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.
]]>But two of Europe’s biggest markets actually have limits on the practice:
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:
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.
]]>Fremantle, owned by the RTL Group of Europe, produces hit entertainment franchises like American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent and The X-Factor.
Mostly, of course, those shows are sold to TV networks around the world. But Fremantle is also taking advantage of all the opportunities to monetize its own assets.
“We do about 29 billion views every year on YouTube. We have direct (ad) sales rights,” says Sam Glynne, Fremantle global VP of branded entertainment, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“All our shows have got sponsors integrated into the shows. We do between 300 and 400 sponsorship integrations every year.
“So the next step would obviously be extend that relationship to our brands and offer them a place on our YouTube network.”
Glynne says Fremantle works with RTL AdConnect, the media sales arm run by its parent, to sell its content.
She acknowledges that buying ads within Fremantle video requires buyers thinking a little outside oft he typical programmatic box, calling her offering ” a new tool to play with”.
But Glynne says Fremantle content is family-focused and brand-safe.
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.
]]>“All of the hospitality industry today, six years ago everything was digital,” the SVP of Global Marketing Strategy says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“And now we are let’s say back in the roots simply because you can see that Booking and Expedia and all key players today” invest in TV advertising.
Having done as much as it could to increase sales and ROI in digital media for its brands, which include Fairmont, Raffles, SLS and Sofitel in 100 countries, Accor decided it needed to travel in a different direction. “So we decided to come back a year ago on TV but TV in a different way. It’s how do you link your brand awareness with what is going on in the physical world in the hotels,” Dubois says.
TV provides a new way to reach the right audience. “In the hospitality business, we need to touch some niche audience and as part of a global scale it’s always a big challenge. We are able to target the right people at the right time to talk about our universe. It’s not a day-to-day conversation for consumers.”
Accor has the tools to link its TV advertising to “what is going on in the digital space. These tools today are great. When you do TV, it’s not only to spend a lot of money and have status. We’re very confident and very pleased to be back on TV for our hotel brands. We see great results,” Dubois says.
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.
]]>Visit the Shell website and you won’t see promotions for the company’s liquid products. Instead, the issue of climate change takes center stage. And so it was with one of Shell’s latest YouTube initiatives, called The Great Travel Hack, hosted by actress and sitcom star Kaley Cuoco.
“Over the last two years we have reframed our presence on YouTube,” Silva says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “And I would say today we are much more professional, not only on the type of content that we put there but also the type of content that we don’t put there, to preserve what our subscribers want,”
Shell leverages technology for audience targeting and retargeting, “playlists, call to actions, all those types of best practices that are available today for anyone. You need to be good at all those things, otherwise you are missing a piece of the puzzle to be performing at your best,” says Silva.
The Great Travel Hack pitted two couples with “their own social media presence” against one another in a race from Los Angeles to New York. “We selected them by their audiences, their profile, their sympathy, their engagement, their awareness in their own countries and the authenticity that they have with their own audiences in the countries that they work.”
The goal was to make the 3,000-mile jaunt while emitting the lowest possible level of CO2. Vehicles used by the social media influencers in Team Alpha and Team Omega included a sailboat and a three-person sled powered by 12 dogs.
“And what we saw throughout this journey from Los Angeles to New York is that the more stimulus we gave them, the more interested they were in this subject and the more fluent they became to talk about this subject,” Silva says of the influencers. “Which was exactly what we wanted to achieve because it’s very organic, very natural, very native. We didn’t script it at all. This came across very natural.”
The company has several objectives for outcomes and KPI’s. “The success for us is really the outcomes in terms of the perceptions of the brands,” Silva says. “To have millions and millions of views on its own is not enough to be successful.”
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.
]]>Whilst the European market, like the continent itself, is fragmented, its broadcast ecosystem is far less so. Furthermore, initiatives like HbbTV have seen the entire chain of electronics manufacturers and broadcast groups come together to define common device standards.
Systems are simpler, through which media owners, more than underlying distributors, tend to control their ad sales.
That is something SpotX, the video ad serving platform, has discovered since it was fully acquired by RTL Group of Luxembourg in 2017.
“We see … a duty to work through the fragmentation, and the changing regulation around audience and targeting capabilities, around measurements,” says SpotX’s Sean Buckley in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re hard at work with, not only our customers, but partners across the industry, to really streamline those concepts.
“You … have a lot of inventory fragmentation in the market, in the US, in terms of who gets inventory rights, depending upon how the consumers are accessing content. Less so, in many cases, in some of the European markets.
“In markets like Germany and France and Italy, for the most part, the broadcasters control all of the inventory, and they’re just bringing these new capabilities to market. (They are) not as much dealing with the fragmentation, and distributors having an inventory share, et cetera.
“We do think OTT is the game-changer for that.”
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.
]]>Case in point – Germany, where many kinds of modern ad practice are curtailed by regulation in a country long sensitive to privacy concerns.
That is something acknowledged by Rhys Nölke, SVP strategy at RTL Group, the pan-European broadcast and production owner.
RTL Group operates its eponymous RTL TV broadcaster in Germany, but it is nevertheless taking steps forward in upgrading the country’s advanced advertising capabilities.
Nölke says RTL Group is building on its previous acquisition of video ad-tech vendor Smartclip and its tech stack’s compatibility with Europe’s HbbTV technology standard, by launching a joint venture with Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, a broadcast channel owner.
Earlier this month, the pair formed a joint venture, allowing them to control a platform for the automated booking of addressable TV and online video, the latest in a series of European alliances between rivals coming together against big tech platforms.
Nölke, in this video interview with Beet.TV, calls it “a booking engine for clients to actually simplify access and actually have an addressable TV product available from one spot”.
He says German addressable TV ad spending remains small: “We’re not even there on a significant million Euro figure today.”
But he is seeing “the first encouraging signs on some very small, very simple products that we’ve got out there, which also are still under scrutiny of regulation because replacing spots, et cetera, is also not possible” due to regulation.
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.
]]>Luxembourg-based pan-European RTL Group is living out both of those trends.
Its Adconnect unit is an ad sales arm for RTL-owned broadcasters and shows made by its Fremantle Media subsidiary (American Idol, Got Talent, X Factor) around the world, but also those owned by other operators.
And it is doing that by trying to satisfy advertisers that have an increasingly global outlook.
“What we saw over the last few years with the appearance of the big pure players, to have global partnerships at HQ level, and we are here to answer to those needs,” says Stéphane Coruble, RTL Adconnect CEO, in this video interview with MTM’s Jon Watts for Beet.TV.
“We call this a ‘glocal’ approach. You know, global KPIs, because brands are very global now. You can go wherever you want in the world, you will see the same brands. But, when it comes to implementation, it’s clear that you need to have a strong knowledge of the local discrepancies across the world.”
Around the world, operators are coming together in partnership, seeking scale to fight common challenges. That is what Germany-based broadcast group RTL is doing with more than 400 partners.
Last year, after acquiring SpotX, RTL Group created Video Marketplace (VMP), an initiative to combine various source of online video ad inventory which its AdConnect sales house represents.
And this June the company formed a joint venture with Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, helping the latter to sell ads in addressable TV platforms.
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.
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