But is full attribution really available today – or is it just a mirage?
In a spicy panel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a trio of executives disagreed on whether the relative absence of such strategies in the TV industry today is the fault of lack of technology – or lack of willingness:
They were led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis.
Kinsella of TVSquared’s, whose platform helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites, took issue with sentiment expressed on an earlier panel – that measuring TV ads based on real outcomes, like sales, should not take precedence.
“That boggles my mind,” she said. “Why am I going to give you money if you can’t prove that it’s going to work? I’m not going to believe that bullshit. Currencies and GRPs? Just stop! We have the data, we have the technology – and people are getting in the way. It’s time to stop being scared. Use the data, use the tech, drive results. Simple.”
Bob Ivins of NCC Media – the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter – that is measuring set-top box viewing data – said measuring “outcomes” is not so simple.
“You’re measuring an outcome, one outcome – and there’s a bunch of different outcomes,” he explained. “An outcome could be to ‘go to a website’, an outcome could be ‘do a transaction’, an outcome could be ‘do a search’. There’s a bunch of different outcomes.
“Unless you have all those outcomes with the metric on them that you can monitor with real-time and at scale the way you are, then we’re just doing one at a time. And I think when you think attribution, it’s not one thing.”
Wallach of Comcast-owned FreeWheel said the new technology allows ad buyers to change how they buy inventory in the middle of a campaign – a vast change from previously.
“A year ago, it would be six months after a campaign was completed before you first look at a report,” he said. “(By then), everything has changed – consumer behaviour has changed, the product may have even changed or the sales channel, etc.”
Kinsella said being able to do that across TV devices required consolidating from multiple distinct software platforms to one that gives a holistic overview.
But NCC Media’s Ivins replied: “There’s a long journey though, until we can do that executionally in linear TV.
“I mean, there’s a long, long road ahead of us. It’s hard. I think it’s (because of) technology, I think it’s people, I think it’s just the cable plan itself is hard to work with. There is legacy infrastructure on the agency side and the brand side and the technology side.”
But TVSquared’s Kinsella disagreed with the “no”: “Just say ‘yes’. (People say) ‘there’s still so much’, ‘no, it’s hard’, ‘we can’t do that, the systems are old, what about Nielsen? I can’t fire that many people’.
“Just say ‘yes!’. Just say ‘yes’. We are doing it today. It’s happening. It’s real.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them.
Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies, they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.
An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
In a panel interview at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis, two executives were asked how they are reconfiguring to service D2Cs…
In October, NBCU partnered with the agency Giant Spoon, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, to start Direct To Scale, an advertiser offering specifically geared toward helping D2Cs.
Norris says it “is really designed to help brands that were typically born in social scale beyond social – they hit a ceiling and they need something a little bit bigger.
“What we ended up finding is that these brands spent so much time on segmenting their audience, coming up with a really sound strategy for growth,” Norris said. “They spend a lot of time, money, effort, consideration, and then when it’s time to execute, they go buy a DR (direct response) schedule.
“The brand will have to retrofit their strategy to fit the inventory that’s available. We kind of didn’t think that that was the right way to go about it.”
Norris and Lee agreed that, just because ad buyers can now laser-target ad campaigns at cohorts of individual households, that doesn’t mean they always should – at least, not in isolation.
WideOrbit’s Lee said: “We’re allowing you to buy by daypart, by specific market programme, and it really is getting a lot more granular and giving them the capabilities to really see how they want to carve up their campaign based on the results they’re seeing.”
Norris said: “There’s a place for both (precise targeting and mass reach). Especially with direct-to-consumer brands, it’s not just good enough to do one.”
Lee agreed: “We can get too granular with that data. I think we have to find that balance. The more precise we get, you’re shrinking that funnel and you’re missing that whole audience… You need to make sure that you’re not trying to get so precise that you’re missing out on the big picture.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>The ability of marketers to target individual viewing households with specific messaging seems revolutionary. But, though it has existed for several years now and though consumer technology deployment is wider than ever, discussions from successive Beet Retreats suggest some advertisers are still getting up to speed, and are still yet to be convinced.
eMarketer recently revised down its 2019 forecast for US addressable TV ad spending, from the earlier $2.54bn to $2bn. The earlier forecast had pegged addressable spending at just 3.7% of total US TV ad spend in 2019.
As connected TV ad spending continues to grow — addressable TV ad spending is slowing down. Check out eMarketer's revised forecast. #DigitalMarketing #ProgrammaticMarketing pic.twitter.com/ZJwfn7rd1V
— IXS Performs (@ixsperforms) June 28, 2019
Whilst that was attributed to connected TV platforms gaining a faster share of spend than traditional MVPD platforms will, we continue to hear brand views at both ends of the spectrum… from skepticism that addressable presents any brand benefits, to brands needlessly hoping to fine-target audiences.
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, an executive from a company which has been a canary in the mineshaft for addressable TV said he sees varied willingness on the part of brands.
Marc Cestaro, MODI Media addressable lead, was interviewed by Howard Shimmel, president of Janus Strategy & Insights.
“Whether clients are willing to abandon or learn something new is kind of where (growth) lies.
“I think it’s just (about needing) a unified march to understand and push and accept that it is fragmented, but it’s really not that hard.”
“People tried this (technique) three or four years ago and say it didn’t work or it was too complicated, (but) it’s totally different now. We’re not reinventing the wheel, but it’s just, with repetition, comes ease.”
“Another misconception is, (when marketers say), ‘My brand is not fit for addressable because my target is very broad’. And, I’m not going to say that’s not true, but it’s all about how you look at it…
“If I own a tissue company … would it make sense to target that (precision) way? (No), everybody’s using tissues. But, within that, you can have a subset:
“I think we’ve kind of moved beyond the challenges that were just six months away.”
Asked to rate advertisers’ acceptance of the tactic, Cestaro rated it four out of five on average.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Speaking at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” , Brendan Condon, Comcast Spotlight CEO, said: “If you don’t have good creative, your ad’s not going to work … especially when you’re thinking about attribution to digital.
“In the tier of marketers that are mid- to smaller-size, either they don’t have good creative and they need some advice and insights or they don’t have television creative at all.
“We created a team and then we’ll be launching this officially in the next couple of weeks, whereby they’re exclusively focused on being a full-service creative agency for these marketers.”
Successive Beet Retreats have heard of mixed reception for advanced TV advertising techniques, with some large brands slow to put spend in to addressable TV. Lately, however, smaller, direct-to-consumer brands have been adding to their digital ad spend with TV, whilst local cable providers are getting tooled-up to support addressable tactics, including with technology that can attribute consumers’ online actions to their TV ad exposure.
All of that new toolset would seem to require some hand-holding. “In an effort to show that it’s not that hard, we can do that for you and therefore get you on to television,” Condon said.
The move follows a busy month from Comcast Spotlight. Condon spoke with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City.
Comcast Spotlight just published its Q1 TV Viewership Report, finding TV viewership is at a two-year high, reversing the trend of decline that Comcast Spotlight has seen since it began tracking this data in 2017. The report analyzed nine billion hours of cumulative Comcast platform viewing.
“Not only are (viewers) watching it more but (also) for longer periods of time,” Condon said.” The average television viewer in the Comcast household is watching television for about six hours and 25 minutes every day. It’s remarkable.”
“In 2019, we saw twice the amount of volume in terms of VOD (versus 2016). And that’s up 36% over the prior year.”
Spotlight just launched Instant Impact, an analytics software platform that shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission. Initially, Comcast Spotlight rolled it out to car sales advertisers. But now Instant Impact is about to gain wider impact, sold to other kinds of brands.
Condon said he wants local advertisers to start adopting a “marketing funnel” approach, the same way big brands do, which requires drawing a line between initial awareness and measuring an end sale.
“We went all the way down to the local marketplace as well and said, Hey, that should hold true for them as well.” Instant Impact was conceived to answer the question: “How do you prove that the funnel actually works?”
With a 2020 presidential election season gearing up, TV ad campaigns will be a focus again. This time, more than ever, household addressability based on available voter data will be well-used tactic. Now couple that with attribution technology which can actually illustrate the online outcomes of candidates TV ads.
But, from its analysis of the 2018 mid-terms, Condon’s TV Viewership Report, showed a broad approach can work best.
“Actually, the winning candidates spent money and time on the top three news networks. They spent less money on the primetime day parts. They spent less money in terms of shorter campaigns. The winners … needed to diversify their network selection. They need to diversify the day parts.
“Fourteen percent of our viewers are watching only the top five networks. That’s 86% of watching everything else. On average, the households are watching 34 different networks in any given month.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is according to an executive whose software company’s insights have been encouraging hundreds of advertisers to greatly increase their spending in the medium.
TVSquared helps power Instant Impact, an analytics platform at Comcast Cable’s Spotlight ad sales unit which shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.
The relationship started with a proof-of-concept in three to five markets, followed with a pilot involving 25 advertisers and the full roll-out was announced this month. Comcast Spotlight has also said it intends to apply Instant Impact to more customer types outside of automotive.
Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, spoke with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp, in this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” in August.
“Television, to me, has the opportunity to thrive, not just survive now,” Swartz said.
“(In TV), we’re really not … losing money to digital,” Kinsella concurred. “We see (advertising) people coming back all the time. We have advertisers on the platform in 72 different countries right now, soon to be probably up at a hundred countries.”
She said one advertiser on the platform, which spent $1 million on TV three years ago, this year plans to spend $40 million.
The “game-changer” is attribution technology. Historically, TV has been viewed as a brand-building medium, at the top of marketing funnels; it has been difficult to prove how television commercials prompt actions like store visitation or, particularly, purchase.
That has caused many marketers to turn away from linear local TV, finding they can get results and proven effectiveness in digital channels.
“Now we can measure it and make it accountable,” Kinsella said. “We’ve seen advertisers double their spend, double their commitment, saying, ‘I’m not just going to advertise for three months, I’m not just going to do a Pulse campaign, I’m going to do an annual commitment, because now you’ve shown me that TV. is working’.”
Kinsella doesn’t expect the return of ad flow to local TV will happen overnight. Rather than place all their money on black, she imagines ad buyers making iterative changes, testing to discover exactly how TV can demonstrably fuel performance.
“When they’ve done that for a couple of months and they see that it’s driving more response, whatever the response might be, they say, ‘Oh, this is working, let’s keep doing it’. We have clients that have been optimizing now weekly, monthly… for three, four, five years.”
Kinsella acknowledges that many in TV land are “terrified” of data-driven, automated TV ad sales. But she expects they will come around when all kinds of TV are made measurable.
“It just changes the whole TV ecosystem, if we can now measure everything, whether it’s a digital platform or a linear platform,” she says.
“It’s about serving up an analytics platform that allows our clients to choose their KPIs and to tie TV performance, whether it’s linear or digital, back to business outcomes. That’s the future.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>After a recognition that proxy metrics like “clicks” didn’t necessarily translate in to real goals, like sales, certain publishers and even TV operators are now doing just that, offering “guaranteed” outcomes in return for ad spend.
But, is “outcome”-based pricing really effective?
In this panel discussion Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, Joe Marchese, Attention Capital CEO, and Joanna O’Connell, Forrester Research principal analyst, poured suspicion on the new trend in ad pricing…
“I don’t believe ROI is actually the input for advertising, ROI is an output,” Marchese said. “The ROI is what you seek. You don’t get to buy ROI.”
O’Connell concurred. “I get very nervous when I see people moving to these very outcomes-based models, and I just think, ‘I think you’re missing something really important and I’m not sure you totally know it’, and that makes me super nervous.”
Marchese replied: “Here’s what I don’t understand about outcomes. Aren’t they working (both) with Ford and Toyota? Like, which one (brand) are they promising the outcomes to for real? Outcomes are possible on a relative basis.”
Marchese and O’Connell voiced concern that, in the new push to offer outcomes-based ad pricing, some on the sell side may be constructing an incorrect causal link between an advertising exposure and real business health.
Marchese said he suspects “spoofing of ROIs and the mis-attribution and reverse engineering” are gathering pace.
“How do these brands that are collapsing keep getting ROI reports that say it’s working?,” he asked the conference.
Marchese is the former CEO of true[X], the ad-tech company that seeks to make TV ads more engaging to viewers through interactivity, incentivising them to trade that engagement for lower ad volume. Now he has launched an investment firm called Attention Capital , which has taken a controlling stake in the Tribeca Film Festival and plans further investments.
“Data’s a good thing, but we have wildly swung too far,” he told O’Connell. “Attention is more important than data.
“You think we incept human beings? You think your consumers are that dumb that they weren’t going to go eat that thing and then you put it in front of them? (Rather), it’s a build over time.”
Marchese said modern advertising had the power to play a wider part in consumer conversations than even content these days, because the latter is so abundant and because viewers are no longer all viewing at the same time. But he criticized the culture that data-driven thinking had infused in advertising.
“We had perverse incentives that said ‘We need more impressions, they don’t have to be good or bad, we just need more of them’.
“We had really bad measurement. It was binary – ‘it either is or is not an impression’ – rather than some sort of gradient. And we kind of looked past the fraud and we had an over-belief that data would solve everything.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>In a panel discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, three TV platform representatives discussed their take on “addressable” TV.
Ahead of next year’s 2020 US presidential election, two of them said that electoral candidates are big customers for local addressable TV ad campaigns.
Ashley Swartz, Furious Corp CEO, led the discussion with:
“We started this addressable journey seven years ago,” Robertson said. “We have the set top box data. Let’s use that to make our advertisers more enabled and more capable to reach a target audience.
“One of the early adopters to addressable was the political marketplace. It’s not (for them) enough to do (targeting by) age, gender and geo because you and your neighbor will have different politics.
“We looked to streamline that process and formed a joint venture (with DirecTV) called D2 where all political dollars to our two firms on an addressable scale are coming through one joint department.”
“Comcast has invested in technologies like blockchain, Blockgraph,” said Zapata. “I mean we are really looking at making sure like right now in the local space, we’re doing BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) actually for political ads. We are doing some really cool things in the local space.
“In five years what I would really like to see is, ‘How do we get addressable? How do we get national, how do we get geo all actually bought from the same team?’ It’s audience focused, it’s platform agnostic, it’s network agnostic. And there’s a currency that actually looks at (it) impression-based and de-dupes (audiences).
“At Hulu, the nice thing about our local team is that we can execute with an ease on the client side,” Donohue said. “You can buy every DMA (designated market area) in the United States or you can buy down to one zip code.
“It doesn’t just have to be a 15-second spot or 30-second spot. You could use our ads selector, make a decision. The viewer could decide, “I’m going to watch a two-minute commercial and then be ad free, a binge ad or a pause ad.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is the view of a company that has long offered the infrastructure for local TV networks’ ad management around the US. But now WideOrbit wants to service ad buyers, too.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Zinsmeister, WideOrbit chief revenue officer, says the “spot” TV ad market in the US is “haemorrhaging” money, down from $18 billion to $16 billion [source unknown], “because it’s not super-accessible”.
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
Now WideOrbit is bringing workflow automation to spot TV advertising. It wants to speed up the old manual system in which an ad buyer passes campaign requirements to a buying representative, on to stations and back to the buyer.
WideOrbit’s Zinsmeister spoke with Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
“If you really kind of look beneath the covers, when (ad buyers) say, ‘I don’t buy local (TV ads)’, it’s because it wasn’t accessible. Now I think we’re going to change that.
“We’ve spent 20 years putting everybody on a similar platform, now we’re really doing cool stuff to be able to leverage that. We’re working directly with Hudson MX and Mediaocean, the big buying systems that the buyers are utilizing.”
“The problem with local, at least in spot (ads) and to some degree local cable as well, is an agency is working at a 2% or less profit margin. It works really well, the brands want it. It’s a fantastic medium, but it costs so much to transact it.
“Data providers, buy-side systems, sell-side systems, we’re now working together to communicate information that reduces discrepancies, and more importantly, the time that it takes to transact. ”
“They don’t see the performance until way after the campaign, so you don’t get that level of attribution.
“By putting everybody on a similar footprint, by now working with the buy-side systems instead of competing with them, we’re providing really fast access, both for traditional buyers and also for folks like Google.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>GroupM’s North America CEO Tim Castree used Beet Retreat to call for the industry to develop common standards for measuring ads on an impression basis.
Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, in this video interview with Beet.TV, said agency in-fighting is stopping standardization.
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory. It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
Smolin spoke at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” with Janet Balis, EY Global Advisory Services Leader for Media & Entertainment.
Smolin said technology is not holding back standardization – “operational” disagreements, between agencies’ distinct traditional TV-buying and programmatic trading desk teams, are.
“There’s kind of a fight in a lot of agencies over who gets control over that, on who’s going to lead in that going forward,” Smolin said. “On the sell side, you have a similar challenge in that, up until very recently, most of the broadcasters, programmers and MVPDs have generally been leaning back in regards to programmatic, as opposed to leaning forward.”
Asked by Balis if technology was “out-innovating the market readiness”, Smolin said he saw a three-step process through which agencies can prepare themselves to buy in this converged fashion…
Smolin said advanced TV ad buyers that are profiting from the opportunity don’t want to be named, seeing the technique as a “competitive advantage”.
“We are seeing some organizations that are pretty evolved with their traditional TV investment teams, very data-driven. They are doing data-driven (TV) upfronts, and then they are taking those and using digital KPIs measured against the linear TV upfronts in order to do monthly and, for some of their brands, weekly planning updates.”
The company spent $101 million on the TV and video ad-tech supplier in 2018. But what was the rationale?
“Amobee’s heritage as a technology platform was in programmatic,” Smolin said. “Programmatic evolved out of remnant display advertising; it’s demand-constrained.
“But when you look at TV, it’s supply constrained. It introduces the dimension of time, upfronts, reservations.
“It’s very different algorithms in order to solve those problems effectively. We realized it would take us years to build (this new kind of software).”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is according to the North America boss of the world’s largest media-buying agency, GroupM.
Tim Castree, GroupM North America CEO, in this video with Beet.TV, says traditional TV, therefore, remains robust with plenty of remaining upside to sell data-optimized traditional TV ad campaigns.
He is calling for “open” standards to change the game.
Castree spoke with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp, in this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” in August.
Castree is calling for three things to accelerate adoption:
Swartz described Castree’s vision for a common standard as “ensuring that they have a UID that allows them to identify unduplicated reach across multiple supply sources.”
He added: “Within that (standard), we’re (need) to understand, who have we reached perhaps, and at what level of certainty, and who have we reached for certain.
“We want to bring other data into systems where we care about people as the central kind of units that we measure things around. I think we can do a lot more with television than we are today.”
Castree accused certain vendors of acting in their own best interests.
“We’ve had a lot of systems … a lot of companies trying to bundle data, technology, and inventory, and not bring it back to us,” he said. “(But,) we (at agencies) want to buy that in a disaggregated way.
“Bring the data back to us, so we can de-duplicate it and look across that”
Some of these challenges may seem big. But Castree is confident. “I think we can get all those three things done in the next year,” he said.
That is because it isn’t the technology holding back adoption, it is protectionism.
“When we don’t operate this way, we give a massive advantage to the walled gardens (Google, Facebook and Amazon).”
And GroupM seems intent on the industry building common standards in an open way.
“Our goal at GroupM is to have an approach … which is not some locked-in GroupM standard.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Attribution technology is rising in prominence, as programmers seek ways to show agencies the effectiveness of new-wave, data-fuelled advanced TV ads.
But an executive at the center of the emerging capability says a foundational element before attribution is ensuring that ad creative can be placed for the right viewers in the first place.
“Everyone always wants to look at sales,” says Brian Wallach, FreeWheel SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And if you’re a publicly traded company, you’re looking at sales quarterly, and some companies weekly and daily.
“From a business perspective, the media and advertising industry has really been about matching up audience with an advertiser’s message. And I still think, foundationally, the attribution plays a role in it, but our job in the ecosystem is to make it as easy as possible to find those audiences. Yes, using data, and then (to) deliver that message whatever screen the consumer’s watching on.
“I think if we do our job of matching up those audiences, the outcomes will be what the outcomes need to be, based on that creative, and that messaging, and that offer, and the value prop that the marketer is presenting to all of us as consumers.”
He was speaking with Janet Balis, global leader of EY’s media and entertainment practice.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is the takeaway from a leading soothsayer at one of the US’ leading broadcast companies.
In the last couple of years, Comcast has built a significant technology portfolio and overhauled its own ad sales efforts to support data-driven, targetable advertising in both linear TV and digital video.
“What kind of data are we harnessing? The most beautiful kind,” says Andrea Zapata, Comcast VP research and insights, Comcast Spotlight, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We have viewership data across our platform. We started tapping into our (own) data in a very privacy-compliant way about two years ago.
“I will tell you, though, that we have really pivoted away from using a lot of third-party syndicated measurement to really using our data to help inform what happens across our house.”
Zapata was speaking with Maryann Halford, senior advisor at MTM Consulting, for Beet.TV.
Comcast Spotlight is publishing some top-line data from its Comcast platform through its quarterly TV Viewership Report, the latest in a long line of insight products that has also integrated all the publications its FreeWheel unit was producing.
“They’re watching in ways that may be fairly surprising to you and actually might break some of the ideas that you have, the contracts that you have and how you reach your customer,” says Zapata.
“It’s not just prime time, it’s not just a handful of networks. In fact, it’s probably networks that you don’t even know but your customer is watching and values.”
She says Spotlight offers advertisers the initial big reach that goes with mass, data-driven linear TV, perfect for upper-funnel goals, followed by lower-funnel approaches which use addressable TV capabilities.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That doesn’t look like happening any time soon, says one man leading advanced TV for the world’s biggest ad-buying agency – but it also doesn’t matter.
And, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Marc Cestaro, MODI Media director, addressable lead, says the industry may never get there.
“I need a magic wand,” Cestaro says. It would make my life awesome, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get there.
He rates advertiser acceptance of addressability – the practice through which they can target TV ads to household-level using IP-connected viewing devices – at only four out of five.
“The connected partners are sort of coming from a different angle,” Cestaro observes. “The traditional cable partners have zoned legacy business, their spot business. You have internet providers, 5G could come into play somehow. That would be awesome. But I’m not sure that they’ll all play together.”
MODI Media helps brands navigate the new opportunities presented by advanced TV capabilities.
Peers report initial confusion amongst brands, followed by a period of education. Over the years, Beet.TV has also heard some brands present with too-specific an idea of the targeting they want to achieve.
Cestaro does see a range of consolidations happening. He imagines connected TV hitting two-thirds household penetration, centering on a core range of services and devices, plus groups like NCC Media, Xandr and Nielsen all helping normalize the playing field. It’s getting much “easier”, Cestaro reports.
Regardless, he doesn’t necessarily think the holy grail of a single universal addressable TV marketplace is needed.
“I don’t know if we need that to really scale it,” he says. “I think (the opportunity is) there.”
He was interviewed by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But they should nevertheless be realistic about the kinds of super-powers they can find on the screen, says an executive whose company manages the movement of TV ad inventory across the country.
“We’re seeing the shift from digital coming towards the TV space,” says Frederick Lee, WideOrbit director of sales, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“That’s exciting because they’re looking at it from an (ad) impression standpoint; it makes perfect sense for them to have an easy way to access that inventory and marry it with their data on the backend.”
Advanced TV capabilities include targeting viewers at the household level and attribution which allows brands to track a viewer exposed to an ad, all the way to outcomes like website or store visitation and even sales.
Lee says traditional agencies and digital agencies are connecting to TV inventory through APIs in order to take advantage.
Amongst the digital-style brands embracing TV is the wave of direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce companies that are selling direct, without the need for intermediary retail platforms.
In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them.
Meanwhile, an umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
But Lee also cautions the new digital brands not to expect things to work the same on TV as they do online.
“I think we have to be careful because the difference between digital and TV is you are dealing with a finite amount of inventory on the TV and an infinite amount of inventory on the digital,” he says.
“There’s a way to manage those expectations. It’s just something that we constantly have to be aware of. What works for digital might not necessarily be the same as how it is executed on the linear side.”
Lee says a consultative approach is needed by brands as they make the transition.
He was speaking with Janet Balis, global leader of EY’s media and entertainment practice.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is according to an executive who thinks critics of the emerging opportunity are wrong.
Addressable TV, which gives brands the ability to buy ads targeted at the household level, has made particular in-roads in certain local cable operators and in particular OTT services or TV devices.
Mike Bologna, the former president of GroupM’s MODI Media advanced TV unit who later co-founded Cadent’s one2oneMedia addressable TV arm, says there are two ways of assessing addressable TV’s deployment:
“Getting the national inventory into play addresses the scale issue as it comes to impressions available,” he says. “That’s the part that we need to focus on so this can really start to take a chunk out of that $70 billion (total US TV ad spend) that everybody’s chasing.
“How do we get all of the national TV networks? How do we get their inventory, which is the bulk of the television inventory, enabled so they can start offering up an addressable option to advertisers?”
Doing so won’t necessarily be straightforward. Whilst many new OTT entrants are offering dynamic addressable ads out of the gate, incumbent national TV networks still have their traditional direct-sold ads business to manage, often going through cable operators.
“(National broadcasters) don’t have the ability to light up the inventory,” Bologna explains. “It’s not within their control. No national network can light up the inventory by themselves.
“They have to create a relationship, make a deal with either a cable system, a set-top box maker or a smart TV because, for the foreseeable future, dynamically-inserted commercials over live linear programming is going to happen either through the set-top box or through the smart TV.
“Then they need to go through the calculations and figure, out of their programming, which is best suited for an addressable insertion and where are they going to generate the most yield?”
He was interviewed by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But it turns out those same capabilities may also trickle up to the big brands that were more commonly thought of as TV advertisers.
That is according to one long-time TV ad exec who recently added a three-letter acronym to his role.
NBCUniversal ad sales senior vice president Brian Norris recently took charge of a “D2C” push.
“These brands were born in social, and they get to a point where they need to scale their businesses,” he told EY’s Janet Balis during Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
Norris was talking about how advanced TV ad capabilities allow emerging direct-to-consumer brands to get the appeal of TV whilst also enjoying the measurability of digital.
But, asked if those same capabilities can be used by more than just the “emerging” set, he said: “These brands are primarily thinking about how do they succeed against their KPIs. When you’re looking at brands that are new to television and you’re looking at established brands, the one thing that they have in common is that they have to achieve against KPIs.
“Whether that KPI is site conversion (for new brands) or brand lift (for mature brands), they have to achieve against those.
“There’s really no difference in success when you’re thinking about a direct-to-consumer brand and a legacy brand. We ultimately, we need to perform for those brands in order for them to grow and ultimately stay with our platform.”
In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them. Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies ,they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.
An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
All of which places Norris and his peers under greater pressure to prove the effectiveness of TV as a medium.
“I get the question pretty often, ‘Why did you leave direct response?’,” he says. “Part of my answer is around attribution… not really believing (until now) that television was getting the credit that it deserved for attribution.
“I think that it’s really important to give television the credit that it deserves and not just have that value siphoned off by a social platform.”
Comcast, owner of Norris’ NBCUniversal, has developed and acquired its way to offering such a solution, including taking on AdSmart through its acquisition of Sky and its earlier acquisition of video ad-tech software FreeWheel.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Next year’s presidential election will move the needle back up, but most people agree that TV ad spending is plateauing somewhat.
What can restore positive momentum? Showing advertisers how TV advertising really works, according to one man at the center of doing just that.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bob Ivins, NCC Media chief data officer, talks about how new attribution technology allows broadcast platforms to help brands truly understand the linkage between ad viewership and consequential outcomes like website visits, store visitation and eventual sales.
“Digital has had this narrative for the last 20 years,” Ivins says. “We’ve kind of just let it play out in front of us, from a TV perspective.
“Now for the first time, we’re passively collecting … set-top box data, actual viewing data from millions of households.”
Attribution technology comes in various forms. It relies on IP-based viewing devices and tracking for viewers’ consequential actions, including mobile geo-location tracking, all linked by identity resolution that bridges the gap.
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.
The organization is repeating the effort for the reams of data now available to its owners in digital viewing devices.
“Intuitively, we all kind of know TV works, but now we can measure it,” says Ivins. “We as an industry need to be able to provide these metrics. Otherwise, flat is going to be the new up for a long time.”
He was speaking with Janet Balis of EY’s media and entertainment team.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Over a sustained period, across platforms and using a targeted approach, according to James Rothwell, Comcast VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations for Comcast Spotlight, which is Comcast Cable’s ad sales unit.
His recommendation is based off a just-released analysis of 36 media and entertainment campaigns that Comcast Spotlight ran in 2018:
1. Sustained exposure:
“A flight of about five to seven weeks really drove conversion rates and ensured that the reach and frequency was was high,” Rothwell tells Beet.TV in this video interview. This particularly benefits episodic content.
2. Multi-platform approach:
“Using both linear and VOD … in concert … enabled viewers to … see the ads multiple times, which again drew more conversion lift.” A campaign spanning 3+ platforms drives significantly higher results than campaigns running on just one or two platforms, according to the research.
3. Mix and match platforms
The combination of those platforms is a significant weighting factor – and choosing distinct platforms can reduce overlap. Comcast recommends choosing one broad-reach platform, one narrow. It has seen that, “by combining linear and VOD, only 29% of reached households were exposed to both platforms, demonstrating the value of multi-platform incremental reach”.
4. Smarter audience segments:
“Ensure that your audience segments are constructed in the right way. In the past, we’ve seen media and entertainment clients just going after the clients that are already loyal. (But) (they) need to find new viewers. (They should) feed the top of the funnel (and) push those new potential viewers down the funnel to convert and tune into the new content.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But, with different advertisers each having unique different outcomes and measurement metrics for them, how can a TV platform manage the proliferating burden?
An ad-tech exec serving TV publishers says they must go beyond the now-accepted obsession with data.
“I think (the industry has) a lot of understanding that targeting data is important and necessary,” says Stacy Daft, Amobee GM, Enterprise Commercial Business Development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But almost as important as that is an understanding of what the competing KPIs and metrics are for all of the clients you’re trying to satisfy across your scarce inventory pool.
“That problem set requires an understanding of not just the target segment that’s being used and asked for by a client, but that of all of the other competing campaigns.”
Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the yse of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.
The latest imperative Daft is describing sounds like a game of 4D chess.
She says: “You need to understand the audience overlap, you need to be able to understand what’s been committed and sold to to date.
“And then you need to be able to forecast and understand the fluctuations in the viewership, and the changes in terms of the volumes that you’re going to be seeing in order to be able to confidently determine ‘How much inventory do I need to set aside for my addressable campaigns versus how much inventory do I need to reserve to satisfy my traditional linear?’
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That was the subject of a conversation between Tim Castree, GroupM north America CEO, and Howard Shimmel, president of his own Janus Strategy & Insights at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
Asked by Shimmel about measuring how many viewers saw a TV ad, Castree replied: “I do think it’s just a simple agreement about math.
“Let’s just say (it’s) 60% likely that … the person we wanted to reach in that household saw that impression, even though we don’t know precisely.
“Let’s just agree some of those things – and I don’t think it’s complicated. It doesn’t require a lot of technology. It’s a simple agreement about a math-based kind of framework for translating things back to a common impression standard.”
Castree had another framework to offer, too – a three-pronged approach to being able to transact ad impressions across platforms:
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>eMarketer puts that figure at 5% of the total in 2019.
That opens up a disconnect with the proportion of TV viewing that is itself getting delivered through internet channels.
In this discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, Kelly Abcarian, GM of video advanced advertising at Nielsen, says US smart TV adoption has exploded from 16% four years ago, to almost half today, approaching 250 million TV sets; source unclear.
The gap between adoption and ad spend is reminiscent of the early days of mobile advertising, when consumer media time on mobile far out-flanked the proportion of ad spend brands were putting to the same channel.
But Nielsen’s Abcarian says publishers are nevertheless intensely interested.
“Programmers are looking at ways in which they can drive better yield for themselves, but even more importantly yield for their advertisers,” she says, speaking with Howard Shimmel, president of his own Janus Strategy & Insights.
“They see real value of being able to take a first-party or third-party (audience data) segment and really activate that on behalf of their advertiser. And so I think they’re really leaning in.
“You’re seeing a lot of that and kind of the audience-based buying, being able to … reach an ad schedule against a consumer segment defined very uniquely by that unique advertiser. And then as we do one-to-one addressable, really being able to kind of fine-hone on how you get that right message at the right time in front of that right consumer.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Fortunately, many ad agencies are now putting together the pieces involving audience data sets and software tools, according to Philip Smolin.
“We’re seeing a number of agencies that are on the leading edge of that evolution,” says Amobee’s chief strategy officer in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And I think generally we’re seeing it play out in three somewhat discreet phases:
Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the yse of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>The chief revenue officer at Comcast Spotlight, Comcast Cable’s ad sales unit, says he can help bring ad spend back to local cable – by proving to advertisers the effectiveness of their spending.
Spotlight just launched Instant Impact, an analytics software platform that shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.
And it seems to be working. “We’ve seen sizeable double digit growth in spend, as well as in renewal rates,” Condon tells Maryann Halford, senior advisor at MTM Consulting in this video interview for Beet.TV
So, why has Comcast launched Instant Impact, which is powered by TVSquared? Chiefly, because marketers – especially auto dealers – have been turning away from linear local TV, finding they can get results and proven effectiveness in digital channels.
“In order to stem some of that share shifting and also to grow with the spend for these automotive marketers, we needed to ensure that we could show, when they advertise on television, that it actually works, that we can attribute the traffic to their dealerships or respectively to their websites,” Condon says.
Comcast initially launched a proof-of-concept in three to five markets, followed with a pilot involving 25 advertisers and the full roll-out announced this week.
Whilst it initially focuses on auto dealers, the company wants to make the software available to all advertisers across its 67 markets, and plans to target financial services, quick service restaurants, insurance and travel categories.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>The San Francisco-based company offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
“It really is the infrastructure of the supply side,” says Mike Zinsmeister, WideOrbit chief revenue officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Now that we’ve done that, we’re working with buy-side systems, and indirectly buyers, to try to make that available.”
Zinsmeister says servicing the buy side will begin in the next month or two, though WideOrbit will begin by “walking” slowly in to the new arena. He acknowledges making the flip will be challenging.
“Disrupting incumbents is a tricky thing,” he adds. “It makes people nervous when there are new folks that are coming in,when we change our position from just being a supply-side system of record to one that’s helping them to transact against their inventory. Those things makes folks nervous.”
“But there’s also a healthy dose of appreciation for it, and a lot of energy and enthusiasm. We don’t sell it, we don’t buy it and then package it up and sell it. We really just try to make it accessible as an option to sell.”
WideOrbit is bringing workflow automation to spot TV advertising in a bid to stop money leaking out into other forms of media.
It wants to speed up the old manual system in which an ad buyer passes campaign requirements to a buying representative, on to stations and back to the buyer, which Zinsmeister takes three-and-a-half-days.
Instead, he says, his system aims to make TV ad buying more like travel planning on Kayak or Orbitz. “They’ve actually gotten the buy- and sell-side systems to talk, and that’s what we’re doing,” he adds.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Yet, fast-forward to 2019, and it seems proliferating content plus diminishing, an obsession with data and ad supply chain issues are posing new challenges to the idea.
That is why Joe Marchese, the executive who led a company trying to make ads more engaging, has now launched an investment firm called Attention Capital.
Joe Marchese’s firm has first taken a controlling stake in the Tribeca Film Festival, alongside James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems. Next up, he wants to put more targets in his portfolio.
“The plan will be to buy control stakes in media brands or iconic brands that are permission-to-curate,” Marchese said during a discussion at Beet Retreat in the City. “And then scale those brands with technology, scale those brands geographically in new business lines.
At Beet Retreat, Marchese was interviewed by Joanna O’Connell, Forrester principal analyst.
“We think the curation layer is what’s missing from media brands,” he added. “In the open web … right now the AI is curating content for people. And I think people are looking for something a little different.
“And then (with) media technologies … how are we going to measure attention better? How are we going to access attention, respecting consumers a little bit better? And how are we going to monetize attention in ways that it’s consumer-friendly?”
That last part may sound familiar. Because Marchese is also the former CEO of true[X], the ad-tech company that seeks to make TV ads more engaging to viewers through interactivity, incentivising them to trade that engagement for lower ad volume.
The company was acquired by Fox Networks Group, where Marchese became president of advanced advertising and advertising revenue. He had also been on Tribeca’s board since 2015.
Attention for new-style ads needs to be boosted, because attention for traditional ads is declining, Marchese added.
“If you account for consumer experience, meaning that they abandon watching in particular areas, and if you accounted for the amount of fraud or fraudulent impressions that are out there, the number of people watching real ads is shrinking at a rate at which I think it actually should be profitable to have good experiences that people are willing to sit through ads for,” he said.
“The market, I don’t think, recognizes it, but that is how you make it profitable.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
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