“It’s designed to be watched live, it draws great audiences. It’s not designed to be viewed on demand,” says Dan Callahan, Fox’s vp of audience and automated sales, speaking to Beet.TV during an interview at Advertising Week. “Live only happens once and we’re excited about that.”
Live sports is only one piece of the puzzle, though, and Callahan says that like most other networks, Fox is figuring out its own direct-to-consumer play and subscription model (a betting component might be up next). The goal is “to be the best facilitator and partner for brands and agencies to come activate against,” says Callahan, and in service of that, Fox is working across a wide range of partnerships in order to light up the most inventory and match databases to Fox’s audience network. It’s currently splintered across linear TV’s MVPD, smart TV manufacturers and digital channels like Hulu, says Callahan.
One solution to that separation is OpenAP, which Fox is a founding participant in. OpenAP, which is an across-industry platform that consolidates premium TV programming and inventory into one place, was established in order to bring more transparency to ad inventory buying across new TV platforms. Callahan says OpenAP has gotten a new “shot at life” now that CEO David Levy is building a dedicated team for the initiative. “It’s been refreshing to have a group of thoughtful individuals focused wholeheartedly on the project,” says Callahan.
For Fox, the point of OpenAP is to standardize the process around audience definition, and make it easier for brands and agencies to work more holistically with the network.
“We’re trying to create a transactional workflow for a very manual process today, and if it can become an enter-exit point for planning and posting campaigns, we think we’ve got the ability to be successful and add value,” says Callahan.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>“We’re seeing an explosion in video content,” Morganstern tells Beet.TV in an interview at Advertising Week. “We work with advertisers, we sit down, we have a mantra. The two things we focus on the most is growing their market share and increasing their sales.”
That explosion has led to some saturation. Pluto TV offers free, ad-supported content, which has become an increasingly crowded section of the video streaming platforms, with competitors like Xumo and The Roku Channel offering similar value propositions. Pluto TV, which was acquired by Viacom earlier this year for $340 million, believes its appeal to customers, content providers and advertisers will help it stand out from the competition.
Pluto TV takes a hands-on approach to its client relationships, says Morganstern, and its team will sit down with clients to look at attribution, what drove a lift in sales, what didn’t and what can be fixed. In figuring out that ad performance, Pluto TV uses tools like attribution studies, brand studies, metrics on monthly average users and other technologies to measure success. It’s still a work in progress, says Morganstern, as there’s no universal toolbox for measurement.
“There will be some consolidation and there will be some measurement that gets set in place for the long term where clients and hopefully the platforms will agree and unify, and then we’ll move forward from there,” he says. “But right now it’s an early part of the game where we’re figuring it out.”
That doesn’t mean Pluto TV is making rash decisions to figure out measurement or drive growth as the streaming wars ramp up. Morganstern calls it “the age of acceleration,” and says that all the new players, like NBC, Disney and Apple, are racing to one-up each other, sometimes at risk of alienating the customer.
“The good news for us is, we were first to market in AVOD. We’re unique in how we go out there, being free and bringing good content,” says Morganstern of Pluto TV’s competitive advantage. “All platforms want to be bigger, better and faster, but I think it needs to slow down a little bit for better understanding of the industry, advertisers and what it all means for consumers.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>“It started three to five years ago when Apple launched its non-deletable app and ‘Serial’ was launched,” Lagana told Beet.TV during an interview at Advertising Week. “That started a groundswell of interest in the podcast space.”
Growing interest and activity in podcasting has also brought on clutter. According to Lagana, there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts in the market, making it hard to break through. To cut through the noise, content producers have to “create different, innovative types of content, and we’re doing that at Entercom in leaps and bounds,” says Lagana.
Discovery may be challenging considering the amount of podcasts available, but Lagana says when listeners find a show they like, they latch on. As competition ramps up, that creates opportunity for brands and advertisers to get a piece of the growth. Lagana likens the current state of podcast advertising to where digital video advertising was 10 to 15 years ago.
“It’s open road in terms of who’s buying but in terms of why advertisers love it, and why we’re seeing brands jump in with both feet, is that level of engagement,” says Lagana. “It’s unrivaled with any other media platform.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, the owner of a software platform powering supply-and-demand advertising data for media companies observes a shift.
“If you look at the big box retailers like Walmart, Target… these guys have always been on the forefront of how to use data,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
“They know their consumers better than any other sector. And ultimately they’ve used that data not just to drive revenue and to drive business outcomes. They’ve used it to create an experiential experience within their big boxes.
“People come in, they feel known, there’s a sense of identity. They’ve threaded that through to actually how they look at purchasing behaviour. And then most importantly, they’ve shared that data… particularly with Roundel launching a new platform for data-driven television and ultimately offering a data product to enable that. What is so interesting is they are willing to share it.”
Swartz was speaking after Target’s in-house media agency Roundel partnered with Disney Advertising Sales to offer disney’s TV advertisers data about Target shoppers’ behavior.
Marketers who buy ads on a Disney channel, such as ABC or ESPN, will be able to see if their ad spurred product sales on a Target shelf, AdAge reported.
The partnership will involve both online purchase and brick-and-mortar purchase data.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But how does ML work in advertising, and what can be gained?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jim Lawson, CEO of one vendor offering the technology, explains.
“Whatever your business goal is, if you have enough data and there is a ton of data out there, the question is there’s too much data, what do you do with it?,” says Lawson of AdTheorent.
“We take the data, we integrate them into our machine learning models and algorithms and then we predictably score every impression that comes into our system.
“We serve ads to the high predictive scores, and we ignore the low predictive scores all the while optimising the best price.”
Eight-year-old AdTheorent offers predictive targeting, geo-targeting, audience relationship graphing and creative production.
Lawson says “science” can solve advertising’s persistent waste problem.
There’s a lot of waste in digital advertising, so we use science … it is consistently and daily executing on campaign objectives for your clients as measured by their goals, not by clicks.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>That’s what Ericsson thought when it launched Emodo in 2017. The telecommunications company’s technology powers the underlying networks of many of the world’s mobile telcos, giving it unprecedented access to raw audience data.
That is why it brought to market in Emodo, a new ad marketplace “powered by carrier intelligence”.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Emodo data solutions VP Jake Moskowitz explains how Emodo’s pre-id algorithm algorithm uses AI to provide ad buyers a subsset of only the inventory deemed most likely to be effective for particular audiences.
“The data running through the pipes, basically, we use as a truth set to verify the accuracy of data around the ecosystem,” he says.
“It uses years of deterministic matching between the carrier data and programmatic inventory and looking and seeing, historically, which data points have ended up being accurate and which have not been accurate.
“Based on that, we use AI to accurately predict the likelihood that any given bid requests in real-time can be trusted. We’re running that pre-bid algorithm in real time and using it to filter out inventory that is highly likely to be a waste of money.”
Emodo has flown relatively under the radar since it launched two years ago. Moskowitz says its capabilities are enabled through buying tools via Google, Trade Desk and MediaMath.
One of the biggest use cases has been to ensure the accuracy of location data signals used these days by retail establishments like quick-service restaurants, who want to use programmatic advertising to drive football to eating places, activity they want to be able to track verifiably.
“There’s an enormous issue of fraud and waste in the form of data that people don’t really realise and don’t really focus on,” Moskowitz adds.
“So much data in the ecosystem, probably half or more of every type of data that we have been able to measure, is totally inaccurate. Our mission, is to clean this stuff up.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>And, it seems, nothing qualifies an end purchase like raw purchase data.
That is the theory according to Cardlytics, The 11-year-old, Atlanta-based company is using its network of banks, comprising 120mn accounts, to help advertisers verify purchase and target known customer behaviors.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Carlytics chief marketing officer Dani Cushion says one way of describing the company is “a native ad platform built within banks’ digital channels” – a way for banks to power cashback offers to their own customers. But that’s not the whole story.
“For advertisers, we use purchase data,” she says. “We see about $2.8 trillion in purchase data through our relationships with the banks, and we use that to help marketers make more informed decisions based on where people are shopping.
“We can actually see … whether someone has actually made a purchase and truly whether it’s incremental or not.”
This summer, Cardlytics found that back-to-school shoppers who buyers from a brand both in-store and online spend 48% more than those who use only one of those channels.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV during Advertising Week, GroupM president Gonzalo del Fa says the goal of the initiative was to re-engineer the conversation around multicultural advertising in the US. “Multicultural” and “minority” are in fact misnomers, says del Fa, when the country is shifting and people 18 and younger are now majority non-white in the US, and as of next year, 53 percent of American households will be of ethnic or mixed races.
So the initiative, dubbed New Majority Ready, aims to reflect that shift.
“We want our clients to understand this new reality and get prepared to talk to these audiences in a relevant and authentic way,” says del Fa.
With New Majority Ready, GroupM has established a coalition of media partners that the media agency will work with in helping them to navigate new audience groups as well as internal staffing practices that will go hand-in-hand with a more diverse audience strategy. At the start, GroupM is partnering with Disney, Viacom, Google, Meredith Corporation, NBCUniversal, Univision, Twitter and iHeartMedia. According to del Fa, GroupM wanted to partner with media companies in order to expand the initiative’s reach.
“If we join forces as a media agency who handles a lot of really important clients and bring aboard media partners with the audience and content, we can do a much better job,” he says.
At the core of the current New Majority Ready strategy is content packages that take high-visibility audience moments and turn them into bigger-reaching properties and conversations. Take the NFL for example, which del Fa says has considerable African American and Hispanic audiences: the plan is to create content that goes across platforms in order to have more impact specifically with these audiences, beyond commercial breaks.
Another goal of the initiative is to help companies get up to speed in hiring more diverse teams, a component that del Fa says is necessary if they want to get to the right place with diverse audiences.
“We want to help clients navigate these waters that we know isn’t easy, we know it’s new, but we can help them get to the right place,” says del Fa. “We want the clients to start thinking if they don’t have multicultural in mind, their businesses might be at risk.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But, whilst few people are talking about it, the world of location advertising signals is also plagued with problems.
Beet.TV interviewed Jason Smith, chief business officer of Location Sciences, a company which runs verification on location data signals. Its just-published half-year report The State Of Location Advertising, analyzed 500 million digital location targeted impressions delivered in the UK and US from January-June 2019, and uncovered three worries:
Location Sciences’ Verify tool purports to ascertain the accuracy of GPS, carrier IP, WiFi and beacon signals. But Smith says the industry is even starting to see the rise of fraudulent location signals.
“We see many sellers and many platforms replacing high quality GPS with low quality IP,” Smith says. “It’s widely available. It doesn’t cost very much and it’s much easier to detect.
“As a result, we see marketers targeting people that may have visited a McDonald’s, they may have visited a Cadillac dealership, they may have visited a Buffalo Wild Wings and the advertisements are inaccurate because they’re targeting people where they live, not where they are.
“That happens because of maybe just poor management of the campaigns, lack of inquiry from the brands, but in some cases, GPS signals can actually be presented as fraudulent. They’re all self-reported throughout applications across each of the app stores.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Now the landscape is a mixed economy, but one of the leading publishers, Activision Blizzard, has only just got in on the in-game advertising game.
That is why its Activision Blizzard Media recently launched a new initiative aimed at making it easy for advertisers to buy in-game ads.
“Most advertisers are surprised to find that we actually haven’t had ad opportunities in our games up until very recently,” says Jonathan Stringfield, VP, Global Business Marketing, Measurement, and Insights at Activision Blizzard Media, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s largely been funded through in-app purchases.
“While that’s made a good business model, we knew that there was a lot of potential for advertisers to integrate with the core audience.”
The push is being driven out of King, the mobile game company Activision acquired in in 2016.
Previously, analysts pegged King’s possible advertising revenue at $500 million per year, when it had higher engagement, Motley Fool reports. Now Activision will need a bigger, all-over drive.
Stringfield describes the ad model being offered.
“Gaming is new for a lot of advertisers, (so) we’ve really tried to make it as simple as possible,” Stringfield adds. “Essentially it is a rewarded unit that, for at certain points in the game, whether it’s pre level or perhaps they’ve had a tough time and they need a little boost after the level… someone can opt to see an advertisement for a booster that will help them in their gameplay.
“Then the ad will play as if like any other video unit that they might be playing on Facebook or another mobile environment. So essentially, we’re not requiring advertisers to make any kind of specialised mobile units or anything that’s very unique to the game. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to be, one, integrated with our franchise, but two, kind of dip their toes into the world of gaming.”
Whilst it may be straightforward for a media agency to shovel its existing video ads from other media in to games, there may be a big question mark over how well such arrival will be received by players.
But Stringfield insists the ads “can even improve the concept of the game”
“What we’ve found is that, if we can coax marketers to be respectful of the context and respectful of the players of the games, that when they are integrated in a way that is rewarding the players and enhancing their gameplay experience, it tends to pay outsized results in terms of brand recognition, in terms of sales lift, in terms of a number of KPIs that we look at and that are associated with the bottom line impact for brands,” he says.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>That means the technology of the future will depend heavily on the outcomes of the past.
But the effect, nevertheless, could be to unlock big future growth. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Gaurav Shirole of 605 imagines a future in which the predictions are informed by a body of personal effects research.
“Our dream is to be able to tie that back to qualitative research so that, in the future, we have our attribution outcomes mapped to a focus groups that might involve neuroscience data collection on skin response or temperature, eye tracking, and all of those things,” says the SVP of product and client analytics.
“If you can build a really, really big data set of the performance of ads and then go further up the cycle of creative production, hopefully there’s a future – in the next three to five years – where you might even understand the brand effect or the sales effect of a storyboard, based on thousands and thousands of campaign outcomes that have been mapped through a variety of different processes.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households.
It combines viewing data from:
The company was recently enlisted by Discovery Inc. to provide advertisers with outcome attribution for TV ads seen by 40 million households.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Whilst online ad buyers, over the last few years, have wrung their hands over viewability, fraud and supply-chain transparency issues, television – if only because it has been, by definition, disconnected – has sailed on by the controversy.
Could the new connection of TV devices to the internet change that, however?
Integrated Ad Science, a maker of ad fraud detection software, says it is gearing up to launch a product for connected TVs by Q1 2020.
But Mike Fisher, the VP of advanced TV at online ad platform MediaMath, says the problem isn’t necessarily a problem… if you buy from the right places.
“Connected TV is inherently 100% in-view, unskippable and fraud-free when buying through the right pipes,” he says, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“MediaMath’s philosophy is to always buy directly from the end seller, and from premium-end sellers, especially for connected TV… the Hulus, the NBCs, the Viacoms, the Discoveries of the world.
“We know that they are the good actors in the space. They’re not sending impressions saying they’re one thing (but) that they’re another. We’re not worried about impression spoofing or server-side ad insertion spoofing. We know what we’re buying is what we think we’re buying because of who we’re buying from.”
Fisher acknowledges some lingering issues like the inability of TV to truly indicate digital viewabilty signals, like whether a viewer walked out of the room during an ad playback.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>GSTV is a national video platform, running in more than 200 markets with 93 million monthly unique viewers, per president and CEO Sean McCaffrey. “We’re content and context on the consumer journey,” he says, getting in front of customers four to six times a month at three to five minutes at a time.
Speaking to BeetTV at Advertising Week, McCaffrey says that the GSTV environment is “naturally data rich.” That makes is a go-to partner for brands and agencies that work with its in-house suite of solutions called Octane.
“Brands don’t look to us to bring them new data, what brands and agencies ask us is how do they use the data they already have to target consumers,” he says. “We think about each GSTV site as an addressable household – that’s how we program the advertising in the show, and then we can use the same data signals to determine footfall, store lift, that sort of thing.”
Content fit
What works at a gas pump is similar to what works on mobile devices. McCaffrey says that what works on social, like six- and fifteen-second videos, works well in the GSTV experience. Partners like Cheddar, the NFL and Live Nation work with GSTV to provide content around news, sports, weather highlights, music and food. As for brands, GSTV provides access to an audience for any brand seeking out a mobile, on the go consumer.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>According to Vudu vp Scott Blanksteen, it’s what brings “power to the platform.” Shopper marketing data from Walmart – which includes customer purchasing and behavior data around habits like who buys Coke and who shops for a certain brand of razor – is layered on top of Vudu’s other data practices, including content targeting by demographic and integrations with third-party data providers to create audience segments.
Vudu launched as a transactional service offering a library of approximately 180,000 TV and movie titles available to rent or purchase. It introduced a free-with-ads streaming service two years ago, a platform that currently houses around 10,000 titles.
“Ad-supported content on OTT is TV done better. It’s better for advertisers and brands because they can do a much better job reaching the audience they want, with messages that are appropriate for customers,” says Blanksteen, speaking with BeetTV during Advertising Week. “We can help advertisers reach the right customers and help customers see ads that aren’t completely pointless to them.”
Better ad experiences, Blanksteen believes, mean that viewers won’t go to great lengths to actively avoid ads. Vudu sells standard ad units in 15-, 30- and 60-second lengths and keeps the ad load light, running six to eight minute ad blocks per hour, “to ensure engagement and responsiveness,” he says.
Surviving the streaming wars
Blanksteen acknowledges that competition among streaming platforms is coming to a head, an indication that Walmart and Vudu are “heading in the right direction.” He sees Vudu’s positioning as an advantage – it offers a combination of original content, new releases and free streaming – as well as its dedication to building out a great customer experience, something that comes into play when customers can watch the same content across multiple platforms.
One area Vudu has built out an enhanced customer experience is in family programming. The company has launched several tools for parents and kids, including a partnership with Common Sense Media to make more informed family-friendly recommendations, a kids’ content platform within the app, and a playback feature that can automatically fast forward through sensitive content when selected.
Ultimately, Blanksteen believes differentiation for Vudu boils down to its selection of services.
“What we’re hearing from customers [is that] there’s getting to be a bit of subscription fatigue. We don’t believe customers should subscribe to 10 different services. We want to give people a choice,” he says.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>The company, which owns media titles including Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Huffpost, TechCrunch and Engadget, has content at scale second only to Google and ahead of Facebook, according to Jeff Lucas, Verizon Media’s head of North American sales and global client solutions. That positions it between two content hubs that rely on user-generated content, making brand safety at scale one of Verizon Media’s top differentiators and value propositions.
“We have an extremely close relationship with our user, who leans in every day to consume professionally produced, premium content that’s totally brand safe,” says Lucas, speaking with Beet.TV at Advertising Week. “It puts them in an environment of trust. We would never betray that trust.”
First-party data, transparency around data practices and customer trust shapes Verizon Media’s work with advertisers – Lucas says he feels Verizon Media offers the best data in the business. He says the company has created a data ecosystem that includes customer data, customer safety and brand safety. That’s good for both customers and for marketers, because in the right environment, customers are more likely to convert from ads. “If you’re in an environment that’s not brand safe, and you’re seeing bad content, you’re not likely to trust the advertisers that are building around that.”
As a media company part of the broader Verizon umbrella, Verizon Media is also looking ahead to coming developments around the 5G network, which Lucas says is “limitless.”
“Really, what’s endless is – think about production,” says Lucas. “There’s so much to do where marketers can get right there in the middle of it and see how it’s going to affect their business. When it starts to get more widespread, you’ll see it’s a new revolution.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Mark Rotblat, chief revenue officer of the free, ad-supported movie and TV streaming platform, told BeetTV during Advertising Week that the streaming wars help Tubi “greatly.” As more platforms launch, like Apple’s streaming network and NBC’s Peacock, more people will cut the cord, argues Rotblat.
“There’s been a decline in linear TV subscribers. The tipping point has happened,” says Rotblat, adding that most cord-cutters pay for between one and three subscriptions. Tubi, as it’s free, becomes a complementary add-on. Most Tubi subscribers subscribe to Netflix, according to Rotblat. “They use us when they say ‘I want more, but I don’t want to pay any more.’ Others like Peacock and Apple just adds to the incentives for people to cut the cord. Then they find us.”
That helps to shape Tubi’s pitch to advertisers, which are critical to the platform’s ad-supported model. According to Rotblat, Tubi has 20 million monthly uniques, over 15,000 titles and is now on more than 20 distribution platforms. During Advertising Week, the company announced it would be available on Vizio TV sets.
The age of cord-cutters
Tubi appeals to buyers who are seeking to maintain a relationship with cord-cutters. In the second quarter of 2019, Comcast, AT&T and Charter reported losing a combined 1.25 million subscribers, an increase of 1.1 million over the same quarter the year prior.
“It’s the same buyers buying television looking to get reach to target audiences, which are declining as linear TV subscriptions just fall off the cliff,” says Rotblat. “Things are changing very rapidly – where are they going to reach that audient? They can reach them on OTT.”
Rotblat says Tubi’s strength is that “it looks like TV,” thanks to its movie and television library and advertisements, without being tethered to a cable package. As cord-cutting continues, that’s an advantage.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Over the last few years, a growing number of premium publishers has become increasingly vocal about their discontent with ad-tech – principally, excessive fees taken by intermediaries and fraud committed by bad actors.
With a mission to restore trust, transparency and safety, TrustX was formed by Digital Content Next in 2016, launched in beta in 2017 and went prime-time in 2018.
Launched in May 2018 on tech ultimately built by Iponweb and Moat, TrustX is a consortium of 35 publishers – like CBS, Meredith, NBC, Vox, Hearst, ESPN – making their inventory available to buyers together with a human-viewable guarantee.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kohl says: “The alignment with that mission and that purpose has really enabled us to grow the business, we’re now doing about eight figures, so it’s very exciting.
“The thinking process was, if we are owned by a trade body, if we have no profit motive, no exit strategy motive, we can focus purely on this mission of creating that distinction and restoring that trust.”
In other countries, publishers have been cooperating on ad platforms against common foes for a few years. There are already several cooperative marketplaces operating around the world. Until TrustX, however, the idea was slow to have been embraced in the United States.
Owned by publishers’ non-profit trade association Digital Content Next, which has strongly criticised ad-tech vendors and big digital platforms’ tactics alike, TrustX is a non-profit, B-corp company and runs as a membership organization
Kohel criticizes the “crude methods and blunt instruments” which many ad buyers now use to avoid buying ads against negative or difficult news stories – chief amongst them, “blacklists” through which buy-side platforms allow advertisers to bypass articles tagged with certain keywords.
“In April, there was a fire in France at Notre Dame (Cathedral), and all our publishers that run sports (content) said that their sports ads (sales) went down because Notre Dame (University football team) was running their (recruitment) draft,” Kohl says. “The news environment is having a rough time.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, 605’s chief revenue officer Noah Levine describes the value of that deterministic data, which connected TV devices can now supply.
“The key difference about what deterministic TV viewership data is, compared to others, is that there’s an ability to associate identity through a safe haven so that data can be activated at that individual household level,” he says.
Despite the existence of a fragmented TV ecosystem with distinct buying methods, that real viewing data will allow advertisers to buy seamlessly, Levine reckons.
“We have a national ad market, we have a local ad market, we have an addressable ad market – they’re all planned and transacted separately in silos,” he explains.
“Deterministic TV viewership data … allows for the types of insights at scale to be able to combine these three disparate television advertising markets.
“But also (you can) take deterministic digital data or deterministic CRM data or deterministic purchase data or whatever first-party data an ad seller or a marketer might have, or third party data… to be able to plan, activate, measure and perform attribution and then close the loop from an optimization perspective.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households.
It combines viewing data from:
But Levine says data isn’t enough. In TV, deterministic – which still isn’t captured by 100% of all TV sets – also depends on a projection model which can extrapolate out across the national footprint.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Today, technology’s ability to collect and interpret vast quantities of data means marketers are swimming in reports, often leading to insights which can inform recalibrations in strategy.
But the emerging possibility of “predictive” technology, underpinned by cloud-based AI compute technology provided by vendors like Google, could take things a step further.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Deloitte Digita’s Todd Paris describes how deterministic and probablistic marketing techniques will be “married together” with emerging predictive techniques, to support business functions that go beyond advertising.
“You can look at the data components, the insights, and you can start to look what’s the next best offer,” he says. “Not just the next best ad, but what’s the next best offer? What content are (audiences) likely going to view over the course of the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?
“This is going past just marketing itself. CMOs can use the techniques and the tools, and the platforms to think about marketing activations … (like) what are (users) more likely to click on?
“They also can then start to talk to finance, and to the supply chain folks to talk about logistics. So using the marketing data signals, the demand signals across the value of the enterprise. That’s where I think increasingly CMOs and marketers will tend to move towards.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Acast, launched in 2014, is a global podcasting network that serves as the gatekeeper for brands and agencies to the podcasts it hosts, which have become valuable advertising real estate. Long a go-to channel for upstart direct-to-consumer brands, podcasts are now on the radar of brands of all sizes across all categories, according to Serrander, who spoke with BeetTV during Advertising Week.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth, of new brands and advertisers embracing audio but specifically podcasting,” says Serrander. “What makes podcasting different than music streaming and radio is the intimacy. You’re so close and intimate with the listener that any type of advertising really reaches through. And it’s a medium that’s really quite early in its day that you still have the attention from the audience.”
That’s good business for Acast, which has developed a suite of tools and launched its own in-house agency, Acast Creative, to help brands adapt to advertising on podcasts. Acast’s goal, says Serrander, is to create a medium where brands are invited and appreciated – and listeners aren’t turned off – so making sure advertising fits naturally into the content surrounding it is key.
“As it is so intimate, you don’t have a lot of room to scream and shout that much,” he says. “You have to find the right tonality and alignment for the content that’s being listened to.”
Acast’s listener data guides brands in figuring out how to reach their desired demographics by using contextually related data points to target listeners. The secret sauce, according to Serrander, is understanding what customers are listening to and aligning tonality and content to reach mass audiences at scale. It’s a fine art.
“Podcasting is a mindful medium, and you have to really pay attention in the creative process to make it successful. That’s where the magic is,” Serrander says.
Now, Acast is putting more muscle behind its in-house agency in order to ramp up its tools and services that it offers brands and meet demand.
“Brands are so interested in the medium but need some help around best practices.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But, beyond the abstract, understanding for how AI can help real use cases tends to remain spartan.
So, what can AI really do for P&L? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Manish Mittal, SVP of predictive analytics vendor Course5, explains how it works.
“(With AI), we are analysing a lot of work which has already happened in past – a lot of creative which has been designed, which has been launched in the marketplace, he says. “The system is breaking that video into micro frames. For each frame, the system is able to identify the scene variable and the emotional variable.
“Assume a 30-second ad broken down into a hundred frames. For each frame, it is able to identify what has gone behind in that particular ad. Then (it is) mapping that with some kind of (observed) in-market performance – either in the digital space or in the sales space – in terms of how the consumer responded to that.
“If I accumulated that at a meta level – thousands of such ads and with so much of learning around those campaign – the system is in a great position to then help corporate identify that… what in your brand and creative has been working and what it has not been working?”
Essentially, mapping historic emotional responses to fragments of previous ad campaigns could allow creators of new ones to better determine the right triggers for the right scene at the right time.
That, says Mittal, course elucidate the “likely success” of a media plan.
Course5 offers insight and analytics products and services available, infused with AI algorithms.
It was able to tell one brand that its historic use of celebrities in marketing campaigns was not moving the needle, showing how other factors – like scenery and color combination – had an impact. The brand no longer uses celebrities.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Especially for brands. In this video interview with Beet.TV, an ad agency leader says, when he buys ad campaigns across media types, he sees a lot of wastage in television.
“What we’re seeing across dozens and dozens of campaigns is that, generally, 80% of the total impressions delivered in linear television is going to about 25% of households,” says Doug Ray, Dentsu Aegis’ head of media in the US.
“That’s pretty significant if you’re trying to reach a very large audience and also you’re generally driving about three times the average frequency. So (there is) massive, excessive frequency that’s inherent in the system.”
Ray is talking about the problem which arises when ads purchased to reach a particular target audience do exactly that – but too often.
Whilst modern digital platforms can narrow the scope of target audiences so as to not waste ads on undesired targets, traditional TV lacks that relative power.
But there is a solution to be found in the way TV itself is evolving, says Dentsu Aegis’ Ray.
“We’re looking at things like addressable TV, OTT, other advanced TV platforms to essentially help us mitigate that, to rebalance the delivery, to help clients achieve more, more reach, more even distribution of impressions for the same amount of money,” he says.
“Effectively, (we could be) getting more value for the same dollars by including multiple platforms in their overall approach to video.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>In June, Index Exchange announced its partnership with Roundel, in an approach to programmatic advertising that uses Target customer data sets to inform media buys. According to Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange, the partnership “brings addressability through first party data like never before.”
“Traditionally, addressability and attribution all came down to the cookie. But the cookie is kind of going away,” says Casale, speaking with BeetTV during Advertising Week. “In the new world, first party reigns supreme and Roundel has rich data from their guests, which is enabling a new paradigm in addressability.”
For publishers, that means audiences can be created based on shopping behaviors by Target customers, including in categories like CPG that have struggled to access first party data and figure out addressability. That attracts business from marketers. The overall goal is to reach audiences proactively, not passively. According to Casale, traditional tracking through the cookie was about passively collecting data.
“That doesn’t roll anymore,” says Casale. “There’s a platform war at play, the consumer is rising in every way, and control is of the utmost importance.”
Platforms currently have the advantage. Companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix and Facebook can collect customer data through authentication – customers have to log in and identify themselves. Media companies that offer free content have given up customer identification. Casale believes that that will start to change, if media companies want to survive.
“Some form of authentication will come to bear to enable the exchange between free content and some form of identity,” says Casale. “Otherwise, we are concerned our ability to drive marketing outcomes will be compromised, which will certainly have implications on our ability to drive revenue and sustainable economics for a media company.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>In a deal announced today, Discovery Inc, which already was a FreeWheel customer, says it will now take on FreeWheel’s “unified decisioning platform to enable holistic advertising management for Discovery’s full roster of cable networks”.
Discovery wants advertisers to be able to reach viewers across:
“Measurement of addressable (TV) had been limited to the addressable campaigns (alone),” FreeWheel’s data platform GM Claudio Marcus, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“What’s new here is the ability to combine the addressable exposures with the linear exposures, perhaps with digital video exposures.
“Let’s say that we already knew that a household that was in our target had already been reached enough times with linear – well, then I wouldn’t necessarily want to target them with an addressable expression, because the CPM on an addressable impression is much higher.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>That was just one piece of the problem. Ad-tech vendors also stood accused of obfuscating “ad-tech tax” fees siphoned away from real advertising spend.
Since then, the barely a week has gone by without various companies mooting solutions to the problem.
But, whilst a consensus has gathered that progress has been made, one of the leading ad-tech companies thinks the problem remains chronic.
“Surprisingly little progress has been made since, I think, two or three years ago,” Konrad Gerszke, president of MediaMath, says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The ecosystem has evolved into a situation where there’s a lot of fraud across various steps in the supply chain because of a lack of transparency. As a result of that, there’s a lot of money wasted that the brands and the agencies are investing.
“What we see in certain test we are driving is, between 20 and 50% could be wasted.”
That estimation will shock many in the industry, who believed that matters were improving.
“A lot of the advertisers were starting to get on the barricades to hold the industry accountable for all the spend that is going in the industry.
Gerszke thinks the ongoing problem needs solving through three “pillars” of accountability, addressability and AI. Specifically, through three measures:
MediaMath operates data management platforms, omnichannel DSP, audiences, supply and intelligence services.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
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