Merrill Edge is BoA’s investment platform for customers that like to control their own investments.
And Andrew Deming, BoA’s media leader, says the company needed a fresh approach, to become more “relationship-driven”.
“We’re shifting from being product-led and everything revolving around the credit card or an investment or a home loan, and it really being more focused on what is right for this audience,” Deming tells Beet.TV in this panel interview.
“The traditional mindset of mass marketing … is all about the product value prop. And that just doesn’t work anymore for everything. We’re trying to get away from designing for a product and delivering to the masses and really designing for an audience and delivering to individuals.”
The main problem was, Bank Of America was only reaching 15% to 20% of intended audience. So the company turned to addressable TV advertising, with a nine-week campaign delivered by Starcom Mediavest Group to re-use an existing piece of TV creative.
Deming says the Merrill Edge campaign was able to reach a smaller but more relevant audience than with mass TV advertising.
So what were the proof points of the campaign? Deming cites multiple returns on investment:
Dan Bruinsma, SMG’s media activation lead on the group’s Bank Of America account, says he would like to see more dynamic audience segments buildable with addressable TV.
This panel was moderated by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>In fact, that future is already happening. It’s called “addressable TV”, and recent estimates of the number of addressable US TV households count about 45m properties.
So what’s next in the addressable journey? Beet.TV convened a panel of leading exponents to offer their views.
Innovation will start in Europe – Dave Downey, CEO, INVIDI:
“We launched the most sophisticated targeting system in the world in Brussels. It’s a cloud-based decision system, it supports several million simultaneous linear buys
“We pioneered that technology in Europe hoping to bring it back to the United States. You … get this system going in the United States and the first reaction of the MVPD owners is, ‘I want to keep this for my inventory,’ because they’re getting great results.
“Well we, of course, always wanted to do it with NBC and CBS and ABC because that’s where the big money is. So a lot of our innovation goes and happens in another market with an eye towards, ‘When will it be ready for the States?’ And I think we’re getting close.”
National addressable will happen – Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology:
“There will be MVPDs, broadcasters … all selling addressable-linear … in the future. It’s a combination of … the technological deployment, the business model and… the human condition.
“We all have to get comfortable with the fact that the world is changing, be okay with changing it. Twenty years ago, the idea of saying you were tethered to some sort of electronic device that was always with you, you’d be like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ So that’s the human condition element.”
Addressability will hit scale – Brian Cordes, director, AT&T AdWorks:
“The marketplace is demanding it. We’re at over 50 million households right now. Projections are that, by 2020, we’ll be in over 80% of households nationally.
“What’s been happening with advertisers demanding these increased metrics and accountability is something that’s going to drive us forward and I think it’s inevitable for it to happen on a national scale.”
This panel was moderated by The Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>“Over the last three years, (I’ve done) … 250 campaigns, addressable to the household,” recalls Tracey Scheppach, the former long-time SMG advanced TV exec who recently left to form her own Matter More Media.
“Over $100 million we’ve spent in the market. A lot of campaigns. So this is not a test and learn thing anymore.”
Scheppach was speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV to discuss the emerging strengths and weaknesses inside the opportunity.
Success inside failure
Scheppach and Jamie Power, managing partner at GroupM’s advanced TV unit MODI Media, had seemingly different takes on what happens what addressable TV ad campaigns fail.
“The value that’s brought is not only when a campaign works, but it’s also when a campaign doesn’t work,” Power said. “At the end of the campaign, if the campaign doesn’t work, I know why the campaign didn’t work.
“The retention rate is 85%, but, you know, there are a lot of times that it doesn’t work and we’re able to use that data and it’s really powerful to bring the advertiser back and do it bigger and better next time.”
But Scheppach commented: “I’ve used 29 different data providers to deliver those 250 campaigns. I see that addressable works for every single client. I have not had a failed campaign yet.”
The real question, Scheppach said is, “Does addressable work for everyone?” But that is just a function of the price put on the campaign, she said.
So, if the technology and the strategy is in place, what is left to do as addressable grows up? Both execs have a wishlist.
Addressable wishlist: Jamie Power
“In order to scale it, you actually do need some standards. Right now, the product is great, but everyone’s still doing it differently. A simple thing like media delivery … the impressions that ran, not only are we getting in a different format from each of the MVPDs, they have different methodologies.
“How do you scale this into a marketplace, especially when you want national broadcast buyers who are used to accountability and scale and standards when we still don’t have standards? The easiest thing to fix would be a standard media delivery report.”
Addressable wishlist: Tracey Scheppach
“I would love more inventory in the marketplace. We’re very fortunate that two satellite providers kind of got the real party started, so we had national scale. But, even when we’re stretching the number, 52 million households, it’s still 1% of the inventory.
“I would love to see Charter to deploy, I would love to see over-the-top be addressable. I would love to see the national programmers start to have a real conversation with operators about enabling their inventory. The one thing that we need, that would make me happy, would be to grow the inventory source from 1% to 25% by the end of the decade.”
This panel was moderated by The Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>What’s next? Eric Schmitt has identified three big changes occurring amid the revolution. The VP of TV at marketing data company Acxiom, in this panel interview with Beet.TV, offers up the following. “I would say there’s three big changes that we’re tracking,” he says:
If that sounds complex, Schmitt thinks of the broad opportunity on a simple grid. “I think of it as a 2×2,” he says. “You’ve got digital and TV, you’ve got planning or targeting and measurement.”
The same panel also heard from:
Dethero said brands can take data on anonymous website visitors, match it against a cookie pool, translate it in to subscriber IDs or TV audiences, and distribute those audience profiles out to addressable TV platforms.
Danaher says his goal is to help advertisers use Experian data, work with agencies and buyers to action decisions through any media channel.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matt Prohaska, CEO of Prohaska Consulting.
]]>But a nationwide footprint is still some way off, many industry execs believe.
Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO of his own Vertere Group, an investment advisory and consulting firm, thinks the current deployment of addressable – limited to the two minutes per hour of local cable programming available – is a “ghetto” that limits grand uptake.
That could be solved by national operators and networks coming closer together or by local broadcasters and operators to partner. Hanlon isn’t betting that either of those things will happen in the near term – but he thinks the companies should recognize the need.
“One only has to look at how people are unbundling their cable subscriptions … cable distribution of cable networks is starting to decline,” he tells Beet.TV in this panel interview. “Even ESPN, the king of all kings, is seeing significant declines.
“As those subscriber bases get smaller, it’s pretty clear that the network operators are not going to pay programmers or TV stations as much as they have been in the past, because their subscriber levels are going down. So that money has to be made up and then some – and advertising … comes to the rescue.”
Now here is an interesting comparison. Hanlon likens the cable operators’ situation to that of Netflix. Netflix’s subscriber base may still be growing – but many observers, casting forward to slow-down, imagine the outfit will need to start selling ads to maintain positive momentum for investors. Hanlon agrees.
Typically, those most excited about advertising on Netflix are on the advertiser side. What does Hanlon think?
Asked which he conceives happening first – national broadcast addressability or Netflix beginning advertising – Hanlon says: “I don’t think national broadcast addressability happens that soon only because the local TV stations and the affiliate relationships are so convoluted and murky that that has to be completely rethought and reinvented.
“So, if I were a betting man, I would say that we’re probably going to see some judicious, target ad opportunities within the Netflix environment sooner than that.”
In January, Ampere Analysis’ Richard Broughton gave Beet.TV an analysis of Netflix’s advertising opportunity, saying the company could make between $270m and $2bn per quarter from advertising, depending on the model. But each model would also have an implication for subscriber churn.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This panel was moderated by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
]]>In this interview, our panelists discuss lingering fraud issues, vendor challenges and the multi-dimensional value of video…
Cross-platform brand safety
Brand safety on web may have been improved by software, but is still a problem on mobile and new platforms like connected TV, according to Integral Ad Science general manager Kevin Lenane.
“We can now measure viewability in in-app and mobile,” he said. “But there’s probably I would say generally less being done about brand safety on mobile and other things, you know, there’s fraud models on mobile now, too, but it’s definitely newer than web, and then if you look at connected TV, it’s wow, we have even less there.”
Vendor value
Many ad-tech vendors are taking too much and not providing enough value, according to FreeWheel’s agency VP James Rothwell.
“I think there’s a lot of extraction of value without actually the creation of value there,” he said. “So we need to find ways—better ways—of bringing the buyer and seller together to ensure that they are using partners all the way through that value chain.”
Video’s broad context
Video advertising can be valuable in its own right but can also provide a boost to other aspects of a marketing campaign, according to Mediaocean’s product VP Cordie DePascale.
“I’d look at TV, I’d look at video, I’d look at display, and I’d find ways to show that when I package it all up together in a certain way, they lift each other up,” he said. “We kind of have to get people comfortable with that idea and bring the comfort across from what they do in TV today.”
This panel was chaired by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Unlike the typical picture of programmatic which most people have, TV ads are sold upfront, ahead of time, rather than in real-time. What could TV possible want with programmatic.
A panel convened by Beet.TV discusses the options…
Value in the 7%
Real-time bidding of video from open markets equalled just 1% of TV ad spending last year. So Videology has shown interest in the larger segment of businesses more keen to spend on digital video using upfront, TV-style budgets, according to Videology North America SVP Brent Gaskamp.
He said: “The 7% world was (saying), ‘I’m selling a guaranteed sort of placement type of audience in my digital ecosystem or I’m managing a pool of inventory that I want to actually sell and package that way or buy for advertisers that way’. So the 7% club kind of became very important to us.”
Programmatic confusion
The word “programmatic” for advertising automation no longer encompasses the rich palette of tools on offer, and requires lots of effort, according to DataXu TV VP Tore Tellefsen.
“… The ‘p’ word, the programmatic word …I hate the term,” he said. “I don’t like it because it causes confusion. If I broke down the amount of time I spend on just education and clarification, it’s far more than it needs to be or should be.”
Automating TV
TV may historically be a direct-sold, upfront advertising business. But that doesn’t mean it won’t become programmatic automated as it becomes digital, according to Clypd strategic development VP Jason Burke.
“When we look at TV, we often hear, ‘Well TV’s easy – we don’t need to automate that’,” he observed. “I agree – I think the digital folks in the room will go through ten different layers to make that $50,000 IO happen. That doesn’t happen in TV.
“But automation’s needed as you start to bring in advanced data sources so that research teams can understand a forecast against Mercedes owners, so that, longer-term, they can sell them that way. Doing that across a multibillion dollar business across thousands of clients in a futures market … requires software. That can’t happen with a spreadsheet and a whiteboard.
This panel was chaired by Prohaska Consulting founder Matt Prohaska.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Panel moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., cites the lipstick and pig idiom as she asks Adobe Primetime’s Sr. Business Development Manager, Art Mimnaugh, about his customer’s cross-platform pain points.
“It’s hard,” says Mimnaugh. “You’re not going to have some of the standardized metrics across there” but programmers and operators are gaining more insights into their actual audiences.
“We keep getting into this chicken and the egg,” Mimnaugh adds. “As much as we want to transact on audiences in certain ways, if we don’t have the back end measurement in certain parts of it then people will say, ‘no I’m not really interested.’”
What it comes down to is the proper value exchange. “That value exchange looks different depending on the lens you’re coming from,” says Mimnaugh.
“I think you’ve got to take risk,” says Kevin Patrick Smith, SVP of Comcast Media 360. “Risk comes with key advertisers and their agencies going out of the box working with us on new media, new measurement, new integrating and realizing that it’s not perfect. But we’ve got to push the envelope and go out of traditional measurement and try new things.”
Asked by Swartz to describe the role of Google in the future of television, the digital giant’s Jennifer Koester says it’s an open platform devoted to data activation for advertisers via seamless direct and programmatic buys.
“Everybody is looking for this unified system that pulls in legacy and over the top and digital and lets you plan against that and optimize against that,” says Koester, Google’s Director of Telco & Video Distribution. “People just have to open their minds to new platforms and new platform partners to think about solving this.”
Rob Klippel says Charter Communications is focused on being able to consistently pull audience measurement data across its footprint and have a “common, consistent view” of its customers.
“I know that might seem mundane, but for us we’ve got three different versions of that all on separate physical networks right now,” says Klippel, who is SVP of Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy. “So trying to pull that all together right now is a pretty big task.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>At the Beet Retreat, Swartz led a deep dive into the future of TV advertising, especially as it relates to data and measurement.
Key players in the TV advertising landscape are looking for a unified system that pulls in legacy TV, over-the-top and digital and lets marketers and providers plan and optimize against that, Koester says during the discussion.
To get there, the industry needs to take risks on media, new measurement and new integration. “We need to push the envelope and go out of traditional measurement and try new things. Get new measurement for some campaigns. We are working with advertisers to get some insight on a correlation of media with sales. . .it’s not an overnight solution,” says Kevin Patrick Smith, Senior VP at Comcast 360 Media. “But I love working with partners who will work with us and will change the game.”
One of the biggest questions for the future of TV and digital advertising is what sort of backend measurement can enable standardized metrics. “You need to allow for standardized data modeling that lets you drive the transaction for operators, programmers and advertisers,” says Art Minnaugh, Senior Business Development Manager, Adobe Primetime.
Understanding audience data consistently cross the customer footprint is key to Charter, says Rob Klippel, SVP Advanced Ads and Strategy at Charter. “That’s the foundation to everything we try to do. For us, that’s to drive capabilities to let us become more efficient marketing partners for our advertisers, to turn around media campaigns and media plans, and to help them accomplish their goals and have the data to prove that out.”
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>What becomes clear from the mix of agency, marketer and media company panelists at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016 is that technology really hasn’t made the budget allocation process any easier, and that the Upfront period of forward spending commitments not only endures but is spreading to digital as well.
Asked for his thoughts on the move from agency to client by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink, MasterCard’s Ben Jankowski—who spent 28 years in the agency world—says “It’s more different than I thought it would be.”
What stands out most is the amount of time that Jankowski, who is SVP of Media, has to spend thinking about AdTech. “I spend probably three times more time than I thought I would on things like ad technology,” says Jankowski. “It’s a colossal amount of time.”
Nonetheless, putting aside the quantitative side of media optimization, Jankowski believes “the cool part of what we’re doing” is applying data and insights around more qualitative factors. This includes “how we can use data to become better story tellers,” Jankowski says.
Jason Baadsgaard, Chief Revenue Officer for video marketing technology company Eyeview, says his clients took Eyeview into addressable TV. “What I do know is the space we created is very powerful, but it’s also very confusing for the buyers out there,” Baadsgaard says. “I think we overemphasize the technology too much, make it too tech driven and the marketing gets lost. Buyers are just very confused.”
In response to a question from Spiegel about budget allocation, Dan Bruinsma, SVP, Director at GroupConnect, says it’s a combination of top-down and bottom-up activity. It begins with setting a clear vision, according to Bruinsma.
“If we’re plotting the future of what we want to accomplish in video, then we compartmentalize it in such a way that it allows us to be very forthright when we go into the market,” says Bruinsma.
On the bottom-up side, while addressable TV “may be important,” Bruinsma says he can’t just indiscriminately decide “go ahead and put $5 million in there. We need to do the work to understand all of the economics associated with the size of the segment and communication goals we want to hit.”
As in many things in life, timing is everything. “Typically we’re still doing a lot of planning and a lot of investment in and around an Upfront, whether it’s a broadcast year or calendar year,” Bruinsma adds.
His comments provide a segue for Spiegel to inquire about the importance of Upfront deals and how marketers should decide how much budget to commitment ahead and how much to hold back.
“It’s really a balancing act. We’re constantly mixing with a lot of different moving parts on that,” says Andrew Deming, SVP of Marketing at Bank of America. “Some years I feel like we actually put a greater importance on the upfront process. Then there are other years where we’re putting less importance on it. Just depends on where we are.”
Twitter is new to the forward spending commitment game, according to Ryan Moore, the platform’s Global Agency Development Head.
“This is the first year where some agencies are actively committing upfront TV dollars to our video products,” Moore says. “That’s an interesting experience where we’ll do year-long contracts based on fixed prices. That was not the twitter world a year ago.”
Deming cites Turner Broadcasting’s audience guarantee deals as a positive sign in the trend away from targeting on age and sex demographics. “These types of insights make me a lot warmer to the idea of laying a higher percentage of the dollars down upfront, because of the fact these tools give you a lot more opportunity to optimize against your audience segments,” Deming says.
“Even if you don’t have that fully designed at the time you lay the money down, if you’re working with a Turner and are able to say we have this shift” in audience segments during a campaign, “we can actually shift the inventory around to align to that. It lowers the risk there,” Deming adds.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>“If you open up that app today, it looks a hell of a lot different” than the typed-character limitation landscape of yore, Ryan Moore, the company’s Global Agency Development Lead, says during a panel discussion during the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016. “It looks like video from marketers. It looks like video from users.”
According to Moore, the amount of videos that were published by Twitter users increased 50% this year, “so the way that we’re communicating these types of platforms is increasingly visual.”
Twitter has largely staked its future on “pulling live television directly onto the phone,” beginning with such content as NFL, NHL and NBA games.
“We’re moving pretty quickly into this world, and I think it’s more and more important that we understand the needs and constraints of this industry as we try to fit into that in a more video-centric way,” Moore says.
Asked by panel moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink why Twitter is the appropriate platform to combine social engagement with live video viewing, Moore explains why Twitter users choose to have it on their phone in the first place.
“When you tap that little bluebird, you tap it because you want to find out what’s happening right now in a world you care about,” says Moore. “It’s the fastest, most personalized and comprehensive source of information that you care about.”
So the natural extension is live video, with the whole experience replacing watching a television while following tweets on a mobile device. “Why don’t we bring those together on one screen?” Moore says.
Asked by Spiegel about marketer uptake to Twitter’s live video offerings, Moore says, “It was a relatively easy sell to bring it to market. Sales have been really strong for all of the partnerships that we’ve launched.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Troiano shared these and other observations during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016.
“We in this space do a disservice to ourselves when we try to apply digital to television,” says Troiano. “We should define come up with our own definition and terms and not try to retrofit television into digital, because it really does a disservice to everything we’re doing.”
Automation and technology are two elements to “making things easy to buy,” according to Troiano, but there’s also an oft forgotten component.
“There’s a people side to this business,” says Troiano. “We’re unearthing local inventory and aggregating it up for a national buy. There’s education, there’s communication, there’s information.”
And then there is transparency into advertising inventory.
“The problem we have is, if you just put everything into a technology discussion and you co-mingle it with digital, you lose the value of the inventory. You lose the actual discussion,” says Troiano.
“Let’s stop talking about automation ands programmatic and talk about what is value and how do we actually help the industry move forward in terms of transparency,” he adds. “What are people buying? What’s the inventory? What’s the value.”
Lastly, there’s scale, without which Troiano says it’s not worth all the effort. He points to Cadent’s direct-sell approach as a key underpinning of the company’s progress since the TelAmerica days.
Back then, 85% of its advertisers back then were direct response, while about 10% to 15% were brand marketers. Today, it’s about 90% national advertisers and 10% direct response.
“It’s because the team has communicated and educated national television buyers of the value of local inventory aggregated up,” says Troiano. “And that would never have happened if all I did was slap a screen in front of them and said you can actually aggregate this just like you do digital.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>For Sorenson Media, which uses data from smart television sets from partners that include Samsung, the main focus is that first screen. “That said, especially when you take an addressable approach, it kind of makes a lot of sense when you serve something on the first screen to follow up on the second screen,” says Stefan Maris, the company’s VP of Product Marketing & Partnerships.
Because Samsung has a device graph, it knows exactly what kind of devices are connected to the television and all the devices in the same household. So it knows the impression level data of exposure in the households and can use it to retarget those same devices.
“Those two worlds are definitely coming together,” Maris says in response to a question from moderator Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Corp. “In our view and our vision, TV is always leading. And then the second screen activation or extension if you like is always on top of that.”
Simulmedia has made big strides in measuring cross-platform exposure through its work with Facebook, showing reach across the social network and TV, according to Jeff Storan. Advertisers get a unified view of the audience they’re targeting on Facebook and how they’re reaching it with TV ads.
“For TV networks, they also get to see how those two mediums are working together to convert audiences to tune into their programming,” says Storan, who is Simulmedia’s VP of Marketing.
Device graphs and various data sets are fine for Joan Fitzgerald, VP of Product Management & Business Development at TiVo. “But then you have to build in a lot of custom targets and first-party targets, and I think that’s where things just slow down a little bit,” she says.
Noting that an unduplicated reach curve isn’t about to happen, Swartz asks about the limits of set-top box data in cross-platform planning. Does one just keep overlapping data sets “until you go from approachable audience with a net of two million to five moms in Duluth?” she says.
“I think creating more and larger single-source panels for the purpose of cross-media measurement is the path we have to take,” says Storen.
The reality is that advertisers are tracking against both age/gender targets and other targets defined by external data, according to Fitzgerald.
“We’re in this transition period,” she says. “You’re looking at the performance of that audience target over time and you’re experiencing the benefits of doing this kind of media planning optimization,” adds Fitzgerald. “But you’re delivering on both of these targets.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Mediaocean, whose software helps advertisers automate their operations, acquired INVISION, a peer whose technology helps TV companies do the same.
It was the fourth acquisition by Mediaocean since itself being acquired by Vista Equity Partners in August 2015. So, why did the New York-based company do the deal?
“We’re building converged future media systems,” Mediaocean partner management VP Cordie DePascale tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Everything we have done is about getting the buy and the sell side to work better in a converged ecosystem.
“We need to have sell-side solutions that can fit in with our strategy. Invasion was a company we saw fitting in to the strategy. Having the buy side’s great, we need to be able to talk to the sell side. Let’s acquire a company that has really great foothold in that direction.”
Mediaocean claims its software is used by 80,000 people across agencies, advertisers, broadcasters and publishers, powering some $125m in media spend. The move represents Mediaocean branching out to cater to both sides of the industry, and buying further in to TV workflow automation.
But DePascale says uniting the two sides in a common system doesn’t mean “gaming” anything – he says both constituencies deserve efficiencies.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
]]>That’s according to one ad-tech exec who spends his life talking with brands about the changing nature of their work.
“Used to be, marketing was perceived as a cost center and the primary mission was to build brand – called ‘the brand thesis of marketing’,” Jason Baadsgaard, chief revenue officer at video ad technology firm Eyeview Digital, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“What’s been happening is they’re increasingly being asked to invest marketing dollars to drive top-line sales – the ‘investment thesis of marketing’, and they’re much more invested in driving the outcomes.”
What does this boil down to? Historically, brands have been satisfied to use TV, and its large, mass reach, to address broad audiences, happy to consider that TV ads raise the profile of brands at customers’ early point of purchase consideration.
But now that TV is turning in to connected internet video, more is possible. Eyeview Digital commits to guaranteed sales returns for the video ads it helps brands place.
“As we’ve talked to marketers and done surveys, the brand thesis has always been number one,” Baadsgaard adds.
“But it’s poised in the next year or two to become number two behind driving sales. So there’s a tremendous need for solutions in market to drive sales. It’s the number one thing marketers care about.”
Earlier this year, Eyeview took a $21.5m investment to further invest in its sales, marketing, and engineering efforts.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by MediaLink marketing and technology solutions MD Matt Spiegel.
]]>But, by and large, just like connected TV itself, they depend on boxes, dongles, consoles or widgets connected to a television set.
What if you could do dynamic ad replacement in the TV itself?
That’s what Sorenson Media, a broadcast technology support vendor with a range of services, is aiming to help TV manufacturers do.
Product marketing VP Stefan Maris explains: We engage with companies like Samsung, LG, and Vizio. At this point, we are in integration mode with Samsung.
“Next year in Q2, we’re going to start field tests on the dynamic ad replacement, and we target to have a full commercial at least in Q3 next year.
“So if you looked at the overall footprint of Samsung, by the end of 2017, we’ll be looking at 50 million internet-connected smart TVs of which 28 million are in the US and 22 million are in Europe. Of the 28 million in the US, roughly 50% will be available upon launch.”
Sorenson was founded by Utah businessman Jim Sorenson, is led by CEO Marcus Liassides and numbers execs from Cardiff’s former on-demand pioneer Yes TV. Maris was previously with Philips and its Civolution unit, which performs broadcast tracking and automated content recognition.
He says Sorenson boasts partnerships with the US’ Hearst and Sinclair TV groups to replace ads ad certain times of day, targeted using data held about viewers, including via Neustar and Experian. He hopes SMG and Modi Media will show interest in buying the inventory.
Sorenson also offers real-time analytics of viewing behavior inside connected TVs, including analyzing which show promos yielded viewing uplift.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
]]>But in that reach also lays inefficiency. If TV ads reach consumers who can’t even access the buyers’ services, that’s wastage. But new-wave TV-buying techniques, infused with data, can help the problem.
“I live in Manhattan,” Videa sales and marketing VP Archie Gianunzio tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Every time I’m watching cable TV and it goes to break, in every pod there’s a Sonic commercial.
“The closest Sonic to me is 34 miles away and I am not going to take a bus to a train to a cab to go get a corndog at Sonic. And yet, they’re advertising on network cable.”
Gianunzio wants to solve that conundrum. Videa uses automation software to aggregate local TV ad inventory to be more sellable to a marketplace.
Videa’s private marketplace provides stations, agencies and brands with a simplified way to sell and buy local television station inventory at scale.
“Whereas, on a national buy, you can find the pockets that meet any criteria, on a local buy. in a local market, you might not find enough people that meet your criteria for it to be worth it in that market,” Gianunzio adds.
“The spot TV stations are sort of the last ones to get called up to the buffet, where national goes first. Now digital is getting a much faster look at a buyer’s budget than is spot TV.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
]]>It makes consumers schizophrenic. In other words, they have multiple identities, scattered across services. And that is a targeting nightmare.
But many advertising technology vendors are now promising to solve the problem, and Experian sees the pain easing in the new year.
“Linkage is the connection of customer data and partner data in order to identify a segment for use in targeted media – whether that is using name and address data, IP address data, cookie data, email addresses, mobile data, we can take all of those things and resolve them to an ID,” says Experian TV partnerships director Brad Danaher, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It is a key cog in the wheel that makes all of this go. It’s getting more advanced all the time. Marketers are getting much more savvy about the measurement they want around targeted TV.”
Experian began helping advertisers perform advanced TV targeting with Comcast back in 2007.
“A lot of people don’t know all that can be done,” Danager adds. “The word is getting out – they say], ‘Oh, I can link that to geolocation data so I can see that TV drove someone to a retail location’, which helps prove the value of TV, even if the sale didn’t occur. That’s something we can tell people now.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
]]>That transition is “about three or five or seven percent of the way there,” the Chief Research Officer of Omnicom Media Group opines during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016.
Steuer recalls that when he started in the media business, data availability was a major obstacle. “And in particular, the combination of what I would call small data, the data that lets us understand how individuals are using a bunch of different media devices across the day, with what’s now big data,” Steuer explains.
He defines big data as “the device-level data that’s giving us very precise mounds of data that’s hard to connect together because you can’t connect it across the different platforms.”
Even though the industry is on the path to rationalizing the data piece, “The supply side plumbing is what’s missing to get us all the way to the IP-based, highly targetable, very audience-based future of television,” Steuer says.
Then he shifts to a food metaphor to address the combination of highly targetable and broad reach options available today.
“The problem of today is figuring out what’s the food pyramid of TV circa 2016, 2017 where I can have a balanced diet of my addressable as a sometimes food and still deal with the broad reach,” says Steuer.
He notes that clients like McDonald’s want to say something to everybody, but “what they say to different groups is something advanced television can help them to get to in a more and more focused way.”
Panel moderator Tim Hanlon, Founder & CEO of The Vertere Group, asks Steuer whether traditional media agencies, with their broad-based approach to marketing and media, are up to the task of becoming more data driven.
By way of response, Steuer says client wins of AT&T and Procter & Gamble by Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency were rooted in the belief that “data is a key ingredient of the full stack, all the way from how do you inform building the right creative plan and the right messages all the way through to how do you target and measure it.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Back in 2006, when Comcast first debuted addressable ads in Huntsville, Alabama, the media world was analog only. “Trying to launch a digital-like solution like addressable on the back of an analog architecture was a little like pushing a string,” Ward says during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016.
Now Ward is Group Vice President of Comcast 360 Media, which helps advertisers manage digital convergence across the full scope of Comcast’s multi-platform media properties. His dry humor on full display during an interview by moderator Tim Hanlon of The Vertere Group, Ward says there was “a fair degree of separation of church and state” between the advertising and distribution business inside Comcast.
“I remember being at an investor conference where Brian Roberts was speaking not long after I joined the company,” Ward recalls. “He said ‘well, we’re really not in the ad business.’ And I said wow this was a bad career choice on my part.”
That was because advertising was the tail on a $40 billion distribution dog. Then came Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal, wherein advertising became the second largest standalone business behind residential video.
Now a major priority is monetizing a vast amount of inventory across more than five dozen networks.
“I’m going to make up a number, but these numbers aren’t far off,” Ward says by way of explanation, adding that “forty percent of our sellable impressions represent ten percent of our revenue, give or take.”
The disparity is due to a lack of data “to help sell and monetize that long-tail inventory,” Ward says. “So that’s one clear opportunity for us.”
Another opportunity is for Comcast, which is largely rooted in the spot TV marketplace, to compete for national direct marketing budgets “by applying that same data and distribution,” according to Ward.
Asked by Hanlon about the need for programmers and distributors to do more collaborating so as to expand the addressable marketplace, Ward offers the analogy of when Procter & Gamble and Walmart “were at loggerheads” until they came to realize “wait a minute, if we work together we can compete more effectively with Amazon.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>But “addressable TV” is about to go large, and it’s time to start spending to meet the opportunity, according to one man whose company is helping brands come aboard.
“Through this year, maybe a third of US households are addressable,” according to Neustar’s business development director Lock Dethero. “Next year, we could be to 60% of US households, given some new TV providers that are becoming available and some other smart TV sources.
“Now’s the time to do tests. If an advertiser has not applied their CRM data or tried addressable TV to figure out where it fits in to their overall mix, they should do a test, with at least one of these TV providers, with some reasonable spend.
“If they’ve been doing it for a while, it’s time to double down, to work with greater scale next year.
Recent estimates of the number of addressable US TV households count about 45m properties. We have heard from plenty of ad industry folk who appreciate the long, slow progress – but who now say the technology needs to gain a wider footprint.
Dethero’s Neustar is an ad-tech company offering data management platform, customer data intelligence, marketing analytics, activation, compliance solutions and fraud detection. “The point is scale,” he says.
But Dethero cautions against conflating addressable and programmatic TV. “A lot of people who are focused on digital advertising hear the word ‘programmatic’… we talk about it in television… we use it too much,” he says.
“People think, ‘I’ll start doing addressable TV when I know it’’s fully automated’. Well, it’s not going to be fully automated any time soon. But the people know what they’re doing.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
]]>This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.
To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. “These are three very distinct and different tools,” observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. “They are not currently easily melded together. That’s where we have to go.”
Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it “might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space,” a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. “On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn’t the right approach,” said Bologna.
Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. “This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects,” said Bokor. “And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it.”
But there’s still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn’t going away anytime soon.
“There’s always going to be that top of the funnel and there’s always going to be the mass GRP’s being pushed there,” said Bologna. “But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it.”
Added Mantel, “It’s finding the balance” and for advertisers “not caring where your airing but who you’re reaching and that you’re reaching the right person.”
Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. “It’s absolutely both. There’s nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics.”
Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. “The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient,” Bokor said. “We have a marketplace that doesn’t truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme.”
Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in “all hell is going to break loose” because the CPM’s could skyrocket.
“I want a holistic marketplace so that it’s not just about TV,” said Bokor. “I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I’m paying for and I might be willing to pay more.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>“We definitely have a perspective that eventually everything is going to go IP,” says Brian Jankovsky, Director of Entertainment & Sports Partnerships at Google, during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016. “It’s going to take some time.”
Jankovsky calls enabling programmers to better connect with viewers “really our core DNA” before citing two examples. Google recently began ingesting TV schedules that show up in organic searches. And it will “eventually roll out” a feature that give programmers more control on where they drive users who through search end up on a particular TV program’s landing page.
On the content distribution side, in addition to Play and Android TV Google is “investing a ton in the cloud,” says Jankovsky. He cites the company’s acquisition of Envato, which TechCrunch reports is a platform for encoding, editing, publishing and distribution video across platforms.
DoubleClick is the prime source of Google’s monetization efforts, according to Jankovsky. Two big areas of activity are user experience and dynamic ad insertion for “true one-to-one addressability of linear signals” delivered via IP, along with a major emphasis on programmatic.
“That feels a lot like mobile felt five, six years ago,” Jankovsky says of programmatic. “It’s coming together. We’re seeing more adoption on those screens.”
Asked by panel moderator Tim Hanlon of The Vertere Group to explain the value Google provides while “selling into the ecosystem,” and whether Google will be a means of simply re-aggregating lost audiences as defined by Nielsen ratings, Jankovsky offers a neutral response.
“I think as an ad tech player in an open ecosystem, we have to support whatever currency the buy and sell side wants to use,” Jankovsky says. “There is some data that we think we can lend to the conversation. Like brand attribution through search.
“Where we can make a real difference is on the programmatic platform. That’s true one-to-one targeting and as the signals get better I think that’s only going to get more precise.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>During a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016, Gupta explains the 4C product suite, which includes activation on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter as well as TV-synced ads across digital display, mobile, search, social and video.
“We have figured out, by looking at each and every platform that we’re integrated with, the right metrics and have the whole closed-loop optimization kind of built in,” he says in response to a question from moderator Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.
4C Insights doesn’t want to be known as just another data provider, according to Gupta. “For us, it’s about connecting data and activation. Those two things happen side by side,” Gupta says.
The company also provides advertising and content analytics leveraging its Teletrax global TV monitoring network and proprietary social affinity database.
Mixpo developed a modern enterprise cloud platform to help media companies, advertisers and agencies run advertising campaigns, with an emphasis on the proper creative elements. “I absolutely believe that as ad tech and marketing tech com together, and you think about what the challenges and opportunities are for marketers, targeting and creative go hand in hand,” Gupta says.
Asked whether there are specific winning formulas for specific social media platforms, Gupta says, “There are so many different things. Direct response campaigns. Direct mapping to conversion versus branding campaigns. There’s no one answer to that.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Prompted by panel moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., to reflect on the transformation of Comcast over the last several years, Smith, who is SVP of Comcast Media 360, invokes the fictional Philadelphia-based company Kabletown.
“When you look at the legacy cable company created by Ralph Roberts, which was parodied on a show called 30 Rock, which is on a network we owned, and you look at where it is today, the way we look at it is in the eyes of the customer and certainly the advertiser,” Smith says.
He goes on to cite the “radical evolution of measurement” from C3 and its innumerable permutations along with the many choices consumers have for viewing video content. “I think it’s constantly evolving, but the one thing that we really do focus on and we have to be cause it’s competitive is the consumer experience,” says Smith.
When he mentions addressable TV advertising, Smith puts it into a larger perspective. “I’m so glad you’re taking this beyond just addressable,” Smith says. “I think addressable is a tactic. It’s part of a plan. It’s evolving. We’re all learning.”
While specialist companies like GroupM’s Modi Media are “very advanced” in the addressable TV space, “others are getting up to par,” according to Smith.
He then acknowledges the benefits of addressable TV for providing more accountability for advertising spending, in the process offering a caveat that’s close to home at Comcast.
“And for us, we want to do that,” Smith says of addressable. “But we’re a big advertiser. We spend a significant amount of money. So we want to use it too. But it’s all in the context of our overall media plan and the tactics that we deploy.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
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