This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
The increased viewership helped CNN to expand outside of key categories of advertisers such as pharmaceuticals and financial services into youth-oriented brands, Katrina Cukaj, executive vice president of ad sales strategy at WarnerMedia, said in the latest edition of Beet TV’s “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” series.
“Dunkin’ Donuts has never aired with us before,” she said, highlighting newer brands that have come to CNN in the past few months. Its CNN.com website in May received 46 million visits from millennials, more than other news brands like the New York Times, NBC News and the Washington Post.
With many kids stuck at home and parents in need of activities to keep them occupied, daytime TV ratings surged, according to Nielsen. The media researcher saw a fourfold yearly jump in daytime viewers ages six to 11 during the first month of pandemic lockdowns in the U.S. Meanwhile, the daytime audience for kids ages 12 to 17 more than tripled.
WarnerMedia has expanded its range of programming for families and kids beyond Cartoon Network and Boomerang to include shows featuring characters from DC Comics like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Last year, WarnerMedia added AT&T’s Otter Media to its lineup, adding the social media platform Fullscreen and other digital content.
Cartoon Network, Fullscreen, WB Kids and DC Kids gives WarnerMedia six times the reach of YouTube Kids, or a 173% increase compared with Cartoon Network digital alone, according to metrics compiled by WarnerMedia.
Looking ahead, Cukaj expects the company to keep working on advertising solutions for marketers as the economy recovers and consumer demand picks up.
“We’ll keep working it through to a road to recovery as we go into the latter part of the year and into 2021,” she said.
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for more of this series.
]]>Frank Wall, senior vice president of Turner Sports at WarnerMedia, has been keeping a close eye on these developments and the possibilities for advertisers to participate in live broadcasts of games on channels including TBS, TNT and NBA TV. Turner Sports also oversees digital properties including Bleacher Report and NBA.com.
“With no fans in stadiums, that could create an interesting opportunity in terms of what we do on screen,” Wall said in this episode of Beet TV’s “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” series presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. “With the use of technology, we can do some entertaining things with our telecasts.”
The resumption of sports comes after several months of revamping its programming to appeal to fans who have hungered for fresh programming. With people showing their enthusiasm on social media with #NBATogether hashtag, Turner developed programming that included memorable games from yesteryear to maintain fan interest during lockdowns.
“A lot of fans have been able to get through this because they’ve been able to watch some classic games of their favorite teams throughout basketball history,” Wall said.
The return of live sports will be pivotal for broadcasters and sponsors who want to reach a broad audience that defies categorization
Sports programming “is such a powerful platform in terms of its ability to bring together all different kinds of people … in the thrill of victory and the anguish of defeat,” Wall said. “For a lot of people, that is galvanizing. Sports is that great neutralizer for society.”
The National Football League is planning to start its regular season on Sept. 10, while Major League Baseball announced Opening Day will be on July 23, followed by a shortened season. The league last month was said to reach a $3.5 billion deal with Turner Sports for the rights to air playoff games for the 2022-28 seasons.
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for more of this series.
]]>“There will be an emphasis on quick-turn production — producing spots and longer-form pieces in a matter of weeks to address an ever-evolving situation,” Otto Bell, chief creative officer at Courageous, CNN’s branded content studio, said in Beet TV’s latest installment of the “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” series presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr.
His team recently has produced commercials for a range of advertisers including AT&T, Eli Lilly, Invesco, Papa John’s Pizza and Procter & Gamble. In many cases, the commercials emphasize practical matters, such as how they’re helping people get through the public health crisis and its effects on the economy.
Inspirational advertising also has become more popular, as seen in Courageous’ commercial for P&G’s Secret brand of deodorant. Secret partnered on the campaign with the Girls Leading Girls, a nonprofit focused on coaching girls ages five to 18 in soccer, leadership and service. The commercial has an uplifting message about female empowerment.
“The expectations from our clients really run the gamut,” Bell said. “We’ve had to adopt a range of tones.”
He also discusses his team’s culture, and efforts to over-communicate with clients while maintaining high quality standards amid the challenges in producing video content.
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>Until then, broadcast groups are thinking creatively to give them the next best delivery opportunities – and ensure ad budgets can keep flowing.
In this video interview, Amit Chaturvedi, EVP, Product & Revenue Operations at WarnerMedia, explains how the group is responding.
“As a result of COVID, when sports marketing or sports programming essentially shut down across the globe, there’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines ready to be activated that historically has been activated across events like March Madness and NBA playoffs, Major League Baseball etc,” he says.
“Studios have gone dark across the globe. So, other than news organisations filming live, generally studios and creative shops have shut down.
“We’ve heard from marketers that they need our help with creating new messages that get broadcast on television and via digital. We’ve tried to use our muscle in the creative production space to really help our advertising clients.
“Sports money was sitting on the sideline and we’ve been trying to help marketers find places to place that money. So even though sports programming or the context of sports is out of the picture … we’ve been successfully finding appropriate audiences for those clients so that money doesn’t sit idle by the wayside.”
WarnerMedia’s ad operations span branded content, audience targeting, programmatic.
Whilst the traditional setup was to offer programming for sale of contextual ad placements, WarnerMedia is one of the companies that is now rolling out a digital tactic to TV – the ability to target an individual household or viewer, regardless of the content they are watching.
It is doing so in part with its AT&T stablemate Xandr, which is now being folded into WarnerMedia itself.
Broadcasters that are technologically enabled to do so have been endeavoring to find sports fans even though no sports programming has been broadcast, for example.
It is one way that Chaturvedi hopes to be an “empathetic, understanding, helpful” partner to advertisers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whilst the promise of TV ad targeting is clear, Chaturvedi acknowledges the difficulties, which focus on effective delivery and measurement when there are so many channels, pieces of software and viewing devices.
“You’re talking about close to 70 different end points just for CNN,” he says. “You’re talking about probably a half dozen ways just on Roku alone. It leads to a very high degree of fragmentation.”
So Chaturvedi is hoping a growing consensus approach within the industry can help. He says Xandr’s linear addressable effort, comprising inventory from Altice, Frontier AT&T’s own DirecTV, and Ampersand’s own, comprising 85 million households, can smooth the path to purchase.
And he says Vizio-backed Project OAR, in which WarnerMedia was a founding member, will standardize transacting in addressable TV.
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a trade group for marketers and their agencies, last month demanded that TV networks shift the marketplace to a calendar year, among other requests.
Omnicom Media Group’s Sal Candela is seeing the transformation of the media marketplace up close as president of enterprise partnerships at the agency.
“The real change shouldn’t be just about the timing of the upfronts. It should be about the how and why the upfront changes to really better the industry,” he said in Beet TV’s latest installment of the “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” series presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr.
Advertisers are demanding from linear TV the same kind of flexibility they experience on digital platforms, including more choices in dayparts, ad formats, cancellation options, commitments and the ability buy programmatically. Those demands underlie a shift from linear TV to over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) platforms, he said.
“The ability to connect with consumers through video, whether that is a connected television, an over-the-top service, a full-episode player — the technology is there,” he said. “If we can get there is this year’s upfront, that would be a tremendous push forward in terms of how marketers are looking to reach consumers.”
Candela sees tremendous promise in ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) channels that give marketers a chance to reach consumers who are willing to see commercials in exchange for free programming.
The AVOD market has grown more crowded in recent years as traditional media companies look to compete with services like Roku that was an early entrant into video streaming. Before its merger with CBS was completed, Viacom this year bought Pluto TV for $340 million, while Fox acquired Tubi for $440 million and Comcast snapped up Xumo for an undisclosed sum.
“The real benefit of AVOD is that we go back to a great exchange for free content in exchange for advertising,” Candela said. “There’s still room in the marketplace for consumers to be able to have a free experience, to watch great content and to be able to have marketers advertise to them in a very personalized and customized way.”
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>But software vendors, too, have learned to think on their feet and find new customer categories.
Case in point – Cisco’s WebEx has been supporting video calls and presentations for years. But recently it has also turned that toward powering TV programming.
CNN is amongst the broadcasters using WebEx to involve remote guests in shows.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ashley Marusak, Global Lead, Sports Marketing, at Cisco, explains how the company is responding.
“WebEx is not something that’s traditionally used for broadcast, but I think in the spirit of being nimble and being innovative we were able to pivot that way,” she says.
“Not only for CNN, not only for The Jimmy Kimmel Show, the Ellen DeGeneres show, but also for Turner.
“We were able to turn our solution into one that could be utilised for broadcast and we worked with them in the weeks leading up to the event to really instil a lot of trust that the programme would go flawlessly and it did.”
Cisco’s WebEx has been spreading beyond CNN. In May, the software facilitated a pre-tournament collaborative chat ahead of Capital One’s The Match: Champions for Charity, a golf match presented by WarnerMedia’s Turner Sports on TNT, TBS, truTV and HLN.
During the broadcast, a collection of contributors joined in to offer commentary and donations.
“It’s not every day that we get tasked with having Peyton Manning and Tom Brady and Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods on a WebEx together,” Marusak says.
“But in having them all together and sort of breaking this traditional model of what a press event or press release tends to look like and turning it into a virtual collaboration session it let, I think, them really shine.”
For many viewers, it was a much-needed return to sports broadcasting. For advertisers, it was the welcome re-appearance of programming their marketing budgets hve been missing during lockdown.
To Marusak, the technology it’s all part of a world that is helping people come together and get stuff done, from wherever they are.
“I’ve been a remote worker for eight years,” she says. “Being together is wonderful, but we can also be incredibly productive remotely. That can be a benefit to people’s personal lives, their professional lives. I don’t think that we’re really going to see that go away.
“So I think the trends that we’re seeing towards video technology highlights how important it is to see people, to see nonverbal communication.”
This video is part of a series titled “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>Sean Muzzy, president of North America for addressable advertising company Matterkind, discusses the potential for its audience-based approach in Beet TV’s latest installment of “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” series presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr.
Linear TV can offer addressable advertising as networks couple their audience data with consumer information from other sources, Muzzy said.
“There’s been a lot of work on the network side on developing their own audience intelligence and data-driven products,” he said. “What we see as an opportunity is behind — connecting those pieces so that we can offer our clients greater control and visibility into their advertising.”
Interpublic Group (IPG) last month created Matterkind as part of a rebranding of its ad-tech services that harness consumer data from Acxiom. IPG two years ago acquired Acxiom for $2.3 billion as advertising agencies responded to growing demands from brands for data-driven marketing.
This video is part of a series titled “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>We have already seen the annual upfront TV ad sales season delayed, and a new call for a further delay plus significant reform, as advertisers and agencies grapple with the realities of limited spending visibility and a poorer content roster.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cara Lewis, EVP for video investment at Amplifi USA, the innovation and investment arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, says, at a time of adaptability, she is searching for change.
“We need flexibility and we need that more than ever because there’s so many still unknowns,” Lewis says.
“We want to get the best pricing obviously, but we also want to get the best content.
“Content being so unknown and sports (programming) being so unknown, it’s definitely on top of mind … clients have to have the flexibility and they want to have the time to be able to make these really large decisions.
“If we can’t advertise, then the networks don’t have our money if we are in a client in the future.”
The traditional TV UpFronts events have been cancelled or have gone virtual. Negotiating in this climate has proven challenging to the nation’s marketers as they assess TV ad investment.
Now the ANA, representing ad buyers, has demanded upfront sales, which were due to be for ads airing between October 2020 and September 2021, should occur this fall for ads transmitting starting 2021.
Amid the turmoil, Amplifi’s Lewis sees brands leaning into personalization.
“We were on the phone with a couple of vendors this week, just talking about M1 and partnering together to get them in as a PAM (Publisher Addressable Marketplace) partner and I think we’re hearing from a couple that they’re more interested to do it now than ever,” she says.
She is talking about M1, Dentsu Aegis Network’s people-based identity and data platform, and its Publisher Addressable Marketplace, which provides insights on person-level marketing results through programmatic platforms.
Lewis is also seeking other changes in the way agencies engage with programmers.
“We would love to integrate into more content and not have it be costing millions of dollars to do so,” she says. “(For example), how can we partner when we’re giving you a car on set that costs our company money?
“And maybe that flexibility is within the actual partnership and within the actual parent company group, since there’s seven or eight big companies that own the majority of the impressions out there.
“But I think really being flexible, honest, trusted, and allowing us to not have to spend the same amount of money that we did pre-COVID, is very important.”
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
There’s still a role for an upfront market amid the uncertainty and advertiser demands for greater flexibility, Adam Gerber, global chief media officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM, said in an interview.
“There is going to be a market, whether it happens all at once or whether we have some clients moving on a broadcast-year basis, others on a calendar-year basis, or some choose to move to a hybrid scatter,” he said. “What’s going to change and what needs to change is we need the upfront to move from the 20th to the 21st century.”
Gerber spoke with Beet.TV days before the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publicly pleaded for a shift in the upfront market. The trade group for some of the world’s biggest marketers this month asked that the upfront be shifted to a calendar year.
The move would let advertisers buy 2021 media placements this fall instead of committing now to the traditional October to September schedule that corresponds with seasonal viewing trends. The shift comes as advertisers seek more flexibility during a period of heightened uncertainty.
“We don’t know whether specific programming assets have been confirmed, whether sports is coming back. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace,” Gerber said. “That doesn’t mean that the discussions that we all need to have with our sell-side partners aren’t happening.”
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>In an announcement, the ANA demands upfront sales, which were due to be for ads airing between October 2020 and September 2021, now occur this fall for ads transmitting starting 2021.
More than that, it also lined up a series of chief marketing officers to call for “sweeping changes and improvements in the media ecosystem”, including “transformative changes to the upfront marketplace” – effectively questioning not just the timing but the purpose of upfront ad sales.
“While there are benefits to the upfront, it remains an antiquated business system that needs reform,” said ANA chairman and P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard.
“Right now, we are going through a substantial turmoil, upheaval literally, and we don’t exactly know what to forecast for 2021,” says Mastercard chief marketing officer Raja Rajamannar, one of those firing the ANA’s warning, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“To be able to commit in this level of uncertainty that is prevailing right now, it’s not very easy. So it does help us to have more time.
“In times of crisis, such as this, we are very flexible to our partners and we want the same flexibility to be displayed to us from our partners as well.
“This is the right time, given the level of uncertainty, that the industry has to look at upfronts in a slightly delayed cycle, starting with the new year, as opposed to doing it right now.”
The ANA’s message will ring alarm bells amongst broadcasters. TV companies have been dealt a blow by diminishing advertiser demand during the pandemic, causing many to discount their inventory.
On both sides of the industry, “agility” is the new watchword, as broadcasters try to keep ad buyers engaged and as ad buyers strive to pivot their spending strategy within the space of a quarter or two.
The key pressure is that marketers, in the current climate, are struggling to gain the visibility and confidence required to make the kinds of annual upfront purchase decisions they have in the past.
But the pandemic may also end up being the straw that broke the camel’s back. Over the last couple of years, broadcasters have tooled-up to offer ad buyers fine-grained targeting of OTT viewers and much closer to transmission.
Many will be asking if now is the moment when the upfronts calendar gets consigned to the history books – or if we are in a particular moment in time that simply calls for a time-out.
All this is quixotic because TV demand is booming – yet networks’ production calendars have been impacted by COVID-19, leaving some 2020/21 premium content line-ups looking relatively thin.
Mastercard’s Rajamannar, who is also president of the World Federation of Advertisers, says: “I think that upfronts are absolutely essential and do serve a purpose, clearly.
“Depending on how this entire upfront situation ends up, there might be some scenario where you are making some upfront commitments still, probably, and in some cases you’re not able to.
“Every marketer is significantly after good content, less clutter and, of course, very good economies that are supported by the kind of impact that gets created when you have less clutter, when the content is good, when the consumer engagement is good, etc.”
The ANA broadly is articulating what its media advisory board said in mid-May, when its white paper called for upfronts to be “shifted from a broadcast year to a calendar year to reflect and improve business planning, elevate marketer decision-making, and align television buying with most marketers’ fiscal years”, as “an immediate priority”.
This year’s upfront sales season would be for ads due to air between October 2020 and September 2021.
Instead, the advisory board wants upfronts moved to the fall for inventory in the year of 2021. “That would be after advertisers have greater financial certainty and the major network groups are able to publicly share their approach to programming based on studio production limitations and their contingency plans around sporting events based on league decisions,” it says.
The ANA’s demands don’t just pertain to the upfronts. P&G’s Marc Pritchard also repeated his historic calls for improvements like transparency, decrying the “sub-optimal media ecosystem”.
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>That was before the pandemic forced broadcasters to lower ad rates.
But those with a glass-half-full outlook see an opportunity – although linear numbers are declining, new opportunities to see, understand and target viewers can nevertheless translate into a greater TV ad effectiveness.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lauren Wetzel, the SVP, Head of Strategy & Corporate, at AT&T’s Xandr, contemplates a brighter, converged future.
“Consumers just aren’t tuned into the same one live stream at the same exact time,” she acknowledges. “They’re consuming in so many different ways in so many different channels, which creates a tonne of complexities to reach them.
“What that means, in terms of the way that the industry needs to think about it, is unifying, automating, planning, activation, and measurement, and attribution.
“All of those audiences that live across those premium environments, we need to find the technology and the data to really connect and allow you to plan and forecast across those screens.
“That’ll help make up for the loss in scale that you’re seeing as traditional TV continues to decline, and also allowing for the way that marketers are starting to really drive towards specific objectives and specific outcomes.”
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has already up-ended business. In TV, ad rates have plummeted and advertisers are less likely to commit large sums in upfront air-time commitments.
That means the annual “upfronts” ad sales season, when broadcasters preview their upcoming slate of content to ad buyers, looks particularly challenging this year.
But, for Wetzel, wider broadcast and ad technology changes already meant the “upfronts” were evolving.
“The upfronts (will) take a little bit of a beating, especially this year,” she says. “I also think the notion of wanting it at a discounted rate will continue.
“But I think there’s a lot of elements of the upfronts that will continue. The notion of marketers still wanting the reach and scale that linear TV offers will continue as a part of their objective.”
To deliver, Wetzel says Xandr is pursuing a number of partnerships. For example, back in March, AMC Networks, Disney and stablemate WarnerMedia joined Xandr Invest, its TV-buying platform, giving advertises more breadth, 76% of US households.
The broadcast partners said they would make most of their national TV inventory through Xandr Invest, which uses AT&T’s customer data to bosot targeting capabilities.
Xandr also invested in InfoSum, a UK SaaS business that helps facilitate the use of brands’ first-party data in ad targeting.
“With the market trends you the industry being disrupted, I think that everyone needs to come together,” Wetzel says.
]]>The main lesson that the pandemic has echoed is that brands have to work for humans and they must put their needs first.
“Let’s focus on how brands can help in these trying times,” Carter says. “And as we evolve through the lifecycle of the virus, let’s focus on how we can help customers, consumers, and businesses get back on their feet. That really has to be the guiding light of the work we do.”
Avoiding the hard sell should only help to deepen the relationship with customers. Carter added that although this period is unprecedented, there is a silver lining. With no standard formula or rulebook to follow, brands have been forced to innovate, which has led to significant growth in the industry overall.
“We’ve been on a super highway to the future of digitalization and ecommerce that frankly is fantastic for us,” Carter says.
Some examples of this include serving customers via contactless delivery or virtual consultations. Industries have had to reform how they do business in a rapid fashion, and in turn, marketers have had to deliver changes that they have been talking and debating about for some time now.
“I’m thinking about all of the big issues and as a collective with our marketers we’re urging the marketplace, ‘Let’s go and tackle some of those right now. Let’s go and drive reform, let’s break the legacy,’” Carter says.
Some of these issues include not being able to have digital competitive media intelligence across the entire ecosystem, driving the casebook and use case for diversity, greater transparency in the digital ecosystem, changing the timing of the upfront to be more flexible.
“If we don’t get inventive now, we’re not going to survive,” Carter says. “We need to come out of this strong and together for our customers and for the economy.”
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
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