In a sit-down discussion at Cannes Lions, Tracey Scheppach – who encountered that challenge over years spent specialising in smart TV at Publicis and Starcom, and who now runs her own Matter More Media – led a discussion on the conundrum with two execs focused on improving measurement…
Abcarian began by excitedly illustrating the growth the industry is seeing in smart TV adoption, something which is lighting up the opportunity for broadcasters and marketers alike.
“When you look at the growth of smart TVs, it’s been incredible,” Abcarian said. “Almost half of the homes have at least one enabled smart TV, 47%. We look four years back, that was at 16% so it just shows you the hugest acceleration.”
But that growth is driven by proliferation. There are many smart TV viewing systems, many ad delivery mechanisms and many ways to measure the ultimate consumption of smart TV ads and content.
“The thing that concerns me … is, we need all of the smart TVs to be available under the same umbrella … both from a data-for-targeting-and-measurement purposes, and from an addressable-inventory point of view,” said Steuer, who also spent years in the trenches on the same issues at TiVo.
To that end, both Abcarian and Steuer both recently helped drive a new “measurement taskforce” in June, focused on improving data readiness, transparency and reconciling smart TV consumption to Nielsen C3 and C7 ratings.
That, says Abcarian, is the “number one thing I tell everyone that is the core focus for me and my team to solve this year”, because she believes that has been holding back the industry’s ability to realize full advanced TV ad benefits.
“Our target is June of next year,” she said. “We’re working alongside the committee and based on kind of progress and feedback and the bringing that transparency and ensuring the methodologies right is critically important.
“With C3 (and) C7 we’re under penning $70 billion, so there’s real money at stake here, so we have to get this right and we’re very committed to doing so.”
Omnicom’s Steuer said his agency holding group, like the others, wants to achieve a person-based view of consumers, usable across all media platforms, built out in to a unified measurement framework.
Hard problems don’t have easy solutions. But, if the growing raft of initiatives and working partnerships is anything to go, the “umbrella” may become a lot more effective soon.
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>This theoretical game isn’t going to be won by the emergence of one overriding supply side platform, Pangis predicted in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Moderator Tracey Sheppach asked what it is that buyers can ultimately expect to see. “Once we move through this innovation, do I have two logins to two different systems Xandr and NCC? Is that what it looks like?” said Scheppach, the CEO & Founder of Matter More Media.
“I think the future of collaboration in television is a much different discussion than what a lot of people are having, which is like ‘come on my platform and then you can use my demand-side’…that is not the way we’re going to get far fast,” responded Pangis. “It’s how do we connect with one another and sort of bring each of our super powers together, and the demand side is always going to want to do something a little different.”
Allison Metcalfe, GM of LiveRamp TV, explained that about two years ago, LiveRamp began to focus on automation to better serve the sell-side. Last fall, the company sold Axciom, the data provider that had itself acquired LiveRamp in 2014. “Life has changed pretty dramatically since then,” said Metcalfe.
Along the way, LiveRamp figured out that it needed to pay more attention to the buy-side. “The reality is that LiveRamp sits on the CRM’s of close to four hundred of the largest brands in the US and internationally. Those brands rely on us for people-based marketing strategies. It’s very natural that they would look to us to help them understand what’s possible in TV,” said Metcalfe.
Easier said than done, she went on to explain. Her team of four full-time people whose daily mission is to evangelize advanced TV to brands typically come away from meetings with “a list of twelve questions” regarding how to reach those brands’ audiences across platforms “and it takes us months to answer those questions.”
Even when such discussions lead to a purchase order, the entire process can take six months. “If we could get that to maybe two or three months, that would be a win for both Nicolle and I.”
One advantage of distancing itself from Axciom is that it dispels doubts about perceptions of LiveRamp’s neutrality, according to Metcalfe. “We are a technology platform with a data marketplace.”
Under the leadership of Grant Ries, LiveRamp is helping companies that have data assets but never considered themselves to be data suppliers. Metcalfe cited the example of travel data co-op Adara, which came to LiveRamp because it wanted to get into TV.
“So now we’re able to offer some really unique targeting capabilities to the travel industry, which historically wasn’t a really big buyer of advanced TV strategies,” Metcalf said. “We’re seeing a lot of trends like that.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.
Following the acquisition, Comcast in March announced it would merge NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, whilst the pair said Sky’s Sky Media ad sales house, which sells inventory for both Sky’s owned-and-operated channels and others’, will adopt NBCUniversal’s CFlight metric across all content and platforms in the UK from autumn and in its other European territories next year.
This panel discussion at Cannes Lions saw executives who have driven the companies’ advanced TV initiatives talk about going even larger…
The pair revealed to their host, MTM co-founder Jon Watts:
“We’re all now gunning for the same end game, which is consistency for an appetiser across global markets,” West said.
“We’ve enabled more and more channels and hopefully there’ll be more announcements about that in the coming weeks, rapidly scaling and the conversations with Denise and the team mean that we can go beyond little old Europe into the US and ultimately South America.”
In its home UK, AdSmart benefitted early by being deployed on the largest pay-TV platform, Sky’s own. It will soon be lit up also on rival Virgin Media’s cable network, taking penetration to 40%.
NBCU’s Colella explains the logic in using tis approach around the world.
“I think the benefit really comes down to our advertisers and their agencies,” she said. “They all are thinking of how do they take these audiences and leverage them in a global way that they’ve never done before.
“It really comes down to planning globally, but then activating locally … CFlight was an actual evolution of that because it gave us the ability to measure across channels.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>What also came to the fore in this segment recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit and presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science was differences of opinion about the role of technology providers and the status of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium.
Asked by panel moderator Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, about Fox’s approach to advanced advertising, VP of Audience & Automated Sales Dan Callahan says the company is “piecing the bits together. There’s a million different places where our content is distributed and each has different rules and standards and tech specs, and that’s what makes it hard.”
He described a process wherein it’s “very much what can we deliver across these five platforms and what are their standards and methodologies. And then you have to have the conversation with the client and they’re like ‘we agree with these five but not these five’ and it’s a mess.”
So while everyone agrees on the need for convergence, “right now unfortunately it’s packaging smaller bits of our content and here’s what we can sell this way, here’s what we can sell this way, are you willing to accept it?”
Things are much different at Univision, as President, of Ad Sales & Marketing Steve Mandala explained.
“We have tried a lot of things, sought quick failure and fast learning on it too,” Mandala said. “One of the reasons that I’m glad to be able to be here because I don’t think we’ve figured out our solution yet. I think we’ve learned a lot of things along the way, typically much more of what we don’t want to do than what we do want to do. And are still searching for it.”
What Univision lacks in complexity can largely be attributed to the fact that 92% of its primetime programming is still watched live. “So we don’t have the issue of the time-shifted, alternative viewing sources that is so prevalent with all of our competitors, colleagues, peers. The issues regarding standards and unification of those standards are going to happen. It’s going to get fixed. It’s a rule of nature basically. It won’t happen as quickly as any of us want it to, but it’s going to happen because it’s the only way that the industry can come together.”
Mandala was not big on praise for tech providers, most of which he described as promising “silver bullets” that fail to solve what they purport to solve. “We’ve been completely dissatisfied in what we have found so far, other than Videology to be quite honest, is that there’s a flavor of the week all the time. It’s what is the next silver bullet that’s going to fix things. The truth is that very few of these things have yet panned out. The thing for us is to try to find those places where we believe that they’re really delivering simplified value.”
When the conversation shifted to OpenAP, Mandala noted that Univision was one of the first non-original partners to join the initiative “and I completely agree and endorse what OpenAP started with and still do.” However, Univision has had “an incredibly disappointing first year with OpenAP” and Mandala voiced doubts about so-called industry standards.
“There has to be a common vernacular. And the question is, is it going to be the seller or the buyer who develops that lexicon and that vernacular? What I worry about is that as we do this as sellers, we’re asking buyers to change their way of doing business to accommodate what we decide is the way that lexicon process should all be structured.
“Yet on the other side,” Mandala added, “I don’t think that the buyers can hardly agree what day of the week it is let alone a standard like that. Agency A will compete with Agency B in reviews based upon their view of how they deal with advanced advertising. So I don’t think it’s actually to the advantage of the agencies to have a standard in many ways so they can differentiate themselves.”
Callahan was more sanguine about OpenAP. “I feel like OpenAP is really putting their best foot forward to solve what they feel the programmers’ situation is, and then it really is the agencies and the brands and the others that can come to the table if they want to band together.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>There was no doubt that consumers had completely changed their viewing television venues, but that was just one component of the larger picture, Smolin related in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science.
“You have to have the broadcasters and programmers that are in a position where they really want to lean in for what is bringing data into advanced television,” Smolin said in response to a question from Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM.
“But you also have to have on the buy side, you have to have the agency ecosystem be in a position where it’s really ready to start using that and converging maybe the TV investment team versus what had been the digital trading desk.”
Amobee made its wager after assessing a variety of technology providers and determining that Videology was unique compared to companies that had fashioned themselves to fit into the programmatic space “for a world that came out of remnant display advertising and frames every problem like that,” Smolin explained.
Given the difference between display and long-form, premium video, “Videology to their credit had designed from the ground up to solve the problems of how TV works. That was uniquely powerful, and we thought it was the right technology at the right time and it’s had a huge impact on our business.”
Now, with Videology’s assets and Amobee’s partnership with Nielsen “we are able to bring converged measurement to linear plus digital activation. When we use the term advanced TV, it’s very much about being able to take that digital-first audience, first-party data, and to use that within what is video, what is OTT, what is connected TV but also to linear.”
Noting that eMarketer predicts linear will be 50% or more of all TV budgets by 2022, Smolin said it’s important for many brands to think holistically and for Amobee to provide “true, converged media solutions.” Another thing Videology had in its favor was its sell-side presence, “and that’s also critical because if they’re not positioned with the right tools to be able to sell the way that the advertisers want to buy, then it doesn’t work on either side.”
He echoed the concerns of many in the industry that agency structure remains an impediment, as some still have siloed TV investment and digital trading teams. “They don’t have to be the same people, but getting them to look at the same measurement data and turning that same measurement data into integrated planning” needs to happen.
Asked how TV can win back ad dollars that have flowed to Facebook and Google, Smolin cites data, targetability, measurement and scale. Where TV has an edge is that premium, long-form content “is not the strength for Facebook and YouTube. If the broadcasters, the programmers, are now bringing the data that gives you the audience and the measurement at the scale they already have, they’re now in a position to compete very effectively with much higher value ad units than what Google and Facebook have been doing.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>The broadcaster, which airs Downton Abbey and Coronation Street in the UK, recently picked Amobee as the platform through which it will distribute its digital ad inventory.
The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on its VOD catch-up service, the ITV Hub.
“ITV was keen … to take a much more proactive stance in terms of how they were going to operate in the programmatic and converged digital and TV space,” says Ryan Jamboretz, Amobee chief development officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“They realized that, technologically, they were going to be relying upon third party vendors and it was such a critical thing, not only to their future, but their future in terms of their share, that it was important for them to actually take some ownership and control.”
ITV is a public service broadcaster, meaning it must operate within a regulated environment to fulfil public purpose.
But it is also a commercial one, meaning it must fund itself to do so. Historically, that has been through advertising. Whilst it goes on upgrading its ad capabilities, however, ITV is also endeavoring to offer paid VOD services, something that is proving a challenge.
Still, Jamboretz sees the Amobee-ITV relationship as two-way.
“It’s incredibly close,” he says. “We are working with them very closely to develop what will be their stack. And in many ways, what they’re helping us develop is helping to inform what we are pushing out around the world.
“It’s quite a cherished position for us because we have a customer in the form of ITV who, in their market and across the region of Europe, is considered to be probably one of the largest, most progressive players.
“And to have them, in many ways, kind of holding our hand, guiding us on some of the more, interesting product development aspects makes it much less guesswork and makes it feel like we were actually going out into the market and other regions with a lot of confidence about what’s coming.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>US Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is finding that there is still plenty more value to be mined from live linear TV, after refocusing on the medium following an earlier expansion in to digital and English-language content.
“What’s unique about our business and what contrasts with the general media landscape is that 92% of our primetime viewing is still done live,” says Univision’s president of ad sales and marketing Steve Mandala.
“It’s not time shifted. Our viewers and users online and listeners on the radio are quite satisfied with what they’re getting out. So far, we’ve not seen the same kind of fragmentation.”
Still, Mandala is trying to exploit what digital tools can offer. He has collected “a huge amount of first-party data” on his viewers and users, has “enriched all those records” and is now “trying to find ways to apply those enriched consumer records for the benefit of advertisers”.
The company recently tapped ad-tech vendor Amobee to provide a linear TV optimization platform, allowing its advertisers to use data to plan and transact against custom audience segments.
It comes after Univision sold its Fusion Media Group, a portfolio of web publications it had acquired to build a beach-head in English online content, leaving it refocusing on its core.
Mandala describes the period as a “distraction” for which Univision got “punished”, but the company is now focused on its main constituency.
“I’m very anxious to see how big, live event content continues to develop and attract big audiences, whether it’s music shows, some reality competition shows, sports, and news,” Mandala adds.
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>Now it is taking that ability up a notch, with a two-way partnership with an ad-tech platform helping it go one step farther.
The broadcaster, which airs Downton Abbey and Coronation Street in the UK, recently picked Amobee as the platform through which it will distribute its digital ad inventory.
The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on its VOD catch-up service, the ITV Hub.
“We’re seeing increased demand for more addressability … the ability to really target individual viewers based on the data we have on those viewers,” says Steve Bignell, ITV advanced advertising director, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’ve got 29 million registered users on the ITV Hub and we collect a lot of data about themselves, about their consumption behavior, and we can allow advertisers to target those people really granularly within our content.”
Bignell says the deal with Amobee is a “pretty unique partnership”.
“It’s going to really drive .. programmatic enablement … ease of (ad) purchase,” he says. “It’s about enabling our buyers, be those media agencies or clients, to easily be able to access the fantastic inventory that we have on the ITV Hub.
“The Amobee ad stack really helps us to bring up the data we have at ITV, the pretty unique first party data we have. Bringing that to bear, again, easily for our advertisers.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>That was the clarion call from an ad-tech exec enjoying the sunshine at the Cannes Lions advertising industry gathering.
“Everybody sees kind of this moment in time, where we can really embrace converged strategies,” says Philip Smolin, Amobee chief strategy officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But, in order to do it, we have to have standards, we have to have scalability in those solutions.”
Smolin was speaking after a couple of years in which acquired two other major ad-tech suppliers – Turn and Videology – in a further sign of industry consolidation.
The Videology acquisition last summer meant Amobee became a major player in the TV and video ad ecosystem.
“It’s not about just creating competitive advantage, it’s about creating solutions at an industry level. It’s a complex industry, but we do have a path forward to really being able to simplify it and make it scalable, so that it works in both the buy and the sell side.”
Amobee is a software-as-a-service vendor which helps ad buyers plan, activate, optimize and analyze their media spending, and which helps programmers control how they package up their inventory for sale, including to work with buyers’ first-party data.
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>The Open Addressable Ready consortium announced in March is the result of Vizio having watched a number of companies try to bring more scale to addressable TV, McAfee says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“There are a lot of technical challenges with someone being in the middle of that conversation and then there are also a lot of business challenges. As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work.”
OAR membership includes both inventory owners and platforms, ranging from CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal to AT&T’s Xandr and Comcast’s FreeWheel.
By seeking an open standard, Vizio decided against “trying to force the entire market to jump into a single stack and adopt a single solution,” McAfee says. Given that “NBC’s going to want to use FreeWheel, WarnerMedia’s going to want to use Xandr, Disney has their deal with Google,” allowing flexibility “is the only way you’re going to get to scale.”
Vizio sees itself as stewards and OAR members as owners. “They’re the ones making the decisions and we’re just building everything to their requirements.”
McAfee notes that most addressable TV execution to date has been through MVPD’s. “We think there’s a complementary ability to generate more scale on live linear,” McAfee says, hence the inclusion of companies like Comcast and Xandr. “We bring incremental reach to all of those players and scale is absolutely critical to addressable. There needs to be more and there also needs to be more premium linear inventory in that bucket for addressable.”
McAfee says he’s old enough “to have watched multiple consortiums in our business not go very well. I think as a group we’re beneficiaries of good timing in that I think the television stakeholders in our business understand that they need to work together to succeed.
“And so far our meetings have been very collaborative, everybody’s leaned in pretty hard on the subject matter and everybody’s cooperating. So I’m really encouraged by that.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
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