted consumer groups.

“Publishers are still the owners of first-party data and will be for the foreseeable future,” he said. “Blend contextual data with your first-party data, and that enables you to leverage the power of both contextual and first-party data for a better result at more efficient scale.”

Strategies for Brands

Brands must align their ad creative with the surrounding content to optimize the effectiveness of contextual targeting.

“One of the things we don’t often talk about is from a purely media perspective is the creative message,” he said. “Most of the challenges that you have when contextual advertising goes wrong, it’s because the ad messaging itself is not as respectful of the contextual environment.”

Better Than Blocklisting

AI technology can help to provide a more nuanced approach to contextual targeting that considers the reputation of a media company and the specific content it publishes. That approach is more effective than key-word blocking that can prevent ads from appearing alongside appropriate content.

“One of the greatest failings that contextual had in the past was that it was a blunt-force object, and it really was key-word targeting,” Lowcock said. “If we can move away from seeing key-word targeting as equaling contextual targeting, and use AI to mean semantic analysis, that’s when AI becomes a powerful part of the contextual toolset.”

You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Our secret sauce is our authenticity in storytelling. We really enable and bring brands to life, give them a platform where they can really tell their story,” David Apostolico, senior vice president of platform strategy, development and distribution at Qurate Retail Group, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We look at these other platforms where we can stream and have content – it’s just a natural fit for us.”

Entertainment and Shopping

Video commerce is a core competency for QVC and HSN, not an ancillary service for other retail channels.

“What we offer is that video commerce experience that’s very different. It’s not a utilitarian experience. It’s really an experience that allows us to totally engage our customers,” Apostolico said. “We’ve had some terrific partners such as Roku. They were the first to launch our streaming service. They really helped guide us in audience development opportunities to attract both existing and new customers.”

Qurate is seeking additional opportunities to collaborate with brands as they seek to stand out from competitors in a crowded market. Its merchandising teams continually hunt for brands and products that are a good fit for its video commerce channels.

“One of the things we are exploring is how we can partner with more people to help … combine these entertainment and shopping opportunities,” Apostolico said.

Amid the growth in social commerce, Qurate has extended its presence on more digital platforms to engage consumers when they’re ready to shop.

“We can broaden that audience through so many different platforms. Our social team does a terrific job with engaging with some of the newer platforms,” Apostolico said. “Our TV platform is a rich experience with decades of history of bringing products to life, but we think about some of these other platforms where we can just do more.”

You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.

“I can say with confidence that we finally have this at scale,” Raghu Kodige, founder and chief executive of LG Ads, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “That’s mainly because of the connected TV environment, where it is possible to place your ad on the big screen, but also make it addressable and targeted to individual households – and measure the outcome as well.”

Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence

LG Electronics this year launched LG Ads as the consumer electronics giant rebranded its Alphonso adtech and analytics platform. The company this month introduced a smart TV operating system called River OS to support a more personalized viewing experience for consumers.

Audience Data Consolidation

The market for audience data is consolidating as the major original equipment makers (OEMs) including LG Electronics reduce the distribution of automatic content recognition (ACR) information about what appears on TV screens. Brands now can get the reach they want on traditional linear TV and over-the-top (OTT) platforms by working with a smaller group of OEM ad networks like LG Ads.

“It helps the market overall use the data better,” Kodige said. “Even for things like enforcing frequency across linear TV and OTT, if you’re working with a few large players who have the scale, you can achieve that.”

You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Canadians are looking at how to re-evaluate where they can trim their expenses. An easy way to do that is looking at cutting cable,” Christina Summers, Roku’s country manager for Canada, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We find that consumers appreciate the value exchange that comes with ad-supported content.”

More than three quarters (77%) of Canadians, or 29.3 million people, said they watched streaming TV by the end of last year, according to a study by Fuse Insights on behalf of Roku. Almost half (46%) of survey respondents said they had signed up for a new streaming service in the prior 12 months.

Bridging Linear TV and Digital

AVOD services typically have half the ad load of traditional linear television, helping marketers to stand out among their rivals. That’s especially true among younger consumers who are among the early adopters of new consumer technology.

“[Streaming] creates an opportunity for marketers to reach these new audiences that we’re finding in the ad-supported space,” Summers said. “It’s going to bring the TV and digital worlds together. Viewers are still watching on the biggest screen in their home, but the delivery of the advertising happens digitally, providing deeper targeting abilities and measurement.”

Roku recently introduced its programmatic ad-buying solution, OneView Ad Platform, to Canada as part of a collaboration with agency holding company Interpublic Group.

“Through our partnership, we were able to get them up as our first test partner within the Canadian marketplace for one of their advertisers so that they could evaluate the benefits of the OneView platform,” Summers said.

As consumers shift their viewing habits to AVOD services, advertisers need to be there to remain relevant.

“Audiences have already moved into streaming,” Summers said. “What we need to do is to showcase to the marketplace and our partners as to why they also need to shift within the space or risk being left behind.”

Roku this week launched an app that lets Shopify merchants to build, buy and measure TV streaming advertising campaigns. The app is available in the Shopify App Store.

You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.

Tracking cookies have been a key part of ad targeting for decades, but fewer makers of web browsers are supporting the technology. Contextual advertising makes sense in that marketers want to reach consumers who express their interest in a product by seeking related content.

“Sometimes we try to push away content because we were so focused on targeting individuals at that cookie level,” Joshua Palau, chief media and activation officer at Omnicom’s PHD, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The construct of reading a piece of content that you’re interested in and then seeing a product that’s related to that content does still hold true in the way that consumers look at products.”

Data Signals and CTV

Advertisers have a wide variety of data signals that help to determine how to reach target consumers and measure the effectiveness of their media spending. Privacy-compliant data sets and identity graphs based on location, demographics, purchase history and search histories are an important resource.

“You can still be effective, efficient and look at performance,” Palau said. “You could also be aligned with content that lines up with your brand values.”

Connected TV (CTV), which has always been cookieless, provides marketers a way to target audiences with more personalized ads, while also avoiding wasteful spending on repetitive media placements.

“Another great thing about the connected piece is having those things in place so that you can minimize that waste piece and get more targeted in terms of that audience,” Palau said. “The way that you manage these things is starting to become a lot clearer. Contextual has a nice seat here in the TV world.”

You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Our research shows that there’s very little duplication across the major OEM households,” Katie Barrett, head of programmatic at LG Ads, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It allows advertisers the ability to buy audiences within our walls without very much overlap, especially now that our datasets are not available elsewhere.”

Automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provides insights on which commercials and programming appear on a TV screen, helping marketers to optimize their media buying strategies.

“It gives advertisers the majority of audiences and inventory on streaming platforms from a handful of partners,” Barrett said. “This simplifies the overall fragmentation that’s going on in the universe, making it almost as easy as broadcast TV buying, but this time with a lot more sophisticated data that will allow to find actual incrementality amongst unreachable audiences.”

LG Electronics this year launched LG Ads as the consumer electronics giant rebranded its Alphonso adtech and analytics platform. The company this month introduced a smart TV operating system called River OS to support a more personalized viewing experience for consumers.

‘Home Page of the Household’

Similar to digital media, CTV data provide a variety insights about media consumption habits. The information helps marketers to manage their reach and frequency, and stand out from their competitors.

Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence

“OEMs or smart TVs who are collecting ACR are understanding everything that touches that glass,” Barrett said. “What that offers is an opportunity to have a similar experience in the living room, where now the smart TV is really the home page of the household.”

Advertisers that commit budgets to CTV platforms are more likely to reach audiences that have canceled their cable and satellite service in favor of streaming video.

“We’re seeing that CTV and OTT are only accounting for a small percentage of overall reach,” Barrett said. “This isn’t because the OEMs and streaming platforms can’t deliver it, but rather marketers as a whole are not buying enough impressions to have real scale within the platform. They need to move those dollars over to actually achieve the promise that CTV can offer them.”

You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Three or four years ago, who would have thought that the OEMs would be playing such an important role here?” Serge Matta, president of LG Ads, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It is very rare that I go into a brand or an agency or advertiser and…educate them about CTV. They’ve been well educated. They’re very sophisticated buyers.”

Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence

LG Electronics this year launched LG Ads as the consumer electronics giant rebranded its Alphonso adtech and analytics platform. Its global smart TV footprint consists of more than 120 million TVs worldwide, including 20 million in the United States.

LG Ads is building its sales team and developing its technology to support global growth, Matta said. The company this month introduced a smart TV operating system called River OS to support a more personalized viewing experience for consumers.

Cross-Platform Support

Matta said advertisers are seeking more information about CTV viewing habits, such as automated content recognition (ACR) data that indicate what appears on TV screens, including programming and ad creative.

“If there are campaigns that are cross-OEMs – among us and across others in the space — we are open to that measurement and making sure that it’s consistent,” Matta said. “If you don’t have the measurement in place, you can’t evolve as an industry and as a medium in terms of CTV.”

You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.

‘The content side of the equation has become a lot more important in the last few years,” Mike Henry, chief executive of contextual analytics firm OpenSlate, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Three or four years ago, people were primarily thinking about identifying the user that they want to get in front of. Content become more important as the opportunity to individually target users became under threat with the deprecation of cookies and unique identifiers in phones.”

His company started with a focus on helping marketers to identify quality content for ad placements on video-sharing site YouTube. OpenSlate has expanded to other platforms including Facebook, TikTok and Twitter as advertisers seek consumers whose media appetite includes influencers and creators.

“The original idea remains the focus for the company, which is….advertising is going to run a lot more places in the future than it has in the past,” Henry said. “We started not with brand safety or suitability, but with quality – understanding that advertisers would try to compare the content that’s on a platform like YouTube with content that’s on television.”

Awareness of Social Responsibility

Many major companies have been mindful of their broader responsibilities to society for years. However, the past couple of years of the coronavirus pandemic, protests against racism and growing awareness of fake news have pushed more advertisers to scrutinize the digital content they support. OpenSlate has been able to show that consumers are much more likely to pay attention to ads that are within content that’s relevant to them.

“Advertisers can’t just let algorithms determine where they’re going to run,” Henry said. “They need to be involved in the decision about where their ads are running and what content they’re supporting.”

OpenSlate plans to expand to more media outlets to help its clientele to better track the effectiveness of their cross-platform campaigns.

“Ultimately, our goals is to measure all ad-supported content with the same set of metrics,” Henry said.

You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Media has become more complicated as we’ve seen more fragmentation, the shift to digital and the shift to mobile media consumption,” Ron Amram, senior director of global media at Mars, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The ROIs and effectiveness of media are more volatile than anything that we’ve seen.”

Stricter privacy laws and the eroding support for tracking cookies in web browsers add to the challenges in measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns. In some cases, market mix modeling (MMM) and 360-degree have complemented strategies to improve predictions of results.

“We’ve shifted to modeling to do what we may have outsourced or used cookie data for in the past to fill the gap,” Amram said.

‘Laying Models on Top of Models’

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze vast troves of data and help with decision-making are gaining prominence amid the more complex media market. The technology can provide insights to optimize ad creative and media investments as consumer habits change.

“What we’re finding is there’s not one model. We’re laying models on top of models to try and find the best course forward,” Amram said. “You used to hear about things like weather prediction – now, we’re applying that same science to marketing.”

OOH Resurgence

As more consumers resume their former habits of commuting to work, going to restaurants or traveling by plane, out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is showing signs of bouncing back. Mars is weighing the opportunities to raise visibility in those channels, depending on the signals it receives from consumers.

“If you can optimize quickly, and digital out-of-home placement allows you to do that, then you’ll start to see us using it more,” Amram said.

Mars also is looking at the opportunities in addressable advertising to personalize its messaging, whether it’s promoting its chocolate brands like M&M’s or pet-food products like Iams.

“It depends on the category, it depends on the product, and the amount of personalization and customization,” Amram said. “For us, addressable is a broad category of different content and for different media types.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

That’s especially true with TikTok, the social video platform that this year become the first non-Facebook mobile app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. TikTok uses a variety of algorithms to identify videos that have the power to go viral, and to personalize the viewing experience for each of its users.

“The ads become part of that contextual experience,” Sandie Hawkins, general manager of North America, global business solutions, at social video platform TikTok, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The same algorithm that is choosing the right content from a creator standpoint is the same algorithm that’s picking the ads for delivery.”

Community and Creators

Brands that tend to be most successful on TikTok are quick to identify trends that engage its community, which consists not only of people who watch videos, but also create them. TikTok has made overnight celebrities of people whose videos went viral.

“We see that TikTok as a platform is about the community coming together, determining what they like and then rallying around it,” Hawkins said. “It’s really about what the democratization of culture is, and what content should be, and letting brands be a part of where culture is going.”

Because most of TikTok’s content consists of user-generated videos, brands are mindful that their messaging appears within a suitable context.

“Brands can get concerned around the brand-safety elements, and so, we’ve partnered with companies like OpenSlate to help brands be more comfortable with the content that we have on our feed, because that’s really where the magic is,” Hawkins said.

Influencers who create videos and build up a following are an important part of the TikTok experience, and offer brands the possibility for partnerships on campaigns. The company’s research has found that 63% of users said like it when brands show TikTok creators in their videos.

“We always try to make a point of having brands leverage creators when they’re putting together content,” Hawkins said.

You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.

CTV Has Room For Improvement in Ad Pods

Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor

Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.

YouTube Drives Significant Share of CTV Viewership

Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence

YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.

More Brands See CTV Opportunities on YouTube

David George, CEO of Pixability

The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.

CTV Ads Help to Drive Purchase Intent

Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony

Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.

CTV Success on YouTube Takes Know-How

Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’

“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”

Brand Suitability More Nuanced Than Safety on YouTube

Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability

While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.

Consumer Intent Emerges as Key CTV Audience Signal

Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability

“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”

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.

“Even before the pandemic, there’s been more attention on understanding the impact of media, and there’s more pressure on the CMO to be able to show accountability around performance,” Peter Vandre, chief analytics officer at Dentsu Media US, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

Replacing Tracking Cookies

Amid the demand to find greater efficiencies in media spending, Vandre sees three developments that will replace current measurement methods such as tracking cookies. First, advertisers will measure digital ad performance in terms of “qualified clicks” – or consumer engagements that result in a specified outcome. Second, media sellers including search engines, social networks and publishers are developing solutions to measure ad performance. Third, audience modeling is becoming more sophisticated.

“I see modeling becoming more and more granular to try to understand not only how are we driving high-level impacts across media, but modeling more specific actions – downstream engagement,” Vandre said.

Identity and Privacy

The heightened awareness about consumer privacy is the major impetus for developing an alternative to tracking cookies. Those efforts include Unified ID 2.0 backed by demand-side platform The Trade Desk, and proprietary solutions that ask consumers for consent to be tracked.

“We’re focused on person-based identity overall,” Vandre said. “The big question is: how do you scale that? How do you build the connections between that identity and publishers? That’s an area we’re spending a lot of time on.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

Addressable Ads Growing on Linear TV

Chris Maccaro, chief executive of Beachfront Media

“We’re most excited about accelerating addressability across traditional linear, and that’s where we see an enormous amount of growth, both this year and into the future,” Maccaro said. “Our focus has really been on enablement, building the infrastructure to enable that addressability to happen, and then bringing the ability to access that supply through automated channels,” Maccaro adds.

Addressable TV Is Bridge Between Linear, Streaming

Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio

“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”

Media Measurement Underpins Convergence

Beth Weeks, vice president and group director at Digitas

“Measurement becomes critically important as we’re losing reach on linear, but gaining in digital video,” Weeks said. “How are we validating the effectiveness of that holistic reach as we think about bridging those platforms, and being able to validate and verify that we’re achieving those critical KPIs and those business outcomes that our clients are expecting.”

Unification Means Greater ROI

Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery

“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” Kazi said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”

Video-on-Demand Offers Brand Safety

Chris Pizzurro, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Canoe

“We have a very well lit, brand-safe VOD environment today with the Canoe footprint,” Pizzurro said. “We absolutely need to maintain that quality, but we know we need to open up the pipes to programmatic so our programmers can sell 100% of their inventory…We’re up-and-running, and we look to turn up the heat this year.”

Brand, Consumer Experiences Are Key

Rob Christensen, vice president of advanced TV sales and distribution at Vevo

“As we’re running ad pods in multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands, it’s a great experience for users and of course, maximizing the monetization opportunities,” Christensen said.

Don’t Forget Frequency Capping

JoAnna Foyle, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk

“[Ad] frequency is a big challenge, that if you’re not using the right platform and the right tools – we see this as consumers while we’re watching content on mobile devices, on streaming services…the odds are frequency isn’t being managed very well,” Foyle said. “One of the things we talk to our buyers a lot about is making sure that they’re using the tools available to them.”

CTV, OTT See Data-Driven Innovations

John Vilade, head of ad sales at Premion

“We’re out right now doing a lot of education with marketers. Marketers are seeing rapid changes in the marketplace. There’s a lot of complexity and fragmentation. There’s a lot of nuance in terms of what you can do inside the connected TV space,” Vilade said. “I’m most excited about now is the data-driven innovations that we’re seeing inside of connected TV and OTT.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

“The expectations right now is that vendors are bringing us opportunities to break through the clutter,” Doug Zarkin, vice president and chief marketing officer of Pearle Vision, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We are not going to be a brand that outspends the competition. We are a brand that continually out-thinks the competition.”

He said Pearle Vision is seeking marketing partners that understand its business and how they can add value to its marketing infrastructure.

“Frankly, I don’t care if you have a bunch of ex-Google people that work for you,” Zarkin said. “I don’t care if you worked for Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson, and I certainly don’t care if you worked for one of our competitors. What I’m really interested in is a vendor who comes to us with really strong insights driven from their investigation into our business, and very clear reasons to believe they’re a solution we currently don’t have in the portfolio.”

‘Human Truth’ Overrides FOMO

Zarkin said marketers need to recognize qualities of “human truth” that are enduring, such as the need for relationships with others.

“When you finally decide to go out of your home, and enjoy a meal at a restaurant or shop in your favorite brick-and-mortar outlet, there is a sense of joy and a bit of nostalgia for how great it is when there’s somebody there to care for you,” he said. “Personal relationships are something people are longing for as they look for goods and services.”

Brands also should focus on the fundamentals of consumer needs, rather than current trends, he said.

“Fear of missing out is not a marketing strategy,” Zarkin said. “There are so many things that you could do. There are less things that you should do. There are even less things that you need to do, and a much smaller set of things that you must do…We have to make that sure we’re nailing ‘the must.’”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

He joined Samba TV, the provider of omniscreen advertising and analytics, in July as vice president and head of agency development after a 27-year career in media buying. His agency experience includes leadership roles at Dentsu Media, IPG’s Initiative and Publicis’ Zenith, Optimedia and DeWitt Media.

Magel sees an opportunity to transform the way advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and improve audience targeting.

“I have just been so fascinated and so excited by the amazing amount of transformation and evolution happening in the television industry,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The hot spot of where all that is happening is in the addressable and advanced video sectors, specifically being led by connected TV.”

Data Insights for Advertisers

Amid the fragmentation of the media landscape, advertisers have grown more reliant on first-party data to hone their messaging and create a

“Marketers are absolutely much more focused on building their repositories of data about their customers,” he said, “and leveraging knowledge and insights and understanding from that data to improve and connect all of their brand experiences. A big part of their brand experience is their advertising and media presence.”

Improvements to measurability will help advertisers to avoid showing ads too frequently to the same audiences. Such saturation creates a negative experience for viewers, and is wasteful for advertisers.

“It’s an undeveloped space. The experience isn’t optimal yet. The industry hasn’t matured,” he said. “There’s been a huge change in viewing behavior by the consumer. The amount of insight into what viewers are actually watching between linear and streaming is limited.”

Automatic content recognition (ACR) data that capture what appears on smart TV screens provide more details about viewership for linear and streamed programming. With that information, marketers can implement frequency capping, reach deduplicated audiences and measure their return on investment (ROI).

“When you’re going to market utilizing audiences that have been built by such a granular set and individualized set of data, you need to be able to measure viewing of those audiences,” Magel said. “That is what the data that Samba does provide enables.”

Greater Media Transparency

Advertisers also face challenges as media outlets develop closed systems, also known as “walled gardens,” that limit their ability to measure whether they’re reaching the same consumers among different platforms. Improved cross-platform measurement can help to improve the effectiveness of media buys, driving additional investment that improves the ecosystem.

“Intermeasurability is a critical step the industry needs to take,” Magel said. “All boats can rise with that tide if there is an ability to see across all of those partners. That’s good for viewers. I think that’s good for marketers, and I think that’s good for media companies.”

Roku, the maker of streaming devices that connect TVs to the internet, this year formed the Roku Brand Studio to help advertisers create branded experiences. It signed a deal with digital comedy producer Funny or Die to hire several executives. Among those professionals was Chris Bruss, the former president of digital content at Funny or Die who now leads the Roku Brand Studio.

“The goal of my group is to figure out how to take those advertisers beyond the 30-second spot,” Bruss said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We can do that in a number of different ways.”

Bruss’s group specializes in creating content that can range from short-form spots to long-form shows that showcase brands. Roku’s research found that a branded experience can lead to consumer purchase intent that’s four times as much as for a 30-second spot.

“In the Roku Brand Studio, we have both the data and also just the experience that shows us that branded content and branded experiences are going to create more impact with our audience,” he said. “You can create truly and genuinely entertaining content, and invite that audience into be part of that. Now, they’re not just watching your ad, they’re in your ad.”

‘The Show Next Door’

Among the recent examples of Roku’s productions are “The Show Next Door,” an interview show created in collaboration with Maker’s Mark, the brand of Kentucky bourbon made by Beam Suntory. The show appears on the Roku Channel, the company’s hub for ad-supported video on demand (AVOD).

“We understood what their [Maker’s Mark] brand goals and what their marketing goals were, and how to incorporate their brand and their product into that show,” Bruss said. “We produced that show from creative all the way through to post-production.”

Data-Rich Platform

Roku can gather detailed insights about viewer behavior and consumer preferences, which help advertisers to improve their targeting and to develop ad creative that resonates with those audiences. After seeing that viewers spend an average of seven minutes looking for things to watch, Roku Brand Studio developed a weekly show called “Roku Recommends” to highlight the best new programming. The show also offers an opportunity for marketers to showcase their brands.

“As brand marketers are thinking about streaming, I think that understanding the power of that platform – and not just how big the audience is, but how you can gain insights from that audience and then you can target that audience in really powerful ways,” Bruss said.

You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.

“We’re looking more at first-party data to ensure we’re prepared as we can be, as it relates to this cookieless future that is on the horizon,” Jennifer Kohl, senior vice president and executive director of integrated media at WPP’s VMLY&R, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re chasing quality engagements for our clients to the best extent possible.”

AI Tools for Targeting

Marketers and their agencies are adopting more advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze vast amounts of data and automate some decisions about media placements more quickly. Those adjustments are possible while ad campaigns are in flight.

“AI can help in real-time optimization and predictive models, helping to drive positive outcomes that we’re working for,” Kohl said. “We have had success with partners like a LoopMe that specialize in AI real-time optimization, and we continue to explore other AI partners.”

Streaming Video’s Growing Role

As consumers spend more time with connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) video services, advertisers are shifting media budgets to reach them on a wider variety of devices including smart TVs and mobile phones. Awareness campaigns aimed at the top of the purchase funnel have an effect on lower-funnel activity like conversions and sales.

“When we incorporate things like CTV or OTT into our media plans, the role is very similar to linear. It’s higher-level, awareness-generating role,” Kohl said. “What we know directionally, though, is when we put these higher-funnel media channels into the mix that are a little bit more awareness-focused, we do see a good, positive impact on lower-funnel tactics.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.

Interoperability Is Great Unifier

Kevin Lemberg, head of partnerships for advertising solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions

“There has to be some sort of unification and some sort of common language and goals between the partners within a solution or technology that we’re offering out to the industry,” he said. “Partnerships are going to be very important to round out the technology offering and the solutions for the industry in order for us to move forward.”

Holistic View of TV Landscape

Jen Soch, executive director of specialty channels at WPP’s GroupM

“We’re really seeing an idea where we can be with addressable and CTV part of the main video recommendation that goes into what we’re doing with a client, and look at it more holistically.” she said. “I do see a lot more interest in bringing it [addressable and CTV] very much to the forefront and being a bigger part of their overall play.”

Don’t Devalue Premium Content

Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal

“Interoperability across linear and digital without losing the value of premium content along the way is going to be so critical,” she said. “If we lose and swing the pendulum too far to ‘audiences only,’ imagine content being cheapened over the coming years and basically creating a society that the value is placed on audiences alone….I look forward to working with the industry on how, as we try to equivalize and become more interoperable, we don’t lose the value of premium content.”

Addressable TV Unlocks Insights

Kristine Bayles, vice president of advanced advertising sales at AMC Networks

Addressable TV “enables us to get the insights into communication and driving deeper understanding in the industry,” she said. “We all know TV is important, but CTV and VOD is just as important…Viewership is truly fragmented now, and it’s not that less people are consuming, they’re just consuming differently. We need to understand this, and move forward with converged impressions.”

Automate Workflows for Savings

Mark Marshall, president of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal

“Our goal on that [automated workflows] is to work with our partners on the agency side be able to get rid of about 30% of the manual work that we do,” he said. “How do we find different APIs [application programming interfaces] and different ways to interact, and take out some of the manual elements to allow us to move faster and hopefully improve margins for clients.”

Outcomes Need Collaboration

Nicole Whitesel, executive vice president of advanced TV and client success at Publicis Media

“We need systems that collaborate — tools that talk to each other, data that can break down those walls, IDs that can understand each other,” she said. “Better sharing of that data enables us to have conversations with our clients about outcomes, and outcomes that deliver change to their business, and outcomes that change the way they decide media mix.”

Self-Scheduling Becoming the Norm

Vicky Fox, chief planning officer at OMD UK

“We’ve moved from a place where people were quite wedded to a linear schedule,” she said. “Self-scheduling is going to be the norm for everybody. Anybody who switches on the TV and either looks at their connected TV menu or their EPG [electronic programming guide] can see how much has changed, because some of the linear schedules may take second place.”

Technology ‘Lifts All Ships’

Richard Nunn, vice president and general manager of advertiser solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions

“Through automation and understanding what has worked and what hasn’t in more real time across channel – that in principle, should mean a greater ROI across what is a fragmented channel base,” he said. “They’ll drive that solution a lot more efficiently because of technology.”

You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.

Editor’s Note:  Special thanks to Jon Watts who collaborated and reported for this series.

“We’re going to reach a point soon-ish, I would say, of mass scale,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “At that point, media planners will start to lead with addressable audiences.”

He said advertisers can be classified among three broad categories of addressable TV strategies.  The first group consists of sophisticated, big-budget advertisers with a “total TV” strategy that are seeking to add incremental reach with addressable TV.

The second group includes advertisers that have an “addressable-only” strategy to reach audiences in the lower parts of the purchase funnel.

The third group is made up of marketers that are completely new to TV, and recognize the opportunity to reach target audiences economically.

“You don’t need a big budget that TV has often been associated with,” Harcus said. “Smaller budgets can still allow smaller, scale-up brands/startup brands to target their priority audiences.”

Future-Proofing Against Cookies

While digital advertisers are bracing for the continued loss of tracking cookies that help with ad targeting, addressable TV platforms haven’t ever relied on those kinds of identifiers. Instead, their targeting tends to be based on location, postal codes and households, Harcus said.

“We’ve got a future-ready data strategy for targeting and measurement that has been immune, to some extent, from the changes in the world of cookies and IDs,” he said. “That’s not to say that innovations aren’t going to come along.”

As more advertisers measure the success of their campaigns with outcomes, Harcus is advising them to gain greater expertise in addressable TV by experimenting with the platforms. Those tests should include different kinds of ad creative that are customized for audiences.

“Our research says there’s a very compelling case for getting the relevant creative message in front of the right audience, but also on the right screen around the right content,” he said.

You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.

“We are moving from outputs to outcomes,” Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), said in this interview with Beet.TV. “There is an increased focus to understand what is being delivered, and if you look at the last year and a half, we’ve had such an acceleration particularly on the performance side and with e-commerce.”

Advertisers face additional hurdles in improving their measurement methods as more regions enact privacy laws that give consumers greater control over how their personal data are gathered, shared and used for ad targeting. Technology companies have responded by gradually limiting the use of tracking cookies that help to measure online ad performance.

“It’s going to require everyone to come together to really think about what does attribution look like moving forward,” Kaplowtiz said. “We need tools, and we need access to be able to look across the ecosystem, not just have this group of walled gardens where we look at this in isolation, but how do we understand holistically what’s going on with a campaign.”

Advertisers are seeking ways to get a more comprehensive view of consumers as they spend time among different media platforms. They’re also looking for data that help to compare ad performance throughout those channels.

“There are so many business use cases out there, and one tool or one piece of technology may only apply to one piece of that,” Kaplowitz said “You may need to leverage different approaches, and that’s going to be a little bit more complex and challenging.”

Agency Compensation

The 4A’s collaborated with Google and Forrester Research to study how outcomes-based measurement affects the way agencies are compensated. Kaplowitz said performance-based pricing is better than full-time equivalent (FTE) models, but requires additional metrics.

“It’s a positive move, but it also relies on having good data in order to connect it back and ensure that you can accurately define what the performance was based on the activity that was put in place,” she said.

Ad-ID Adoption

The 4A’s has undertaken several initiatives to transform the media ecosystem, such as urging marketers to support diversity and inclusion in their ad spending. The organization also is working to drive adoption of Ad-ID, an identity solution for creative assets on any platform or in any format. NBCUniversal last month became the first major media company to adopt Ad-ID as a standard across its One Platform portfolio.

“We are now investing in new technology and capabilities for these, but we need everyone to adopt this,” Kaplowitz said. “It’s primarily been used for linear television, and we want that to be the ubiquitous code on every single … creative asset moving forward.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.

“We see a vast ecosystem that uses data and metrics in different ways, not just for currency,” she said in this interview with Beet. TV. “We think there will be many different ways to transact over time.”

Consumer data applications for advertisers include media attribution, conversion events, business outcomes, viewability and fraud prevention. For publishers, consumer data can help to get a better understanding of their audiences.

“If you’re taking the impressions that you’re serving, not only understanding the reach and frequency they might be delivering, but then also getting all the way to business outcomes, you’re able to create that transparency all the way to the bottom line,” Grammier said.

LiveRamp prioritizes authenticated, opt-in data from consenting consumers.

“When we think about responsible media at LiveRamp, we definitely start at the consumer. We to make sure we have their consent” to gather personal and authenticated data, she said. “You ask for their permission, and in that moment, you also capture the information that allows you to potentially to deliver the targeting to them.”

Connected TV platforms not only can glean viewership data from device identifiers and internet protocols (IPs), but also when they collect payment information.

“Most of the inventory is actually authenticated because we are charging for it. We are creating authentication moments,” she said. “The infrastructure, though, really wasn’t built to use that authenticated data originally.”

Advertisers have shifted their media spending to CTV and over-the-top platforms whose viewership provides incremental reach to linear TV.

“We see a lot of reach-maximizing strategies going on, and the consumers’ eyeballs have moved to the CTV platforms,” she said. “There will be a time when we’re all using that authenticated data, that consented data.”