“There’s a lot of talk about addressable TV. The market is trying to look for what is real,” comments digital ad group 4C Insights‘ CEO Lance Neuhauser, whose company offers social media insight in to the buying of TV ads.
“We finally now have the infrastructure and the data available to actually deliver on the promise of addressable TV – one ad going to a specific household.
“That brings about a whole new series of questions – ‘Who should I be putting my message in front of and why?’ ‘How can I measure whether that ad was effective?’ We plan to play aggressively in the delivery portion of this.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
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The tweaks, which Facebook detailed here and which First Post covered, include better calls-to-action, more pages, better layouts
“If you’re a restaurant here in New York City, you can have your menu page there, you can make a reservation, you can click to call that restaurant,”says Facebook global agency development director Patrick Harris, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We want to make that navigation experience, and the ability to find the most relevant information to you, as easy as possible for all businesses.
“We want to provide the right type of canvas in a mobile-based environment… “Without having to send you to another landing page … we’re trying to make it as frictionless as possible for the consumer. We can help connect people to commerce.
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What does the deal mean? Media banker and adviser Terence Kawaja, whose company LUMA Partners advised Unruly in the transaction, gave three talking points to Beet.TV:
As co-founder Sarah Wood explained to Beet.TV in May, Unruly systems have analyzed viewing and sharing data for two trillion online video views. Using everything Unruly has learned about viral video, they can predict the likely shareability of given video content or themes, and also provide analytics to track virality.
Unruly will now report in to Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News Corp’s News UK division, who was recently returned to the helm there following her acquittal of phone hacking charges last year and who also has oversight of Storyful.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>Ad Tech's SUM OF ALL FEARS pic.twitter.com/E1IQVduQi4
— Terence Kawaja (@tkawaja) September 15, 2015
But there is yet another industry practice to add to that list – pirate sites, which rip off premium publishers’ content in order to attract audiences, and ad spend. That doesn’t just hurt publishers affected – it also threatens advertisers, who want their ads to appear on kosher sites.
“I think it’s understated – I think it’s a billion-dollar problem,” says GroupM Connect’s north America chairman John Montgomery, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“This isn’t something that (advertising) clients get immediately. They say, ‘Why is it my problem if content is being pirated?’ Clients don’t realise that their ads are what’s fuelling the profits of the at-risk entities, the pirate sites.
“It’s a serious, long-term problem. There are a lot of non-legitimate sites making tons of money. Our clients’ ads are making this happen.”
GroupM started working on its own approach to tackle the problem a couple of years ago, and, this February, the IAB’s Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) created a certification that will allow advertisers through compliant platforms to buy ads only on unpirated content.
Montgomery acknowledges the challenge: “The cheaters are always one step ahead of the chasers.” But he reckons recent initiatives will help: “It’s going to dry up the area of great funding for these pirate sites. It’s something that we can stop.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>Now 4C has fully integrated this special-sounding little piece of tech, and is planning a “coming-out party” at the DMEXCO advertising gathering in Cologne, Germany. So what does it do, and what’s in-store?
“The holy grail that we’ve all been chasing forever is right person, right person, right message, right time,” says 4C chief marketer Aaron Goldman, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Now advertisers, agencies can use the 4C social ads platform to run ads on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and sync them up with what’s running on broadcast, whether be it a certain program or a certain advertiser.”
The system works because the technology employs the former Teletrax’s bank of computers and global TV feeds to identify and understand what kinds of shows are being broadcast at any minute around the world, indexing and categorising content by type in its live database. That gives advertisers another targeting characteristic, beyond demographic and interests, that can be deployed in real-time in social media.
“Nobody is just watching television anymore – you’ve got your phone in your hand, your tablet,” Goldman says. “We can make sure advertisements are in sync across all devices.
“We’ve seen as high as 50%, 70% higher click-through rates. We’ve seen conversion rates go up 20% to 30% across multiple different categories.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“Multiple technology platforms create multiple sources of data – lots and lots of different silos,” says Acxiom European strategy director Thaer Namruti in this video interview with Beet.TV. “With that comes the challenge of, ‘How do you architect great customer experience across a marketing ecosystem that is quite heavily siloed?
“It seems like, every year we attend DMEXCO, it becomes more and more complex. How do we connect all of that together?”
Namruti says Acxiom, the marketing technology company, aims to solve the problem by “bridging worlds” – that is, by bridging offline and online data sources.
“(Using) better targeting for paid social media – using the audience insights and information we have, to deliver to Facebook and Twitter better targeting,” he adds.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“The world between performance and brand advertising is starting to collide,” says Facebook global agency development director Patrick Harris, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Advertisers that were focused on brand metrics are now much more interested in sales volume, new markets, how their advertisements have impact.
“On the other side, you have people that were traditional performance marketers – be it the gaming companies or ecommerce companies or somebody new like Airbnb – whose pouring a ton of investment back in to their brand.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“It feels like the business, certainly our business, and probably the whole industry, is obviously a year older but definitely a year wiser – and I think maybe a year braver,” he says.
At DMEXCO, SMG will be discussing the marriage of technology and content as well as how to bridge the gap between technology and brands – topics that reflect the business’s direction, particularly around precision marketing.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“The starting point is the client and the client brief, and we just want to meet as many startups as possible who can answer them,” he says.
Currently, there are about 100 startups on the NTN directory.
“We’ve got our own media village here, and DMEXCO will be an opportunity to actually get to know some new startups, to get to bring them into our camp,” Kite says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>He says that advertising on Instagram is launching in 30 markets. First to use Marquis is FOX networks for the promotion of the fall program line-up. More on the new ad unit reported last week by Variety.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
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Norman points out that more than 80 percent of people’s time spent using smartphones and tablets is with apps, not the mobile web, and people with smart TVs are increasingly engaging with apps in that environment. The app landscape is much less diffuse than the web, since there are relatively few apps that have become everyday destinations for people.
“The assertion that I am making is that apps actually signal the end of fragmentation and a return to scale,” says Norman, GroupM’s chief digital officer, in an interview with Beet.TV prior to giving a keynote on the topic at DMEXCO.
Norman observes that the rise of apps is going to give advertisers the opportunity to take “franchise positions” the way that some brands did when the TV and magazine markets were gaining maturity. They bought prominent media space and “projected those franchises by negotiating them year after year after year and doing so at a point or two below inflation and over time building the delta of competitive advantage in media value versus their peers,” he says.
In the dawn of the internet age, staking out a franchise position wasn’t considered possible, since there was a seemingly limitless supply of web inventory. But now, especially in the app ecosystem, there will be supply constraints.
“Advertisers that go fast, go hard and go big will rebuild the platform of durable competitive advantage,” Norman says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>Maxus’s global CEO Lindsay Pattison observes that her agency is applying the same principles to technology solutions that it does to the traditional discipline of media buying, and it comes down to agnosticism.
“Bringing together a clear tech stack is a bit like putting together a brilliant agnostic — and I use that word really carefully — media plan,” she says in an interview with Beet.TV. In other words, an agency would never develop a media plan that was 100-percent Google or 100-percent Rupert Murdoch-owned properties, and it shouldn’t go all-in with a single technology vendor either.
“We’d never invest all our money in one area, so why would you invest all your tech money with one provider,” Pattison says. “We believe that for every single client, we should craft a bespoke tech stack — look at the ads server, look at the DSP, look at the DMP — and work out what’s going to work for that particular advertiser.”
Agencies are currently being challenged to prove they can consult on technology services just as ably as they can on media, and in one key respect, they have a leg up on consulting firms with technology offerings: insight into potential impacts on media spend.
“We’re adding on a layer that those other competitors can’t possibly add,” she says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“I think it’s becoming the norm now for clients, quite rightly, to expect flawless execution and great value for money and brilliant client service, and I think now that we’re seeing an increasing desire among the client fraternity to have a more rounded offer actually, which is about creativity every bit as much as it’s about data and technology,” says Steve Williams, Maxus’s CEO-Americas, in an interview with Beet.TV.
The value that clients are looking for their media agencies to deliver has shifted, in part, because “with more data, there are more ways to see clearly through to ROI,” Williams says, making it incumbent on media agencies “to ensure we’re testing and learning every day.”
In terms of emerging platforms that are getting him excited, Williams says he’s been fascinated by video platforms like Snapchat and how the latter is driving the trend toward vertical video.
“Snapchat would be an example of one of the leading-edge technology vendors out there that are getting us jazzed,” he says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>Announced last month, the deal sees GroupM and WPP constituents gain a “creative residency” amongst BuzzFeed content producers and a creative group at BuzzFeed’s video studio, meaning the two sides will jointly work on viral content for advertisers. But it also includes preferential ad rates and access to BuzzFeed’s POUND, a data technology platform showing the Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion – in other words, how content flows across multiple online platforms.
“We’ve been reticent historically about announcing partnerships with media vendors,” GroupM chief digital officer Rob Norman concedes, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The BuzzFeed one is different. The future of our business lies at the intersection of creativity, media and technology. BuzzFeed has exploited this as well as any other.
“Unlike Facebook, BuzzFeed is a creator of content… distributes that content across many platforms other than its own and, unlike any other media vendor, they gave a very complete, thoughtful and sincere approach to off-platform distribution.”
The deal involves “no binding guarantees of money”, Norman says, although The Guardian reckons it to be worth “tens of millions” of dollars. Norman likes that, with POUND, “you can observe, if something starts on Snapchat, what happens when it gets pushed to Twitter”.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
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Some in advertising are jumping to act. “We are closely working with the IAB, 4As and ANA to identify anti-ad-blocking solutions, some of which are directly content-related,” GroupM’s managing partner for digital ad operations, Joe Barone, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Publishers will have the opportunity to promote to their users – ‘If you want this content, you need to turn off the ad blocker or there might be some micropayment involved’.”
This Bloomberg article investigates the possible threat to publishers. The Washington Post has already begun blocking ad-blockers.
In truth, Apple is not launching an ad blocker. Indeed, in iAds, the Cupertino company operates a mobile advertising business of its own. But its extensions will allow Safari users to block content – whether that be mentions of the Republican party, Mail Online in its entirety or, yes, ads. Barone says Safari represents “a big chunk of traffic”. Apple is far from alone – one of the leading developers of ad block software for the desktop has just released an ad-blocking mobile browser.
An early 2014 study put the number of people blocking ads at 4.9%. Later studies seem outlandish, but are nevertheless scaring the horses.
“Some numbers say as much as 16% to 25% of US traffic is blocked,” Barone says. “It was more prevalent outside the US. We’ve reached a point where we can’t no longer say that it isn’t an issue in the US.”
“The real concern is targets like millennials, IT professionals, who are almost invariably using ad blockers.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>A recent report from Belgium’s data protection agency claimed Facebook tracks computers of users without their consent, whether they are logged in to Facebook or not, and even if they are not registered users of the site or explicitly opt out in Europe.
So what’s the lay of the land? “Data and privacy… the level of sensitivity around those issues is so amplified in Europe compared to the US,” according to Furious Corp CEO and founder Ashley Swartz.
Swartz, who will moderate two panel discussions at the upcoming DMEXCO ad conference in Cologne, Germany, says deploying data-centric ad targeting in Europe is not so straightforward: “The use of data is parsed by country – large companies can’t just roll up a pan-European high-level first-party data set.
“Although programmatic and automation is accelerated more so in Europe than here (in the US) … adoption of addressability and targeting down to an individual level is much slower to evolve.”
However, Europe is not behind in every race. “Netflix is on fire in Europe,” Swartz says. “Adoption of smart television and over-the-top platforms is much than in the US – disruption of traditional media providers is different, but still great.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“It’s sometimes an afterthought,” IPG Mediabrands global mobile head Travis Johnson agrees, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“We’ve got clients … seeing upwards of 50% of their site traffic come from mobile devices, and they’re dedicating 1% of their spend to driving people there. (Only) a few percent of global media spend is going to mobile. They’re not making the most of that.”
What accounts for this ongoing schism? And isn’t it a missed opportunity? Johnson says: “It’s a new space where … it take s a lot of infrastructure to get all your assets aligned. It’s taking a lot of clients quite some time.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>One development that creatives are excited about is the availability of programmatic technology that allows them to show hundreds of different iterations of creative to different customers, according to Erin Matts, CMO of Omnicom Media Group’s data arm Annalect, in an interview with Beet.TV.
While programmatic buying is nothing new, the ability to deliver customized messages to individuals at scale is.
“While we were optimizing the heck out of the media plan, every single person was getting that same creative message,” Matts says.
When describing how “programmatic creative” works, Matts observes that an automotive brand could start with its own first-party party, where it might have customer emails and insights into whether they like red cars or convertibles or a certain kind of interior. Then it could bring in third-party data to ascertain things like when the customer likes to shop for a car.
The creative winds up being tweaked based on people’s understood likes and interests, which manifests in differences in the color palette, the specific product shown, and the call-to-action in the ad.
“It does get into hundreds of permutations of that creative,” she says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of media M&A advisory LUMA Partners, says his firm is advising on several deals, due to be announced this year, that will likely bust the half a billion dollars mark.
“If you look at the next six to 12 months, you’re going to see an array of transactions being announced at scale,” Kawaja tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re working on a number of very considerable transactions, a growing proportion of those are over $500 million.”
Kawaja says an increasingly diverse range of buyers is coming to the pot – including big internet firms, CRM vendors, Asian ecommerce conglomerates, telcos and media companies. That diversity is what’s driving the deals Kawaja says LUMA clients are gearing up for.
“Technology intermediaries are changing the way media is sold and ads are bought,” he adds. “One of the most interesting things about this sector currently is the growth and the depth of the robust strategic buyer pool.”
The prospects for IPO’s remains weak, he explains.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
]]>AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says: “We’re going in to open beta for our new video-buying product in early August. We’re also innovating on the sell side to fix video load time – we’ll release a product for that later in the year.”
O’Kelley’s company tried video back in 2010, but the results were disappointing and the effort was abandoned. “We weren’t thrilled,” he admits. “It didn’t allow the kind of open innovation we were hoping for. “We spent the last 18 months rebuilding our video platform from scratch.” Now the video platform hooks up with AppNexus services like Programmable Bidder (APB), which the company launched in June to offer audience reach, targeting, access to inventory, analytics and reporting.
O’Kelley says: “A couple of the largest video buyers on the internet are experimenting with ways they can use this APB capability for video.”
Coming later this year, AppNexus plans a product to tackle what O’Kelley says are becoming unacceptably long video load times because so many servers are being called when videos are played.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
]]>“Everyone would like to get in to … the dream of one-to-one advertising,” IPG Media Lab managing partner Chad Stoller agrees, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But there’s a lot of components in the ecosystem that need to (align) … We’re not necessarily there yet. A second-best thing that you can do is synchronized digital advertising.”
TV-synced advertising is where brands can run ads in web or social media platforms, timed in sync with TV shows, to maximize the chance of reach.
“Consumers use the commercials as a time-out… heads go down in to the devices,” Stoller reckons. “So it’s nice to be able to run a display ad in an app. It doesn’t have to be the same ad that is on-screen – it could be a competitor’s ad.
“What I like most about it is the future retargeting aspect. If I know you’ve seen an ad five times, if I have a chance to reach you two days later at 11am, that’s where I have a chance to solidify that connection.”
In the interview, he describes the utility of TV-synch platform Samba TV, in which Interpublic Group invested a minority stake earlier this year.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
]]>Addressable screens are also likely to come onto the scene as TV operators stitch more devices into their content ecosystems, according to Henry Tajer, who became CEO of IPG Mediabrands in May.
“That rigor and that granularity make for a much more effective and accountable television channel that we can put on recommendations for clients and can invest in around brands, and the ROI on that will be, I think, pretty tremendous,” says Tajer in an interview with Beet.TV.
Tajer also dismisses the notion that TV operators should be counted out. He expects more and more broadcasters to be embracing hybrid solutions that marry traditional linear TV with digital.
“For all the people throwing stones at the television industry, I would point to the simple fact that they are big businesses, they are robust businesses, and they are critical to consumer engagement,” he says.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“This is really about human behavior; it’s not really about what technology will allow,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which is building an inventory management platform to help video programmers maximize revenue for their ad inventory, in an interview with Beet.TV. “The reality is that if the true demand was there and the economic upside and incentive was, we would be there a lot faster.”
She likens it to how cable TV still hasn’t unbundled “in a pure sense,” even though there was a sense that consumers were insistent that it would. But it still hasn’t come to pass.
The opportunities afforded by addressable TV are clearly immense, and marketers are hungry for the ability to measure their television buys with the precision and granularity of digital video. However, Swartz observes that the industry is proceeding with caution, and the existing model for how TV is bought and sold remains entrenched.
“We will continue to perpetuate the old-media traditions of television and the business models until they don’t serve us anymore,” she says. “So the reality is that I think we’re a bit away from true addressability and specifically on an individual household level.”
Beet Retreat on Addressable TV
The topic of addressable TV will be the subject of a three-day executive retreat at the W Fort Lauderdale, November 11-13. Swartz will be one of the featured speakers.
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Companies tackling and talking about that problem are now commonplace. One such, Cadreon, believes the answer lays in what global president Arun Kumar calls “advanced TV” – a mix of household-level addressable capability, programmatic audience buying and smart TV sets.
“TV ratings are dropping because people are not just watching it on the main screen in the house; they’re watching on all these different platforms,” Kumar tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The measurement systems have not kept up pace.
“There is a lot of viewing that takes place for some of these programmes, but it just doesn’t take place on the channels which we measure. But, as an advertiser, I want to be able to reach these people. You can target them on other platforms. The possibilities are endless.
“So the fascination with ‘Are we going to get cheaper pricing by moving to a programmatic trading model?’… that should not be a topic of discussion. The bigger component is, in a dynamic age where consumers are moving fluidly in their journeys between platforms, how are you going to keep track of that?”
Cadreon’s Audience Measurement Platform (AMP) and advanced TV platform, built with TubeMogul, help advertisers combine multiple data sources to target audience groups.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.
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