“What’s different about them is they come to the TV investment process with data of their own” typically consisting of e-commerce conversion data, CEO Baker says of direct-to-consumer marketers. Dataxu’s OneView identity and data management platform can “turn that into a TV plan,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“That’s one of the big trends in advanced TV in 2019 and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen our revenue go up forty times year over year from connected TV.”
Already comfortable with a data-driven marketing process, newer users of the company’s TouchPoint demand-side platform seek to leverage all of their online and mobile data in new channels.
“Many of them have seen things like Facebook or Google search sort of saturate as a play for conversions, and so they’re very interested in not only the branding aspects of TV but also the ability to drive return on investment for new customer acquisition.”
Nine years ago, long before the concept of advanced TV, demand-side platform TouchPoint was dataxu’s starting point. Along the way the company found that most marketers had a problem with connecting the dots between targeting and measurement on PC’s and mobile phones. OneView, which solves for this and can now factor in streaming devices and connected TV, “has really been the center point of our growth in TV and addressable TV,” Baker says.
Consumer device identity is a problem shared by the sell-side, as evidenced by dataxu’s involvement with media sellers like Sky in the U.K. “So on the sell-side, we’re increasingly working with some of the big media companies to help them on attribution and media planning that merges digital and linear data.”
In addition to direct-to-consumer brands, agencies with billings between $50 million and $100 million that never developed big TV teams, are bringing some of their clients into advanced TV. Baker predicts that some of the biggest agencies will be joining in as well.
“What’s been holding them back has been a little bit of uncertainty around who owns converged TV” within those agencies, Baker says.
As for a misconception that advanced TV cannot be done at scale, he adds, “I think at CES we’ll be talking a lot about the fact that you can and a lot of people are doing it today.”
Update: NBCU’s Yaccarino Issues Call To Action On Advertising Standards
On Jan. 7, NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino cited “privacy issues, data misuse, measurement chaos and brand safety neglect” at “major digital advertising platforms” while seeking industry unity for high business standards.
“For decades, audiences have loved premium content, and advertisers have trusted networks’ multiscreen advertising ecosystems,” Yaccarino said in an article published on the NBCU website. “That’s why the premium media industry has refused to compromise its core values for how that content is created and distributed, even as we disrupt legacy mindsets and reinvent how we operate.”
Among other benefits, lowering barriers to entry for marketers to engage in TV advertising has attracted direct-to-consumer brands, Yaccarino noted.
“Already what had been an exclusive space for established companies is now welcoming a wave of entrepreneurs whose disruptive brands had long been at a disadvantage against larger incumbents. But here’s the best part: The marketplace is opening up without any compromises on consumers’ or brands’ safety.”
She called for all media publishers, agencies and platforms “to raise standards to let a safer, smarter, more accessible advertising ecosystem take flight.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The house of brands is now more unified than ever following the consolidation of sales efforts this fall under Ferro, who is President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships in a unit called Disney Advertising Sales. In this interview with Beet.TV, Ferro recalls taking over the ABC/Disney/Freeform portfolio about 18 months ago and having happy advertisers respond “Where’s ESPN?”
At that point, “we slowly started working toward understand that this was going to come together because the marketplace was asking for it,” she says of the inclusion of ESPN in the unified sales structure.
“It really is about bringing all the best of the brands and storytelling of the Walt Disney Company together so that advertisers can reach audiences across all dayparts, all lifestyles, all genres, in the best way possible.”
Asked about differentiation from other multi-brand publishers, Ferro says it all comes down to one word: Disney.
“I think when you talk about data and technology, everyone has their flavor. I think the difference is Disney. The way we tell stories and connections we have with our fans and our brands, no company has that,” says Ferro. “You name it, we talk to that audience. It’s great storytelling that has really differentiated us and I think bringing it all together only allows us to really accelerate what that’s going to be for partnerships and brands.”
Now that advertising sales, data and technology sit under the purview of Kevin Mayer, who is Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer and International, the company’s products and services are now aligned “under one opportunity to make sure that we can sell you across the portfolio and you have visibility to that. So we’ll have better metrics, better targeting, we’re building out better vendor relationships and better technology partners.”
One recent tech change was Disney ending its involvement with FreeWheel in favor of Google Ad Manager to manage and deliver all online ad campaigns. Disney has worked with both FreeWheel and Google Ad Manager in the past, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
The efforts under Mayer will “allow more visibility, more targeting, better metrics and also allow us to launch new products like programmatic linear television, which we’ll be bringing to market,” Ferro says.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV roughly a month into her new role at the measurement company, Hofstetter talks about Comcore’s doubling down on offerings like its Comscore Campaign Ratings and what’s needed to move cross-platform unification ahead.
“The question that has been brewing has really been a big question on the buy side. There have been silos. There’s TV buying, there’s digital buying and then there’s that premium that sits in that purgatory in between,” says Hofstetter, who until September of 2018 was Chairwoman of marketing agency 360i.
“Consequently, media partners have tried to aligned themselves to the buyers. So we’ve had a little bit of a breakdown in the ecosystem and that has inhibited a lot of the movement towards looking at video more cross-platform.”
Measurement providers want to see things go cross-platform, “but the buy-side’s not always organized for that,” she adds.
“I think the more we can get better video, better targeting, better cross platform, better de-duplication, the more we’ll be able to proliferate and help advance that.”
In speaking with marketers, media partners and agencies, Hofstetter has found that “everybody has their own perception of what Comscore is and what they do. And if I just say we’re here to bring trust and transparency to media and marketing to use data to drive growth, that is true but it doesn’t explain the how.
“So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us, call it in the next six months, to better educate the marketplace on who we are, the benefits that we provide and then bring that to market and deliver on the promises.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“That’s because there’s not only the interest but the capability and also the audience. This will be the first time as we go into the video season that you have those things together,” Rozen says in this interview with Beet.TV.
He separates advanced TV into three buckets, beginning with its increasingly programmatic nature for automated buying.
“We’re really excited about the programmatic television, and that scale is growing ridiculously fast. We’re able to do more and more today to address more individuals than ever before,” says Rozen.
The world of smart TV sets occupies Rozen’s second bucket. He cites a “cacophony of partners and players” that are providing technologies and platforms that enable IP targeting, tracking co-viewing and listening and understanding what’s being displayed.
All of this information can be used to retarget viewers or for “individualized household delivery of nuanced creative because I know who you are versus somebody else,” Rozen says.
Third is OTT disruption of the traditional linear broadcast TV model and the advanced advertising opportunities created along the way.
Prior to joining 360i this summer, Rozen was at OMD, where he drove all digital and innovation activities, including Ignition Factory (trend spotting), Zero Code (gaming and virtual reality) and OMD’s mobile and social divisions. Now he’s helping to scale the media capabilities of the agency that has a deep heritage in search and now integrates creative and media capabilities.
Clients, says Rozen, are trying to understand the shift from such historical TV measures as reach and frequency with GRP’s in mind to being able to correlate ad impressions with sales. Historical comparisons of reach and frequency must yield to used advanced identity tools and media selection “and then be able to attribute that to a direct sale.”
While 360i’s roots are in performance, “We have been driving very quickly beyond that to be a full-service agency, which is refreshing, exciting and certainly I think ripe for where the market’s going as media and creative really need to be tied together more closely,” Rozen says.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>CFlight was launched in the spring of 2017 to enable holistic video planning across platforms by measuring all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions. It initially was available for solely for NBC’s primetime and sports programming, Vazirani, who is EVP, Insights & Measurement for NBCU, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“Going into next year we will expand it across the portfolio, and we’re working through how do we make it less friction with the systems and what are the investments we need to make from an operations perspective to make this easier across the portfolio,” says Vazirani.
In addition to facilitating cross-platform planning, CFlight also was intended to “raise the bar on digital and provide guarantees on completed views” while providing a new way for NBCU to maximize ad inventory and yield portfolio-wide. “It was really a mechanism to deliver on our vision to measure across all screens, all platforms and have a unified impression measurement approach.”
She stresses the open source, transparent nature of CFlight’s methodology. After considering “many different partners,” including Comscore, Adobe and VideoAmp, NBCU chose Nielsen’s C3 and C7 TV ratings and its Digital Advertising Ratings for digital media.
“We know we’ll evolve it in the future, but the key was that this is open source and we are very transparent with our methodology.
According to Vazirani, marketers thought CFlight was “conceptually fantastic” at the outset and that agencies were also excited. She cites Simulmedia’s adoption of CFlight two months ago as it added OTT inventory to its campaigns as additional validation. But systems remain a challenge.
“We’re still on some of our older billing systems. How do we transform from an operations perspective to now report on it holistically and how does an agency ecosystem transform from that?”
In the meantime, NBCU is building “a continuum of measurement” from unifying impressions with CFlight being able to assign credit to television and providing marketers with a closed-loop evaluation of their campaign and, eventually, a series of campaigns.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”
In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.
Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.
To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”
It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.
He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.
“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”
Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.
“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.
Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.
“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”
She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.
The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.
“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Case in point – NBCUniversal, which just switched on a new tool that uses machine learning to better indicate to ad buyers the best moments in which to buy ads in commercial breaks between TV shows.
“It’s always been common sense that having an ad run after a contextually-relevant scene does more for it,” explains NBCUniversal EVP, head of marketing and advertising creative Josh Feldman in this video interview with Beet.TV.
So NBCU has created a proprietary new tool, which it’s calling the Contextual Intelligence Platform, that helps ad buyers identify those moments. The tool sets machine learning to work on three data sources:
“We put it into the machine, and then we know our episodic program schedule for the entire quarter,” Feldman says. “So, if an advertiser comes to us looking for a very specific sentiment, we can place their ad in the A-pod position running right after that.
As well as mining its own data sources, the NBCU system also ingests the script and close captions of the advertiser’s creative, as well as target keywords and sentiments. The platform also runs sentiment analysis to ensure that the placement doesn’t just match the right themes, it also matches the right vibe.
For example, Feldman says, if a brand wants an ad to run in a commercial break following a wedding scene, the platform can find just the right moment.
In a way, the tool helps TV broadcasters sell ads the way they always have – with the power of contextual placement – but, through its data crunching, seemingly with more power than ever before.
The platform is in beta with up to five advertisers and a full launch planned early in 2019. Says Adweek: “Focus groups for ads placed with the platform thus far have shown an average bump of 19 percent in brand memorability, 13 percent in likability and 64 percent in message memorability.”
Feldman adds: “I think there’s going to be quite a demand for this product once everybody fully understands the full capabilities of it.”
And he thinks the tool will benefit viewers as well as advertisers. “If you’re watching a certain type of show, instead of just ads haphazardly running as they do across all of television right now … we can program breaks to make that entire show more of a single flow for a viewer, which is a better viewing experience overall.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Analysis from nScreenMedia suggests U.S. Netflix viewers, by substituting free viewing for subscription video-on-demand, are missing 2 billion ad views every day, totaling missing ad sales estimated at between $3 billion and $6 billion annually.
So what’s an ad buyer to do? The woman in charge of helping one major ad agency plan the future destination for billions of dollars says the industry wants to get better understanding.
Maggie Zhang, SVP on-linear video research and insights at Amplifi, the media investment arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, had this video interview with Beet.TV
In it, Zhang says: “In order to understand the audience shift from linear platforms to OTT-connected TV platforms, we need to drive further understanding of the audiences that are viewing ad-supported content on OTT platforms as well as the impact of SVOD, which is ad-free subscription-based OTT services, and the subscribers and also understand the impact of linear TV ratings as a result of the increasing amount of SVOD subscription.
“We have done a lot of analysis and internal research on these audiences and the impact on linear ratings. We are having more in-depth analysis of OTT ad-supported viewers as well as SVOD viewers on the OTT platforms. And potentially, the insight will be able to drive and inform at lot of our cross-platform video investment decisions.”
Earlier, eMarketer had forecast US TV ad spending would this year dip below the $70bn mark as audience viewing behavior shifts more and more toward OTT options, with the number of OTT viewers growing 2.7% to reach 198.6 million.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The bottom line is that consumers need system interoperability, not “essentially closed loops” but one particular operation system across devices, Balis explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
And then there’s the television business. “I think television follows the same parallel here. In this case, it’s the advertiser that needs interoperability,” says Balis. “And they really need interoperability at scale. So the worst thing we can do is fragment all of these different sources of supply.”
Bringing things together and infusing it with data would produce standards so that people “can make intelligent decisions about what media they can or cannot find value in.”
Whether it’s open platforms or walled gardens, at the end of the day what facilitates fluidity in marketplaces is what wins, according to Balis. “I think we have to be able to connect supply and demand in a way that’s objective, that’s infused with data and ultimately that allows you to compare one piece of inventory with another. Fundamentally I think walled gardens make it harder to do that. It implies some layer of comparison that we’re going to have to make across walled gardens.”
EY fundamentally believes in building a better working world, with TV being no exception even if it means competitors working together. “Data and technology fundamentally connect everything. I think the big question is, if everyone’s innovating in a vacuum, we may not get to answers as an industry as quickly as if we come together.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>While a lot of progress has been made in the last several years, “there’s still too many people that want to own their own solutions, own their own data,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to CES 2019. “So we’re seeing a lot of advanced television silos pop up, which makes it more challenging and less simple to aggregate that back up for marketers.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree took on his new role earlier this month, as AdExchanger reports. The CEO position had been held by Brian Lesser, who joined AT&T in 2017 to build an advertising and analytics platform for the data and content assets the company would acquire from Time Warner.
Castree sees too many publishers that want to create their own end-to-end solution comprising data, inventory and technology “and sell it bundled in a package.” Hence GroupM’s focus on collaboration, consortiums and a “disaggregation of technology, inventory and data so we can re-aggregate more bespoke solutions for individual advertisers.”
Judging by market mix modeling and performance attribution, “video is still the top of the performance stack” but it’s a fragmented world of premium video distribution.
Stressing the importance of scale, particularly for mass-marketed products, advertisers can’t always target their way to growth, according to Castree. Within that scale lies the ability to add targeting layers and dynamic creative optimization to find “more interesting, nuanced and targeted ways to reach certain segments of those audiences.”
Asked about marketers’ understanding the value proposition behind addressable and other forms of audience targeting, given the incremental cost of creative, data and technology, Castree adds, “I think some advertisers understand it very well and others don’t. Everybody understands it conceptually.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>As he looks ahead to CES 2019, he talks about “redefining” television, outdated audience metrics and the need to preserve the traditional cable/satellite/telco distribution business as viewing fragments across devices.
“Television has to be redefined and has to be redefined in a few different places,” prominent among them the big screen that hangs on a wall, Levy says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Television programing is still a very, very popular thing that people watch.”
Also in need of reordering is Nielsen’s “outdated metric system that we’ve been using really since the 1960’s. Television isn’t about primetime only. It’s about all dayparts. “We need to think about not selling this in dayparts but selling it in audience segments.”
He expects that among the topics of conversation at CES will be addressable targeting and attribution of campaigns to business outcomes.
Asked about the effect of AT&T’s bringing Warner Media into its arsenal of advertising and media assets, Levy points to premium content. “On the AT&T side, they were looking for that quality, premium programming and I think that’s one of the reasons why they purchased us.”
For Turner, “why I think it’s so attractive from an AT&T perspective is the data they’re going to provide,” encompassing 170 million consumer touchpoints. “That data, coupled with our first-party data and mapping it together, is going to allow us to have better information around a few things.”
With viewers as the top priority, the data will help to inform program production, provide a better understanding of viewers and facilitate better targeting for clients. But there are more fundamental issues as well.
“First and foremost, we need to keep the ecosystem that we live in today very healthy,” Levy says. “We have a great relationship with our cable operators, with our satellite providers and with our telco companies and now the virtual MVPD’s. That is a very healthy business and is going to continue to be a very healthy business at our company.”
But as a modern media company, on top of that ecosystem “we also need to have a one-on-one relationship with the consumer. Personalize content for them if need be.”
He notes that truTV has reduced almost 50% of all the primetime inventory to half of what it was three years ago, while all of TNT programming originals are now produced with about 50% fewer ads. “We’re trying to give the consumer a better experience, which is very, very important.”
Using data to generate more contextually relevant advertising amid less commercial load “is going to be a better consumer experience also.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“I feel that more and more TV is getting baited into trying to become a performance outlet,” the President of Advertising Revenue says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.
“The biggest thing would be to make sure you’re not fighting a fight that you can’t win or being tricked into fighting the wrong fight.”
Marchese says he understands why “the ideal” would be to say “prove performance and then I can spend more money there. But the truth is, performance is that I get people to sit there and watch the ad. That’s what TV does.”
He notes that TV has always performed by helping to build brands over periods of time. But there’s more of a balancing act going on among networks to let consumers “dictate how many ads are tolerable. I’m looking for a better way to say it, but tolerable it is.
“People think if the ads are good enough, people will like them. No. Advertising is an interruption. It’s not what you came there for.”
Asked about household addressable TV ads, Marchese points to such shortcomings in the quest for performance as co-viewing, wherein it’s hard to determine what person among several who are watching a Sunday football game is actually being addressed, and going too far with person-specific targeting.
Brands are built not only on advertising but also on cultural, family and familial ties, among other things, according to Marchese. “Take it to the extreme. It feels odd to say, ‘Imagine a world where we can perfectly target only the people we think are going to buy the product.’ Then what would the brand mean anymore if no one else ever saw it? No one would know what that brand stands for, so what difference does it make if the person’s wearing it?”
As for the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, Marchese believes that traditional TV must “create a Netflix-competitive experience, or ad-supported TV, if you will. As far as the other three FANG members, “Their advertising is different. It’s not a TV ad that’s running there for the most part. It’s performance advertising.
“But I think you’ll see the marketers reclassifying more and more dollars towards performance advertising. Because you know, who doesn’t want performance?”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Core pillars of that cadence are measurement, commercial innovation and technology, The Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.
The goal behind NBCU’s State of the Industry Forum could be boiled down to one element, according to Yaccarino. “Our behavior, processes, do not reflect consumer behavior as they exist today.”
She uses the word “fatigued” to describe the sentiment that existed within NBCU because the company was certain that “advertising is likely to change more in the next five years than it’s changed in the last fifty. We needed a reset.”
On the measurement side, Yaccarino says nothing has changed in more than a decade. “Think about consumer behavior and we could use measurement just as one example. The iPad didn’t even exist.”
Last April, NBCU developed the all-screen measurement currency called CFlight because “we couldn’t wait any more so we decided we’ve got to do it ourselves.” CFlight measures all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every platform, as Advertising Age reports.
“The good news is, other companies are starting to adopt that CFlight measurement,” Yaccarino adds.
NBCU has been promoting its contextual intelligence platform, which matches specific ads to specific programming, another step toward commercial innovation. “We’re able to marry the content that is contextually connected to our advertisers’ commercials. It’s the first scaled tool that we’re able to offer the advertisers.”
Asked about her expectations for CES 2019, Yaccarino says her activity will include giving clients “a performance report” that encompasses things like CFlight and PRIME PODs, which reduced clutter by 20%. “Show them that our hunch was right and it’s working, and it’s working really well.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
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