“You see a tremendous explosion in the technologies that can produce content, the companies out there that are producing content, and the distribution opportunities to get that content in front of an individual,” says Cridlin.
Anything that can capture data can work to create an individualized experience for somebody. For this reason, the TV watching experience will be customized down to the very consumer not long from now. One encouraging result of this is that previously underserved communities now have content that’s on-demand and is targeted towards them.
“Our team here in North America recognized that LGBTQ journalism and content was suffering because white lists and block lists were automatically filtering out that content from advertising dollars,” says Cridlin. “So we created a private marketplace of those approved publishers to ensure that that content continued to live because we believe that in the future that content is going to be important.”
The television that watchers are accustomed to already doesn’t look the same as far as devices and set top boxes. Cridlin says that we’ll also start seeing television taking a common experience and making it more unique to the individual.
In particular, he references a technology he saw at CES that gives TV watchers an earpiece and allows individuals to select volume levels as well as tune into particular parts of a program like background music or dialogue. He describes seeing glasses that can literally rearrange letters for readers that suffer from dyslexia. According to Cridlin, augmented reality delivery devices will start to make their way into TV, too.
“If there are glasses that overlay some type of experience on top of the content you’re watching,” Cridlin says. “That could be an even more interesting way of delivering a personalized television experience.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But, this time, things could look a little different. So says the strategy chief of an ad-tech firm aiming to help the industry buy and sell better across four screens.
“How both the buy and the sell side are looking at the TV upfronts within 2020, which are going to begin sooner than people realise, is very, very different,” says Amobee’s Philip Smolin.
“The ability to package and sell their media the way their customers want to buy it, on an audience basis, and to be able to do that as converged packaging across all devices is fundamentally the next step for the industry.”
Big day for @Amobee as we announce Amobee 4Screen, a first-to-market collaboration with Nielsen for advertisers and broadcasters to bridge linear TV, connected TV and digital data, further powering the convergence of TV and digital. Read more: https://t.co/Yg8pbVFqDW
— Nick Lashinsky (@nlashinsky18) December 13, 2019
Smolin was speaking with Beet.TV after Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.
4Screen, as the package is called, works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.
“The problem is all of those media platforms … become a highly fragmented media landscape that is very difficult to almost impossible to measure,” Smolin says.
“(It powers) planning, activation, optimization, measurement and analysis,” he adds.”
The recent 4Screen launch builds on Amobee’s earlier acquisition of Videology.
Smolin will be a speaker at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 5 to 7.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to client expectations, but focusing on performance goals is a good way to start.
“No matter what that KPI is and no matter what that expectation is of our client, we want to be able to say, ‘How do we make the most?’” says Montenes. “‘How do we then pivot to determine what vendor to use to then be able to provide that client back the best offering from an attribution perspective?’”
Another factor that is changing expectations is the growth of direct-to-consumer. According to Montenes, most direct-to-conusmer clients already have their own tools and proof of measurement, but with A+E’s own tools and measurements, they’re able to see what the client is doing and blend it with a more collaborative solution.
Lately, they’ve been moving a lot towards national buying because with direct-to-consumer in particular there’s a need to get down to the program level. They also recognize the need for cross-platform optimization, but there’s still no picture perfect solution.
“We know that our library has such demand across the board,” says Montenes. “If you look at some of the platforms that A+E Networks partners with, and we’re number one or number two with some of the shows that we had in our library.”
This means A+E is being strategic in placing their inventory across the entire portfolio rather than randomizing.
“The same audience is not viewing TV the same way that they are on our other platforms,” says Montenes. “So it’s very important to ensure that we’re optimizing against that different audience that’s viewing on other platforms and then watching the audience that’s watching across just our linear arm. We blend those two together and that’s how we get back to our cross-platform optimization.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But Ed Davis isn’t stopping there. In this video interview with Beet.TV at Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the consortium’s chief product officer Ed Davis explains why he wants to see more names on that list.
“We’re pretty focused on more publishers that offer premium programming,” Davis says. “There are a number of publishers that aren’t under our umbrella.
“Some of them of course might not be within the next year, but many of them, I think, have been taking a step back and let’s just see how these things unfold.”
“Those are the conversations that we’re having right now,” Davis adds. “We have a number of active conversations with other networks and I think we’ve sort of shifted the way you integrate with us and made it a lot more straightforward. Even here at CES, we’ve been having a few of those conversations and we can see that, just (by) reducing a little bit of the friction to activate with OpenAP, the response has been very, very positive.
“So I think you’ll see not a lot of surprises in membership over the next year. It will be people you’ll say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense. They’re in good company if they join OpenAP’.”
Big Five US broadcast networks not on OpenAP’s list include ABC and The CW, though, of course, considering the wider world of premium non-broadcast video, the universe is much larger.
We are proud to announce the official launch of the OpenAP Market, which brings simplicity and scale to audience-based campaigns in TV advertising across both linear and digital. Learn more: https://t.co/DGScM2vuBb @FOXTV @NBCUniversal @Viacom @Univision pic.twitter.com/8O8lnFbKbA
— OpenAP (@OpenAPTV) October 9, 2019
OpenAP launched three years ago as the means through which the TV networks harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.
Recently, OpenAP made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns.
Great crew last night at the Beet – @OpenAPTV party with Krishan Bhatia @GKBhatia2 @NBCUTogether @DonnaSpeciale David Levy CEO of @openAP and Irwin Gotlieb @WPP @GroupMWorldwide great party at @michaelsnyc #HappyHolidays pic.twitter.com/P2TYuPh2qL
— Andy Plesser (@Beet_TV) December 3, 2019
“The initial phases of OpenAP were very focused on clients who wanted to come and build an audience with OpenAP,” Davis adds. “And what we’ve realised through a lot of conversations with clients is, a lot of them don’t really need or want help defining audiences.
“What they really want to do is take all of the investment they’ve made in their own very sophisticated data solutions and have an easy path to activate all of those audiences so that they can be used for targeting. So we sort of reframed what we do on the audience side.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Upfronts season peaks in May, when video and TV content owners showcase their upcoming repertoire in a bid to secure advance ad buyers from brands and their media agencies.
In this Consumer Electronics Show (CES) video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer at LiveRamp’s TV division, talks about what is different about 2020’s upfronts season and what the industry is still lacking.
“Coming out of CES, it’s already basically going to be upfront season,” says Prasad, whose appointment to LiveRamp was announced at CES. “The Beet Retreat (an executive event in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in February) is basically the last respite before the next crazy months of the upfront starts.”
LiveRamp Welcomes Industry Leader Jay Prasad to the LiveRamp TV Team
Prasad is the former TubeMogul and VideoAmp executive with a long history in online video business.
LiveRamp is an ad-tech is an audience identity resolution provider, aiming to help ad buyers knit together fragments of consumers’ disparate digital breadcrumb trails.
It offers Identity Link – a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data
“What’s missing in the marketplace is a scaled, neutral company who can actually make interoperability work amongst all of the big media companies via connective tissue to the brands and the agencies,” Prasad adds.
“That means you’re not buying or selling media, you’re not owned by a media company so, therefore, you can be a trusted steward of all of the data that is required to create this liquidity.”
LiveRamp recently published its guide to the upcoming 2020 upfronts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>LiveRamp acquired the company back in July. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Allison Metcalfe, the GM of LiveRamp’s TV offering, explains what new capabilities she has acquired.
“We’ve been working with those guys for six months now and we are aggressively expanding the scope of measurement to include not only outcome-based measurement but total cross-screen measurement in total,” Metcalfe says.”
“What’s unique about Data Plus Math is the outcome-based (aspect). Traditional measurement in TV has been much more about reach and frequency. We are actually now able to tie a business outcome – whether that be a store visit or a purchase or a website visit – to the impression of the TV advertisement.
“Marketers are truly able to understand the true business outcome of the investment that they’ve made in TV. That is something that the industry has embraced frankly with the advent of what Facebook and Google have been able to offer marketers and now it’s being demanded across all channels.”
At the Consumer Electronics Show, LiveRamp announced that former TubeMogul and VideoAmp exec Jay Prasad is joining as chief strategy officer for its TV division.
LiveRamp Welcomes Industry Leader Jay Prasad to the LiveRamp TV Team
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At least the overall growth of connected TV as an overall category is giving them some reassurance. After all, connected TV services provide more precise audience targeting characteristics than traditional broad demographics, and the rise of advertising-supported, AVOD services is aiming to fill the gap.
So, how is the world’s largest media buying agency seeing things play out?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Group M chief investment officer says connected TV has reached a tipping point – and broadcasters need to go fasters.
“I heard that adults 18 to 34, over 50% of those folks now are watching subscription services” Sweeney says.
“We’re also thinking that, in 2020, (the) prediction is that the largest segment of the audience … 18 to 49, will also go over the tipping point – 50% of those people will be watching not traditional linear TV, but connected TV in some way, shape, or form.
“That’s a big change for the industry. So our hope and the hope of our clients is that that’ll open up the ability to move off of some of the traditional buying metrics that have been in place for 30 or 40 years and that were incredibly effective and efficient from a delivery standpoint.”
Across the landscape, a plethora of technology companies and consultancies is bringing software that helps better index and target inventory available in VOD shows.
Increasingly, that intelligence is also being applied to linear TV ad inventory, whilst broadcasters themselves have spent the last few years trying to apply more data to their ads, satisfying marketers’ craving for ever more precise reachability.
Asked what media companies need to do, Sweeney says: “Hurry up. Measurement is hugely important. Those things need to change.
“We’ve got to get our clients to understand how you can change a target from ‘adults 18 to 49’ … (That’s) hard to do when you just buy a daypart and demo on a traditional TV or cable network.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But automatic content recognition (ACR) technology is now beginning to help advertisers and broadcasters know for sure.
It works using a range of hardware and software that either listens to or sees the content viewers are watching, typically matching the fingerprint against a cloud-based database of TV shows.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Karthik Rao of Nielsen, which offers such ACR capability, says the aim is to deliver “One Media Truth”.
“One Media Truth for Nielsen is all about the ability for us to measure these interactions between platforms and brands and the end consumers,” says Rao, the chief product and technology officer of Nielsen Global Media.
“Addressability, the excitement about that at CES this year, is one version of that, the most exciting versions for this year.”
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables real-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Rao’s Nielsen has also been enabling ACR for Amobee, the video ad-tech supplier, as it seeks scale for its offering.
“That helps Amobee create great experiences for what they do as a business,” he says. “And so it’s just amazing to see such granular data being brought to life in very different ways and helping new use cases that was just not possible before, in the case of Amobee as an example.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>NBCUniversal, for the past four years, has been investing time and resources into its addressable advertising systems, work that has so far resulted in AdSmart, the company’s audience targeting platform. Now, Colella tells Beet.TV in an interview on site at CES in Las Vegas, NBCUniversal is ready to debut One Platform, an addressable advertising system that lets clients plan, schedule, optimize and measure across both digital and linear channels. Previously, separate systems oversaw digital and linear channels. The future of addressable for NBCUniversal is holistic.
One Platform, Colella says, is the result of work with partners like Project Oar, the industry consortium setting addressable advertising standards, and other industry leaders like Comcast. “We’ve been working tirelessly to test how we’re going to create linear, addressable opportunities for our clients who want them and ask for them, and we’re finally able to deliver.”
According to Colella, while the launch of One Platform is a milestone for the company, there’s still progress to be made, particularly in defining new modes of measurement. “We’re looking for a lot of players to get involved and understand how this is going to change measurement for the ads that it replaces, so I don’t want to say we’re exactly there yet,” says Colella.
What’s important, though, is that linear television is now on par with digital streaming services in terms of targeting and performance capability. That’s particularly crucial in a year that Colella says is set to see the launch of six new streaming services.
“It’s the year of the video platform,” says Colella. “But we can do a lot more for our advertisers and agencies than we ever have been able to do in the past. We’re making investments in content and bringing that together is a great user experience.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>By working with Nielsen, and specifically with the company’s Gracenote ACR (automatic content recognition) data, Amobee has access to more granular viewership data that functions on the individual user level, rather than the household level.
“Nielsen recently rolled out user-level viewership data against their Gracenote ACR, about 4.5 million TV sets where they’re utilizing their national people meter panel to create models that are tied to the data,” Aleck Schleider, svp of data strategy and monetization at Amobee, told Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s really important – it’s the advancement of ACR data for planning and measurement.”
That advancement gives broadcasters and advertisers a better understanding of who is actually watching content, and on what type of device. Formerly, measurement systems tracked viewers on the household level by tracking TV sets. Big data, as part of the convergence of linear television and CTV, has raised expectations around what information is available.
“It’s a big step for the market because the market wants faster data. They want to understand it, given the fact that so much information is available from the ACR, and be able to utilize it,” says Schleider. “And so this advancement is really a milestone, a big step forward for the industry to adopt ACR data when it comes to planning linear television, ctv and convergence.”
At the center of this need for better, more granular data and measurement is the change in consumer habits and how people watch TV. In any one household, multiple people may be watching live TV, streaming content on a mobile phone, and plugging a casting device into a TV set to run apps. Nielsen and Amobee’s partnership will give advertisers more clarity into who is seeing their content and where. That level of visibility, while new for linear TV, has been available to advertisers in advanced TV.
“What Nielsen has done with this data set is take that smart TV device and break it down more granular to who’s watching that, and who’s watching on other devices in the home,” says Schleider. “It’s leveling the playing field in this world of devices.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>As far as opportunities for creative optimization, Savic says that in years past it has mostly centered around content creation and partnerships. The last year, however, has shifted more towards how we can develop processes or capabilities that will deliver a mass of content pieces for any given client in a calendar year.
“Basically we build a platform, which uses personal profiles to understand personal affinities and preferences,” Savic says of the work that MediaCom is doing. “Merge that with a DCO platform that creates a combination of facets to personalize an ad for every single person.”
Savic believes that technology is now in a place where we’re capable of delivering on this; we’re now using technology to enhance the purpose of a brand.
“This belief that we should create and own our technology,” says Savic. “I think we went away from that because that’s not the business we’re in. We’re in the business of creating the best possible solutions for our clients and partnering with anyone who is in the latest and greatest rank.”
As far as expanding this creative capability, Savic, sees both an opportunity and a client need in many often-overlooked areas. Many companies are delivering at the very top, meaning TV campaigns and ads, and on the very bottom, such as programmatic ads and display, but ignoring everything in between—social, cultural outreach, purpose-driven advertising, all of it was never quite there. Savic hopes to fill that void in order to be relevant in today’s media landscape.
Reaching a large audience and repeating a message over and over just isn’t enough anymore, and Savic is noticing that with the clients that approach them. He’s finding that DCO is a big element moving forward, as well as opportunities in sports and advertising, and having a clearly communicated purpose.
“Especially when it comes to millennials and younger people,” says Savic. “They want you to know them by name and they expect you to create advertising that is meaningful to them that talks to them, and communication for brands that goes beyond ‘this is my product or service and this is the price we hope you’re willing to pay.’”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Scheppach was shocked to calculate that maybe 3% of all linear media has been made addressable. In 2020, however, she’s optimistic that the programmers and technology are available to push that figure closer to 25% of inventory.
“We’re going to see a lot of new opportunities coming for advertisers to take advantage of,” says Scheppach. “What’s most exciting is that the programmers are going to start bringing it to the advertisers.”
With all of the OTT services available, Scheppach is witnessing a technical shift in how content is being delivered. By its very nature, she says, OTT is addressable because you only receive the stream that you want which means you could see a unique ad. The issue, however, is that so much of this content is still not addressable.
“What they have done is they’ve really opened up their supply to the DSPs and they’ve made it so easy to buy that I don’t feel like a level of addressability that we’re seeing in linear is actually happening in OTT, which is interesting.” Scheppach says. “It’s kind of high price and not as targeted as we’re seeing in linear television.”
This comes as a result of a lot of people who were responsible for originally deploying the technology. They saw it as an advantage at the time to hoard the inventory, but now with all the acquisitions and mergers, we see people wondering why all of this inventory can’t be unlocked.
According to Scheppach, buyers likely will not care as much about technology as much as addressability. For this reason, she sees a need for further education across the industry.
“We’re starting to see so much flavor of addressability coming out, do we really know what we’re doing as a buyer and a seller? There’s so much need for education in the marketplace.” Says Scheppach. “We have to figure out how [this technology] works together, simply, so that a buyer can easily buy it.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Nielsen announced the beta on Monday. It will run through the first half of 2020 ahead of a planned full commercial launch later in the year.
Speaking with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Nielsen’s general manager of advanced video advertising, Kelly Abcarian, said: “We’re … unlocking true live linear. It’s really any kind of telecast, whether that’s sports or drama or comedy; we’re enabling any programmer to basically execute ad replacement in real-time as that telecast is being watched and viewed in real-time in a consumer’s home.”
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables teal-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Abcarian says the beta will take three phases:
“I think what they’re hoping to learn out of the beta is to understand how their workflow needs to evolve and change,” Abcarian says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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