Now Virgin Media’s owner wants to replicate the impact across its global footprint.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Paul, Liberty Global’s MD, advanced ads and data, described the power of targeted TV advertising.
“(The relationship with) Sky has been very successful and the partnership there really just grows that scale in the United Kingdom,” he says. “We’re doing the same thing in other markets, like in Belgium. So, it’s really about accelerating that business.
“It opens television advertising up to the world. While the CPMs are higher, the total campaign costs can be lower, and because of the targeting ability, which opens up local opportunities, there is an entirely new set of advertisers, which is very exciting.
“I think that it’s not going to replace national brand-building advertising, but it’s this amazing new tool that allows broadcasters and sales houses to go into a brand with a much broader capability in being able to engage customers.”
Liberty Global’s footprint numbers 14 countries, many of which are rolling out addressable advertising opportunities for buyers. They are 12 in Europe and two in Latin America, including Belgian’s Telenet, Germany’s Unitymedia, eastern Europe’s UPC, Netherland’s Ziggo and, since 2014, UK cable operator Virgin Media.
Paul has previously told Beet.TV how the UK’s Virgin Media, one of the largest in Liberty Global’s portfolio, is now going to market with an addressable offering. But, like most of the stars in Liberty’s constellation, the company lets networks sell their own ads in to the inventory – Liberty Global rarely sells on their behalf.
Paul describes it as a “meta-aggregator” strategy, enabling broadcasters on Liberty Global-owned operators to sell their own ads.
“We’ve been able to move the needle with that in Belgium, United Kingdom, Ireland,” he adds. “Now it’s shifted from us trying to convince the broadcasters to them now knocking on our door saying, ‘We really want this. We want it for linear and we want you to help us monetize non-linear as well’.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Now the publisher wants to help brands reach a young audience that it knows is increasingly skeptical of being marketed to.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Vice Media international and global chief revenue officer Dominique Delport lays out the scale now on offer to Vice ad buyers.
“Every day we produce 1,500 video, pieces of content in 25 languages,” he says. “We have 900 content producer in 35 countries, 500 editing suites, it’s a huge content machine.
“This generation are the bullshit flamethrower. We have 36 million of them on Snap. Every brand wanted to go deep in that kind of gen-Z insight and I think that we have probably the biggest library of survey and 35,000 people we interview every day.”
Founded 24 years ago, Vice has long since expanded from being a magazine and website. Now it offers its Viceland TV channel; operates Munchies.tv, Motherboard.tv, Noisey.com, Thu.mp, and Broadly, and it just set up a live experience division.
The outfit just signed a distribution deal bringing much of its video content to Hulu’s platform in Japan.
After video-on-demand, though, Vice is turning page a page to linear.
“Live on TV is back,” Delport adds, hinting at upcoming plans for a live TV show from Vice.
“Everything started with the insight from that generation. They want and expect it. They want to be surprised. If you want them to watch something for two hours, it needs to be very different and not pre-tape or pre-produced, because they can watch that any time.
“And so February 25th, we will have the first show at 9:00PM, 11:00PM, and huge possibility for brand integration.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>But new technology allowing TV to operate like digital channels means the medium can fulfil both awareness and “performance” goals, which aim to generate an actual, measurable business outcome.
That is what a growing number of industry insiders are saying. Amongst them is Sandro Catanzaro, founder of dataxu, an ad-tech company set up to facilitate connected TV ad placements.
“When we started working on TV, in many cases, what we saw is, actually advertisers wanted reach, initially,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “More recently, we have been a big more surprised to find that both, on the buy side and on the sell side, there’s starting to be a nascent and a strong interest in getting performance – the advertisers want to know whether that exposure created a conversion.”
How can TV become a “performance” medium? The growing number of devices and channels that mean TV is delivered over the internet make it possible. But that is just the start. Catanzaro:
And the connected TV boat is certainly rising. Catanzaro says his company alone serves more than nine billion impressions per month.
Knowing the identity of viewers unlocks heightened results. By knowing who is watching, Catanzaro says a typical ad load of 18 to 20 minutes per hour can, over connected TV, be reduced to just three to five minutes, such is the effectiveness bump/
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Founded in 2010, Adaptly partners with some of the leading digital platforms, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Instagram and Snapchat, for a client roster that includes Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint.
“What attracted Accenture Interactive Operations was the fact that they really are leaders in terms of the whole platformization of marketing,” Mendonca explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “They really know how to leverage platforms properly to be able to give a step change in business outcomes.”
Adaptly will significantly bolster the capabilities of Accenture Interactive Programmatic Services, whose core offerings are helping marketers in-house programmatic media; media strategy, planning and activation; and adtech implementation and support.
“We’re very much starting with the world of programmatic delivery because we do firmly believe that all media will be programmatically delivered” as early as 2025, inclusive of TV, Mendonca says. “That’s really where our lens is so we’re starting first with programmatic activation and then we’ll scale that through to myriad number of touchpoints including TV, outdoor, radio, et cetera.”
The acquisition of Adaptly comes as Accenture is creating “experience activation centers” for clients “everywhere from Warsaw to Sao Paolo. What we’re finding is our clients really want us to have a very integrated offering across all paid, owned and earned channels and touchpoints, and that’s really what we’re focused on.”
In all, Accenture has “a whole scaled operation” of 16,000 people across the globe “developing new marketing operating models for clients and new solutions to their growth challenges.”
Because content lies at the heart of marketing experience activation, “We very much are building our product and service offering around a data-driven, tech-enabled content powered way of going to market, which is exactly what are clients are asking for.” Even when building new marketing models, “building a new content operating model is at the heart of that solution,” says Mendonca.
What should be a constant is that any form of brand communication “is actually more engaging and enhances the customer experience,” she adds, “to make sure that advertising is not a tax and it’s not an annoyance for the consumer because ad blocking is only going one way.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Since gaining, keeping and growing customers involve different phases, being able to discern them leads to knowing what messaging to deliver across platforms. “Linking those two things up we think is the next phase of where the business is going,” Spengler opines in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “It’s data, but then you have to know what to say and it’s creativity.”
Powering much of this progress within Dentsu is the M1 platform developed by the Merkle agency prior to its acquisition by Dentsu in 2016. M1 now has an identity graph that comprises 95% of U.S. adults by way of personally identifiable information codes, according to Spengler.
“That gives us a tremendous ability to work with our clients to identify true targets based on all the data they would want to know about somebody,” and then to figure out “how to connect them at various end points so we can actually speak to those exact people. So it’s making media more precise and more powerful.”
Part of the process is connecting audiences with media owners. “The conversation we’re having is about audiences, it’s less about GRP’s,” Spengler says. “It’s about content and environment, because content and context will always be important. We’re coming together on that.”
Understanding the differences among audiences goes hand in hand with being able to determine how specific targets are consuming media, according to Spengler.
“You’ve got five different devices. Am I going to waste money and talk to you five different times when I only want to talk to you once? So you’ve got to really understand who you are and what device you’re on so we’re not wasting the money.”
Asked about the value that media agencies need to provide, Spengler says “It’s very complex. It used to be strategy and save me money.” Now its data, technology and creativity working together.
“It’s higher level work but that’s what our clients need and that’s what we’re trying to build ourselves to be able to deliver.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>As a media proposition, what does a beast with such breadth add up to? Scale, says Verizon Media Head of North American Sales & Global Client Solutions Jeff Lucas
“We’re intending to bring content, data, and innovation with scale to the marketplace,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “When we aggregate all of our audience, we rank number two behind Google in terms of total audience.”
At CES, where Lucas was speaking, Verizon and Microsoft announced an expansion of an existing ad partnership, extending Verizon’s handling of Microsoft’s display, video and content marketing to also include native ads.
Powering native ads on the Microsoft properties extends the latter’s ad inventory by 20%, the pair said.
And, of course, Verizon Media Group will need to make good ad money. Having spent almost $10 billion to acquire AOL and Yahoo, Verizon in its 2018 Q4 wrote $4.6 billion off the value of its Oath assets after Oath ad sales under-performed.
Closer ties to Verizon could help, Lucas says. “When we came together with Verizon, we also came together with Verizon Wireless,” he adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“This isn’t some fad, some flash in the pan,” Kawaja says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
While it’s still early days in the sector, “We are seeing companies in a variety of verticals, in a relatively short period of time with relatively little capital, garner significant market share, in some cases double digit-market share, away from category incumbents who have been building their brand equity for decades.”
In its D2C BRAND LUMAscape, the investment banking firm identifies more than 400 direct-to-consumer companies. The overwhelming majority are in clothing and apparel, followed by personal/family care and home/furnishings, then food/ drink and travel.
The rise of these companies “has major implications for the marketing world writ large, and our message to traditional marketers is don’t take this lying down,” Kawaja says. “Take a good hard look at what is causing the success of these startups because yes, while like any tech ecosystem, many of them will die but some will live and become major competitors.”
It comes down to a build-versus-buy scenario, but it can be very hard for legacy marketers to create a cool, new direct-to-consumer brand, according to Kawaja. His hypothetical example is a company selling a high-margin product through traditional means. “It’s like having a virus. The antibodies will come out and kill it. Good luck with your new division that’s going to circumvent that and disrupt that. That’s hard for a legacy company to do.”
Companies that have opted for buy versus build include Walmart and its acquisition of Jet.com for $3.3 billion. “Now they’re sort of infusing the culture that Mark Lore developed at Jet to drive Walmart’s broader ecommerce business.
Then there are Unilever and Dollar Shave Club and Procter & Gamble’s purchase of natural deodorant brand. These and other well-established companies “are capturing the growth, capturing the magic if you will, of these DTC brands. Not just for the business per se, but also to sort of infuse that thinking, that culture, that approach to the marketplace,” says Kawaja.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>But Rohit Thawani has something altogether more creative in mind.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, the digital experiences lead at the creative agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab was excited about technologies that offer him a new creative palette.
“With the trends that I’m seeing here at CES, there’s a lot of personalization that consumers are able to do, both actively and passively,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’re also starting to see them making their choices and really creating their own (content), we’re also seeing technology that is adapting to people’s behaviours directly.”
Thawani was most intrigued by new technologies that leverage audience members’ own bodies as cues for marketers.
“We saw a few devices that actually use facial analysis,” he says. “They actually use expression and even pulse and body temperature to actually design and create the specific ideal content that these people would want to see.
“There is no more personalised direct way than to give them the content that their body is asking for, and their face is asking for.
“How can we make content that is reachable enough for so many audiences and do it in a way that is really efficient, taking out a lot of our steps? Imagine just having this artificial intelligence able to then be our media planner.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“Before us there was YouTube and Netflix and that was it,” says Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat. “We are across all the major platforms, eighteen of them, mostly on televisions.”
Those platforms include Roku, Amazon Fire, Samsung and Sony smart TV’s, along with gaming consoles, mobile devices and Android TV. In November of 2018, Tubi expanded its footprint by adding 20 million homes in the Comcast Xfinity X1 footprint.
A free app for a service that doesn’t require subscriptions, Tubi sells adds through both programmatic partner channels and direct to agencies and marketers, Rotblat explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “Really, whichever model works best for the buyer. What they love is that it’s only movies and TV shows.”
Since there’s no digital short-form content among the more than 9,000 movie and TV titles available on Tubi, “It really looks like what they buy in television and it solves the problem of linear ratings in decline, making it harder for them to reach their target audience through linear. It’s the cord cutters and cord nevers that are spending more and more time in OTT,” says Rotblat.
Asked about the growing number of direct-to-consumer video services slated for launch by major media companies, Rotblat says, “You’ll see in all these announcements are subscription services. Whether it’s skinny bundles or otherwise, there’s competition for that type of content. But we’re really feeling that there’s going to be some subscription fatigue.”
He describes Tubi viewers as “media enthusiasts who typically have one or two subscriptions “and they kind of bounce around. They might have Showtime for a month, Hulu for a month for this show. But we’re kind of the consistent that they know they can go and find just a massive library and it’s free. They’re willing to have ads if it’s a light ad load that’s unobtrusive.”
Tubi’s ad load around four to six minutes an hour, about a third of what’s on linear TV, according to Rotblat. Ad inventory is mainly 15- and 30-second ads managed through the company’s own ad server, “and we have on average three to five ads per pod every fifteen minutes or so.”
Tubi is similar to Pluto TV, which was recently acquired by Viacom for $340 million. Pluto TV is expected to complement Viacom’s cable distribution, as USA TODAY reports.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>But, if addressable TV ad spend is still small-scale, it may be a function as much of available ad space and success proof as of ad buyers’ reluctance.
In this video interview with Beet.TV during CES, the enterprise strategy EVP of Publicis Groupe’s planning and buying division, Publicis Media, outlined the way ahead.
“Clients’ appetites (are) larger than ever before to explore,” said Nicole Whitesel. “And, where in the past, it was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach, I think you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.”
If that is a change of attitude on the brands’ own part, what about those brand’s media planners themselves? How do they regard the emerging connected video landscape?
Whitesel says her own company is responding to growing demand by more closely aligning its teams, just like the new media landscape is melding together classical TV with the qualities of online delivery.
“There’s an opportunity to get in early, test things, build operational muscle between teams that maybe haven’t worked together as closely before,” she says.
“Historically, broadcast teams and national teams have bought broadcast and (separately) you have teams that maybe are more precision- or audience-driven that buy programmatic. You’re seeing a lot of work between those teams now to think about the way we’re buying connected TV.”
That plays out by the broadcast-buying team doing so during an annual upfront whilst an activation team buys an ad during quarter.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Beck talks about research Turner recently conducted to see what’s top of mind with viewers who face an ever-expanding roster of streaming choices, some of them without advertising.
“The research we did recently is very interesting,” says Beck. “People kept going back to trying to simply discover content has become more of a challenge because there’s so much out there. What can I watch and where can I watch it? And by the way, do I have to pay incremental for it?”
Among the research learnings was that people want more relevant viewing recommendations in a world of increased co-viewing wherein “typically you’re getting a recommendation based on a single profile when you have multiple people who are interested in what the content is,” Beck says. “Why can’t we have recommendations that are based on multiple profiles?”
But recommendations come with nuances, he adds, one example being not everyone who likes comedy programming likes dark comedic material. “The ability to go more granular in search to really get to what you’re looking for is going to be important.”
Another research finding that stood out is “there’s so much clutter in the experience today. When you open up any screen, there’s that infinite scrolling of content and how do you de-clutter that? So I think there’s going to be a lot of focus on UI, UX to make more personalized experiences for people,” says Beck.
Asked about reducing ad loads and other ways to improve viewing experiences, he notes that while Amazon, Netflix and others have done well without ads, Hulu has done well with an ad model.
“I think a lot of the services are going to have to consider is there an ad-supported model. Consumers may be very open to that, especially if the ads get better. By better I don’t just mean the quality of the content but not as interruptive or served at the times in which people are open to that.
“I definitely think that anybody that’s in this space is thinking hard about how can advertisers help fund the experience for consumers because we know consumers are going to want a free or ad-supported version.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>But new digital platforms are collapsing the marketing funnel as we witness the emergence of ad units which tick both boxes.
That is the view of Twitter’s VP of global client services Sarah Personette, who says brands can have the best of both.
“We’re seeing this migration from a siloed world of ‘performance’ on one side and ‘branding’ on the other … to a collapsing of a world that’s really focused on performance branding,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
That’s how it looks from where Personette sits. Twitter says it can help drive both branding and performance goals.
“A lot of our ad solutions actually allow you to, in one unit, experience the storytelling power of video from advertisers, and then actually drive down to understand more about that product, be able to buy that product directly, or be directed to a site where you’re able to do some sort of direct-to-consumer buy,” Personette adds.
She tells Beet.TV Twitter has made over 950 content deals with publishers around the world over the last year, and explains that the platform’s modus operandi is helping brands connect to conversations that “move at the speed of culture”.
For its latest quarter, Q3 last year, Twitter reported advertising revenue of $650 million (up 29% year-over-year), whilst ad engagements increased 50% year-over-year and cost per engagement (CPE) decreased 14% year-over-year.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Its goal is to “evolve the consumer experience of watching live, primetime television into a better experience because we know that they have an immense amount of options to be able to watch television,” says Mark Marshall, NBCU’s President of Advertising & Client Partnerships.
Along the way, NBCU has trimmed ad loads to evolve the consumer experience. The days of 42 minutes of content and 18 minutes of interruption “are going to have to be behind us if we want to continue to make this ad sales ecosystem continue to be healthy,” Marshall adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
Reducing ad loads began two years ago when the company trimmed 35% from its digital properties. Last year NBCU said it had cut 10% out of its top 50 shows across eight networks.
In sports programming, it faces restrictions but “we’ve tried some different things,” says Marshall. One is during hockey games, “when a puck is iced and we have the transition before the next face-off of having a drop in-ad in that period of time. It’s in the flow of the sport, it’s not disruptive and it actually has performed very well for us.”
On the segmentation side, worked with an outside firm to create a tool called the “content code.” Starting in primetime, NBCU wanted to figure out not only why people were coming to its shows but what mood they were in when they were watching. “And then we layered on top of that what ads performed best within that. Putting the right tone of the right ad in the right show we saw the brand metrics jump.”
This year, it will continue to refine its artificial intelligence-informed optimization to target ads down to the scene level. “Our goal is to make to advertising as effective as possible. And we know that it does two things. It works for brand metrics and it also helps with retention, making sure people stay with it,” Marshall says.
Meanwhile, “challenger” brands like Peloton have added TV to their options “ and they talk in terms of how it really influenced their brand as soon as they went on television.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. “We’re getting TV’s largest advertisers,” says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% “and we’re super serving them with some new tools.”
Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they’re watching.
Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share—information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports.
“We can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data” resulting in a “census-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,” says Naylor.
Working with Telaria, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that “we can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.” It’s a closed market because “we’re very protective” to avoid “category collision with our advertisers” and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.
“Happily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn’t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they’re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is “conventional TV with conventional breaks,” it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine and Innovid.
The “latest kid on the block” that Hulu is beta testing is “a pause ad.” When viewers hit the pause button “we’re going to serve up a little image” but not a display or video ad. “Imagine a Coke can with language like ‘the pause that refreshes.’”
The goal is to exploit the opportunity of “knowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It’s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,” Naylor says.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>While the People’s Choice Awards had long been owned and produced by Procter & Gamble, “We wanted to make it new young and fresh in E!’s voice. And we recognized that if we just did it in the linear space it really wouldn’t be new and fresh. So we had to use our partnerships to offer marketers even greater opportunities for their content they were doing with us,” Molen says.
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, she explains how NBCU custom builds programs for marketers that span various channels and platforms in “one cohesive plan.” At the awards ceremony, Ebay sponsored backstage views while Subaru had a commanding presence near the red carpet, as Variety reports. Metro by T-Mobile sponsored a “live look-in” of a music performance by Rita Ora that garnered 2.3 million social media views—an audience that was 90% composed of 18-24-year- olds, according to Molen.
“So it’s that kind of impact that we’re looking to help marketers make by distributing their content wherever the consumer is. On Telemundo, we see this all the time.”
NBCU has social partners that include Snap and Twitter, while its Social Synch offering makes it easy for brands to reach audiences across various social media platforms.
“We sell all of our content, even if it’s distributed across other people’s platforms,” Molen says. “We give our marketers one cohesive plan, making it very easy for them to buy.”
She draws a parallel between premium content and most of social media because “that’s where the conversation is around premium content and long-form content.” Her conversations at CES include improving the commercial experience so that consumers enjoy the content better “but they also engage more deeply around a marketer’s brand.”
Some advertisers are rediscovering the value of premium content, having seen “a lot of shiny objects” and had issues with certain platforms. “Working with NBCUniversal we can give them the things that they need in data, in distribution, in commercial innovation, in ROI and attribution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a functional need for our product in the market and an emotional one and a community to belong to,” Away VP of Brand Marketing Selena Kalvaria says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “The problem is we haven’t reached all those people.”
Away’s experience with television thus far has focused on direct response. This year it’s looking to find out “what other roles can TV play, not just reach but driving culture, emotional resonance and return on brand equity via premium programming,” says Kalvaria.
“How do we start to think about the full marketing funnel, the full strategy, in order to grow our reach and to really be able to have those conversations with those people?” she says. “And at the same time think about how that impacts and actually makes our bottom of the funnel more efficient.”
It’s not just about commercials per se but “there is customer alignment, there’s emotional alignment, there’s values alignment” while creating “mental availability,” another term for getting into more peoples’ purchase consideration set.
While most direct-to-consumer companies think about channels they can measure easily, Kalvaria embraces traditional brand health metrics. “Awareness, consideration and ultimately market penetration.” For her, consideration is one of the biggest metrics for a brand whose key brand attributes include being stylish, innovative and unique.
“How are we moving those metrics through the stories that we tell on television, through the stories that we tell through upper funnel?” asks Kalvaria. “As your awareness and your consideration moves, your penetration will move too and that’s your bottom funnel.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, U.S. CEO Gerhart discusses the “perfect balance” between TV’s scale and addressability along with the challenge that accompanies the need for increasing amounts of consumer data for targeting purposes.
“One of the biggest things that we’re starting to see is the unbundling of services,” says Gerhart, citing the Consumer Technology Association’s projection of a 27% increase in streaming revenue in 2019. “That’s huge and it has massive implications when you think about the control that it gives to consumers in terms of building their own packages with their own channels, their own networks.”
Byproducts of this customization can be positive or negative. Among the former is greater fragmentation, while the latter includes “understanding more about who those consumers are through the data that we have, from the suppliers providers and carriers that are actually starting to create some of those bundles,” Gerhart says.
He sees opportunity in the “perfect balance between the scale that TV can afford and actually the addressability that it creates. I don’t think we have many clients that are on one extreme or the other.”
Mindshare has a lot of small “challenger brands” that use addressable TV and new technologies to precisely target people who may be in market for a particular product or service. Then there are clients that need traditional scale and eyeballs, reach and impressions.
“And it’s the combination of those two and understanding where and how they intersect, that’s the art and science of what we do,” Gerhart says.
He believes there’s a paradox now in that “everybody wants to be as addressable and precise as possible. But in order to do that it means that we need more data and more information from consumers from providers, third party, first party, you name it. That’s the tension that we’re constantly faced with.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>The end goal is “how you can get a holistic view from television viewing across the same audiences across different platforms into one place so you can offer video viewing to the buyers in a more holistic fashion,” Clarken adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
Nielsen has been working the industry on cross-platform measurement “and it’s been complicated.” Signs of encouragement, according to Clarken, include the “fantastic job” that Linda Yaccarino and her team have created in the form of CFlight.
Within CFlight, Nielsen provides foundational data from its traditional television ratings plus Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings “as the underlying data, and then they put those things together inside of this platform. It’s great. It’s a place where it’s a starting point,” says Clarken.
“I think it’s great for the industry. It shows movement across a problem that’s been there for some time where there hasn’t been movement. We’d love to continue to work with them and see how this can be adopted more broadly.”
She considers calculating cross-platform reach and frequency as “the first place to start. How many people saw it, how often did they see it, how long did they see it for. And that provides an underlying platform for everything else.
“And what’s really important is that when you measure reach and frequency across platforms you’re doing it in a comparable way. Buyers want holistic view. They don’t want to try to cobble together their TV data with the data from mobile, with the data from PC, with data from multiple providers to try to get some sense of their ad spend on video themselves.”
As more advertisers extend their audience targeting beyond age and gender into different demographics and biographics, the next step is to show actual business outcomes.
“You have to start with the base before you can get to the sales targets, but ultimately the holy grail is to put the base in place and then start to building the pieces on top of that to the ultimate outcome. Which is did I actually sell something on the back of my advertising,” says Clarken.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg says he sees an “explosive opportunity for television networks” – the growth in direct-to-consumer brands, many of them wholly digital – which need to gain consumer awareness outside of the hyper-competitive digital environment.
“It’s a very competitive marketplace, they need to break through,”Rothenberg says. “They’ve been very successful in their launch phases, marketing using social networks and some other things.
“But now, in order to be even more competitive, they need to move into main media. And so we’re seeing that over and over and over again. These companies, at a certain point in time (generally, we think it’s around three to five years into their life span), they’re looking at TV and radio, and they’re achieving a lot of success as a result.”
Last year, IAB worked with Dun & Bradstreet to produce research illustrating the trend.
The pair’s IAB 250 Direct Brands To Watch showed two things – first, the extent to which many new brands are foregoing intermediary retail going direct to consumers; second, the extent of competition within that set.
This is a different world because, unlike those which use retailers as intermediaries, brands which have first-party ecommerce data on their own consumers and prospects can take it in to advertising environments.
“That’s one of the interesting hurdles for the television industry in attracting direct brands … first-party relationships realized through first-party data are the core asset of the enterprise,” Rothenberg adds. “So, the challenge (also the opportunity, frankly) for television, for radio, for print is to:
Rothenberg’s observation was echoed by Video Advertising Bureau, whose own research last year identified 80 new brands – largely, digital and direct-to-consumer – which are now spending $2.6 billion in US TV ads.
To capitalize, IAB’s Rothenberg says television companies must more fully integrate their cable and digital assets, analytic abilities, strategic abilities, understanding of consumers and marketplaces and their expertise at storytelling.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>In Las Vegas, Beet.TV found technology executives eager to say that, despite growing industry concern at changing viewer behavior, TV still has unique qualities. But they also said now is the time for TV to embrace new digital demands.
“(There is) emotional residence and empathy that goes along with great storytelling that’s right front and center, right in the middle of your living room and there really hasn’t been much to replace something as powerful and meaningful as that,” says Annalect North America Chief Executive Officer Erin Matts in this video interview with Beet.TV. Annalect is a unit of the Omnicom Media Group.
“That being said, for a number of years now, television has been left by the wayside when it comes to a truly data driven approach.”
Matts says, whilst TV has always data of some form to sell ads with, the rise of “programmatic” ad trading has led to a more scientific approach, making TV look antiquated.
Matts sees linear television soon benefitting from the same kind of programmatic, laser-targeted ad sales processes now widely used in digital advertising.
But her company Annalect, which provides consulting and insights technology, is using an approach called “behavioral optimisation” as a stepping stone.
“It essentially helps us identify audiences at an individual level and applies that and overlays that,” she says. “There’s a lot of advanced analytics that goes into this.
“(It) applies that to a traditional television buy of, say, ‘women 25 to 54’. But perhaps I want to talk to ‘women who drive convertibles on Tuesdays during a full moon’, or whatever that happens to be and I can still find those individuals within that television by and serve the right kinds of ads to those people that are going to be relevant to that particular audience versus the broad ‘women 25 to 54’.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>Roughly four months after AT&T unveiled Xandr, the company announced in early January an integration with WarnerMedia’s Turner to improve the relevancy of advertising, fueled by data and content connections.
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Welday talks about the new collaboration with Turner along with the high-level aspiration of Xander to make advertising more relevant while leveraging nearly 200 million consumer billing relationships that yield fertile data for both buyers and sellers.
And then there are viewers of premium video content, whose needs are a high priority. “Consumers should not have to tolerate sixteen minutes of un-targeted advertising for every hour of programming,” Welday says. “That’s a widely agreed upon problem. We think we can help with that.”
The Turner and Xandr ad sales teams have been working on the following four initiatives, with several enhanced products now available from Turner:
• More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data
• Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties
• Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV
• Proving the impact of advertising through attribution
Elsewhere within the AT&T fold, Xander is using some of its audience targeting segment capabilities to inform both CNN digital and Bleacher Report across linear and digital. Meanwhile, it’s assisting the LaunchPad branded content solution extend into addressable. “So we can take the same audience they’re targeting with the branded content and find them on our addressable footprint,” Welday says.
Asked about Xandr’s desire to be a supply-side platform for competitors, Welday says it’s “very, very grateful” to be representing both Altice USA and Frontier Communications, with which it has agreements to aggregate and sell national addressable TV advertising inventory.
“Our intention is to build a marketplace where we can provide premium content in a brand-safe environment with visibility and transparency into how the campaign is being delivered across platforms. That by definition is open. We want all comers to be able to access that marketplace,” says Welday.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>The bottom line, Sable explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, is that TV advertising will need to rise to the quality level of the programs themselves.
Noting that he predicted 10 years ago that Amazon would have brick-and-mortar stores, Sable says, “Netflix within the next two years will have advertising. They have to, in my view. Amazon’s already going to be there.”
This means “we’re going to have more and more opportunities to put more and more great advertising” around premium content.
A once widely held view that with the rise of digital most video content would be user-generated hasn’t quite worked out, according to Sable, citing “the cat peeing on your shoes that everybody would share. That’s such crap. It’s exactly the opposite.”
In recent years, producers who once shunned TV are flocking to its seemingly endless channels. “They all want to be back in TV because the budgets are high, the production quality is huge,” Sable says.
Of course, someone has to pay for all that content and “advertising has to be as good as the content that you put it around.”
While for many of Y&R’s clients TV “has to be that branded piece, to create the brand image,” more companies beginning to understand that “Amazon is DTC and so is e-commerce.”
With a drive toward direct-to-consumer even in staid consumer packaged-goods categories, there’s more concern now about “how do my ads look different, how do they sound different, what’s the call to action, what’s the offer? What’s the pricing. These have to be in there,” Sable says. “You see it with the Warby Parkers, you see it with the Caspers.”
Even companies like Facebook and Amazon are buying “a ton” of traditional TV. “How come they’re not just on Google or Facebook or Amazon? Because they’re smart.”
Asked about the proceedings at CES, Sable prefers to think of the annual event as more about innovation than technology per se. While he was impressed by a new LG screen that folds up like a window shade, he’d like to see more visibility around 5G cellular service “because so much of what we’ve seen is going to be dependent on 5G.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>The Upfront is the only marketplace where you can “figure out your whole year. There’s a whole bunch of efficiencies attached to that,” says the SVP of Client Strategy. “Getting the right kind of pricing, cementing a partnership, so there’s always going to be a role for that.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Effik also talks about the expectations of so-called direct-to-consumer advertisers and his team’s job of sifting through the “treasure chest of riches” that is the NBCU content portfolio.
At NBCU, the “whole idea of doing mass media now sits very comfortably with us bringing more targeted media, data-driven media, into the Upfront as well. So we’re managing to marry both of these worlds within the existing upfront,” says Effik.
His reference to a treasure chest of assets reflects, among other things, NBCU’s motion picture studios, theme parks, digital assets and set-top boxes. “My team’s job is to look at where the value is in that and then connect the dots for our clients.”
When talking about direct-to-consumer brands, Effik says that while NBCU wants to be “where any industry is being reinvented,” it’s also an opportunity change the way people see his company as just an upper-funnel player. “We think there’s been a misperception in the industry around what NBCU represents.”
For companies that grew up on Facebook and or Google, “we’re showing them that they can actually get just as good if not more superior returns by working with NBC at the lower end of the funnel.” For new but more established brands, “We’re now showing them that they can be mature brands by using the full scope of our portfolio.”
A common characteristic of direct-to-consumer brands is that “they’re CPA obsessed,” meaning cost per acquisition, according to Effik. “They want to get a low cost of acquisition, but they want to do it at scale. We know what things in our portfolio drive that the best and we’re packaging that kind of stuff with them.”
Priorities do change from one company to another, including economically driving website visits and gaining more brand awareness. For example, “People on the coasts, in the hip neighborhoods of New York or L.A. know who we are. Now we want to go into Middle America. I want awareness.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“We Believe defies the convention that ‘boys will be boys,’ which is just an excuse for bad behavior,” P&G Chief Brand Officer said in an email to Beet.TV. “Although many examples exist where men are NOT at their best, we believe in the best in men and that by holding each other accountable, eliminating excuses for bad behavior and being a role model for a new generation we can deliver positive and lasting change.”
In this interview at CES 2019, Pritchard explains P&G’s work with the Association of National Advertisers’ CMO Growth Council in the area of society and sustainability. Among other goals, the company is focusing on racial equality “both in the advertising and content that we create, but also behind the camera so we can really create much greater degree of equality, diversity and inclusion throughout our entire creative supply chain.”
At the 2018 Cannes Lions, racial equality was the subject of an initiative by I.D.E.A. hosted by Spotify and P&G and sponsored by true[X]. This Beet.TV series from the event features a range of industry executives discussing how their companies are promoting racial diversity.
The purpose of We Believe is to inspire men to be part of the solution by moving from “inaction to being a role model for positive action for themselves, their loved ones, their peers, and for the next generation of men.” To support that effort, Gillette has launched thebestmencanbe.org, which includes a commitment to donate at least $1 million each year, for the next three years, to organizations with programs that help men of all ages achieve their personal “best,” starting with the Boys & Girls Club of America.
“I’m quite proud of this campaign and of the Gillette team, their partners at Grey, and film director Kim Gehrig (who we discovered through Free The Bid) for redefining what it means to be “The Best a Man Can Get,” Pritchard said in his email.
Pritchard’s desire is that all companies get involved in such movements as the ANA’s #SeeHer and its Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing.
“Because if everybody in the industry is involved it will truly change the way all people view the world.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“We feel great. It’s really a time of technology sophistication where it’s intersecting with creativity,” says the Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships at NBCUniversal—the “largest legacy content company.”
Whereas TV used to be the sole province of big brands behind a “velvet rope,” the evolution of the medium is ushering in a new wave of entrepreneurs seeking the advantages of co-mingling with premium content, Yaccarino explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
“No one ever argues that’s the best performing opportunity, but now as TV’s gotten smarter we’ve invited in a whole new crop of brands that are able to expand into a space they once thought unattainable.”
Newer brands bring with them an expectation to break out “beyond the limitations that they’re experiencing from solely being a performance based marketer” but without some of the strictures that have long governed TV advertising, according to Yaccarino.
“You can only survive in point-and-click or performance-based marketing platforms and grow to a certain point. Then you start to hit a ceiling.”
What these brands do expect is business performance without any legacy hesitation. “We’re on a playing field that’s not officiated by an obsolete success metric, whether it is a currency of a rating or the legacy that’s held our industry back or the inertia that’s held us back from past business practices,” says Yaccarino.
Asked to comment about controversies that continue to bedevil some of the biggest digital media platforms, she demurs while calling NBCU a worry free zone.
“But I have to say that the transition that once was taking your media mix to the shiny new toys of the new social platforms, or that were new back then, and the promise of media effectiveness and efficiency and the disappointment that then followed, that pendulum has swung back.”
Noting that the live linear TV experience is “very imperfect,” reducing commercial load has brought improvements for viewers and advertisers. “The brand metrics consistently across the board have exceeded our expectations.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
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