At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:

• Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
• Michael Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp
• Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee

Chicken or egg?

Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.

“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.

“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”

Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

Agencies not on the same page

As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.

“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.

“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.

“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”

Is measurement to blame?

VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.

“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.

“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Grunther says that EDO is focused on how to capture the moment of impact for an ad, and specifically how to capture impact at the middle of the funnel.

“Everyone was at the top and hopped right to the bottom and attribution is terrific,” Grunther says. “But there is the ability in the middle of that funnel to capture impact when viewers are engaged and want to take an action. How do you capture that?”

The way he thinks of impact right now is the moment in which the viewer moves from passive to active. There’s exposure, attention, engagement and outcome, all of which are important and all are different measures of impact, but ignoring the middle-funnel metrics would mean losing out on a lot of key insights.

Part of finding a measurement that could be currency-grade requires thinking about scale. For the TV industry, this means being able to measure a small program on a cable network the same way that we measure a huge tentpole event like the Super Bowl.

“It’s basically being able to apply measurements and metrics to the entirety of programming regardless of how large or small the audience is,” Grunther says.

Reaching scale may be a huge step, but Grunther doesn’t necessarily believe that it will make the transacting process seamless. The buy side will look for accountability and proof of performance. Sellers, on the other hand, don’t want to guarantee anything that they don’t have to.

“In there lies this sort of conundrum and that is if you’re guaranteeing on outcomes or impact or other forms of effectiveness, it’s going to come down to what’s in it for both sides that is valuable for both,” Grunther says. “So I think we can get there, but ultimately the sellers are going to have to feel enough pressure from the buyers to basically adjust the way that they guarantee deals or conduct business.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

“We’re a provider of data. What we see is an interesting confusion in the market around what attribution means. People think it means something different for them – conflating the notion of ROI and incrementality with attribution,” he says.

What Brothers advises is that advertisers map out everything that happened along the way to conversion or a sale, but keep in mind that it’s all correlative. The tendency is to isolate measurements and measure by independent variables, but focusing on causality is key to understanding what to do next time and what to optimize.

“Digital has been there for a long time, and TV is starting to get there,” Brother says. “That’s the set up for the notion of the confusion.”

In discussion with advertisers, Brothers says that there’s a common theme of wanting to shift away from demographic-based, mass reach ad buying toward finding the right audience. “The right audience is an option to attack. The right buyer is worth the added price as part of the CPM,” he says. The two best indicators that a buy is right is targeting previous customers and people who fall into the same category as previous buyers.

“Getting away from mass reach to the right buyer to drive success in causality is where things are tending to move,” Brothers says.

With more ways to reach people, Brothers says that the common goal will be figuring out what creative and what platform prompted the sale – that’s attribution.

“That’s going to be very, very important,” he says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.

Last month in Puerto Rico, at the Beet.TV executive retreat, we spoke about endemic child poverty  on the island and what can be done.   We presented a fireside chat with  Olga Ramos, the president of the 52-year old Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.  She was interviewed by Jose Cancela, President and General Manager of Telemundo Puerto Rico.

Below is Olga’s update today on the Boys & Girls Clubs during the pandemic.   If you can make a contribution, please do.  There are so many in need.

Last month at the Beet.TV executive retreat, we interviewed Tubi CRO Mark Rotblat about the company.  We have republished the interview and story with today’s news:

It may be a fundamentally different business model, but there is one thing advertiser-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) services have in common with their subscription (SVOD) siblings – the importance of the content catalog.

Still, that fact does not give Mark Rotblat sleepless nights.

The chief revenue officer of Tubi, a growing AVOD service, says his company is confident about its catalog.

“We work with the largest studios, pretty much all the main studios and networks out there – Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, et cetera. A&E, AMC – and so we work with over. I think. now 250 content providers,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We are just getting more better content month over month. We’re (at) over 20,000 titles. And, while there’s a lot in the market about the Friends and the Seinfelds and those things being locked up for hundreds of millions of dollars, that’s not our focus or our concern because there still is something like over 700,000 titles out there in the market, and we want to provide access to that.

“The studios want services like Tubi to provide access to that and to make money from that.”

Something seems to be working. Rotblat shared December Tubi stats:

• 25 million monthly active users (up from 20 million in June).
• 163 million hours viewed in the month (160% year-on-year).

Here is the company’s press release on growth disclosed today.

A free app for a service that doesn’t require subscriptions, Tubi sells adds through both programmatic partner channels and direct to agencies and marketers.

Tubi pulled out of Europe, citing GDPR non-compliance, but plans to relaunch, including growing its 229-employee headcount overseas.

Rotblat was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The complicated bit? Measuring your campaign holistically, when every platform is like an island.

In this recorded interview session, Robert Bareuther, SVP of business development at iSpot.tv, says advertisers are asking for unification.

“They’re all saying how hard it is to measure it,” he said.

“Measurements come up multiple times. And my sense is that everybody thinks we need better single source measurement covering TV/OTT/streaming services on connected televisions and other devices.”

iSpot.TV, which offers measurement, attribution and technical services, takes viewing data from Inscape, the subsidiary of TV maker Vizio that uses automated content recognition (ACR) to capture audiences’ real viewing behavior.

“We built a company over seven years that in real time syndicated, basis tracks all national ads for all brands, shows, dayparts, network spend, et cetera,” Bareuther added, “to have this baseline of ad buying, and then measure business outcomes, measure various KPIs.”

On March 18, iSpot.tv holds its “Pre-fronts“, an event at which brands, agencies, publishers and tech platforms will discuss the future of data-driven TV measurement.

The session was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Caroline Horner says she is used to hearing openness from people in the internet industry, who will say ”

“I’m going to put the data out there because it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to evolve the place”, “What if we try this?” and “Can we do this?”

The SVP of products for ad-tech firm 605 understands the reluctance.

But she thinks computing power – plus a little cajoling – can help ad buyers to see the benefits.

“We listen really hard on what the issues people have with their data,” she says. “What they’re willing to do and what they’re not willing to do. Then you go with what they’re willing to do, and you start there.

“Things like AWS (Amazon Web Services), a lot of the ability to use computing power at this point … whereas we had a lot of technology and advancements through the years, we only had certain data structures and sizes and the servers could only handle so much.

“Now, we can get to an existence where everything can be calculated on the fly. That means all these data sources can relate to each other very quickly and have all those permissions. ”

The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Those were some of the questions being asked at the recent Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, when Julian Zilberbrand stepped up.

Zilberbrand, EVP of audience science at Viacom, was asked by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz about marketplaces.

“Marketplace is very important,” he said. “We were a founding member of OpenAP. We probably do more advanced TV than most because we believe in what it is and we believe in and how to make that work, and we believe that that’s a value for the market.

“Within the structure of that, we think that it makes sense to kind of create multiple opportunities for different ways to kind of invest with us. If you want to invest with us traditionally, we’re more than happy to do that. If you want to invest with us in advanced way with data at the centre, we’re more than happy to do that as well.”

Zilberbrand went on to describe multiple “variations” of marketplace.

The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Google has declared it will phase out all third-party cookies – the tiny, user-side files that store information – from its Chrome browser by 2022.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Xandr corporate strategy director Allison Paley describes the consequences.

“Top of mind is data and measurement,” she says. “Data, obviously with CCPA over here and GDPR in Europe. It’s hard and it’s a really meaty problem that everybody needs to come together to solve within the industry.

“And understanding how we do that and how we share data and create a universal ID with the cookie crumbling, it’s a big question that we need to answer.”

Ad-tech vendors have been racing to tout alternative technologies that rely on consumer opt-ins but which also allow parties to share and pool consumer data.

Whilst that may seem against the spirit of the new privacy regulations, they argue that such uses are permitted.

This month, Xandr announced that AMC Networks, WarnerMedia and Walt Disney would use its Xandr Invest buying platform, which allows advertisers to define audience segments to be reached through their TV programming.

Variety reports that those three networks joining Xandr’s Invest “sets up a battle of sorts”, with NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Forx Corp and Univision part of the OpenAP consortium for audience buying.

The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But that is all set to change. US addressable TV is going national.

In a session dubbed Addressable for National & Linear: Solving the Problems, panelists at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 discussed that prospect:

• Kelly Abcarian, GM, Advanced Video Advertising, Nielsen
• David Porter, VP, Ad Innovation, WarnerMedia
• Julian Zilbebrand, EVP, Audience Science, ViacomCBS

A watershed for targeted TV

It was kicked off by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media and a veteran of early addressable TV infrastructure initiatives.

“I literally have goosebumps at this idea,” she said. “Sixty million households have addressable capabilities, some through DirecTV and DISH and Comcast and so on.

“But it still only amounts to 3% of the inventory because it’s sitting on the two minutes (per hour of ad inventory that TV networks allow cable and satellite operators to sell in their live feeds).

“So, one of the things that we’re going to see in 2020 … is lighting up the smart TVs, which could take us from 3% to my estimation of 21%.”

The expansion, she said, is being driven by initiatives like Inscape’s Project OAR and Nielsen’s acquisition of Sorenson Media, plus the application of software from vendors like INVIDI and FreeWheel to a wider, national set of inventory – something which could make as much as 35% of inventory addressable, she said.

Start at the bottom

WarnerMedia’s David Porter said he won’t be putting WarnerMedia’s best content in to addressable bucket just yet, and not in the upcoming 2020 upfront ad sales season.

“While the technology … is getting better, it’s still not perfect and we want to make sure it is perfect,” he said.

“When we begin our technology pilots this summer, it will not be on a primetime inventory, it will not be on our sports inventory.

“We are going to find some lower-viewed inventory. We’re going to take one unit and we’re going to convert it on one network, and we’re going to test that.

“And then we’re going to test it on another network and another network, and then we’re going to start converting multiple networks per day and then multiple units per day, multiple units per hour. So we’re going to grow it very, very slowly.

Set-top box data

Nielsen’s Abcarian said future TV measurement will need to combine specific data straight from connected devices with audience panels.

Scheppach said “measurement” would come to include attributes about a person and a home, augmented with automatic content recognition (ACR) like that from Nielsen’s Gracenote, which can identify real viewing behavior from digital fingerprints. Abcarian replied: “And set-top box data.”

Abcarian agreed that panels and big data would go hand-in-hand.

Nielsen is working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year, following its acquisitions of Sorenson Media and Gracenote, and spent “gruelling 11 months of integrating different companies, different cultures, different technology”, according to Abcarian.

Critical mass next year?

But, the pathway for scale is being laid, panelists didn’t believe it would be in place during 2020.

“It’s progression (this year), because I don’t think we’re going to reach critical mass,” said WarnerMedia’s Porter. “I don’t see critical mass in 2020. I see it in 2021.

“But I want to get to 50 million, and I believe that we can aggregate all of these different distribution endpoints to get to 50 to 60 million by 2021.

“I do think we’re going to have some buyer education. We’re going to have to talk to a lot of agencies to understand how they want to leverage it.”

The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But how are advertisers adapting to the palette of options presented by OTT (over-the-top) and connected TV delivery?

In a panel called “Buy-Side Perspectives – The Big Asks” at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, four industry executives described how they see ad buyers adjusting:

• Julie Anson, Director of Strategic Investment, Advanced TV, MAGNA Global
• Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C
• Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Verizon Media
• Sean Robertson, head of partnerships, DISH Media

Advertisers don’t know what they’re asking

Magna Global’s Anson said, when ad buyers make requests, “they don’t actually, they don’t know they’re asking for advanced TV”.

“First thing is, ‘I know I can get audiences, but I don’t really know how or why’,” she said.

“Second is OTT – they just know that there is a thing called OTT, they know they need to start spending there. And the number one thing that I get asked is, ‘What is the actual de-duplication between the offerings, between the Tubi, the Xumo, the Pluto? They may each have 20 million uniques per month, but how much of that is a crossover?’

“The third thing is probably putting it all together and that’s incremental reach. That is a big focus these days.”

Making OTT clear

DISH Media’s Sean Robertson said his company tries to clearly explain to ad buyers the over-the-top TV opportunity.

“The first thing is education and clarity in the marketplace about what offering should be utilised to solve what problems,” he said.

“When we enter the marketplace, we take a stance of ‘Let’s be very clear about what addressable is’.

“We talk about what OTT is and what our offering does and the skinny bundle versus the other competitors. We think that education in the marketplace helps us all. It truly is trying to raise all boats with the tide.”

Help advertisers target

Verizon Media’s Brett Hurwitz said ad buyers often “have a confused perception of what target they should really be using”.

“Fortunately, addressable television lets them kind of learn from their mistakes,” he said.

“For those that are really embracing it most fully, I think they’re looking to remove friction. They’re looking to bring down the walls and be able to have simplicity in the way that they’re achieving total reach.

“The process for (buying) a linear addressable (ad) is a lot more complicated than an ad in the traditional linear piece. And so I think we as an industry need to look toward simplification.”

The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

That is according to an ad-tech boss whose platform is facilitating some of the deals.

John Hoctor is president of Data + Math, a company that maps consumer behavior like purchases, store visits and app downloads to TV ads.  It is now fully owned by LiveRamp.

“Going into this upfront season, we’re very, very busy,” Hoctor says. “There’s forward-thinking marketers working with us in partnership with some of the biggest cable and broadcast networks to set benchmarks and baselines so that they can actually transact.

“They’re partnering. They’re working together. They’re setting benchmarks. It’s like a cooperation. People talk about ‘currency’ – if both sides are using the same dataset and they both understand the models, they can create a currency between them for that particular buy.”

Hoctor means that the price of ads is being set upfront because advertisers now are armed with evidence of ads’ effectiveness.

The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Now, after many early attempts, finally addressable TV is reaching scale.

But just how advanced is the infrastructure behind “advanced TV”?

In a Beet Retreat panel, Addressable Tech: Next-Gen Solutions: Fixing the Plumbing, three industry executives were asked that question.

• Chris Curley, Partner Lead, Google
• Adam Lowy, Chief Commercial Officer, Telaria
• Jodie McAfee, SVP, Inscape & Project OAR

All agreed that addressable TV capability and viewer scale has grown leaps and bounds since the earliest attempts a decade ago. But the panel also raised concerns that the infrastructure is not nearly as mature as it should be.

Ad delivery takes too long

Telaria’s Adam Lowy said lining up ads to support personalized play-out is not as frictionless as believed.

“In television, you have to send the (ad) spot to the box over the bird, has to sit in the box,” he said. “It takes about three or four days, maybe a week, to acquire (the ad), and then you go ahead and serve it.

“You can call that ‘mature’, I call that ‘we’ve got to move on from that at some point’.”

Addressable needs simplification

Telaria’s Adam Lowy said, right now, selling addressable ads to buyers is too complex.

“When you’re out there selling addressable (ads), it gets into the weeds so fast (that) you’ve essentially lost the sell, you’ve lost the mojo,” he said. “Because you get so into how it works and all the tech about it.

“I think we have to simplify the process and really state what addressable (advertising) is when you’re out there. And I think that is one of the things we need to fix.”

Long way to go

Google’s Chris Curley explained that, relative to digital media, addressable TV still needs to focus on open ecosystems.

“If you want to continue down a path where ads become more meaningful to the user and you can protect the privacy of the user and their wishes, as well as create meaningful measurement across all of these screens so that all of this works well at scale, we have a very long way to go,” he said.

“We need to focus on interoperability. We need to make sure that we’re working together and we’re using open standards in a way that works for everyone.”

Project OAR paddles ahead of Canoe

Project OAR is beginning to issue over-the-top firmware updates to 10 million connected TV sets, to better deliver ads from FreeWheel, Google and Xandr, said the outfit’s Jodie McAfee.

OAR is a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising,

“We’ve also hit our milestones, one of which was to have a live demo at CES, which we did.We actually ran six different demos with members, two of which were live feeds broadcast into the Vizio space at CES.

“We (also) distributed the measurement spec. We will start pushing the solution to Vizio TVs in a firmware update next week. We’re on track to have 10 million TVs live by the upfront.” The discussion took place on February 5.

The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But, he cautions, there’s still a lot of work to be done delivering a seamless and relevant user experience, one that can be measured in a way that ensures impressions aren’t being wasted on ads that are not actually relevant to the end user. 

“Ad sellers want the ability to make sure that the ads that they’re delivering and selling can be more meaningful to the end consumer,” Curley says. 

“Whether that means having an ad based upon a specific data point or based on what content the user is watching, the overall lens of addressability varies based upon who’s selling those ads and the data sets that they have, and how they apply those data sets to their business.”

Privacy is another big issue that Google is paying attention to and Curley notes that while some marketers are very “leaned in” and understand the issues, there are still many who seek his company’s guidance. 

“We feel that everyone needs to start participating in industry standards around privacy, so that as an industry and as an ecosystem, we are all moving together to deliver a compelling ad experience while protecting users privacy,” he notes.

One final observation is that Curley sees the industry moving away from QAM, towards IP enabled devices and IP connections. 

“I think you’re going to see the technology barriers start to break down, which means that we’re now free and open to make the sorts of meaningful business arrangements that will really help this industry move forward.”

Curley was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Advertiser-supported VOD (AVOD) is bringing ad support back on the agenda, even as the rise of pay-for video services brought many to conclude that the era of ad-funding was over.

Amongst the AVOD contenders are Peacock, Xumo, Pluto TV and Tubi.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tubi chief revenue officer Mark Rotblat says AVoD has an attractive complementary place alongside SVoD.

“There’s a lot of room,” he says. “Most of our viewers are Netflix subscribers, I think somewhere around 60%. They typically carry maybe another subscription that they bounce around.

“Maybe they are subscribing to HBO, and then Game of Thrones is over and they move on and then, ‘Oh, we’re going to Showtime’. And they binge something else. And we are the comfort blanket for everything else.”

Tubi carries a library of over 20,000 titles. Amongst recently-disclosed December stats:

• 25 million monthly active users (up from 20 million in June).
• 163 million hours viewed in the month (160% year-on-year).

Whilst the big SVoD services are currently spending big money on titles to entice subscribers, Rotblat says Tubi has a different agenda.

“We think we’re playing a different game,” he says. “We’re not throwing out money, 500 million for Friends. We are there finding the things that are going to keep people engaged.

“We think that’s the most important metric, is total viewing time. It’s about having them find something new, something they love every time they come to the service.”

So, what of Tubi’s ad model? Running just four to six minutes of ads per hour, Tubi may carry more ads than SVoD services, but it compares incredibly well, from a viewer perspective, against traditional TV.

Still, despite being happy with his current line-up, Rotblat thinks AVoD services will likely acquire SVoD’s shows at some point in the future.

“I think you’re going to see some things from some of these services that start to end up on services like Tubi,” he reckons. “There’s libraries that will be under-monetized by staying within the walls of the services that they were initially produced for.”

The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But driving widespread adoption is going to take a culture shift.

So says Kim Norris, VP at Charter’s Spectrum Reach ad sales division.

“First, you have to change culture. And one thing I’ve learned – being a change agent, and a very large company, we have 3,000 employees – just in the advertising group, is (the importance of) changing culture.

“If it’s between culture and change, culture always wins. So I think education is key.

“We embed digital sellers into our local markets. They all come from digital, they help our TV people learn how to speak the language of data.”

Spectrum Reach’s offering includes an app for better campaign planning, a portal for uploading and targeting TV ads and ad inventory across Spectrum News, the news service operating across New York areas.

Whilst Spectrum operates in local markets, Norris thinks its developing expertise in advanced TV capabilities could spread up to larger markets.

“Some of the stuff that we and other companies are doing in local markets could actually help us with how we want to push the national footprint forward,” she adds.

Norris was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hulu director of ad sales research Asaf Davidov complains that differences persist.

“When we’re talking to TV teams versus digital teams, those conversations are still very fragmented,” he says. “I think (the industry likes) to pretend like we’re buying and selling across all of those, and I don’t think that we truly are.

“The way that TV looks at reach and frequency is much different than the way that digital looks at reach and frequency. Different even within digital, video versus social versus display.

“And so, I think there’s a lot of work still to be done to figure out how to connect all of those pieces. ACR (automatic content recognition) data is the first step in being able to kind of connect across all of those platforms, but I think we’re still a little bit a ways away.”

Last year, Hulu launched a new ad format, “Pause Ad“, and claimed to generate 68% increase in brand lift associated with those campaigns.

Whilst Hulu offers an ad-free subscription option, ad-supported viewing remains a major part of its business.

Next up, it wants to offer advertisers certainty.

“We don’t guarantee on reach and frequency today,” Davidov says. “We are working closely with a lot of our measurement partners to figure out how to do that, and working with third-party vendors to be able to do cross-platform de-duplication.”

Davidov was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

There are consumers that engage with ads and marketers and then consumers of the content itself. Vangeli explained that there’s a lot of change happening between different stakeholders, whether it’s with the client and the agency, the agency and the publisher, the publisher and the distributor, and so on.

“There’s a lot of pressure happening,” Vangeli said. “And that’s why right now it just makes so much sense for a pivot to happen in the marketplace where we finally break through. But with that is a lot of complications because there are so many business models and legacy models, multi-billion dollar business models that are in there, and everyone cares about only what’s on either side of them, but it’s an equation that needs to balance out.”

This will ultimately lead to some level of disruption and discomfort, and fragmentation is one part of that. TV viewership has increased over time, but a great percentage of that has transitioned to a non-live linear stream. Consumers don’t realize this fragmentation, they’re simply doing what is convenient, so it’s up to marketers to build around this complexity.

At NBCU, they’re dealing with this complexity in three different ways. They’re producing more content than ever before, they’re rethinking distribution, and they’re building technology that supports all of the fragmentation. For the latter, NBC is now introducing One Platform.

“We’re at this point where we’ve had these different strategies of bringing things together from a structural standpoint, but also technology in the advanced advertising space with our AdSmart portfolio,” Vangeli said. “And so the amalgamation of all of that has unveiled onePlatform where you can have one plan, one optimization, one view, one measurement, and it all comes together for an advertiser.”

Interoperability, or the ability of computer systems to exchange and make use of information, is what’s helping NBCU to be able to accomplish this.

“Everything we’ve been building around that and on top of that has all been with this philosophy that we believe that there needs to be an interoperable ecosystem for television.” Vangeli said. “We’re still TV, so we’re only as good as the collection of the TV partners we have around us. So if that’s the case, in order for this to truly scale for all of us to continue making transacting easier on television, we need to be able to be interoperable.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

That is the view of one software vendor aiming to bring simplicity to a local TV supply chain he says is too complex.

“The biggest problem with local (TV) is it’s historically been too hard to buy (ads),” says Eric Mathewson, CEO and co-founder of WideOrbit. “The (ad) agency has not made money buying local and hence it’s just not that exciting to recommend to your marketer client.

“You should buy more local. It’s very effective because it’s geo-targeted and you buy programmes, so on and so forth – but it’s not been effective to the bottom line of the agency.”

San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.

WideOrbit’s programmatic TV open marketplace lets ad buyers make automated, data-informed offers in more than 1,000 stations and networks.

“With our system, instead of taking 50 (agency) people to buy 70 markets over two weeks in local, four or five people can buy it in a couple of days,” Mathewson adds.

And WideOrbit has scale.

“We’re now live in 93% of TV stations in the US, about a third of cable nets, half of radio, 75% of sports nets,” Mathewson says.

“We’re processing $37 billion in ad spend from order entry through receipt of cash.”

Matthewson was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

In the ‘50s, the industry was trying to prove that TV worked through things like econometric modeling. By the ‘90s, there was a growing over-excitement at the thought that everything could be measured, yet there’s still no full picture.

“There are two reasons why TV attribution is important,” Giacosa said. “One is that we do need to redress that balance, but two, we need to make sure that we don’t do it in a silo.”

Giacosa explained that it’s important to look at the consumer experience as a holistic mix. Attribution must be done but within the context of everything else that the industry does and every experience that the consumer has.

This has become easier in some sense, because there’s no lack of data, but also a bit harder for two reasons. The first is the communal industry lexicon that is used, and the second is the currency.

“We’ve been trading off GRPs and old lexicon for quite some time and we’re quite happy with that,” Giacosa said. “But we need to redress that balance and think about how to take that to not even the future—it’s still years ago at this point that we have to catch ourselves up to get to a place where we have all of that set top box data, all of that connected TV data in one place because at the end of the day TV attribution is not just TV, it’s every video platform.”

There’s a lot of fragmentation across the industry, and in order to help solve it, there has to be a shift in focus on data costs that come with outcomes.

“For me, it’s more about how we connect the dots,” Giacosa said. “How we collaborate as an industry, and make the data more accessible and more palatable for clients and corporates to get to understand that business, because I think it’s all there, it’s just a case of how we break down the walls, how we bring all that together and bring it across different platforms.”

Stitching together a common methodology, lexicon, and currency will be the first step needed to make this happen, and Giacosa said that the industry collectively has the people and resources to make that happen.

A lot of performance advertisers work in small increments, day to day or hour to hour. Brand equity has a huge impact on how fast that works. She cited the success of Peloton in the past several months as an example.

“The impact that social media can have on brand equity and how fast it moves really changes how we think about TV attribution because how the brand is performing has an impact also on how it’s going to perform in terms of the TV attribution and the effect that it’s having on your business,” Giacosa said.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

In this townhall discussion for Beet.TV, Michael Scott, Samsung Ads’ head of brand sales in North America, was asked what role mobile plays in his connected TV offering.

“We’re in the process right now of trying to really understand how to work with our mobile team, both in terms of data as well as in terms of inventory,” Scott says.

“There are some exciting announcements that are coming down the pipe later this year that I’m not at liberty to discuss right now, but I think you’re about to see some additional executions that we’re able to augment.”

Launched back in 2015 as “Samsung Smart TV Advertising”, Samsung Ads, a unit inside the giant Korean electronics manufacturer, tracks what audiences are watching on Samsung Smart TV screens, in order to provide targeting data to marketers.

The business unit is able to understand actual viewing, whether it be linear or OTT, by running automated content recognition (ACR) on Samsung Smart TVs, to identify content that is actually being consumed.

Now it claims to have 60% of the consumers visible via industry-deployed ACR technology, whether they ware watching live TV, VOD or playing a console game – in all, around 220 million connected devices, 45 million TVs in 38 million US homes.

“It’s tough to compete on beautiful screen quality when you walk into any retailer and you see this wall of black glass in front of you,” Scott adds. “That’s where content and services really comes in.”

The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But the emerging focus on “attribution” and “outcomes” doesn’t come as easy as it sounds.

“Data is not sexy,” Hinnant says, in this Beet Retreat townhall interview. “It’s really a tough business. And the more you have, the more that you know that, Hey, there’s more work to be done to clean it up and to make it usable and intelligible in order to make business decisions off of it.

“So there’s a lot of datasets out there, a lot of closed loops, a lot of people coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we have measurement’. But it’s really trying to figure out, ‘How do you decipher that and how do you aggregate it, bring it together so it can be actionable data at a large scale?’

“It’s one thing to do outcome-based measurement. It’s another thing to say, ‘Okay, now I’m going to take that outcome and I’m going to plan and try to optimise off of them’.”

At the same event, 605’s Noah Levine also said much of attribution is a “house of cards” due to insufficient focus on data provenance.

Hinnant was in January promoted to chief revenue officer after working in national ad sales for Comscore.

Comscore merged with TV measurement firm Rentrak in 2016, creating a company with capabilities across both TV and online channels.

Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.

The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But too few brands are doing so, because vested interests and a lack of action stand in the way.

That is according to an industry executive who is urging the supply chain to speed up.

At Beet Retreat, TVSquared president Jo Kinsella: “People are talking, but they’re not taking action.

“We need to figure out a way to play nice, and simplify what the marketer wants.

“The marketer has to win. The platform providers have to win, and we have to do it in a privacy-compliant, secure way.”

TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

“We did a study of 2019, a thousand advertisers using our attribution platform, (they) reduced their cost per response by 41%, and increased their TV spend by 91%,” Kinsella added.

“We come to these conferences and we stand up and we talk and we are all passionate about it, and then we leave and do fuck all. Just take the step. Just to do it. Just take the step. Just do it.”

Kinsella was interviewed by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

“With change, there’s a lot of education,” says Sandra Sareyko, the vp of platform sales, advanced TV and addressable at Simpli.fi, during an on-stage town hall in conversation with Furious Corp founder and CEO Ashley Swartz at the Beet Retreat in San Juan. Investing in the education of its clients when it comes to learning the ropes of programmatic – Simpli.fi has its own educational portal – helps improve the performance of its clients by providing confidence. That then drive Simpli.fi’s business upwards.

As of this conversation, Simpli.fi was running 130,000 campaigns across 4,000 advertisers, with 17,000 OTT campaigns in January with a completion rate of 96%.

At the core of Simpli.fi’s model is privacy and transparency, Sareyko says. “Folks want to know what they are buying and how much they’re paying. We can report at the data point level. We bid, optimize and report at a granular level.”

That’s made the platform prime for local media and businesses. Sareyko says Simpli.fi is the premiere platform for local media groups, and that it recently launched a foot traffic attribution tool for cross-device measurement.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

There are two forces that got the industry to where it is today. One is the promise of digital and how the way that digital optimization has worked has led us down a dangerous path where optimization is about short-term campaigns simply proving that something worked. In turn, the data that is yielded has shown short-term gains and ignored the big picture.

“The data that we buy and use has been focused more on showing short-term gains because they’re easy to show than thinking about how data fits into a broader audience strategy that looks holistically at the whole marketing funnel, the consumer journey, the true inventory optimization,” Steuer said.

The industry is also still operating in a world of measurement that was designed for a TV ecosystem in which there were three TV networks and where rating numbers felt like an accurate representation. Now, this ecosystem has evolved.

Accuracy now comes from counting each atomic exposure, including delivery and and outcomes.

“If you skip that counting step and go directly to the, ‘we’re going to do it on an outcome’, you necessarily sort of collapse the entire conversation into, ‘This campaign did awesome because more people bought beds or beer or subscribed to a newspaper,’” Steuer said.

In order to make this more accessible and more realistic, Steuer explained that it’s about simplification and standardization. The industry has been so fragmented that there is no standard interface or data set or way of looking at outcomes.

“You need a standard underlying data set that everyone can trade on so that instead of worrying about the information gradients around who has what data and who can do what better than the other folks, you can at least look at reach and frequency across everybody,” Steuer said.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.