Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
To many, these new techniques may seem to supercede the traditional TV measurement system operated by Nielsen.
But not only does Nielsen nowadays have its own set of products aiming to measure TV and video across multiple platforms for publishers and advertisers – OpenAP is also part-powered by the company.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen global president Steve Hasker says: “From a Nielsen perspective, this is good news, because our data can and will feed in to those platforms pretty seamlessly. We’ve built it so it provides a true cross-platform comparability in terms of its audience measurement.
“No matter how a marketer wants to use those platforms (or) wants to use that data), we’re able to provide it seamlessly.”
Nielsen is making its audience segments, household, personal and buyergraphic TV ratings data available through OpenAP, the company announced in April. The system also leverages Accenture and comScore know-how.
To Hasker, cross-platform media measurement has now reached an inflection point.
“We’ve been talking about measurement for years,” he says. “This year, this upfront, this conference, we’ve really made some progress as an industry.
“I think we’ve seen more progress in the measurement ecosystem … in the last 12 months than we have in the previous 12 years.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV during the TV UpFront market, Brunet addresses the importance of both a unified platform for video and TV inventory and one decisioning engine for header bidding to handle both programmatic and direct-sold transactions.
In one-to-one, guaranteed programmatic selling buyer and seller agrees on things like terms, pricing, flight dates, inventory and audience type. “The seller would actually bundle the inventory and guarantee it to the buyer and the terms would be agreed upon, which is very important in an UpFront setup,” says Brunet.
It also creates a bridge between digital video and programmatic or linear TV. “We think the programmatic guaranteed world will be the way to transact both digital and TV,” he adds.
FreeWheel has committed to creating a unified stack, “which is really the future for the industry. This is what the sellers want but it’s also what the buyers want eventually.”
On the subject of header bidding, Brunet points out the reality that despite being a “red hot topic,” the technique was created for desktop and display. It’s not designed for video, mobile screens, OTT and non-IP environments like set-top boxes.
“Plus it introduces delay in the transaction so it basically ruins the user experience,” Brunet says.
Moreover, having direct handled by an ad server and programmatic by header bidding “basically defeats the purpose of holistic competition across the board between direct sold and programmatic,” he adds.
FreeWheel’s unified decisioning engine bridges this gap so that direct-sold campaigns compete with programmatic campaigns across all screens.
To underscore the depth of digital advertising fraud, Brunet cites the discovery by Internet security firm White Ops of a $1 billion-plus Russian hacking operation called Methbot in which bots posed as humans watching online videos. At the time, FreeWheel conducted a study and found that 99.999% of its traffic did not match the IP addresses that White Ops had listed, “which means our publishers are inherently clean,” he says.
In a related study as part of the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report, FreeWheel determined that on average its viewability metrics were 15 percentage points above those of random publishers.
Looking beyond the desktop, where the need for viewability first became a concern, Brunet stresses there’s a bigger story to be addressed.
“Viewability needs to address all devices,” he says. “Video includes OTT, mobile, set-top, VOD and eventually linear TV. Those devices need to be taken into account as well in the future.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>She wants to “shine a light on the need for the industry to reach out beyond legacy metrics so we can promise our clients, the national marketers, an improvement to their business.”
This was a big theme in NBC’s TV Upfront last week.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Digital Media Summit of LUMA Partners, Yaccarino talks about what advertisers have been waiting for, the value of parent Comcast’s set-top box data and the company’s newly expanded relationship with Snapchat in the form of a daily news show on the social platform.
While no one argues the value of premium content and its impact on an advertising campaign, “How great would it be for us to be able to transact on a currency that reflects their outcomes to improve their business,” says Yaccarino, who is Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships for NBCU.
She dismisses traditional ratings like C3 and C7 as “an approximate number of who may or may not have watched out show that we have to wait three weeks to get.” Lacking better metrics, marketers have lacked “the data they craved or were promised form the digital platforms combined with the scale of premium content.”
She cites NBCU’s audience tools and studio, largely powered by data from parent Comcast’s set-top boxes, as providing insights that can be married together with consumer data “to have a good prediction” of advertisers’ business outcomes.
As ADWEEK reports, NBCU just announced that NBC News will produce Snapchat’s first daily news show. Yaccarino says what started out as a “very modest relationship” with the social platform for the Rio Olympics “changes every single day.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>BOA’s agency, Publicis GroupeConnect, decided that the UpFront planning model “just wasn’t suiting our needs our needs anymore as a business,” Video Investment Lead Jenny Schauer explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
She also offers her encouragement for the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP while pointing out some early shortcomings.
With regard to the UpFront, “This year we actually decided to take the leap of faith and make the move to calendar UpFront planning. It’s a pretty big shift,” Schauer says.
Following the traditional broadcast planning model “wasn’t allowing us to be as strategic as we could because we had to make pretty big and sizable decisions in the TV space before we had any idea who our audience was going to be for the next year, what our products were going to be.”
This had resulted in “force fitting” things into plans that didn’t address BOA’s total business needs. Moving to calendar planning gives BOA the opportunity to get briefed at the same time as all other channel providers, according to Schauer.
Now it will use the UpFront week to identify key partners. “At the end of the day, we decided that’s really the value for us.”
Because Publicis GroupeConnect has been moving toward audience-based TV buying, Schauer is encouraged by OpenAP and the leadership being shown by founding members Fox, Turner and Viacom. “It’s a small step but it’s a very important step,” she says.
What’s tricky about OpenAP in its early stages is that it’s “essentially a consortium of three separate teams,” with no centralized hub.
“It’s streamlined in that you can use one audience, but it still goes to each individual publisher, gets planned using their tools and you have to go to each publisher with your contract,” Schauer says.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So while “we’re taking a lot of first steps in lots of different directions,” sometimes there’s progress in the TV space and sometimes not, says the EVP, Director of Strategic Investments, for Havas Media.
“The data conversation is I think somewhat overblown right now,” he says by way of preamble. “We have been buying using data for years. It’s not something new to us.”
What’s interesting to Kanefsky is the fact that TV networks “are trying to infiltrate that space,” and “they’re charging to infiltrate that space.” He notes that the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom designed to unify audience targeting for advertisers is seeking “a 10 percent up-charge on your media cost.”
He’s not disputing the need for a more unified currency across multiple networks. “With that said, we have a long, long way to go to solve the data issue.”
Kanefsky believes the best way to make TV buying more efficient is to actually have more ratings points available to buyers and that using data to optimize media is not a new concept.
“What we need the networks to do is find more ways to put more rating points back in the market, not necessarily from C3 to C7 but to actually perform better,” he says. “We’re in a marketplace that’s driven by supply right now. But what’s driving marketplace inefficiencies is the fact that supply is down so much.”
Advertisers still expect big ratings impact great content but would like to be able to obtain both while reaching audiences in difficult time frames like 8-11, according to Kanefsky.
Asked what he’d like to see most from the networks, Kanefsky says “a strategy” that would provide a vision of “how are we going to get from point A to point B.”
To his mind, ABC is the closest to having such a strategy, NBC is “all over the place” and CBS “has their model built out kind of perfectly.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>David Sable is quick to point out that algorithms for TV buying are nothing new, as spot TV was traditionally purchased based on CPM’s—the algorithm of the day. In this interview with Beet.TV, the Global CEO of Y&R discusses the seeming dichotomy that is TV everywhere and the growing urge to micro target audiences.
“It’s complex because the promise of so much data and so much targeting makes one think that that’s what they have to do. That you have to be super targeted,” Sable says.
He references Facebook, Mars and Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard as advocating a wider approach to reaching audiences. “We’ve always looked for better ways to target,” Sable says. “I think the problem is we’re in a world of because we can we do, as opposed to people taking a step back and thinking about it and saying ‘what am I actually targeting.’”
He was experimenting with what is now known as addressable TV advertising roughly 15 years ago at direct-marketing agency Wunderman. And while he believes addressable is “going to be important,” he fears that “hyper micro targeting is creating an echo chamber” that keeps getting smaller.
“Do I really only want to talk to people who are going to buy a car in the next six months, who have a propensity to buy a Ford or a Mercedes and only talk to them? If that’s what you do, you’re going down the wrong path,” he says.
In a parallel vein, he points to analyst prognostications a decade ago about the bleak future for TV programming because it would all go the way of CGI.
“There’s more stuff on location than ever before. Less stuff in studio. Less CGI,” Sable notes. “On the content side, we in the golden age here.”
He agrees with NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino on the need for ad-supported programming that fuels the content of popular platforms like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, as The New York Times reports.
“They’re selling the stuff that advertising has allowed to be created,” Sable says. “They’re just reaping the benefit.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These are some of the views that emerge from the vantage point of James Rooke, GM, Publisher Platform at premium video provider FreeWheel, who has long had a close-up view of the digital video landscape.
Asked to identify a major change in the marketplace year over year, Rooke says “One is that the pendulum that’s been swinging back to premium video is accelerating in the direction that the premium video companies want. So that’s a good thing.”
Looking back a few years, he recalls the revelations of fraud within certain ad networks and a resulting pullback of advertising dollars and relocation to safer environments. More recently, some digital video ads have appeared alongside objectionable content, much of it user-generated.
“That has now evolved into a deeper understanding of the depth of challenge of ensuring brand safety,” along with a rise in the recognition of the positive impact for advertisers that premium video content has on viewer engagement with ad messages.
Asked gauge the ultimate impact of Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings, Rooke sees it not as a silver bullet but one step in a positive direction. That’s because going forward, more precise audience targeting will naturally result in a “mosaic” of audience measurement metrics.
Because audiences may be targeted using proprietary first party datasets of a brand marketer, “there isn’t necessarily the need in that instance to have different types of measurement,” Rooke says. He also points to the “leadership that the programmers have been taking” in advanced audience targeting, citing the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom.
“I think those are really important signals that the premium video ecosystem understands that it needs to move toward a model that gives greater options to the buy-side in terms of how that inventory is bought,” Rooke says.
He brings a similarly granular and realistic perspective to addressable advertising. “The reality as I think we all know is that it’s still a very nascent topic.”
FreeWheel’s clients need to unify their quality reach across not just digital video but set-top box, video-on-demand inventory and, ultimately, linear inventory. “What we’re being asked to solve for is ‘enable me to plan, forecast, ad decision, steward, optimize across a unified pool of inventory’ where the screen is simply an end point,” says Rooke.
The second “layer of the cake” in Rooke’s words is enabling the sell-side to be able to “execute on that unified pool of quality inventory against any dataset that they choose.” While it’s still in the early stages, “those are the proof points that need to get put on the board and I think that’s going to be beneficial obviously not just for the sell-side but for the buy-side.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“There was a clear understanding, based on the conversations that we had with brands and agencies, that solving for best-in-class ad experience isn’t the issue of the publisher alone,” says the GM, Publisher Platform, FreeWheel. “There is shared accountability on both sides.”
More than half (52%) of 250 agency and brand leaders surveyed by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video said that improving the video ad experience for consumers is the biggest challenge for the industry.
“One of the interesting findings was that the number one answer for ad experience issues actually came back as creative diversity, and that is something that the buy side has accountability for,” Rooke says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Other findings highlighted the need to ensure the right creative assets are made available for the right screens and that ad tags aren’t so heavy as to cause latency issues. “But there was a very balanced point of view that says that at the end of the day, we have to put the consumer at the center,” Rooke says.
He believes that if everyone does their part, everyone will win. Brands know that they’re getting the best return for their money if consumers are watching content in brand-safe and engaging environments, while MVPD’s and other premium video providers can continue to grow their share of ad dollars.
“That fuels the production of best-in-class content that we get to all enjoy, and that’s good for consumers. So I think there’s a nice virtuous cycle there,” Rooke says.
When it comes to fragmentation, FreeWheel has a bird’s-eye view of the complications, as it executes dynamic ad insertion to more than 200 different endpoints.
“Managing that ad experience is not just a technical issue but it is the combination of business policy, operational execution and technical execution. And those three things have to come together across all the different parties,” Rooke observes.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Right now the scale for addressable television – either linear or VOD – is 57mn,” says one2one Media chief operating officer Jamie Power in this video interview with Beet.TV. “That’s about half of all US households.
“That number will grow to about 70mn households by the end of 2017. So, we have scale there.”
Power is one of two of advertising execs who set up and led GroupM’s advanced TV advertising division, and who have now moved on to run their own, independent company in the Cross MediaWorks portfolio.
Mike Bologna and Jamie Power – who were CEO and managing partner, respectively, of Modi Media – have become president and COO of one2one Media, a company helping agencies to plan, implement and measure advanced TV advertising on multi-channel video programming distributors.
“It’s the most exciting time to be in television right now,” Power continues. “We’ve always known that television works, we never had the data to prove it. Now we have all this data we’re able to show clients that TV does more than drive awareness.
We can target prospects, we can drive conversion. We can use smarter targeting, like we’ve done in digital for years.”
one2one sets out to aggregate addressable inventory and create a managed service so that, instead of talking with multiple MVPDs and working with multiple different data sets and trying to stitch together measurement and sales data, it can all be done by one2one.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Fans are at the heart of everything we do at Viacom,” says Gabe Bevilacqua, SVP, Product Management, Viacom Vantage. “And that gets expressed a lot of ways.”
Fan insights are key to matching Viacom’s brands with marketers seeking to ride the coattails of viewer enthusiasm. “What we try to do is take some data and apply it and understand a little more deeply what makes a fan. To make that real for the marketer,” Bevilacqua says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Studying TV ad engagement, Viacom analyzes second-by-second viewing data, differences in context and differences across audiences. “To the other end of the spectrum, we also think about how fans engage with specific brands,” he says.
It’s not about making gut decisions to decide which brands are best aligned with which viewers but studying affinity maps and audience models to find “a great fit for this show or this star.”
Asked about conversations during this year’s TV Upfront regarding more advanced targeting of linear audiences, Bevilacqua says the launch of the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom is not a beta test or a pilot program.
“We’ve done this a lot of times. We are in full-scale product mode,” he says.
OpenAP goes beyond simply targeting specific audiences just to find higher concentrations of them.
“There’s other marketing objectives and goals, everything from the integrated marketing elements to let’s think about reach and how we’re using data to manage reach against a target. Let’s think about how we’re managing frequency,” Bevilacqua says.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Schwartz recaps his push for commercial impression measurement while sharing his thoughts and concerns about the new audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom called OpenAP.
While he thought that Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings “was a very good start” a few years ago, GroupM’s clients were increasingly “rumbling” about TV ratings being down and commercial pricing going in the opposite direction. That was the impetus for the media investment giant to meet with an unidentified network, as originally reported by Variety, to explore the concept of counting commercial impressions and, in the process, identifying six barriers to completion.
Thereafter followed meetings with Nielsen, comScore, five broadcast networks, the Video Advertising Bureau, 20 media sales heads and assorted researchers. Schwartz predicts progress on the initiative will be made by “multiple research companies,” not just Nielsen and comScore.
“There could be a joint venture with the cable operators, it could be a third party that pulls all the data together, or it could be one of these technology companies like an Adobe who has massive knowledge of how get all this data integrated together,” Schwartz says.
As for Total Content Ratings, TV networks are deciding individually how to encode commercials and content by program, episode and device. “I think it’s important for the networks because then they can dimensionalize the value of their content,” he adds.
He believes that more media sellers will join OpenAP, as it needs to be broader and deeper. Two questions rise to the fore from a buyer’s perspective.
“If I put my information in their system they get to know who the true target is. They get to revaluate how they price the inventory,” Schwartz says. “I want that difference in value between demographic and the behavior to go back to the client.”
Additionally, potentially having 20 clients with 20 different audience targets could be a drawback. “It would be really hard to create a corporate buy and monetize the corporate buy like I do now in that environment.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Instead of a one-size-fits-all, one big event, we take a more tailored approach,” Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP, Head of Marketing, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
AT&T has been sharing with agencies and marketers findings from some of the hundreds of addressable campaigns handled by DirecTV, which it bought last year and hasbeen in the addressable marketplace for four years, as Advertising Age reports.
“It’s about educating them about how to best use addressable, not only TV but across platforms as well,” says Dunsche. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to educate clients.
She sees addressable advertising becoming a more important part of the conversation during this year’s TV Upfront season as marketers look for more accountability from TV advertising. Addressable not only can eliminate TV ad spend waste but also is “highly measurable and trackable through entire marketing funnel,” says Dunsche.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Having pushed its content out across a variety of platforms, when it comes to linear television, “What’s so important now is for us to be able to target it and also be able to measure it accurately,” Price says in this interview with Beet.TV.
To support its Discovery Engage audience guarantees, Discovery uses such data sources as GfK MRI, Experian, Nielsen and Polk. Discovery Engage is part of the One Discovery marketing platform.
“We’ve gone across several categories with it and so far the response has been overwhelming,” says Price, citing automotive, consumer packaged-goods, finance, quick-serve restaurants and travel. “We expect that in this upfront we’ll probably do more categories.”
Asked for his reaction to the OpenAP audience-targeting partnership consisting thus far of Fox, Turner and Viacom, Price emphasizes the need for commonality.
“We’re always open to finding standards that will run across a variety of media companies,” he says. “That’s the reason you have standards. So we’re very open to it and it’s something that I think will be much easier and more effective for clients and agencies to transact on.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>An audience target for a client “that is actually going to move their business is a very different animal anyway,” says Jon Stimmel, EVP, Chief Investment Officer, UM.
Progress on the targeting front has been slowed in part by inventory constraints, Stimmel explains in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he refers to the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom as “the Hulu of data.”
“It’s been a really small portion against each one of those media owners that have undertaken this endeavor and I don’t see that changing in the near future,” Stimmel says of advanced audience targeting. “But I do see more and more of them being able to execute in a way that matches up with how we build our plans.”
Asked for his assessment of OpenAP, Stimmel says it’s a step in the right direction but too early to judge completely as some details have yet to surface.
“I was surprised, not that I’m not an optimist. It’s just you don’t see a lot of media owner collaboration all the time,” he says.
Stimmel likens this cooperation to the advent of Hulu just over a decade ago. “Hulu was a big endeavor when Fox and NBC came together to sell their digital inventory. This is like the Hulu of data,” he adds.
UM research experts will be going under the hood of OpenAP to determine things like how the networks are defining the audience segments they’re offering for advanced targeting and whether they’re in sync with the way advertisers define them.
“That collection of the data is probably the most important in our desire to move from this respondent level data to more behavioral. It’s really the path we’ve been trying to instill,” he says.
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being best, Stimmel rates the current state of cross-screen measurement at “a patchwork five.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>When media agency Assembly talks with its clients, “These are all areas we feel are important as part of the Upfront conversation and the rest of the year,” says EVP and Investment Director Francois Lee.
Two years ago, a conversation with a TV network about a client like Expedia would involve how to target frequent travelers but end up with the network agreeing to guarantee delivery on adults 25-54. “For us, that’s essentially not saying much because we can do the same thing, to be honest,” Lee says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“But now the conversation is the network saying ‘all right we will guarantee you on that frequent traveler,’” he adds. “So that is changing the transaction model. That’s something we’re excited about.”
Lee needs to see two specific components to make audience targeting viable: how close to business outcomes sellers can guarantee delivery, and whether the seller can generate incremental value to what Assembly is getting.
“Keep in mind that as the networks get more sophisticated, so do agencies,” he says. “We have a pretty good idea of how media is performing for us.”
Given the long-term erosion of linear TV ratings, the issue of where to shift money leads to a multitude of options, including authenticated apps, paid apps, standalone apps and virtual MVPD’s like YouTube TV. It’s important to assess a client’s existing OTT exposure “because even when you buy Hulu, 70 percent of your impressions is in connected TV environments,” Lee says.
Asked to rate cross-screen audience measurement on a scale of one to 10, he says perhaps four or five.
“Seeing some of the test results from what Nielsen is doing, especially around digital content ratings, we’re not seeing enough consistency to make it scalable yet,” says Lee. “But we’re encouraged that Nielsen is approaching that direction and hopefully we’ll see further results in coming months.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The reason we’re continuing to be confident about increases in demand is because we’re seeing it come from a broad swath of industry categories,” including automotive, consumer packaged-goods, financial services, travel and leisure and retail, says EVP of Business Operations & Strategy Krishan Bhatia.
Its audience targeting and programmatic offerings are now always on—available in the Upfront and scatter—enabling advertisers to access NBCU inventory “across a number of DSP’s that we’ll be expanding as well,” Bhatia says in this interview with Beet.TV.
NBCU recently introduced a new division called Audience Studio, which The Wall Street Journal reports is dedicated to helping marketers employ data for ad targeting purposes by tying together four of the company’s ad buying products.
Asked whether NBCU will be joining forces with Fox, Turner and Viacom in their OpenAP audience buying consortium, Bhatia expresses support for the endeavor while underscoring the company’s own efforts to help advertisers target audiences beyond traditional Nielsen demographics.
Then there is the reach of the NBCU portfolio. Its scale approximates “95% of total viewership reach in the United states, which is about the same amount that I believe the OpenAP initiative announced,” Bhatia says.
Nonetheless, he says the media giant is “generally supportive of any efforts that help the TV ecosystem go above and beyond the traditional age/gender based way of measuring and transacting on audiences, including this one,” a reference to OpenAP.
At the urging of NBCU and others, Nielsen recently put off the release of its Total Content Ratings, so it’s not a factor in the 2017 Upfront negotiations. In the meantime, NBCU has been investing in alternative solutions with both established companies in the space and newcomers.
“Historically, measurement has never really been fully caught up with where consumer trends are headed, and I think we’ve only seen that accelerate as viewership and content distribution continue to fragment,” Bhatia says. “I’m not sure that measurement will ever quite frankly ever be fully caught up.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Like other media executives whose content is distributed on an ever-increasing number of platforms, Debra O’Connell “would like to see it move faster. We continue to help drive that discussion” about cross-platform measurement.
In the meantime, Disney has made it easier for advertisers to avail themselves of opportunities across a content portfolio that offers “something for all life stages,” the EVP of Sales & Marketing for ABC Television Group says in this interview with Beet.TV.
While ESPN maintains a separate sales organization, as Variety reports, “When clients want us to work together or we have a great opportunity to align both groups we will continue to work together,” says O’Connell. “Actually, having Disney ABC sales as one portfolio makes that streamlining even easier.”
Disney was an early proponent of enabling brands to target desired audiences beyond traditional Nielsen age/sex demographics. “There’s absolutely an appetite for it,” she says. The company’s recommendation for many advertisers is a balance of branding at scale and targeting a particular audience segment “for a particular solution that they’re looking for or key performance indicator that they’d like to see as a return on investment for that campaign.”
She believes the industry is “not quite half way there” on uniform cross-platform measurement but that in the next five years there will be more than one option.
Having a few measurement solutions “as opposed to just one individual monopoly” would provide variety while maintaining “some kind of standardization of what that measurement needs to look like” to provide a true picture of audience and viewership.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But what do brands get out of the upfronts? One woman who guides advertisers through their upfront buying strategy says there are both pros and cons involved in their approach.
“There is a myriad of factors that we consider when we are trying to guide clients in terms of whether or not to be in the upfront marketplace,” says Maureen Bosetti, chief investment officer at IPG Mediabrands’ Initiative.
Amongst the variables involved in the strategy:
And Bosetti says the whole season can be advantageous on at least one of those factors: “The upfront is great to make sure you can buy large amounts of television at scale … At the most efficient pricing.”
But, she acknowledges, spending committed early can limit a brand’s ability to respond later in the fall.
“Disadvantages to being in the upfront could include things like less flexibility, you are committed to the dollars, you may not be able to have funds left for more opportunistic things that come along throughout the year,” she adds.
How will networks fare during this year’s upfronts? Wall Street analysts’ forecasts are split.
“(Jefferies’ John) Janedis sees a 2% decline in the upfront dollars spent on TV to $18.2 billion, with broadcasters down 3% and cable down 1%,” reports Deadline.
But BMO Capital Markets’ Daniel Salmon expects new data-driven targeting offers brought by networks to bring growth, Deadline reports. “Does this sound like a dying marketplace to you?” he asks. “No, us either.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’ve seen ratings lifts in both areas,” Speciale says of the truTV and TNT ad reduction efforts, along with “increased brand affinity to the messages that have been within those pods.” Specifically, she says C3 ratings—which track average commercial minutes in live programming plus total playback by digital video recorder out to three days after—was “probably anywhere from five to seven to ten percent lift,” depending on the programming.
“It’s going to be continuing. truTV might be adding some more of their programming with LCI and there are going to be more originals on TNT in 2018 where you’re going to be seeing reduced commercial load,” says Speciale.
On the native ad front, Turner has been asking clients to take some of the one- to two-minute messaging they’ve done in the digital space and bring it to TV. In addition, its content studio has been marrying Turner’s talent ranks with ad messaging and environments. “And that’s going to have a huge pop and resonate really well with the consumer right now.”
Turner uses its targeting capabilities to find the right placement for native content across its entire portfolio, as Advertising Age reports.
According to Speciale, OpenAP was a direct response to clients “asking us to get together.” Even though the individual member networks had focused on their own audience targeting capabilities, “Some of the comments have been ‘it’s great but it’s a little complicated, it’s not scalable. Would you guys consider coming together?’”
She believes the consortium will be a “catalyst” to spur more advertiser interest in audience targeting using their own data sets during this year’s TV Upfront.
“We have been getting a lot of response from other media companies and we are hoping shortly that we’ll be able to announce other people joining the consortium,” Speciale says.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These are some of the trends that Tim Hill sees when he views the TV Upfront with the perspective of nearly 17 years at UM. Now EVP, Managing Partner, Integrated Investment, he shares his thoughts on a range of issues affecting buyers and sellers in this interview with Beet.TV.
It’s no secret that more advertisers would like to achieve more one-to-one messaging by being able to serve the most appropriate ads at a given moment via dynamic ad insertion. “The technology exists to do that. The problem has always been the scale of how you get there,” Hill says.
He finds it promising that video-on-demand providers from Hulu to DIRECTV NOW and others are providing more inventory for dynamic ad insertion, pressuring affiliates and MSO’s to get on board as well. “I think what we’re going to have to see is the traditional players in the space having to set up that dynamic ad insertion environment because they’re being challenged by people who are building that from the ground up,” says Hill.
While the desire for dynamic ad insertion varies client to client, it’s “powerful on the seller end” because it can make their inventory much more efficient, according to Hill.
In every TV Upfront, certain topics rise to the top of industry conversations, pushed there by competitive forces. This year those topics include the new audience targeting consortium by Fox, Turner and Viacom called OpenAP, along with brand-safe digital ad placements.
TV networks will use brand safety issues to tout their inventory control while downplaying the disadvantages of audience migration to a host of competitive platforms. “So while they control their inventory sourcing, they’re losing audience just in general to the marketplace,” Hill says.
He believes the talk about safe environments is a good thing for the industry because “people are going to have to come out stronger and put more accountability against this.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Several of the big US TV networks have declared they will make moves to let advertising buyers use granular and first-party viewer data, over and above traditional Nielsen data, to target ads on linear TV to guaranteed audiences.
The recent announcements included:
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Starcom USA investment and activation president Amanda Richman welcomed the moves.
“The networks leaning in to their audience optimisation products … demonstrates that they are committed to understanding we do need more precise targeting, we are pushing harder for more granular measurement,” she said.
“Doing that in premium environments is certainly welcome.
“Much of the targeting and optimisation that’s been happening in digital can now been brought in to the television space.”
Richman also observes an “explosion of content” presenting “new opportunities for us to find that audience in different spaces”, including the possibility of shorter and more interactive TV ad formats.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>One of the retail giant’s top execs says TV is still performing for the chain – but that doesn’t mean times are not changing.
“We continue to see a reasonably healthy television marketplace,” Target marketing SVP Kristi Argyilan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We see, in our data, plenty of evidence that our guests are still watching a lot of television.
“But we do see it diminishing a little bit every year … to the mobile phone. We will be following those changes in behavior.”
What does that following look like? For Target, it means a combination of partnering with digital ad companies, reviewing where best to spent traditional TV money and commission creative for new screens.
“We are trying to assign value to all television at this point – there’s a long tail when you consider all the inventory sitting in cable, in particular,” Argyilan adds. “Where is the programming that’s really valuable?”
She says a combination of Target’s own studio, in-house creative department, an Indian creative outpost and its creative agency suppliers are tasked with making new-style ads for a plethora of new platforms.
“We’re able to hit at all levels and altitudes and to create the amount of content that we need,” she says. “We’re still working on the pipes to distribute the content faster.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For premium video overall, it’s been six years of double-digit growth in both ad and video views, Mike Lawlor, FreeWheel’s SVP of Client Services, explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “Live video is really starting to take off in terms of ad views,” says Lawlor.
The FreeWheel VMR reveals a migration over the past few years from viewing happening predominantly on desktop and laptop computers—largely a function of distribution—to mobile devices and, finally, the living room. “Set-top VOD and OTT is our strongest growth story and something we’re really excited about. For the first year, it’s the biggest category,” he says, noting that 41% of ad views happened in the living room environment.
As viewership continues to congregate in living rooms, live and simulcasted events have been on the upswing, as has advertiser use of digital dynamic ad insertion. “It’s a natural evolution that we’re seeing more and more dynamic ad insertion activated on live environments and we expect that to continue.”
Asked about the impact of publicity surrounding a backlash by some advertisers to their ads appearing alongside objectionable content, Lawlor says that while it’s the story of the day, it’s nothing new to FreeWheel’s clients. “That’s because premium programmers have had their eye on the user experience for a very long time. This isn’t new to them. Premium programmers in this ecosystem have ensured that they’re developing and maintaining well-lit environments with content that is premium in nature and is safe for advertisers to have their messaging next to. ”
While there are frequent calls within advertising and media circles for a uniform way of targeting people across devices while measuring engagement and campaign ROI, FreeWheel doesn’t believe there will ever be a “single source of truth” as has long been the case with linear TV.
“Marketers intend for their campaigns to do different things on different screens,” he says, ranging from viewability and attribution to brand outcomes. “I think what’s most important is that we enable the ecosystem to target on and measure by whatever’s relevant to the buyers, and a lot of the work we’re doing at FreeWheel is to ensure that we have that capability.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I’ve been in the business for a long time. I never thought that demographics made a lot of sense when we were talking about broad demographics, like women 18-54,” the Vice Chairman of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think this notion of demographics has never made a lot of sense in many, many categories,” she adds. “I’m glad to see if fading off a little bit.”
Selling TV time by audience instead of by “literal programming” makes a lot of sense to Millard. It’s part of the evolution of the business and how people are approaching “intelligent media buying and spending. So I’m a big fan of the evolution.”
One trend she observes is programmers taking an integrated approach to this year’s TV Upfront season. “I would say most of the companies are selling online video, mobile video with their classic television.”
On the headline-grabbing issue of brand safety, trust and the reliability of media, Millard says it’s a conversation that is front and center once again. While the quality of the programming “is anybody’s opinion,” brands are justified in their expectation to know their ads are running where they want them to run, particularly in digital.
“That’s not a lot to ask, but that conversation is critical at this moment when the black box of some of the operators in digital is still out there,” says Millard.
Millard Moving to London in MediaLink Expansion
Following MediaLink’s recent acquisition by Ascential plc, Millard has just been tapped to run MediaLink’s first office outside of the United States, in London.
“This is a clear step to fast-track MediaLink’s business and further increase its presence outside the U.S.,” Ascential Chief Executive Duncan Painter said in a news release. “We are continuing to develop synergies between MediaLink and our other businesses to better serve our customers and bring additional elements to our growth strategy.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“By and large, if you have a sizable amount of advertising dollars to spend in national television we try and get you into the Upfront, because history has proven it’s an advantageous position to be in,” Chris Geraci says in this interview with Beet.TV.
For a variety of reasons, some advertisers can’t make a long-term commitment for TV inventory. In those cases, Omnicom tries to structure shorter, multi-quarter deals if possible, according to Geraci.
Even with the arrival of digital publishers and their inventory, giving brands more choices of where to run their ads, supply and demand still dictates pricing during the Upfront. This is particularly the case when audience fragmentation and audience losses ultimately impact the available supply of gross ratings points.
“We actually saw a little bit of growth in last year’s Upfront in terms of advertiser spending,” Geraci says. “That combined with what was a pretty horrendous year in terms of ratings performance certainly produced a significant amount of inflation.”
He doesn’t expect to see similar TV budget growth in 2017, “But inflation is part of the deal when you’re talking about a supply and demand environment.”
Advertiser demand for better audience targeting beyond traditional age/sex demographics spawned the recently announced OpenAP consortium involving Fox, Turner and Viacom. Geraci describes the move as be “great” because it provides a uniform metric in the advanced targeting arena.
Asked if he expects to see more programmers join OpenAP, he doesn’t see why others would not. “You’re basically offering something to the agency and advertiser community that is going to be simpler to use, it will be easier to make comparisons,” Geraci says. “I don’t really know what the downside would be of not being part of it.”
When the subject turns to the continued emergence of brand-safe environments for video ads, he believes it’s going to be “shouted from the mountaintops” during the Upfront season. But he offers perspective as well.
“I think that there are still plenty of places in the online world where brand safety can be all but ensured,” Geraci says. “We’re talking about a very specific problem dealing with what is, for the most part, user-generated, non-professional content that has always been an obvious concern.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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