ViacomCBS this month heralded a “breakthrough” when it delivered what it called the “first ever” addressable ad impressions in live national broadcast TV via a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) set-top box.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, ViacomCBS SVP for advanced advertising Mike Dean explains how the ads were delivered in certain CBS markets, via live broadcasts consumed by DISH customers.
How it works
Adcuratio has built the technology that sits at the CBS broadcast centre that allows us to essentially send the signals to the DISH head end, which tells DISH, when they are receiving those affiliate feeds, where to place the markers that they send to the set-top box that instructs the set-top box when to execute national advertising,” Dean explains.
Those are the technical details. But the consequence is that some DISH customers viewing CBS channels didn’t just get the same national ads everyone else did – they got ads custom targeted to them.
It is one example of the growing emergence of “addressable” TV advertising, which has been available in relatively limited fashion in local cable for some time, at the national scale.
Omnicom Media Group Embraces National Addressable TV Amid OTT Boom: Kramer
Addressable awakening
“National broadcast television has never been addressable before,” Dean says. “It is the most premium programming in terms of delivering events like the Super Bowl, the Masters, the Grammys.
“Up until now, only cable has been addressable. That started with two minutes of MVPD local cable time (per hour).
“So this is really a breakthrough to bring addressability to new inventory, to new audiences, and really do a lot more value for advertisers.”
New powers
The lighting-up of addressability in national TV creates new capabilities. Local advertisers could get seen in national programming. National advertisers can gain greater control over the ads they buy.
Dean says benefits of addressable TV include:
- deduplication of audience exposures
- effectiveness
- reach extension
- creative sequencing
- lower-funnel conversion
Beyond cable
In the UK, national satellite TV and broadband provider Sky pioneered addressable TV ads with its AdSmart suite, a technology that beams a library of ads to its set-top box for playback in response to audience targeting against both Sky and third-party datasets including factors such as home ownership, life stage, post code, affluence, household composition and location.
There, addressability is introducing smaller, local advertisers back to a medium that had become increasingly national in scale.
In the US, says ViacomCBS’ Dean; “Up until now, if you were a marketer buying addressable TV, again, you could only buy it within the cable networks, the cable avails.
“Now we’re talking about an unduplicated full expansion of that inventory.”
]]>Case in point – newly-cautious brands, looking to prove the effectiveness of spending, appear keener to buy advertising that is based on real outcomes, something connected technology has been promising for the last couple of years.
So, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Amplifi’s USA president Mike Law says 2021 is shaping up to be a year when such schemes are committed to.
Outcomes on the rise
“What is exciting about going into next year is really the scale and the pace at which things have changed over the past nine months,” he says.
“COVID accelerated a lot of the ways that we needed to buy media across all channels but, in particular in the connected (TV) space. We saw more and more consumers moving to streaming; it really highlighted it for ad buyers, ad sellers, and for our clients to see what that change look like.
“Going into next year, the hopes of scaled, connected TV buying, the growth of addressable TV, the ability to continue to use better data to target linear television – these are things that we’ve been trying to do and wanting to do over the past few years, but there’s no better time than 2021.”
Dentsu’s path
Amplifi is the media innovation and investment arm of Dentsu.
Amplifi’s goal is to help the whole of Dentsu identify and generate value across all media opportunities. It works on investment, global media partnerships, Dentsu’s Amnet programmatic group, its Story Lab entertainment company and commercial teams.
Dentsu-owned Merkle has recently been building out its identity chops, off the back of its Merkury.
It is an identity graph platform covering 96% of US adults aged over 18 that includes associated email addresses, device identifiers like cookies and device IDs.
Simplify the system
Law sees an opportunity to help brands that have become concerned about performance, saying: “I think we really need to start talking about effectiveness and business outcomes.”
But he also doesn’t want the opportunity to be overly complicated.
Asked what one message he would advocate to publishers and broadcasters, Law responds: “Simplification.
“There are so many great options that exist inside the marketplace. And I think for buyers and for clients to begin to digest that and figure out, ‘How do we actually attack this marketplace?’ … I think, simplification. ”
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]]>“The TV industry is made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of different entities that are working together,” Tim Myers, general manager of strategy, products and partnerships at DISH Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s always going to be complex, and because of that, you’re going to have to be flexible, and you’re going to have to have this interoperability.”
National TV ad spending will grow 6.6% next year as demand for media recovers, WPP’s GroupM forecast this month. It’s not clear how much of that spending will go into addressable ads, amid some of the uncertainties of the pandemic and implementing the technology to show different ads to different households on national broadcast TV.
Source: GroupM
For addressable advertising to grow and support continued investment, metrics that provide greater insights and transparency are a key part of a more open ecosystem.
“Working with others to drive that scale is very important in that open environment,” Myers said. “Being flexible to work with a variety of vendors, to be flexible in terms of the way the transactional models work and the services we can provide to programmers.”
While addressable advertising has been available for two minutes of every hour on cable and satellite TV, the inventory is going to expand to the other 14 minutes that programmers sell. That expansion will make addressable advertising more mainstream and bring greater scale.
“Addressable has been a great product that DISH and others have been able to drive through that first wave of scale, when it’s still been limited to the smaller portion of TV budgets,” Myers said. “We’d like to see addressable become the way that you transact television on an impression-based model.”
TV ratings company Nielsen this month announced plans to unify media measurement among linear and digital channels, a key step in encouraging advertisers to allocate their budgets more effectively and support further innovation.
“I’ve been talking about national enablement since I first started working on addressable,” Myers said. “The problem has always been for national networks, if you go to addressable … you’re only affecting a percentage of your overall footprint. You had to take that unit out of sale with Nielsen, and now the economics of trying to get back to what you could have sold that unit on a national basis always has been very difficult.”
More comprehensive metrics can help to make the market more open and transparent, supporting continued investment.
“The ability to have that inventory that you can still sell broadly, you can still transact with a Nielsen currency, but in the case where you’re going to take some of the audience out and transact that audience addressably — that’s critically important to make it so that programmers can optimize their inventory, and make much more of that inventory available for sale in an addressable model,” Myers said.
You are watching “An Open Ecosystem Is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But, as more opportunities are lit up to deliver targeted ads across the entire US, some are swallowing the challenges – whilst hoping for a more straightforward 2021.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Samantha Rose, Horizon Media SVP, Advanced TV & Video Solutions, says OTT has come a long way – and, yet, has a way to go.
National excitement
“I think OTT at this point is table stakes,” Rose says. “As consumption is shifting out of the linear space and into the non-linear space, OTT is where we know a lot of those eyeballs are headed. That was really incorporated into our media buys several years ago.”
Until now, it has mostly been offered by local cable operators, but growing capabilities from national operators are expanding the opportunity.
“National enablement really is going to increase the scale of the addressable marketplace very considerably,” Rose says. “It’s making the inventory on that other 14 minutes of inventory, of commercial inventory on national TV networks, addressably enabled.
“That’s going to make it a much larger landscape. It’s really exciting because it combines the scale and opportunity of national TV with the targetability that addressable has offered the past several years.”
Fragmented landscape
That comes with its challenges, however. The more that agencies and brands lean into national-level addressable, as it rolls out, the more they have to struggle with a splintered market.
The problem, as Rose puts it, is having to buy in separate chunks – “a few million TV sets over here, a few million households over here”.
“Trying to bring that together and deliver back a media buy, a holistic media buy to a client, is much more challenging than when we were just buying linear across the total TV landscape,” she says.
Growth through simplicity
In November, eMarketer forecast connected TV ad spending will grow 40.1% in 2021, but less in later years, reaching $18.29 billion by 2021.
To boost growth, most people in the industry pine for simplification. So Rose is hoping for things to coalesce.
“It’s not completely standard yet,” she says. “It’s much more difficult and challenging to move forward from the advertiser’s perspective.
“There’s a lot of different vendors and a lot of different publishers in the mix. What we really need is standardisation, and really trying to wade through that and understand how to transact in that marketplace, it still remains to be seen.
“Standardisation is key. Collaboration is going to be what’s going to make it move forward.”
Closing the loop
As TV becomes connected, it becomes trackable, measurable in a way that traditional panels – premised on merely age and gender demographics – could not accommodate.
Closing the loop between TV ad exposure and viewers’ consequential actions could transform TV into a performance ad channel.
“Business outcome results and business outcome guarantees is something that’s absolutely a top of mind for us at Horizon,” Rose says. “We would love to be able to connect, not just guaranteeing that the audience are seeing our advertising, but that it’s actually delivering sales lift, location visits, brand health lifts, things like that.”
Addressable TV Can Overcome Challenges: Horizon Next’s Wallach-Baker
Rose says 2021 is likely to see a big solidification in such campaigns, after a 2020 when “outcomes” was high on the discussion agenda with clients.
“We had a lot of those business outcomes discussions in the works on behalf of our clients and with our partners, and unfortunately with everything else with 2020, that sort of paused because of everything that happened,” she says.
“2021 will be a good year to get back on track. For business outcome results, I could see that being huge.”
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]]>“We really need to solve for that holistic, cross-platform measurement in terms of measuring full video in the landscape,” Cara Lewis, executive vice president of video investment at Amplifi USA, a media buying agency owned by Dentsu.
She has seen a hesitancy among marketers to take a holistic view of video advertising because of challenges in cross-platform measurement. The marketplace has become more fragmented among linear and digital channels, making it more difficult to tell whether some viewers see the same ads too often, while others are missed.
Source: Deloitte
The industry needs to solve “frequency management in terms of connected TV and over-the-top, because there’s so many different vendors selling each other’s inventory,” Lewis said. “We really need to solve for that holistic, cross-platform measurement in terms of measuring full video in the landscape for our clients.”
TV ratings company Nielsen this month announced a plan to replace its measurement system by 2024 with a unified metric for traditional audiences and viewing of digital platforms such as streaming TV. It’s a massive undertaking that requires collaboration among marketing and media industries.
“Working together is only going to make the industry stronger,” Lewis said.
While she has seen dire predictions about the demise of TV and video advertising, especially as households subscribe to ad-free services like Netflix and Disney+, video content will always find an audience.
“Video is powerful, because video is content. If consumers weren’t before seeking out content, they’re 100% seeking out content now,” Lewis said. “They’re searching for what they want to watch. Video has evolved…but we just have to buy it and look at it holistically.”
You are watching “An Open Ecosystem Is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>So the managing director or advanced advertising at Omnicom Media Group is making CTV measurement a focus for the year ahead.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kramer describes the problem – and what needs to happen to solve it.
Up-sizing measurement
“Measurement is a really key thing for 2021,” Kramer says “Measurement is going to be big for us in 2021.
“There’s a major outage in terms of (measuring) app-based media. (In) OTT, which is the largest growing and the fastest growing medium we have today, we don’t have a great way of measuring that, Nielsen doesn’t have a great way of measuring that area.
“(We will be) working with the partners and the sellers to make sure that there’s ways for us to get the information we need from them to at least incorporate that black box into our overall reach frequencies and then eventually things like MTA and attribution analysis is really key.”
Omnicom Media Group Embraces National Addressable TV Amid OTT Boom: Kramer
Dearth of data
The challenges are severalfold. In digital display, of course, identifiers are declining in usefulness with the deprecation of third-party tracking cookies and the move to opt-in mobile ad identifiers.
But many connected TV platforms have never known such device-level identifiers in the first place.
And so the same challenge faced by digital display advertisers is also one that needs addressing for CTV advertisers.
“Right now, we’re living in a world where, specifically app-based media, we can’t even really plan against it that well,” Kramer says.
“We’re triangulating data that we’re getting from the SSPs, that we’re getting from the publishers themselves, and that we’re getting from guys like Nielsen. But not everybody has the entire ecosystem and so we’re really going to have to work and continue to work through the rest of this year and into 2021.”
Providing insight from EVP at @InvidiTechnologies Michael Kubin, @AENetwork’s Santosh Mathai, and @OmnicomGroup’s Matthew Kramer, @MediaWhiz Jeff Minsky explores #addressability’s new abilities thanks to @Adcuratio #OnTheVillage. #AENetworks #Omnicom #OTThttps://t.co/K3eODGRVGY
— MediaVillage (@MediaVillageCom) October 14, 2020
Growth probability
EMarketer last November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.
That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Ad buyers are getting interested by the ability to target specific audiences or households, the ability to use other data in doing so and the ability
But growth is going to depend on more platforms opening up to offer the capability at scale.
Addressable enablement
Kramer says he is welcoming the growing number of national-level addressable ad placement opportunities.
“Right now we’re working with the MVPDs, which are of course your local cable provider,” he says. “We’re able to buy through their smart TV boxes, we’re able to deliver specific ads to specific households and that’s available in about 60 to 65% of U.S. cable TV households.”
But Kramer says agencies and their brands need more scale than local cable.
“The way that we do it is working with guys like Project OAR, we do it with working with Canoe who is doing more of the VOD side, and also working with the TV manufacturers like Samsung, LG Vizio, and trying to get more and more of those homes to be addressable so that we can serve again, the right ads to the right household.”
‘Very exciting’
That means “enablement” – the craft of utilizing more and more such opportunities i is another big watchword for Kramer in 2021, “a huge endeavour for us”.
“We’re already talking to the major network groups like WarnerMedia, for example, who are starting to dip their toes in allowing for their national inventory to become more addressable,” he says.
“So it’s very exciting. We’ve been waiting for this moment for many years now and we’re excited to start working with these partners to enable those households to be more addressable.”
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]]>Next year, Lauren Bernard wants to help it do just that.
As VP, Marketplace Solutions at IPG’s Kinesso knows the medium is often caught between its potential and the reality – but, in 2021, she thinks more can be done to help advanced TV show prove itself.
Upfronts’ magnetism
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bernard says Nielsen’s new measurement of addressable advertising is helping convince brands that are already data-driven to push dollars toward advanced TV.
“But you have other advertisers who historically have bought very, very heavy in the upfronts and get their cheap reach that way,” she says. “It’s more difficult (for them) to rationalise pushing dollars towards these audience-based tactics because of the additional tech tax unless we’re able to definitively prove out that value.
“So I think that that’s a major focus of ours for this year and next year – really enabling those measurement insights so that we can prove out to our marketers what is working, and we believe that, similar to the digital world, where that story has been proven time and time again, that we’ll be able to do the same in linear and addressable tactics as well.”
Check out our latest piece on #Viewpoints: "Faster Feedback Loops" by Karin Mihkels, EVP Business Development & Partnerships, West, @Matterkind https://t.co/ioXeLESqix pic.twitter.com/shWsg5wwY5
— Kinesso (@kinesso) December 7, 2020
Kinesso’s emergence
Kinesso, the division IPG launched in October to provide data-driven capabilities to clients, thinks the unit has plenty of work to do.
Kinesso is comprised of IPG’s addressable activation team Cadreon and its Data and Technology group. Kinesso will work with IPG Mediabrands, Acxiom and will provide services to agencies across the IPG network.
It expected to have a staff of 1,400 in more than 70 countries this year.
‘We’ve Come a Long Way in Identity Resolution’: Kinesso’s Lauren Bernard
Advanced tactics
Bernard actually sees two different kinds of advanced TV ad channel:
- Data-driven linear, working with national networks, Axiom, Clypd and OpenAP to create plans that are optimised against custom audiences.
- Addressable TV: working with MVPDs or partners like Sling or Dish that own subscriber data and are able to enable addressable buying across their footprints.
And each brings its own strengths, weaknesses and configuration requirements.
“On the data-driven linear side, it’s very much a Nielsen-powered game,” Bernard says. “We have a longstanding relationship with Nielsen and there is clearer paths to be able to get our audiences to a destination that can then be matched against national networks on historical viewership data, which is powered by Nielsen.
“On the household addressable side, it’s interesting because really to enable the types of transactions that we want to pursue, it requires direct integrations between every MVPD across the US market and our internal audience graphs, which currently, that’s kind of the piece that Acxiom powers.”
You are watching “An Open Ecosystem is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by DISH Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>So far, that promise has also been laced with complexity – connected TV can be as complicated as it is impactful.
But Rachel Wallach-Baker, Horizon Next, SVP, Investment, sees improvements on the horizon.
Level the playing field
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wallach-Baker acknowledges addressable is “extremely powerful”. But there are also limits, she says.
“I think there’s still a lot of improvement needed, because linear television, at its core is hitting an entire audience at once,” she says. “There’s burst models that can go to it – whereas addressable or OTT is one-to-one.
“We’ve done a lot of modelling at Horizon to figure out how to merge all of those. And they’re not right now all looked at in the same playing field. So, there’s still a lot more work to be done to get there.
“I think Nielsen’s announcement that they’re going to be measuring the national addressable in the coming months, will help facilitate that. Having everything on the same currency will really, I think, help drive some of this.”
Widespread access
Wallach-Baker says she is excited about the prospect of addressable TV ad-buying being on offer nationwide across the US.
Until now, it has mostly been offered by local cable operators, but growing capabilities from national operators are expanding the opportunity.
“To really do that on a national scale, it is huge – but we need to get all of the tech partners involved in that, she says. “It can’t just be Vizios, it has to be all TVs and all smart TVs that are able to do that.”
Overall, she wants that opportunity to be easier to access.
“I want it to be uniformed across the industry,” she says. “I want it to be accessible to clients, regardless of their maturity level. I think a lot of clients want to get into addressable and they know it’s the right place, but the out-of-pocket cost is hard for them to get there.”
Direct impact
Horizon Next is an agency with a pedigree in direct-response, but, despite its characteristics, Wallach-Baker doesn’t see addressable TV as direct-response.
“It’s a way of being flexible and being able to drive performance,” she says.
“We’re doing what we need to do for our clients to move their business.”
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]]>That is to say, many trends which marketers got interested in last year and now ready to be adopted in earnest in the year ahead.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Julie Anson, Director, Strategic Investment, Advanced TV, at the ad agency Magna Global, says interest in targeted TV ad buying is ready to flourish fully in 2021.
“I think we’re going to see a combination of all of it,” she says. “More of a shift into nonlinear CTV streaming environments, more use of platforms and technology to make it feel more programmatic, and ‘audience’ (is) going to continue to be the hot buzzword for 2021.
“2020 was a year where people were really interested in moving away from traditional demo(graphic targeting), and more into audiences, and trying new technologies and innovation. So I’m really hopeful and excited that 2021 is going to be the year we do it.”
Forecast growth
EMarketer last year estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion. That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Ad buyers are getting interested by the ability to target specific audiences or households, the ability to use other data in doing so and the ability.
Going nationwide
Anson is interested in how addressable TV is emerging out of local cable operators’ domain and on to the national scene.
“I think national addressable is a really exciting possibility,” she says.
“In traditional local and addressable, I think everyone’s pretty set; they know what it is, they either do it, they don’t do it, they feel they’re a client that it applies to. I think national addressable is just going to change that.
“I think national addressable is something all clients can be a part of, not only the ones with a really hyper-focused target, and a niche consumer base. I think, even for creative versioning, take a national ad that you bought in the upfront anyway, and do creative versioning to different targets, something really simple, that isn’t so hyper-precise. I think there’s room for a lot of clients who haven’t done traditional linear, to start to play with it.”
Business bottlenecks
But the transition won’t be all plain sailing. Anson thinks bottlenecks remain that inhibit the pace of roll-out for addressable TV.
For once, they aren’t strictly technical, however. Rather, she sees challenges in simply educating advertisers and in ensuring that the old business can adapt to the new way of doing things.
“It’s not there yet, I’ll be frank,” she says.
“As buyers and sellers, we actually have to come to the table and figure out what the business terms look like – how does it fit into the larger upfront conversation, what the financial, commercial terms look like?
“So I think that piece is still TBD, and I think it’s going to be an obstacle in 2021.
Buy-side education
“I think there’s a big learning curve on the buy side, a lot of conversations that we’re going to have to have with our clients, and our agency teams, to educate them and bring them to the table,” Anson adds.
“I think they know it could be a thing, I don’t know if they totally understand exactly what that thing is yet. I think there’s definitely interest; I get emails every now and then about testing opportunities.
“We’ve been writing POVs every time there’s an announcement – (for example), Nielsen bringing in different data sources to help measure national addressable … the difference between Nielsen beta, and Adcuratio, and Project OAR.
“So, they’re definitely asking, but to be very honest, there’s a lot of conversations that still need to happen.”
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In June, DISH Media told Beet.TV it was selling 60% of ads programmatically.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kevin Arrix, Senior Vice President, DISH Media, says players in an increasingly splintered industry need to come together in pursuit of openness and a common goal.
Catalyzing collaboration
Arrix sees strong momentum around the advancement of advertising technology, with plenty of healthy competition amongst distributors and programmers, tech companies and measurement providers.
DISH’s goals are two-fold, Arrix says:
- To be a catalyst to companies marching in the same direction.
- To partner with a strong collection of advertisers, peers and competitors to hash out evolving approaches.
“Our goal is to bring clarity to the forefront around what the biggest priorities are not only for DISH,” he says, “but everybody in the addressable space, so that we can lock arms as we hit 2021 and keep bringing what the industry does want and keep evolving to a world of better data-driven advertising.”
Arrix continues: “We’re big proponents of open. Open from our point of view is going to be key to success in this fragmented media market going forward. There isn’t going to be one central technology that everyone is going to use. You have to be interoperable, and you have to plug in as a supply side, and as a publisher side. It’s our obligation to plug into tech and platform that our clients select, so interoperability is really important.”
National addressable
DISH Media has been expanding its addressable capabilities for a few years now. Twelve months ago, it launched Reach Booster, a tool that can extend the national reach of brands’ ad campaigns.
It also launched a creative versioning tool for campaigns. But Arrix says most momentum is happening on national minute enablement.
“For us, addressable has been incredibly successful. It’s been a very strong growing line of business. That has primarily focused on the two minutes of addressable (per hour) that distributors have. And now we’re at the dawn of enabling the national minutes for programmers.
“So from our point of view, what we want to know is, what are the biggest priorities and hurdles that we need to get over and solve for? And it really spans across the industry, from tech players to programmers, distributors and measurement companies.
“We all should have the same north stars. At the end of this project, if we can have two, three, four north stars that we’re collectively marching towards, I think that’s going to make a big, big difference.”
Glass half-full
Arrix acknowledges 2020 has been challenging. But he sees a way forward for the business.
“The most important thing to do is dig in and keep working hard, stay connected with your clients and understand what’s happening from their side,” he says.
DISH is very fortunate to have a balanced portfolio with DISH linear and SLING OTT.
“From a media point of view, the negatives of COVID outlined in anybody’s business what their true weaknesses are. And we took that as a glass half-full, and looked at those weaknesses and addressed them.”
Opening new doors
For Arrix, the positive way ahead leads back to openness, transparency and accountability.
“I haven’t met a marketer or agency lead in the last six to nine months that doesn’t have accountability at the top of their priority list – ‘I need to know what the impact is of the dollar that I just spent’,” he says.
“Accountability is really important going forward, it’s one of the core pillars of our open approach and I think that has fuelled the fire for data-driven addressable advertising, and that is a positive that has come out of the COVID situation.“
You are watching “An Open Ecosystem is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by DISH Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
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