“You’ve got a lot going on, but ultimately each of these companies needs to figure out a strategy that ensures that the video that they’re producing and that they’re delivering is getting watched and that it’s being monetized to build a business,” the company’s CRO says.
On the publisher side, IRIS.TV has a video personalization and programming platform that drives more views and guides content strategy and makes your site. For marketers it’s a marketplace for distributing branded video and sponsored content in-stream alongside editorial video across the company’s publisher clients.
Through integrations across the ecosystem of video players and content management systems, IRIS.TV acts as “a brain in terms of helping to decide what is the best most relevant video that any individual should be seeing at any given period of time,” Harrison says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event.
The company’s focus is on the “core video environment” of major news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment media companies. More people watching more video ultimately results in more ad inventory being created.
“And if there’s more ad inventory, then it’s also about ensuring that you are highly relevant in terms of the advertising that you show,” says Harrison, who joined IRIS.TV a year ago from Oracle Data Cloud. “So we start to match up the context of the video to the actual context of the ads which solves for both sides of the equation.”
The key has always been about finding “the right mix of advertising or subscriber based-models” against content, something for which companies like AT&T Disney, Fox and others are spending considerable resources. The end goal for all, according to Harrison, is “to be viable.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>But that opportunity could be squandered if marketers don’t use technology which has full sight of the addressable market.
That is according to one exec who aims to help them get a better view.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Wiesenfeld, Tru Optik’s chief strategist, says OTT campaign measurement and attribution depends on two things: massive scale and cross-device capability.
“OTT is all about specific targeting,” he says. “And the ability to manage campaigns in a very specific level. Without a massive dataset to power that kind of measurement to be able to drive those insight, you can’t do that.
“Scale is hugely important in OTT. There’s tremendous fragmentation… lots of people on lots of different devices watching lots of content at the times of their choosing, and the ads run whenever they run.”
Stamford, CT-based Tru Optik’s solutions include:
Here is where scale’s rubber meets the road.
“We’ve got (technology that can see) 75 million households that represent about 90% of ad supported OTT viewing in the U.S.,” Wiesenfeld adds. “So we know, if we pixel the campaign, we know every single time that campaign was served to which household and to which device.
“(Attribution for) OTT is really going to be the thing that catalyzes TV to becoming a performance-based medium.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>If digital was being exposed to dark data tactics, good ‘ol TV seemed altogether cleaner.
But what happens when TV becomes digital, when even linear TV ads start getting targeting using data obtained from virtual warehouses in the online ecosystem?
That is what Webbula sets out to combat. For the last 10 years, the company run by Vince Versosimo and Douglas Egeth has aimed to speak “truth to data” – meaning, it offers “hygiene” and verification for email data, plus audience data services that target customers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Douglas Egeth says the aim is to improve the quality of data which marketers are now beginning to use in the TV environment.
“OTT is an emerging market, it hasn’t matured of course yet,” Egeth says.
“The threats are there and it’s ever-growing and, as it becomes a more mature marketing channel, it’s only going to increase in intensity.
“It’s better to be vigilant now, in terms of making sure those audiences are not just cleansed, but that you’re getting maximum ROI for these fantastic segments that people are purchasing.”
Webbula’s clients include agencies and brands who are looking to understand more about the people described in their audience data segments.
Egeth laments: “Unfortunately in today’s marketplace, there are a lot of false positives and false negatives, so they’re buying audiences that just aren’t real.
“(Some data providers are) not able to really quantify where it comes from, how it is cleansed, how it brought to market and how it is segmented and refreshed.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>Williamson held various roles at Cox beginning in 2006, with stops along the way at Cumulus Media and Nielsen Audio. Upon assuming her present role, “we really felt like we had a right to win in video,” Williamson says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
What she’s seeing in OTT “is an early adoption through great partners like Tru Optik where we can start to understand cookie data into the household level through their graphing,” Williamson says.
One thing that’s needed is “a little bit more scale. So now we look at models.” This is because unlike traditional television metrics based on panel-based, probabilistic data, “Within digital we really value one-to-one type of transactions” requiring a different kind of modeling.
“What we’re trying to figure out now is how to we take the best of both and create a new type of model or new type of application with data to be able to not only be more effective and efficient in our targeting, but also have more accountability on the back end with performance.”
It’s long been said of broadcast and cable that people would buy local if it were more easy and efficient. “Who wouldn’t want a strategic plan for every single DMA? We know when you buy national you get very heavy in the top five markets and then typically national advertisers come back in and fill in in the scatter market.
“So I think we’re getting to a point where with more addressable television, those lines between national and local are getting very blurred because you can get much more targeted than you could in the past with linear.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>“And also as we get into more interesting things like measuring unduplicated reach, we think it’s a really exciting product for the market,” Buckley adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
Discovery and Fox among the first media owner partners planning to leverage the new data-driven solution to enable cross-platform ad sales. MRI-Simmons will be a key data partner in helping to deliver a unified audience target across platforms, an essential aspect in the clypd/SpotX solution, according to a news release.
SpotX has bee working on three main categories of data enablement. The first is enabling media owners to bring their first-party data “into the fold in a protected capacity” to use it particularly for programmatic ad transactions. “We also enabled media owners to license that data to other media companies on the platform in a safe and secure manner,” says Buckley.
SpotX then worked to onboard the major third-party data marketplaces to ensure all of the major third-party data segments are available to any of its customers.
A major focus has been activating buy-side data so that brands and agencies synching their data with the SportX platform gain enhanced planning and forecasting capabilities.
This facilitates automated guaranteed and programmatic guaranteed transactions “in the way the industry wants to do it. In order to do that well, we have to refine the inventory down against exactly what the buyer is looking for, including perhaps data they may have housed on their side before we even send the ad requests out,” Buckley explains.
“So once we have the full picture, all the targeting attributes including the data the buyers are using on their end, we’re actually able to refine those ad requests down so when the buyer actually gets it they’re able to respond ninety-five, one hundred percent of the time with an ad.”
SpotX now has more than 600 employees in 26 offices around the world. In addition the merger of SpotX with sister company smartclip, SpotX parent RTL acquired dynamic ad insertion provider Yospace, as The Drum reports.
“It’s clearly a core integral technology that our customers need,” Buckley says of the Yospace contribution. “And we feel there’s huge potential between pairing that SSAI technology with the monetization platform in terms of what we can deliver for our customers.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We saw early on the continued growth of connected TV and OTT supply and obviously it continues to increase dramatically,” the SVP of Data & Client Strategy says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
“But the need to think about that supply in an addressable format really wasn’t available until Tru Optik came to marketplace bringing data assets and appending attributes to an IP address.”
Amobee’s integration with Tru Optik included the ability to do addressable targeting across connected TV but also support opt out, “which was a key factor around privacy and the needs for us to support a single opt out across all video devices.
“It wasn’t until our integration with TO that we really were able to start powering addressable powering across OTT and connected TV supply. It’s very much needed,” Schleider says.
One result was an increase of brands wanting to access that supply. Some weren’t going in that direction because in the digital world brands were used to being addressable on digital video and on mobile video and display.
“And so they really didn’t think about connected TV, OTT as an option until the addressable aspects really started growing and the ability to target against that supply became more available.”
As soon as that addressable targeting became available, “we found more brands adopting those channels because they could frequently cap and they use first- and third-party data to reach audiences on the big screen in an addressable format,” Schleider says.
Because of limited addressable linear TV across MVPD’s, “connected TV really filled a gap in the addressable linear side because of the IP-based capabilities that Tru Optik helped bring to marketplace.”
Meanwhile, Amobee has been quite active overseas. A week ago ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on the ITV Hub. According to a news release, it will enable ITV to launch a new, fully programmatic, premium advanced advertising platform giving advertisers complete control over the purchasing of their campaigns across ITV’s premium VOD service, the ITV Hub.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>That scale has just brought another investment round, totalling $10 million, from a group led by Mithera Capital and including TransUnion, Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund and Progress Ventures.
Tru Optik’s tech allows ad buyers to use third-party or first-party audience segments to target viewers in a “graph” of 80 million households using various over-the-top and connected TV equipment.
Why does it want more money? Tru Optik’s announcement says funds will go toward increasing its sales effort, international growth, extending that footprint and even branching in to audio ads.
Why did Mithera Capital stump up the round? Because Tru Optik is executing well on the way the wind is blowing, says Mark Feldman, Mithera Capital MD, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The shift of ad dollars to over the top streaming is happening and going to continue to happen – there’s just a great market opportunity there,” he says. “It was the right company at the right time.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>That comes after Facebook, suffering its own Cambridge Analytica scandal, last year shut Partner Categories, the program which it allowed advertisers to target ads using customer profiles bought from Experian, Acxiom, Epsilon, Oracle Data Cloud, TransUnion, WPP, Greater Data, Quantium and CCC.
So how is a company like TransUnion, a credit scoring agency, negotiating its new business initiative – selling consumer financial data to help marketers better target their advertising?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel explains: “We’re a company that’s been under various regulations given the data we touch for many years, and as the world becomes more and more highly regulated in the marketing space (through) things like GDPR and CCPA and the like.
“We’re used to having a compliance footprint that understands how to deal with regulations.”
So what is TransUnion, a credit score supplier, offering advertisers? Partly, a suite Spiegel calls “Digital Marketing Solution”, partly a data offering to big publishers and ad-tech agencies.
He explains: “How can we take the same type of assets that we have … and apply it to an industry which is clearly becoming more data driven, more driven by data making decisions and have a bigger need for data sciences?”
It’s something TransUnion is now bringing to connected TV, after a partnership with Tru Optik, the OTT targeting and measurement tech vendor, which sees Spiegel’s company invest in the Stamford, CT-based firm.
“What Tru Optik has built is an aggregator of that kind of data stack, that data marketplace, and we think has the best one that we’ve seen in the marketplace,” Spiegel says.
“We loved their approach to the market … being this kind of connective tissue between different source of inventory, different sources of data, to make the ability to transact in this OTT world much more simple and scalable.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>The funding round for the provider of over-the-top targeting, measurement and privacy management was led by Mithera Capital and also included Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund and Progress Ventures.
“We’ve been very deliberate and frugal in terms of how we raise capital,” Swanston says in this Beet.TV interview at the company’s fifth annual InFronts event. “We accomplished a lot with relatively a very small amount of money. To be able to have the success that we’ve had and then now have a much larger cash infusion is really substantial for us.”
Tru Optik has doubled in size “in just the last quarter and our revenue is pretty much skyrocketing,” Swanston adds. With regard to the relationship with TransUnion, he cites as main factors as scale and quality of data plus being “tight knit” on data security. As to the latter, “Those are things that TransUnion seemed to care more about than probably anybody that we’ve talked to in the industry. A lot of the diligence process was around privacy policies and data security.”
Where Swanston sees OTT/connected TV headed in the next couple of years is “we’re not even going to call it that anymore. It’s just going to be called TV because it will be the main opportunity to reach consumers across the biggest screen in the household.”
Tru Optik recently expanded its management ranks with the additions of Richard Kosinski as EVP of Sales and Jonathan Bokor in the role of Chief Privacy and Business Affairs Officer.
“We’ve always been blessed with some really talented, experienced people,” says Swanston. Really what we’re doing now is just being able to do that even more increasingly and fill gaps that we had” in such areas as sales and privacy.
Tru Optik kicked off this year’s InFronts by presenting a timeline of the company’s accomplishments and partnerships in an industry with non-stop announcements from companies announcing all manner of news. “The funny thing about it that we laugh about internally is everything that anybody has announced in the last six months, Tru Optik announced in 2018, or 2017 or even 2016.”
One of its more substantial undertakings is the recently announced integration with the Oracle Data Cloud, something that Tru Optik began working on in the summer of 2017, according to Swanston.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
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