Launched in 2015, Hippo Insurance this summer raised a $100 million investment round, ratcheting up its valuation.

The company has a fresh approach to providing insurance – analyzing data from municipal building records, satellite imagery and (through a partnership with Notion) smart home devices to enable customers to qualify for coverage instantly.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hippo marketing VP Andrea Collins lays out her strategy to grow the Hippo bigger.

“In each individual state, we have a product that has clear defined coverage around what people actually own in their homes,” she says. “Our current focus right now are these localised launches and these regional campaigns.

“We know where our price is best based on how quickly and at what a high rate that people convert at. I can get that down to the zip level. I know per zip code – and that could be a few thousand people – how well our product is priced and that allows me to go in and usually convert a lot quicker.”

Collins says Hippo is growing thanks to the use of search, direct mail, radio and television. While Hippo primarily uses television for reach, it continuously measures campaign performance using TVSquared to ensure its message is resonating. It uses those TV performance insights to understand and then optimize how spots drive response to other channels, especially search.

Despite the industry’s growing interest in addressable TV advertising, with which advertisers can precision-target different ads to different homes, Collins says Hippo is using TV more in the traditional sense – for building initial awareness in the brand.

“TV is not a medium that you want to test out messaging … You want to have a pretty good sense of what’s actually going to drive awareness or growth or whatever your goal is before you actually start down the path of TV because you could waste a lot of money otherwise,” Collins says.

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“We absolutely know that we have to get beyond the core linear product because we want to essentially be platform agnostic,” says VP of Research & Insights Andrea Zapata. “Just as we are now network agnostic when it comes to reaching customers and making our recommendations, just as we are now daypart agnostic.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Zapata explains how it’s “still early days here” in proving the value of TV beyond simple ad recall and viewer sentiment. “I think for television now it’s absolutely crucial that we start proving our value as we go down that funnel. It’s not just good enough to say that we got people to see your ad.”

Comcast Spotlight’s approach is rooted in the belief that if it’s going to be making audience targeting recommendations, it should be able to prove they worked. “For us, attribution is did the person who saw your ad take an action and can we measure that. We know you’re going to measure it. You absolutely should. It’s your responsibility,” says Zapata.

Deciding on partners is “a very rigorous process,” she adds. “I always say God bless our vendors because they have to go on this journey with us.”

With TVSquared, the process started with a proof of concept followed by a pilot and scaling. “We’re in north of sixty markets, so for us we’ve got thousands of sellers and thousands upon thousands of clients. We want to make sure the solution that we’re building for can answer core questions and scale appropriately.”

Initially, Comcast sought to determine if exposure to TV commercials drove website traffic for advertisers, whose websites are tagged by TVSquared. “They get the option of two KPI’s or two pages based on their campaign objectives,” Zapata says.

Within 30 days, Comcast sales personnel and advertisers can log into dashboard “and see if there was any lift to performance after exposure to an ad. For us it wasn’t good enough to see lift website over a long period of time,” so Comcast chose to use a 30-minute window of time after exposure to an ad.

It’s a case of correlation as opposed to causation. “Giving the right credit to television but not all credit,” says Zapata.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

Zapata will be a speaker at the #BeetRetreat  August 7 at GroupM.  Here is the speaker line-up:

Kelly Abcarian, GM, Video Advanced Advertising, Nielsen, @kellyabcarian

Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment, E&Y, @digitalstrategy

Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media, Cadent, @CadentTV

Tim Castree, CEO, GroupM North America, @castree

Marc Cestaro, Director, Addressable Lead, MODI Media, @ModiMedia

Brendon Condon, CRO, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight

Jennifer Donohue, VP, Local Advertising Sales, Hulu, @hulu

Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer, NCC Media, @bobivins

Ryan Jamboretz, Chief Development Officer, Amobee Broadcaster Solutions, @r_jamboretz

Jo Kinsella, CRO & EVP, TVSquared, @JoKinsellaTVS

Joe Marchese, Entrepreneur In Residence & Co-Founder, Human Ventures, @joemarchese

Brian Norris, SVP, Direct to Consumer, Ad Sales, NBCU, @thebriannorris1

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, @joannaoconnell

Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, @BGCPR

Sean Robertson, General Manager, Partnerships, DISH Media, @DISHMedia

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy & Insights, @HowardShimmel

Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee, @philipsmolin

Ashley Swartz, CEO & Founder, Furious Corp., @RedFuryNYC

Brian Wallach, SVP, CRO, Advanced TV, Freewheel, @bw10

Andrea Zapata, VP, Research & Insights, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight

“I think we’ll get to the day where it’s always on, real-time measurement,” says Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer of NCC Media.

Not that long ago, MMM was the sole answer to advertising/marketing attribution, when sales were seen as a function of everything. “Distribution, price, promotion and TV activity. You would get all of the data into one spot,” Ivins says. “You would harmonize it and then you would run regression models against it and that would be a year-long project, and that would cost a lot of money.”

Now activity data—ranging from ad exposure, website visits, point-of-sale transactions and more—are passively gathered at scale. “So it’s not a modeling exercise but a lining up exercise and making sure you can attach ad exposure at a household level to an activity.”

Asked about partners with which NCC works on determining ad attribution, Ivins cites TVSquared among others. “Especially for the DTC space or to advertisers that want to drive people to an online activity, they’re a fantastic partner.”

As for the differences between local versus national advertisers’ goals, Ivins says they are pretty much the same, with the exception of scale. If Ford Motor Co., for example, wants to send out a national brand, it wants to drive awareness, traffic and sales.

“If I’m a local car dealership, I want to drive awareness, I want to drive traffic and drive sales. They’re just doing it at a different level. So it’s a different part of the same campaign, but it’s at different stages of the customer journey.”

NCC Media is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned in partnership by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Because it reaches some 85 million U.S. households, the ongoing election cycle is of particular interest.

“I think there’s going to be a big pot of money that’s going to be spent early next year. I think that will put pressure on inventory as we think about advertisers trying to squeeze themselves into the pressure coming from the political arena,” Ivins says. “Unless the economy falls apart, we should have a good year both the Olympics and the political year.”

On a macro level, he thinks the traditional TV industry recognizes the need to neutralize the competitive advantage that digital media have in data, targeting and measurement.

“NCC Media feels that we need to work together as an industry to make this happen rather than have a walled garden.”

These will among the topics covered on August 7 when Ivins takes to the stage at the Beet Retreat in the City, “We Are Going Local.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.  

But a new generation of technology, a new wave of direct-to-consumer brands and a strategic re-awakening at ad agencies are changing that story.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Natalie Wollet, president of The Cross Agency (TCA), a Cross MediaWorks company that is focused on using new-style TV as a direct response channel, explains how she is fusing digital chops with the TV box…

Scale: “We’re talking 119 million homes, 240 million viewers.”

Attribution: “What can be different for advertisers are digitally native is that they’re not used to the non-linear consumer path. So we work with our TV partners such as TVSquared, to give them the attribution and the control and the clarity that they’re looking for … similar to how they are in their digital executions.”

Pricing: “Our agency works with everything from cost per install to cost per visitor, cost per new user, cost per member… all the way down, funnel metrics, to cost per orders and costs per revenue. We’re no longer looking at … the traditional brand metrics where it’s spot-ran, cost per thousand achieved or eyeballs achieved.”

Creative versioning: “You have to have multiple (ad) creatives. We have no less than two, ideally three or four. You want to make sure you’re testing different creative unit lengths… different CTAs. You want to make sure you’re testing a mix of different formats. I’ve seen the difference in creative performance of up to 35%.”

Wollet explains: “Once we move out of planning, we move into execution. We are working every single day getting pre-logs and then day following post logs, uploading those into TVSquared and reporting back on KPIs.

“We do daily and weekly calls with clients; daily when we launch, weekly once the campaign is fairly calibrated and moving. Lots of hand holding but it needs to be when you’re working with such aggressive metrics like this.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

Performance has always been a priority for the retailer geared to millennial men “because we grew up in the digital realm, where everything could be tracked and you can attribute revenue specifically to ad campaigns,” Hum says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.

“What we don’t like is a general if you spend it you’ll just kind of see it materialize somewhere and it’s all kind of wishy washy. It’s really important for us to be able to measure the actual performance of television and not just kind of throw the money into the air and hope it comes back to use later on.”

Hum was one of the main presenters at the VAB session, along with Peloton Founder & CEO John Foley. For TV campaign attribution, Touch of Modern— which offers unique and new-to-market products not easily found at retailers—works with TVSquared.

“We measure a baseline of traffic before and after each airing and then we attribute the spike in traffic to television,” says Hum, noting that the company’s most important KPI’s are “sales, signups and sessions.”

His key takeaway for other companies is that “TV nowadays can be measured just as precisely as digital, and it’s really important to have a diversified portfolio when it comes to marketing.”

Launched in 2012, Touch of Modern shot its first iteration of a TV commercial using its employees and an in-house production team. While it worked pretty well, version #2 created largely by Marketing Architects “opened up new markets. Things that didn’t work before suddenly started working with the new creative.”

One way in which creative for digital media differs from TV is that “every banner is pretty short-lived, whereas the creative you produce for television tends to have a longer life span.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

The independent agency was founded by Chuck Hengel in 1997 to create TV campaigns for businesses looking to reach major milestones. 

In the last couple of years, as broadcast media have become connected, Marketing Architects has gained new super-powers.

A partnership through which it utilizes TVSquared, a technology company allowing brands and agencies to measure and optimize TV ad campaigns, is a driving factor.

“We are making optimizations really regularly, probably weekly,” says Matt Hultgren,  VP Analytics, Marketing Architects, describing his use of the platform in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“You can actually tell how are two different creative performing. If one creative is bombing … you can potentially pull back on that creative or maybe pull it all together to optimize your budget and make it work harder for you.

“It really goes for the media side of things as well. Starting to find those segments of media that performed the best for you and starting to maybe heavy up in those particular areas. We’re pulling back from those ‘maybe’ mixes that don’t work as well.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

One of them is TVSquared, a company helping brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

Whilst the ability to attribute website visitation back to TV ad exposure seems like something from the future, TVSquared is one of the suppliers enabling it today.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, says national brands don’t necessarily have a one-up in this regard.

“Local has really been one of our fastest growing areas in the last 12 months,” Kinsella says.

“From a local cable standpoint, the ability of inventory is significantly bigger, the spot count is bigger.

“Smaller advertisers don’t spend as much as they do on the national side but actually have the ability to flex spend, increase spend relatively quickly (and) also make changes to the media buy.”

So, what exactly can attribution from TV ads through to websites do for a brand?

Kinsella says the growing crop of direct-to-consumer brands is especially interested in the possibilities.

Despite often being digital-only, many such brands are spending heavily on TV exposure – but they nevertheless want to benefit from the kinds of measurement they have seen in digital.

“What they’re doing is, they’re making these changes and then they’re running another (campaign) flight and they’re seeing actual increases in sales or conversions or whatever their business KPI is,” Kinsella explains.

It all falls under the category of “teaching TV new tricks”.

Kinsella observes: “We’ve seen articles over the last couple of weeks that say, ‘Maybe we said TV was dead a little bit too early’. And certainly what we’re seeing is the way you can prove TV works people are actually moving money back into TV.

“We have clients that we’ve actually written about before that credit TVSquared insights with 30% increase in sales. We have clients that have come on with an initial TV strategy that have then ended up spending three times what they’d originally planned to.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

“From a measurement perspective and understanding viewership and consumption, we are partnering with Inscape to complement our Comcast set-top box footprint,” FreeWheel’s Brian Wallach says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We will be the largest footprint where you can actually get an understanding of deterministic viewership and consumption of digital video content across every screen.”

The SVP and CRO of Advanced TV says FreeWheel is “leaning into being able to show incremental reach” to advertisers using a national campaign or a targeted one on linear TV “and also the complementary digital delivery that’s happening in our footprint and across the Inscape footprint as well.”

The goal is to be able to determine whether someone watched a program on TV or digital and did an advertiser reach them in one or both environments because “there’s light TV viewers, heavy TV viewers, all types of consumption that’s happening across screen,” Wallach says.

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, every advertiser is different. Some are as simple as brand metrics measured with the help of research studies while others are looking for down-funnel conversion.

“As a marketer defines what their KPI’s are, we help them with different providers to match up whether or not the media that was shown to those consumers actually drove that behavior. That’s a growing trend.”

According to Wallach, some marketers could look to seek different audience guarantees from publishers that are based on campaign outcomes, as “guaranteeing delivery of impressions is somewhat not enough these days. Obviously, this is important for our publishing partners as well.”

He describes TVSquared as “a very valuable attribution partner for us. They really help us understand how to optimize a campaign and try to drive impressions against inventory that is yielding good results.”

While campaign performance beyond mere impression delivery has traditionally taken “months and months,” TVSquared provides “a rolling report on information that’s happening with those interactions, where we can actually optimize a campaign, maybe move inventory from one publisher to another based on performance” and do creative optimization.

Better analytics at the local level means that search no longer gets 100% local attribution, according to Wallach.

“We have data that can show exposures across TV, exposures across digital and then the corresponding interactions with search where they’re getting a location or address for a particular store and then visiting it,” says Wallach.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

This typically means selecting one or two dayparts and perhaps five or six networks in all and maybe a sports package, Zapata explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Those clients of ours who buy in a very specific way, they will get lift to their website,” she says. “But with the same budget, and this is what’s incredible for me, if they’re willing to take a more data-driven approach to their planning and buying process, and they open it up to all day” the results multiply.

“If they open up the five to seven networks or the sports package to forty-plus networks, which I know sounds crazy, but that’s where your customer might be.”

Zapata says in that scenario, results can go from a 2-3% lift to as much as 8%.

“What we have found is that the reach can go from twenty percent of your backyard to sixty percent of your backyard. Reach is vitally important, so use TV for what it’s good at, don’t constrict your customer you can yield better outcomes.

“So what our guts once told us is actually being demonstrated with validation outside of just our guts.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium.  For more segments, please visit this page.  This series is presented by TVSquared.

In 2013 and 2014, direct-to-consumer marketers were the biggest TV attribution enthusiasts, Smeaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Among the first of the company’s insights was the anomaly that “the fastest growing part of the TV spend was coming from e-commerce companies and direct-to-consumer companies. And that was fascinating to me.”

TVSquared discovered that it was “the forward-looking brands, a lot of the DTC brands, that really kind of grabbed TV attribution and ran with it,” Smeaton says. He cites as clients Credit Karma and Expedia, “Brands that have really helped shape this space.”

With its roots in linear-TV ad attribution and optimization, “In the U.S. we can take connected TV device data, take our approach, blend it together and then show have TV actually works for them and help them improve performance.”

TVSquared drops pixels on its clients’ websites, germinating a trove of response data for correlating downstream conversion. “We can get response via website, via apps, via SMS, via phone. And then we take when the TV airs and then we look at how we can get a lift that TV has produced because of the spots that have run,” Smeaton says.

Adding deterministic data to the mix can “enhance that and provide more information not just on the lift but also on the audience and which demographics are working for them.”

Two to three years ago, agencies got more interested in TV attribution, according to Smeaton. “They were looking at how they can retain clients and win new business by showing that insight into how they can optimize TV.”

Lastly came media owners and broadcasters looking to protect their revenue turf amid a wave of change in TV content, distribution and monetization. “We’re now seeing the full range of the ecosystem looking at TV attribution and how to use it.”

Within the last couple of years, TVSquared begin assisting the sales side at broadcasters in Europe. “I think they were quite early in realizing that proof of performance to prove that TV advertising works is going to be key going forward with how you sell TV advertising. I think now we’ve seen the same in the U.S. We’re working with a number of the MPVD’s already, we’re working with a number of the broadcasters as well,” Smeaton says.

Asked how his company differentiates itself from others in the attribution business, he cites being “global since day one,” a hybrid approach of combing advanced-TV data with its own solution that provides a “scale and range that others can’t,” along with an easy-to-use, end-to-end platform.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium.  For more segments, please visit this page.  This series is presented by TVSquared.