In this video interview with Beet.TV, Eric Ferguson, Nielsen VP media analytics, reveals the sheer scale at which over-the-top TV devices have gained US traction:
The data comes from Nielsen People Monitor, the panel through which Nielsen quantifies behavior, and was issued in November.
With that kind of consumer up-take, attention turns to how marketers can best reach the target audiences.
Ferguson talks about how Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings system measures ad exposure on, first, computers, evolving in to mobile and now connected TV after it added Roku and Hulu.
If those services only represent a partial picture of the burgeoning connected TV landscape, Ferguson acknowledges: “There’s more work to be done.”
He says: “There are some things that are more difficult than others to measure but, by and large, we’re capturing the vast majority of it through infrastructure that’s agnostic regardless of platform, in platform.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>But what if, for a cable provider, video wasn’t the thing worth paying for at all?
What if market evolution suggests MVPDs should open their platforms to the new competition, and make higher margin from a new focus on broadband infrastructure?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Darren Glatt, Searchlight Capital Partners partner, discusses the changing emphasis for the traditional cable company.
“These companies will have to think very deliberately on how they transition their video models,” says Glatt, whose firm last year made a $225 milion investment in ad-tech firm MediaMath, bringing the tech company’s total amount raised up to $607.5 million, according to Crunchbase.
“They are fine with their video product lagging, in favor of OTT and IP TV platforms, because the more devices the consumer has in his or her home, the higher-bandwidth speed they will require to maintain functionality
“If you think about 10, 12 devices … all of that requires high-speed internet broadband. Which is, ultimately, a very high-margin product for the cable providers.”
Can cable companies make that kind of transition? Historically, they have preferred to gatekeepers to video content.
Increasingly, however, they are adopting a two-pronged approach – not only opening up their own online TV bundles, but often even carrying rivals’.
“What I think you’ll see, is over the next few years, the cable providers begin to embrace more of IPTV,” Glatt bets.
“Five years ago, they were very reluctant around platforms like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube.
“But, the more applications run through their gateway, through their platform, the more the customer will consume broadband, which is a much more profitable product for them.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>The VP of Digital Media at the Rochester NY agency explains how things have changed and what needs to change further in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts event in Manhattan. With a broad range of health care clients, “Obviously there are a lot of regulatory issues which we specialize in. We understand the space, what you can and can not say and do,” Ensign says.
A lot of the companies that Butler/Till works market rare disease orphan drugs to smaller populations and as such they “aren’t going to buy national TV and do mass-media marketing because they want to talk to a very thin sliver of a population that is distributed across the country.”
To leverage advances brought about by programmatic and other advanced TV targeting solutions, pharma advertisers create proxy audience targets based on privacy protected, third-party data, according to Ensign.
“Of course we’re not able to target one-on-one based on things like symptoms or doctor visits or prescribed audiences, but we can use data and model based on that,” he says. Some addressable formats can target the ZIP Code level, which “might have a higher propensity for those afflicted and prescribed populations.”
With rare disease and orphan drugs, there can be as few as 20,000 to 30,000 potential marketing targets within the United States. “So mass-market TV doesn’t really work in that context.”
More precise targeting reaches these niche audiences with less waste. Meanwhile, campaigns use back-end measurement to show things like prescription lift. “It’s an exciting space for those companies who want a TV-like experience,” Ensign says.
Asked about the friction points involved in targeting narrow audience segments, he cites fragmentation because of so many companies operating in the space. While some have a lot of reach, it might add up to five percent or less of the population.
“One of biggest challenges is bringing that fragmented marketplace across things like connected TV, OTT more addressable and advanced forms of TV into one strategy that allows us to hit a targeted audience across a much wider swath of formats,” Ensign says. “We’re seeing progress in that direction.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“One of the newer and exciting announcements for us is Sky with AdSmart,” says Mike Reidy, SVP, Digital Ad Sales, NBCUniversal. Sky being this amazing international leader but also in the OTT space as well.”
In this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan, Reidy also talks about the migration of video viewing to big screens and evangelizing the opportunities of connected-TV and programmatic advertising transactions.
“I think it’s interesting because when digital video viewership first began, it was seen as taking viewers from the big screen to the small screen” amid concerns like viewability of content and ads. “But now with the advent of connected TV, OTT you’re seeing those viewers migrate back to the big TV screen,” Reidy says.
It’s one thing to have “the largest canvas for a brand to communicate via sight, sound and motion” and another to have advanced TV sitting on a digital platform. “So that lends itself to all the capabilities of dynamic ad serving, new interactive ad units as well as data.”
Last month, Comcast united NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting solutions with Sky’s addressable advertising tools. Operating under the AdSmart name, it’s designed to enable global brands to reach customers in international markets and measure results across NBCU and Sky’s TV portfolio, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
Asked about AdSmart’s plans for the United States, Reidy says, “That’s what we’re working through right now, identifying what are the strong points from each of us respectively. But ideally, the long term is that if we have a client that’s looking at things from a global landscape through a global lens, we now have this incredible domestic and international reach to have a much more strategic conversation with them.”
As for working with DSP’s, Reidy says NBCU is “really excited about what MediaMath is doing. They’re leaning really heavily into the connected TV space and this programmatic landscape. We look at them as people we can partner with, collaborate with, to evangelize what the capabilities are here.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“We do think that we have a couple of really interesting categories that would play really well above and beyond just long-form programming but maybe short-form programming and text and/or other kinds of products,” says SVP of Sales for TV Everywhere Lauri Baker.
“You’ll start to see a lot more kind of direct to consumer different models coming out of Discovery,” Baker adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan.
Discovery launched its branded streaming apps under the Go moniker in 2016 and they now number 17. That opened the door for a company used to traditional linear sales relationships to more advertising opportunities and, in the process, transacting programmatically.
“We found the capacity growing very fast on Go and we knew that we had to tap into demand from all sides,” Baker explains. “So we knew that if we wanted to tap into that we had to be a leader in bringing full-episode content to the digital world and we wanted to do that through very transparent and open relationships programmatically.”
Discovery engages solely in private programmatic marketplaces and eschews open exchanges, according to Baker. It works “very closely with DSP’s like MediaMath” and likes the marketplaces being created.
“We’ve seen a lot of change over the last year in bringing connected TV marketplaces into programmatic, which has been really exciting to us because it does give us the ability to separate our long-form content with the short form content, which is the majority of digital video in general.”
Addressing the direct-to-consumer landscape, Baker acknowledges “that’s where the bulk of the growth is happening from a streaming perspective but that’s not good for advertisers because there are no ads there.”
She believes that companies with deep roots in linear programming, along with its scale, can build streaming apps “that can rival a Netflix or an Amazon because we have the content at our disposal.” Discovery’s 17 apps are tied into one ad-serving platform and one DMP, “so all of the data, all of that scale lives together.”
Baker points to Discovery’s international rights to the PGA and its “incredible relationship” with Tiger Woods. “We have a direct-to-consumer app that we’re launching any day now that really has everything from video content to lessons with Tiger to setting up a tee time, et cetera.”
Subsequent to this interview, Discovery and Magnolia, the home and lifestyle brand led by Chip and Joanna Gaines, announced a media joint venture. The as-yet unnamed multi-platform media company will be composed of a linear television network and TV Everywhere app to be unveiled in Summer 2020. The venture has plans for a subscription streaming service to debut at a later date.
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Last July, MediaMath raised $225 million from Searchlight Capital Partners, bringing its total funding at that point to more than $500 million, as The Wall Street Journal reports. In addition to independence, objectivity and scale, the trend toward more media—particularly video—being transacted on programmatically all bode well for MediaMath, says Searchlight Partner Darren Glatt.
Within technology, media and telecom, “What we see is a really interesting confluence of events where each of those three very large sectors are converging in vary many ways,” Glatt says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan.
“What we see tectonic shifts happening in these industries where we’re seeing increasingly, brands and agencies for that matter thinking through how to make their purchase of media more effective.”
As programmatic transactions for advertising inventory continue to grow, there needs to be an underlying level of software and technology to enable the more efficient purchase of media, according to Glatt. “We thought that MediaMath was one of the leading players, one of the really few leading global DSP’s of scale that’s positioned very well to offer an independent solution to both agencies and to advertisers.”
As opposed to walled gardens equipped with their own tech stacks and, in some cases, a vested interest “of selling and buying their own media on behalf of clients,” MediaMath doesn’t own its own media properties “and is very objective in terms of the results it tries to deliver to its clients,” Glatt says.
Both advertisers and publishers acknowledge that “there’s too much volume to be traded in an analogue fashion.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Hulu has had programmatic capabilities since 2014 but “only recently we built a sales team around it” to work with Hulu’s local, national and performance marketing teams, the Regional Sales Manager of Advanced TV says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. “Hulu hasn’t been the easiest to work with programmatically in the past.”
The company works with “pretty much all” DSP’s, offering three types of programmatic deals. The first is automated guaranteed, wherein Hulu uses various data and determines targeting. “And then we send all those targeted impressions to the advertiser,” Laurenzo says. “It’s a fixed price. We do all the decisioning and pass those impressions on.”
Hulu’s second programmatic offering also is based on fixed pricing, called “unreserved fixed,” but it offers advertisers the ability to do the decisioning. “So based on the bid stream, they can decide if they want to accept or pass on those impressions.”
Three months ago, Hulu added a third programmatic variation that Laurenzo describes as the company’s “most differentiated deal type” called an invite-only auction.
“This is our first biddable model where you can actually go in and bid on inventory from Hulu,” Laurenzo says.
“It’s also the first time we’ve allowed multiple brands to run through one single deal ID. That’s a big deal for our DSP partners because that’s typically how they would prefer to work anyway.”
Asked about working with MediaMath, Laurenzo says, “We love the transparency, not arbitraging our inventory. We have so many issues in the marketplace with people representing Hulu inventory when maybe they shouldn’t.”
Given Hulu’s audience growth, “the DSP’s are actually working with us to help find ways to better utilize some of that extra capacity that we have.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“I definitely think we’re coming of age, if you will. We’re hitting that critical mass where yes there used to be scarce inventory. But especially with consumer trends we’re seeing more and more of that inventory becoming available,” Psacharopoulos says.
Comscore is one of many companies that participated in the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. In this Beet.TV interview at the event, Psacharopoulos details Comscore’s latest contributions to planning, transacting and measuring results of advanced-TV campaigns.
Comscore is integrating advanced audiences into programmatic TV so that buyers can continue to venture beyond standard age and gender demos.
“We’re now introducing new metrics such as show-level exposure and dayparts and exposure to linear TV advertising,” says Psacharopoulos.
“We’re even getting into personas, believe it or not, whereby we’re now making available to the buying community the ability to buy based on people who were exposed or engaged with the World Series or the Stanley Cup or the Super Bowl.”
Also for programmatic TV, Comscore has metrics showing heavy, medium and light OTT and SVOD subscribers, as well as online gamers. “We’re trying to respond to what we’re hearing from the buying and selling community.”
Psacharopoulos says the industry wants trusted, third-party metrics that incorporated advanced-audiences insights. “We’re fundamental believers in the way in which we should be doing that is not from a single-source basis, given all the known issues from single-source type solutions.”
He calls MediaMath “an absolutely phenomenal partner. The way that they see us as a trusted partner, we also see them as a highly trusted, highly valuable partner.”
Comscore’s latest announcements heralded new “packages across our planning suite to enable folks to understand dynamics of disparate audiences, be it for their online and or offline behaviors in terms of understanding trends and patterns and so on.
In addition, “we’re enabling the targeting of those individual segments and making those available within MediaMath.” From the measurement side, within the Comscore Campaign Ratings suite, “we’re making available that post ad exposure measurement transparency again across these advanced audiences.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Connect All Fronts is the name of the conference MediaMath, founded in 2007 as an early programmatic pioneer, recently hosted to connect the various partners that are key to that vision.
“We know the goals of our clients. They’re looking to reach the people they that care about, they need to do it in a way that the people at the other end of the screens appreciate,” MediaMath Founder & CEO Joe Zawadzki says in this Beet.TV. interview.
He refers to the “technical plumbing” that integrates “a variety of standards with a variety of specifications and provide the normalization layer.” His longer explanation: “The bridge between the thousands of players that are necessary to make all this stuff happen across media technology and data partners and be able to translate those into the goals that Fortune 2000 marketers and their agencies across the world are looking to achieve.”
At the center of things is the question “Can we bring the community together?” If so, Zawadzki envisions a future that is “non zero-sum, where we’re creating value together because people think of this as a world of sides and it’s not. Good marketing makes consumers happy, good marketing makes companies happy.”
He believes it must be done in a way “that respects and rewards the ecosystem that connects them in a way that encourages people to do it again tomorrow and do more of it. This is a shared relationship, and if we can satisfy everybody in this process you can really produce a better marketing future.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>One of Sling’s key selling points is enabling live television to be delivered by IP. “Being able to bring live television to a programmatic environment and bring it to buyers who can transact in real time is really unique and really exciting,” Arrix says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan.
“And I think that’s a beacon of what’s to come down the road for anybody in the live TV OTT space as well as CTV.”
At Sling, programmatic is “a significant portion of our overall revenue. It’s a really unique way for buyers to come in and get live television advertising in real time,” Arrix adds.
What powers the combination of programmatic with real time transactions is the ability to leverage Sling’s viewer data. “By leveraging our data, you can deliver very unique targeting and probably more importantly, you can deliver reporting on the back end that ties into ROI and ties in to attribution and takes measurement to the next level.”
Asked about how Sling works with MediaMath and other DSP’s, Arrix says there’s a lesson to be learned in terms of “what the DSP’s have built” and that their utility is dictated solely by the demand side.
“The demand side is saying ‘I like this company, I like MediaMath I like their UI, I like their platform and I am going to run my marketing dollars through to this platform.’ Supply siders that want to be a part of that “need to get connected and get integrated.”
Noting that Sling has full integration across the spectrum of DSP’s, Arrix says he thinks Mediamath “has done a great job in terms of drumming up added demand around CTV and OTT.”
As for the continued emergence of new, streaming-video competitors, Arrix says, “The advanced advertising or data-driven video space is exploding and there are developments left right and center. We love were we stand right now.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>But, little by little, other platforms are getting lit up with these new tricks, too.
That’s why the man who heads MediaMath’s video operations expects programmatic to hit TV in a much bigger way.
“I think that, during the back half of 2019, you’re going to start to see more linear inventory become available in a way that looks more programmatic,” says Mike Fisher, head of advanced TV and video at the ad-buyer platform tech vendor.
“(This will happen) via either optimized linear buying pads like what Viacom Vantage is doing, or through true addressable set-top box VOD which some of the MVPDs are starting to roll out, connections to SSPs.”
Programmatic technology processed just 2.5% of all US TV ad spending in 2018, expected to rise to 6.8% by 2020, according to eMarketer, which estimates: “Live TV Isn’t Ready for Programmatic Yet“.
But a host of technology companies is approaching the idea of “programmatic TV” around the edges, bringing more intelligence to linear TV ad buying, all eager to claim a slice of a US TV ad market that, whilst it is in slight erosion, is still worth around $70 billion.
Fisher says there is an opportunity to impress direct-to-consumer brands which, previously, may never have had the resources to buy a TV campaign.
This videos was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
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