Addressable Ads Growing on Linear TV

Chris Maccaro, chief executive of Beachfront Media

“We’re most excited about accelerating addressability across traditional linear, and that’s where we see an enormous amount of growth, both this year and into the future,” Maccaro said. “Our focus has really been on enablement, building the infrastructure to enable that addressability to happen, and then bringing the ability to access that supply through automated channels,” Maccaro adds.

Addressable TV Is Bridge Between Linear, Streaming

Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio

“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”

Media Measurement Underpins Convergence

Beth Weeks, vice president and group director at Digitas

“Measurement becomes critically important as we’re losing reach on linear, but gaining in digital video,” Weeks said. “How are we validating the effectiveness of that holistic reach as we think about bridging those platforms, and being able to validate and verify that we’re achieving those critical KPIs and those business outcomes that our clients are expecting.”

Unification Means Greater ROI

Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery

“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” Kazi said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”

Video-on-Demand Offers Brand Safety

Chris Pizzurro, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Canoe

“We have a very well lit, brand-safe VOD environment today with the Canoe footprint,” Pizzurro said. “We absolutely need to maintain that quality, but we know we need to open up the pipes to programmatic so our programmers can sell 100% of their inventory…We’re up-and-running, and we look to turn up the heat this year.”

Brand, Consumer Experiences Are Key

Rob Christensen, vice president of advanced TV sales and distribution at Vevo

“As we’re running ad pods in multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands, it’s a great experience for users and of course, maximizing the monetization opportunities,” Christensen said.

Don’t Forget Frequency Capping

JoAnna Foyle, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk

“[Ad] frequency is a big challenge, that if you’re not using the right platform and the right tools – we see this as consumers while we’re watching content on mobile devices, on streaming services…the odds are frequency isn’t being managed very well,” Foyle said. “One of the things we talk to our buyers a lot about is making sure that they’re using the tools available to them.”

CTV, OTT See Data-Driven Innovations

John Vilade, head of ad sales at Premion

“We’re out right now doing a lot of education with marketers. Marketers are seeing rapid changes in the marketplace. There’s a lot of complexity and fragmentation. There’s a lot of nuance in terms of what you can do inside the connected TV space,” Vilade said. “I’m most excited about now is the data-driven innovations that we’re seeing inside of connected TV and OTT.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

But spreading the benefits of targeting and measurement in streaming and connected TV is important for local TV operators, too.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Vilade, head of sales at TV proprietor TEGNA’s Premion division explains why.

Pandemic progress

“Streaming had been accelerating and the pandemic really accelerated it even further,” says Vilade, whose Premion is a premium CTV/OTT advertising platform for regional and local advertisers.

“I think we got probably three to five years worth of growth in a year’s period of time.

“Ad-supported OTT is just continuing to grow with more offerings, we’re seeing the major media companies obviously invest in buy fast services. We’re seeing a lot of testing with regards to hybrid models, SVOD plus AVOD.”

And the growth is filtering through to Premion’s own performance.

“In 2020, we saw a 40% growth, this year we’re expecting 45 to 50% growth,” Vilade adds.

AVOD slowdown?

Data released by Omdia analyst Maria Rua Agete this week paints an intriguing picture, however.

It shows:

• Overall AVOD consumption did not rise during the pandemic, and has actually fallen by 10% between November and April.
• “A significant number of users are eschewing AVOD and instead increasingly consuming content via paid alternatives.”
• “The average number of US video services (SVOD and AVOD) taken per VoD user has also fallen for the first time, from 7.23 in November 2020 to 7.06 in April 2021.”

#CTVSummit : Breaking news:
US #AVOD user base declines by 10% and:
The average number of US video services (#SVOD and #AVOD) taken per VOD user has fallen for the first time, from 7.23 in November 2020 to 7.06 in April 2021 according to our latest @OmdiaHQ survey. pic.twitter.com/dO26IKrAMB

— Maria Rua Aguete (@maria_aguete) June 15, 2021

Wiring-up local

For Vilade, TEGNA and Premion that will likely underscore the need to wire-up local television to exploit over-the-top streaming.

TEGNA owns more than 60 television stations in the United States.

Premion aggregates supply, and brings it back out to national spot buyers and local buyers.

Its works with premium publishers like Discovery, A+E and Viacom as well as FAST services like Tubi and Xumo.

Going large on sales

“Right now, Premion does not have a programmatic offering,” Vilade says. “We do all of our business directly with our advertisers and our agencies.

“We come in, we create media plans for them that give them very wide distribution across all 210 DMAs with advanced targeting and advanced reporting, and create terrific value propositions and terrific measurability and accountability within that streaming marketplace.

“I think we probably have the largest ad sales team in the local streaming space right now between TEGNA stations and Gray stations and our Premion direct national spot sales teams.”

Measuring up

He says it is important to educate customers on what is an environment of complexity, with many viewing channels, and many different ad-buying nuances.

Premion recently partnered with Polk Automotive to get sales data that could prove the effectiveness of CTV car ads.

It teamed with Arrivalist to leverage real-world visitation data that could be linked back to CTV ad exposure.

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

The music video service was once weighted heavily toward online and on-demand viewing.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Vevo advanced TV VP Rob Christensen says CTV is exploding.

CTV booming

“Prior to the pandemic, when you look at five quarters ago, connected TV revenue represented 4% of our total direct ad sales,” Christensen says.

“As we close out two to 2021 here, as we sit in June, connected TV will represent just about half of our overall advertising revenue directly.

“We’ve officially reached the inflexion point of supply and demand in TV. And we look forward to surpassing that 50% mark as we head into 21 and 22.”

Trending up at upfronts

Vevo, like other digital publishers, has been going through its NewFront, a period during which it touts its upcoming content roster to secure advance ad sales commitments.

During the season, WarnerMedia’s head of ad sales JP Colaco said: “We believe IP is the new primetime.” Vevo’s Christensen adds: “We happen to agree with that.”

For his company, TV consumption was growing 40% year-over-year for the two years before the pandemic. Now it has grown even faster.

But it’s not all about VOD. “We’re looking at linear as well as VOD opportunities for launch,” Christensen says. “We have linear channels here in the US live on Samsung TV Plus, Vizio, Xumo, Pluto TV and more to come.

“You’ll start to see some more channels launching here this year globally.”

Supporting cast

To build everything out, Vevo is assembling a range of ad-tech suppliers to support.

For self-service platform (SSP), it has used SpotX, FreeWheel and Christensen says “others to come”.

“We’re very excited to work with Beachfront for their ad pod bidding solution,” Christensen says. “It will maximise every single ad pod that we’re running.

“We’re testing varying lengths on VOD and linear right now. As we’re running ad pods and multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands to create experience for users and of cost maximising the monetization opportunity.

“So we’ll be utilizing their tool for all those things, as well as managing competitive separation for our clients and frequency.”

Measuring-up

In the new environment, Christensen acknowledges there are difficulties around measuring success, since consumption platforms and patterns have proliferated.

He wants to answer questions like “How do we increase yield?”, “How do we maximise every ad opportunity in real time?” and “Can we better unify ad decisioning and monetization?”

There is a particular challenge around measuring incremental reach.

Vevo has turned to iSpot.tv to help it distinguish connected TV audiences from those viewing and other platforms to authenticate a campaign’s incremental reach.

And it uses TVision, which has an opted-in panel of users throughout the country, to measure attention for content as well as advertising.

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

With that challenge, it may seem like the ongoing limits being placed on digital user identifiers would hamper the process.

But, piece by piece, companies are giving publishers, broadcast owners and buyers new tools that, in many ways, are better than traditional targeting tech.

Better than cookies?

The Trade Desk kickstarted Unified ID 2.0, a post-cookie solution for making identity buyable by using hashed and encrypted email addresses.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, JoAnna Foyle, SVP for inventory partnerships at one such firm, The Trade Desk, says the mission is to build an effective, consumer-safe identity system.

“We think, frankly, it provides advertisers and publishers with a better option than cookies ever offered,” Foyle says.

“It really is an opportunity to rise all boats for the open internet.”

Paprtnership approach

Elaborating on that idea, Foyle says: “For those of us companies who philosophically believe in an open internet, this is a way for us to band together and continue to offer targeting for publishers and for advertisers at scale in a world where cookies are no longer the option.

“What we talk to our buyers and our publishers about a ton is the notion of interoperability. We don’t all have to use the exact same solution, but our solutions have to talk to each other because that’s the only way we come up with a solution for cookies, at scale, across the open internet.”

To that end, recent months have seen the announcements that UID 2.0 will be integrated by the likes of Epsilon’s CORE ID, OpenAP and Blockgraph.

And UID 2.0 just began its first ever deployment in Asia-Pacific, in Taiwan.

Cap the frequency

For The Trade Desk’s Foyle, it’s all about balancing advertiser and publisher interests plus a good consumer experience.

She says, too often, the inability of different channel screens to stitch together a single customer identity leads to excessive frequency of ad exposure, and she urges companies to use new tools available to overcome the problem.

Meanwhile, UK TV media sales house Sky Media in May announced it would tap The Trade Desk to make its VOD ad inventory available to buy programmatically.

That inventory exists in the VOD services not only of Comcast-owned Sky, Europe’s large satellite TV provider, but also of the broadcasters whose ads it represents, including Channel 4.

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

The company two years ago formed the consortium to develop technical standards for addressable TV among the biggest media companies in the U.S. Those efforts are coming to fruition, with Vizio this year presenting at the Newfronts for the first time.

“Our partners are now moving into production. We are running campaigns,” Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “At the same time, we’re starting to build our own Vizio addressable business, and sourcing new types of inventory — both national and local.”

‘Some Further Ahead Than Others’

Gaynor, who joined Vizio last August, has been immersed in the effort to develop addressable advertising for most of his career in TV and digital advertising sales. His responsibilities include developing Project OAR, whose members include Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks.

“What I noticed when I came in nine months ago was that some of our network partners were further ahead than others — and those are the ones that really understood the technology that was in place, and were able to choose which technology to put in place,” Gaynor said.

At Vizio, his goals have been to help existing Project OAR members, attract new members and develop new sources of inventory for Vizio’s addressable TV business. In doing that, Vizio started working with ad-tech company Beachfront.

“Beachfront is now contributing to our own tech-stack solution,” Gaynor said. “They’re great partners who have visibility into the digital and linear world.”

11 Million Vizio TVs

Project OAR-enable software is now on more than 11 million Vizio TVs, giving advertisers a way to being running addressable campaigns.

“We now have a number of members that are in production and are running addressable ads,” Gaynor said. “There are a handful that are just on the cusp of going into production. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll see them move into production.”

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision in February joined Project OAR, which also collaborating with ad-tech vendors.

“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

For years, CTV has been a side note to many media plans.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Digitas VP Beth Weeks says brands in the current season of upfront ad sales deals should embrace the channel.

Upfront tipping point?

“For many advertisers that are big linear spenders, this year, this upfront year is going to look different and that we really need to embrace different video channels and different means because consumers’ behaviours are changing,” says Weeks.

“We’re really seeing consumers shifting over to streaming … it’s critical to really ensure that our clients are up to speed and aware on this changing and dynamic marketplace.

“It’s also critical for our brands to be changing the way that they’re investing.”

Similarly, GroupM executive director Jen Soch has told Beet.TV that some clients are considering CTV “their main foot forward”, an approach she endorses.

Understanding the market

These agency buyer sentiments are important because they point to addressable and connected TV having solidified in the marketplace.

That tipping point starts with responding to consumer behavior, but it continues in the proliferating number of ad options available in the channel.

“It’s critical to understand the dynamics of the connected TV marketplace, because we know that it is dynamically and rapidly changing,” Weeks says.

“We’re seeing new partners emerge. We’re seeing reach in different places and spaces, and it’s becoming far more competitive. It’s also becoming more competitive for where you can reach your consumers within ad-supported environments.”

Easing complexity

Still, as ad buyers lean into CTV and addressable opportunities, they nevertheless must brace themselves for a world of complexity.

Repeated buyer sentiment surveys tend to show up frustration at what is a fragmented landscape, unlike TV before it.

Digitas’ Weeks is excited by the opportunity to reach individual customers at distinct points in their buying journey and the ability to reduce ad loads.

But she wants to reduce fragmentation in doing so.

Role of SSPs

Technology is the solution, Weeks says, and supply-side platforms (SSPs) have a critical role.

“Some publishers are striking certain supply deals with a certain SSP,” she says.

“So it’s important to be able to kind of follow the inventory.

“As we work with SSPs, I think there is a great opportunity to take advantage of more programmatic guaranteed buying as we look to the upfront and being able to secure inventory in a programmatic fashion.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

In the last few months, it has added linear addressability to 22 million homes in its footprint of 38 million.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Canoe’s sales and marketing SVP Chris Pizzurro explains the development.

Expanded VOD

Canoe recently began allowing two supply-side platforms (SSPs) – Beachfront and FreeWheel, which in turn are connected to eight large demand-side platforms (DSPs) – access to TV networks’ VOD inventory.

Pizzurro says the result was 25 campaigns bought via those DSPs.

“And now the capability is expanding to more TV networks and more DSPs,” he says.

“So we’re up and running and we look to really turn up the heat in this year.”

Pathway to linear

But the latest development is about going beyond VOD.

“We used to be a single-threaded company just doing video on demand,” he says “Now we’ve taken on the responsibility of linear addressable, so that, now, when one of our national programmers run an addressable campaign, that’s going to cross across linear and across VOD.

“In Q1, we provided addressable services on 27 campaign lines, spanning across seven TV networks,” Pizzurro says.

“We stewarded audience segments, those addressable segments, across the three MVPDs – across Comcast, Cox, Charter – and … now out expanding that to more national TV networks and MVPDs.”

Turning up the heat

In the US, approximately two minutes each hour are made available to
cable or satellite operators to sell TV ads, limiting the amount of targeting that can be done using at-network infrastructure.

But Pizzurro says things are changing.

“So yes, we have absolutely finally moved beyond the two-minute local avails and into the many, many more opportunities that are the national programmers.

“It’s early days, but we’ve got the system up and running. We’re running campaigns, and we’re just going to turn up the heat more this year.”

Pushing forward

Canoe provides integration, monitoring, resolution and analysis to improve the experience of MVPD VOD, including understanding audience target segmentation data.

Canoe has been enabling networks to sell their VOD ads for the last nine years.

“Today we don’t have the exact capabilities and programmatic as CTV programmatic does for the Canoe footprint,” Pizzurro acknowledges.

“But we are pushing toward that with a path forward, while still maintaining our quality.

But that’s only half the story.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief executive of one TV ad-tech company says linear has a future.

Viewing habits converging

VOD and linear viewership could be on course to equal each other, at 50% of total viewing, by 2031, according to UK TV measurement agency BARB.

But Chris Maccaro of Beachfront Media says linear remains important.

“We don’t see linear TV going away anytime soon, although we’re extremely excited about the growth in convergent TV,” he says. “In our opinion it’s one of the most exciting mediums in advertising.

“We do feel like linear TV has been underserved via technology. And our mission is to continue to be a leader in servicing that sector of the market, and bringing the same automation and tools that streaming TV benefits from, to that linear client base.”

Co-mingling channels

Beachfront Media – based in New York, Florida and Pasadena – offers technology to publishers including revenue and yield, ad operations, ad experiences, unified decisioning, programmatic SSP, direct-sold ad server, creative validation, reporting and analytics.

“I think the biggest challenge is we see the acceleration to CTV,” Maccaro says.

“Although we’ve seen a decline in traditional TV, it still accounts for the vast majority of ad spend today.

“And what we continually see as a problem is the ability to co-mingle those assets, for a programmer, and the ability for the buy-side to be able to execute and buy across those disparate pools of supply through one interconnected channel.”

Paddling with OAR

To that end, Beachfront did a project with TV maker VIZIO’s Project OAR, a consortium aiming to standardize addressable TV advertising approaches.

The episode saw Beachfront use its decisioning technology to execute an addressable TV ad campaign across locally and nationally syndicated TV programming seen on more than three million VIZIO TVs.

“Our focus has really been on enablement, building the infrastructure to enable that addressability to happen, and then bringing the ability to access that supply through automated channels,” Maccaro adds.

“We’re most excited about accelerating addressability across traditional linear, and that’s where we see an enormous amount of growth, both this year and into the future.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

The launch of Discovery+ preceded this week’s announcement that Discovery and AT&T plan to pool their media assets into a new company led by Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The companies haven’t said whether they’ll keep Discovery+ separate from HBO Max, the streaming platform that AT&T’s WarnerMedia launched last year, or combine them.

In the meantime, Discovery+ is working on creating a positive user experience for its ad-free and ad-light versions, Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery, said in this interview with Beet.TV. The ad-light version currently carries about four minutes of advertising with each hour-long episode.

“We’re focused on things like creative diversity, frequency capping and a seamless transition between advertising and the content playback to ensure that the ads are not a disruptive experience,” Kazi said. “It really should be a complementary experience that helps enhance the entire Discovery+ viewing opportunity.”

The ad-light version of Discovery+ carries a combination of direct-resourced national ads and programmatic ads to help unify its platform for media buyers.

“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” she said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”

Programmatic ads aren’t considered a “backfill solution” to fill remnant time on Discovery+ as advertisers and their agencies automate their media buying, she said.

“We’re a programmatic-first organization. Even to have programmatic running on our premium product, I think that’s probably something not everyone in market is doing,” Kazi said. “We’ve been able to offer our content directly, but then also allow advertisers to find specific users in this very premium environment in real time. They’re able to reserve supply, but then they’re also able to come in and find specific supply that they’re looking for in a brand-safe, premium way.”

Discovery participates in Project OAR, the industry consortium led by smart-TV maker Vizio to promote the adoption of addressable advertising. Discovery also works with ad-tech company Canoe Ventures, which was founded by cable companies Charter, Comcast and Cox to support addressable advertising on national TV networks.

“We’re very excited about linear addressable. It’s a true convergence point, bringing together linear supply and digital execution,” Kazi said. “Linear addressable, it’s a great opportunity to get that reach, the scale that we get from linear TV, but also the digital targeting and measurement capabilities.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.