These are among the takeaways from a panel discussion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. It brought together representatives from OMD, Nissan, true[X] and Wavemaker led by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman likened the current wave of video ad format experimentation to the early days of digital media. While there were potentially innovative solutions, they came at such a pace that “you really didn’t get the time to absorb the learnings and focus. So it just became another version of spray and pray with new ad formats,” Richman said.
Her advice to the audience: “You want to choose your partners wisely. Because there is the potential risk right now where there’s a new-ad format fatigue, where everyone is coming out with different formats.”
Alternately, having worked with true[X], Richman suggested focusing on “learnings across a few different formats, understand the measurement, understand the operational impact all the way through billing, because that’s what really matters too when it comes to scaling solutions.”
true[X] President Pooja Midha said that engagement ads only belong in front of truly premium and compelling content, so as to offer a real value exchange. “We’ve done some incredible work with Nissan where we’ve gotten to talk about both a new model, the LEAF, as well as Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. That’s a lot to get across even in a 30, but when you’ve got this rich canvas you can really go deeper and I think that’s what engagement is all about.”
Allyson Witherspoon, who heads up Global Brand Engagement at Nissan, would like to add value-based ad measurement to the industry’s standard measurement metrics.
“Lead generation is a big thing in automotive, but that may not be the most important metric for an individual experience,” said Witherspoon. “So you have to look at it by experience. If we keep measuring agencies and media performance based on the last several decades, we’re never really going to advanced what we need to do.”
Asked by Spiegel “What do we have to do to be here next year or the year after and this becoming commonplace?,” OMD’s John Osborn said the industry has a habit of productizing new things and then trying to force fit them into legacy measurement. “And the two don’t always meet,” said Osborn. “I think that we need to figure out different ways of looking at different measurement systems that are matched to the types and formats that are coming out faster than ever before.”
One challenge with emerging ad formats is that “everyone’s kind of trying to attack it, but they’re all in their own swim lanes and I think we need to come together. It’s got to be intentional and deliberate and I think we collectively need to come together to tackle it. I don’t think any one party alone can do it,” Osborn added.
Richman described the role that marketer procurement people play in innovation as “huge.” They can either allow spending in new ways “or they can control and say, ‘no it’s year after year, it’s like for like.’ And you’re going to be judged only by the money that you save, which tends to lead just to measurement only being by the CPM cost.
“Until we bring them into the conversation, it feels like we’re still going to have this logjam of only so much money can be spent on innovation because we’re not being judged by anything but pricing,” said Richman.
Witherspoon has made progress on that front because procurement at Nissan has been open to new ideas. “That was kind of the aha moment for me is that they’re actually kind of dying for this innovation as well because they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again they don’t know any different. They were really open to it.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.
Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.
‘Not waiting’
“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.
“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’
“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”
Brands ‘thirsty’ for more
That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.
“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”
Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.
“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”
Tech ‘not ready’
Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Such was the case at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity when Marchese was interviewed on stage by Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.
Never one to mince words, Marchese described the complexity of trying to figure out just how many commercials a given consumer is willing to watch on a given platform and how sellers like Fox should price newly emerging ad formats.
What’s not complicated is the silent clock ticking in the background for an industry that is known to advance in capsulized increments, according to Marchese.
President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, Marchese was blunt about “what sucks” about television. “TV and advertising have been for so long negotiating with each other and they didn’t have to worry about a third party in the negotiation. Building a business model for consumers first, that’s what’s different,” Marchese said.
“Why does anybody like you?” asked Clark.
“I’m not sure anyone does. I say what other people I think are thinking, I hope,” Marchese responded.
The ticking clock analogy refers to the two or three years he estimates might pass “before you start to see massive, tectonic shifts in how viewers behave.”
Clark: “Is there a simple way to think about the amount of advertising that consumers will accept?”
“It’s variable,” said Marchese. “The real problem is we haven’t even gotten to how complex it’s actually going to be.”
Since consumers are not “some giant, homogenous group of people” but individuals who value their time differently at different times, “I think we have to have a test and learn approach to what’s intrusive and what isn’t.”
That approach will reveal that there is content people are willing to endure ads to access “and there’s content people won’t sit through ads to get,” Marchese said. “Google’s already doing this in a lot of places. On YouTube, not everyone sees the same ad load. I think TV has to get a little bit smarter about when and where.”
Asked by Clark whether advertisers are willing to pay more for exclusivity in a commercial break, Marchese said “They have and they are” while noting that Fox’s two-ad JAZ pods “sold out early in the Upfront.”
Nonetheless, there’s no easy formula at this point for exactly how much to charge because marketers in certain categories might be willing to pay more, according to Marchese.
“The real problem is, saying what are they worth or how much more is so relative to who buys it. And so until these things are out there and the market can get set, we don’t know how much more yet.”
As a founder of engagement-ad pioneer true[X], a startup that Fox acquired for approximately $200 million, surely Marchese has some advice for TV networks, said Clark.
“Be prepared to work in chaos, things are going to change,” said Marchese before explaining that companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix are in the video space “because they want to be the operating system for peoples’ lives, but people choose their operating system based on where the best stories are.”
Citing FX, Clark asked whether the highly awarded network holds lessons for other networks. Marchese said it was among the first to abandon the model of producing cheap programming in bulk to fill a 24-hour schedule. This helps to explain why when it comes to Emmy and Golden Globe awards, the most have gone to HBO, Netflix and FX, “and only one of those still sits on a cable-operated system, ad-supported,” Marchese said.
Asked by Clark whether he’s worried when he sees people like Shonda Rhimes leaving ABC and Ryan Murphy exiting Fox to join up with Netflix, Marchese said Ryan indicated that interruptive ads weren’t his main motivation.
“Shows had to be exactly 42 minutes and the episodes had to have exactly these arcs,” Marchese observed. “Then you add in the fact you’re scheduling to a clock that has ads in very particular breaks. When they add a new break, they actually have to add a new act to the show and that’s a lot of actual work and creativity.”
On a positive note, Marchese said that when Fox announced its JAZ pods, Seth McFarland said he wanted them for the entire season of The Orville. “That’s a creator being excited about a better ad system,” said Marchese.
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.
Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”
Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”
That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”
Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”
Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.
“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.
He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”
true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.
Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.
“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.
Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.
“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.
The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.
“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.
As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.
“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…
Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.
Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”
She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.
Accept inconsistency
But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.
“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>That doesn’t seem about to change anytime soon judging from a one-on-one interview with Marchese, who is President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, and Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television, the discussion did point to some amount of certainty.
For example, the futures market for national TV inventory known as the annual Upfronts isn’t going away anytime soon, for the simple reason that it protects buyers from price increases the way airlines hedge their bets with oil futures. The process is also something of a comfort to sellers, particularly those with the most coveted (and limited) ad avails.
The search for unification among TV sellers came about because of the digital age, according to Marchese.
“What we’ve never had to compete on before was what the currency metric was because we had Nielsen. People could complain all day about Nielsen, but at least it was consistent for everyone who was trading on it,” Marchese said.
Digital media introduced cost-per-view pricing, but when TV tries to create a new product, “everyone’s like, ‘cool, how does that fit in with what I paid you last year?’ There’s just no consistency.”
Fox has been pushing hard to establish new ad formats while reducing overall commercial load, “But if we do it alone, it won’t matter. You can’t create a market and you can’t understand what the market price of anything is if there’s only one person doing it,” said Marchese.
Given the difficulty in pricing new ad formats in something approaching a consistent manner, the lack of a common market will sow pricing disagreement. “Until then, opinions will differ. And then depending on the creative, one of us is right and one of us is wrong.”
Clark noted that the industry is will run by people who have been at it for two or three decades and asked Marchese what leadership traits and characteristics are most important.
“We need to understand that we’re just used to fighting over things because that’s just the way it was done. We’re used to negotiating with agencies over every penny because that’s just the way it was done.”
Now, in some ways, everyone’s on the same side of the table. “We have the same goal, that we would like to not kill long-form storytelling as an advertising vehicle,” Marchese said.
Responding to a question from the audience about the long-term viability of the TV Upfront, Marchese said he doesn’t think it will die. “I actually think we just get better at predicting where the inventory is going to be.”
Between now and then, he believes the “dumb definition” of a CPM—an impression is an impression—will yield to something akin to the real estate market.
“We analyze real estate not just for the square footage but for where it’s located, what are the amenities, who are the neighbors. There’s a bunch of things we do.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel prefaced the conversation by calling into question the age-old format of 40 minutes of TV content leavened with 20 minutes of commercials. Encountering no disagreement, Spiegel elicited the following condensed thoughts from the varied panelists.
Amanda Richman, CEO, Wavemaker US: “This battle for attention is really sparking different ways of working. And we’re excited about now it’s becoming less of a focus just on the precision and data and targeting and keeping that within the realms of digital media only. And maybe back to the creative agencies and a different level of collaboration to recognize that we need to actually help develop the stories and messages that are bespoke to these new ad formats and platforms and broader distribution.”
John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA: “I think media more and more is just as innovative and in some ways just as creative as the creative storytellers in a creative agency. No one’s ever gone wrong by considering the consumer first and foremost. You’re seeing I think some real evolution in terms of innovation in different formats if you think of what Fox is doing with JAZ pods or NBC with Prime Pods and you’re seeing a variety of different formats coming to life. But I think a lot of the conversation is around formats. I think more and more we have to change and tilt the conversation more to experiences.”
Allyson Witherspoon, GM, Global Brand Engagement, Nissan: “Relevancy becomes what the experience is because we know so much more about who our consumers are and what their interests are that we need to be serving up content and experiences to them that’s relevant. In the case of automotive, we know when they’re going to be in market, we even know what type of vehicle that they’re in market for. So we should not be advertising a van to them if they’re interested in a sedan and we know that type of information. And then it’s to the point of how you can combine media and creative to actually deliver that message, which I think is still not something that we’re able to do at scale but it’s definitely something that we’re trying to build towards.”
Pooja Midha, President, true[X]: I’m heartened and I love the discussion that’s happening these days around bringing the consumer back to the center. While I’ve not been with the company terribly long, true[X] has been around for years and really from the beginning said we need to think about the consumer. We need to respect the consumer. We have got to think about messaging and context, advertising and an experience that is worthy of that consumer’s attention. If we’re not delivering that, then we really have no right to be there and to be expecting something back. It’s nice to be in Cannes because everyone we work with is represented. The creative side of the business, the media side of the business, the agency side, client marketers even the technology companies and measurement companies we partner with to deliver.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“It’s still very cumbersome and difficult for advertisers to buy TV across screen and we all on the inside know the labor and intricacies of those challenges,” says Joy Baer, President, FreeWheel Advertisers, FreeWheel, which is a Comcast company.
FreeWheel Advertisers processes roughly one-quarter of total U.S. ad spend annually, servicing 7,500 media buyers at 1,200 media buying agencies and in-house advertisers in the U.S. and Europe. In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Baer explains the ramifications of cross-screen buying challenges for her clients.
“They in turn create real significant margin problems for the agencies because they’re under such pressure to begin with. Their only solution to really solve for TV meaningfully is to throw additional investment and throw additional bodies at the problem.”
FreeWheel Advertisers is bringing to bear measurement and technical capabilities “so that TV can be as easy to buy as a spot was fifteen, twenty years ago,” says Baer, who started at Strata in 2007.
Many agencies maintain a completely separate digital department while using a whole host of tools to buy digital media, and there’s a crossover. “The digital platforms that they use in the space are DSP’s and DMP’s to help them target and make sense of different audiences and make sense of the data that’s available out there to target television today.”
Nonetheless, it’s not enough to reach “the real living room, to actually get to where television has its largest impact,” Baer adds. “We have to get to a cross-screen solution and combine the capabilities of these DSP’s with our platforms that work so well in linear. And that’s exactly what FreeWheel and FreeWheel Advertisers endeavors to do.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“So now we’re talking about what’s the right messaging format, how do you tell interesting stories,” Spiegel adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recently concluded Cannes Lions 2018.
Such discourse generates lots of discussion about, among other things, interesting new ad formats, the role of engagement ads in television, more precise micro segmentation and ad sequencing.
There’s another side to the coin that is a rapidly changing television landscape, according to Spiegel. “The business of television is certainly dealing with figuring out how to equal itself as a platform at scale, much like you’d see from Google and Facebook. In many ways, television today already drives more scale, but for marketers they want to figure out how can I buy against many audiences in one simple way.”
A lot of what was talked about at Cannes is how the business of television is “evolving to do that, and how are the various traditional competitors playing enough together to enable that. I think that’s a good hot topic as well,” says Spiegel.
On the subject of ad loads, keep all eyes on consumers, because “millions and millions” have voted that they prefer an ad-free experience.
“The dichotomy from ad-free on hand to the traditional broadcast model on the other, which is as much as twenty percent out of an hour of content is commercials, is the other extreme. I think that choice for consumers is pretty easy.”
So there’s little doubt that the “ecosystem of media companies” understand that they need to shorten formats, create new ad experiences and rethink how they make the exchange between content and advertising. What will the impact be on media company revenue?
“I don’t think that’s fully solved. I don’t think anyone would tell you on the sales side that they have that question fully answered. But I think they realize they’re going to have to experiment,” Spiegel says.
“And maybe there might be some short-term up and down pain, but I think there’s also the reality that marketers are willing to potentially pay more for things when they have less clutter and they’re more engaging.”
Proving paying more is worth it falls to measurement, particularly when it comes to marketers’ procurement teams.
“You’ve got to bring procurement departments along to make sure it’s not only about cheaper, it is actually about more effective,” Spiegel says. “These things are alright and I think we’re going to get there, but I think as you point out we’re in for probably some years of some bumpiness as those revenue shifts kind of shake out.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“There are a lot of us that are hungry for different solutions to get it right with how we need to go to market,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “We value the consumer experience. We value our relationship with the consumer more than anything.”
Companies like L’Oreal want to “get it right moving forward,” including messaging and creating meaningful engagements with consumers, according to McHugh, who believes “there’s great learning” that can emerge from working together.
“I think that we need to be part of the piping part, not just the ‘here, we’ve got a solution for you. Isn’t it great?’ And it works for the networks and maybe it’s not so great for how we would want to go to market. I think that is huge and I think we’ll get there together.”
What she’s seeking is a true partnership with the sell-side in a test-and-learn-together mode. “We rely very heavily on our agencies and they should absolutely be at the table as well, but marketers need to more and more be at the table and we’re hungry for that.”
At last year’s Cannes Festival, L’Oreal revealed that it would experiment with Google Labs on six-second creative spots. As BusinessInsider reports, the companies would work together to examine data on what people are engaging with on YouTube so that L’Oreal could produce timely, six-second ads running prior to content on the video platform.
“We also do tutorials that run much longer,” says McHugh. “It should be about the consumer experience and what they’re looking for and the value exchange between the messaging and what you’re providing and whether or not it’s valuable to the consumer.”
While 30-second ads play a certain role, “it’s certainly not the be all and end all and we need to test and learn our way into the future.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“Chances are, we’ve probably done some work for someone with a similar objective or we’re actually working with an ad studio that has the creativity, the flexibility and the prowess to help them think through how we can do that in our ad format.”
Just after the Cannes Festival concluded, true[X] said that it has reached a one-year deal with GroupM digital agency Essence to develop and test new approaches for connected TV advertising. As Advertising Age reports, the aim is to develop consumer-friendly and compelling brand experiences that can scale to connected-TV offerings like Roku and Apple TV. In addition, Essence will be the first agency to access engagement ads programmatically.
At Cannes, true[X]’s focus on brand lift as a measure of success “is really resonating here,” says Midha. “There’s no better personal primetime than the OTT viewing we see happening across our publisher partners.”
Asked to comment on developments in OTT measurement, Midha says, “It’s unfortunate that it’s a little bit nascent because it’s such an incredible viewing environment. There’s a lack of standardization in those platforms. Each one is a little bit different, which makes rolling measurement across very difficult. It’s not something that’s happened quickly.”
True[X] has already built a measurement tool that can live in all OTT environments called Uplift, which measures brand lift.
“Because if you want to create a brand, you need emotion. That’s the difference between a brand and a product. The first thing you need to do that is you need to have attention, which is what our format is about, and once you have attention you want to make sure you’re lifting your brand and you’re having impact. We’re trying to follow the whole thread.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>When she eyes the video landscape, Richman sees it evolving toward the opportunity for more precision targeting without taking away from the scale “that all the big players and certainly the television networks bring to the party.
“So it’s starting to shift from the conversations that used to happen that really separated the two worlds of digital and linear,” the U.S. CEO of the agency Wavemaker adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Guided by data and a better understanding of where audiences are and how they’re consuming video, Wavemaker’s focus on the purchase journey and where people are consuming video within the journey “creates just much more fluidity in how we can think about budgets, how we think about planning and connecting at the right time.”
These insights also fuel conversations with creative agencies “to make sure it’s not just about where we’re connecting with the consumer, but what’s the right messaging that’s really going to draw them in.”
Looking at learnings from, say, feed consumption of video or OTT viewing can be scaled across other platforms and “it gets much more interesting from a sense of how do you plan for that engagement and plan the right message,” Richman says.
Asked about Wavemaker’s interactions with creative agencies, she says the main goal is to get insights faster and integrate them into story and message development. “That is fueled by often the media agency’s data inputs and for Wavemaker, it’s thinking through momentum and our purchase journey understanding and the database of data points that we have that can then fuel more insights into how to connect and what message to deliver.”
Providing its data assets to a creative agency “gives them a deeper understanding of the consumer than they might have typically gotten on a brief from a client and that’s where the magic starts to happen.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“We have so much available data in our hands now that we’re able to customize content and have more personal conversations with consumers, as opposed to just kind of talking at them whether or not it’s relevant to them in their daily lives,” Witherspoon adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Addressable advertising is enabling Nissan to find people who are actually in-market for certain vehicle groupings. “The way we look at our vehicles, it’s by segments. So if you’re interested in an SUV, let’s concentrate and focus on providing messages based around an SUV.”
This is much more effective than the traditional broad-brush approach to selling things, according to Witherspoon. “For example, in a global market, we don’t need to be communicating about convertibles in Russia,” she says. “We can find much more relevant and personalized experiences for people that are in market, currently shopping for automotive, as well as by segment. So if they’re shopping for sedans or SUV’s or trucks, we can actually customize those messages.”
Asked for her opinion about the offerings of the various TV networks, Witherspoon would like to see different types of content, having long been locked in to certain levels of ad formats. “It’s not really based on consumer behavior, it’s just based on how they’ve been sold for decades. So if we can have more types of content that are more relevant for consumers and the way that they consume content.”
She notes that it’s common knowledge that people are using multiple screens as they’re watching content. “But even if you’re looking at something that’s on television and you’re actually engaged in a program, maybe a 30-second isn’t the best type of format. Maybe there’s something else we can use to capture peoples’ attention to drive interest and consideration and move on to the next message.”
As for video ad formats with which viewers can interact, Witherspoon sees that space as a work in progress. “Right now, I think the formats for that are not quite up to speed. I think there are a lot of expectations for it, which I don’t think have necessarily been delivered on yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“We understand that brands are going to demand their own special measurement. It’s not our place to determine exactly who they should use,” says Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, NBCU. “So we’re allowing them to use a suite of attribution partners that we partner with to make sure they can measure anything they do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Colella expresses enthusiasm for NBCU participating in the OpenAP audience targeting consortium and the need for added speed in moving the TV industry forward.
When NBCU looks at cross-platform viewing, it tries to deliver a “premium experience” regardless of where its content is being consumed by using a device graph that reflects that consumption, according to Colella.
“We’re able to use OpenAP to make sure that our planners can plan and the brands can plan across publishers” and then use a suite of offerings that are “great towards being able to measure these campaigns across platforms.”
Having recently joined OpenAP, “We’re very excited to work with Fox, Viacom, Turner to make sure that the industry is really moving ahead at the breakneck speed that we need to be going at. They’re our first partners that we’re so excited about.”
For attribution, NBCU is working with iSpot and is testing with Data + Math, among others. With iSpot, the company works with advertisers to define the outcome they want to measure and then tracks the success of the campaign, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Not every partner is going to be the best at every vertical, so we make sure we have a good host of those,” says Colella. “So we have an entire group that’s dedicated to just managing our data and partnerships.
“The overwhelming effect is that everybody wants the same thing. They all want to be across platforms, they all want to be able to plan that way and they all want to be able to measure that way.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“We’re living in a day and age when there’s no shortage of innovation,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “Certainly innovation has come in the form of different ad formats. If you look at what Fox has done with JAZ pods and NBC with Prime Pods, you’re really seeing a different way of delivering messaging in a variety of different formats.”
As for experiences instead of formats, he believes complexity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “It think that provides an opportunity for us as sort of Sherpas, if you will, working with the clients to figure out exactly what the right formats are and what the right choices are for clients to make. To distill it down to brilliantly simple solutions that ultimately are an economic multiplier for the clients we serve.”
But old habits can and will endure. Osborn invokes the “our own worst enemy” adage when discussing change in advertising.
“Our immediate impulse is to take something that’s innovative, that’s been proven out in a test and win format and to productize it. And then we set a pricing structure to it. And there are no real benchmarks for that so it leads to a lot of questions.”
A better approach is to “just constantly strive for the right kinds of innovation, figure out the right measurement formats, and then collectively what does it all mean for the marketers we work for,” Osborn says.
At Cannes, OMD has altered its approach to an industry fixture that is also undergoing considerable change. Whereas the company used to craft its own experience and then welcome clients to that experience, “This year, we’re working with the clients to give them more curated experiences that are more customizable to their specific needs.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 on the future of television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, FreeWheel general manager David Clark says the deal will help ad buyers get better incremental reach, including to light TV viewers.
The partnership will expand measurement to over-the-top inventory and addressable
set-top box video on demand.
“We know marketers looking for scale, we know they’re looking for quality,” Clark says. “But it’s been really hard for them to get at the inventory because it’s just not measured in the right way – particularly when we talk about OTT, and set top box.
“Our agreement with Nielsen solves that problem by providing unified measurement capability across those two polls of inventory.
“Nielsen’s the right partner for us at FreeWheel because it’s all going to be linked back to television to sell. So now marketers can look at that entire pool of inventory with one currency across it seamlessly.”
The announcement comes as FreeWheel, at Cannes Lions International Festival of Media, readies to begin pushing itself as a TV ad partner of the kind which ad buyers already enjoy in digital.
“We have seen that the platforms – the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons – have their power as a platform has resonated with marketers,” Clark adds.
“There’s an opportunity through coming together, unifying our technology, sharing our data with each other; we can actually go to marketers and provide them that same kind of platform dynamics that they see in these newer companies.
“The conversation we’re going to have on the beach tomorrow is going to be all about that.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 on the future of television. You can find more videos from this series here.
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