In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event, Ward pegs the spot TV universe at about $30 billion in advertising sales, with the NCC-aligned MVPD’s representing roughly $6 billion. “We actually think there’s a terrific opportunity to grow that spot business by bringing to the table many of the attributes that are going to drive the addressable marketplace around data, targeting and measurement,” he adds.
As with the new NCC division, which is expected to launch in June, the overall concept is to move away from traditional Nielsen age/gender audience measures and “deliver audiences in a more robust manner than traditionally has been afforded” to the local TV marketplace.
Across the 60 or so cable networks “that we insert advertising in each of our markets, that aggregate impression pool is about sixty to seventy percent of total viewing,” Ward explains. With two-thirds of viewing and one-fifth of dollars spent, “We think there’s opportunity to grow that core spot business by layering on increased levels of data, targeting and measurement focused in the spot environment.”
Although the sales structure of the new NCC division will rely on a “very much independent sales effort focused on the national addressable marketplace, we think the work we will be doing in that environment will also fuel the spot marketplace.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>NCC Media is owned by Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications.
“Really what we’re talking about is all of MVPD inventory in the live linear environment, the on-demand environment as well as the digital environment,” Ward adds in an interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event.
“That’s really one of the primary drivers behind the creation of the enterprise. How do we begin to federate those solutions” in a horizontal manner.
Comcast Media 360, Comcast Spotlight’s former national advertising sales team, will form the foundation of the new unit together with resources from NCC Media, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, NCC media said in a news release.
The second goal—data consistency—will address such advertiser concerns as audience segment definitions, which can vary from one media company to the next. Ward also wants to extend that consistency to analytic and data partnerships to bring uniformity to “what is currently an irrational marketplace.”
Simplification will require structuring “an end-to-end solution” to ensure that transacting national addressable TV campaigns is profitable for advertisers.
“Nobody doubts the sound strategy of using richer data to more precisely deliver audiences and measurement those audiences in more robust ways,” says Ward. “But we’ve got to encase that transaction in elegant architecture from pitch to pay, such that the process is simplified.”
The new unit within NCC Media will use viewers privacy compliant, non-personally identifiable data. This is not an issue because the companies involved are subject to 1980’s rules that Ward characterizes as “probably the strongest consumer protection language in the marketplace.”
All of the aforementioned goals have one common thread: To move national TV targeting, measurement and attribution into the future.
“We don’t fundamentally believe that the future of television planning, buying and measurement will sit on top of an age/gender definition and on top of a panel-based survey methodology,” Ward says.
He takes a broad view of the term “addressable” and points to other forms of audience targeting, including by geography. “Our addressable strategy is part of an overarching targeting approach that also takes into consideration various lenses. Context, device, geo and ultimately household,” Ward says.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“We’re a one-stop-shop for national addressable scale,” Bologna adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “We package everything together.”
To improve simplicity and reduce complexity, “Our business is, for the most part, identifying a particular segment, dynamically inserting a television commercial to that household via that segment, and then tying that ad exposure back to a sale.”
In describing the addressable marketplace, Bologna depicts a landscape with multiple systems, technologies, data sets and reporting scenarios.
“In the absence of a single platform that ties all of that together, it makes the process laborious, cumbersome, sometimes monotonous and frankly difficult and frustrating.”
To execute addressable TV at scale typically entails “making phone calls to eight, ten different systems,” among them MVPD’s, satellite operators, telecom companies and smart-TV providers.
“You’re applying multiple different data sources, you’re integrating multiple different measurement systems. That’s where the bandwidth comes in and that’s where the complexities come in,” Bologna says.
So even if there’s no question that if executed properly, the return on investment is there with addressable, sometimes that return “from a time perspective might not necessarily be there and that’s what we solve. We have everything already aggregated together.”
The majority of one2one Media’s inventory derives from the local two minutes per hour of cable inventory that is owned and operated by MVPD’s. While some national TV networks also make addressable inventory available—the majority of it VOD—along with some broadcast inventory via smart TV’s, those two sources comprise “less than ten percent of the inventory in the business right now.”
One indication of the value of addressable TV, according to Bologna, is that more than 95% of one2one Media’s advertisers “come back and they usually come back at a higher budget because they see the results.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>These trends will help to change the TV business “more in the next two years than it has in the last fifty,” says Jamie Power, Chief Operating Officer of one2one Media.
In addition to aggregating linear TV inventory, one2one does the same for addressable video supply. “Anyplace we can apply the same data and then get the measurement on the back end we’ll do it,” whether it’s OTT, mobile or desktop, Power adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
Goals vary by advertiser needs—from sales lift, web traffic or foot traffic to physical locations. “We can even tie addressable exposure back to social media chatter.”
Post-campaign analysis indicates return on ad spend. One2one knows by category and advertisers “how much they can pay and we’re able to go back and adjust the pricing,” Power adds. “So you’re able to finally ad some transparency to television and see what works, what doesn’t work.”
Knowing what doesn’t work is valuable feedback “because you’re able to go and make adjustments to future campaigns.”
In the simplest terms, MVPD’s that are able to offer addressable advertising have invested in technology to make their set-top boxes function like digital ad servers.
One2one is “starting to look at matching the smart TV device ID, IP address and ACR technology” to make addressable TV perform more like digital media, which will enable in-flight campaign optimization. Legacy systems cannot do this because “it takes a couple of weeks to populate the set-top boxes and get the right messages to right households,” Power says.
For brands with very broad consumer targets, addressable might not make sense unless, say, those brands want to conquest against competitors. Many advertisers start testing addressable by working with one TV provider then scale up from there.
Power cites the example of an online retailer with which one2one has worked for four years. At the beginning, the retailer’s total targeted households were 700,000 and it achieved a return on ad spend of $300,000. This year, its campaign reached more than seven million households and its return was in excess of $6 million, according to Power.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>As advertisers increasingly seek better audience targeting and efficiency, “The marketplace has kind of come our way,” says the company’s President of Advertising Sales, Jim Tricarico.
Less than five years ago, Cadent was “a DR product,” Tricarico explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan. “It was a way for people to get inexpensive GRP’s. But we knew that in order to evolve, we had to create a network-like solution.”
That solution is used by a host of premium brands, including Amazon, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble.
Tricarico says Cadent can access network inventory for advertisers at a 30% to 50% discount from direct-network buys. “We’re never out there saying we’re better than network, we’re instead of network. We really just want to be a complement to network and solve some of those problems that are going on in the marketplace.”
Cadent has access to inventory on all networks and such major sporting events as the Olympics and NCAA tournaments.
A TV veteran whose background includes stints at MTV Networks, Viacom and Screenvision, Tricarico smiles while noting that some people talk about data as though it never existed before. “Every plan has data behind it. The question now is how deep is that data that they’re using,” he says.
Noting that Cadent eschews “walled gardens,” Tricarico says the company does what data tells it to do.
“Whereas when you go to a network group, they actually optimize to their portfolio because they don’t have access to every network. We buy directly against the data and optimize to the data and not to the portfolio.”
In addition to its own data, Cadent has partnerships with companies like 605, which has access to Charter Communications’ 10 million set-top boxes, and with Adobe and Videology. Cadent can cross-reference advertisers’ data with that of 605, “or we become more of an execution arm where we work with the Adobes and the Videologys of the world to execute on the fact that they’ve already put data over their plans and they use us as the inventory source.”
To broaden its footprint on the local broadcast side, Cadent has spent the past year hiring an internal buying group and now has relationships with more than 600 local TV stations, according to Tricarico.
“People are so desperate to find efficient GRP’s that even in cable there’s not enough reach to find them all. What’s growing so much right now is both news and syndication on the broadcast side.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“We have knowledge and capabilities to essentially put dollars to work over three-, six-, twelve-month campaigns like we do in Upfronts,” the CEO of Cadent and one2one Media adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has.”
At this month’s Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan, the sister companies brought together industry leaders to discuss the state of advanced and addressable TV, along with end-to-end solutions encompassing mobile and over-the-top viewing.
Troiano shares two takeaways from the event: TV’s standing in the media hierarchy and the evolving role of data in driving brand engagement.
“With all that’s happened in the marketplace and the changes over the last couple of years, TV still is a dominant medium for brand advertising and will continue to be so,” he says. “Second, the use and influx of data is forcing evolution and change within our industry. Facebook, Google certainly have some of the best data in the space, but data isn’t what drives brand engagement. TV does.”
While the evolution will take time and will be accompanied by “bumps in the road,” the best way to achieve it is through collaboration by advertisers, programmers and technology/platform companies.
“I think if we keep true to the value of television, what it means for our advertisers and for our clients, and find ways to take advantage of what technology and data offers, we’ve got a bright future,” says Troiano.
Troiano says no one questions the value of addressability and the application of data to bring digital-like capabilities of ROI to TV. “The challenge that the industry has encountered is how do you actually make it easier to simplify that process to execute addressable television across a national footprint.”
In the past year since one2one Media joined Cadent under the Cross MediaWorks umbrella, “we’ve invested tremendously in technology and workflow. It’s exactly what we did with Cadent over the past three to four years where we brought scale and stability and ease and transparency to an unwired base of inventory.”
Asked to look ahead, Troiano thinks data-driven television “will continue to be a much bigger play for next year, a percentage of the media buy for the Upfront. The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has. Two years ago they dabbled with it. This year it’s going to be a significant part of the upfront, at least the upfront discussion.
“Whereas next year I think there will be a larger percent of the transaction in the Upfront for advanced TV, addressable we expect to be the same thing for next year.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“For us, it goes back to the simplicity of understanding the consumers really well,” says the company’s VP of Brand Marketing, Tim Goldsmid. “As a small advertiser company, we have to do that better than larger companies. We don’t have the scale.”
Smaller brands “need to be very clear about what it is you want to accomplish, and then once you’ve got your media plan together or your plan of attack, you want to make sure you’re measuring and learning,” Goldsmid explains in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
Jack Link’s identifies specific needs and then matches up the appropriate consumer targets with the most appropriate media channels. “We do a lot of measurement and read on the back side and then scale from there. So we have a lot of little tests going on to see how we can connect with consumers and then move it forward from there,” says Goldsmid.
If the chosen medium is TV, Jack Link’s will shoot “multiple amounts of content and then we’ll optimize and get feedback. We have a partner that can tell us which spots or which creative is running, whether it be digital or TV, and then we optimize from there.”
One of the brand’s partners is Cadent “because they bring a solution that allows us to be much more efficient in the marketplace that we couldn’t get if we weren’t working with a partner like them. If we were going straight to networks.”
By working with Cadent, Jack Link’s is able to localize because Cadent buys media on the local level and offers “different solutions and products that allow us to go into different markets.”
Having worked with other small brands, Goldsmid says it’s all about testing, learning and then scaling.
“You need to basically be scrappy and push your agency or partners to find different solutions, like a Cadent, like other partners that are out there,” he says. “Because it’s not a one size fits all solution anymore. There are very different ways that you can put your marketing model together.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>One key question on everyone’s lips, according to one ad-tech exec: “Will audience-based and cross-screen transactions become a key part of how the upfront negotiations work?”
That is according to VideoAmp chief strategy officer Jay Prasad. His company aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.
Founded four years ago, the company has witnessed the evolution of early notions of “programmatic TV” – from packaging up remnant inventory at a mark-up, to something with far more potential.
“I think the market has moved past that,” Prasad says. “(You were) putting data on top of inventory that a brand advertiser doesn’t necessarily want and then you’re saying ‘it’s just gonna be more expensive’. The market’s really not going for that.”
Instead, Prasad sees more emerging value in programmatic tools being used to create private marketplaces for linear TV, so that premium broadcasters are dealing with clients through programmatic platforms.
If the very notion of programmatic TV has changed, so has VideoAmp’s own approach during its last four years in the market. Prasad observes:
Late last year, the company added Google’s Luis Manrique as product VP after raising a $21.4m series B investment.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”
Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.
“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.
As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.
“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?
“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”
At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.
“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”
OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”
When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”
That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event, the media veteran talks about the three buckets of TV ads—broad distribution, indexing by overlaying data and “served”—along with the risks of not doing addressable well.
The “served” bucket “can be digital, but addressable fits into served, which is we’re sending an ad right to the household or person that we want to receive that message,” says Schwartz. “That area over time is growing and the distribution capabilities are growing.”
Many marketers are very targeted, something has limited their use of traditional television advertising. “They can’t afford it because their target may be one or two percent of the United States,” Schwartz says.
Addressable “allows us to serve those ads to that small population and allows our communications options to grow for those type of ads.”
Another benefit to addressable is that it can facilitate lots of testing, according to Schwartz. “By looking at people, you no longer have to go county-to-county or state-to-state. We can do on-off right next door to each other and make sure that the people are very similar.”
Nonetheless, addressable will likely never constitute 100% of an advertiser’s spending “because you still want to feed the top of the bucket. But when you get to the actual sales and last step, last quarter mile, addressable focused in that manner seems to have a very good return,” Schwartz adds.
He’s still optimistic about the growing penetration of addressable TV, as more MVPD’s warm to it, despite current constraints on the available volume of inventory.
“So I just think that this area is going to continue to grow, and as the economies and capabilities grow and technology is dispersed in the United States, it will have a tremendous upside potential.”
Schwartz cautions that “potential” can be “a very dangerous word.” In the context of addressable TV, one challenge is learning how to use it “in the right manner and make sure that it’s an appropriate use of the vehicle.”
This is because with addressability, “you’re either going to hit the person or not. And if the targeting is off, the person’s not going to get any impressions. That’s why I only think that addressable is going to be a component of the communications platforms used, not the sole.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“Certainly the more partners that join OpenAP the more it allows us to really have that standardization across a greater amount of networks within the portfolio,” Bosetti says in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
When Fox, Viacom and Turner announced OpenAP in March of 2017, Bosetti says Initiative was excited by the opportunity “because one of the challenges that we’ve had with audience buying is the limitations to optimize within different walled gardens versus trying to optimize across the entire cable or broadcast landscape.”
On April 19, NBCU disclosed that it has decided not only to participate in OpenAP but will bring its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation.” the sales chiefs at Fox, Viacom and Turner said in a joint statement.
Bosetti sees advanced audience targeting as a complement to the traditional way of buying primetime shows and daypart mixes, something that isn’t about to change.
“But layering on an audience-based approach allows us to extend that reach across other channels or other platforms that we not be reaching them through those more traditional, fixed-TV buys,” she explains.
OpenAP also offers transparency into buys instead of a “black box” approach to reaching audiences. This gives advertisers increasing confidence to continue investing in advanced TV targeting.
“Clients more and more obviously want to make sure that every dollar that they’re putting their investments into places that are driving the most effectiveness to drive their business,” Bosetti says.
In an interview with Beet.TV one year ago this month, NBCU’s EVP of Business Operations & Strategy, Krishan Bhatia, expressed support for OpenAP while underscoring his company’s efforts to help advertisers target audiences beyond traditional Nielsen demographics.
Bhatia said NBCU was “generally supportive of any efforts that help the TV ecosystem go above and beyond the traditional age/gender based way of measuring and transacting on audiences, including this one,” a reference to OpenAP.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
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