“Data is paramount to every strategy we put together with our clients, with our partners. It’s sort of the universal language that we have not just to transact on necessarily but to plan against,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.
This language translates into understanding people as people, not just as broad-based segments to be traded on or targeted against. Tapping into mindsets and behaviors while grasping the effect of ad environments can unleash many useful changes.
“We can create better ads, we can certainly create better experiences and over time we can probably eliminate a lot of the waste that exists today,” Shlachter says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat.
That wastes derives from a lack of transparency, lack of connectivity and “quite frankly an overly complex media ecosystem that is not as connected as we’d like it to be.”
It’s been just over a year since Publicis Groupe began to transform its media operations, eliminating some divisions while merging agencies, as The Wall Street Journal reports. From a central perspective, the realignment facilitates greater intelligence sharing while providing better access to talent, resources and technology, according to Shlachter.
“I do believe that these transformations take more time,” he says. “You have to make sure you have all the right pieces in place. Nothing’s going to happen overnight.”
Nonetheless, he’s excited about the momentum Publicis has exhibited in recent months. And he marvels at the pace of the long-discussed convergence of data, technology and platforms, plus the growth of industry partnerships.
“We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. The next three to five years are going to be super interesting,” Shlachter says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But the new broadcast contenders should not just assume they will become all powerful.
One executive brokering the future of connected TV advertising thinks quality of experience must be the watchword.
“Television is at the mid-stage of migrating in to the digital world,”Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Beyond Sling, Sony Vue and DirectTV Now, YouTube is coming along, Hulu is delivering their live television service, maybe Apple will deliver their service.
“More and more people will stop paying or not even start their cable bill and immediately pay Google or Hulu and that will be their television service.
“Companies have a responsibility to create television quality equal to television now. Which means television should never buffer, should be high quality, volume should be correlated. All those things which seem very simple are actually hard to do.”
Chalozin’s Innovid, which helps advertisers personalise their video messages for viewers, claims to be processing a third of all video ads in the US.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These and other insights emerged from a discussion about enhancing the value of traditional TV at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Moderated by MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel, it featured Arthur Mimnaugh, Head of Advanced Advertising for Adobe, and Marc Siegel, the CRO at advanced TV provider Simulmedia.
Siegel described the process of using advanced data sets to both predict where people are going to be watching TV and reaching them in a cost-efficient manger. Finding untapped audience potential can be counter-intuitive, as in “We’re seeing that if you’re a sports enthusiast, there’s plenty of those watching the cookie channel,” Siegel said.
The goal for Simulmedia is to generate unique audience reach by gauging how many new people a particular ad inventory unit will bring to an advertiser. This is typically a complement to an advertiser’s Upfront or base buy.
“There’s certainly a wide debate on what the right attribution model is,” Siegel said. “There is not a one-size-fits all when it comes to measurement.” It can range from a direct-to-consumer brand with lots of data to work with to those in consumer-packaged goods where data sets can have “a little less fidelity.”
Mimnaugh explained how Adobe helps marketers extend the information they already know about the users they already have in order to improve their viewing experiences. “One big area of focus is the collective group and the value of it,” he said in a reference to Adobe’s Device Co-Op, a network to brands to work together to better identify consumers across digital touch points. “So you can look at ad sequencing and targeting and other types of storytelling, when you’re merging that between what you’re going to do on traditional linear versus what’s actually happening on digital.”
Asked by Spiegel how advanced is the conversation about consistent consumer ID’s, Mimnaugh said, “I think we are seeing more and more of the notion of a common ID. It’s a process.”
For his part, Siegel noted that Simulmedia isn’t in the personally identifiable information business. “What we’re seeing is CRM’s collapsing with DMP’s identifiers and being able to transfer that over to linear has been a huge move,” he said.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Speaking on this Beet Retreat panel, representatives of the networks explained their strategy.
The recent announcements included:
NBCUniversal advanced advertising SVP Denise Colella:
“We’re going to avail up to $1bn in inventory to be traded on non-Nielsen guarantees, or audience guarantees.
“Our clients are investing a lot in data, they really want to put that to use. We’re willing to put our money where our mouth is. We’re not reserving inventory per se. We’re making all our inventory across all of our networks available for audience.”
Turner Broadcasting ad innovation and programatic VP David Porter:
“OpenAP does three things – helps define audience segment, allows an advertiser to choose wha publishers they want to share that segment with, and aggregates reports. That solves a lot.
“There will be no commingling of inventory in this platform, this is not a transaction platform. This is just a way to get a consistent definition. Then the advertiser can send that definition out to any publisher.”
Viacom audience science EVP Julian Zilberbrand:
“It is uber-complicated to have different methodologies when you have one data set you’re working off of.
“This is about enabling the advertiser to have an easier experience.”
ABC TV Group programmatic VP Michael Dean:
“We’re excited about it and we’re supportive. This is all the right things to do. Removing friction, removing cost, lowering complexity is absolutely where all of us want that market to go – as long as we can make differentiation, that’s the key.
“The devil is in the details. For Disney Company, it’s about ‘How do we bring our unique data assets – what we know about families, homes, from the parks, from our games network?’”
605 president Ben Tatta:
“It’s great news. We felt, for a while, that there will be a shift to more audience-based buying, selling and measurement – but that starts by moving off a panel, which is really just a large focus group. It drives demand for census-based data. The market is demanding that more granular attributes, other than age and gender, are available.”
Panelists also discussed the emergence of addressable TV advertising technologies and amateur versus premium video.
This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>When MDC launched Assembly three years ago, it combined the prowess of TargetCast, RJ Palmer and Doner Media under one roof. Lee joined in 2015 from MediaVest, where he had spent 16 years and seen enough silos.
“We had a lot of leeway to build what we need in the marketplace versus inheriting what’s already there,” Lee, who is EVP of Investment at Assembly, says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “Having everything under one roof helps us build a pipeline that goes through the entire company in sharing, accessing and analyzing the data.”
Lee’s background is in traditional TV video landscape, where there was far less data to inform decision making. “We have more information than before in seeing what networks, what dayparts, what spots are working harder for us,” he says. “I’m excited about having more data available to me in the way I activate.”
Having all teams under one roof is another plus. “I sit very close with the analytics team to see what’s working, what’s not working. Having everything under one roof helps us build a pipeline that goes through the entire company in sharing, accessing and analyzing the data.”
In addition to having data and analytics at the company’s core, Assembly takes a different tack when it comes to media buying practices that have raised eyebrows in the client community.
“We also strongly believe in building everything around a very transparent model,” Lee says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to a trio of ad-tech execs whose companies help bring some visibility to the problem, but who say the challenge is greater than that.
Almost three years after the Media Ratings Council set guidelines for what constitutes a viewable ad impression (50% of the video player in view for at least two seconds), Beet.TV convened a panel to discuss viewability at the Beet Retreat.
The discussion, viewable in our recorded session, showed a general appreciation for viewability – and a recognition that it should be used as just part of an overarching strategy.
Moat sales director Peter Kuhn:
“Viewability should be a baseline standard but it shouldn’t drive investment.
“We fundamentally need standards. If we’re all going to grade, as Mark Pritchard of P&G said, a yard the same way, it’s impossible to start asking questions around where investment should go, what effectiveness is, if we’re not all measuring things the same way.
“(But) the consumptive patterns of consumers is outpacing the ability for a marketers to … come up with the right standards for success.”
Ooyala advertising platforms GM Scott Braley:
“The idea of needing standards is categorically right. (But) the intimacy between buyers and sellers has, for a while now, been lost and needs to be regained.
“When you rely on those (companies) that are all too willing, ready and happy to be intermediaries – to rely on the platforms without understanding who you’re buying, what the inventory is or what you’re selling to – that’s when you start to over-rely on the idea of metrics as a universal truth for good and bad. That’s a subjective thing.
“They’re so myopically focused on the idea of this metric, and not what you’re buying.”
Eyeview Digital TV SVP and GM Boaz Cohen
“We need standards – but for us, our standard is sales. Instead of focusing on media metrics – viewability, completions and other stuff – we focus on sales. Give us $100k for video budgets, we’ll deliver you $300k in sales.
“We do need viewability … but that’s our problem, the supply problem, the ad-tech problem – not the marketer problem. Their standard should be sales; focused on offline and online sales.”
Cohen countered the suggestion that video outcomes are only for driving immediate actions, saying that marketer outcomes linked to video – including car dealership visitation and loyalty card-linked retail purchases – can be measured up to 30 days after an ad is watched.
The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Fortunate, then, that a whole new raft of data sources is coming on-stream to help them do that.
In a panel discussion convened by Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat, executives from advertising technology and data vendors got excited about:
Here is a flavour of what they said…
Alphonso CEO Ashish Chordia:
“In 10 years’ time, there’s no reason to believe that every device in your house runs ACR – we’ll get there.”
Chordia says his technology, running on consumers’ mobile phones amongst other devices, has already helped a mobile studio know for sure whether a consumer is in a movie theater watching its movie.
TruOptik CEO Andre Swanston:
“We marry the app data we get from OTT and connected TV with the open network. You get content viewership data, second-by-second, across half a billion unique IPs in every market in the world. For people coming from desktop and mobile, this is what they’re used to.”
Neustar strategic partners head Ted Prince:
“(We have) a persistent key across household, phone number, address, cookie, mobile ad ID, set-top box, IP address, mobile phone number.
“We try to make sure you, as a marketer, can get to the household you want. You can put your CRM file on there, the segments you want to reach. We have 200m individuals. Set-top box data is about 40 to 45m households.”
605 Group VP Gaurav Shirole:
“We’ve been focused on achieving scale around census-level set-top box data.”
Shirole said there is an opportunity to use data-targeted TV ad technologies first to sample limited precision-targeting, before going all-in with a targeted campaign.
Amid this proliferation of new data sources, it is becoming a more complex media world for marketers. Whilst some vendors may profess to do it all, TruOptik’s Swanston said it is important for brands to piece together multiple specialist vendors.
“There’s nobody in the industry can be a one-stop shop for everything, and there have to be the ability to sync different data together,” he said. “That’s pretty commonplace across the industry – you have to be able to work with different partners.”
The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Publishers and platforms go on tinkering with offering new ad experiences in a never-ending quest to push the boundaries and increase consumer attention.
But what happens when publishers innovate ahead of the standard curve, how do they approach inventing a new format, and what are the results? A panel of executives convened at the Beet Retreat summit discussed during this panel debate.
true[X] east coast sales and partnerships SVP Sam Amiri:
“Digital has always struggled because it never had its own native ad break or format. We just, as an industry, took pre-existing platforms, took a TV spot and called it pre-roll, took a newspaper ad and called it display.
“As a consumer, it’s difficult to find a reason to support advertising in our daily experience. There’s no reason to want to see those ads.”
Spotify video sales head Brian Danzis:
“What if you could speak to someone when they’re going for a run, or lifting weights? Music gives us a unique opportunity to look at what people are feeling, what they’re doing and decide on multimedia ad formats to reach them with.
“Knowing what people are feeling and thinking about based on the music that they listen to gives marketers the ability to reach somebody in a proper mindset.
“We released a new ad format in the fall called ‘branded moments’, where you could take existing creative, we would help retro-fit it for vertical, allowing advertisers to speak to users in these moments that matter.”
Facebook agency partner manager Jason Dailey:
“We start with watching consumers. Once we find something that seems to be a common thread across all of them, we figure out how to build a solution or produce around it.
“Right now, we’re trying to create ways for people to create, share and consume video in all the ways they want to – vertical formats, live formats, ephemeral formats… short-form… long-form … creating the widest possible palette of options there is.”
Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin:
“The problem is scale. (Marketers say), ‘I need my message on YouTube, Snap, Hulu and many other places and I don’t want to work with each and every one of them to build something that is (only) a little different’ … that doesn’t translate well between devices.”
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Speaking at the Beet Retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the middle of March, the satellite platform’s advanced TV director Jamie West said: “Sky AdSmart launched in Italy six weeks ago, it launches in Ireland on April 7 and then in Germany in 18 months’ time.
“It’s important than all advertisers can expect the same quality of service and execution across the different territories.”
AdSmart was launched four years ago, and allows advertisers to pre-fill subscribers’ set-top boxes with ads for custom-targeted play-out during linear TV commercial breaks. It is helping smaller and local businesses buy ads in TV for the first time.
Sky has since launched AdVance to help ad buyers understand frequency of play-out to deduplicated consumers across Sky’s advertising offering, which includes online sales, as well as an analytics tool.
As he aims to deliver an advertiser offering that can match those of Google and Facebook, West says the changes are prompting a reboot of how Sky wants to price its advertising, having introduced a commitment, four years ago, that it would only charge for ad views that were 75% completed.
“TV has the best opportunity now to really differentiate itself,” West said. “TV as a business should have standardised currencies, measurements and metrics. We need to start thinking about the differential between a view on a three-inch screen versus a 52-inch screen.
“We will be transitioning all of our currencies – whether it be long-form video – to be all 75% view-through rate – in a high-engaging, lean-forward environment, where brand messages excel and excite on he big screen.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Guess what happened? Nobody was buying,” recalled Carl Fremont, Global Chief Digital Officer at media agency MEC.
That’s because there was no measurement around digital viewing and digital really couldn’t be compared to broadcast buys, Fremont said in a keynote interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
“It was a complete buyer’s market,” Fremont added, in response to a question from Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. “It forced us to really look at the measurement pieces of it, both the planning side and the buying side.”
While some things have changed since those first NewFronts efforts, much remains the same in the absence of uniform digital video audience measurement. This is a source of much frustration given the universal appreciation for the sight, sound and motion characteristics of advertising messages delivered every second of the day to ubiquitous screens small and large.
“It’s so fragmented,” Fremont continued. “It’s still a confusing marketplace.”
Swartz sees it more an issue of EQ (emotional intelligence) as opposed to IQ, requiring buyers and sellers to come together and forge solutions. “It’s not about cherry picking problems. It’s about providing solutions,” she said.
Both agreed that removing complexity from the ecosystem would lower costs as more brand marketers embrace addressability and an audience-based world. “We do need one way of measurement. We need one way of planning,” said Fremont.
One of the challenges of planning video buys is there’s no line of sight to inventory, particularly premium video. A system that could look across different platforms like OTT and connected TV would be akin to utopia if buyers could gear the right content to the right consumer experience in the right channel.
To Fremont, programmatic is a key component but not just for the sake of technological convenience. There still must be human interaction among partners whose interests are common but whose approaches vary.
“It has to be done in a dialogue manner,” said Fremont. “The relationship that I think we need to have is less about the complexity of the buy side and more about how do we use data to find audiences at scale.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But a new rationalism has recently dawned on the vendor community, and ad-tech suppliers, aware they won’t change the TV industry overnight, now realise they must work with existing TV industry structures and business models.
At a Beet Retreat panel, a variety of executives debated how so-called “programmatic” technology might gain a foothold in traditional TV.
And Jamie West, advanced ad director of leading UK pay-TV platform Sky, which has trialled DataXu and a combination of FreeWheel and Videology as ad-tech suppliers, told the panel of suppliers what a broadcast operator is looking for.
“The ad-tech industry consistently and regularly over-promises and under-delivers,” West said. “Claiming that you can create world peace, make millions for the business, just doesn’t wash anymore.
“We need to take in to account regulatory compliance, customer experience, advertiser experience. You need to ensure we can deliver out against every single element, before we start thinking about how we’re going to move to a biddable platform or process.
“I don’t see that we’re going to have a huge amount of RTB in TV, but we will have inventory traded via full system-to-system integration between agency/advertiser and platform publisher.”
FreeWheel markets SVP Neil Smith conceded: “Nobody’s going to rip out existing (TV industry) systems, they work really well and serve their purpose.” So he feels the question becomes: “How can we build out an evolution for enabling those systems to talk better with each other, to ultimately where we move to a state where the technology converges?”
Google global partnerships top partner lead Amy Young explained why she had been hired from CBS: “One of the impetuses was, they realised, we need to understand a bit more about how the broadcast business works. Direct sales is not going away.”
DataXu co-founder Sandro Catanzaro explained: “We believe (TV ad) spots are here for quite a while. Technology that works today should enable to traffic in spots as well as an impression-by-impression level.”
Videology partnerships SVP Tony Yi acknowledged that “there’s a lot of legacy systems” in the TV industry, but his company has found a way to work with broadcasters’ ongoing inclination to use them for the time being.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Now new technologies claim to be able to follow the actions of video ad viewers all the way through to product purchase, and so to offer advertisers guaranteed sales outcomes.
Eyeview is one of the players, and it is now also working through Facebook to bring the capability to the social network.
“We’re starting to drive sales and results from Facebook – we drive different creative and messaging from the platform,” Eyeview TV SVP and GM Boaz Cohen tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Facebook is very aligned with that message. Facebook is talking about driving sales, people going in to stores and taking actions. We are one of the players working with them on driving sales from video.”
Eyeview’s heritage is in helping advertisers assemble viewer-personalized video ads from individual fragments of creative, making for tens of thousands of ad permutations.
But the New York-headquartered outfit, which last year raised another $21.5m in funding, has also been adding capabilities to tie video viewing to specific consequential consumer sales.
It is a linkage that Facebook may appreciate for helping make it a more attractive advertising destination, and which Eyeview is also taking to connected TV platforms.
“Give us $100k to run your video advertising campaign and we will deliver you $300k in sales, measured by a third-party measurement company, somebody that you trust,” Cohen adds.
“We look at how video drives impact and sales and results. We look at online sales, offline sales and focus on how to use video campaigns to drive those campaigns.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV in this panel interview, 605 founder and CEO Kristin Dolan said: “We’ve definitely had conversations with a number of partners about what opportunities we can bring to their upfront presentations to help them think through continuing to get advertisers excited about this, and to consider different approaches.
“You’re always going to have the advertiser who wants to see their ad in the Oscars … but if there are opportunities to spend dollars in a way that’s easier to justify and optimise, that’s going to matter.
“At the upfront this year, you’re going to continue to hear a significant amount of conversation about this topic.”
The 2017 US Upfronts and NewFronts season, in which TV networks and digital publishers tout their upcoming content roster in a bid to secure ad spending, began early in March and is set to continue through to mid-May; here is the calendar.
Dolan’s 605 was founded last year when Cablevision executives Dolan and Ben Tatta left to form their own company providing set-top box data to marketers. The move came after Dolan’s Dolan Family Ventures acquired the existing Analytics Media Group (AMG), a data analytics firm with a background in politics, last year to immediately launch what Dolan is calling “605“.
Dolan adds: “We were thrilled to hear Linda’s (Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s ad sales chairman) announcement, and the subsequent announcement by A+E.
“They’re brave and passionate and she’s willing to put money where her mouth is on this. She’s been an advocate for a long time. The announcement with Turner, Viacom and Fox continues to indicate that people are passionate and enthusiastic about it.”
This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Work touched by true[X] received four wins at the Internet Advertising Competition awards.
Awarded work included a commercial for Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad movie, one for auto research site Kelley Blue Book and a cat commercial for an anti-tobacco group – each variously working with other industry partners.
The ads true[X] works on include interactive elements and rewards, currently delivered across properties owned by Turner, Viacom, CBS and ABC. For Sam Amiri, true[X]’s east coast sales SVP, that means “finding ways to be more efficient with consumers’ time.”
“How can an advertiser empower those consumers when they’re watching episodes of their favourite content or listening to their favourite music, in a way that also creates a better experience for the consumer,” he asks, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
The answer is “trying to find a role for advertisers in these experience,” Amiri says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But Liberty Global’s advanced advertising MD thinks he has found a way to keep things simple whilst also being disruptive and going about things in a way US operators could never conceive.
“We’re doing the opposite of what the US did,” John Paul tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re going in to the free-to-air broadcasters first, not our own inventory, and trying to convince them that this is a good thing to do.”
Liberty Global’s footprint numbers 14 countries, many of which are rolling out addressable advertising opportunities for buyers. They are 12 in Europe and two in Latin America, including Belgian’s Telenet, Germany’s Unitymedia, eastern Europe’s UPC, Netherland’s Ziggo and, since 2014, UK cable operator Virgin Media.
Paul says the program called Liberty AdPlus is innovative but not to the point of complexity.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of data science,” he says. “When we first started this, we thought we were going to have to hire a gymnasium full of Cambridge data scientists to do predictive analysis. But 90% of the value that is being generated is thought he application of very basic data sets.
“By doing just a little and staying focused on the business outcomes, that’s how we manage innovation.”
Paul has previously told Beet.TV how cable operator Virgin Media, one of the largest in Liberty Global’s portfolio, is now going to market with an addressable offering, but, like most of the stars in Liberty’s constellation, the company lets networks sell their own ads in to the inventory – Liberty Global rarely sells on their behalf.
He may not want to disintermediate broadcasters – but Paul’s company is changing the nature of the relationship with ad buyers, that is for sure.
“We’re having many more discussions directly with the advertisers, the budget owners,” he adds.
“I wouldn’t describe it as ‘disintermediation’, but you’ve got smarter advertisers with their own data sets and ideas about what they want to achieve, and now they’re having a dialogue with us and they’re not part of that old sales model.”
This interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>His focus is on emerging platforms like Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV Stick. “Our North Star is truly addressing audiences at a household level,” Walters explains in this interview at this year’s Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
One of the benefits of connected TV and a “profile-type environment” is being able to take targeting down a step further and pinpoint specific household members, according to Walters. “Increasingly, we’re trying to work with our partners to help enable this for clients,” he says.
Modi approaches video investments for its clients at a portfolio level, paying particular attention to decision creative iterations for targeted households. For example, a household whose known annual income is $250,000 might see an ad for the American Express Platinum Card.
“We’re also able to look at the outcome and understand if that exposure is driving traffic to the website and conversions, to really move that altogether to create more value,” Walters says.
His passion for commerce-enabled interactivity derives from being able to pre-qualify an audience and target them based on purchase behavior. Or to provide people with the ability to purchase something immediately or “at the very least add to a cart to move them down the funnel.”
He cites Amazon as a major player in using first-party and purchase behavior to understand and motivate its users. “I’m excited when it goes beyond just enabling through a tile on Amazon Fire TV to something we can actually build throughout our entire video investment on their platform and off,” says Walters.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These were among a variety of possible scenarios explored at the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat during a one-on-one keynote session with Adam Shlachter of Publicis and Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. Among the agreed-upon certainties five years from now: 15- and 3-second ads will not be the predominant video ad units and gross rating points will be a currency, not the currency.
When YouTube launched its paid channels about four years ago, Shlachter, who was at Digitas at the time, viewed the company as a modern day MSO. “A vessel for programming, distribution, monetization and ultimately for audience,” is how he recalls it. While many people weren’t surprised that YouTube launched a premium subscription service, “That it exists now built into television sets or any device and any screen and it’s with you everywhere is something that I don’t think people were thinking about initially,” he said.
While both Facebook and YouTube have such massive audiences they cannot be ignored, “We’re also still trying to figure out the right way to engage with them,” particularly since their respective viewing experiences are so different, according to Shlachter.
Asked by Spiegel whether 15- and 30-second ads will dominate five years hence, Shlachter responded, “I hope not.” But he was skeptical about a headlong rush to reduced commercial loads wherein many units are transformed into content that could be more valuable to sellers.
“They have to figure out economically how to make that work,” Shlachter said, referring to companies like Fox. “We have to make the experience a little bit cleaner and we have to make it smarter.”
So why on earth would Netflix get into the advertising game? “Right now if you ask anyone they will tell you absolutely not because there’s no need,” he said. However, if net neutrality laws go in a certain direction and Netflix is taxed for its bandwidth consumption on different operators’ systems “maybe they have to look at alternative ways,” Shlachter added.
As for five minutes of commercials in one hour of content, he agreed it’s possible. In addition to ads taking different shapes in the next several years, cross-channel planning will see great advances along with closed-loop measurement models, according to Shlachter.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At MEC, the process is called Momentum and it derives from surveys showing how brand perceptions influence behavior. Momentum provides “a deeper understanding of each brand’s purchase decision,” Fremont explains in an interview during the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “What’s going to make them make the decision about that brand based on different stages of where they are in that purchase decisioning.”
All forms of data “are critical to ensure we are reaching the audience most receptive to a brand’s message,” Fremont adds. “So when we go out to find those audiences that are most relevant, it’s with an understanding of what’s going to impact them.”
MEC wants to understand people behaviorally, emotionally, active and passively before marrying this intelligence with creative that will “drive their decisioning forward and make it all end to end.”
When it comes to measuring outcomes in terms of brand lift and ultimately brand sales, “That’s what I’m most excited about,” says Fremont.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s not that easy,” Claudio says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Not all the data that is needed is available in all markets.”
Claudio was among the several dozen advertising and media executives who convened here for the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Noting that Hearts & Science is “not a media agency anymore,” he describes the company’s mission as it staffs up around the world to service clients like Procter & Gamble and AT&T.
“Work on data to identify resources that can give us enough information about consumer behavior. Therefore, we could deliver better resources to our clients,” Claudio says.
P&G is its biggest client in North America, Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico. Then there is AT&T in the United States and Mexico. In short, the agency grew from zero to about $5 billion in billings in seven months, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’re growing. We’re already over 800 employees around the globe,” with offices in such far-flung locations as Dubai, London, Japan and China. “Our clients are telling us they want to deliver better messages to better audiences in a way that they can measure the resource.”
But simply being big and thus far successful doesn’t overcome all challenges, particularly with regard to data availability. “In Puerto Rico, we don’t have all the resources that we have in the States,” says Claudio. “In Mexico we have other challenges as well.”
He chooses to look on the positive side.
“That’s a good challenge for anyone in the market because it’s no longer a media buy or digital buy. It’s how you deliver the right message in the right platform at the right time to the right target,” Claudio says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But CTR is undergoing an assault, as brands worry that a simple click is no longer the whole story and search for an alternative.
Put simply, the foundational mechanisms of digital marketing effectiveness are in flux.
It’s a challenge that Moat Director of Sales Peter Kuhn, whose company sells analytics software to help advertisers understand the potential effectiveness of their advertising, understands. His company is now launching the Moat Video Score.
“(It is) a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears,” Kuhn tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Brand marketers are trying to move away from an ad-served impression currency and click-based KPI model to asking other questions (like), ‘What lens can we look at success through in digital?'”
The video score was announced back in the fall and is now ready to go live, Kuhn says. But Moat has been offering related at-tech solutions since 2010.
In that time, Kuhn has seen the evolution of the industry from a CTR-based economy, to one plagued by a crisis over viewability, to one in which that thorny problem has died away.
“In 2014, we saw the guidelines getting set for viewable impressions,” Kuhn adds. “We saw in 2015 agencies updating their trading models to purchase and transaction off of viewable impressions.
“And now we’re starting to see brand marketers and agency partners ask different questions around what effectiveness might be in digital.
“Now it’s not just viewability at all costs – viewability is a table-stakes question that you need to answer about what could potentially be effective.
“We’re looking at other questions like, ‘In video, how do I compare cross-device, cross-screen, what effectiveness can mean for me?’, ‘How do I understand if my audience is paying attention to what I’m trying to market to them?’ or ‘If I’m a publisher, how do I sell that attention and find ways to engage better with my brand marketers?”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to one ad exec turned software founder, hoping to help solve some of those problems.
“We’re all looking for ways, across the entirety of the television ecosystem, to better productize premium products, to continue to grow and to create more revenue,” says Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz in this video interview with Beet.TV.
But Swartz also sees a problem. “As you add more products and audience segments and that gets increasingly more difficult, the reality is Excel can’t be the tool that powers that business,” she says.
So Swartz’s Furious – headquartered in Israel and operational in the US – developed Prophet, a software-as-a-service platform aiming to help customers see inventory, sales and audience data from multiple channels, all in one place.
Earlier in March, Fox, Viacom and Turner teamed to form OpenAP, a system in which they will allow ad buyers to define audience segments that are targetable across the networks, not just individually, whilst NBC plans to sell $1bn of its upfront inventory through its own Audience Targeting Platform.
That is part of the revolution Swartz is talking about. “The productization, pricing and management of inventory – all those really difficult business operational workflows – is exactly what we built Prophet to address,” Swartz says.
“There’s a huge opportunity for us to step in and do what we’ve seen a lot of other industries, (introducing) systems that connect enterprise and automate workflow, use data, math and data science to ensure that, at all times, you are maximising the yield of all your portfolio of advertising products across all your channels, markets and customers.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Streaming music provider Spotify has no shortage of insights that define its users, as the company’s Head of Video Sales, Brian Danzis, explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Foremost among the tools for understanding what Spotify users are doing and feeling is their persistent identity.
With a user base that’s 100% logged in, there is “no opportunity for fraud on our platform, ever,” Danzis says during a break at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
Always on the lookout for new metrics that are unique to particular users, Spotify sees things on a continuum—from people who prefer the music the company programs for them to those who prefer a la carte selections, and everyone in between.
“These people are very different and we’re learning a lot about what those differences and behaviors are,” says Danzis.
Another metric is discovery, meaning whether users opt for tunes most familiar to them or whether they delight in finding new artists and use Spotify playlists to discover them. Then there is diversity, as expressed through the exploration of new types of cultures and genres, according to Danzis.
Having introduced its video advertising formats two years ago, Spotify “was in a unique position to not have to retrofit our ads to meet the needs of our customers” who were concerned about viewability, he adds. Spotify’s mid-roll ad units, consisting of video takeovers on both desktop and mobile, are served at key points in between songs, “only when an ad is in focus, so we know someone is looking at it,” Danzis says.
Each mid-roll video is billed to advertisers based on Moat’s Human, Audible, Viewable on Complete guidelines, meaning videos are viewable not just a the start or in the middle but upon completion.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That deal was announced on December 14, but the company expects the conclusion of its sale to Golden Gate Capital by the third quarter of 2017.
So what is Neustar all about? The outfit operates across marketing services, risk, technology security, phone services and internet domain registration. On completion of the deal, it plans to separate activities in to two companies – one including marketing services, security services and data services; the other focusing on order management and phone number services.
SVP of Corporate Development Ted Prince thinks marketing is undergoing a revolution, and it’s all about using data to segment audiences for targeting.
“We’ve broken up the country in to 172 segments,” Prince said, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“That enables us to go to marketers, we can then make sure you’re targeting those audiences for prospects, we can also make sure you’re targeting your CRM first-party data – on TV, mobile, desktop, direct mail, call centre, email.
“We’ve seen a wave of audience-building online, audience-building on mobile, and now the ability to target audiences on television.
“We’re trying to help marketers be able to target online and then measure … the effectiveness of those audiences.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Marketers, challenged by the proliferation of modern media devices, are dreaming of a day when they can distribute their ads for a multitude of screens, from just a single screen.
But Sandro Catanzaro says that day is already here.
“Imagine a world where a campaign can span every channel – linear TV, addressable TV, connected TV, desktop videos, banners in websites, mobile devices,” the co-founder of ad-tech company DataXu tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It can be all seamlessly executed through a single user interface, very simple and it’s totally self-service.
“What really excites me is the underlying technology. (It) is a graph of graphs. We are connecting all the different devices consumers have.”
According to Catanzaro, that will enable advertisers to answer questions like: “How can we use mobile phone behaviour to affect the campaign that’s executed in linear TV, connected TV or addressable TV?”
This kind of correlation is getting in to the realms of science, but not science-fiction. A range of companies is now boasting to link together data trails from individuals’ different digital devices, to plot better targeting across each.
One of the key features as a result will be to reduce the frequency of ads seen by a consumer who may already be excessively exposed across multiple channels.
“If a person has seen one, two, three, four (or) five ads, you can decide whether you want to show a next ad or not, and you can also know which acidness this specific consumer belongs to,” Catanzaro adds.
“That technology is fully operating right now, these are datasets of petabytes in size that can respond in real-time.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“What’s really interesting today is advertisers are much more serious about programmatic than they ever have been before,” says Schmidt, who is MD for North America.
What used to be a small and simple line item has progressed to Cadreon clients taking programmatic so seriously they feel the need to contemplate their own marketing ad tech stack, Schmidt explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere!
Cadreon augments its own datasets with what its clients bring to the table to find the highest value audiences, making sure it can not only plan but activate based on the data. This avoids the use of standard proxy metrics like reach and frequency or generating ratings points, according to Schmidt.
Beyond cultivating its own data to use with that of its clients, Cadreon works to foster cooperation among clients.
“For example, if you have an advertiser that has sale point data because of customer loyalty, how can you bring that to a CPG that’s trying to measure convenience type of sales,” Schmidt says.
Clients can leverage their own datasets not just for their own investments but can also use such second-party data “to generate revenue that they’ve never seen before.”
One of the best aspects of the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat for Schmidt is that it represents an amalgamation of “really progressive, forward thinkers that come from every spectrum of the ecosystem”—from data to media owners to agencies.
“What was really fun was yesterday was the panel of major broadcasters telling what they’re doing in the advanced TV space, in particular the news with the partnership across Fox, Turner and Viacom,” says Schmidt. “To me that was great to be with those individuals the day after a major announcement and have the opportunity to peek under the hood and really understanding what they’re doing.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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