This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
To many, news itself has become a problematic channel, whilst the increased scale offered by national or global distribution has proved more attractive.
But some of that could be about to change, as ad agencies seem keen to rediscover the strengths of local media. To fully capitalize, however, they are looking for some upgrades to be made.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Israel Mirsky, executive director of the OMD media agency, says he is now using black lists and white lists, plugged in to digital ad buying platforms, to ascertain the “brand safety” of inventory available for purchase through various publishers. The trouble is, those lists are not yet quite deep enough.
“Maintaining inventory that comes from some of the smaller local and regional news organizations – not only in the US, but outside – becomes more challenging,” he explains. “Reputability is a concern.”
Why does Mirsky think local news media could be valuable again?
“Trust in local news is actually quite high, a lot higher than in what most would consider mainstream media,” he says. “It’s about 76% of folks trust local news versus around 50% for national media.
“The problem is scale. Achieving scale through local news is challenging. Sorting through all of the individual organizations is a problem and there isn’t a great way of aggregating that inventory right now. We’re starting to look for alternative solutions.”
One of those solutions is United for News, a coalition comprising advertisers’ agencies, tech platforms and journalism non-profits that is working to restore the strength of local news media around the world.
Beside other initiatives, United For News is compiling a reputability index for local news outlets around the world. The theory goes, if that could be plugged in to ad buying platforms, advertisers would be encouraged to spend more in local news, thus helping to restore revenue to quality publishers.
Organizations like United For News are interesting because they can help us get a reputation level out of the smaller publishers that we can then apply potentially to our buying strategies.
Writing on Business Insider recently, Mirsky said that local news outlets are a good foil against misinformation and can deliver value to advertisers – but he was critical that local media stakeholders were not present at Cannes Lions to discuss this.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>Still, local news publishers, when they were in the throes of attempting to build their own digital platform, often found it hard to see that the world had already fallen from beneath them.
At fault? As advertisers have followed audiences to alternative online channels, the economic model for local news has evaporated.
Now a group comprising advertisers’ agencies, tech platforms and journalism non-profits is working to restore the strength of local news media around the world.
“We’ve actually built a whole system to identify and to create an index, essentially,” says Tom Jenen, United for News MD, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“(It is) a scoring index for news and information media. We can identify what is the reputable news and information media in a market. And then … we’ve established a brand alliance where brands could join and commit to spending money with those sites that score highly on that index.”
A coalition, United For News has parallel trust initiatives, including to amplify women’s voices in local media, but it is this sustainability project which aims to address the economic foundation.
Essentially, it aims to develop a list of “brand-safe” media to make available to advertisers, agencies and platforms.
Jenen is a veteran of several digital marketing companies.
The way United For News sees it, the problem is that “bad” news sources – and, therefore, bad advertising vehicles – are coming in to colonize the local news deserts, whilst legitimate local news sources also struggle to offer the services from the likes of Google and Facebook.
So it is building “a program to on-board trusted media into (automated) digital advertising markets, enabling them to participate effectively in the advertising ecosystem that will dominate this century”.
“Over 100 news websites are going out of business every year, just in the US alone,” Jenen tells Beet.TV. “Right now in the US, over 30% of Americans live in news deserts where they have little to no access to local news. The same story (is) in Brazil and in other countries around the world.
“(News) content itself sometimes presents challenges for brands. And so rather than simply leaving news, which has kind of happened over the last couple of years as brands have come under fire for some times appearing next to the wrong kind of content… actually, the reality is that we need to find the right way to fund news and brand advertising is a strong way to do that.”
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>This is because the musically inclined Goldin considers conductors to be “not people who just orchestrate and coordinate,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“Their job is to envision a piece of music and bring it to life in a way that it’s never been heard before,” Goldin says. “They are standing in front of a very big orchestra. But you also have to understand how to bring people together, so it’s a huge leadership job. At the same time, you also are delivering to the audience behind, which is in our situation the consumer.”
It’s Goldin’s deep belief that marketing “sits at the crossroads of arts and science and the heart of the right and left brain.” She considers marketing to be “even more essential now than ever before to actually enable the business to achieve growth through real understanding of consumers, audiences and creating very strong value.”
When she talks about her “really big team,” Goldin notes that many don’t have marketing in their title. “But in some ways, I also feel that they all contribute to that same sort of cause, let’s say.”
Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, who is VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, how she goes about recruitment, Goldin says it’s first paramount to define not just the role of marketing overall but within a specific organization.
“In my organization we have product design, we have a creative agency, we have brand insights, we have content developers, we have long-form content developers, we have digital platform owners.”
When you add all of those roles together, their commonality is safeguard brands and franchises, according to Goldin.
“I think it’s absolutely essential to talk to them about the role that they play because in my view they are uber conductors of the symphony that is around each one of the big themes or products or innovations that we move forward with.”
Great marketers need to understand the entire value chain. “They understand how everything happens to actually create a product or create a campaign all the way through to how it flows into the stores, into consumers hands and ultimately reaches a child and hopefully delights and surprises them.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>Case in point – the company’s global head of analytics Matt Krepsik thinks brands should actually look beyond merely media measurement, and beyond counting existing audience members, to return to bringing in new audiences in the first place.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Krepsik issues a call-to-arms for getting back to brand-building.
“Over the past three to five years, we’ve focused on metrics, and metrics have been indispensable to helping ad brand advertisers drive accountability, drive transparency and drive clarity,” he says.
“However, those metrics have also made it easier to focus on short-term outcomes. That’s come at the expense of brand building. And brand building takes time.”
Many brands have taken advantage of the arsenal of digital tools available to develop sophisticates, data-enabled strategies that increasingly veer toward targeting consumers known to be in-market for a particular product.
And many publishers and intermediaries are now on-hand to price those ads based on known outcomes, like when an actual purchase occurs and can be attributed to an ad exposure.
But Krepsik thinks that more brands need to get back to building initial awareness.
“The biggest gap that a lot of brands see today, is they need to continue to nurture that upper funnel,” he says. “It’s not just about that last click, that last conversion and getting a customer once they’re already in the store.
“It’s about ensuring that your brand is in the consideration set. So before they go to the store, before they go to your website, before they engage at an automotive dealer or a bank or a financial institution, you want to make sure that your brand has that awareness.”
Krepsik says Nielsen has picked up know-how from service auto companies, whose products typically operate on a longer consume awareness-to-purchase cycle, and has been applying that timeline to things like financial services and consumer packaged goods.
He is telling a new generation of brands: “It’s not just about the next transaction, it’s actually the next five transactions, it’s in the next 10 purchases.
“It’s ‘how do we make sure our brand stays in the basket, our brand stays in the consideration set, and build that strong connection with this next generation of consumers?'”
But what if emerging technology imperatives said that both sides could now benefit more from shared interest?
“When you look at the kind of the technologies that underpin this entire industry, you’ve always had this world of advertising technology and then content technology,” says Daniel Harrison of IRIS.tv, a video technology vendor. “But very rarely have they really spoken together.
“If you really want to deliver on the concept of relevance and create that personalized stream from the ads you see to the content you experience, and then ultimately tie that to some outcomes for an advertiser … you have no choice but to start to link these tools together.”
Harrison is chief revenue officer of the LA company whose technology is already deployed on many broadcaster and publisher sites, for which it uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.
That data now also signals the context of videos to ad buyers, and IRIS.TV even allows buyers to buy ads right in its own publishers’ video units.
“We actually bring both the content decisioning and the advertising decisioning much more closely together,” he says.
MediaMath, a digital ad-buying platform, has just teamed up with IRIS.TV to provide a “sentiment score” brands can use in their buying decisions.
The company took Series A funding in 2015 from investors including Sierra Wasatch, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Progress Ventures and Machinima founder Allen DeBevoise and executives from Nielsen, AEG and Lionsgate.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>“Brand purpose is so incredibly powerful and has the potential to do so much,” Hanson says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “You look at the state of the world, the planet is in, there has never been a greater need for a complete overhaul of institutions, around politics and social and educational.”
Alluding to the “tons of panels” at Cannes centered on cause or purpose, Hanson draws a distinction between the two.
“Cause is often a reaction to something that is kind of negative. The question around purpose is how do you shift companies into a space where they are putting it right at their DNA. How do you act as a force for good and you don’t simply kind of badge it?”
While every brief that OMD sees is ultimately seeking to deliver better business outcomes, an understanding of what consumers care about shows that “the need for purpose is absolutely rising,” Hanson says.
She cites research showing that 33% of consumers will shift and buy from brands “that are doing better” while 50% will move to brands of parity “as long as they are reflecting of your values. You shift from one to another.”
To participate in the purpose space if it’s meaningful to a brand “There has to be a genuine commitment to it and all that it takes,” Hanson says.
It’s not uncommon for a client to have multiple projects or commitments already in play. “But the question is which ones are relevant to amplify. Which ones do you potentially communicate more and why. We start to look at where can you affect culture most effectively and also business outcomes and where do you have the greatest space to show your impact.”
One of the big hurdles is expectations, because aligning with a purpose for a year or less doesn’t cut it, according to Hanson.
“Some of these shifts, they take two to three years to have an effect because you are requiring a different set of behaviors to be at stake. You take the best of brand building, but you’re taking that to have a different impact.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to our sponsors of our festival coverage which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>The Association of National Advertisers and the Cannes Lions Festival started the CMO Growth Council to reinforce and elevate the role of marketing in the C-Suite and corporate boardroom. In this interview with Beet.TV, Hatch gives her vision of what’s been accomplished so far and what lies ahead.
“I think what we’re recognizing is that we’ve broken marketing apart into different components that all need their focus and we need to get down to business and actually make change and action happen,” Hatch says. “A lot of that is foundational, but what does it really ladder up to?”
The answer is a common recognition within the Council that while marketing must drive businesses, it’s also paramount for brands to drive good.
“And so there’s a higher purpose in all of the work that we’re doing together, which is really unleashing the true power of brands today in the world and ultimately helping to impact all of humanity in a way that is incredibly important.”
Whether it’s social responsibility or environmental sustainability, “the roles that these companies that we’re in are playing in the world today has changed and we have to respond to that and use the power of brand to make that a reality,” Hatch adds.
Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, what lies ahead for the Council, Hatch says the power of brands lies in their ability to influence people.
“We’re seeing that our purpose conversations are getting bigger than any individual brand,” Hatch explains. “We’re starting to see partnership happen. We’re starting to see brands say ‘what can we do about climate change? What can we do about issues that affect all of us in a way that’s larger than just your brand purpose but it’s about human purpose?’”
She believes that the communications industry, working together, can wield more influence than any single company or government.
“We have a lot of influence and I think we’re all really recognizing by the simple act of organizing, we’ve gotten together. That’s what the Council is. We brought everybody together and magic happens. It will continue to happen and the conversation is expanding.”
How does Deloitte itself benefit from its participation in the Council?
“For our company, what we’re able to do is actually benefit not only from the learnings of other CMO’s, of other brands, we’re all working towards common vision in many ways.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>If that seems like a tall order, there is still a growing array of publishers and ad-tech vendors seeking to give advertisers exactly what they want.
And that is music to the ears of one of the leading headphones and speakers manufacturers.
“The issue I have with TV is, I need to lock in budgets really early,” says Bose global media manager Jorma Kremser, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And, once they’re locked in, I can’t move them around, and that’s not the case with digital.
“If I see a country or a region or an area or a product perform better or worse in one place or the other, I’m able to shift to make the campaign work harder, whatever the stuff like that’s happening in the company.”
Kremser says the likes of RTL’s AdConnect, the pan-European broadcast group’s ad sales unit that is also striking partnerships to make programmatic vide and TV ad sales easier, smoothe the path to digital-style buying.
“Where I want to go is, I want to deliver the right message at the right time to the right audiences using the right device but also the right platform,” he says.
“I need seamless integration of that data to make sure that I’m not wasting too many contacts and creating kind of synergies when it comes to making the message stick maybe on the awareness level. And then walk the journey with the consumer down the purchase funnel.”
This segment is part of a series titled The New Global Marketplace for Premium Video, produced at Cannes Lions and sponsored by RTL AdConnect. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. For all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019, please visit this page.
]]>The CMO Growth Council has been asking the same questions about marketing since its inception at last year’s Cannes event. As a participant in that collaborative initiative, Goldin is looking forward to helping produce “tangible actions” that will benefit individual companies and marketers at large.
“I feel that marketing got sidelined over the last couple of decades and also became somewhat misunderstood and maybe narrowed in terms of what it is all about,” Goldin says.
Among the outcomes from the work of the CMO Growth Council that Goldin expects to see is to create “much more excitement around this industry,” which in turn will help in recruiting talent. “I think it’s going to open up a lot of opportunities for people who are already in marketing but also for the generations of the future.”
The Council “sharpens up” all participants within their respective organizations and collectively, according to Goldin. “I think overall it’s going to create the kind of movement that we need that is going to be much more cohesive and consistent versus everybody kind of doing their own thing.”
Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, who is VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, about specific areas of focus, Goldin cites the role of marketing and how it’s positioned as a profession. This includes education, training and development capabilities.
“What I think our generation of marketers wasn’t super prepared for is the rapid speed of innovation and change coming so fast and being able to learn on the job,” she says. “I think that’s a requirement. We need evolution.”
Embracing change is not only about learning but about how to be adaptive, given the multitude of changes still to come.
“We need to be adaptive to the environment in which we live and now we live in an environment where change is very rapid. Very soon they’ll be talking about AI, they’ll be talking about voice, and very soon they’ll also talking about regulation. Just like we’re seeing right now the importance of privacy and data protection.
“That will all happen and we need to be prepared for that and ultimately we should be driving the right changes. We should also be the ones to protect consumers, not just protect brands.”
How has LEGO benefited from the CMO Growth Council? “For me it’s super interesting to hear what other people are doing,” Goldin says. “It’s much easier to get closer together when you’re aligned against a goal and an issue that is really of value and interest to you and you’re passionate about because it matters to you, it matters to your organization.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>“We have to go to market with a very different approach. This is to moment for us to really transform,” VP of Marketing Allyson Witherspoon says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
After long relying on buying TV audiences by demographic, Nissan has been able to shift to its own audience segments “but it’s a manual process. With connected TV, all of that’s kind of integrated. It’s a seamless approach to it.
“For us it’s can we make sure that through video content and through connected TV how can we reach the right type of consumer in the right type of vehicle segments that we have for Nissan at the right time in the vehicle shopping process,” Witherspoon says.”
Asked by interviewer Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, how Nissan has been using either specialist agencies and/or internal data scientists, Witherspoon says “kind of all of the above. From an agency standpoint, we’ve eliminated the silos that have been traditional over the last several years. Basically, we have all of the subject matter experts all on one team.”
Everyone on the team gets the same brief to create a go-to-market plan for both creative and media. “So we’ve completely collapsed our agency silos into one team.”
On the publisher side, Witherspoon notes that Nissan recently attended the annual UpFronts and observes that “I think the UpFronts even are taking a much different approach that is going to be much more about connected TV.”
Nissan “thinks about TV differently now” and also how it approaches content creation.
“You can’t get away with one size fits all when it comes to a TV ad. Now we have to have custom content based on the audiences that we’re trying to reach.”
Her expectation for media partners is “understanding the business challenges that we have, having open conversations about how we need to be reaching the right type of consumers. And then as much as possible, how can we show how our marketing investment is connecting to transactions.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>Vice Media arrived at the Cannes Lions advertising gathering in June with HBO having cancelled Vice News Tonight and Disney having written off its investment in the company.
But, speaking with Beet.TV, the outfit’s international and global chief revenue officer was full of optimism about the road ahead.
“We will announce soon the new home for that Vice News content,” Delport said. “I mean, (it is) multimedia-awarded (by) Peabody, and (is) the biggest newscast for the young audiences in the US.
“We want also Vice News to become more international because we don’t need less Vice News, but more Vice News – in the world of fakery, to have trusted sources, the highest journalistic standards, and (to) deliver, every, day 30 minutes of premium news, it’s something that we need.
“And, with elections coming all over the world, not just in the US, you need more and more that kind of immersive reporters from a great newsroom.”
Vice News Tonight’s incredible 2017 film on white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, received a 2018 Peabody Award, after also receiving Emmy, Polk, Scripps Howard, Gracie and Sidney Hillman awards.
One thing seems sure – Vice Media is diversified enough at this point that it can react to a changing and challenging media environment.
Delport says the company produces 1,5000 pieces of content every day in 25 languages, has clocked 1,000 hours of original Viceland originals – 900 hours of which has been licensed by the UK’s Channel 4 – and productions for Sky, Amazon, Netflix and more soon.
For him, it is all about tapping the spirit of a can-do generation to fix what may be broken.
“The world is young,” Delport says. “Don’t feel that the world is broken and that disruption is the end of the end. No, no. It’s the beginning of the beginning.
“Take that optimistic lens and look at the world as an array of limitless possibilities.
“The new generation that is coming is just crying for that. They want to fix the system. They want to have that positive impact.”
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>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…
- Kelly Abcarian – General Manager of Video Advanced Advertising, Nielsen
- Jonathan Steuer – Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group
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.
]]>“When you see brands lead their creative with a purpose, I think people realize that brands stand for something greater than just the bottom line. That’s getting us noticed in a slightly different way,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Behind the scenes, IBM is sensitive to the reality that because people build algorithms, the end product could very well contain bias. “So what we’re doing is building models to evaluate the models that AI has, to make sure that there’s no bias within them and constantly check the technology we use in order to make decisions.”
Hammer believes that maintaining the public’s trust is one reason why the company has survived for more than a century. “Think of how we change what we sell every ten years. So we don’t sell products, we’re selling trust and a relationship. We help clients get from here to there.”
Blockchain technology is another tool in the pursuit of transparency, particularly among business partners, according to Hammer. One example is the amount of money on a digital media buy that used to end up in the pockets of technology middlemen but now more is ending up with publishers.
“A blockchain built with a network of partners can help deliver that,” Hammer says. It goes beyond the technology itself to “also having the players who are ethical and have the right DNA in their core to participate in a blockchain. You have to bring the right players to the purview, you provide that transparency and openness, and people tend to act in a way that’s better for the collective.”
A recent initiative by IBM called B Equal, which promotes gender equality in business leadership, isn’t just a campaign because “it has to be about the way we work and the things we do, and I believe that’s what you’re seeing in the brands here as part of the ANA and CMO Growth Council.”
Formed a year ago at Cannes, the Council represents “a diverse group of people” that is producing initiatives that are “not just words but they actually have action behind them, and I believe that’s the next step in this initiative. We’re aligning on some pillars, we’re aligning on our missions and our outcomes, and now we’re putting the actions in place and saying ‘let’s go make this happen.’”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, D’Angelo says he’s had “quite a number of interesting conversations about this and in preceding months where people will want to segment with a very hard line between performance marketing and brand marketing.
“And I think there’s a bit of an analogy also between digital marketing and analog marketing,” D’Angelo adds. “Those two things don’t exist in two kind of separate universes.”
In “very traditional advertising and marketing,” it was always about performance. “We were always trying to elicit a response from consumers.”
What’s different from half a century ago is that “the response was somewhat delayed and you didn’t have the immediate return path and ability for interactivity with consumers.”
D’Angelo believes that if marketers can maintain “that kind of holistic vision that there are points on the scale, I think that’s incredibly healthy.”
When it comes to campaign KPI’s, he notes that the vast proportion of P&G’s consumer packaged-goods sales still occur in brick-and-mortar stores.
“I think the key for us is to find ever concrete KPI’s that we can begin to measure consumer response. Whether that’s quality visits to our websites, appointments with beauty advisors in department stores or clicking to download a coupon. If we can continue to move along that spectrum I think we’re going to be in a good place.”
In a similar vein, D’Angelo talks about the “big bifurcation” between Game Of Thrones-like, extended long-form content “that plays out over a number of years” and very short video content on the other end of the scale.
“I think as advertisers, we should be inspired by that because the traditional workhorse of the thirty-second or the fifteen-second commercial I think is coming under scrutiny. I think we have to respond to that as advertisers and take note of the fact that consumers will want to be much more flexible in terms of how they’re consuming their video content and that we need to respond to that in kind.”
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page.
]]>So says the recently-appointed global MD of Nielsen Media.
Matt O’Grady just relocated to London after a decade with the company in New York.
Nielsen recently acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising, which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
And O’Grady says Nielsen wants to bring Advanced Video Advertising to the UK.
“It’s starting in the U.S.,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But, I have to say, Sorensen first started in the U.K., and then they went over the pond. So my intention is bring them back over the pond, because the broadcasters in the U.K. are keenly interested and were, because Sorensen had a big position in the U.K..
“That’s really where they got started. So they want me to bring it back, so I’ve got to bring it back over there. We’ll start probably in the U.K. with that.”
Compared with the large but fragmented and often disjointed US media market in which O’Grady operated throughout his career, media markets like the UK are relatively more straightforward.
Often, there are fewer partners to deal with, fewer links in the chain. O’Grady says smaller media markets are more nimble.
“I’m really surprised at how quickly you can move in some of these smaller markets and how different some of the broadcasters operate in different markets,” he says.
“In many of these other markets, they already have OTT platforms that work very well. Netflix and Amazon Prime are obviously there, but (broadcasters) were monetizing their own content with over the top prior to a subscription video on demand coming in.
“A market that’s smaller and a market that’s evolved often does things that are very innovative, that take longer in a big market like New York.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
]]>But two of Europe’s biggest markets actually have limits on the practice:
- In Germany, strict privacy regulation means broadcasters can’t use personal information to target ads, ProSiebenSat.1 is using probabilistic matching that employs piecing together a host of descriptive and demographic signals to infer the likely characteristics of a household.
- In France, all commercial targeted broadcast TV is prohibited. For the last couple of years, broadcasters and telcos have been trialling workarounds including playing out swapped-out ads from a local source.
M6, the French broadcaster owned by pan-European RTL Group, is one of those getting its house in order, in anticipation of regulations being relaxed.
“At the moment, on the French market, we do not have the authorization to do addressable TV,” says Kim Younes, marketing and innovation director at M6 Publicité, the company’s sales house, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “So, we’ve been preparing, and we’ve been preparing with SpotX, to be able to substitute spots on linear TV.
“We’ve built a technological know how, and a technological platform with SpotX, to be in capacity to deliver addressable TV on connected TVs. We’ve been doing that for almost two years now, 18 months.
“We’ve conducted the first experiments 18 months ago, and we conducted a new one month ago, with La Poste (France’s postal service). And the difference was we added a layer of data, meaning we were able to achieve the first live and audience targeting substitution on the spot, on a French national channel.”
SpotX and Smartclip were acquired by RTL in recent years, in addition to VideoAmp and Clypd.
It is reckoned addressable TV, by giving brands targetability like they find in digital, could unlock new ad spending for TV.
SpotX has previously written about the importance of respecting privacy regulation.
M6 has already teamed up with rival TF1 and public broadcaster France Télévisions to mix audience data and sell ads across their combined portfolio.
Younes hopes the industry can find its way through to an addressable solution.
“With addressable TV, basically, you will find the best battles between the two worlds,” she says. “The possibilities brought by the digital, and the quality and the safety, and the power of television.”
This segment is part of a series titled The New Global Marketplace for Premium Video, produced at Cannes Lions and sponsored by RTL AdConnect. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. For all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019, please visit this page.
]]>That is stark contrast to the US, where many media houses remain in competition with both each other and the tech giants.
But one European media company that is amongst the leading exponents of joint working thinks partnerships point the way ahead.
“Partnerships in general, and alliances, will be really the big industry topic from a publisher or a broadcaster point of view in the next couple of years,” says Daniel Bischoff, chief marketing and operations officer for RTL AdConnect , in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“(That is) in contrary to the U.S. where you see a lot of mergers and acquisitions, they’re more straightforward. You’ll see a lot of more alliances, whether it’s around data, whether it around access to inventory.”
Bischoff’s AdConnect is an ad sales arm for broadcasters owned by pan-European RTL Group and shows made by its Fremantle Media subsidiary (American Idol, Got Talent, X Factor) around the world, but also those owned by other operators.
In examples of cooperation from the RTL portfolio:
- Its French TV channel operator M6 is teaming with rival TF1 and public broadcaster France Télévisions to mix audience data and sell ads across their combined portfolio.
- In Germany, the RTL TV network formed a joint venture with ProSiebenSat.1, allowing them to control a platform for the automated booking of addressable TV and online video.
It is as though the contestants of Fremantle’s televised song contests were coming together to form a super-group.
“Regarding Germany, I think if you’ve been around a bit in the business, you know that a couple of years back this wouldn’t have been possible, no way,” Bischoff tells MTM’s Jon Watts for this interview.
“The biggest two enemies in the market, RTL and ProSieben are lion’s sharing about 80% of the television market, getting together and doing something. But I think it’s just a start of what we’re going to see”
RTL AdConnect uses a video marketplace platform to access premium inventory across linear TV and VOD, built on SpotX and Smartclip, both of which RTL acquired in recent years in addition to VideoAmp and Clypd.
The idea is to give video and TV companies a leg-up in ad sales against the might of tech platforms, appealing to international companies with a clear pitch in a fragmented market: “Buy Europe”. Specifically, 800 million audience members in Europe.
“It’s a super big challenge,” Bischoff acknowledges. “But at the same time it’s our promise to the advertising industry is that we simplify this continent of Europe with it’s different languages, different legislations, different obstacles, in order to give you a one-stop shop and simplified solution.”
That is why, to bring the world to Europe, AdConnect is going out to the world. Recently, the outfit opened up two US offices and enlisted an agent in Japan.
“What we want to do is really build as multiple touchpoints as possible with the advertisers,” says Bischoff.
This segment is part of a series titled The New Global Marketplace for Premium Video, produced at Cannes Lions and sponsored by RTL AdConnect. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. For all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019, please visit this page.
]]>NCS is the unit which uses consumer data to help consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies target ads more effectively.
Coinciding with Cannes Lions, it announced it would add machine learning – the practice through which algorithms can learn underlying patterns so as to perform repetitive future tasks without explicit instruction – to its targeting and measurement products:
- NCS Target – for creating audience segments
- NCS Sales Effect – for sales lift measurement
- More services coming later in 2019
“We’ve been working on machine learning and artificial intelligence for the last five years, with a lot of testing and rigour,” says NCS’ CEO Linda Dupree, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re harvesting a lot of the innovation work that we’ve invested in for a long period of time.”
Why is NCS adding machine learning? In order to speed up the creation of audience segments and the measurement of sales lift from advertisements – so that Nielsen Catalina Solutions can begin to play a different role for customers.
“We have to find new ways to accelerate, to add agility to the system,” Dupree says. “It’s really to add more time, time for reflection, for reflection around insights for our clients, reflection time and consulting time for Nielsen Catalina associates, so that they can actually dig in with clients and with brands and better understand what those data are telling us.”
There are few specific details as yet on how machine learning will be deployed to speed up these processes.
A year ago, a survey found almost a third of advertising and publishing professionals do not confidently understand the potential application of artificial intelligence to their work.
NCS’s Dupree tells MTM co-founder Jon Watts for Beet.TV that, in 2019, many brands are finding it harder to win new customers, so there is a renewed focus on retaining existing ones.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of the Future of TV is Now, a day-long event presented by Innovid. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page. You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tariq Mahmoud, Roku head of international sales and strategy, describes a disconnect he expects will be closed in the next few years.
‘There’s this delta right now between OTT viewing and OTT ad spend,” Mahmoud says. “That will get closer and closer over time. Just like we saw in digital over the last five years, I think we’ll see that in TV as well. Ad spend on OTT … will catch up to viewership on OTT.”
His comments come as just-published analysis by Strategy Analytics shows how Roku’s lead for connected TV device adoption is accelerating. More than 30% of the connected TV devices sold in the US in Q1 2019 were Roku devices, it says…
And the observation is interesting. eMarketer forecasts OTT viewing reaching another 1.7% of the US population by 2021…
But Winterberry Group sees US OTT advertising spend slowing, from 42% in 2018 to 20% in 2019…
That illustrates the need for OTT ad spending to catch up to OTT viewing.
Roku is well positioned. An attractive pricepoint, a simple proposition and integration in some TV sets is seeing Roku pull away from the rest of the pack, according to Strategy Analytics.
There are now more than 41 million Roku-based devices in use, including Roku media streamers and Roku-based smart TVs, accounting for 15.2% of all media streaming devices.
Roku now has a 36% lead over the next major platform, Sony PlayStation, in terms of devices in use. The report predicts that this lead will stretch to 70% by the end of the year, largely as a result of the success of Roku’s smart TV partner strategy.
Mahmoud says: “In Q1 of this year alone, we reached 29 million active accounts, which was 2 million more than the quarter before that, 9 billion hours of total hours streaming, relative to about 25 billion last year in total, 9 billion just of Q1, so our growth is tremendous.”
So, what is Roku doing to win advertising?
The outfit holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Earlier this year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.
Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.
Twelve months ago, Roku launched a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page
]]>But, little by little, other platforms are getting lit up with these new tricks, too – even good ‘ol linear TV.
“On the linear side, (we) really have been focused on ‘How do we apply that programmatic mindset to our linear teams?’,” says Megan Pagliuca, media agency Hearts & Science chief data officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
She says that involves a transformation in measuring, planning and allocating linear TV ads.
“We essentially have pulled together a view of TV consumption and TV performance data … using ACR (automated content recognition) and set top box data sets,” Pagliuca adds. “We can then tie that into our digital log so we have a connected view.”
The new capability allows agencies to start thinking about even linear TV ad inventory as though it were akin to digital media inventory.
When platforms are able to measure real consumption of even linear TV ad play-outs, using the automated content recognition algorithms that report what viewers are really watching as opposed to panels, the data supports more sophisticated actions.
“Then we can plan with an audience-first approach, and then we can allocate,” Pagliuca explains. “The inventory we’ve gotten through the upfronts … we buy it the same way we always have, but then we reallocate that inventory based on this smarter, more data-driven view.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to our sponsors of our festival coverage which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>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…
- Jamie West – Deputy Managing Director Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Sky
- Denise Colella – SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU
The pair revealed to their host, MTM co-founder Jon Watts:
- Sky’s AdSmart will be enabled across new TV channels in the next few weeks.
- AdSmart will reach 65% to 70% UK household penetration in the future across all platforms, based on West’s projections.
- The duo imagine bringing the functionality to South America.
- It’s all being driven by brands which have an increasingly global outlook.
“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.
]]>As a member of the “Group of 25” under the aegis of the CMO Growth Council, Lau is hoping to create “congregations of marketing organizations” to restablish the importance of marketing, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“The conundrums of the marketing fraternities that we’re facing today largely has to do with some of us have kind of deviated from the very first mandate or mission of being a great marketer,” says Lau. “Marketing in the past used to be a very, very highly regarded profession that brings great values to society.”
Lau, who is Tencent’s SEVP, Chairman of Group Marketing & Global Branding, gave a presentation at Cannes to introduce “Tech for Good” as an integral part of Tencent’s new vision and mission. His speech outlined how Tencent ignites the goodness in individuals to build a “universally accessible” digital community that addresses the challenges to individual empowerment, community, society and the planet.
One example is the Tencent Foundation, which engages individuals in charitable causes such as monthly donations, bundled charitable programs and daily step challenges and has become the world’s largest online platform for public charitable donations.
One of the goals of the CMO Growth Council at Cannes was to figure out how to turn the passion displayed by its participants in meetings over the past year into concrete action. “It has to move beyond passionate individuals…into an organizational-led movement,” says Lau. “The real thing is not about hastily coming out with solutions, it’s really about being honest to ourselves.”
Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, who is VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, whether marketers face a challenge of process or people, Lau points to the latter.
“Everything leads back to people, because people create process,” he says. In seeking to create a “global center of excellence for innovations and creativity,” the Council must “let information flow, let people really cultivate a life-long learning experience” as opposed to seeking quick fixes.
So how has a company as powerful as Tencent benefitted from its participation in the CMO Growth Council? “Immensely,” Lau says, adding that the company is “very privileged and fortunate to be among the McDonald’s the Googles the IBM’s of the world. But then we must remember that we’re only 20 years old.
“There is also a strong ambition, there’s a strong dream, to share with the world what we thought have made us from good to great, from China, from Tencent, from the so-called first mobile-first land of the world.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>But, what is an identity graph and why does it matter?
Simply, an identity graph is the collection of data points from disparate devices that, when pieced together, add up to indicate a single person’s holistic media behavior.
Identity resolution is the practice of doing that stitching together – and, increasingly, that stitching involves data from online TV consumption, according to Mari Tangredi, SVP of audience solutions and advanced TV at 4INFO, an identity resolution vendor.
- “Mobile is a great identity identifier … that’s the thing that you carry with you, you tend not to have a bunch of mobile devices.”
- “Then we connect that to home addresses … you (also) tend to have one home address. Those are two really static identifiers into the OTT space.”
- “In the Connected TV space, they have an IP address. We have a home address identifier.”
Add to that mix conventional cookies from web browsers and the likes of 4INFO have what Tangredi, speaking with MTM co-founder Jon Watts for Beet.TV, calls a “pinwheel” of audience data.
4INFO itself uses what it calls Custom Connected Identity Maps (CCID) and its Bullseye ID, which starts by mapping a mobile device to a home address, a match key for other devices, too.
Whilst 4INFO’s underbelly is in mobile, the company had previously branched its identity graph system out to other platforms, like the new wave of TV devices.
Now the outfit has branched out from just offering its demand-side platform (DSP). Eighteen months ago, it decided to break out its identity technology, Tangredi.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>Almost exactly a year after AT&T acquired ad-tech platform AppNexus, it has just rebadged AppNexus’ demand-side platform (DSP) as “Xandr Invest”, and allowed ad buyers to to target viewers using AT&T’s first-party data and its new Community premium video network.
That is all part the wider convergence, which is seeing AT&T mobile, Turner, WarnerMedia, CNN, DirecTV and other assets come together in a kind of cross-screen super-play, helping to target viewers across devices and content.
But that doesn’t mean traditional methods of TV ad sales are done. In this video interview with MTM’s Jon Watts for Beet.TV, says Christina Beaumier, Xandr VP product for TV platform, says the traditional upfront method – through which ad buyers put down money for advance slot bookings – will prevail alongside programmatic-, exchange-based transactions.
“We need automation. Automation is coming,” Beaumier says. “Automation does not mean that we are going to move towards a fully real-time auction-based exchange trade and marketplace.
“The TV marketplace is here to stay, meaning upfront, scarce reserve inventory and the business rules that surround that marketplace will continue to be grounded in an upfront reserved model. Why? Because marketers need to be able to guarantee an audience at specific times within the year, and they’re not going to want to pay at the pump for advertising.”
AT&T’s WarnerMedia is known to be planning to join the subscription video-on-demand wars in 2020 and, according to Business Insider, “rumors have emerged that WarnerMedia might offer an ad-supported version”.
AT&T is putting together the pieces of infrastructure required to make digital, targeted advertising work across a vast trove of media properties and devices.
“Real-time exchange marketplaces are great for filling out additional impressions and additional reach,” Xandr’s Beaumier adds. “But, just because we have the technology that will enable it, does not mean that the full media plan should then convert to a realtime market.
“That’s what we’re focused on is really the holistic view across the reserved upfront marketplace, and surrounding that with the realtime marketplace.”
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
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