You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
For some in the industry, that is a blessing but also a curse.
In this video interview with editorial advisor Jon Watts for Beet.TV, Comcast Technology Solutions’ VP and GM Richard Nunn explains why current systems need to connect up to manage the coming expansion.
Ad expansion coming
“What we’re seeing from a numbers perspective is, over the next three to five years, about a 7X increase in ad volume, driven by obviously a lot of the emerging channels that we’re now seeing, OTT and CTV and addressability,” Nunn says.
“If you throw on personalization on top of that, those numbers get very, very large indeed. The current manual processes that you allude to really are struggling to deal with that scale.
“That challenge of scale, which is a challenge that the industry has to face and become a lot more standardised.”
Changing it up
Comcast’s footprint includes NBC and Sky, a cable division and ad-tech including FreeWheel.
The division offers a host of solutions to bring infrastructure to the digital TV world.
Comcast Technology Solutions recently published a report, What’s Next For TV Advertising?, detailing four changes that will happen in the next five years:
- Addressable becomes a reality
- Workflows get automated
- Standards are helped to scale
- Data will differentiate measurement abilities
The world of TV advertising is changing quickly, and businesses must adapt to keep up. explore the major drivers behind the changes: https://t.co/w8V9CA0Geb #TVAdvertising pic.twitter.com/VWILtW09dd
— Comcast Technology Solutions (@ComcastTechSoln) August 19, 2021
Thirst for scale
“Today it’s very siloed where you have linear and digital technology,” Nunn continues. “You can start to bridge that divide for sure.
“But the opportunities really are about the automation that will drive the solutions to deal with that advertiser volume, as well as advertiser scale as well, and bringing together a lot of these point-based solutions in an aggregated platform that gives you complete transparency around where and what an asset has done, where it’s landed.
“It really helps solve that challenge of scale, which the industry has to face and become a lot more standardized.”
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The new pandemic had startled brands, causing many to press the pause button on ad spending – particularly upfront ad buys.
Fast-forward, however, and Michael Falco doesn’t think the upfronts are dying. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief revenue officer at Fox Corporation says they have learned new tricks – and Fox has seen an “influx” of buyers back to upfront sales over the last year.
Upfronts reborn?
Falco offers two reasons why:
1. Evolution, not revolution
“There’s still the need for a futures market,” he says. “In reality, what the last year and a half taught us was not that we needed to get away from the upfront, but that the upfront needed to evolve.”
2. Upfronts for streaming
“This notion that the upfront is just a linear television event is completely, completely wrong,” Falco argues. “Case in point for Tubi – we nearly tripled our revenue year-over-year in the upfront for TV, and we almost doubled our clients year to year.”
Pandemic panic
Falco isn’t ignorant of the effect the pandemic did have on upfront ad sales.
He says Fox had to figure out how to present its programming and ad products at a time when most potential customers would have been gathering in New York to hear its pitch.
But ad buyers, he says, fell into three camps:
- Those which had to bail on upfront commitments.
- Those which had products useful during a pandemic, which continued.
- Those which flexibly stepped back with a view to later going after targeted media.
Tubi lights the way
Fox acquired Tubi, an ad-supported streaming TV service, for $440 million just as the pandemic panic was kicking off in early 2020.
Having Tubi in the stable has enabled Fox to make the kind of offering that ad buyers – during the pandemic or otherwise – were gravitating toward, namely choice, flexibility and audience targeting.
Tubi made more than $100 in ad revenue in the last quarter, more than $400 million over the year, according to its latest filing.
Data-driven TV
Falco says data-driven TV ad targeting is key. Fox has wrapped together its offerings under banners called “One Fox” and “Fox Next“.
“It’s going to allow us to move into that more audience-based selling, which I think is something that we’ve been looking forward to for quite some time,” Falco adds.
“Now that we have Tubi in the fold, it’s really going to give us the wherewithal to do that.”
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“Our focus has always been around premium TV, and how do we help the ecosystem, both buyers and sellers, transact in a way that has migrated from one screen to multiple screens,” Mark McKee, senior vice president and chief revenue officer of advertising technology company FreeWheel, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “That’s become a complexity not only for the publishers that are creating this great content or the distributors that are putting out that great content, but also for the advertisers and agencies.”
FreeWheel, which is owned by Comcast, provides a variety of services to bring together buyers and sellers of advertising time, including a sell-side platform (SSP) for providers of premium TV content, including multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and virtual MVPDs.
“The importance of having the ad server and an SSP be in one adds tremendous value to our publisher clients,” McKee said. “The biggest value … is the ability to have unified decisioning as it relates to how they monetize their inventory, how they curate or utilize their audiences — that’s across their direct-sold, other automated or programmatic fashions as well as the rights that they have between MVPDs and other publishers.”
The commingling helps to provide a holistic view of how publishers monetize their content, protect brand safety and distinguish themselves from competitors.
“While it might be a new screen and a new way in which it’s distributed, it’s still premium TV,” McKee said. “The rules that apply in the TV ecosystem must apply in these new formats and ways of transacting.”
With advertisers seeking to target audiences based on other criteria beside age and gender, consumer data have become more crucial. Because advertisers want to protect their proprietary data and the privacy of their customers, identity resolution also is a priority.
“We’re helping to resolve audience in the TV ecosystem in a way that protects the consumer first and foremost, but in addition to that, allows for the data owner, whether that be the advertiser, the agency or the publisher or the MVPD, or anyone in between, to remain in control of that data,” McKee said.
To expand its programmatic services in TV and video advertising including CTV and video on demand (VOD), FreeWheel last year agreed to buy Beeswax, a software as a service (SaaS) advertising company. FreeWheel also is focused on addressable advertising, which gives marketers a way to reach different households during the same programming.
“Our sights are set on addressability and helping to pull back together the fragmented audiences that exist for publishers and for the agencies and advertisers that are looking to transact against them,” McKee said.
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Advertisers who don’t participate in the Spanish-language media are missing an essential opportunity and losing return on their market spend, says Dan Riess, EVP and Chief Growth Officer of Univision in this interview with Beet.TV
Riess suggests that national advertisers craft messages in Spanish to maximize impact.
Creating Spanish-language advertising can be a challenge, Riess says. To assist marketers, Univision announced a set of tools at last month’s Upfront along with an ambitious programming slate.
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>It is becoming one that is precision-targed to household and accurately measured by on-box data.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jerrold Son of ad-supported VOD service XUMO explains how the mechanics of connected TV (CTV) ad buying are changing.
CTV PMPs rule OK
Son says private marketplaces, allowing buyers are sellers to transact programmatically but without dipping into the entirety of the open auction system, are the order of the day.
“The private marketplace (PMP) seems to be a very popular option for the programmatic spend within the CTV space,” he says.
“We’ve seen some more growth in some of the other types of deals that are available – whether that be programmatic guaranteed, first-look – but the PMPs are still the flavour of the month right now.
“We’re seeing a lot more of the other available targeting moving into this space, whether that’s audiences, demo, third-party targeting. So I think we’ll continue to see that evolve as well.”
Targeting content metadata
It is now a little over a year since Son’s XUMO was acquired by Comcast, one of a series of acquisitions and launches of ad-supported VOD (AVOD) services by major broadcast networks.
Son says XUMO is enjoying being part of an empire drawing on the skills, content and technologies of FreeWheel, NBCU, Sky and others.
He says the way ads are targeted is changing.
“One of the things that we’re starting to see in the CTV space is the improvement of all the different metadata that’s available,” Son says.
“There’s obviously quite a lot of content metadata available for targeting, and we’ve started to see advertisers ask for, and decision against, things such as genre, category, title, ratings. So I think we’ll continue to see that evolve.”
For The Weather Group, the near future is about a steady bounce-back fueled by recovery, SVoD and a culture change.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Barbara B
ekkedahl, President Ad Sales, The Weather Group, explains the message she is taking into this year’s upfront TV ad sales season.
‘Scramble for inventory’
“The pandemic is not officially over but, from the consumer marketplace, things are picking up tremendous steam, and that has really radically changed the marketplace dynamics from last year,” Bekkedahl says.
“Additionally, as everyone knows, there’s been a decline in traditional media impressions as viewers have migrated their behaviour towards OTT and streaming services and, in many cases, places where there’s no ads, sadly.
“So there’s a nice tailwind for us on the sales side this year as buyers are scrambling to find that premium inventory and those impressions in a shrinking linear marketplace, as well as advertisers shift their dollars over to OTT options.
“So we’re pretty excited to get into it and hopefully we’ll be talking soon with the numbers and negotiating CPMs, et cetera.”
Forecast for TV
EMarketer forecasts that US digital ad spending will increase 25.5% this year, the fastest growth rate since 2018, as the ad market and wider economy continue recovering from the pandemic.
It says TV and out-of-home (OOH) ad spending will increase this year after sharp declines in 2020—but neither medium will reach its previous peak again.
That is in contrast with US digital ad spending, which will increase 25.5% this year, the fastest growth rate since 2018, on course to comprise nearly 75% of total US ad spending by 2024.
Making the case
But broadcast salespeople like Bekkedahl are making their case for ad dollars, including the new tactics offered by connected and digital TV platforms.
She says transacting via OpenAP, of which The Weather Group is a part, allows it to learn more about benefitting from higher CPMs.
“The upfront season is incredibly important to The Weather Channel,” she explains. “As a basic linear cable network, we really do put forth a good amount of our inventory into the upfront marketplace and it helps us to really set our plans for the year based upon the commitments and advertiser mix that we have in place as a result of the upfront.
“This year, we’re really, really putting forth the ownership of our company, which is Byron Allen. He is a black media owner, and he’s been really vocal in the marketplace about the necessity to include and be inclusive of black-owned media. So we’re working side by side with Byron, his entire portfolio, of which The Weather Channel is one of the larger properties within the portfolio.”
This was issued today by Entertainment Studios/Allen Media Group Founder and Chairman Byron Allen. "Black America speaks. America should listen."https://t.co/cRuBoidkja
— EntertainmentStudios (@ESGlobalMedia) June 8, 2020
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>As powerful as CTV can be, a common complaint is that it remains too complex.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Al Lustgarten, Senior Vice President, Technology & Information Services, Hearst Television, explains how Hearst tackles the issue.
CTV complexity
“We know our sales are becoming more complex,” he says. The tasks include a strategy that now offers OTT platforms, converged selling methods and advanced ad targeting.
Lustgarten says Hearst is currently figuring accommodating everything. Next up, it wants to develop one platform to embrace it all, “over the next few months”.
For now, though, challenges are sufficient. “We’re experiencing very large growth in our digital business while maintaining our legacy linear broadcast business, and figuring out the path forward to have a unified workflow to accommodate both those lines of business is something that we’re spending a lot of time on currently,” Lustgarten says.
“We’re dealing with disparate platforms. Some of those platforms are legacy, so we’re dealing with platforms that are not necessarily accustomed to doing integrations or developing APIs. We’re working with the vendors to put those in place. Then we have the industry-old issue of dealing with disparate platforms on the buy side of our business and on the sell side of the business.”
Hearst’s tech approach
Lustgarten says Hearst is trying a few technology approaches to make it all work:
- RPA, robotic process automation.
- Working with TIP Initiative, created to develop and publish open transaction interface standards for the broadcast industry.
- Compartmentalizing its tech stack, including separating its online marketplace software )OMS) from its linear traffic system.
- Bringing this separate data into a “data mart”, where it is “normalized”.
“That’s given us a competitive advantage to get all that data and not only use it for decision support, but use it to work with our individual third-party vendors for other services that are wrapping around the tech stack,” Lustgarten adds.
Buy, don’t build
But the different approaches have one thing in common – Hearst doesn’t want to build the software for itself.
“We’ve taken a position at Hearst Television that we would prefer not to build, so we prefer to buy or lease technology,” Lustgarten adds. “So we also have targeted trying to find best of breed technology.
“We’re working with our existing vendors and we accumulated a variety of what we consider best in industry technology. The challenge is trying to get them to all work together.
“Companies like Matrix are very easy to integrate in and out of. Other vendors are not as easy to accomplish that with, but it’s a challenge that we’ve tried to take.”
]]>“We’re talking primarily about growth, and the concept of growing with Univision. It’s a unique promise we can back up because of the growth of our audience,” Dan Riess, executive vice president and chief growth officer of Univision, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
Univision’s programming strategy focuses on themes of togetherness that resonate with Hispanic audiences, not only on television, but also on social media, digital video and connected TV.
“That is a core cultural tenet of the Latino audience. It is a core tenet of the things we put on air, live every day,” Reiss said. “It’s a big, live communal event that drives togetherness.”
Univision’s exclusive programming includes the “TUDN Mega-Fest” that will coincide with the Liga MX “Campeón de Campeones” match weekend. The championship is a major event because Liga MX is the most-watched soccer league in the United States. Univision plans a live concert series, a gala wards show and other pop culture, sports and event TV programming.
Univision also will launch a series called “UniVisionarios” to honor Hispanic thought leaders who contributed to the Spanish-speaking community in the United States and worldwide.
As more people stream video on connected devices like smart TVs, Univision plans to expand the programming for Prende TV, its ad-based video on demand service, with the launch of a 24-hour news channel.
Univision is expanding on its branded content offering with a new influencer team that can create Spanish-language ad creative for marketers, and is building out its Hispanic audience graph to help with targeting.
While many English-language linear channels saw a drop in viewership in the past year as people spent more time with digital video and streaming platforms, Univision maintained its linear reach on cable and broadcast, Reiss said.
Its goal for Prende TV is to reach 5 million unique viewers by the end of the year, while providing marketers a way to stand out with a lower ad load. The streaming service carries about seven and a half minutes of ads every hour.
“We’re significantly lower on ad load by choice than many of the other AVOD services,” Reiss said. “We’re very conscious of the experience. We’re being very careful with not only the ad load, but the number of different ad products.”
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is why the ecosystem of software designed to help them is so rich.
One vendor of such software has been operating since 1992 – but Matrix Solutions has its eyes on the future, not the past.
Matching enabled
“There’s a lot of talk in the industry about getting universal customer IDs, et cetera,” says Matrix CEO Mark Gorman in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“And, of course, that would make it better and it would streamline a lot of the technology.
“But we have a lot of those things to already do those kinds of matchings within our system.
“We as an organisation have proprietary algorithms that can do a lot of that internal matching.”
Sales as a circle
ICYMI last month our CEO Mark Gorman delivered this video update to share the latest happenings at Matrix including Media Ad Sales Council (MASC) updates, a Media Ad Sales Summit 2022 announcement, & the newest product innovations! Watch now: https://t.co/DgFvMT1xtT #MediaAdSales
— Matrix Solutions (@MatrxSolutions) April 30, 2021
The company offers Monarch, a CRM pipeline management, budgeting, forecasting projections and reporting and BI tool for media companies that sell advertising inventory.
Now it is also developing Matrix Sales Gateway, a system that will ultimately be an automation and convergence of the media ad sales workflow.
“I like to think of the sales workflow as a circle,” Gorman says.
“Really, the idea is to help manage that whole process from the initial identification of buy to the ultimate conclusion and revenue recognition for the, the media company.”
Gateway workflows
Matrix's CEO, Mark Gorman, and CRO, Brenda Hetrick, talk to https://t.co/uDK7mj2jUL’s President, Angela Betasso, as she discusses how her past experience as both National Seller and Local Seller are influencing her role at https://t.co/uDK7mj2jUL & more. https://t.co/t1VFTXt7JG pic.twitter.com/wVRMqYHkuL
— Matrix Solutions (@MatrxSolutions) April 28, 2021
The gateway will start by identifying and displaying the buy-side demand signalled by platforms like Hudson, MX, MediaOcean and FreeWheel, after which a sell-side executive can build an electronic proposal for buyers.
The system will then send orders, and continues to offer revenue recognition and intelligence.
“The sales gateway is really seeking to bring in a lot of efficiencies into the process to help maximise the value of the various inventories you’re selling, reduce errors, et cetera,” Gorman adds.
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.