“The bulk of linear is still bought at a corporate level, so until those buying habits change we’re not going to see too much movement there,” Khan adds in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
WideOrbit has long provided the foundational piping for local TV broadcast transactions. After several acquisitions of digital assets, its programmatic solution now consists of four “flavors,” according to Khan. They are programmatic direct and private marketplace, which are “more akin to your traditional buying RFP’s” for guaranteed inventory that can be bought one year out.
“Then we have open marketplace and direct response, more akin to your open RTB protocol” in which spots can be purchased in real time anywhere from two to seven days out.
Meanwhile, on the demand side, WideOrbit engages with brands directly, “we do work with the DSPs, and we service our core SSP client needs in that we provide the channel for direct sold.”
Khan mentions WideOrbit’s 2017 partnership with Google, in which WideOrbit integrated with DoubleClick to allow ad buyers to buy broadcast TV spots from the same interface they use to secure digital display and video campaigns.
“We continue to see increased volume through that channel. We work with a number of DSP’s as well, and again we continue to see increased volumes coming through those demand channels,” says Khan.
To advance the convergence of digital and linear media, WideOrbit has developed different tool sets. “We are helping with the data and the targeting through our programmatic platforms. “Brands don’t necessarily always want to target a specific audience. They like the shotgun approach of linear. It helps with their brand building, and obviously it’s the safety that goes along with that as well.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>AT&T used a local meteorologist/social influencer to help inform and people prepare for the hurricane, while providing journalists with free WiFi data cards afterward and using satellite television programming time to inform children sidelined by school shutdowns. P&G provided free mobile laundry services so that people had clean clothes to wear. Telemundo took to using a live Facebook feed to communicate news developments while hosting gatherings of friends and competitors alike in the industry.
Beet.TV’s efforts to galvanize support for Puerto Rico relief efforts continue on February 5 at Xandr/AT&T in Manhattan. Accompanied by advertising and media executives, the program will explore fund-raising and other charitable initiatives to further support the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.
“The media landscape was basically starting over again,” Andres Claudio, MD of Hearts & Science/Omnicom, Puerto Rico, said during a Beet Retreat session titled Puerto Rico Media Transformed by Hurricane Maria and moderated by former GroupM executive Phil Cowdell. “Imagine in New York City if you have no power, no signals, no cell phones, nothing. At least you have another state around you.”
While brands have a responsibility to understand consumer needs, “we have a social responsibility” as well, said Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director, USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility. In the case of Maria, that responsibility started with the mobile service company helping people prepare for what lay ahead. AT&T leveraged the effort by using a local meteorologist who had a substantial social media following.
“What we did not expect, besides the fact of what happened after the hurricane, was that influencer became the top trending person within all possible influencers,” said Burgos.
“Basically we were in the dark ages” in terms of the ability to communicate through everyday media, with the exception of AM radio, said Freddie Hernandez, Site Leader, P&G Puerto Rico. When the company saw images of people washing their clothes in rivers and other waterways, P&G knew it had to do something.
“There’s a lot of health issues related to using non-purified water to clean your clothes,” said Hernandez. And while P&G had learned from such U.S. natural disasters as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, it had no logistical way to bring its Tide Loads of Hope community service from the mainland. “We decided to create our own asset” in the form of a Coach bus transformed into a laundromat with 12 combo units of washing and drying machines that assisted more than 2,000 families.
“It’s incredible the reaction of the people,” said Hernandez. “You take for granted what you have. People were just crying when they would see the bus getting to a town and people would be wearing clean clothes for the first time in about three weeks.”
Telemundo had been broadcasting “all the way up to the storm” but was forced to shut down early on the first morning that Maria made landfall, according to Jose Cancela, President of Telemundo/NBCU Puerto Rico. “When we cranked back up we were really broadcasting to the States because there was no power here. Whatever cell phone probably you had you probably used it up,” said Cancela. Reporting news live via Facebook was “for four days how we were broadcasting. Radio became the media of the day for a number of months.”
From the onset of Maria, advertising and media competitors pulled together, initially using Telemundo as a base for meetings. Meanwhile, Cancela credited Nielsen for doing “a great job in bringing their panel back on track. Without that measurement, our currency was zero and it wasn’t until May of this year that they were finally able to bring it on track. But during the whole process, they really kept the broadcast community and the agency community very much informed in getting their panel back up.”
One exception to media outages was satellite TV for those fortunate to have a source of electricity, said Burgos. Since all schools were either shut down, destroyed or being used for community services, “we had children at home doing nothing, so there was a need to educate or entertain those children.”
So AT&T organized a tour of education professionals under the auspices of DirecTV and used programming time to provide useful content to kids in 10 different towns. “They were dying for information,” Burgos said.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.
That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.
A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…
The big reduction that wasn’t
The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”
Peacock’s cut is coming
Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”
Linear is hard to change
Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…
Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:
“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.
Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:
“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”
Tech can solve for excess
If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”
Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:
“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”
Viewers are revolting
Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:
“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”
Re-think the ad unit
Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:
“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”
Proof of the pudding
Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…
Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:
“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>So why are so many advertisers either spending so little or using addressable for a different purpose?
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat, a cast of “millennial”-aged companies assembled to discuss issues affecting the pace of roll-out of future TV advertising – and what advertisers really want it for…
Scale before sale?
The panel heard that what ad buyers really want is audience scale. This may seem to go against the inherent promise of addressable TV, which can make an audience far smaller but also far more relevant…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“There’s a lot of great data sets out in the marketplace. There’s 199 million homes. Get to half, you really have something. And then the strategy and the media planners will start funding that at a much, much higher rate than it does now.”
When scale fails
Today, connected TV even seems to mitigate against large-scale campaigns. One ad-tech exec said the promises aren’t quite living up to results achieved in limited trials – perhaps one reason so much advertiser spending in OTT is still considered “test-and-learn”…
Hardeep Bindra, Managing Director of Product, Sizmek:
“The general expectation from our digital-first customers is as we expand to CTV, OTT – and then adventuring to addressable and linear – is that we will continue that same (performance) approach in defining attribution. It works to a degree when it’s in a closed-loop testbed … But the minute you try and reach scale with it that’s when these systems start to either fall down or the delay in attribution breaks the existing models that we have in place.”
Connectivity to cap
If connected TV advertising doesn’t yet have big scale, it may offer something else. Beet Retreat heard many executives talk about its ability to help cap the frequency with which viewers see a TV ad…
Frank Sinton, President & Founder, Beachfront Media:
“Connected TV but it hasn’t hit that 50% (penetration) mark yet. So we’re more like 10 or 15% penetration at this point. (In) connected TV, in particular, frequency (of ad exposure) is something that we’re looking really closely at.”
Reach is within reach
But the panel heard that using addressable TV to reach large audiences is possible. Two companies that have spent the last few years building out a patchwork of advertiser delivery opportunities, in very different ways, weighed in…
Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid:
Right now Innovid is 75 million households through nine different streaming devices across 1,000 different apps that are capable of delivering an interactive OTT ad. So the capacity is there. The systems and structure that we’ve talked about today is lagging that a bit. But we are continuing to focus on the largest potential audiences that can be lit up to be able to bring this reality to market.
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“One of the things that we’ve built over the last couple years is this local owned-and-operated station group opportunity which is, going back to we’re in 35 million homes, one out of every three TV homes, so we work with almost all the large station groups.”
Beyond TV
Connected TV isn’t just about what happens on the TV. In a multi-touch consumer ecosystem, if you can track viewership and link it to outcomes like visitation and brand CRM data, you have the capacity to deploy sophisticated attribution that can prove the real value of connected TV exposure…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“We’re literally enabling them to prove that their local TV ads are actually driving to the website or actually driving to the store. We’re able to do that because we are literally bringing live placeIQ data and matching it against our IP and IDs. So, ‘Wou’ve seen the ad for the F150, did you go to the dealership?’ ‘Did you see the ad for Taco Bell, did you go to Taco Bell or to the website for TD Ameritrade?’We literally get live information.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>After all, “programmatic” advertising unleashed “real-time bidding” (RTB) on to the world several years ago now. Today, real-time auctions for display ads are commonplace and many hope for a similar arrival in TV and video.
But a panel discussion at Beet Retreat discussed ongoing inertia in a $70 billion US TV advertising business where the legacy medium is proving reluctant to change…
DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:
D’Antoni was asked if ad buyers’ requests for audience segments are still processed “mostly in Excel and (with) manual extracts of data from various systems, lots of macros”.
He responded: “Yes. There is still some friction.
“And that’s just dealing with one supplier – if you’re on the buy side, you’re going to have to deal with that three or four times. So there is a long way to go in terms of streamlining the process.”
Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:
Automation is what Videa is aiming to bring to the market. The company makes platforms that reduce friction in ad avails, makegoods and posting
“We have found, much to our chagrin, that (even) within the same broadcast group … multiple stations are not speaking the same language. There’s almost no standards at all when it comes to broadcast.
“We spent probably two years on something that we called traffic normalization, which was literally just getting our system to understand all the different names that exist for one program so that when someone wants to make a buy across multiple markets, the buy could happen and the system can understand (what) they mean.”
Google Head of Telco/Video Partnerships Peter Dolchin:
Asked for the most important priority, Dolchin said: “Interoperability.”
“We like challenges, but this is clearly complex and we have some really smart, talented people at the company who understand it. We’ve been recruiting people from the industry over the past decade. And so, we know it’s hard, but we are testing in a variety of different ways.
“So with this new linear addressable solution that we’ve launched, there is the ability to look at set-top box tuning data real time and bring that into the decision making when they’re selecting the ad. That is one of the ways in which we’re bringing real time to it.”
Experian director of TV solutions, Experian Marketing Services, Brad Danaher:
Danaher said his company had helped political advertisers target campaigns during the recent US mid-term elections.
“It was a big cycle for political. Even though it was big, we actually thought it would be a little bigger.
“When we work with folks like DISH, we have a platform called Audience Engine, which basically allows counts to be accessed within seconds if needed be. If (the audience target is, for example), environmentally-aware consumers … we can tell the MVPDs through that platform within 10 seconds and you can go on the platform and know it, and then launch that into their media plan, knowing the sizing right away. That’s an improvement.”
DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:
D’Antoni was asked to describe the typical lead time to make an addressable TV campaign active.
“Typically three to five days,” he said. “And then that it served, it’s beamed up to the satellite. It’s (then stored) in the (set-top) box.”
Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz:
That prompted the panel moderator to make a “broad” statement on the relative slowness of what many think should, by dint of being digital, be a fast process.
“There is no real-time in TV,” she said. “Tthere’s really very little real time data, real time insights, real time decisioning, real time delivery, realtime ops.” Fellow panelists agreed, though Google’s Dolchin explained that Google has launched a linear addressable TV ad solution which supports examining set-top box tuning data in real-time.
Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:
Gianunzio said he thought a lot of the infrastructure inertia remains in place because few inside the legacy TV business perceive a threat driving need for change.
“Within TV, things have always been relatively rosy. There’s this feeling that, ‘No matter whatever came along, we were going to be able to deal with it’.” He cited DVRs, internet and Netflix as examples of purported TV-killers that have not turned out to be.
“Every article that you read is like ‘The audience is down and yet it’s more important than ever that you’re using television to get your message out there’ – Facebook and Uber are (doing just that).”
But Gianunzio sees a change may finally be coming.
“The people who thought ‘we’re just going to go passed this and we’re not going to have to actually deal with it’ … they’re either retired or they realize that they’re not going to get to retirement without dealing with it. I think that’s what’s going to push us there.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>That means spending on addressable TV – with which buyers can use advanced data and return path to more precisely target viewers and households – would represent only around 1.1% of total US TV ad spend.
What could draw more spending? For one, we know that US OTT device penetration is high – but also that much consumption through those is devices is of ad-free, subscription VOD.
Furthermore, the Beet Retreat heard many views about the importance of scale, with claims that ” about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines“, worries that many advertisers are still just experimenting and a call for more inventory to be given to addressable TV.
In this panel, several executives further debated how addressable can hit scale.
Scale is an organisational challenge
Even the largest of media companies is grappling with how to transform their ad sales initiatives…
Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:
“The whole reason that you’re seeing all this consolidation in the media industry is to get scale, and to get reach. Other companies have already done it. We’re doing it at our point.
“We had all these individual businesses that had different types of scale. In the linear side, it worked – but now we have to spend millions of dollars … to find the right partners to be able to activate the inventory and look at it holistically.
Competing with SVOD’s scale
Years ago, few may have predicted that paid video over the internet would be as big as it has become. But the rise of Netflix and Amazon now presents a challenge to media companies. Panelists discussed whether those players would emerge in to TV ad sales, and how TV companies must team to compete…
Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:
“If you think of our competitors particularly in the space like Netflix and Amazon. Netflix has scale, but are they going to be able to sustain what they’re doing with one revenue stream (subscription)?
“Amazon, on the other hand, is a whole other thing. Right? They have this whole base. They have multiple revenue streams coming in, and then they’re going to invest in content. To me, they feel like our biggest competitor from a scale and a reach perspective.”
Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:
“They’re going to invest, between Netflix and Amazon, over $20 billion next year, which is larger than most of the TV ad revenues of any single companies in this room. They own the entire consumer funnel.
“We in the TV industry … need better consortiums, better marketplaces, better easier ways for the buy side to buy in a more frictionless manner. I think we’re seeing that right now with EGTA, with EVX, with RTLs, TV Marketplace, with OpenAP. We see a lot of starts to that solution.”
Buyers want more, better – and cheaper
The internal structure of the relationship between advertiser brands and their buying agencies influences the kind of ad inventory being chased, which may ultimately impact outcomes…
David Hohman, EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen:
“Right now, most of the media agencies are winning business on a savings guarantee, which means that they have to show the advertiser that they’re spending less money. They want reductions every single year.
“So, there’s this pressure on agencies who are trying to innovate, who are trying to do the right things for their clients, and in the end of the day, they’re chasing low CPMs.”
Finite media time impacts scale
The entire media universe is growing – but consumers still only have 24 hours in a given day. Panel host Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Corp cited eMarketer research showing 2018 consumer media time went from 12 hours and 7 minutes to 12 hours and 8 minutes a day. She asked if consumers’ capacity to consume content naturally limits scale…
Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:
“The latest stats on Facebook are that less than 20% of their audience will view a video ad for more than three seconds. That’s not going to move the needle.
“I definitely think there’s a capacity issue – the human conscience capacity issue.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?
Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.
But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?
A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…
TV is the same – and different
Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:
“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.
“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”
But TV is fragmenting
Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.
Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”
Advertisers want ‘TV’, but like digital
From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.
“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”
Addressable TV hard to scale
The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:
“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.
“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.
“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”
But beware excess scale
But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”
Measurement needs metadata
Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:
“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.
“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Brands would buy ads and, with little insight in to who really watched what, would need to unleash a slew of media mix modelling tools to understand what exposures may have led to which purchases.
That imprecision has led the industry to focus on the half-full glass – TV is an amazing medium for building mass initial awareness, if not for closing a deal with a customer.
Now that over-the-top TV services and addressable TV advertising technologies, which allow for precision targeting, are coming on stream, the industry is contemplating changing the way it trades ads, like offering guarantees on business outcomes, measurable with digital attribution.
For an industry that is worth north of $70 billion in the US alone, the change could be profound. But how quick is it happening? What will the real nature of ROI look like? And who stands to gain?
At Beet Retreat, a panel representing all sides of the value chain – brand, agency, programmer, and technology supplier – was convened to thrash out the issues, concluding three days of debate in Puerto Rico. Here is what they said…
TV is not direct mail
The panel was cautioned against comparing the emerging technology of addressable TV to forebear marketing channels, just because it exhibits similar one-to-one qualities…
Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover
“There’s going to be this inherent reaction to treat addressable TV like it’s direct marketing or direct mail. But, if you benchmark the performance of, let’s say, addressable TV from an ROI perspective, from an effectiveness perspective, it’s never going to perform similarly to direct mail.”
Top of funnel still matters
Addressable and OTT TV ads can laser-guide creative to individual households or even individual viewers, just like digital – very different from conventional mass broadcast. But reaching that mass is still important…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Awareness matters. The high-funnel stuff, brand-level marketing, actually really matters. In a rush to try to make everything accountable in a direct markety, outcome-based way, you end up minimizing the value of all that high-funnel stuff. We’ve done that largely because we never thought of making TV accountable at all. ”
ROI is a team sport
With so many technological possibilities at play, and the emerging possibility of selling ads only when an attribution can prove they have led to a purchase or other action, the whole notion of return on investment (ROI) is up in the air. But all sides of the value chain are playing the game…
John Hoctor, CEO & C0-Founder, Data Plus Math:
“Agencies, marketers, media folks (are now) partnering on (defining) ROI, which is kind of interesting. We’ll go on a lot of sales calls as the tech provider, as the glue that’s kind of holding it all together, to talk about what sort of outcomes can we measure for this particular advertiser. There’s some advertisers where the outcome is pretty clear, and you can measure it. There’s real budgets going against it. But it has not displaced the GRPs that are out there. But everyone is leaning into it. We’re in tons of these meetings with all of these folks. It’s a super hot topic.”
Turning around the TV ship
New technologies offer advertisers the ability to buy ads on TV in a manner consistent with digital – transacting not just for precise targeting but also buying specific business outcomes. But that is going to need the TV industry to change decades of habit…
Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal:
“TV has been transacted in a very similar way for the last 50 years or more. We’ve been really vocal about transitioning away from legacy measurement. Marketers by the way, are interested in that, and they’re leaned into it … (moving) into some sort of impact-, outcome-based measurement.”
Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp:
“But, still, 90% of your business is transacted against the Nielsen guarantee. $10 billion top line … moved against a currency that you and Linda (Yaccarino, Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships at NBCUniversal) and everybody openly express you feel needs to be refreshed. I guess maybe it’s also. ‘Guys, when is it worth the effort?'”
Jump right in
Beet Retreat heard frustration from attendees that many parts of the media-buying landscape still treat addressable TV advertising as a test-and-learn opportunity, with many holding back from significant investment. When could that change… ?
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer, VideoAmp:
“In 2018, a lot of it was research, so that you can prepare for how you want to start transacting moving forward. So by 2020, I’m hoping a lot of that volume, which is already pretty significant, is now moving into actual delivery, with measurement that is making buyers and sellers, both more effective in what they’re trying to do.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>The event raised funds for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. Many thanks to the the U.S. Park Service for welcoming us and to the dinner sponsor Amobee and to NCC Media for sponsoring the Beet Retreat.
Thanks to everyone who supported the fundraiser including the auctioneers Phil Cowdell of GroupM and Puerto Rico’s revered actor Braulio Castillo, Jr.
Big thank you to Puerto Rico’s most influential chef Jose Enrique for cooking a memorable meal for us, right at the Fort.
Please find extensive video segments from the Beet Retreat right here.
Beet Retreat 2019: We will be back in San Juan for our next Retreat November 20-22. Stay tuned for more information.
]]>A consensus also emerged during the session that ultimately, one or more companies will figure out how to compensate consumers for their data beyond simply dispensing coupons and swag, perhaps one of the major credit card providers.
The panel was moderated by consultant Howard Shimmel, most recently of Turner Broadcasting, who at the outset mentioned the Starwood data breach because it was in the headlines that very morning. He asked whether despite the availability of great content and technology, “immense demand and an appetite to scale,” there will be enough data available given new legislation like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California.
Jodie McAfee of Inscape, a subsidiary of smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO, related the “classic case of no good deed goes unpunished” that occurred in 2015. VIZIO had just pushed to TV owners notification of how it collects household viewing data and where the data ends up. One of those owners was a reporter for Pro Publica who wrote a mostly “inaccurate” story about how TV’s can spy on them, according to McAfee.
“Two class action lawyers saw the article, found two plaintiffs and sued us and the rest was a complete mess,” said McAfee.
Among the more interesting learnings from the whole episode, the Federal Trade Commission thought that the language explaining what VIZIO does with owners’ viewing data was too buried. It should be “separate and prominent” from the TV setup process, which is what VIZIO ended up doing.
“Unless and until the consumer clicks ‘I accept,’ data collection is default off on our TV’s, so it is a full, true opt-in regime,” said McAfee.
Another relevant learning was the FTC’s view of the so-called value exchange that most advertising and media companies believe underpins the collection of consumer data. The government said “everybody needs to stop promising this idea that when the consumer opts in they’re going to get these bells and whistles around greater search and recommendation or whatever. Just knock it off. That’s not necessary and it’s kind of bullshit. Just tell them what you’re doing,” McAfee said.
The architects of GDPR hold the same view, according to McAfee. “It’s in GDPR. Don’t promise anything special. Just be clear about what you’re doing. That’s all anybody cares about.”
With an opt-in rate of 90% in the United States, “What we’ve learned is if you’re front and center with it and you are completely transparent about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, pretty much everybody, at least in the United States, they’ll opt in and they’re fine with it,” McAfee added.
Robert Bareuther of analytics and measurement firm iSpot.tv said the company gets “a tremendous amount of raw data from our valued partner VIZIO and we take that raw data and we decipher it into how households view content” and then measure business outcomes for advertisers. “We never see any private data, but it’s very important to us that rules are followed and you don’t breach anything. I think VIZIO’s done a spectacular job of making sure that everything’s on the up and up,” said Bareuther.
Nielsen Catalina’s Matt O’Grady said his company doesn’t touch any personally identifiable information about consumers, “but our applications for measurement and targeting are highly dependent upon PII. I’m dependent upon everybody in the ecosystem not violation or for lack of a better expression not screwing up.”
As for the impact of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica misadventure, “that made our liability statements and our onboarding much more difficult than it had ever been before,” said O’Grady.
Asked by Shimmel whether CPPA in California will end up looking like GDPR, O’Grady said the initiative is “a very healthy democracy in the sense that the pendulum can swing and people can really get a chance to voice their concerns. But I think a good substantial part of that opt-in is going to be re-written” before the law takes effect in January of 2020.
So will marketers ever end up having to actually pay consumers directly for their data, along with letting them control their data? “If I was involved in that, I don’t want a coupon,” said O’Grady. “I want true compensation for that. Somebody’s going to come along and figure out how to crack this nut. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or twenty years from now, but I really do believe that we’re heading in that direction and there’s an enormous opportunity for somebody to come up with the vault concept.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Moderated by consultant Matt Prohaska, the discussion touched on the eternal reality of supply versus demand in making sales decisions, along with the prospects for the OpenAP audience targeting consortium.
“We still have bifurcation in linear programmatic and digital, so that’s always something that we have to navigate,” said FOX’s Noah Levine. “We’ve seen a maturity begin to develop in the linear programmatic TV space, which is quite nice.”
From the sell-side, programmatic is “primarily about automating the buy and being able to empower the agency, the buyer, to do more. That’s a good thing for us as sellers,” Levine added.
“The fact that we still need to look at linear programmatic as kind of a separate beast is something we should all start to want to reconcile and maybe have some degree of concern about,” said Brett Hurwitz of OATH, the Verizon unit. And if all TV inventory becomes available on an IP-based delivery platform, a major concern will be getting “enough of a premium on the highly desirable target folks to make up for the fact that some of your other impressions are going to probably be going at a much lower price.”
The issue of brand safety still holds sway and stands in the way of 100% data-driven decisions, according to Mike Law of Dentsu Aegis Network. “We need to find the right balance of that, because some brands hold that way too close to them and some buyers hold that way too close to them,” said Law. “They fear that if I don’t say something then this computer will do my job for me or somebody will do it for me.”
Sellers have obvious concerns about total automation when optimizing their inventory across the multitude of buyers. “In linear, there’s a lot of pressure on the inventory. There’s a huge amount of demand,” said Levine.
“It’s true, the private marketplaces are really the path forward for the most part when it comes to especially linear television inventory,” said Hurwitz.
Given some marketers’ desire to cherry pick ad units versus having the ability to transact via automation, “There’s a very healthy tension between those two models that we’re seeing in the marketplace,” Levine noted. And while being able to leverage programmatic technology to access inventory and re-optimize plans “is a very desirable state for us to reach in the future,” it’s tough to do for sellers that don’t have lots of unsold inventory. “That’s one of the challenges.”
Asked by Prohaska about the prospects of the OpenAP targeting consortium launched by FOX, Viacom and Turner, Law said its premise “remains really strong and positive.” The missing piece to him is being able to transact collectively across all members.
And OpenAP is in a crowded space.
“There’s OpenAP and then I’ve got actually all the partners included in OpenAP trying to sell me their own platform, plus fifteen other networks trying to sell me their platform as well,” said Law. “And then I’ve got Simulmedia calling me, I’ve got Adobe calling me, I’ve got Videology calling me.”
OATH experienced its own version of too many choices upon the merger of AOL and Yahoo, Hurwitz recalled, given the existence of “I’m going to say eight DSP’s between the two companies” plus a number of DSP’s. OATH decided to sunset its linear TV programmatic platform, which Hurwitz called “a fantastic product,” because “we felt was going to serve the industry for some period of time and then perhaps not be the tool the industry needed.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Now we are living in a world which is swimming – or, perhaps, drowning – in the sticky, digital substance.
For many in broadcasting, data is proving to be transformational to the way they sell advertising, reinventing a discipline that has long relied on manual operations and sketchy viewer targeting.
In this Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV, executives discussed the application of data to their businesses.
Data is a product
Panel leader Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by positing that “data is a product”…
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“100% data is a product. We just announced the fact that we’re launching our own Warner Media D2C (direct-to-consumer) product itself, which will be driven by deep insights on consumption, on behavioral insights, personalization, recommendation engines, dynamic ad insertion built into the overall interface, as well as dynamic content insertion, and dynamic framework of how the actual product itself gets built out. That’s all data driven.”
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“Typically. what we see is in a programmatic delivery or even in a direct sold model, we see anywhere from 15% to 20% lift on the value of media when that kind of data is applied to it.”
Data needs more
But speakers also said that data alone won’t be a game-changer…
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“I would say it’s not just the value of the data. It’s the value of the addressability itself. You’re also enabling this household-level dynamic insertion ability. It’s the combination of those two plus the media I think that gets you to that.”
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“They have to work together.”
Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:
“Where I see the convergence of these two is traditional linear and then you have this audience data. The challenge is, what is the value of that? Is it about outcomes? Is it about time spent? Is it about consumer lifetime value?
“I think we’re not getting to that. We’re not starting to understand the value of combining data and linear television in a way for brands and buyers to truly value it in a sophisticated way.”
Quantifying value
Turner’s Redniss argued that this value actually is becoming clear. But Swartz asked panelists whether it can really be quantified…
Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:
“There is not a significant interest in proving the value from a buying standpoint at the moment, because they’re not incentivized to do so. They’re incentivized to efficiencies and reach.”
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“I think we have the talent. I just think the costs of trying to understand the end ROI is still so high, and every marketer has their own metrics for success. It’s just hard to make it a universal standard.”
Industry must come together
Swartz said she feared different companies, all hoping to burst the bubble of traditional TV measurement currencies, would simply pick their own solutions, leading to silos…
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“We as an industry need to come together to identify some key data points that we can all trade on. That’s it. If we can all baseline around that – and it’s not just one currency, it’s probably going to be five or six – that’s when it really starts to come together.
“We all need to do a better job of educating … the end consumer. Right now we’re giving them a shit ton of opportunities and a shit ton of choice. How do we help teach them and educate them on what those things mean?”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“We kind of fill the gap that the education system leaves in Puerto Rico,” Ramos explained in a one-on-one discussion with Phil Cowdell, formerly Global President of Client Services at GroupM.
In Puerto Rico, nine out of 10 schools “are failing schools” based on standardized tests, according to Ramos. Add to this some “crazy stats” cited by Cowdell: Maria damaged 82% of the island’s homes, 42% of the population had daily food shortages and 44% of children have a registered mental health impact from the storm.
“That’s pretty cataclysmic and we’re talking about this is part of the United States of America,” said Cowdell.
The bottom line education-wise was that children in Puerto Rico missed a half a year of schooling in a system already burdened by systemic failure.
“In Puerto Rico, we tend to be short minded, so we forget really quick, and we will say that we reopened schools six months after and that we passed our students. We pass them,” said Ramos. “How do you insert those kids in the formal economy later on, ten years from now?”
In the aftermath of Maria, her organization reframed its services to include things like yoga and mindfulness “so we can try to help the country doing the job they should have done with the storm.”
Having been involved early on in emergency relief efforts, Cowdell recalled that just over a month after Maria, “the far end of the island hadn’t seen milk for six weeks.” At a Costco store, “there were people there buying flat screen TV’s because they live on Ashford Avenue in the downtown part of San Juan.”
His point was that when the storm first made land, “it was a very democratic storm, it impacted everybody. It became very economic the week, the month and then the period after it. And what we see now is an economic impact.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.
Slow addressable adoption?
The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:
“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.
Brands only dipping a toe
Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”
More supply needed
Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.
“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:
“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”
Don’t target, cap
The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):
“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”
Solve for cord-cutting
But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Operated by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications, NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks.
In this Beet Retreat interview with Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV, NCC Media’s CEO Nicolle Pangis says: “What NCC did is literally brought together a fragmented industry and became the one place where you could buy across all markets in the United States, across all networks.”
But that was “NCC 1.0”.
Under the new CEO, the group is transitioning to a more consulting role – but it also aims to solve a familiar problem.
“Ironically, we all know that the world is again very, very fragmented from a media perspective,” Pangis says.
“A fragmentation problem now exists across different data sets that are not pulled together in a cohesive way for the buy side to be able to leverage in a scaled way.”
Pangis says that problem doesn’t just exist across smaller distributors, but larger ones, too, like NCC co-owner Comcast, which has a large footprint of addressable TV-viewing households.
What do ad buyers want? “To be able to look for audiences that they need to reach, wherever they need to reach them,” Pangis reckons.
Put simply: “Anybody who buys addressable advertising knows this… there’s nobody from an addressable perspective now who has a big enough addressable footprint to be relevant to a large national advertiser.
“So that’s the 2.0 version of NCC – pulling together the largest data set in TV, which is part of the ownership of NCC, set-top box data, broadband, IP data … and leveraging that data set in conjunction with the supply that we have access to from a national addressable perspective.”
For NCC, it is perhaps a repeat of its founding mission, but with a different slant. “Addressable” TV is when internet-connected TV sets allow for the targeting of individual households or viewers, going far beyond the old way in which advertisers bought ads in shows whose audiences were deemed to be broad demographic matches.
2018 US spending to over-the-top (OTT) TV platforms was due to reach $2 billion, Magna recently forecast.
As much as that is an amazing opportunity, making it happen to the fullest extent means guaranteeing a degree of commonality across systems – or, as Pangis puts it, “making the dirty data clean”.
How will Pangis do that?
- “One piece of the puzzle is making the operational workflow between the agency, the buy side … make it easier for agencies to buy inventory that isn’t upfront inventory.”
- “Two is (to) just transact that down to the sell side with the make-good process in a more efficient fashion. We’re working through that right now with workflow tools. There’s things that are manual (that) can be automated if we put a little time into it.”
Which means NCC’s role will be that of “an aggregator of aggregators”.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>For Disney, the acquisition a year ago added to an already-broad portfolio of assets, and came right as the company was figuring out a direct-to-consumer SVOD strategy and learning to get to grips with a whole new world of advertising capabilities.
In this Beet Retreat interview with Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV, Disney’s SVP, Audience Solutions at Disney Advertising Sales, Laura Nelson, opens up on a big year for the Mouse.
“Disney, as a whole, is going through a huge transformation right now,” she said. “We have a ton of operational challenges because we are effectively still in the middle of reorganizing our whole company.
“We have multiple systems and multiple process, and we potentially may be inheriting new ones. So just trying to streamline and create a technology stack and a data stack that is unified across our company is going to take us some time. We’re behind some of the other larger publishers … who have already gone through that.”
Those changes are coming about including through combining ESPN and ABC ad sales efforts in a single division, led by Disney’s chairman of direct-to-consumer and international efforts Kevin Mayer. Nelson said: “We’ve actually changed the way the whole company is set up now so that there will be one group and on infrastructure that’s going to do that across sales and marketing.”
Nelson said a big part of the transformation involves growing a desire to be more transactional and automated in a data-driven way. She wants to eliminate friction in the ad sales process and believes automation can bring benefits for both buyer and seller.
But, despite fragmentation in how the industry is approaching that opportunity, Nelson is sceptical that a single industry platform can be achievable.
Nelson concedes Disney is arriving late to the idea of selling ads based on advanced audience data segments across different TV networks, in a way that makes it seamless for buyers.
For instance, Disney’s ABC is not a member of OpenAP, the joint Turner/Fox/ Viacom initiative to normalize consumer identity attribute descriptions, which was also joined by NBCU, though of course 21st Century Fox’s Fox Networks Group is plugged in.
But she also questioned whether such an opportunity can work when who is paying for it isn’t necessarily clear.
Nelson says she aims to unify consumer data sets including ESPN sports affinities, Disney lookalike models, theme parks, Disney gamers and, later, digital viewing.
“A lot of different divisions – from the film studio to ABC Television – have been doing it their own way,” she says.
“I think really bringing all the processes together, being uniform, and not having people create their own ideas is going to be more beneficial.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“We view it as a deterministic match between two first-party data sets,” Arrix, who is SVP of DISH Media, said of the addressable designation.
“I think that is really important because there’s a lot of faux addressable out in the marketplace that is disguised as data-driven linear, and I think it’s really important for the marketplace to understand what is true addressable and what is not.”
For their part, DISH and sister entity Sling TV aren’t looking to “create automated tools or platforms per se” but rather see things from a predominantly supply side partner point of view, according to Arrix.
“One thing that we’re trying to do to make it easier for the market is combine our full addressable footprint of DISH with Sling,” Arrix said. “We’re not trying to break it apart and say this is linear addressable and this is OTT addressable.”
One year ago this month, DISH partnered with Comscore to launch a cross platform/screen solution encompassing inventory on both DISH and Sling.
Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now President of Janus Strategy and Insights, assumed that over time Sling will become more of the companies’ distribution footprint than DISH “due to natural things going on with consumers. Is that a good thing for your ad capabilities?”
Arrix drew distinction between DISH trying to maintain its pay-TV subscriber base and ongoing set-top box migration, since about 70% of DISH’s boxes are addressable. “While the overall DISH subscriber base, TBD what happens there, the addressable footprint of DISH will continue to grow,” said Arrix.
Asked about Comscore’s role, Arrix said the company provides third-party measurement of addressable impressions that are unified in a single report. “It’s not this set of impressions because they’re coming from a set-top box is measured this way and this set of impressions I measured this way. They’re connected in with the technology that’s actually driving addressable on our side, which is Invidi, and they’re able to deliver one pool of addressable impressions.”
As for third-party measurement in general, Arrix said, “We advocate for and partner with any third-party measurement company and we believe that it really is up to the demand side, marketers and agencies, to determine which measurement they want to go with.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“To think that somehow everyone is okay with personalization, or to think that everyone hates personalization, is wrong,” O’Connell said at the outset of a fireside chat with GroupM’s Phil Cowdell at Beet Retreat 2018. “None of us feels the same as any other person.”
As an example, she cited two hypothetical 25-year-olds that might have totally opposing attitudes toward the use of their data to better target them with ads.
“So that really is the crux of this, is that we need to appreciate that humans are individuals and we’re not doing that very well right now,” said O’Connell.
“We have all this data and technology available to us. It’s how we sort of tune the machines. The industry is kind of in the crapper. Consumers feel about different ad channels and formats, it’s not an awesome story,” particularly in the digital space, O’Connell added.
Addressing frequency capping of ads, Cowdell, most recently of GroupM, asked “How do we do it? Is it real or is it BS?”
From an omni-channel perspective, “There’s a lot of stuff out there where we are serving ads and we are just not cognizant enough of how all of those ads are interacting,” O’Connell responded. “We’re doing a good job in little fiefdoms of making things better, and that’s great.”
She talked about working with clients in the retail sector, one of which asked her “what should we centralize versus allow the brands to own?” Her response was to inquire whether the marketer understood the overlap in its user base, which it did not. “That might be a good place to start. Maybe the first thing to start thinking about is unifying your data. You can start thinking about execution a little bit later.”
Cowdell then asked about the potential for marketers embracing a service offering as opposed to individual brand managers selling individual products. “For sure. It’s starting to happen in little levels inside of these giant multi-brand organizations,” said O’Connell.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>But what if the presuppositions they made with that data could be improved on in yet another step-change?
One leading TV company researcher thinks viewers may soon elect to give broadcasters and their advertisers far more specific information about their buying intents.
In this fireside discussion with Prohaska Consulting CEO Matt Prohaska for Beet.TV, Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel – previously chief research officer at Turner – opens up on how Turner’s research has convinced him the change is coming.
“We did some research at Turner that we call the Consumer Data Value Exchange,” says Shimmel. “We were trying to get an understanding of what consumers are willing to give up in terms of data to get a better ad experience so they’re not getting ads for categories they don’t care about.
“The reality was consumers said they’re willing to give up a lot more than we think they’ll give up. They just need control and they need to be paid for it.”
That realization could have profound consequences for marketers and the publishers or broadcasters they go through.
For one, it could mean a change in emphasis – from second-guessing consumers’ position in the purchase funnel for various products and services, to actually knowing.
“I think eventually we’re going to have to get to a world where there’s more consumer control and they’re giving us signals a little bit more directly than (simply) ‘I’m in the market for a car because I happen to go to a BMW site yesterday’,” adds Shimmel.
This kind of approach may see new power brokers emerge. Shimmel, who joined Janus last year, says comScore and Nielsen evolved to measure media consumption because buyers didn’t have access to first-party data with full accuracy. But now connected TV sets can give off exact data signals about who is watching.
That, he says, should prompt the measurement agencies to change the nature of their service, and – for anyone hoping for a career in media measurement – it will place a premium on getting skills in data science.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>That was one of the many tricky balances debated in a fireside discussion at Beet Retreat between Turner EVP of data strategy and product innovation Jesse Redniss and Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
Swartz set up the distinction as a juxtaposition of “EQ” (emotional intelligence) and “IQ” (intelligence quotient), noting that the ongoing human characteristic of TV involves a heavy dose of the former.
Agreeing, Redniss said: “If you don’t have a great consumer experience, you’re never going to capture data.
“TV traditional business was never based on PII (personally-identifiable information), it was based on panels that Nielsen drove for a long time. Then along came all mobile platforms, web-based platforms, which are capturing IP, device IDs, you’re capturing a lot of behavioral insights.
“Now a lot of companies are blending emotional responses that can be gleaned from everything from biometric measurement to social conversation. All that (is) flowing into now how you’re actually really truly trying to understand consumers.”
After watching the digital display ad business convert largely to programmatic modes of ad trading, the broadcast business has spend the last couple of years looking for similar ways to inject data and automation in to TV and video advertising.
But, so far, a fraction of the US TV ad business has converted, and the evolution is now happening amidst a new global concern over practices which use consumer data in ad targeting.
Is the pendulum suddenly swinging back toward the human touch?
“I think right now, we need to put a pause, quite frankly, into the free fire hose of how data is accessed and utilized to strategically align use cases of how data can be leveraged,” Redniss added.
“Facebook is now in a position where they took too much liberty in how they’re leveraging data and who could actually access it.
“That’s the balance that every single company and every publisher is trying to solve right now – how do you scale content creation, how do you scale direct-to-consumer relationships in a way that respects that balance?
“When you look at what’s going on with GDPR and soon to be CCPA, which we believe and I believe should be an overall regulation that the US has to stand by. We’re going to have to do it.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>The short summary of their back and forth would be that from a cross-platform perspective, TV is still “a mess” and that despite much talk about industry collaboration among competitors, reality is bound to intrude when companies like Comcast and Disney wage their inevitable marketplace battles.
Gerber has been on the sell- and buy-side and is currently President of Global Media Investment for GroupM’s Essence agency. Clark is EVP of Advanced Advertising at Comcast & GM of FreeWheel.
In trying “to make supply make sense,” Comcast has scooped up no fewer than five companies—from FreeWheel to STRATA, under the FreeWheel brand—with the overarching goal of unifying linear and digital by removing a lot of the fragmentation and friction among the tv infrastructure, working on addressable technology, decisioning, and making life easier for marketers at the end of the day. The competitive backdrop is the ease of use of such platforms as Amazon, Facebook and Google.
“Whether you’re a programmer or you’re a marketer, you cannot run one campaign across TV. You cannot have it optimized in real time, you cannot get a report. You have to go hire an army of people to do that,” Clark observed.
This is why “television is not a platform…it is hundreds of sales teams, different ways of selling depending whether you’re local or national, measurement’s all over the place.”
As for Amazon, Facebook and Google, “Yes they’re walled gardens but they are unified tech and data platforms and they can bring sort of a seamless solution to marketers there’s no question about that. TV is not that,” said Clark. “Programmers are unified in wanting one campaign across linear and digital environments, which FreeWheel serves against all–including STB VOD–so that programmers can have everything unified.”
Never one to beat around the bush, Gerber put aside digital/linear unity for the more timeless question of competitive media selling, particularly as it pertains to national TV avails. “The fact of the matter is, most inventory still trades in television in a traditional unit linear model and it’s controlled by independent sellers,” said Gerber. “I care about the national avails that the national networks control because that’s where the bulk of viewing occurs. I need that brought together with the local avails, with the digital avails, everything together on one platform like you said with Google and Facebook. I don’t see that happening.”
Clark recalled when TiVo launched in 1995 and some people predicted “this is the end of television, it’s all going to change.” From his vantage point close to technology, he likened the state of affairs as “driving towards a mountain on the horizon, it doesn’t look like you’re ever getting close to it and then one day it’s right in front of you. There are massive investments right now going into the technology needed to clean this up.”
Gerber: “Who’s your competitor? Are you guys all going to work together to help us figure this out? Are you all going to compete with each other?”
This is where reality intruded. Just one day before, it was announced that Disney had chosen Google over FreeWheel to handle its digital advertising, as Advertising Age reports.
“They make the decisions that are in their best interests of course,” said Clark. “It’s undeniable that Google now has a massive beachhead in the industry. There’s no question about it.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Colella joined Howard Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now the head of the Janus Strategies and Insights consultancy, in a fireside chat titled Setting the Aperture for a Consumer-Centric TV in which Colella described NBC’s audience optimization solutions and discussed its motivation to join the OpenAP consortium.
“Can there ever be one unified pool of inventory?” asked Shimmel. “If you have to go to five different stores to buy the ingredients for your dinner, it’s a little annoying.”
Colella acknowledged that “it’s a real problem” in light of digital walled gardens and several marketplaces, including AT&T’s new Xander unit. “But eventually there will be a reduced number of marketplaces, as well as one report across channels that advertisers will be able to look at.”
Asked by Shimmel whether that’s a decade away, Colella responded, “I’m typically a glass-half-full person so I think it’s a bit faster than that, but it’s definitely a few years out. No matter how great a digital system or addressable we develop, as long as there are these legacy systems we’re not going to be able to get the data we need, we’re not going to be able to target the way we need to.”
She then provided a recap of NBC’s audience optimization efforts, which use second-by-second viewership data to target at the show level. “The optimizer is able to find your audience in its highest concentration at a desired frequency,” said Colella, who does not foresee a wholesale shift to audience buying.
“I think in the future we’re still going to see sponsorships. I think that there will be a portion that is bought on an emotional buy.”
NBCU’s decision to hold off from joining the OpenAP audience targeting consortium until about a year after its launch was the result of a feeling that it wasn’t far enough along, combined with internal concerns, according to Colella.
“So our decision to join was when was joining OpenAP not going to set us back with our own systems, because we had ways of doing things, investments had been made. So we felt when it was mature enough we would take the plunge,” she explained.
“It’s very much a work in progress. We’re tasked with a gigantic problem.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Experian helps advertisers determine the data segments that will perform best and use those segments more seamlessly. In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, Danaher talks about the company’s Audience Engine platform and heightened concerns about consumer data privacy.
The company launched Audience Platform in 2016 to facilitate cross-channel audience targeting and closed-loop analytics. Citing one function, Danaher says the platform takes in data from MVPD’s and “can quickly, within seconds, determine the size of the audience that the advertiser wants. That is something that is removing a pain point.
“It’s often been very cumbersome to create segments. And there’s still some difficulty there, but this platform helps to speed up the precise of sizing up the segments so that then the media plans can be put into place a little quicker,” he adds.
Both the buy- and sell-side have similar concerns with regard to advanced audience targeting.
“The buy-side is trying to solve their advertisers’ desire for an interesting segment, one that is effective for them,” he says. Experian provides its own data sets “and we also have a team that helps them craft it together. A bit of a service model.”
On the sell-side, “they also need help guiding their clients and just understanding data, and also quickly matching first-party data as well as using that third-party data.”
Consumer data privacy was one topic of discussion at Beet Retreat 2018. Danaher says the company understands the concern all too well.
“That is actually in line with what we’re all about at Experian. As a credit bureau, we have all the rights to use it as a credit bureau, but also in our marketing data that is all opt-in data. It is not behavioral data or taken from online sources inappropriately.”
Looking forward, Danaher says Experian is very focused on identity, linkage and advanced data and measurement. Using data that’s effective and then measuring that on the back end “will prove the value of the data and prove that you did it right. That’s the advantage of targeted TV is that you can see it turns out and very clearly the cause and effect.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>NinthDecimal specializes in “physical world data” that, among other things, help advertisers understand the impact “that television ads had on where you’re going, meaning did you shop more because you saw an ad” by tying mobile devices to households,” Kilmer says.
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Kilmer talks about the quest to properly attribute to advertising media like TV business results that are being credited to other media and how marketer KPI’s can change given campaign results.
NinthDecimal can tell whether someone visited a quick-serve restaurant after viewing ads not just on TV but in digital, mobile and out-of-home media.
One of “the more interesting tactics we’re working through in television” is helping to determine whether the premium cost of a commercial pod takeover drove enough business outcomes to justify the premium “or is it more effective to just buy thirty-second spots or fifteen-second spots,” Kilmer says.
For theatres, primetime TV spots on Thursday night are a mainstay of movie premieres. But does a film also need to be advertised on the weekend after the opening? “Or can they supplement that advertising with different forms of marketing to drive consumers into theatres?”
Apportioning the right level of credit for advertising “is a hot topic for me personally,” says Kilmer.
“We measured a campaign last year that reached ninety-five percent of U.S. households with their linear TV buy. And we were measuring their digital ad effectiveness as well. Which simply raised the question, is TV doing a lot of the work that digital media’s taking credit for?”
While marketing and media modeling techniques abound, Kilmer would like to see an analysis within a consistent environment “to be able to truly understand the impact that mass awareness and the upper-funnel activity does have on the digital-based media that we often drive life from that is getting a lot of value based on other advertising.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Data Plus Math has also partnered with Inscape, IRI, LiveRamp, Verance and others in its quest to supplement expensive post-campaign analyses with in-flight learnings that can be used to optimize campaigns on the fly.
When the company was launched in 2016, with investors that include Comcast Ventures and Greycroft Partners, it saw an opportunity to bring attribution to TV.
“Our main idea was that TV advertising works and the data would tell a good story if someone would go in and actually analyze it ad show that television is driving real world outcomes for marketers,” CEO & Founder John Hoctor says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
Data Plus Math started by building a signal graph that uses advanced data science and automated machine learning techniques to map actual ad exposure data to consumer behaviors.
“There’s been lift reporting and consultants and expensive studies. These studies usually take weeks to do. You usually get them weeks after a campaign is over. We wanted to have fast, low-cost attribution,” Hoctor says.
Going beyond consumer panels, the company prefers to work with “more of a footprint” of TV viewing data from set-top boxes, smart TV’s and streaming. “We have our own impression tracker that gets trafficked along with the creatives and can bring back exposure data from OTT or full-episode players,” Hoctor adds.
“It really helps TV get the full credit. If an advertiser’s trying to drive a certain attitude toward their brand or show that their brand is a fun brand, for instance, Millward Brown’s panel is really good at doing that.”
Describing A&E Networks as “great, forward thinking partners,” Hoctor says Data Plus Math is helping A&E to use attribution “not just as a report card. Attribution sometimes can be seen as you run the campaign and attribution will tell you if it worked.
“What really gets me excited is closing that loop and being able to not just measure whether something worked after it’s over, but measuring it in flight and providing back levers to help optimize for it while the campaign is still in flight.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
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