“The look and feel is a lot like linear television, or cable network TV,” says Scott. “Advertisers want to run their 30s and their 15s, and they want it to work just like that.”

Samsung TV+ is an ad-supported free app that is programmed into Samsung’s smart TVs. According to Scott, it’s one of the fastest growing apps on Samsung smart TVs, and channel and publisher partners has grown from 60 to nearly 100. That makes for “really high quality content and low-ad environments,” says Scott. It’s Samsung’s No. 2 ad-supported app.

“What’s great is you buy the TV, open the box and you have 80 channels – it’s just like cable, but it’s free,” says Scott. “Nothing’s ever been free in marketing. A lot of that has happened with adoption, and discovery and new ways of working.” Partners include Vevo.

While Samsung TV+ is positioning itself as a modern, forward-looking partner for advertisers, Scott says the audience is still the top priority.

“One thing we’re really concerned with is viewer experience, so you’ll see fewer ad pods, lighter ad load, less ads in a break,” he says. “You want a real engaged experienced with advertisers and consumers and brands on television.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

The first of these problems is to leverage this data and scale in order to drive incremental reach.

“Consumers are shifting and CPGs know that in order to continue to grow and develop their brands and gain market share, they need to be where consumers are,” says Denn.

Secondly, these metrics provide Samsung with the opportunity to provide a holistic and comprehensive view of consumers in order to help reduce duplication and further understand how the clients investments are working together. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, their job is to then generate business outcomes and prove the effectiveness of these outcomes.

In order to do this, they’ve worked to get a better understanding of what the expectations are around performance. According to Denn, this typically varies with clients depending on their Advance TV and linear television strategies.

“I think where we’re seeing a shift with CPGs is making it more accountable and I think a lot of CPGs are being challenged to move away from media KPIs and start moving more towards business outcomes,” says Denn.

The data that Samsung gathers not only can tell them who their audience is and how they’re engaging with television, but also how effective they are at reaching those audiences.

In turn, these metrics can help them create a more targeted and meaningful strategy based on what kind of content they’re engaging with and how well they’re reaching this audience.

“Then we can actually do the math using real deterministic data to then look at things like their share of voice against their competitors and start honing in on the white space or playing where all the competitors are playing,” says Denn.

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

From a reach perspective, Evans says that clients are anxious about missing out on customers if they simply reuse last year’s linear plan. They also express concerns about the streaming ecosystem in general because it’s relatively new and there’s plenty to be unfamiliar with.

“We try to remind our client that they can achieve the precision of targeting and scale with ad-supported streaming,” says Evans. “In our platform, we’re able to reach more people than any other platform except the big four broadcasters, and 5 million of our daily users are cord-cutters, so we’re able to help the clients manage those anxieties by reaching their linear viewers and cord-cutters with precision and at scale.”

In terms of response, Samsung Ads tries to focus the customer on their business objective, which is essentially what happens after the reach is achieved. This might include honing in on brand awareness, website searches, store visits and offline sales.

For Samsung ads, this formula equated to helping clients achieve 100 million conversions in 2019.

“I think the real message for clients is, as much as the ecosystem is changing, they should think about television as of course linear and streaming,” says Evans. “But also think about television as a full-funnel solution where they can achieve broad reach and powerful response.”

Evans sees many clients approaching with the problem statement of spending a lot on linear and a lot on streaming but not knowing whether or not they’re working together. Samsung Ads has been increasingly trying to encourage clients to manage their linear and their streaming together in order to achieve greater results.

“The metaphor we use with clients when it comes to using linear and streaming together is the keyhole,” says Evans. “If you’re just looking at linear in isolation, or you’re just looking at streaming in isolation, it’s like peering through a keyhole. What we’re trying to do is open the doors and let clients manage video together holistically.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

But, after perhaps 15 years in which marketers have done that, ow times are changing, according to an executive who is watching them change their strategy.

“The conversations that I’m having with partners and different industry people is that they really are changing how they look at content distribution, as well as how to leverage advertising based content and distribution and monetization on connected TVs,” says Sang Kim, VP of product at Samsung Ads.

Kim says brands grumble that the TV ecosystem is “really fragmented”.

“For content partners or advertisers to reach their audience, they have to reach out to multiple platforms,” he says. “And to go global really, there are not many options other than to reach out to many, many different platform partners.”

Launched back in 2015 as “Samsung Smart TV Advertising”, Samsung Ads, a unit inside the giant Korean electronics manufacturer, tracks what audiences are watching on Samsung Smart TV screens, in order to provide targeting data to marketers.

The business unit is able to understand actual viewing, whether it be linear or OTT, by running automated content recognition (ACR) on Samsung Smart TVs, to identify content that is actually being consumed.

Now it claims to have 60% of the consumers visible via industry-deployed ACR technology, whether they ware watching live TV, VOD or playing a console game – in all, around 220 million connected devices.

Samsung launched its own Samsung TV Plus, its own gateway to over-IP TV services on its smart TV sets, which now numbers more than 90 free channels

Gaming provides a target audience for Samsung in age and gender, but also with the availability of their TVs and technology. This is a solid match for the publishing end of the gaming industry.

“The publisher side of gaming is leaning towards us to measure the efficacy of their media against the release of a particular game in any given time,” says Meyer.

What that means is that Samsung is able to measure the exposure of their media against the game release on release day. They can then track it back to the time spent watching and playing games.

On the publishing end, Meyer explains that it’s difficult for them to attribute their linear spend to more digital means. Digital offers a lot more accountability and measurement, whereas linear is coming along. He adds, however, that Samsung has metrics that provides insight on digital.

“We bring a unique measuring tactic that has great one-to-one deterministic and data fidelity that they get from digital but not from linear,” says Meyer. “So we fill that gap in a big way.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

That is according to one man who can plug them directly in to the TV set itself.

Samsung Ads, a unit inside the giant Korean electronics manufacturer, tracks what audiences are watching on Samsung Smart TV screens, in order to provide targeting data to marketers.

“Our relationships with agencies at the high level have grown dramatically over those last three years,” says Samsung Ads’ head of agency development Joe Melaragno in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We have very large partnerships in place. We’re integrated into some of the data stacks that the agencies have been building and our upfront relationships continue to grow.

“Agencies now are really starting to lean into CTV. It’s been in the pilot phase forever and they finally see it as a proven source of high-quality inventory and ways to solve their clients’ problems … That also can drive ROI that can be measured after the fact.”

Samsung Ads launched back in 2015 as “Samsung Smart TV Advertising”.

The business unit is able to understand actual viewing, whether it be linear or OTT, by running automated content recognition (ACR) on Samsung Smart TVs, to identify content that is actually being consumed.

Now it claims to have 60% of the consumers visible via industry-deployed ACR technology, whether they ware watching live TV, VOD or playing a console game – in all, around 220 million connected devices.

Melaragno describes the opportunity as “one-to-one targeted or addressable way in the language of TV”.

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

“These four to five billion smart TVs, connected on a daily basis – they’re smart about that and now our data is one-to-one deterministic,” says Karl Meyer, head of sales, media and entertainment for Samsung Ads. “So that’s why they’re looking to us as a key partner.”

Samsung Ads has typically partnered with linear networks, providing data and insights to a legacy market that has been picking up the pace and pushing businesses like Samsung Ads to grow its business into other areas as needs change. One area is direct response.

“It’s immediate and it’s so actionable,” says Meyer. “The information we get is through ACR – we’re able to turn that data around provide it back to our customers so they can use it the very next day to action an audience.” According to Meyer, both retargeting and ratings are primary KPIs.

Part of Meyer’s job is to help clients work through the changes that are happening in the entertainment industry. One such shift is the move to what Samsung calls “discovery” mode, or search mode: The time viewers spend looking for the next thing to watch on their smart TVs. That typically ends up giving about a 15 to 20 minute gap in viewing, where ads can get prime visibility.

“That is the winning opportunity for an OTT app or linear and that is in some sense the sweet spot,” says Meyer. “So it’s the advertising and promotional opportunities that we present back to this particular cluster of accounts and clients and allow them to market and promote their shows down to the program level.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

But new software that can provide exact intelligence on audiences’ behavior is giving ad agencies super-powers to be more “thoughtful” about how they reach people.

That is according to Ly Tran, chief media officer of Proof Advertising, an Austin-based ad agency.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, she talks about how automatic content recognition (ACR) run on devices like smart TVs by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) is arming agencies with new intelligence.

“OEMs (are) sitting on a lot of data that is making us more smart,” she says. “The fact that the industry is still – for 50, 60 years – relying on Nielsen data (and a) small panel, and that’s where we’re buying TV, (it) blows my mind.

“(It) will help us be more thoughtful to consumers when we’re trying to connect with them.

“Samsung can tell us more information than Nielsen can. We trust the data more.”

Thoughtfulness is key because Tran thinks brands are “the uninvited guests in consumers’ bedrooms or living rooms or phones”.

She wants to see consumers get fewer, more relevant ads – something is going to require better, more accurate intelligence on their real behavior.

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

According to Zhang, Dentsu has conducted a comprehensive audit of ACR data, and from this, has learned more of the opportunity that these figures present. She sees particular potential for the granularity, real-time nature, and linear transferability of the data, but recognizes that it works best when paired with other numbers.

“ACR data alone is not the only source,” says Zhang. “We’re looking into the possibility of co-mingling or connecting ACR data with traditional panel data as well.”

Zhang adds that they’re currently looking into cross-platform measurement capabilities based on ACR, too. She’s excited about all of the great OTT services currently available and the content that goes with them. She believes that there’s opportunity for brands to connect more effectively on ad-supported networks as well as an ability to create a more individualized connection.

As far as addressability, Zhang has already identified national linear addressability as a trend in 2020, which will allow for a more customized experience for the consumer.

“Now with the new possibility of unlocking more national linear addressable impressions, we definitely see great opportunity for more personalized [content] in creative to create a more relevant experience for our viewers,” says Zhang.

This should also help to better manage frequency, which has been an issue, especially for heavy linear viewers.

In 2020, Zhang hopes to collaborate to better unite the different moving parts of the television and digital marketplace.

“I’d love to talk more about standardization,” says Zhang. “Our marketplace has been very fragmented. There’s a challenge in the OTT measurement space, and how can marketers understand holistically across all of the tactics—addressable is one, CTT and OTT are another one, and there are so many more.”

Maggie Zhang will be speaking at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5 to 7, 2020.

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

First, GDPR altered how European companies could store and track customer data. Now, with the roll out of the California Consumer Privacy Act, the motion to protect customer privacy is coming to the US. Nineteen additional US states are considering introducing their own privacy regulations.

“Privacy is increasing the importance of first party data for clients we’re working with,” Sedlarcik told Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “That is much more of a factor in informing media activations and other audience targeting efforts.”

According to Sedlarcik, building out customer databases has been a core component of companies’ ad buying and media strategies. Increasingly, he says, the competitive advantage will be building a database on owned data. For now, Havas Media’s job is primarily to help clients understand what data regulations mean for them, in particular, how it impacts their work. Good business for Havas Media is a compliant ecosystem of partnerships, because then its clients will be compliant, too.

Privacy concerns don’t take away from the excitement around ACR, connected TV and other data streams, however. The goal is to bring digital measurement capabilities to linear TV. “In many ways, it brings us closer to the viewers in terms of understanding what they’re viewing, how much they’re viewing, when they’re viewing,” Sedlarcik says. “There’s this promise that it brings us closer to taking the TV world into the digital media world.”

Bridging the gap of connectivity between linear TV and digital streaming and media services is the next step in addressability overall for media. But Sedlarcik warns against throwing all old methods of measurement out in favor of the new.

“A risk is getting a myopic view of viewing data based on a subset of the audience,” he says. “There’s a lot of promise, but there’s also a lot of caution and steps that need to be taken.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

“There’s a greater pressure on understanding the TV ecosystem, knowing if you keep doing the same thing you’ll get diminishing returns,” Hartofilis told Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Zenith’s response has been to build out a platform that lets clients take their typical ad buys and make them addressable by dividing up national inventory and creative into more targeted content identified by household demographics. This helps clients fit addressable advertising, including in mediums like MPVD, satellite and smart TV, into their existing budgets, making it an easier sell to CMOs.

“This is an addressable experience in a unique way we haven’t seen before and it’s super intuitive for clients,” says Hartofilis. “It’s something they see a lot of possibility for and use case for.”

At the center of Zenith’s addressable strategy is ACR, or automatic content recognition, which Hartofilis says has gotten the company close to true outcome measurement, helping clients to better understand engagement and action in response to TV ads. Now, Zenith is focused on bridging the gap between TV and digital. The next step: unification.

“We’ve done great things in linear TV but we need to expand that supply space, that aperture in which we’re operating in a total video environment,” says Hartofilis. “ACR tech is key to building more robust panels and smarter predictive engines to do that effectively and bridge digital and television.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.   

Now that he helms his own S4 Capital, Sir Martin Sorrell aims to repeat the trick – with a twist.

S4 Capital, a brand-new but publicly-listed company, opened 2020 by announcing another piece of M&A, a merger with Circus Marketing, a Latin America digital marketing agency.

In this video interview with Beet.TV from the Consumer Electronics Show, Sorrell explains the rationale…

“So, now we’re in 30 countries,” he says. “(It’s) basic digital advertising content, so it very much fits with our model, which is purely digital, we’re only interested in where the growth is.”

After its initial capitalization in 2018, S4 Capital was kick-started by a pair of key acquisitions – content studio MediaMonks and programmatic firm MightyHive. Since then, MediaMonks and MightyHive have respectively acquired or merged with Caramel Pictures, Datalicious of Korea and ProgMedia.

The plan is to continue bolting on what Sorrell calls “practices” in order to execute a “land and expand” strategy of customer growth.

In October, MediaMonks merged with Firewood, a large digital agency servicing Silicon Valley companies. So S4’s client list already includes Microsoft, ServiceNow, Uber, Amazon, Facebook, TikTok and others.

“Growth is very hard to come when you have a traditional analogue business,” Sorrell adds. “We have no traditional, no analogue business. (We) focus on digital because that’s where the growth is. So that’s where we’re zeroing in. Our client list is 50% tech…”

He says his approach puts S4 and its constituents at an advantage over the likes of his former WPP.

“We have a supply constraint, we don’t have a demand constraint,” he says. “The holding companies have a demand constraint – they’re all flat on their back or up by 2 or 3%, at maximum.

“Sixteen months in, we’re a dollar unicorn … capitalised at about $1.2 billion on the London Stock Exchange. Our organic growth is 45%. There’s very few, if anybody, in our industry growing at that rate.  On a pro forma basis, our revenues are about $400 million. So we’ve made a fast start.”

This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads.  For more videos, please visit this page.