The answer rests on delivery systems, according to Joe Marchese, President, Advertising Revenue, Fox Networks Group.
“The idea is, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you know who’s watching and, secondarily, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you can either change the ads or not change the ads?” Marchese said during a panel discussion by Comcast at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. “Last portion is, is it being delivered on demand or live?”
Additionally, he suggested separating content from delivery vehicle. This yields a definition of TV as “long-form storytelling, sports, news and information.”
To panelist Eric Johnson, EVP, Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, behavior is a key component. People watch on average 63 of live sports, whether on a TV set or mobile phone. “The behavior looks the same. If they’re watching SportsCenter they’re watching for 15 minutes on a television or a mobile phone.”
Beyond definitions, the only thing that marketers should care about is the likelihood that their message was delivered, according to Marchese. The problem is “pricing mechanisms and the currency we trade on. So we can innovate on the format all we want but if we don’t change the currency, if we don’t change what success is, none of it matters.”
ESPN is moving to a Nielsen Total Live Audience metric this year, Johnson said in response to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
“We’re seeing a 9 percent lift with young men in terms of streaming that’s not being counted by the current Nielsen measurement tool. I think it’s going to help immediately,” Johnson said.
Marchese would “love to have Nielsen measure 9 percent more audience” but wondered whether “I have to take the same ads that were in the linear TV environment and then put them into the place, that other 9 percent where I could do a digital ad where you could get a different ad from me? Is that the only way I’m going to get paid on that extra 9 percent?”
Johnson’s response: “We are passing through the commercials for the part that’s being measured by Nielsen and then we have another half that we’re dynamically ad serving, that we’re selling digitally, so to speak. So it’s a little bit of the best of both worlds.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So it was when Comcast presented a panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity featuring Amplifi US’s Lucas Cridland, Magna’s David Cohen and David Penksi of Publicis Media Exchange. Moderated by Matt Spiegel of MediaLink, the discussion tended to underscore the reality that while agencies would like to move faster on their clients’ behalf, many aspects of measurement just take time to coalesce.
First the metaphors from Cridland, who is President of Amplifi US, with regard to measurement challenges. “A game of football or soccer isn’t as interesting without a referee,” said Cridland. “And for the moment we have different tools and different rules and different referees trying to adjudicate what is essentially the same game.” And there’s nothing wrong with different tools, Cridland added, noting that golfers use different clubs on different holes.
Cohen, who is President of Magna North America, said that agencies are always juggling “tradeoffs” from one platform to another and trying to understand the implications for clients.
“For lack of a better one, Nielsen DAR is a kind of equalizer for today,” he said. “We see today 30% of video consumption is not linear, going up to 40% by 2021. So this is a thing that is not going away, is growing.”
Penski, who is CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, opined that his industry has a tendency to swing pendulums from one direction to another quite quickly. It’s not always a good thing, particularly regarding audience targeting—say, “Mothers who are exactly 33 years old, live in these two states with this many children. “We have a tendency to move far one way. There’s a line we need to draw. It goes back to scale. Sometimes what we’re doing now is going the other way.”
Asked by Spiegel why agencies seem to be wrestling with producing a great number of creative iterations, Penski gave them credit for what they have been able to achieve.
“Not that long ago, a marketer might do 6 to 20 ad spots and now it’s 600. The problem is we want 6,000. It’s improving and I think it’s moving almost as fast as the media side. I’ve definitely seen huge progress within the last two years,” said Penski.
When the discussion turned to walled gardens and the resources required to figure out and transact with them, Cridland said it just takes time. “Not all of our clients are saying you can have more resource to investigate this and fund it,” Cridland said. “Everybody believes that digital addressability is going to take labor and people out of the equation. At this moment in time, we’re nowhere near that because it’s increasingly complex.”
Asked whether Magna will embrace Facebook’s going Hollywood, Cohen said “Definitely” because it provides more opportunities to reach audiences at scale.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It’s that “other” programming that concerns media sellers like ESPN and Fox, as evidenced by the discussion during a Comcast panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In fact, it keeps them up at night.
For ESPN, live is a North Star given its connection with fandom, according to Eric Johnson, EVP of Global Advertising Revenue.
“What has become live sport is expensive and at the same time we continue to just grow the way that consumption looks like,” said Johnson. “In live, real time. It’s complex, without a doubt. We try to make it as simple as possible for marketers.”
Fox Networks Group’s Joe Marchese is a big fan of live programming because it’s a choice of that or on-demand, where viewer attention isn’t a given. “Live doesn’t have that same problem. I will keep signing up for making money on live,” he said.
Asked by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink what keeps them up at night, both Johnson and Fox cited the options available to consumers who don’t want to see ads. Then there is a “virtual tonnage of garbage impressions out there that try to keep the price down. That keeps me up,” said Marchese.
Johnson believes the industry has lost sight that “ultimately good marketing is good marketing. We’ve overcomplicated the industry a little bit to get away from that.”
What keeps Johnson awake is that amid the demand branded, native and other forms of interruptive content, “we’re not thinking about advertising in the same way.”
He explained that most clients could buy a full season of football and run one just commercial with lots of frequency, but that wouldn’t be the optimal way of doing things. They need to be shown that varying creative iterations is desirable.
“That’s part of the process of how do we get to a place where we’re now creating a lot of creative for our customers, because we know what works but we have to help them get to that space of what works,” Johnson said.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So, in a world of ad-tech, what place does creativity have at the table anymore? Creativity is still king, says FreeWheel publisher partnerships VP Julie van Ullen.
“Even though we’re looking for the right audience using data-based technologies … it’s really, at the end of the day, about putting the right creative and right content in front of the right person at the right time,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
In FreeWheel’s latest Q1 Video Monetization Report, the company found:
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Like other attendees of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Johnson welcomed the many conversations about how the industry can come together and drive more effective ways of measurement.
“We’re trading on a CPM currency that maybe is not the most optimal for trying to make television or video look like something that you can understand what the ROI is,” Johnson, who is EVP of Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
He’s not alone when he acknowledges that video is being evaluated differently on different platforms, be it a 30-second TV spot, a pre-roll or a six-second video without sound. “But the allocation of what the value is of each of those components matters,” Johnson says. “At ESPN, we’re measuring the value and impact of a video ad, agnostic of whatever screen it’s on.”
When you add live streaming, all manner of opportunities arise. Not to mention breaking out from standard ratings constructs.
“What’s most important to me about live sports is that it’s absolutely unique to anything else that’s in the market,” he says. “There is nothing that exists from a content delivery standpoint that delivers so many people that are 98% consuming live.”
For advertisers, it’s an opportunity to truly be in the moment. “You’re not getting it aggregated with seven days or 14 days or 35 days. You’re getting it in that live moment.”
ESPN’s streaming content carries pass-through ads from ESPN1 and ESPN2 along with ads that are dynamically inserted.
“So I think we have the best of both worlds available to marketers. We can talk about it like television or talk about it like video or use neither of those terms,” Johnson says. “Addressability is coming and OTT is allowing us to be able to understand that space. This is something that we’re going to make sure we continue to invest in.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That’s the prognosis of Chris Linn, President of Turner Entertainment’s truTV, which was the first network to announce limited commercial interruptions “and we have one of the most robust offerings,” he says in this interview with Beet.TV.
As of last October, all of its primetime premiers have had 50 percent commercials and promo loads, resulting in the addition of six minutes of content per hour.
The reason was simple. In a world of streaming services like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, “we know we have to compete with those platforms for our consumers,” Linn says. “So it’s incumbent upon us to create the best possible viewing experience that we can.”
Calling fewer commercial interruptions “a win win for both programming and also for advertisers,” Linn references research showing that it prompts higher unaided ad recall and higher intent to purchase advertised products and services.
“We can show that it actually drives physical purchase, actual business outcome. We can make deals based on that,” he says.
But on the digital side, there’s still work to be done with the viewing experience in mind.
“We’ve all been in that situation when you’re watching something in digital and you’re seeing the same ad over and over and over again and it feels abusive,” Linn says.
He doesn’t think consumers have a problem viewing ads so long as they are in the right context with content. “So I think we have to do just a better job of managing that aspect of digital.”
There’s also a balancing act between finely tuned targeting and reaching the broadest audience possible. Having lots of tools at one’s disposal is one thing, but at the end of the day most brands are seeking the utmost in reach, according to Linn.
“We look forward to the day when on linear we have the same sort of targeting mechanisms that you have on digital, and we’re working towards that,” he says. “But I don’t think we ever want to get into a world where we’re only talking to this many people.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I think it’s one of the things we’re kind of missing,” Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media Exchange Americas, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Although he’s encouraged by conversations at Cannes about such a value exchange, it’s still very much a work in progress.
“For a very long time in this business, the reason that commercials weren’t an issue is because the consumer realized they had to watch those in order to get the content they wanted,” Penski says. “Now with so many different options on getting that content without the commercial viewing experience is where it’s challenging.”
In the meantime, he feels that reducing ad loads would be an improvement, but it has to be balanced somehow. “Our clients are not going to pay a 100% premium to cut ads because it doesn’t feel like it’s quite their responsibility. I think it’s going to be a mixture of how you value that impression,” he says.
Part of achieving a value exchange requires that agencies evaluate “what we are producing, what type of ads we’re putting against it and what is that value exchange for the consumer.”
Having attended Cannes for about a decade, one of the things that strikes Penski as a “large surprise” this go-round is the number of U.S. clients on hand and their level of engagement.
“You expect the digital and tech clients, but it’s really across all of our categories,” he says. “They’re looking at this as a place to kind of stop, pause and think about what they’re looking for from an innovation standpoint.”
Mentioning Snapchat and Twitter, Penski has a more positive view of them as partners because they realize they need to do a better job of “putting the advertiser first and having the right ad experience for our clients.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Initial FWCE members include Canal+, Channel 4, Discovery International, Medialaan, MTG, Nelonen, Proximus, RTE, SBS, SFR, Sky Germany, Sky UK and TF1. In conjunction with the launch, the FWCE published its first position paper, titled Why Premium Video Matters for Advertisers: a European Perspective. The document provides a definition of premium video, an overview of how premium content differentiates itself from the digital fray and what the industry in Europe needs to do to effectively evaluate and leverage its engaging, brand-safe environments.
“We’re really excited to replicate the success we’ve had in the U.S.” with the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video, James Rothwell, FreeWheel’s VP, Global Agency, Brand & Relations, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
The FWCE held its first board meeting with its members at Cannes, after which it curated the panel session Television Evolved: The Rise of the Dynamic Living Room, in conjunction with The Drum.
Publishers share many of the same interests and needs across the Atlantic, according to Rothwell. “U.S. TV programmers and operators look very similar in many ways to their European counterparts,” he says.
Nonetheless, there are differences from market to market. “So understanding those differences and obviously creating a unified voice and a unified perspective on how we move the industry forward across the region while thinking about the nuances for each different country is very important,” Rothwell adds.
Here are three takeaways from the initial FWCE position paper.
1) What sets premium video apart is its capacity to elicit engagement with both publisher content and the advertising that appears alongside it.
2) All too often the industry is trying to measure premium video by the standards of other formats, pinning its worth on metrics like viewability alone, without recognizing its potential to engage the consumer.
3) In TV-like environments, brand-safety is assured and fraud is virtually non-existent and advertisers can reach real humans, engaged with the content they have chosen to watch.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, VMR author Ying Wang discusses the first quarter VMR findings, which show that premium video monetization mirrors linear TV investment in terms of the top industry categories.
“We’ve never been closer to true unification in the premium video industry. We’re seeing digital video and what we call traditional television look more and more similar,” says Wang, who is FreeWheel’s Director of Advisory Services.
She cites as examples “more and more people are consuming live streaming content through digital devices.” In the United States, about 25% of all ad views come from live stream devices, according to the VMR.
“That’s continuing to grow due to really great sports content, as well as a lot of live streaming happening on news. The content people are seeking out is looking more and more similar across all of the different end points,” Wang says.
One of the more interesting trends to Wang is that one out of every two ad views is now happening on the big screen. The biggest driver is OTT viewing.
For the first time, OTT devices that are connected to the TV set surpassed desktop as the largest platform where premium video is consumed. Together with set-top-box video on demand, the two living room-centric platforms account for nearly half of all ad views the first quarter, according to the VMR.
“OTT combines the best of digital, and the ability to measure and target on impressions with the best of linear, which is the engagement and high quality experience,” Wang says.
About one third of all ad views in the U.S. happen on OTT compared to around 20% in Europe, according to the VMR. Millennials account for 56% of all OTT ad views, “which is a great proposition for OTT,” Wang adds.
Additionally, OTT has very high ad completion rates. Around 98% of all ads viewed on OTT are completed, which is the highest of any digital device.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I always kind of take that as an encouraging thing that we have Millennials and Gen Z’s interested in the subject areas where National Geographic has always been a player and authority and leader,” says Declan Moore, CEO of National Geographic Partners.
NGP represents the combination of all National Geographic assets—from the magazine to digital media, product extensions, licensing, book publishing and its travel business. It’s just 18 months old but is hip-deep in content creation and figuring out new ways to connect its audiences with marketers, a process of integration that must be done with great care, as Moore explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
With a global reach of 450 million homes, National Geographic has assembled a coveted audience that enjoys things like geography, animals, history and space exploration. On its primary TV network, “It’s a very exciting time because we’re really, truly transforming the brand and making sure we consistently deliver premium science adventure and exploration storytelling on that platform,” says Moore.
The company’s first scripted series, Genius, has just completed its run, and National Geographic is always looking for opportunities to lead a particular conversation that has wide consumer appeal. One example is a magazine issue in January devoted to the issue of gender, which “worked incredibly well,” Moore says.
So well, in fact, that it resulted not only in a TV special hosted by Katie Couric but also in the magazine’s first nomination for a Pulitzer journalism prize.
“It was an instance really where we were leading and owned that conversation for a period of time earlier this year, but it originated in the traditional magazine area,” Moore says.
Despite all of its progress to date, the company knows it can benefit from even more “data muscle,” as Moore terms it, meaning even more advanced ways to “be able to identify how our consumer journeys are across the different touch points that we have.”
With that increased knowledge will come more opportunities for marketers, a process that requires integration as opposed to interruption, according to Moore.
“No one really likes interruption, but it’s somewhat of a tyranny that we have on certain of the media platforms that enable the funding of those stories and the content,” he says.
National Geographic knows that it needs to exercise care in accommodating advertisers and consumers “without compromising the bond of trust that has been built up over many years, 129 years in our instance.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At Cannes Lions, the festival of advertising creativity, technology and ad execs alike have been discussing the potential application of blockchain.
But “potential” may already be an out-of-date description – because Comcast used Cannes to announce what must be one of the world’s first blockchain deployments geared toward improving the distribution of ad targeting data insights.
Blockchain Insights Platform, as Comcast calls it, will be a new and improved advertising approach developed in collaboration with Comcast’s own NBCUniversal, as well as Disney (USA), Channel 4 (UK), Altice (USA), Cox Communications (USA), Mediaset (Italy) and TF1 (France).
Specifically, the platform will help advertisers use aggregated insights from data sets, including their own, for ad planning and buying, without having to give away their own precious customer data to traditional data warehouses.
The program comes out of Comcast’s Advanced Advertising Group, which was introduced last week and includes its Strata, FreeWheel, and Visible World companies, and a full launch is expected in 2018.
“We could use blockchain to create a way for anybody with data to query other pools of data without having to pool it,” says Comcast advertising president Marcien Jenckes in this video interview with Beet.TV.
The current line-up of broadcast partners is just the start. “Many others, we will be announcing soon,” Jenckes adds.
For the uninitiated, a blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymized ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin, but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.
Across several industries, speculation is growing that blockchain technology could be applied to more than just currencies or transactions to bring efficiencies, privacy and security.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Therein lies a paradox of sorts, given NBCU’s public bashing of some of the new generation of content providers. So it’s noteworthy to hear the company’s sales chief, Linda Yaccarino, discuss issues like brand safety, premium video and “shiny new toys” in this interview conducted by OMD’s investment chief Ben Winkler at the FreeWheel/Beet.TV New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum, which took place at the Comcast beach cabana.
Winkler set the stage by asking Yaccarino to square her comments about advertisers over-allocating spending to digital platforms with a wave of negative comments about brand safety on some of those platforms. Were the two connected?
Yaccarino responded by citing a “dangerous soup of an environment that we live in today. I don’t think anyone has the answer yet of what’s the right magical number of the mix, of premium content to digital.”
At the next Cannes festival, the subject may very well be moot, as far as Yaccarino is concerned. “Next year, I hope we stop talking about digital versus linear. In a year or two it’s all going to be the same thing,” she said. “But the turf war isn’t about digital versus linear. It’s how can we come together and help our clients sell more product.”
Winkler asked why NBCU disparaged “shiny new toys” in the digital space but proceeded to invest in and partner with some of them. That all depends on how one defines shiny objects, Yaccarino said.
Citing Apple News, BuzzFeed, Snapchat and Vox, she said, “It’s all populated by one thing and that’s premium content.”
Consumers have already dispelled any semantical differences between traditional TV content and video, according to Yaccarino. “The consumer is already there. They see no difference between accessing content via the big screen on the wall in their home or the screen in their lap or the screen in their hand.”
However, barriers still remain in the “ease of transaction for our customers,” she noted, “and the ability to offer them unified measurement or, God forbid, a currency in which to transact.”
NBCU’s Symphony initiative is credited with, among other things, raising NBC from “worst to first” in ratings by pooling the resources of all company units—from linear digital to theme parks. Among the beneficiaries has been the program “This Is Us,” as The Los Angeles Times reports.
“The difference this year is that we’re able to spread that messaging through the partners that we’ve been talking about, Snapchat, Buzzfeed, Apple News so it’s very exciting,” said Yaccarino.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But while there seems to be “a lot of innovation on the supply side,” unfortunately there’s “not as much as we would like in the traditional broadcast area,” Cridland says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We are always looking for good, quality inventory and the way to access it, and we’re trying to find a route to market that’s valuable, measurable and accountable for our clients.”
One desire among those clients is for better access to data from broadcasters, according to Cridland. He views a “big disconnect” between what Amplifi can obtain in alternative content environments for premium video with regard to “the data going in and the data coming out.”
That represents “a gap we’ve got to close in broadcast.”
On the issue of flexibility, he points to the traditional UpFront TV negotiating period as representing “an 18-month forward buy” that leaves little room for tactical maneuvering.
He finds addressable TV advertising at scale in broadcast “very exciting” even though it represents a small portion of client spending. Barriers to expansion include continuity across providers of addressable ad inventory.
To Cridland, addressable isn’t about making traditional metrics like CPM’s cheaper. “That’s not the end game in this environment. It’s about targeting and eliminating wastage difficult to do in a broadcast environment,” he says.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At least it is in the mind of Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink. Following his role as moderator of the FreeWheel/Beet.TV New TV Ecosystem Forum, Spiegel shared his thoughts on definitional differences and whether data segmentation standards are necessary.
“I love the fact that both buyers and sellers are now getting rid of the TV versus digital divide,” Spiegel says. “That’s not really news in some level, but the fact that it’s now being talked about means we’re evolving.”
The industry “transactionally” has had a TV versus digital divide for awhile, according to Spiegel. “It seems to me more than ever that’s coming together. Which is great news.”
He reflects on a panel discussion between representatives of Fox Networks and ESPN in which Spiegel’s age-old question—what is television—was center stage. “If it’s a full screen experience and the ad is being viewed what do I care about the rest of the environment? I don’t care what device it is. I don’t care what screen it’s on,” Spiegel recounts.
The viewpoint from Fox was regardless of how a consumer accesses programming, “if I’m showing you an ad and the consumption is the same and the viewership is the same, then that means an advertiser should look at it the same,” he adds. “We’re far from there but I think that’s an interesting point.”
Spiegel differs from many in the industry when it comes to the perceived need for standardization of data segmentation, another topic of discussion at Cannes.
“I still sit on the side that says customization of data science and the definitions, certainly for marketers of how they think about who they’re reaching and how they define those audiences, matters a ton,” says Spiegel.
The sell-side will probably lean toward more standards. “But I think you’re still going to be dealing with a buy-side that has customized that in a lot of ways. How that continues to evolve, the value of things like OpenAP, will be interesting to see as that evolves.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In the aftermath of the television UpFront season, Sorrell thinks traditional networks have done pretty well price-wise. ““I think they’re quite bullish about the UpFronts in the U.S. They’re seeing reasonably significant prices increases in the mid single-digit area at a time when we’re seeing deflation elsewhere,” says Sorrell, who is Founder & CEO of WPP. “So I think owners of the inventory feel pretty good about it.”
He then cites “obviously broader and much more significant opportunities” for advertisers in the programmatic space. It’s an area where WPP has made significant investments in its Xaxis unit and [m]PLATFORM technology.
“We’re offering something a little bit more than programmatic as it overlays brings in data and technology inputs, which make it far more sophisticated in terms of targeting,” Sorrell says.
Clients that had been concerned about some aspects of programmatic buying are thinking differently, he adds.
“We are seeing I think the start of a groundswell of change in attitude toward programmatic,” Sorrell says, citing marketers’ in-house operations “perhaps becoming less attractive” for reasons that include the need to keep updating the technology.
Turning his attention to newer content providers like Amazon he notes, “The amount of money that these companies are willing to invest in content is quite considerable.”
He says it’s not uncommon for Amazon to spend $10 million on one, hour-long episode, “Netflix maybe $7 million and the more traditional producers spending about three.”
As for whether Netflix, which according to Sorrell loses money on a cash flow basis, can ever turn that around, the answer will lie in its subscription and advertising policies. “In a way Netflix is already advertising, it has product placement warnings in front of some of its series already. So we are starting to see advertising in one form or other start to invade the Netflix platform.”
Companies like WPP, which traditionally had concentrated their investments outside of the content creation sector, have changed their thinking and are ramping up on the sell-side. Sorrell points to investments in Vice Media, Refinery29, 88rising and Mic as examples of his company’s need to experiment “to see how we can learn more and how are clients can be involved in it.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Winkler mentions a conversation he had onstage with NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino during the the FreeWheel/Beet.TV forum hosted by Comcast. He says her call for an agnostic approach to media selection strikes a chord of harmony.
“It’s great to talk to Linda. What’s especially heartening is I think that she and the industry as a whole lower your temperature a little bit around the us versus them, traditional versus digital,” Winkler says in this interview with Beet.TV.
From the beginning of the digital era, people like Winkler found it challenging when broadcast networks “would come out and say digital has garbage content,” Winkler recalls. Paradoxically, some of the same networks would then implore buyers to patronize digital companies in which the networks had invested.
“The reality is any advertiser to succeed needs a nice mix of different types of media,” says Winkler. “You simply cannot deliver on your business objectives if you just pick a single medium.”
He adds that it’s “nice to see that Linda is embracing that idea of a portfolio approach, NBCU being a big part of that. Certainly they deliver fantastic content.”
OMD’s clients “have an insatiable appetite” for video content, according to Winkler. “When I say video content, I don’t mean tiny videos with no sound that are watched for 1.8 seconds. We’re talking about the full commercial experience.”
Beyond traditional TV, there are few places where brands can indulge in “the full commercial experience,” he adds. “Strangely enough, Snapchat is one of those places and it’s good to see that Linda and NBC have invested in that as well.”
Outside of “the video paradigm,” brands also need platforms like Facebook to reach audiences at scale. “You get great data, remarkable targeting with very little waste,” Winkler says.
As with any medium there are challenges. “But at the risk of saying something obvious, you have to spread the wealth when it comes to media planning because it’s the only way to deliver your business objectives.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Sky (satellite) and Virgin Media (cable) may be fierce rivals, but this week they announced a “strategic partnership” to scale advanced TV ad targeting opportunities, against the common enemy of online platforms.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sky’s advanced TV advertising director Jamie West singles out two online behemoths, not Virgin, as competition.
“We’re trying to build a common currency and platform for advertisers to transact addressable TV,” he says.
“Our universe potential will grow to some 30 million individuals in the UK. That puts us on a level playing field with the big tech giants, whether that be Facebook or Google, in terms of reach.”
So, what is the partnership all about?
Sky’s AdSmart has been in market now for three years, and works by storing TV ads on satellite set-top boxes for playback in commercial breaks, targeted based on Sky’s deep customer data. It is arguably the world’s leading advanced TV ad targeting deployment, and is due for expansion to Sky’s Ireland, Italy and Germany operations.
Virgin will now begin using AdSmart for its own addressable offering.
Specifically, Virgin Media will enable AdSmart data targeting for customised ad delivery through its platform, for channels owned by Sky or its channel partners NBCU, Fox, A+E and Viacom/Channel 5.
West is realistic about addressable’s roll-out pace. “We haven’t got every single agency using addressable week-in, week-out or month-in, month-out,” he acknowledges, but says the benefits are significant. “Addressable brings optionality and choice – it means TV is more flexible for a brand.”
]]>That is one way to describe the current state of media – at least according to Turner president David Levy.
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, he sees a convergence of digital and analog advertising worlds.
“There is this race toward this middle,” he says. “Television is the greatest reach vehicle in the world … but it needs the data, the analytics for targeted marketing. The data companies … need premium video content.
“You’re going to see winners and losers at the end.”
The rise of targeted and programmatic video advertising has wet the appetites of many executives who also want to use data to better plan and buy ads on traditional TV. The going is slow but the prize is big.
That is why Levy’s Turner was one of the TV companies which this year launched OpenAP, consortium to introduce some consistency to the ways in which TV platforms describe their new viewer data segments.
Levy says OpenAp is “a big step toward trying to standardise things in this industry”, an industry in which he is keen to commission content that doesn’t just work on TV; it also excels on mobile, social and when a show isn’t even on-air.
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