But now connected TV platforms mean digital-style ad buying can come to the living room, whilst even linear, old ad buys can benefit from digitally-infused planning.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kim Norris, VP at Charter’s Spectrum Reach ad sales division, talks about the importance of marrying digital and TV ad operations at the institutional level.
“Probably about 95% of my employees actually come from digital,” Norris says.
“We’ve actually been pretty successful at combining a conversation between digital media and TV media. We’re able to leverage a lot of the data that we have to, say, run a television campaign and then target unreached, underexposed audiences that we didn’t reach in TV and actually reach them through different digital media.”
Norris says Spectrum Reach is able to take its viewership data and combine it with different types of datasets, like psychographic or automotive, to develop insights like, “People who shop at Zappos tend to watch these types of programmes.”
That can inform even linear TV media buys, Norris says.
“So pretty much I would say maybe 60% of our linear TV buys are actually influenced in the local markets by data,” she adds. “We’re actually able to build more intelligent schedules even before we get into products like addressability where you’re actually delivering directly to an audience.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That is why we are seeing so much discussion on whether advertisers will change their use of TV, which, traditionally – in absence of such metrics – has been to use a mass audience for brand building, toward using it for “performance” outcomes.
But how far will the pendulum really swing in this direction? At Beet Retreat In The City, a panel, “TV In Transformation as Addressable Lights Up”, heard executives discuss that question…
Their discussion was led by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel.
Ampersand is the former NCC Media, a group owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications to ease the path to ad sales on cable and now new-wave TV platforms.
Ampersand’s Ward said:”How can we use deterministic data in defining audiences more narrowly and more robustly just to look at traditional media measures – reach, frequency on duplicated reach, not in isolation, but in addition to attribution work and brand outcome measurement?
“I think a lot of attention is paid to bottom-of-the-funnel performance measurement. I think a tremendous amount of progress can be made in the industry as we begin to think about deterministic data driving traditional media measures.”
That amounts to: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” In other words, TV will be able to support performance-driven ad attribution at the bottom of the funnel as well as top-of-funnel brand-building.
Charter’s Klippel said: “When you look at what TV does well, (it) scale, it’s reach, it’s high-quality produced video and brand-safe environments.
“Also, the engagement of TV and the emotional engagement (beats digital). I’ve never heard anyone run around quoting taglines or saying dillydally after watching it in a digital campaign.
“We’re still getting our arms around that to kind of bring the best of the two together. When you look at what’s happening with viewership trends, there’s no doubt that there is a shift, but there’s also absolutely no doubt that there’s still a lot of eyeballs on ad-supported TV.”
The event was notable for industry executives discussing a new buzzphrase – “deterministic” TV advertising. Other panelists have already attempted to define that.
Ampersand’s Ward offered his definition: “Data that is held to be true versus probabilistic data, which I think is oftentimes inferred or based on panel survey modelled data.
“Probably 10% of our business, thereabouts, is transacted on a deterministic audience-based data and the vast majority still on an age (and) gender panel survey-based.
“We don’t think that deterministic data replaces, overnight, survey-based probabilistic data. We think they will both live in harmony and serve different purposes in concert with one another.”
It isn’t just a single set of known data that creates the biggest opportunity, Ampersand’s Ward said. The real power lays in combining such data sets from different parties.
“It begins … with the name and address of the subscriber,” Ward said. “We know that to be true because the cable companies are sending a bill. Then you start to pivot off of that with other known sets of data – set-top box, ad exposure, commercial viewership, programme viewership data.
“The value that is available in the marketplace is the ability to unlock that data in concert with other deterministic data sets in the marketplace. (For example), Geico happen(s) to know the name and address of their policy holders and whether they’re a homeowner or a renter, if they own a motorcycle or an RV or a boat.
“So it’s that Venn diagram of being able to link deterministic data that we think begins to unlock value opportunity in the marketplace.”
Viacom’s Zilberbrand said infrastructure issues pose a problem to any large-scale shift in the use of TV from brand-building to performance. Namely, forecasting data is too fragmented amongst the variety of operators.
“There are technology gaps with a lot of traditional TV companies that make it very, very complex to forecast,” he said.
“It’s variable depending on, ultimately, the operator that you’re working with.
“There are obviously, I know, efforts to kind of shift that and work towards that and provide solutions there.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Kim says that the availability of new data sets has helped their corner of the industry, especially as they’ve found their footing with tune-in marketing.
“Not only now can we actually get feedback on a more granular tactic-level basis,” says Kim. “But now we can actually action on those things.”
Kim points out that the availability of A+E Network’s data has been a huge advantage, saying “It’s pretty rare that a brand is sharing access with their agency partners, but that’s been a great opportunity for us.”
Taylor adds that the flexibility goes both ways, and Horizon’s ability to see what sticks keeps both parties moving forward.
“They’re not plug and play,” says Taylor. “They’re not continuing the same way we used to as things are changing, they’re really at the forefront of trying and learning new stuff.”
Kim says that this is all possible because of A+E Network’s patience, their efforts in providing as much data and transparency as possible, and their desire to continue building up their database in both digital and linear.
But this partnership doesn’t come without new challenges. While both Kim and Taylor are optimistic, Taylor explains that tune-in makes immediate decision-making more difficult.
“I think the biggest challenge about tune-in marketing is that the show has to premiere, and then it’s premiered, and then you have to get the data, and it either comes back the next week or it doesn’t.” Taylor says. “It is hard getting the data and turning it around fast enough to make actionable insights immediately.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>During “Data Activation, the New Tool for Programmers”, a panel convened at Beet Retreat In The City, executives held a refreshingly frank discussion on the true state of two of the most talked-about tech…
They were questioned by Howard Shimmel of Janus Strategy & Insights.
This year, executives like Levine have started describing the ability of advertisers to truly know who they are targeting with connected TV as “deterministic TV“, a proposed label that is in its infancy.
For Discovery’s Garfield: “I think about it as known versus inferred (audience profiles). As a national programmer at Discovery for 30 years, what we really knew about our audience was on an anonymized basis … age, gender…. inferred from a panel.
“Today, through our affiliate agreements, we actually have access to known (ad) exposures on set-top boxes where they know that person, they know what they’ve watched.”
WarnerMedia’s Aversano cautioned against expecting that the capabilities enabled by “deterministic” will grow to account for all TV targeting tactics.
“As an industry there’s been a ton of lip service given to this idea of a pure deterministic world,” he said. “It just will never happen. You’re never going to have perfect census-level measurement of everything. I don’t think you will. We need to accept the fact it will never be perfect – (instead), just make it a little bit better.”
Levine, deterministic’s champion, agreed. “Deterministic data today, unless you have a hundred percent of the U.S population, it’s not going to work, which is why you have to apply the projection methodologies,” he said. “But deterministic data activation allows us to do things on television that historically have been very hard to do.”
Which brought the panel to the second much-lauded technology – the new ability to attributed advertisers’ intended brand outcomes (be it a purchase or a click) directly back to a viewer’s exposure to a TV ad.
New services allow a line to be drawn between those things. But WarnerMedia’s Aversano says the cost of real attribution is prohibitive.
He explained: “The attribution marketplace today… you have a handful of vendors who I think have really good solutions, but they are cobbled together from lots of different third-party datasets that they have to pay for in licence that they in turn then charge advertisers, agencies and media companies for. A typical attribution study that we run for a specific campaign costs $30,000 to $120,000 for one campaign.
“That’s a million-dollar campaign and we have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to measure it. That will never scale.”
Aversano said the reality of this kind of attribution measurement is, it isn’t effective enough.
“The state of the industry today and this ecosystem of vendors is … none of it is at scale and none of it is always-on, (it) almost makes that impossible,” he said.
Discovery’s Garfield urged publishers not to dive farther in to offering guaranteed outcomes against ad purchases.
“We just don’t have enough of that understanding or benchmarks around what’s driving these numbers to really start guaranteeing on that,” he said. “And I think we all have to take a step back and understand one step deeper around what’s driving some of these outcomes.
“If the same audience is seeing the same creative across a bunch of networks, then what really is the differentiator in that outcome? And that’s what we’re trying to understand and we’re working with vendors and talking obviously to agencies about helping us together to understand that.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>At the Beet Retreat in New York City in November, hosted by Horizon Media, Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz spoke to a panel of women currently navigating advertising’s continuing changes: Kim Norris, gvp of digital and advanced advertising sales at Spectrum Reach; Caroline Horner, svp of product management at 605; and Samantha Rose, svp of video at Horizon Media all discussed how data has changed the advertising industry, the challenges it’s raised, and what’s still to come.
“We’ll see evolution across all verticals”
Norris says that right now, “demand outstrips supply” when it comes to advanced advertising, but that the marketplace is catching up through experimentation and learning. As first-party data for tune-in viewership data has changed how tune-in marketing operates, “we’ll see evolution across all the verticals,” Norris says.
Horner, who saw through early digital advertising models during the dot com boom before moving on to positions on both sides of the market. Most significantly so far, Horner says, data and attribution marketing has changed the role of the marketer.
“It was incredible to see how fast real, deterministic data affected the marketer. We had to re-up relationships and sales processes because they saw real data,” says Horner. “That delight and experience – you know you’ve made a difference and that’s what data has done. We’ve been riding that over the last 15 years.”
Growing pains
While data has infiltrated advertising strategies, Horner’s observed that the sell side has been slower to adapt to new capabilities and approaches influenced by data. While marketers on the buy side quickly realized how data was making advertising work better for them – and how the money would follow – Horner says the sell side had to be “dragged into it,” but are now used to “heavier and heavier analytics.”
But when the agency’s jobs depend on convincing networks, platforms and marketers that the data will help, the stakes are high, says Rose. “What we don’t want to do is have something not work and then deter someone from moving forward. In this more addressable [market], whether it’s MVPD or digital, a wasted impression is wasted. In this area where we’re growing we want to get it right.”
Data-specializing partners, like Ampersand and 605, can help add a support network with the goal of getting advertising from operating like one-to-many fishnet to a one-to-one fishing line, says Swartz.
Where it’s headed
Rose adds that while one-to-one remains a goal to reach, addressable is still in its infancy, and some brands are looking for the mass reach that linear TV provides. “I hate to say it cause it’s a term we always use, but it’s not one size fits all,” she says.
As the space does mature, Horner notes that trust is going to be one of the most important factors when it comes to data sharing and making sure customers aren’t concerned about privacy. That will entail working with the right partners and legitimizing the industry and, as Norris adds, setting standards.
“We have to get standards,” she says. “We need to make sure we have clear definitions, that it’s as standard as possible.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In a panel dubbed “Finding A Path to Deterministic TV” at Beet Retreat In The City, Laura McElhinney, Chief Data Officer, Horizon Media, explained how her agency is adapting.
McElhinney told Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz how Horizon is seeing challenges and opportunities thrown up by advanced TV advertising capabilities.
Advanced TV demands a holistic sight of audience behavior data from across multiple channels. But McElhinney said Horizon doesn’t always get sufficient sight of data to construct the optimal campaign.
“We have to break down the silos,” she said. “The problem is, is that everyone’s working in their own silo and you’re not able, from an agency standpoint, to bring all that data together and to look at it.
“It really helps us really look at the measurement across the ecosystem instead of just looking at one channel or something that’s happening in one area.”
But McElhinney said Horizon is responding to the wish of some clients to change the pricing model for performance-driven advertising.
In other words, she is happy for Horizon to be part part of its fee based on the real, attributable outcomes it can provably generate for brand clients
“We’re driving a lot of our clients more towards that shared risk, shared reward, which is helping to change the KPIs and changing what we look at from a currency standpoint,” she said.
Asked by Swartz if that meant clients are incentivizing Horizon on performance, she said: “Of course. Yeah. We are (open to that). It’s not a one-size-fits-all. You have to play all sides of the coin.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>It is the new practice of attribution, and technology vendors like TVSquared are busy helping broadcasters prove to advertisers how an ad exposure can correlate in to a website visit, a drop-in to a store or even a purchase.
But, in this panel discussion with Beet.TV, one executive says “attribution” technology doesn’t only prove specific outcomes like that – it can also evidence the traditional metric of brand uplift.
Attribution is “being able to measure very specific outcomes, return on ad spend, actual conversions, mid-level activities, whether that is site traffic, foot traffic in the real world, but also to be able to measure the impact of what advertising does to the brand, what is the lift that it has on the brand”, says 605’s chief revenue officer Noah Levine.
But Levine says the same technology can be used for something more.
He says: “There is the lifetime value of a maybe a six-year-old who … sees a luxury car ad … that (ad) impression has an impact on that six-year-old to aspire potentially to something later in life saying, ‘Hey, I want this BMW. I want this Mercedes,’ et cetera.
“That’s something that, particularly with deterministic television and where we’re going with television measurement, we’re more and more able to do this.”
Brand uplift is the ill-defined and hard-to-discover outcome that advertisers have traditionally fallen back on seeking, given TV’s historic inability to measure specific audience behaviors.
Now TVs are gaining the ability to observe specific content and advertising viewing, whilst software platforms can link those profiles to consequential online actions. So, how would Levine use it to measure brand uplift?
He says his company’s technology enables “full-funnel” attribution, meaning it encompasses brand uplift, too.
“The way that you measure the impact on the brand is a qualitative exercise. And the nature of it being qualitative allows for it to be unique in every single application,” he says.
“Different brands will ask different questions in surveys that are delivered in different and through different modalities, digital, telephone calls, mail, and so forth.
“We’re moving away from the one size fits all currency and we’re moving towards providing the data, and technology, and solutions to be able to allow each agency, each buyer, each brand to come up with the way that they want to transact and measure, and the same thing on the sales side.”
Levine was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“My analogy always was what if Mars attacked?” Kline says. “There’s all of these country conflicts, but if our asses were all on the line, just like a good sci-fi movie, we’d have to pull together and make it through. Mars did attack, in the form of Facebook and Amazon and Google. They attacked a few years back, so we’re pulling together now to try and give scale to all this advanced advertising that the ad tech players have been able to do.”
While MVPDs and networks continue to battle each other at times over things like affiliation agreements, they recognize that they need each other for scale in advertising. The resulting data has been enormously helpful in leading smaller businesses to television. Kline cites success stories like Peloton and Wayfair, who have used TV as a leveraging point for growing their brands. Spectrum Reach’s partner strategy also helps bolster its data strategy: Spectrum Reach works with Ampersand to catch up on advertising data collection, while 605 worked with the company to build out an audience app that lets users customize their own schedules.
This has also led MVPDs to explore the use of new products and advanced advertising technology. The launch of an ad portal has been a gateway for businesses of all budgets to get a more advanced look at data and customize advertising that suits them. Kline also mentions an audience app that their partner 605 designed for them that sifts through set-box top data to optimize a schedule.
“That’s been a game changer for us,” Kline says. “That’s taken the conversation away from ‘Just give me ESPN and USA Network’ to 50 networks deep.”
The redefining role of MVPDs as linear and digital continue to evolve has led to more precise data as well as more advanced forms of advertising. Kline says that this creates an environment ripe for opportunity for all stakeholders involved.
“I think from the local perspective to the national perspective, we’re going to make the ecosystem work much better,” says Kline.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In conversation with Furious Corp. founder and CEO Ashley Swartz at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media, the agency’s evp and co-chief investment officer David Campanelli said that the top of the funnel still matters. Relying too much on data can leave a portion of potential customers off the table.
“As we get more specific and more addressable in media, do we lose that reach aspect, particularly in linear TV? What [linear TV] does well is reach massive amounts of people at one time with a 30-second ad,” Campanelli told Swartz. “Going too far down the addressable road, you’ll miss segments of the population that are potential consumers. There is still a role for that.”
The key, Campanelli says, is finding a way to make decisions using both traditional metrics, like Nielsen, and advanced TV metrics that paint more specific portraits of the customer. The more those two sides of the customer data coin – which incorporate top-to-bottom of the funnel reach – can merge, the more value that will be created, he argues.
And of course, as the top metric for Horizon Media is to drive business outcomes for clients, the value of the media buy has to match up for premium prices. As more agencies, including Horizon Media, build out their own data systems, the price of services increase. The investment has to be worth it, but Campanelli says the shift in emphasis from third- to first-party data is only going to continue.
“What we’re learning more and more is first-party data – good, valuable first-party data – is the holy grail, the way to go,” says Campanelli. “Third-party data is not as accurate as we had hoped. Leaning more into first-party matches and developing our own Horizon data practice and platform to match that and push that out to vendors is where we think it’s going in the future.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“The biggest challenge is the breadth of content available,” Taylor told Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media earlier this month. Additionally, marketing strategies have to consider not only what audiences would be right for the content A+E Networks is promoting, but also what audiences watch live TV at all, a problem that’s been exacerbated by cord-cutting and the rise of DVR.
“It’s really important for us to find people who are interested in our shows, or interested in shows that are similar to our shows, who are live TV viewers, and pull them in to watch our content,” says Taylor.
A+E Networks uses “tune-in marketing” to drive people to its live showings, a tactic that involves promoting content as must-see events and driving people – the aforementioned people who are likely to watch live TV – to their TVs at the right time. “We want people engaging with our brand, whether they’re DVRing or time shifting, or streaming on digital, but right now the goal of linear tune in is that live in premiere view,” she says. Partners like Alphonso help A+E Networks identify live TV viewers the network can target, while Samba helps attribute conversions to marketing strategies. Attribution, Taylor says, has come a long way in five years.
“Attribution exists in a way it didn’t five years ago,” she says, when the network was able to understand success in terms of what drove ratings. Only in the past three to four years has the network been able to work with measurement partners to understand not just ratings, but what tactic helped to hit them.
In 2020, Taylor believes that data-at-scale will be the skill to master for marketers.
“As we move into 2020, how do we scale that data? First-party data is not as large as you’d like, and even third-party data isn’t always as scaled as you’d like. So what’s the balance between leveraging first-party data and leveraging scale with our paid campaigns?” she says.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>So says one executive working on understanding audience behaviors for a media owner with dozens of channels.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Julian Zilberbrand, EVP of audience science at Viacom, explains the challenges and opportunities of data-driven TV ad sales.
“There’s a lot of different companies that kind of help the ecosystem but, in reality, it is somewhat of a fragmented process, which requires a lot of work on our end to kind of cobble it all together,” Zilberbrand says.
His employer uses partnerships with the likes of FreeWheel for ad serving, with MVPDs for addressability as well as others , though even Viacom’s own diverse business units have to work hard on overcoming in-house fragmentation.
Viacom Media Networks’ e includes BET Networks, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, MTV and Nickelodeon.
It uses data to enable true “one-to-one” ad targeting in IP-enabled TV platforms, but even uses predictive models to better understand how linear TV viewers’ behavior is changing.
Underpinning all of this? Zilberbrand advises marketers that want to benefit from TV’s new tricks – get your data house in order.
“How much do you understand about what’s available in the marketplace and how you would use that data?,” he asks. “Making sure that you have the right discussions with your vendors, specifically about how that data can be used.
“Even the best marketer is going to have a subset of data that more than likely has to be modelled to reach to scale. So what does that process look like? How are you ultimately making connections with your vendors that allow you to leverage your data?
“And then how are you organising and open with them about getting information back, and sharing information, in a way that allows for us as sellers to be able to optimise for your success? And at the same time ensure that you have confidence in what’s being delivered on your behalf.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“What that means is not just looking at the bottom of the funnel metrics, which we know are important,” says Garfield. “But also looking at the upper-level metrics, like brand awareness and brand health and how that plays into those bottom-funnel metrics.”
While forward-thinking analytics have helped provide insight into specific parts of how audiences have changed, Garfield notes that it’s also worth taking a step back and looking at TV from a larger perspective.
“We’ve kind of lost the full force of what TV can do in the conversation of outcome-based,” says Garfield. “So I think we have to bring it back to looking at what can TV do overall and part of that is brand health and brand awareness.”
Garfield points out that this is something that that digital behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have done particularly well as of recent.
“There’s a reason why those companies have increased their TV budget hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Garfield. “There’s a reason why the direct-to-consumer companies like Peloton are coming into TV, and the reason is because there still is no larger vehicle for mass reach, and so we have to make sure we’re painting the full picture when we look at attribution.”
In order to paint a full picture on their end, Garfield says that Discovery is expanding its partnerships, including one with 605, in order to widen their scale of metrics.
“You need that scale to look at the survey results and the outcome-based results together to get statistical significance,” says Garfield. “So we’re really excited we have a proof of concept in the works and we’re going to have the results in from that soon.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a new trade article every day about a new vendor or a new offering, especially with streaming wars and everything that’s happening there,” says Rose. “Our purpose is really trying to make it something that everybody can understand, and then [determining] how we activate in that space. Not just what it is, but how do we advertise in that area.”
While the instinct is to stay ahead of the curve and chase after advanced TV capabilities and streaming platforms, Rose stresses the importance of not undermining the power that linear TV still offers.
“We know ratings are diminishing, but we do also know that many times those audiences are moving towards the same premium long-form content, just within other platforms,” says Rose. “So we know that dollars and the health of the marketplace might be disparate and might revert off into OTT, but it will be a long time before linear TV goes away completely if ever.”
Rose explains that the sweet spot is finding the happy medium between more addressable models and the ways that long-form content plays out on streaming outlets.
“If you’re looking at OTT, especially with the release of Disney+ and Peacock, those are still largely kind of long-form TV platforms,” says Rose. “But TV now is really going to be addressable, so it’s OTT and addressable and bringing together new data and new platforms and it’s going to be a whole new world for us.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Now WarnerMedia is gearing up to make announcements on how it wants to unlock that opportunity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dan Aversano, WarnerMedia’s ad innovation and programmatic solutions SVP, explains the rationale.
“We operate eight fully distributed linear networks,” Aversano says. “They are national networks, but they’re not addressable. We put the ad in the spot, everybody in the country and our distribution footprint sees the same ad.
“AT&T owns one of the most integral pieces of technology in that space in a company called INVIDI, which is actually the ad serving technology that makes addressable possible in certain footprints – within DirecTV, within DISH, Altice, Frontier and a few others that they’re starting to work with.
“That’s really, really exciting. So we are pushing full-steam ahead around national addressability, we have a ton of work that we’re hopefully going to be announcing as we move into next year, but we think that’s one of the most exciting things that we can push from a technology standpoint by far.”
Addressable TV, which gives brands the ability to buy ads targeted at the household level, has made particular in-roads in certain local cable operators and in particular OTT services or TV devices.
But, whilst OTT devices now have considerable scale, there is also growing concern at the size of the footprint available to TV networks.
Back in the summer, Mike Bologna, president of addressable at Cadent told Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”: “National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because, for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
Aversano is clear why he wants to enable addressable. And it is not just about targeting.
“Addressable technology gives us a tonne of precision, so now we can put different ads in front of different people, at different times,” he says. “There’s a lot that we can do with that precision:
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“I’ll tell you why,” Kline told Sean Cunningham, CEO of VAB, in conversation with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media in November. “We have census data, it’s pristine. We know it’s attached to a household. Everything we do is aggregated, anonymized and privacy compliant. It’s the best tool for an advertiser to use.”
Spectrum Reach’s data, aggregated with partners including Ampersand Media and Canoe, enables the company to make network inventory addressable. That means a cable company can go to a potential ad client, like BMW, and help them target specific audiences based on the data that Spectrum Reach sets the company up with. According to Kline, roughly $65-70 billion is spent in network advertising annually, so the goal isn’t to necessarily win over more ad dollars – even as performance marketing brands like DTC companies are exploring the arena to diversify from Facebook and Google. Kline wants to attract more dollars, but also make the existing dollars spent smarter.
“I wouldn’t say we’re breaking new ground with this, I’d say we’re catching up because the ad tech players have been able to do this,” says Kline. “But we are now in the position to compete heavily with them, with the best data and highest quality content.”
While Kline acknowledges Spectrum isn’t reinventing the industry, he says that it’s most critical asset is being able to make TV addressable at scale. As the definition of TV has changed, Kline says, marketers just want to be able to decipher who their audience is and how to reach them. Now, Spectrum can offer that – it’s no longer just talking about offering it.
“It’s a work in progress,” says Kline. “We didn’t do ourselves any good by talking about it too early, but now we’re there and we need to just shut up and make it happen.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“They reflect what the current state of television is, which is full funnel, all the time,” Cunningham told Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat hosted by Horizon Media in New York City. Cunningham says these brands’ TV ad spend has surged to amount to $4 billion, and that their interest in television signifies its newfound status as a performance marketing channel. Used to call-to-action campaigns on Facebook and Google, DTC brands are now looking to TV to do two things at once: build brand awareness and affinity, and drive conversions while gathering audience insights.
That capability didn’t happen overnight. Cunningham says addressable TV is something that marketers were told about for a “better part of a decade” before it became reality. The rise of data stack and tech stack equipped platforms like Facebook and Google – platforms that lack the premium content of TV – lit a fire under the networks, which had the content but not the data or tech capabilities.
“Another race, essentially was on,” says Cunningham, adding that the arrival at addressable is the outcome of networks’ and marketers’ investment in first-party data, as well as the ability to put that data into action. Now, companies can mesh data with the content that drives companies to spend with TV distributors in the first place. “I’m not saying race over, race won, but race well run to say for the marketer, I’m going to run as hard as humanly possible so I can mesh this data with the content as a TV company. That meshing together gets them to a place where they don’t have to decide between content, context and tech. They get it all.”
As marketers adjust to new capabilities of addressable, and look for results, Cunningham says the most important thing to do is to give it time. While there will be short-term results, the real value comes in the long play.
“The first question marketers should ask is how long should I do this. The answer is quarter, after quarter, for a couple of years, because you need to understand the full-funnel implications of what you’re doing,” says Cunningham.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But television may now be pulling back some of that ad spend, because the old dog is learning new tricks.
“Several years ago there was a big move towards the digital side of things and spending. I think that balanced back,” says David Campanelli.
He should know. As EVP and co-chief investment officer for the advertising agency Horizon Media, Campanelli is responsible for the ad spending decisions of account clients likeWeight Watchers Burger King, Corona, LG, Little Caesars and Capital One.
“Now it’s a little bit more about, ‘How can we use TV more intelligently to target our audiences?’,” he says. “I think that the budgets have found their levels across different media types. Really now it’s about trying to find smarter ways to use linear TV, smarter ways to use OTT, which is a relatively new platform, to deliver that audience.”
If Campanelli’s own spending patterns are playing out industry-wide, they are not yet visible in available data.
eMarketer projects 2020 US TV linear and broadcast ad spend will grow 1% – but thanks to it being both an election year and an Olympics year. Thereafter, the forecast is for a 1% decline in each of the three years to 2023 – the main rationale being the rate at which viewers are cutting the cord for subscription, ad-free video services.
Still, that migration could exist alongside the trend in which linear TV is gaining new super-powers – namely, the ability to
Horizon is pushing more clients’ ad spending in to this data-infused reincarnation of television because it offers such features.
The agency began its journey with the medium by leveraging third-party data sales houses to uncover the right audiences for its brands.
Then it graduated to building its own data platform, used to plan all its buying in the marketplace using digital identities
Even so, Campanelli can see the risk in excessive precision-targeting.
“With better targeting becomes more narrow audiences and more narrow reach of your buys,” he says. I think there’s a risk of going too narrow, too addressable, and not having that broad reach.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.
That digital determinism was the topic of Beet.TV’s recent Beat Retreat in the City @ Horizon Media event.
In this for Beet.TV, Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz reports how understanding is evolving.
“When we started the day, I surveyed the attendees and asked how many people talked about, used the phrase deterministic television or knew what to deterministic television was,” she says. “There were maybe three hands.
“I think we successfully ended the day with many more hands to be raised. We sort of all very organically and naturally set upon a definition of deterministic television.
But there is devil in the detail. Swartz also raises a number of possible frictions with the evolution of the opportunity.
“If we continue to grow revenue with new products or by productizing data, if that revenue is at a cost and has increasingly operational friction, the cost of doing business increases and ultimately is significantly, over time, less profitable revenue growth, is it worth it?,” she asks.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the woman who runs product at a leading TV targeting data technology vendor says, after a long while on the hob, addressable TV is now ready to boil.
Caroline Horner, 605 product management SVP, says there has been an “Arc” of new data that have become available for use in TV ad targeting, data that was previously closed off.
“We’ve seen with the introduction of the Inscape data, more people have been able to get a hold of it and work with it,” Horner says. “It’s created such excitement about looking at what people are exposed to. The industry has been furiously running after all these new insights, back to one-to-one marketing, for television.
“Addressable (TV) … started off very slowly because each MVPD did their system one at a time and the marketers couldn’t really buy national for addressability, and there was such a small amount of inventory that was available for targeting. Fast forward to what’s happening right now … you have the data that can support it and now you have the systems that are collaborating and providing a national footprint for addressable campaigns.”
Horner was speaking ahead of Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media, an industry discussion event in New York on Wednesday.
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from:
Horner calls the new ability of precise viewer data to target TV ads “deterministic TV”.
“Deterministic is really about the absolute knowledge that a household is watching something, that the TV was on at that household at that time and the behaviors that are associated with that household,” she says.
“Deterministic TV data … can add in all that rich Experian data, all the transactions, psychographics, and to look exactly at how they watch, consume television and how they’re impacted by it.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy, by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.
Still, at this stage in the game, too few executives understand enough about the new deterministic opportunity – according to an ad-tech exec urging more awareness.
“I hope that the marketplace at large develops a better understanding of what deterministic data is for television, and what it can do,” says Noah Levine, chief revenue officer of 605, ahead of Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media, an industry discussion event in New York on Wednesday.
So, what is “deterministic” TV data, exactly?
Levine says it includes cable set-top box data, automatic content recognition and (ACR) viewership data – real data about what real viewers are watching.
“Deterministic data obviously supports the ability to see at a granular level who is exposed or what households are exposed to a particular ad, and then to be able to perform a whole slew of attribution,” Levine says.
“What is special about deterministic TV is that it supports extremely powerful data activation onto the television ecosystem, and that’s something that other types of TV viewership data can’t support.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from:
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
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