Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic has up-ended traditional business practices, a growing school of thought, amongst those that are successfully pivoting, posits that these changes were overdue and are, ultimately, beneficial.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy at NBCUniversal, says the group has made a series of rapid adjustments that will lead to a better TV ad experience.

‘Accelerated innovation’

“A very unfortunate situation has taught us new ways of working, increased productivity, how to deal with consumers in different ways,” Colella says.

“We’ve been able to create accelerated innovation with our data partners, our technology partners, agencies, and advertisers, and we’re so looking forward to seeing that continue.

“This accelerated innovation is really going to help with all of our efforts in data-informed advertising, programmatic, getting into new platforms and improve platforms like streaming and also linear

“We see the industry is never turning back. We hope to continue this accelerated innovation throughout.”

Changing times

Recent NBCUniversal innovations have included:

• ShppableTV, a system NBCUniversal launched last year to add ecommerce sponsors’ QR code links to programming, was used to raise $6 million in donations during a recent Parks And Recreation fundraiser for Feeding America.
• Through Stay-In-Theater, NBCUniversal has staged “family movie nights” across its networks, radically reducing ad time thanks to a content sponsorship from Target.
• The company has been more accurately targeting COVID-19 public service announcements at different demographics by leveraging One Platform, the combined tech line-up it is now offering with Comcast stablemate Sky.
• As TV show production and viewing habits have been shaken up, NBCU is using technology to find viewer groups – for example, “golf enthusiasts” – who may be watching entirely unrelated programming.

Granular targeting

“We were able … to reduce advertising load from over 30 minutes to just under two,” says Colella of Stay-In-Theater. “That is something that we’re incredibly proud of and we’re hoping to take reduction in ad time forward

“We’re seeing our technology and our data vendors cooperate and learn how to use data in conjunction with one another.

“Through the pandemic, we realized that not everybody requires the same message. Parents want to speak about the pandemic to their children different than millennials need to hear message, different from people who are high-risk.

“So we were able to segment the data alongside our vendors to make sure that we could get the correct creative to the correct people across all platforms, using One Platform. And that allowed us to contribute to society’s education about a very important topic.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  

Across the industry, advertisers have had to quickly alter their messaging.

But the need for agility also extends to publishers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Alysia Borsa, chief business and data officer at Meredith Corporation, says the lifestyle publisher has had to move quicker and in different directions to satisfy marketers.

Alternative content

“Where, before, we would have done an onsite shoot with celebrities and a lot of planning, that still will happen, but I think there’s going to be demand to get to market sooner and quicker,” Borsa explains.

“So, we’re going to have to come up with different alternatives of content than we have in the past. We’ve actually done that over the last six weeks where we had native content production scheduled to go, and then we had to shift to eve6153288984001ryone working from home.

“We worked directly with our advertising partners to provide different alternatives, to still execute against their demands and their needs to get their content out.”

Insight importance

But speed is not the only way Meredith is having to adapt to COVID-19.

Borsa says publishers now need to give marketers a deeper understanding of consumer behavior.

“We have to be able to identify consumer insights and react to those insights in more real-time than we have ever before,” she says.

“The consumers that we knew five months ago, the trends that we predicted of our consumers five months ago, we’ve got to re-evaluate all of that because there are going to be some fundamental shifts in how consumers behave, and how they interact, and what they demand of us. So, it heightens the need for consumer insights.

“Across our industry, we’ve had to become more flexible, and nimble, and agile in how we respond, (there is) a lot more of test and learn. So, across the board, there’s going to be an increased demand for data, for our business and for our clients.”

Performance marketing

The place agility and insights will combine is in impact.

Borsa says advertisers that are sticking around and leaning in are the ones that are focused on performance-driven advertising, using data to drive e-commerce sales.

That, she says, will drive the necessity to collect data and turn it into insights.

Meredith has been building out its own first-party data via the relationships its brands have with their subscribers.

This builds on top of a centralized topic taxonomy and data team.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  

By working with, not against, prevailing audience behavior.

In this video interview with TransUnion’s head of media Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Hulu advertising VP Jeremy Helfand says more TV companies need to innovate in order to deliver experiences that delight, rather than turn off, modern viewers.

68% recall

Case in point – in 2018, Hulu launched a new ad format, “pause ads”, which show only when consumers actually pause a show. And, my, look how it’s grown…

“Hulu has over a billion ad-supported pauses a month,” Helfand says. “Our Pause ad demonstrated that at 68% increase in ad recall, which is about five X the benchmark.”

For Helfand, it’s about trying to go with the grain of consumer behavior, which, increasingly, appears resentful of interruptive advertising.

“TV has fundamentally changed,” he explains. “But, from an advertising perspective, TV advertising has not. It’s still the same largely disruptive formats that we’re seeing in TV today. (It) really breaks the storytelling experience in a way that really doesn’t need to be.”

Continual experience enhancement

In May, Hulu announced its first significant interface redesign since 2017, which had come alongside its live TV launch.

The company was aiming for simplicity and uniformity alongside the growing number of over-the-top TV services consumers also use.

It also announced a slate of new programming coming in June.

The moves came as Hulu continues offering a combined subscription bundle offering Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ for $12.99 a month.

Hulu’s biggest redesign in years offers a more standardized experience, improved navigation and discovery

Viewer-first

Helfand thinks staying ahead of the game, changing up the old rules, can help the TV industry stay relevant.

“As an industry, we have to come together and acknowledge that there is a better way to do things,” he says.

“The bedrock of our strategy is what we call viewer-first advertising. It’s the idea that advertising should be more consistent, it should be more relevant, it should be more integrated.

“By doing that, you can deliver not only a better viewer experience, but you can also deliver a higher return on investment for the advertiser.

“Fifty percent of our content, our ad-supported sessions, are viewed in a binge mode, which is three or more episodes at a given time.”

Quest for relevance

Last year, Hulu announced it would institute a daily frequency cap of four ads per day, in addition to its hourly frequency cap of two ads per 60 minutes of content.

Helfand says, as it reduces the frequency of ads, a key challenge is to increase their relevance to viewers.

But he says he needs more signals than just demographic indicators to do that.

Helfand says the viewers environment, mindset, mood and the type of content will all play a role in the project.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  

According to the National Association of Automotive Dealers, 80-90% of US car dealers will be transacting online by the end of the year, which is unprecedented.

“We’ve seen necessity drive the change over the past six weeks and moving forward where you had states restricting who could be buying vehicles online, lots of roadblocks in the way of advancing that industry to that e-commerce industry that we’re living with today.”

In a tight market for advertisers, Mynster auto advertisers are pausing their spend and reevaluate their messaging. Brands that are using smart data to determine their messaging and continue spending based on these insights have been successful.

“I think if we look at historical automotive trends, when we saw big recessions in the ‘70s, when we saw the recessions again in 2008,” Mynster says. “The advertisers who have leaned in and spent more and found a compelling and compassionate message have come out as winners.”

Mynster cites Hyundai as a brand that emerged after 2008 as a winner with its Assurance Program that provided relief on the consumer side. She believes that those brands who will be creative and lean into the market by spending more will find similar success in the long run.

IHS Markit is pooling data with TransUnion to help identify the households that will be buying this summer as dealerships begin to open up.

“There’s going to be over 3 million households in the U.S. that have to get a replacement vehicle, their leases are coming to expire and they’re going to need a new vehicle, so working with TransUnion to help identify for our advertisers and those media platforms that these are the households that are going to be buying, make sure they’re in your campaign—it’s going to be critical.”

In order to accelerate the automotive marketplace, Mynster said that we will likely see dealerships and OEM creating frictionless processes for the consumer, such as home deliveries. She also believes that by necessity, there will be a drive in an already-forward movement in data-driven TV.

“Platforms that can identify the appropriate households that will deliver the greatest return for brands will be winners and ones that can prove out the success of that will also be winners.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  

That is according to Comcast’s strategy VP Claudio Marcus.

In the marketing world, software is increasingly allowing consumers to tailor the kinds of content they want – and allowing marketers to build personal profiles of audiences they want to target.

But, in this video interview with TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel, Comcast’s Marcus says that value exchange needs to be recalibrated.

Post-pandemic personalization

“I think we are going to see some acceleration (of personalization) due to the changes in conditions and a greater understanding of the role that data plays,” Marcus says.

“One of the ways that we can support that acceleration is to remove … some of the concerns that people have about abuses of data, privacy and security of data.

“(We should be) adopting standards as an industry or even agreeing to some degree of regulation.

“We can put our best foot forward and start to recognize the things that get in our way of actually having a more fruitful value exchange for both consumers and marketers.”

New insights from @FreeWheel on premium video viewing trends:

80% are spending more time with video since physical distancing began

32% are watching “a couple hours more per week”

22% watching 1-2 hours per day more

See @bcbeat for more: https://t.co/HPRz8IVKzI pic.twitter.com/qOrXi5NPfN

— FreeWheel, A Comcast Company (@FreeWheel) April 28, 2020

Value exchange

Modern advertising capabilities allow marketers to target individuals by a plethora of data points, even down to their shopping activities as reported by their credit card provider.

In return, they can receive more relevant content and more relevant ad messaging.

Marcus says: “If we have a common understanding of what ads you’ve been exposed to, we can then limit the number of times that you’re exposed to a particular ad.

“That’s a good value exchange for the marketer in sense of not delivering too much frequency of ad exposure. And it’s a very good value for the consumer that doesn’t want to be overexposed to the same ad over and over.”

The quest for control

Consumer sentiment makes the importance of that relationship clear to advertisers. Harvard Business Review recently reported:

“A 2019 survey conducted by Cisco of 2,601 adults worldwide examined the actions, not just attitudes, of consumers with respect to their data privacy. The survey reveals an important new group of people — 32% of respondents — who said they care about privacy, are willing to act, and have done so by switching companies or providers over data or data-sharing policies. We call this group privacy actives and, to our best knowledge, this is the first time such a group has been identified.”

But, whilst this active group is relatively comfortable with the trade-off of privacy against value, those who are less active are less comfortable.

In other words, for that relationship to be put on an equal footing, more consumers need to be given more levers of control.

Go high-value

Regulation has already begun to do that, with marketers in many markets now required to obtain explicit opt-in for use of consumer data.

But Comcast’s Marcus thinks something else needs a reboot.

“We need to be respectful and have people understand also that when we talk about personalization,” he says. “Even though the benefit to the consumer is a more personalised experience, from a data perspective, what we’re doing is aggregating data sets to understand groups of people that share some common interests.

“That’s kind of lost in the way we execute things today. We need to establish that value exchange where people understand.”

“(We should) get rid of ads that follow you around, or that you’re exposed to over and over. Just a few very core, very high-value applications for consumers could help us illustrate the case that we do take these things into account and that we’re trying to focus on creating more value by delivering more relevant content, more relevant products, without being annoying about it.”

Auto brands like Nissan have had no choice but to move to a more digital strategy. Many dealerships are not considered essential businesses and instead of forcing consumers into a shopping process that they’re not comfortable with, brands now want to offer options for both. This way, even when these businesses do open back up, the customers feel as safe and supported as possible.

“We and our dealers have been working really closely with our local governments on, how we can actually start to have virtual retailing, which, in automotive wasn’t very prevalent, and what we’ve done on our end is actually start to accelerate ecommerce projects and shopping tools that were maybe seven months if not a year down the road and accelerate those so that we could begin implementation and launch those over the next weeks into the next couple of months,” Witherspoon says.

According to Witherspoon, higher priced items like cars still aren’t retailing online at the same rate as they would at dealerships, but that this is due to regulatory reasons, and lack of infrastructure there, which is what Nissan is working to fix with more urgency. For marketing, Witherspoon and her team have tried to look more specifically at the consumer sentiment in these times, and then evolve their marketing messages accordingly.

“It’s definitely a different approach versus what typically happens which is, ‘this is what we as the brand or marketer wants to say, now we’re going to put it out there and let you adapt to it,’” Witherspoon says. “It’s definitely the other way around. And even now that we’re a couple of months in, we’re starting to tweak and adjust all of our existing communications over time based on the feedback that we’re getting from consumers and what the consumer sentiment is.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, this meant avoiding a heavy sales push and focusing more on instilling trust and confidence in Nissan as a brand and an awareness of what is going on in the world. Over time, this has adjusted slightly, with the brand pinpointing confidence factors, whether it is services they can provide, payment deferrals, or other more specific messages.

Plans have changed around planning large media buys as well. For Nissan, this meant pausing the launch of one of their newest Sentra model until a time in which there will be more demand.

“We’re looking at re-planning that,” Witherspoon says. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last several weeks looking at the ways that we can predict or project where consumer sentiment and where their media behavior is going to be.”

This includes considering a range of scenarios, from the optimistic outcome of a complete return back to normal, to the more pessimistic view of this having a long lasting impact on consumer sentiment. This requires flexibility, from brands to marketers to publishers.

“I think this will change what the Upfront process is,” Witherspoon says. “I think that it was already starting to move in a more flexible direction and a much more advanced targeting standpoint, but I think it’s really, ‘what is the flexibility with your marketing dollars?’ I think that’s where we’ll see the next shift.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page.  We recorded Allyson in her home in Nashville and Matt at his in Chicago.

But exactly how do new media habits provoked by the pandemic change the game for marketers?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Oracle’s Michelle Hulst – GVP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Oracle Data Cloud – explains ways in which new normal will force marketers to change tack:

1. Understanding consumers who are spending more time with at-home devices.
2. Getting a handle on customers who may be trying products for the first time.
3. Contextual ad targeting is becoming a necessity

1. Accounting for at-home

“Almost anyone that’s a CEO or a company leader that I’ve spoken with … definitely part of their plan going forward is to have some portion of their employee base work from home,” says Hulst. “So it’s going to be more important than ever to understand how your consumers are consuming media.”

Once upon a time, marketers could use cookies, tiny text files stored on users’ devices, to track them. But cookies’ utility had been waning in the mobile era and had declined further because of the reality that most modern consumers now use multiple devices in multiple locations across the day.

Gaining a holistic understanding of an individual user’s behavior has become the key imperative in marketing. Hulst thinks COVID-19 accelerates that.

“That’s become even more important now because you have an accelerated transition to digital devices,” she says. “Think about people that weren’t interacting from a digital standpoint in large volumes before, they are all doing that now.

“So it’s more important than ever as an advertiser, as a marketer, to know that you’re reaching your consumers with a consistent message … depending on if you’re reaching them on their phone or their laptop or through a streaming device.”

2. Understanding new customers

The pandemic has thrown everything up in the air, including supply chains and consumer habits.

Not only are audience members spending more time than ever with media, they are also making new purchasing decisions. Hulst thinks it is imperative that makers of those products and services understand what is going on, and how to make it stick.

“In the grocery store right now, when I go in to buy something, a lot of times brands that I’m loyal to aren’t available on the shelf and so I’m forced to switch and try a new brand,” Hulst says.

“So there is a lot of new trial happening among consumers right now. If I’m that brand that’s being tried, I want to a) know that somebody actually tried me for the first time and b) understand how I’m going to engage with them and try to encourage them to stay loyal to me.”

3. Context is king

Many publishers’ wounds have been weeping since ad buyers began using brand safety tools’ keyword blacklisting features to bypass inventory against virus-related news stories, or even opt out of news altogether.

That is pushing many news organizations to the brink. But a growing procession of ad agency and technology provider is also stepping up to say it doesn’t help brands either.

Oracle’s Hulst calls this blocking a “blunt instrument” and “a bad thing”. She thinks there are many virus-related news stories that represent positive opportunities for adjacency.

Increasingly, companies are saying that understanding those opportunities will require technology that can go beyond simple keyword-based blocking. In that space, “contextual targeting”, which can run analyses on content in order to serve up more granular cues about things like sentiment and topicality, is emerging a possible solution.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

For many on the buy side, the knee-jerk reaction to the news of the pandemic was to not want to spend at all in order to avoid any association with the virus. Amobee’s market intelligence analytics have aimed to determine what kinds of content consumers are engaging with, and among other valuable insights, has led to a greater understanding among buyers to approach Covid-19 as not a singular topic, but as many different topics.

“When you dive into it, what you find is that there’s actually a lot of opportunity in there from an advertising perspective and arguably, we’re going into a period of time here that could be the single biggest opportunity for market-share shift for brands that has happened in a generation,” Smolin says.

This alters the way that both the buy side and the sell side adjust their approaches at the core. On the buy side, this means being really data driven and keeping attune to shifts in trends on a weekly basis.

“It is a really real-time, dynamic environment that we’re living in right now. Patterns change, they change by region, they’re changing daily.”

An AdExchanger article by TransUnion’s David Dowhan reinforces this message, saying that brands are increasingly turning to first-party data in order to closely monitor consumer behavior.

“Seasoned marketers are taking more stock in tools and technologies that help leverage additional, complementary data holistically to make the most of their own audience insights,” Dowhan says.

Smolin added that the sell side also needs to respond to this change in media consumption by being increasingly interactive with brands and agencies in order to understand how to best serve these new opportunities.

The lives of consumers have changed so drastically. Interests, intents, amounts of disposable income—this is just a small sample of the ways that the audience has transformed in the past couple months. For advertisers, the knee-jerk reaction to avoid COVID has been flipped around as they have opened their eyes to greater opportunity.

“There’s nuance about how life in America is changing and how your relationship as a brand to consumers should change as well,” Smolin says.

Along with this shift in media consumption comes the need to reimagine how advertisers should change their messaging and where they find their audiences. Smolin uses sporting events as an example, but is confident that this attention to first-party data will help to track where the viewers are exploring.

“It’s a crazy time right now,” Smolin says. “But if people are staying on top of the market insights and the media planning data and they are measuring for media efficiency, there are actually tremendous opportunities for them in market right now on both the buy and sell side to really move the needle.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

The company provides an identity resolution that powers the streaming media ecosystem. The company works closely with data giant Transunion in the identity “spine,” Swanston explains.

Transunion became an investor in Tru Optik last year.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

Nielsen recently began working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year.

A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January. And now Univision is in on the act.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s Kelly Abcarian says: “Total TV time spent … (has) grown by 3.4% in the month of March, and that equates to 37.6 billion hours.

“If we want to unlock addressable in linear across those 37 billion hours of television, it’s important that an advertiser gets an accurate understanding of the linear reach of that ad … have confidence in the data they’re using to transact.”

Nielsen announced its beta test at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It will run in three phases – understanding broadcast companies’ workflow and commercial models, a “light” technology installation in order for broadcasters to identify which ads they want to replace, and selling actual ads that are shown in consumers’ homes.

Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.

Univision Joins @nielsen For First Linear Addressable TV Platform Beta Program https://t.co/DHjJnPexK6

— Univision Public Relations (@UnivisionPRTeam) May 7, 2020

Abcarian thinks the current global pandemic has put a new spin on targeted TV ad capabilities.

“Pre-COVID, you saw about 17% of total TV time usage,” she says. “Now, the week of April 13, we have seen that that has grown to 83% from prior year. So that’s tremendous growth, and it’s eight hours per week.

“We know that the consumer is changing. And therefore, helping a marketer and a programmer understand how to package inventory, price it, as well as optimise against that experience is going to be critically important. We’re very, very focused on delivering on that total audience, reach and frequency, duplicated metric for the industry.

She credits companies like Clypd, Xandr, OpenAP, Mobi, TransUnion and LiveRamp with helping connect up platforms to deliver addressable TV ad scale.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

Increasingly, a consensus for the way ahead looks like being “identity graphs”, software systems which offer up a PII-compliant way to use profiles on millions of consumers.

In the latest example, the media agency Horizon Media says it will use the identity graph products from TransUnion, the consumer identity data provider, to help deliver its clients’ ads at the person level.

Omni-channel

“The identity framework is really key to helping our brands build out their own internal CRM,” says Horizon’s chief data officer Laura McElhinney. “If they don’t have their own internal CRM, if they’re not data-rich, it gives them a baseline of data that is extremely rich … to formulate their target.

“It’s not just digital, it is truly omni-channel. It helps a full consumer journey, because it … it takes that ID… It carries it all the way through the consumer journey, all the way through to attribution.”

The largest privately-held agency, Horizon works with brands like Corona and Geico, managing over $8.7 billion in client investments.

The agency began working with TransUnion a year ago. It gets “deterministic” consumer profile data from TransUnion’s platform, which it augments with data from other sources to create enriched profiles on more than 280 million individuals.

Future of targeting

Identity graph technology has risen in the last five years as a means to tie together the multiple, dispersed facets of a consumer’s digital life in to a holistic database profile.

It works by forging connections between various authenticated user accounts, like credit card accounts or website accounts. Many believe that identity graphs go far beyond what cookies and single-device IDs offer as they are short-lived, don’t necessarily give a snapshot of an authenticated consumer and offer only a partial view.

“We knew two years ago that cookies were going to be going away and that we would need other ways to help enhance that consumer journey,” McElhinney adds.

“We’re able to take data, we’re able to come up with a better targeted segment, we’re able to help utilise that for content, to drive the content change that needs to happen in speed to market.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, head of media at TransUnion, says diminishing ad prices, more opportunistic ad buys and targeting technology will combine to welcome in a new tier of brand advertiser that traditionally had not played in TV.

For one, Spiegel thinks seasonal “back-to-school” and holiday diary markers will see healthy ad spend.

“There’s going to be a lot of pent up demand come this holiday,” he says. “I think there’s going to be a lot of money there.”

Door is opening

Couple that with a raft of content, like top-tier sports, that otherwise have pocketed premium ad spend; Spiegel suggests it leaves remaining content, with cheaper ad rates, ripe for newcomers.

“I think it opens the door for a lot of new advertisers,” he explains. “A lot of new categories that have historically been crowded out (will) likely have room to play.

“TV has often been a big-marketer game, especially linear television, because it’s a high dollar commitment (and) often a longer-term commitment.

“As more dollars are kept to be spent at the moment of opportunity … you leave room for the torso of clients that are not the big spenders but are in many categories that, especially right now, can spend more money.”

Upfronts have changed

The upfront ad sales season is the time of year when programmers traditionally tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.

But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.

Spiegel agrees that “the (TV) upfront has probably changed forever”.

He imagines new advertising coming from higher-education e-learning providers, all kinds of subscription services and from fitness operators launching digital content strategies.

eMarketer reports how ad costs are currently falling across the board.

Data-driven

The confluence of circumstances could be good news for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, which have already been advertising on TV over the last couple of years but which could use the opportunity of cheaper inventory to make a bigger impression.

They are the kinds of marketers that are “data-driven”, Spiegel says: “Those types of marketers are the ones that therefore expect their media partners, their ad tech partners, or a combination of the two, to do a better job allowing micro-segmentation, to do a general better job allowing frequency of optimizations, to do dynamic creative messaging, and to do the types of stuff that really leads to higher marketing ROI.

“Personalization is becoming ever more important. To enable those types of things, you needed a firm grasp on understanding individuals and understanding the households with various identity signals that are necessary to address the appropriate devices, in many cases meaning not relying on a cookie ID but relying other identity signals.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

In Q2 2020, that seems to be the emerging wisdom from a wave of executives.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the boss of a company fresh out of acquiring a big ad-tech player says the media industry needs to think on its feet.

“I think the marketplace has to be more flexible,” says Nick Troiano, CEO of Cadent, the company helping customers use software to buy and sell TV ads.

“Whether that’s a changing upfront dynamics to allow for rolling upfronts or flexibility in terms of purchasing and the ability to react quickly to purchasing behaviour or consumer behaviour in terms of your media strategy.”

Data relevance

The upfront ad sales season is the time of year when programmers traditionally tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.

But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.

That could push a change in the historic relationship – from upfront to agile. Troiano says flexibility needs to be shown.

Change is always constant, but nothing has ever prepared the industry for this level of change,” he says.

“A lot of our partners’ businesses are driven around using data to optimise for future performance and future expected outcomes. Unfortunately, a lot of the data that we use, historical data, has kind of been thrown out the window when you see massive changes in the marketplace.”

TV has evolved into a multifaceted tool that can be used to connect with consumers throughout their journey to purchase. https://t.co/ASTWDpNt88

— Cadent (@CadentTV) April 11, 2020

Audience graph

In January, Cadent acquired 4INFO, a software provider with a platform including “audience graph” technology that links together multiple TV-viewing devices into a profile for a single household.

The pair had already been partners, and 4INFO was integrated into Cadent’s buy-side TV planning and activation platform. Cadent uses data partners like TransUnion on the process.

Speaking with Beet.TV, Troiano says the acquisition has given Cadent two things:

1. “It strengthened our presence in cross channel advertising, especially around OTT and connected TV.”
2. “It strengthened our use of data and first party data and the ability to build a graph to map those audiences across that fragmented supply.”

“Audiences are fragmenting even more so than they ever have,” he adds. “So the inclusion of a proprietary graph to map video viewing to households, coupled with our ability to reach OTT and connected TV platforms to those hard-to-reach audiences, has really been a significant success and boon for Cadent as we try to provide valuable solutions for advertisers.”

Changing behaviors

An updated eMarketer forecast shows how it now expects US consumers’ daily media time is evolving.

In aggregate, digital media time will be up significantly this year, but TV is also a big winner, whilst radio and print time will continue to diminish.

In some ways, the pandemic is merely accelerating slightly some audience trends that were already occurring.

One of them is consumers’ flight from traditional pay-TV packages. In earnings reported last week, companies revealed large-scale loss of subscribers, Videomind writes.

Comcast has warned of a significant revenue downturn for Q2, having lost 388,000 residential video subscribers in the first quarter.

AT&T reported 897,000 premium TV subscribers had churned, along with 138,000 over-the-top subscribers. And Verizon last week reported it lost 84,000 video subscribers.

At Cadent, we know it's important to strike a balance as we adapt to the new normal. As a team, we're sharing tips on how to #WFH with kiddos, like how to keep them engaged with virtual learning and finding fun craft activities to pass the time. #thenewnormal #remotelife pic.twitter.com/qCyehVmzQO

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This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

That is the conclusion of one video and connected TV advertising technology company leader whose platform claims to have sight of 35% of the US streaming video ad market.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin says some brands’ ad strategies are recalibrating – but others are proving resilient.

Flight to agile

“We’re getting into the upfront (TV ad sales) time and what we hear all across the board is that this year probably will be a softer upfront market, for obvious reasons,” Chalozin says. “But, even more than that, many marketers understand the need for agility.

“Agility means (buying in the) spot market or scattered marketing, in television terms. But, in digital terms, frankly, it means programmatic. We believe that programmatic as a share of connected television will increase significantly.”

In other words, more marketers, facing unprecedented pressure, are going to be opportunistic about their ad buys.

The upfront ad sales season is when programmers tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.

But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.

Performance stays solid

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register here –> https://t.co/x5kE7AXpTh#streamingwars #CTV #futureoftv #Livestream pic.twitter.com/tLpuFeP8xn

— Tal Chalozin (@chalozin) April 7, 2020

But adaptability is not the whole story. Chalozin says another class of marketers is keeping money in the game.

“Marketers that have a strong KPI for their video campaign did not decrease their spend, which is a very fascinating thing,” he says. “Marketers that really focused on reach or focused on any upper funnel KPIs or maybe decided based on their balance sheet or consumer spending if they want to increase or not.

“But marketers that are heavy ‘cost-per’ advertisers – so, cost-per-app download, cost-per-delivery, cost-per-add-to-cart or things like that – looked at the situation right now in a much different way.”

Chalozin says, because consumption of digital video is rising, programmatic ad buyers have a voice of better ads available to them, effectively lowering their cost-per-action.

He says that experience will, in the future, cause more advertisers to move toward solid direct-response tactics.

End of the pause?

"We are largely on the other side of the ‘pause,’” IAB’s David Cohen [@mrdcohen] about ad spend trends during the pandemic via: @AdExchanger: https://t.co/3FbbdXEf2l Full report: https://t.co/5TGxrhqvZH

— IAB (@iab) April 30, 2020

In a follow-up survey of ad buyers, IAB observes a progressive easing of spending cutbacks from March to April amid the COVID-19 pandemic:

• More ad buyers are pausing ad spend.
• Digital media are seeing fewer buyers pausing or adjusting ad spend, yet still remain -29% off-plan.
• Traditional media including linear TV are seeing an acceleration in buyers adjusting their plans.
• Social media, paid search and digital audio are leading the “slight rebound” of digital channels, with digital video largely flat.
• 73% of buyers have either modified or developed new creative assets.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

In Q1 results posted this week, Facebook reported returning “stability” in advertising revenue after an initial steep March decline, whilst Alphabet reported a March slowdown but nevertheless a 10% growth in ad revenue year-on-year.

Gravitational pull

“Closed ecosystems are consolidating power during the pandemic,” he says. “Major platforms that have the controlled access so that consumers have to enter into the environment.

“Amazon with commerce and AWS are essential right now. Google with Meets and even Classroom (is) picking up additional steam. Even Facebook, I just bought a Portal for my family to help with a video chatting. You’re starting to see their tentacles expand into additional places.

“Pinterest searches are up 55%, new boards are up to 45%. If you look at Twitter, they’ve been saying that daily active users are up 23% in the first quarter. Even Snap recently came out with earnings and their advertising revenue was up 44%.”

And Goldman says even TV is following the same pattern, as major broadcast platforms grow their audience targeting capabilities, rolled up after a series of acquisitions that have given media corporations distinct advantages.

Biggest beneficiaries

Time spent with media is booming. In a new report, eMarketer forecasts the average time US consumers spend with media will rise by more than 1 hour per day this year, to 13 hours, 35 minutes.

The pandemic has reversed the decline of TV viewership, whilst smartphone and video use are growing, but music and podcast use is coming under pressure from reduced consumer mobility.

For Goldman, the problem isn’t so much that the tech majors are gobbling the lion’s share. Rather, it is that their advertising tools are largely closed ecosystems that don’t allow ad buyers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns across the entirety of media.

Goldman says stats show 81% of time spent in digital media is with the major platforms, leaving 19% occurring elsewhere.

How COVID-19 is impacting media ecosystems https://t.co/NJNELUBEL1 via @4Cinsights

— Aaron Goldman (@AaronGoldman) April 16, 2020

Cross-channel lens

“We’re seeing people anchor in systems and platforms that can address the closed ecosystems,” Goldman observes. “(But) you don’t need a DSP as the focal point of your (advertising tech) stack that’s blending in data into rolled-up CPMs.

“Now’s the time where you need transparency, you need to have control, you need to know how each dollar that you’re spending is moving into market, and you need to have the ability to take data and insights from one platform and on into the next.”

4C Insights is one of the software vendors aiming to unite advertisers’ oversight of ad campaigns across the walled gardens of TV and digital.

Its Scope self-service platform is integrated with the closed ecosystems.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

#HaircutForHealthcare Let's get it trending! Post your DIY haircut and donate to healthcare workers fighting #Coronavirus https://t.co/6nUsFv9Lb9 pic.twitter.com/QZuPwjTv5I

— Aaron Goldman (@AaronGoldman) March 23, 2020