The SVP of North America Sales talks about reconfigured media sales teams and the desire for a unified system serving both digital media and broadcast TV in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.
“Where it really gets complex is where you have different media types and you have to go through the execution process, through delivery, invoicing, attribution, back into the system and collection. That full process, the more complex the sale the more complex the buy, the harder it gets,” Hedrick says.
She describes the rise of sales organizations that are matrixed, “so you have a team that may go across many different products and then you have specialists that come in and go deep within those products. But the expectation isn’t that the sales team can go wide and deep.”
Her take on data is that there’s “a ton” of it, but “we haven’t quite figured out how to use that data in the day-to-day sales effort and adding value to the products that we’re trying to sell. It’s there, we can present it. But we haven’t automated that through software.”
While there’s plenty of technology available to make selling easier and more efficient, automating that process is a big driver at WideOrbit. “Because if we can solve that, we can create an environment where salespeople are able to use their time doing more revenue generating activity and more strategic activity.
“What we don’t want is to promote an industry where we’re doing a bunch of busy work, or we’re swivel chairing between systems because we can’t enter something in one system and have it go out to digital and traditional broadcast,” Hedrick says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>For advanced targeting of TV audiences, “Live linear programming is a big part of it. We are optimizing our television buys today for clients that have a desire to do so,” the network’s VP of Programmatic Sales says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference.
Meanwhile, on the digital side, whether it’s full-episode, OTT, connected-TV devices or set-top video-on-demand, “we are looking to bring this cross-screen, trying to find an auto intender regardless of the modality that they’re consuming our content and serving the person that is in market for that product that ad at the right time,” Callahan adds.
Finding the right ad length and load is easier with on-demand content like movies where it’s scripted and ad breaks are planned. “I think you can do things with the break. You can shorten the break, adjust the break.”
Callahan sees Hulu’s approach “with different flavors of subscriptions” as offering a tradeoff with viewers in terms of ad choices and data sharing, while the “holy grail of serving right ad to right person with right format creates a less clustered more meaningful ad experience.”
Linear commercial breaks remain “baked in, sports isn’t scripted, you don’t know when somebody’s going to score a touchdown or hit a home run. You don’t know when that commercial break is going to happen,” Callahan says.
“You can probably load some up to be a certain way, but I think more in the archived, on-demand digital video library today you can get creative do things unique and interesting and create more value for the interruptions in a shorter capacity in those environments.”
Like other networks, Fox is seeing continued growth in connected-TV viewing year over year. “The idea of cord nevers versus cord cutters, that pendulum swing has happened.”
He sees a call for greater transparency in reporting and proving out de-duplication of connected-TV viewing audiences. “How does CTV really operate as the standalone from a tracking, delivery, audience perspective” is one question. “As far as the CTV environment, there is a greater level of transparency on who’s watching it, what are they watching, when are they watching and certainly the ability to tie it back to greater outcome attributed data sets as well,” says Callahan.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“What we’re doing with OpenAP is integrating it into our products so you can actually build a rate card against an OpenAP target,” says Ashley Barretto, GM, WO Network, WideOrbit.
“You can build deals against it, you can air the deals, you can steward against it and you can produce and report results,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference. “We started out working with Vantage, Viacom’s offering, and that led to OpenAP.”
Calling television a “fractured marketplace” with shrinking linear audiences, both buyers and sellers are seeking more value from advertising inventory, according to Barretto. Because Nielsen’s age and gender metrics are still the transactional currency, the desire for added value is in advanced audience targeting that can be attributed to business outcomes.
“This is taking them a step forward in terms of targeting the commercials beyond the age and gender into more specific targets that can produce results,” Barretto says.
One of WideOrbit’s priorities getting ad impressions to flow across platforms. With its roots in linear TV and having added digital to its toolkit, it’s working to provide clients with “fluidity solutions, where you can actually build a linear deal and if you’re under-delivering on that, you can move impressions across to the digital platform, bring those delivered impressions back and provide a holistic delivery across multiple platforms.”
The company’s efforts on OpenAP is reflective of what Barretto says is the way it does business. “What we’ve always done is partner with our clients. We don’t build it in a vacuum and then go out to market with it.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>Representing more than 90% of the country’s top advertisers, ECN has been the behind-the-scenes connector of people process and technology for 27 years, Tietze explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.
The biggest challenge is to take data from disparate sources and “get it all flowing in one uniform way so that it can be ingested into receiving systems,” Tietze says.
“What seems automated even in the digital environment is ultimately still going in Excel spreadsheets to publishers around the country. Our goal is to try to not just have the digital asset be distributed or the broadcast asset delivered but to automate the scheduling behind that.”
One of ECN’s efforts was to create a standard that piggybacks on the BXF standard from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. “But that was just the beginning of it. Ultimately, it comes down to the people who have built the systems to adopt those standards in order to make it easy for people to do business. It’s still about people getting it done.”
With so many touch points between advertisers, agencies and tech providers, Tietze says a common mistake is that companies “will go build something before truly understanding the workflow and what someone just has to do in order to get their job done.”
The better course is to “go back to the source and find out what systems are being used, how they’re being used by people and what’s missing. And then be able to develop solutions that bridge that gap by enrolling the people who actually have to use them every day.”
Calling ECN’s business “the last mile,” Tietze says technology enabling more granular audience targeting “is running at light speed. What we now have to do is take these other systems and find ways to bridge that gap in order to utilize and adopt these other technologies.
“We have to make it easy for buyers to basically purchase time on in any medium for that same kind of spot and be able to transact business through the same workflows that exist today.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>Where advanced TV goes in the next five years is one of the topics of conversation in this Beet.TV interview with Scoles at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.
At its core, advanced TV connects advertisers’ marketing goals to the way they buy media on television, according to Scoles. Regardless of their target audience and beyond being “hyper focused” on the ideal consumer, “it really has to dovetail on their overall sales strategy.
“You can take what you’re trying to do from your corporate marketing strategy writ large and have it reflect in the way that you buy media.”
Identifying consumers of interest cherry picking media by viewership patterns drives efficiency. “And that’s probably the most similar concept to how digital targeting is thought about,” Scoles says.
But with the way that linear TV schedules are made, audiences can be measured across long periods of time, for example a three-month campaign. “You also have a lot more flexibility to change the definition of targeting to go beyond touching as many of these important consumers as possible to a multifaceted strategy.”
One campaign phase could focus on reach, another on driving frequency, “and at the end of it we want to see how it all compiles back together to fit overall brand strategy,” says Scoles.
Using data and consumer targeting is hardly new to marketing, so what might seem like new conversations aren’t. “You’re tapping the conversations that are already happening. These are part of the marketing departments. In the past, they could do a bunch of great work to understand who our ideal consumer segment is, and then there was not a ton you could do about it, especially on linear TV.
“The way the conversation has shifted is now you can bring those people into a meeting that involves talking about a media buy and say, ‘all the work that you’ve been doing, we can talk about that with you now as well and we can help you activate against that.’”
Over next five years, trends and conversations will center on being more transparent marketing strategy from the advertiser’s perspective, according to Scoles. “Be more adaptable to snapping towards those strategies on a publisher and agency side. That’s where I think we’re going to continue to see a lot of growth. The more transparent you are, the more people can partner with you and help drive your end goals.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“We’re actually going through a huge change right now on the technology side,” says Robyn Goldman, Relationship Manager, AMC Networks. “We are looking for ways to consolidate our delivery process for our assets to make things more efficient, more streamlined.”
In addition to implementing Wide Orbit Program, AMC is working on a work order management system and a new automation system “that play very well together and are going to be highly integrated, so that our processes are more standardized, more automated, less risk and then we can get to the consumer faster,” Goldman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect Conference.
To achieve more fluidity on the sales side, AMC is using multiple WideOrbit products so as to combine linear and non-linear deals into one, according to Goldman.
“There are still some challenges with that because of the ability to track delivery for those deals and invoice those deals in a singular manager. But I think we’re moving toward that area where we can do things across the linear and non-linear platforms in a singular way.”
She recognizes the desire of buyers to execute a single buy across multiple platforms, but there need to be changes as well on the sell-side. That involves “being able to go to one person for a linear and non-linear deal and getting that done in one place as opposed to fracturing it.”
Asked about inventory offerings, on the linear side “things are pretty much status quo” with 15-, 30- and 60-second ads. “But being able to add in the digital platforms and being able to offer additional impressions on that level I think broadens the scope of what the buyers can achieve with their plans with AMC Networks,” Goldman says.
With media companies increasingly adding to the number of over-the-top platforms, and thereby consumer options, “To me it’s how are you providing content to the viewer that’s going to keep them tuning in to your content as opposed to somebody else’s.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference, Viacom’s COO of Ad Sales recaps the progress of OpenAP, which began as an initiative of Fox, Viacom and Turner and offers observations on future growth based on current use by advertisers in several categories. Newer members include NBCUniversal and Univision.
A big impetus behind OpenAP was the fact that publishers had their own advanced-advertising products but the way they defined audiences differed.
“We were all using our own fusion methodologies to, say, come up with an in-target segment list for movie enthusiasts. It was defined differently. The response from buyers was “I’m not buying the same thing.” By providing the “element of currency” that had been missing, OpenAP unified audience target definitions, according to Halley.
The platform has a tool that allows advertisers or agencies to define their target segments using “a wide variety of data sets, and then share that segment across multiple publishes who will then guarantee the buy against that common audience definition,” Halley says.
“This allows buyers the opportunity to look at publishers on a relative basis so they can evaluate share and how much they’re willing to pay for advanced segments. It has done a great deal to provide momentum around the volume of investment in advanced advertising.”
Still, these are still the “very early stages,” says Halley, noting that for some advertisers, advanced buying “is exactly where they should be.” Examples are response-based advertisers and categories like studios, automotive and quick-serve restaurants. One thing they have in common is “they tend to work a lot with data in the first place. They tend to be predisposed to buy it because they have the capabilities in-house to activate in that fashion.”
Over time, as other kinds of consumer products become more data-centric, “you’re going to see an increase in the buying against advanced segments. I would also say that this is really prep for an addressable marketplace, where we’re going to be matching advanced audience segments on a one-to-one basis more broadly.”
Halley places OpenAP’s combined member footprint at 50% of the domestic television impression supply, “so we do think feel like we’re at a critical mass as it is. But I would expect there to be additional key publishers joining the consortium in the near term. We’re going to be taking on other problems. I would look for other kinds of ease of buying type solutions coming up in the near term.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>In 2018, that is the reality that many TV companies are now engaged in – ensuring that advertisers can get guaranteed outcomes, like driving footfall from people who watched an ad.
And it’s one which A+E Networks has also been offering to its ad buyers.
An this video interview with Beet.TV, A+E VP advanced TV David Ernst says the company has two main platforms in this regard:
Whilst the company has already been using Precision to get traction for clients who want to target better, Ernst says something new is bubbling.
“That, increasingly, is just kind of table stakes for us and the entire industry,” he says.
“Really, where we’ve been getting the most traction is with advertisers in being able to show them how effective campaigns have been, to be able to actually even guarantee on outcomes.
“If we have let’s say a QSR (quick service restaurant) client, we could craft a campaign. First we define the target in such a way that it’s not just demographically driven by people (like) heavy fast food eaters. Then we can guarantee that our campaign will drive a certain amount of incremental traffic to their locations.”
A+E is working with Data + Math, iSpot, Nielsen, Millward Brown, Acxiom and others to see the consumer behaviors driven by the ads it shows.
But Ernst says buyers are still “in the bottom of the sceond inning” when it comes to this new way of buying ads.
“Certainly some clients are very advanced and some are still trying to test the waters in this area,” he adds.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..
]]>A recent ANA survey showed 35% of marketers expanded their in-house media buying capabilities in 2017 – twice as many who had done so the prior year.
But, like so much else in digital, disintermediation is “not a zero-sum game“. And the most-quoted media analyst agrees.
“I generally subscribe to the view first put forward by (Publicis Groupe chairman) Rishad Tobaccowala, that agencies are cockroaches not dinosaurs – they’re very good at surviving,” says Pivotal Research senior analyst Brian Wieser in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Even though what we’re seeing is certainly weakness and it’s more pronounced in North America than it elsewhere, collectively the industry is still growing – not by much, but it’s technically growing organically, if we’re looking at the big holding companies.”
Last year, Wieser observed “depressed ad spending growth”, driven by brands tightening purse strings, that would have “a really negative impact on the growth of the industry”.
In 2018, he sees “pockets of decline”, like at global creative agency networks, as brands question how much advertising they really need to do. And, following a couple of years of scandals which shed the like on shady industry practices like agency kickbacks and rebates, Wieser reports “enhanced contract scrutiny” driving some spending cutbacks.
But this isn’t the end of the story.
“Those things are all having an impact right now,” he adds. “I think that, as you cycle through these things, you do get to point where a rebound will eventually occur.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..
]]>Approaching 2019, WideOrbit is working on three initiatives, Offeman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the company’s recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference. Those are providing open solutions, bringing digital and linear together and harnessing data science by “using machine learning and analytics to actually get predictive results out.”
Most of its customers at the conference are asking WideOrbit “how can you help us as this landscape changes, as consumers are consuming content in different ways, what’s our role and our strategy,” says Offeman. “We can’t do everything, so we’re starting with open, making sure as third parties come along they can interface with our solution sets,” he adds.
“We’re building out tool sets to help merge the sales front end so we can put linear and digital plans together. And we’re using advanced analytics both through partners like Revenue Analytics and tool sets within WideOrbit.”
Customers are typically looking for WideOrbit to help them make money, save money or reduce pain, according to Offeman.
“On the optimization piece, it’s really highly focused on either saving them money or making them money. It’s kind of a multi legged stool for optimization. One piece we’ve already built is doing schedule optimization. After the orders come through, how do we optimally put the spots into the slots to reach the greatest audience for what they’re buying.”
The second piece involves improving plan optimization. “How are we selling them the right thing to execute their goals and, finally, for our customers as well how are we maximizing rate. How are we getting paid the optimal amount for what that customer is trying to execute against?”
Having made several acquisition gambits in the last several years with an eye toward digital-linear convergence, Offeman says he’s excited to see that convergence actually happening. They include Fivia (front-end digital ad solution), Castfire and Abacast (streaming tool stacks for live and on-demand streaming) and AdMeta, which was “arguably an RTB exchange platform that allowed SSP’s and DSP’s to plug in together and provided dynamic floor pricing for the SSP’s.
“Part of what I’m working on right now is gluing all of that digital adtech together and marrying it up with the linear side,” says Offeman.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>Underwhelming, it seems.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Pivotal Research senior analyst Brian Wieser, who opines on the media business, says advanced TV targeting opportunities will do little to arrest an overall US TV ad spend forecast that has turned marginally negative.
“I don’t believe it causes growth in advertising,” Wieser says. “Bringing digital-like concepts to traditional TV will not cause digital-like growth.
“The only thing that would cause growth above and beyond the trajectory that TV is on, is if TV can appeal to different kinds of advertisers.”
That conclusion will come as controversial to the many tech vendors now operating in the TV space, which are bringing targeting and programmatic trading capabilities to a TV market that has long revolved around buying ads against broad show audiences and demographics.
The new world, thanks to internet-enabled TV devices, instead offers the opportunity to buy individual viewers, no matter what shows they are watching, and to buy those ads with automated real-time bidding.
But Wieser says: “A lot of advanced TV technologies are really more about optimizing. They’re really more about making the workflows more efficient. They’re about load balancing, in terms of maximizing or optimizing reaching frequency.
“Maybe even one day they can help contribute to reduced commercial loads, because they can identify better ways to reach different audiences with different units, which then just allows the media owners to reduce their ad loads.”
Wieser sees scant potential for brands not already advertising on TV, like direct-to-consumer brands, to come in and add incremental spend.
But he says that is “the only thing that would cause any different growth for the industry”.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..
]]>So although WideOrbit provides the “system of record” for much of local broadcast media, it too needs to maintain flexibility and be willing to integrate its solutions with others, Swift explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual WideOrbit Connect conference.
“There’s a lot of competition that’s going on, especially as it relates to local TV, local radio,” Swift says. “And as you’ve got new players that are coming in, they’re looking for solutions to be able to compete up against them as well as some of the big fish” like Facebook and Google. “What we can certainly see that as the marketplace is actually getting, let’s call it fragmented, more complicated, there’s always going to be different solutions that need to exist to address whatever challenge they’re facing.”
While WideOrbit has a variety of proprietary solutions that are fully integrated with each other, “At the same time, recognizing that companies will often have already in place certain systems or solutions that they’re comfortable with” it’s open to collaborative integration. “We need to be able to play with these other providers to make it easier for companies to affect their business,” Swift adds.
A case in point is the company’s establishment earlier this year of WideOrbit Platform Services, which enables clients to adopt their choice of third-party software for any business function and export their traffic, sales and billing data to external systems. When launched, the new group had integration and API support in place for more than 100 industry standards and third-party software packages.
Prior to joining WideOrbit this summer, Swift was Financial Controller for KSL 5 TV in the greater Salt Lake City area, so he knows the everyday challenges of local broadcasters at the ground level.
“I think to take the contrarian view and look at it from a positive standpoint, local stations have an amazing opportunity to be able to meet the needs of their local clients,” he says.
Citing impending advances like the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard that should usher in more digital addressability, he foresees a future wherein things like better attribution finally come to the local TV world rather than “simply a ratings-type system.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>Beside a $3.6 billion merger with Gray earlier this summer, the company has tapped WideOrbit, a San Francisco-based company with a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for TV ads around the US.
Specifically, Raycom is using the company’s programmatic-direct and open marketplace capabilities, to extend ad buying to non-traditional marketers.
“We’ve trained five dozen (sales) people on how to manage that,” says Raycom Media
GM, central traffic operations Garrett Popein this video interview with Beet.TV. “As the offers we come in, we want to be able to react swiftly and to best serve our clients’ needs and these new revenue streams.
“A lot of the advertisers are folks who would traditionally not buy TV because of that friction.”
WideOrbit’s programmatic TV open marketplace lets ad buyers make automated, data-informed offers in more than 1,000 stations and networks.
So, who is buying?
“They’re people who don’t want to talk to local salespeople,” Pope concedes. “If they can just log in to a dashboard, press a couple buttons, place an order and they get impressions in a local newscast or local sporting event or network sporting event, that’s valuable inventory.”
For Raycom, WideOrbit also supports a private marketplace in which ad buyers can still use conventional GRPs to target ads.
Pope says he is behind the ATSC 3.0 initiative aimed at tooling advanced TV technology for the future. He says addressable TV capabilities should mean higher ad rates for broadcasters.
But he says it’s important that the new enabling technology allows for sufficient control.
“A lot of the live streaming and OTT apps don’t provide the same reconciliation for a buy side that they would expect,” he explains. “We don’t want spots to run back to back to back. We don’t want long pauses. We want to have a user experience on the digital side similar to the linear side where it flows and you can retain audience, rather than just choppiness.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..
]]>Now with the convergence of linear TV and digital, WideOrbit finds itself at the nexus of change that media buyers and sellers are grappling with in one fashion or other, Offeman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual WideOrbit Connect conference.
“Our entire programmatic effort is designed to make the buying and selling of local media easier,” Offeman says of WO Traffic. “We’re extending that local traffic system not just to be the outlet for their broadcast signal but also for all of their different digital outlets as well.”
The resulting solution is designed for WideOrbit’s clients to aggregate their content “both the linear reach as well as the digital reach so that the buy side can get an unduplicated reach number across the two. I think that’s going to add quite a bit of value to the local market.”
While local TV broadcasters tend to garner far fewer headlines than does the battle of the legacy network giants and digital upstarts, they’re not out of the ballgame, according to Offeman.
“For them to remain relevant, they’ve got to use the power that they have, which is that they can reach a very large local audience within, in digital terms, a geo fence or DMA, and hit them with messages on a really consistent, historically reach/frequency goal.”
Providing unduplicated reach means “basically giving them a message, not more than seven times, not burning them out, not giving it to them in the same pod each and every time. That’s some of things that local can do that digital’s really struggling with,” Offeman adds.
Aside from linear and digital convergence, big differences remain in the way that local TV and national networks ply their trade, according to Offeman. Local is still done by rate, cost per point and gross rating point goals, as opposed to national with its Upfront process, guarantees and CPM targets, among other dissimilarities.
“On the national cable net side, we are doing so many different things,” says Offeman, including working with the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to get custom audience segments into rate cards, developing direct response automation to reduce paper handling and making improvements to electronic copy instruction.
Like many others, Offeman would like to see more uniformity across the different types of TV buyers, including large brands, direct response, hybrid direct response and others.
“It’s not like it’s one clean buying strategy. Our customers need to be very flexible for where the money is coming in, what channel it’s coming in, and then how do they maximize their content.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>With operations in Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Hawaii and Michigan, Lilly is keeping things small.
But finance chief Wade O’Hagan thinks small is beautiful – and local TV news is more relevant than ever.
“If you have a strong local news, especially in the smaller markets and even in the larger markets, where are they going to get that information?,” he asks.
“They’re not going to get it from the internet necessarily because there’s maybe nobody covering a smaller market. They’re going to get it from the TV stations in the market. The newspapers have cut way back. Pick up a local newspaper in a smaller market today and it might be more like a pamphlet than an actual paper.
“So, it’s key for us to always stay relevant to the local community and to serve the local community with higher end content. Especially in California, for example – you have wildfires going everywhere.”
That’s why O’Hagan finds ad sales operations at local TV stations so critical.
“The local ad stuff has gone up and down depending on the general economy, but kind of stayed strong,” he adds.
“I think the opportunity is to always try to stay relevant where your local content. And that includes news especially.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here..
]]>WideOrbit was founded 18 years ago to rebuild the systems that supported local media, Founder & CEO Matthewson explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. Now the company is the backbone for more than 90% of local TV stations and about half of local radio stations.
On the national side—which is pretty much another world from local TV and radio—WideOrbit is the pipeline for about 30% of national cable TV networks. “We run their backbone ad systems from order entry to receipt of cash,” Mathewson says of WideOrbit’s clients.
While there are many reasons to increase transactional automation, an elemental one stems from the way local advertisers compensate their agencies to plan and buy local TV and radio inventory, according to Mathewson. The rates are so low, “they really don’t make money on local broadcast compared to the more efficient buying processes in digital and national.”
Asked about the term programmatic and its utility in local media, Mathewson draws a distinction between digital and its real-time bidding for advertising inventory, along with audience targeting. In linear media, with traditional TV or radio buying schedules, “there’s not a real-time nature to it and there’s not typically a one to-one-targeting.”
This will change with the impending rollout of the broadcast standard known as ATSC 3.0, according to Mathewson.
In the meantime, he believes the best way to define programmatic is “improving automation and adding data to local broadcast television and radio buying.”
He also draws a distinction between traditional arbitrage in local TV and radio and true programmatic transactions.
“Some of our competition has kind of put lipstick on that and called it programmatic,” Mathewson says of arbitrage. “I would argue it’s really not automation. It’s really changing their marketing description and adopting the programmatic title.”
In making the local buying process more efficient, WideOrbit seeks to provide both buyers and sellers with better pricing information and targeting information for aggregating audiences as opposed to dayparts and age/gender demographics.
While the backbone of local media has long been smaller advertisers like local car dealers and quick-serve restaurants, others have discovered the space to their advantage.
“We’re though also finding direct-to-consumer models, venture-backed models, that are not geographically dependent are using local television and being very, very successful at it.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>Revenue Analytics is the Atlanta company aiming to drive revenue. WideOrbit is a San Francisco-based company with a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for TV ads around the US.
In April, it launched WO Cloud Analytics, a new cloud-based business intelligence solution that enables media companies to use traffic, sales and billing data to take action on pricing, inventory and financial risk. And now Revenue Analytics has become a partner.
“At Revenue Analytics we’re really more focused on predictive and prescriptive and so we’re able to leverage the WideOrbit Analytics data and all of the work that they’ve done to combine disparate data sources to be able to then predict the future behaviors and then recommend specific actions to our TV and radio clients,” says Revenue Analytics president Zach Cross in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Revenue Analytics’ own media capabilities include a price and yield optimization platform for network and cable TV operators, and a demand optimization engine for radio and broadcast TV users.
“A lot of what we focused on are helping our clients predict future demand … how much likely demand is out in the marketplace, predict future inventory, so what are future impressions likely to be, predict response to pricing changes,” Cross adds “And then we use those predictions to then help maximize pricing and inventory decisions.”
Cross reckons predictive analytics like this are going to become a “necessity” to avoid a race to the bottom on price.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“Local TV still has the majority of its revenue based upon the traditional buy/sell process with our local clients,” says Al Lustgarten, VP, Technology and Information Services at Hearst Television. “What we’ve seen in the market is that there is a very slow evolution of the traditional broadcast sales process.”
Advances like Internet-protocol-based ATSC 3.0 hold the promise of revolutionizing the way local broadcasters can deliver editorial and advertising content. But it’s a voluntary standard requiring investments by broadcasters for something that won’t reach consumers until late 2020 at the earliest.
“We don’t see any significant immediate change, but as new technologies emerge like ATSC we hope to have new targeted and addressable capabilities within our advertising that we could market to our customers,” Lustgarten says in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. “But we are very focused now on trying to maintain our current business but then try to bring more efficiency to the buy sell process.”
A main selling factor for local broadcast is local news, which remains highly relevant despite competition from online outlets. Hearst’s footprint comprises just under 20% of the country or about one in five households.
“The local television market has a unique presence now in the media that the public consumes,” says Lustgarten. “The unique presence is the fact that we can provide live news to an audience in the geographic areas that we support. There is no other medium that can provide that now.”
The TIP initiative involves creating application programming interfaces to streamline some of the transactions that take place between buyers and sellers at the local broadcast level. In addition to Hearst, its members are Nexstar, Sinclair, TEGNA and Tribune.
As Lustgarten notes, agency media buyers typically have their own tech providers and the sell-side has its own. The goal of TIP is to “seamless connect the two and provide them with the opportunity to easily transact business electronically and efficiently.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>So says Bruce Roberts, President of WideOrbit, in this interview with Beet.TV at the platform provider’s WideOrbit Connect conference. In fact, the annual gathering is all about collaboration.
“We need to work more closely with all our clients as their business changes and it changes at an incredible pace and equally as important they need to collaborate with each other,” says Roberts. “Hopefully collectively we can start providing solutions that help them resolve the issues that they’re dealing with today and more importantly about what they’ll deal with in the future.
He describes the opportunities posed by technology and data as enormous. “They really are. There’s a lot of good technology coming forward that’s going to allow them to increase their existing revenue streams as well as open up new opportunities of other revenue streams.”
A prime example is the newly approved ATSC 3.0 Internet-protocol-based standard for local broadcasters. The “direct-to-consumer type of delivery” will enable more precise audience targeting and reach given its potential among people who don’t pay for a cable or satellite package.
Roberts believes that more dollars will flow into local TV as automation and programmatic transactions gain a bigger foothold. “Much more so than what was going out of the medium, going over to network or digital,” he says.
WideOrbit’s Open Marketplace programmatic platform provides access to open-bid linear TV inventory for demand-side platforms. “They’re buying quality programming, quality inventory and they’re basically able to guarantee all of that through attribution. So it’s a great new opportunity in that area,” says Roberts.
On the private marketplace side, WideOrbit clients can white label Open Marketplace and, using Deal ID, enable advertisers to plug directly into those clients’ inventory.
Tribune Broadcasting recently launched an “always-open” TV ad sales operation in a technology partnership with WideOrbit. Among other attributes, a new rule-based auto-acceptance feature enables Tribune to accept complying offers for ad time around the clock.
While a tiny percentage of local TV inventory is now sold programmatically, Roberts sees that rising to perhaps 30% or 40% over the next five years. Along the way, the way inventory is transacted is likely to evolve.
“One of the things that may need to change, who knows if it will, is the currency that local broadcast deals in,” which is based on ratings points as opposed to impressions.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“Think of this new platform like the Apple iOS platform where developers can come and develop new applications and services that can ride on top of our broadcast platform,” says Anne Schelle, Managing Director of Pearl TV.
We spoke to her after her keynote speech to hundreds of local TV and radio executives at the the WideOrbit Connect conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Washington-based Pearl TV was created by broadcasters to bring ATSC 3.0 to fruition, Schelle explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. Its members—Cox Media Group, the E.W. Scripps Company, Graham Media Group, Hearst Television Inc., Meredith Local Media Group, Nexstar Media Group, Raycom Media and TEGNA, Inc.—operate more than 220 network-affiliated TV stations.
Finalized by the Federal Communications Commission in January of 2018, ATSC 3.0 will be dependent on spectrum allocated by individual broadcasters for a consumer rollout set for late 2020. Now its various stakeholders need to agree not only on its infrastructure but also how to explain its attributes to consumers.
“We need to commercialize it,” says Schelle.
Pearl TV chose Phoenix as its test market, setting up one lighthouse station to emit signals under the new standard to kick off the transition from ATSC 1.0. “The trick will be to do that, we have to also maintain our 1.0 services. And we want to. That’s our bread and butter business as well as our multicast.”
Fox, NBC, Univision and PBS are collaborating on the test platform in Phoenix.
With a modernized user interface, ATSC 3.0 will provide free, live linear programing and a host of over-the-top streaming content.
One of the big payoffs for broadcasters is the viewership data they will be able to collect, fueling interactive TV and addressable advertising. “Broadcasters have never had access to their own data on their own channels,” notes Schelle.
The FCC made ATSC 3.0 voluntary as opposed to mandatory for broadcasters at the industry’s request, as CNET reports. It will be segmented into Designated Market Areas like current broadcast TV.
Initially, monetization ROI will come from viewer retention, data and advanced advertising. “It also will enable us to do data-informed sales,” Schelle adds.
The capabilities of ATSC 3.0 extend to the Internet of things, particularly smart vehicles. “This is a really economical pipe,” a one-to-many system with which “we can deliver at a fraction of the cost large data files, information, navigation, maps to connected cars and autonomous vehicles. That brings a whole new world to broadcasters.”
In the meantime, Pearl TV will be setting up consumer labs to explain the new technology, “what to call it” and how best to market the TV sets and other technology needed to make it happen.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
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