All of a sudden, TV isn’t what it used to be. And neither will TV advertising be. The ability to target individual viewers may signal the death knell for a sector that has long sold its spots on loose, upfront demographic sales.
A big shake-up is coming, and TV companies are going to have to watch out for devaluation, according to one ad-tech exec helping them manage the change.
“There is a tremendous amount of audience that will be moving to device-targetable distribution streams,” says SpotX programmatic TV VP Randy Cooke in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The economies of TV and digital video have to reconcile. Every single impression could be monetizable based on being able to identify that device.
“Media owners have to focus on preserving the economics of TV in this transition.
If you’re getting a $50 CPM in your linear inventory today and your digital inventory is worth anything from 40 to 60 bucks, as a programmer you’ve got to keep an eye on what’s going on in the spot TV market.”
The change is coming because an industry predicated on selling 30-second slots ahead of airing is being augmented by the new discipline of household-level targeting and even relatively dynamic ad insertion.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>The San Francisco-based company offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads around the US.
CEO Eric Mathewson tells Beet.TV the company has been providing a “DFP for linear TV” since launching nearly two decades ago.
“We started aggregating stations back in 2001, he says. “We are now live in 3,300 stations TV and networks, we are contracted to install another 1,000 stations next year.
“We’re managing about $30bn in ad spend, we’ve rolled up about 90% of TV station ad dollars, about a third of cable network ad dollars and quickly we’ll be over 50% of radio station ad dollars.”
WideOrbit may have already succeeded at helping advertisers buy traditional linear TV using data-infused techniques. But, now that TV is getting connected to the internet, things could be about to get really interesting. WideOrbit may go stratospheric.
“It’s very early days,” Mathewson acknowledges. “Right now, the programmatic linear ad spend is under 1% in the US, under $750m, but we think it rapidly will roll through those numbers.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest from brand-name, large advertisers who would like to more definitely buy the content that they’re looking for.
“Three percent of television in the US is about $2bn in ad spend. Moving the needle even one or two points is a lot.”
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>Fortunately, an election is happening right now. And addressable TV has been used by candidates to deliver messages in key states, tailored to individual homes with target voters.
“The political inventory is what’s making the addressable system truly hum,” according to DISH Media Sales media sales and analytics VP Adam Gaynor.
For the last couple of years in the run-up to the 2016 vote, Gaynor’s company has been involved in a joint venture with DirecTV, D2 Media Sales, designed to sell precision-guided TV ads to political campaigners.
“We have an ability to bring scale to individual state level, more politicians … (t0) help Republicans find Republicans, Democrats find Democrats, or Democrats find Republicans.
“When you’re trying to find an undecided voter in a certain state with certain other attributes, that may be an audience that we’re typically not reaching. The more we do, the more that system makes everything run smoothly.”
Among D2’s main attributes is its ability to create scalable household-addressable media buys at the local level, enabling political campaigns to target their buys within given states, along with its approach to prevent wasted impressions.
Even though D2 offers some 50 demographic audiences for targeting, in addition to voter file data, buyers bring their own data to the table in line with their specific needs.
Although Gaynor says addressable is here and now, he recognizes advertiser inertia beyond the realm of experimentation. Perhaps that’s why this election a, as a relatively one-off event, is attracting spend.
Gaynor fears “sticker shock” when ad buyers see the prices asked for addressable functionality are holding the market back, but are also misplaced.
“People see, $30,$40,$50,$60,$100 or$200 CPMs,” he says. “The sticker shock is enough to say, ‘Addressable is not for me’. That could not be further from the truth. We work with all kinds of brands.”
That’s why addressable is still in an “education” phase, a reason DISH has put together a report on the topic for buyers.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>This is how Viacom’s Julian Zilberbrand sums up the semantics surrounding the current state of programmatic television. In an interview with Beet.TV, the company’s EVP of Audience Science parses the plumbing of data-driven audience buying in an effort to dispel confusion.
“A lot of people have a misconception of what programmatic TV is,” says Zilberbrand. “The reality is that if you define programmatic as ad tech, which allows for automation of trading and the ability to layer data on to help make decisions on the inventory that you’re going to be accessing, then that doesn’t exist in TV.”
What does exist are solutions like Viacom’s Vantage, defined as data-driven TV that helps advertisers hit desired audiences “at a rate higher than just simply going out in the traditional demo level,” according to Zilberbrand. “Really what we’re all about is trading on alternative currencies by allowing a more audience-based buying approach as opposed to a broad demo buying approach,” he adds.
Zilberbrand explains the disconnect between what might seem like “programmatic” and what the future might ultimately deliver.
“The reality is that most of the inventory is broadcast inventory, which doesn’t allow for DAI, which isn’t really tradable in some kind of programmatic fashion,” he says in a reference to dynamic ad insertion. “It’s planned programmatically but then executed manually on the back end.”
Exceptions include over-the-top TV and full-episode player inventory in the traditional digital realm. Buyers are hoping all of traditional TV goes in the same direction, enabling them to view and trade specific inventory.
“It don’t know that’s a reality because you have a smaller supply source in the broadcast space and the reality that it’s never going to be traded on a biddable fashion,” Zilberbrand says.
More likely are standardized audience targets across sellers of broadcast TV inventory that advertisers could access on a single platform for planning purposes. This would enable broadcasters “to provide in the short term tactical plans that will hit that audience and index high across their own channels,” Zilberbrand says.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>The $49 billion DIRECTV deal has grown AT&Ts addressable household roster to 14 million from 12 million. “Our strategy is to continue to grow our addressable footprint but also grow our addressable offering across platforms,” Dunsche says in an interview with Beet.TV.
AT&T AdWorks has more than doubled the number of advertisers using its addressable TV offering, with thousands of campaigns currently in flight and a 90% repeat purchase rate. “Advertisers get a taste of it and it performs well for them and they want to do more,” adds Dunsche, citing categories that include automotive, consumer packaged-goods, financial services, quick-serve restaurants and retailers.
“At the outset, addressable addressable advertising CPM’s are higher than traditional linear spend, but when you look at the net effective CPM level because there’s zero waste it’s actually a far more efficient and effective spend,” Dunsche says.
On the distribution side, the union of AT&T and DIRECTV means access to more than 150 million screens across TV and mobile, fueling cross-screen ad targeting and results measurement. A main goal is “seamlessly delivering entertainment experiences cross platform,” Dunsche adds.
AT&T took the plunge into political addressable TV campaigns by pairing DIRECTV with DISH Network, forming the joint partnership known as D2 Media Sales. D2 can send targeted political messages to about 22 million addressable households.
“We work with every political presidential candidate that’s been in market,” says Dunsche. “It’s been a great year. Political advertising is definitely up.” One of the main selling points of addressable ads for political campaigns is the fact that “you can keep it within state boundaries” as opposed to traditional DMA-based buys.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>The company’s EVP and Chief Research Officer acknowledges that “There’s a lot going on when it comes to research and measurement” for better targeting of TV viewers. “And there’s a lot going on when it comes to us not waiting for Nielsen and comScore to get their act together for true cross-platform, complete measurement,” Rush says.
For Viacom, its most promising solution thus far is its Vantage platform, “which is really about advanced segments targeting,” she adds. In other words, “Bringing some of the targeting practices that have been very familiar to people in the digital space to TV. But it’s still sight, sound and motion within the context of premium content.”
As MediaPost reports, Vantage gave Viacom a big lift in the recent Upfront negotiations between buyers and sellers, exceeding internal expectations. On a recent earnings call, CEO Philippe Dauman said the company expected to triple the number of Vantage deals from the prior year but had eclipsed that goal, according to MediaPost.
Instead of aiming at broad audiences like women 18-49 or men 18-34, advanced targeting gives advertisers and agencies “much crisper definitions of who that Taco Bell breakfast burrito customer is. It’s not just men 18 to 34,” Rush says.
By deploying the proper audience definition along with other data sets besides Nielsen or comScore data “so you can find that breakfast burrito customer on all of your different programs, on all of your different brands, isn’t that a powerful proposition?” asks Rush. “Yes it is, and we’re getting a lot of traction with a lot of different types of marketers.”
While that’s all well and good, Rush looks ahead to standardized audience definitions across media sellers.
“Companies like Viacom and others have been building advanced audience solutions, but right now they’re separate,” she observes. “One thing that maybe would be powerful to come next is if we could somehow work across media companies so that the target definitions can be standardized.”
Such collaboration would attract more advertisers. “And it will scale faster. Which I think will be valuable to the marketer as well as valuable to the media company. But I think that could take a little bit of time,” Rush says.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>In an interview with Beet.TV, Bokor surveys the current landscape of addressable TV: forecast by eMarketer to hit roughly $850 million advertising spend in 2016 and approximately $1.5 billion by 2017. “That’s real money,” says Bokor. “It’s a significant amount of uptake for addressable, it’s growing every year, it’s delivering results.”
Chalk it up to being able to “do what we’ve always wanted in television,” which is linking viewer exposure to ads with any number of key performance indicators, according to Bokor.
“TV has always been something that we’ve known is effective. We’ve always known if you stop buying television that your sales will go down,” Bokor adds. Problem is, “It’s a really sort of a loose association.”
Some clients of Mediavest | Spark are return players to addressable while others are new to the game. Most active have been marketers that can come closest to matching exposures with actual sales, for example in the automotive, consumer packaged-goods and financial sectors.
“It’s been successful in those categories to the extent that other advertisers are saying, ‘Even though I might not be able to get that closed loop to a sale, that’s that’s something that I want to do,’” says Bokor.
Some Mediavest | Spark clients are also buying audience index programmatic TV, whether directly from a TV network or via a demand-side platform as an optimizer, according to Bokor.
Nonetheless, audience index programmatic and OTT “Are a little behind. We’re starting to see traction but it’s a little earlier than addressable,” Bokor says. “Addressable has moved beyond the test phase. It’s really moved ahead of the other two.”
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>Working the front end and back end of television audience targeting and measurement is TiVo’s legacy research analytics, which provides insights into networks and programs. “But there’s this whole middle layer where the ad sellers actually have to operationalize the promise of audience targeting. They have to look at the inventory level, what ad inventory, what avails are going to deliver this audience target,” Joan FitzGerald, VP, Product Management & Business Development at TiVo, says in an interview with Beet.TV.
That middle is Rovi’s sweet spot. TiVo’s viewership data merged with Rovi’s analytics tools will enable better targeting of media spend for marketers and improved advertising inventory yield for media sellers. Rovi is best known as the company that has provided the onscreen TV guide listings and metadata that power the media-search function on many platforms, along with advertising analytics and cloud services.
After the TiVo acquisition, the resulting entity kept the TiVo brand name. TiVo generates reports containing indices showing how programs rank for certain target audiences. “If you were a broadcaster and have a certain program and you’re achieving a 120 index for Ford F150 buyers, that means your show is likely to have 20 percent more Ford F150 buyers in the audience,” explains FitzGerald, who spent six years at ratings provider Arbitron and an equal tenure at metrics company comScore.
But when it comes to sellers actually deploying their inventory, “You’re not going to deliver the highest target every time,” FitzGerald says. “You’re going to have a mix of targets for the advertisers, because the reality is you’re guaranteeing based on GRP’s.”
As the industry moves toward guarantees based on reach, TiVo will help media sellers optimize their inventory based on what is known about those audiences in the past.
FitzGerald acknowledges that Nielsen is still “a super important part of the equation” and its data is used by TiVo for currency measurement purposes. “Age and gender targeting is not going away. But bringing these alternatives in there to provide more visibility into the system is one of the major road map items,” says FitzGerald.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>Semantics aside, Kumar is focused on answering a particular question from marketer clients. “Have I made a smart decision on my media investment, and why is it smart?” he says in an interview with Beet.TV.
Key to such smart decisions is making sure that creative and planning agencies are working with the same target audiences and that buyers are executing against the same segment.
“What it means for us is this is the way we expect all media to be bought in the future,” Kumar says. “It’s less about whether it’s biddable, whether it’s going through an exchange, whether it’s private inventory. The most important point is are we planning and buying on audiences or are we still stuck with space.”
He notes that advertisers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for media “but we need to know exactly what are we paying a premium for and how is it driving the business.”
Kumar is encouraged by the increasing scale of U.S. households that can be reached with addressable TV advertising. “From our perspective, addressable has been a significant growth area. I think as the number of households scale, that’s where a lot of clients are going to be focused,” says Kumar. “We’ve gone past the tipping point on that.”
The bigger challenge lies in being able to target specific individuals within households as they consume content on a variety of devices through a variety of delivery mechanisms.
“The blockage in the system is how do you measure cross-screen and how are you going to figure out frequency capping across those multiple devices,” says Kumar.
In addressable TV he sees a similar pattern in location-based targeting of digital ads populated by dynamically inserted creative messaging. “I think a lot of that is also driving the growth of household addressable,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>One year on, how is the initiative faring? Donna Speciale, Turner Ad Sales’ president, tells Beet.TV the early results are exploratory but promising, and lead her toward wanting fewer, longer ads that give brands a bigger canvas and exclusive air time.
Shaking up the way commercials are structured in US TV programming is such a significant move, Speciale is treading cautiously, searching for evidence.
Next up, she will be testing reduced ad loads on archive shows, too, to establish whether old and first-run shows perform differently with the new setup.
The advertising and publishing worlds have been rocked by the reality of ad blocking online. Steadily, the TV world is starting to get spooked that it, too, may secretly be suffering from latent consumer resentment.
“The industry needs to focus on the consumer experience int he television landscape,” Speciale adds. “It’s not just us doing it. NBCU announced limited commercials with SNL, Fox is reducing NatGeo and did some stuff with Empire. It can’t just be a Turner initiative.”
So what is the optimum ad format, and how will it be used? Again, Speciale is as yet non-committal while tests are ongoing – but first tests are leading Turner toward a conclusion.
“We’re testing, should there be five breaks that are shorter, or three breaks that are longer?,” Speciale says. “Our initial inclination is five breaks in an hour but two minutes in each.
“The next iteration is to trying take those two-minute pods and get out of the traditional 30-second commercial. We want to make that environment better storytelling with client messaging.”
Those longer slots would allow advertisers to have ownership of a given ad break, a space in which to run longer creatives.
“There’s a lot of content right now in the digital landscape with one- or two-minute messaging but they’re not taking that messaging and translating it in to linear – because of cost, but also we’re not set up that way.
“By making the pods shorter, we can enable them to take storytelling that they’re already doing or we will create and start marrying the right messaging to the content.”
Such a switch would make this a rare occasion on which the US TV advertising infrastructure is re-shaped by online advertising and not the other way around.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>But that’s fewer than half the total number of TV households, and getting here has been a slow slog.
Yet the inertia is not stopping advertisers from embracing opportunities around TV targeting nevertheless.
“TV … has been, and still is, able to reach large audiences with multiple senses and can deliver a powerful message in the right context to great audiences at the right time,” according to Lance Neuhauser, CEO of 4C Insights, a technology company helping marketers.
“However, then digital came up – one person who has one interest shouldn’t necessarily see the same ad as another person. The infrastructure necessary to deliver those separate messages to separate household has taken time in television to build.”
“In the meantime, marketers don’t want to to stop making progress. They are looking at more than just viewing data. They are looking at viewing data in combination with social response information, in combination with CRM data, to have a better picture of the impact of each dollar that’s put in to market and how that ultimately brings back bottom-line results.”
Neuhauser is fresh from raising a $26mn Series C investment to boost geographical expansion, products and technology and sales teams.
The outfit has an integrated platform for multi-screen analytics and activation, with services including online ads synchronized to TV spots, analytics and social media ad buying.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>To be sure, the advantages of advanced TV include the ability to use data for better audience targeting and results measurement, Babs Rangaiah, Partner for Global Marketing Solutions at marketing services provider IBM iX, says in an interview with Beet.TV on the eve of the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
Rangaiah, who spent 14 years on the advertiser side at Unilever, is no stranger to the world of traditional network TV. “While there were great benefits, we didn’t really know which ads were working and how much of it was working,” he says. “You spent a billion dollars but you didn’t’ know how much of that actually impacted your sales.”
With advanced TV, “I think over time we’ll have a much better sense of that,” says Rangaiah.
Alongside technological progress have come greater consumer power of choice and a flip of the business model that once relegated viewers to commercial exposure that interrupted programming. These days, consumers can go over the top or around with ease.
“As TV gets more and more advanced, it will be that much harder to break through that environment when consumers have the option of skipping almost any ad possible,” says Rangaiah.
While the ad industry has “come a long way on the viewability issue” of things like online video, the concentration of power harkens to earlier TV days.
“The digital ecosystem is becoming almost the way the networks were many years ago where you only had a few players that controlled kind of all the inventory and all the viewership,” says Rangaiah. “I think with Google and Facebook especially you’re going to have enormous opportunity, but we’d like to broaden that to more than just those two players obviously.”
Then he shares a personal anecdote that attests to the power of digital targeting. At Christmas, Rangaiah went shopping online for a refrigerator but at a certain point stopped the process and went to a store instead. A few hours later, he went on Facebook and the exact refrigerator he wanted was staring him in the face.
“It was about the data and laser targeting that was contextually relevant to me, for exactly what I was looking for, at the exact time I was looking, and I bought it,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
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]]>But news networks are benefitting as viewers plug in to watch the horror show unfold, and advertisers follow them in.
CNN is finding a bump from both planned and unexpected executions, according to its owner Turner’s ad sales president Donna Speciale.
“News has become the new prime-time entertainment,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The election, I hate to say it, is entertaining. It’s sad that this is what it’s becoming, but it’s also exciting.
“Everybody’s tuning in. CNN.com is booming, CNN Go is out of control. I don’t think it’s going to reduce after the election is over. The inauguration has to happen in first quarter, it’s going to continue the momentum.
This season’s election debates have set all-time audience records, and robust examination from the likes of CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter have drawn Donald Trump to describe the network as “unwatchable”, “fiction” and “an arm of the Clinton campaign”.
For Speciale, all the attention is welcome, though not all of it was expected.
“We did not plan for all the debates CNN ended up getting,” she tells Beet.TV. “Between NBC, CNN and Fox, the debates had to be spread out.
“But I will tell you that a lot of the organizations wanted CNN to take place a little bit more – we ended up getting more of the debates. We did town halls that we were not planning on.”
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
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