The SVP of Video Research & Insights for Dentsu Aegis Network is seeing an “explosive growth of attribution vendors,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
Such providers have traditionally been digital oriented, measuring multi-touch attribution across all digital touchpoints. “But now, especially this year, there’s been a growing school of TV specialists,” Zhang says.
“They are able to attribute the impact of big-screen, top-funnel impact of TV advertising to the actual business outcome in terms of any type of conversion metric, be it foot traffic or online purchase, offline purchase.”
Dentsu Aegis has been doing “a very thorough audit across the entire spectrum of TV/cross platform video attribution vetting. It’s still going and we’ve learned a lot just to understand their modeling approach, their TV/video data sources, their conversion metric sources and how they can match together and modeling and analyze and predict the outcome.”
In an age sensitive to consumer privacy and increasing data regulations, the media agency is looking into “pixel-less methodology” to measure both conversion and viewership data.
“So ACR data is one good example and there are also a lot of other tech platforms that are able to provide data, especially on the back end without pixels. So we’re able to measure in terms of the audience in a one-to-one, deterministic fashion.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Given that some 80% of data is unstructured, “What that means is we’re really trying as marketers to find what are the best sources of data that’s most actionable to help advertisers achieve their audience engagement goals,” the Co-CEO says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
“It’s early stages, but on the same side of things we’ve got a lot of great information that if we could structure it well we can really evolve the industry faster than we have over the last eight years,” Muldoon adds.
Amnet is the programmatic unit of Amplifi, which is the investment division of Dentsu Aegis Group. Muldoon had been the CEO and Co-Founder of Accordant Media, which Dentsu acquired in 2016.
There is so much data available to marketers that it can’t be humanly managed and understood, according to Muldoon. “Let’s understand also that data helps us across the whole advertising process. For advertisers we’re trying to help marketers reach their most important audiences toward engagement that will drive lifetime value of a customer relationship.”
In addition to using data to better comprehend consumers, the same information can help to determine their sentiments toward privacy issues. Working with Dentsu’s Merkle division “we’re really focusing on structuring audiences for people based marketing that are specific and valuable to the capabilities within Dentsu.”
That is a two-fold process, starting with structuring the audience and identifying the best audience segment, then in real time figuring out “how do you make a decision in the moment as to whether or not that appealing audience segment is available to be engaged with,” says Muldoon.
Amnet also employs data to reach and engage with consumers “at a tasteful frequency so that we respect consumers and also deliver the message that’s most impactful for the advertiser.”
Asked about privacy concerns, Muldoon notes that IAB attendees—from agencies to platforms, publishers to advertisers—take consumer privacy very seriously.
“We all value the ongoing relationship that marketers have with their customers and the consumers and the importance of respecting that relationship, making it specific and personal between the consumer and the brand and creating an environment that both we as consumers celebrate the brands that we choose to interact with and support their businesses as appropriate.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>It took just a couple of years, after HotWired sold the ad to AT&T manually, for software to be applied to ad sales.
Now in what the DMP managing director of ad-tech vendor Sizmek, Joshua Koran, calls the “third decade” of “programmatic” ad sales, he describes what is changing…
So, what exactly is different about the current phase?
“A lot of the value-add that the ad networks originally provided is still going to be provided by lots of different third-parties,” Koran acknowledges.
“But the UIs that we are building to make it easy for marketers to make use of all this technology are what are being standardized, as well as the pipes to exchange information across all these companies.”
In 2019, Sizmek is partly created by its earlier acquisition of the demand-side ad platform Rocket Fuel, which itself had acquired the early ad-tech outfit [x+1].
Koran says he is a strong supporter of the open web.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Six months ago, multichannel video demand-side platform Amobee acquired Videology. Now the former describes itself as a video and linear-TV tool to allow advertisers to plan against and deliver campaigns “against really any format that they want to deliver, which could be display, mobile, social. But also into connected TV and linear TV,” the VP of Global Business Development says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
“With Videology, we really get increased focus and driving increased demand through our linear product and driving convergence between linear TV and digital by connected television devices.”
Amobee provides both supply partners like broadcasters and agencies a broadcast platform “to apply data to make their linear plans smarter,” Rogers says. It’s driven by what Rogers calls “the Amobee advanced-TV brain” as linear TV budgets migrate to connected TV.
“The dollars are starting flow as seamlessly as possible right now from one format to another, with data as sort of the underlying feed and baseline.”
As convergence develops, Amobee considers traditional supply-side platforms as very important partners. “What we need to work with them on is making their connected-TV inventory look like linear TV inventory for planning and execution purposes.”
Rogers alludes to a large agency client that uses the company’s linear platform to make its plans efficient against data Amobee provides. “That’s got to be at the show level, there’s daypart considerations, all those different things. Right now in connected TV you sort of see it at the broadcaster level.
“What we need to do is upgrade our integrations with them to make sure that connected TV starts to look like linear to drive that convergence. Not necessarily making digital budgets into connected TV. That’s the convergence that we’re really starting to see.”
This segment is part of Beet. TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Like many companies in advertising and media, Adobe is “seeing more and more that customers want to be working with their own first-party data,” Hammerman adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
“What that starts to bring up is PII, and whether we work with PII or not. We’ve been working a lot to think about how we can work both with, we’ll reference as third-party data, cookie data, unknown data, as well as being able to work with first party data.”
Enter the Adobe Experience Platform. Hammerman describes the technology as being about “the normalization and ingestion of data, along with semantics and controls that allow for the labeling and usage of data along with the democratization of data without the concerns of compliance.”
It’s powered by “a very strong overlay of AI,” which in Adobe’s case goes by the name Sensei. As Adobes AI foundation, the technology “really starts to look at things like what do you with that identity. How to do you look at further segmentation and data science in a very deep and meaningful and broad way.”
According to Hammerman, Adobe has 300 engineers dedicated to AI.
“What we’ve seen in data across the board is that the demand for data science is so high and you just can’t get enough of the workforce in place,” she says. “Additionally, the speed of data is moving so fast that to be able to do this in real time becomes almost meaningless for a customer, and AI allows us to move at that speed.”
With identity increasing at the core of great customer experiences, it encompasses not just advertising and marketing per se but also personalizing content experiences. “And that’s really ultimately what we think about when we think about a great customer experience.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“Traditionally, TV for BtoB audiences is extremely expensive,” Lau says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
He cites as an example a national TV spot for Procter & Gamble that costs $200,000 with the marketer’s entire audience “essentially guaranteed by the demo that you’re buying.” But if a company like IBM wants to reach Fortune 500 decision makers, with a target audience of 100,000 people “less than two percent of those people are going to be tuned in to that one spot.”
He figures that the cost of TV for BtoB advertisers can be 50 to 100 times higher than for consumer TV. “And that’s why we don’t see that many BtoB ads on TV, outside of the big guns,” Lau says.
Founded in 2014, Instinctive spent the past year building out an IP and device graph for its account-based TV offering, which launched this quarter and is in test mode. “So we know for any given IP address whether it’s a household, whether it’s a company. So we’re able to map that, bridge it with the device graph to deliver BtoB adds to people when they’re home.”
A client may give Instinctive 1,000 companies to target so that it can hone in on the “decision centers, where these people are, to make sure we’re reaching the right audiences and then delivering the right message at home that makes sense.”
Instinctive activates media buys through a series of programmatic private marketplace deals with Telaria and other major video supply-side platforms along with individual TV networks. Working on a cost-per-view model, the company guarantees completed ad views and provides insights into “how many households we were actually delivering ads to from a BtoB perspective,” Lau says.
By adding national TV to the mix, BtoB advertisers gain another pillar in their marketing efforts along with events and email. As for the latter, with things like the new GDPR regulations in the European Union “you’re already seeing a lot of email opt outs” or people not opting back in to lists.
“So people are looking for different channels to really reach their customers, and this is an effective way of doing it without spamming their in-box or calling people non-stop until they hang up on you.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>But the unit called Arc Publishing thinks the future is going to be orders of magnitude different – for better or for worse.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shailesh Prakash, Washington Post CIO, outlines the evolution from rudimentary AI to a sophisticated future.
“It’s early days. “Most of it is still so called ‘narrow AI‘,” he says. “It’s good at doing a particular task, but it can’t then be generalized to do other tasks.”
“With companies like Amazon and with Google we are working to see if some of the narrow AI that they all have can be leveraged for publishing, and how much of it can be used elsewhere.
“For example, can we use some of the face recognition technology that’s available to then help our reporters identify where a particular person in a photograph might have also appeared in our archives.”
Arc’s line-up also includes:
For all the hype, AI today is still rather rudimentary. Whilst features like semantic analysis and sentiment analysis are available easily to customers of large cloud services through API and others can even train their own models, results can be sketchy.
But Prakash sees an emerging world of “general AI” which will make the world “fundamentally different within 30 to 50 years”.
“It could be utopia, it could be dystopia,” he admits. “It could be a world where we eradicate diseases and we stop fighting with each other, and we live in peace and harmony. Or it could be dystopia or, as Elon Musk says, ‘Are we summoning the devil with this kind of general AI’?
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“The reality is even in 2019, we still have big-brand marketers and people spending lots and lots of money measuring click-through rates or landing page visits. That kind of stuff,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
About four years ago, Xaxis invested in its own artificial intelligence platform called Copilot. Even though demand-side platforms typically offer great data and technology, “to provide advantages for our clients we had to go even further.”
Copilot was designed to augment DSP’s so that marketers and agencies can “find the metrics that matter most to their business,” Sweeney says.
“What we’re looking at is huge data sets that you can lift from a DSP, log-level files where with machine learning you can look at all this data and look for those multiple touch points. The multiple variables that lead to a better engagement for a client.”
Thus informed, buyers can be smarter about “how do you bid in a very, very competitive marketplace and find more people like those people that engaged with a customer and led to a successful engagement.”
Across all verticals, Xaxis uses what it calls “a custom outcome indictor” to find the best proxies for digital media success. “Stop looking at things like click-through rates and landing pages and start looking at things that drive to a better business outcome,” says Sweeney.
While Xaxis services mostly GroupM clients working with MediaCom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, it also has a direct team whose clients include so-called direct-to-consumer brands. Those tend to seek to combine brand marketing and performance.
“That’s what’s most exciting is very often you have sort of a brand KPI or performance KPI. But a lot of these DTC guys, they want both. We’re learning a lot and we’re driving great results for our partners in that space,” Sweeney says.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>In the last two years, rival publishers in many several countries around the world have come together to form joint systems which aim to unify audience data in to holistic reader identities that can be used across sites.
Such cooperatives are rarer in the United States.
Other publisher alliances: 1XL, Verified Marketplace, Pangea Alliance, Project Juno/Rio/Arena. And that's just ad sales, and just UK. Others around the world, esp. Benelux, as publishers respond to common challenges. https://t.co/st3NYNx7s2
— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) November 14, 2018
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Chris Guenther, News Corp global head of programmatic, says more needs to be done.
“As a publisher, as an ecosystem, we need to do better,” Guenther says. “There’s too many competing IDs out there – The Trade Desk with their proprietary… Media Math… the list goes on and on.
“There’s reasons for that, why it works that way, but can we come together, perhaps only around digi-trends or some of these other initiatives to create a more consistent identity across publishers?”
Many news publishers have doubled down on having a relationship with their own unique audience, building a distinct brand that a subscription can be levied for.
But few a kissing goodbye to advertising. In the ongoing quest for ad sales, they remain challenged by the relative scale that big tech platforms and ad networks boast, compared with smaller audiences for individual news sites.
If publishers took take the information they know about their own readers and combine it with other pieces known by other publishers, they could assemble more detailed user profiles to sell to advertisers.
That has been happening in broadcast and VOD, where partners have formed OpenAP to impose some commonality on how media owners describe their audiences in data sets.
“It makes it easier for the buy side,” Guenther adds. “They can more easily match and find their users across, say, a series of publishers.
“Can we as an industry finally come together and create a more consistent identifier?”
But Guenther suggests such initiatives usually need to be instigated from the ad buyers’ side.
News Corp already operates its own News IQ system to store and combine user profiles from across its news sites.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>This is particularly appealing to so-called direct-to-consumer brands with traditional digital video assets they can now extend to TV, the company’s VP and Head of Advanced TV and Video says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
What those newer brands have in common is that they probably haven’t had a relationship with a traditional agency while growing their businesses on the Internet with one-to-one, measurable marketing. They’re attracted to things like programming and tent-pole events they’ve never been able to access. “Programmatic really fits well into that pipe especially for TV, which is why direct to consumer is so big for us,” Fisher adds.
As video SSP’s continue to evolve, MediaMath’s model is “to focus on running on the rails that the publisher wants us to run on. A lot of our partners build leverage, Telaria and other video SSP’s, as their connection point for us into their inventory.”
This, in turn, “allows us to connect to multiple supply sources. It allows them to connect to multiple demand sources without having to do one-to-one integrations with networks.”
Working closely with its supply-side partners and TV networks yields lots of “cool things,” including enabling the passing of show titles, obtaining more information about viewing habits, which can then enhance the bid stream.
“Another really exciting we’re working on is being able to know how long someone has been in a viewing session,” Fisher says. “If someone’s spending four hours binging TV content, being able to hit them early with a message is so much more memorable and important than hitting somebody later in a binge session with a message.”
Working with SSP’s “we’re really able to determine how many ads that person has seen and use that to determine bidding.” Fisher describes the strategy as “this is what our outcomes are, this is where we want to be spending, but make sure we’re surfacing the right message and the right creative at the right time for that person, without needing to set up a separate strategy for video, and a separate strategy for TV and a separate strategy for display. Letting it all talk to each other, letting it all optimize across full funnel.”
Asked about the use of custom creative at various points in the purchase funnel, Fisher recommends that marketers use the same creative spots in connected TV as in linear.
While MediaMath isn’t seeing 10,000 different versions of a piece of creative, “some of our smarter clients are saying that after first impression happens with that mass-market creative, then start focusing more on driving a message for that specific user based on what we know about that user and their online behaviors.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Now he hopes advertisers can pay a price that reflects the improvement.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, GroupM global brand safety EVP, reflects on the speech P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard gave to the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in January 2017.
“The great news is … it’s a much, much more measured and safe environment for brands,” Montgomery says.
Overall quality in the digital supply chain has increased dramatically. Publishers are using Moat, DoubleVerify, Whiteops, Integral Ad Science so that, by the time we get the inventory, it’s already been scrubbed, it’s already quality impressions.
“We’re seeing a situation where brand safety has become table stakes for a publisher. I think most publishers realize that, unless they deliver brand safe quality impressions to a marketer, they’re not going to get onto the schedule at all.”
Brand safety has been one of marketers’ key concerns in the last couple of years – fanned not just by Pritchard’s salvo but also by high-profile examples of brands appearing next to unsavoury content.
That fired the starting gun for ad-tech platforms to introduce measures including keyword-based filtering of available ad opportunities, based on an understanding of the content there – a practice which now even stands accused by some publishers of going too far.
“Empirical research evidence shows that, once you deliver those quality impressions, the ads work better,” Montgomery says.
“It does justify a premium, or certainly not a declining price which is what’s been happening over the last few years, which is unsustainable.
“If we can prove that quality ads work better, we can at least stop the slide towards lower prices because in that sort of quagmire of lower pricing lies a lot of other safety brand problems that we’ve been experiencing.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>In fact, the number of US brands which have launched in-house agencies has reached 78% – up from 58% in 2013, according to the ANA’s In-House Agency Report.
On the ground, however, chatter suggests that implementation isn’t s easy as going all-in on in-house.
And that is a view echoed by one boss whose company was just acquired by the former CEO of the world’s biggest ad agency holding group.
“Many people have talked about the notion of ‘control’ and ‘taking back control’,”says Pete Kim, MightyHive CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Control is not a binary state. You’re not ‘in’ control or ‘not in’ control.
“There’s always going to be a range of options in between those. Whether it’s fully in-housing or fully outsourced, there’s an infinite number of options in between on that spectrum.”
Last year, S4 Capital Group, a new investment-driven operating company launched by former WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, acquired creative house MediaMonks for $350m to offer content.
In December, it merged it with MightyHive, a company with both programmatic and creative services, in a $150m deal.
Speaking earlier with Beet.TV, Sorrell acknowledges the pressure agencies like his former employer are under. Now Kim communicates his vision.
“Our job is is to help somebody and help our clients to figure out where on that spectrum they should land, and then actually help them get there … whether that is 100% in-housing or an embedded solution or in-housing of one function such as media buying or creative, but leaving other parts outsourced,” he says.
Some brands have already taken to in-house operations naturally, others need more help, he says.
“A lot of the direct-to-consumer companies probably don’t need our help quite as much,” Kim adds. “I think that from their perspective, they’ve been in-house from the beginning because they’d embraced a culture of speed and innovation and growth, that mindset right from the outset.
“We’re trying to … help other companies to transform in order to keep up. They, too, can go direct to the consumer and they, too, can adopt some of the best practices that are coming up for it.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>As the likes of Netflix, Spotify, news publishers, grocery services and more attract monthly paying customers, they aren’t just causing brands to worry about a diminishing ad hole, they are also pushing some to fret about looming “subscription fatigue”.
Mark Zagorski is one who sees it coming – but he thinks the risk will keep media honest, in a state of equilibrium between ads and payments.
“Consumers can only subscribe to so many services whether it’s Prime or Netflix or Hulu or Sling, etc,” the Telaria CEO says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“At some point, they start to wear out, and I think that drives an opportunity which we see, which is the kind of the emergence of the ad supported, over the top video network.
“Folks like Pluto and Tubi and fubo and others who are delivering out-of-the-box free over-the-top high quality linear programming. Or some variation of that type of model where you have a half ad supported, half subscription like Hulu does now.”
That mix of revenue streams has always been the strength of media over the decades – despite the more modern zealotry of some who see either model at the be-all-and-end-all.
Zagorski sees a “tipping point” of “overwhelm” coming for customers bombarded by subscription, seeking a release valve in ad-supported offerings.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“I was fascinated by MoviePass,” says Jeff Cole in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “Even though MoviePass isn’t going to be around to celebrate at the big party, they showed that there was a real love of film in the theatres.”
He credits MoviePass, which faces steep financial challenges as The New York Times and others have reported, with helping to drive the 7% unit increase in box office ticket sales in 2018.
“I think MoviePass was why box office was actually up this year,” says Cole, citing in particular the popularity of documentaries like RBG, Welcome to My Neighborhood and Three Identical Strangers. “I think you’re going to see the whole movie business slowly move to a subscription model the same way the music business has moved to a subscription model.”
He is also enthralled by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming services from the likes of Disney while foreseeing distinct restrictions on that growth.
“This is the most important year for direct to consumer video. All the rules and all the players are going to change. I suspect there’s not room for more than two or three of these services as pay services, so it remains to be seen if they can exist independently or they will re-consolidate,” Cole says.
Nonetheless, he sees Disney as the dominant studio in a field of eight that over time has shrunk to six. “We’ve never seen one studio dominate the way Disney is now,” leaving studios like Paramount and Sony “almost in the dust.” Considering some of Disney’s slate of offerings this year, including Dumbo, a live version of The Lion King and Avengers, he adds, “They’re unstoppable at the moment.”
Consumers have clearly won—at least until now, according to Cole, whose research shows that for people under the age of 30, only 20% of their television is live (mostly sports). The rest is recorded or streamed.
“All of a sudden, the consumer for ten dollars a month was getting all this content from all the studios, a fantastic bargain, in three years may be paying forty dollars for the same thing.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Lowy joined Telaria in the fall of 2018 from Dish and its Sling TV service, where he had been director of advanced TV and digital sales. In this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, he says he was motivated by the growing convergence of digital and TV buying, along with the uptake of programmatic transactions.
“I saw at Sling that if I could be able to do that at a larger scale and really work with many programmers in converging their businesses and help them grow the advertising space, it would be a tremendous opportunity for the entire industry to grow,” says Lowy, who is Telaria’s Chief Commercial Officer.
“What I’m seeing is more DSP’s really understanding the space and helping to go through to the agencies and through to the brands of how to do this. How to purchase this type of advertising. How to purchase in auctions, how to do the private auctions. And really understanding the safety of buying in the space.”
Along with transparency and speed, audience targeting also is a factor in the growth of CTV and OTT. “That’s really driving this wave as well and being able to really understand attribution and what’s happening to your buys.”
Lowy considers transparency to be the number one because advertisers want to know exactly where their ads are going. “And to be assured that your ad is targeted properly and correctly, and also being fueled or put next to the right kind of premium inventory that you want or the premium content.”
The speed and efficiency that programmatic offers extends to campaign optimization, namely “how quickly you can purchase an ad and see how your campaigns are running and be able to change or do what you need to do rather quickly.”
Lowy attributes the explosion of direct-to-consumer streaming video services to a universal desire for total control.
“They want more control of the advertising. They want more control of the content. They want more control of what’s going on and really to understand, start to finish, what’s going to the consumer and how to react and how to move quickly with them.”
Asked about Telaria’s growth plans, Lowy says while lots of partnerships are desirable, “we want to make them richer and deeper.” Citing clients like Hulu, Sling, fuboTV and Cheddar, Telaria wants to “get deeper into helping them to understand the converging business and to help them grow their business.”
Additionally, Telaria is eyeing more global expansion, including in Canada and Latin America.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>But, whilst the push toward connected TV is exciting, some advertisers may be leaving attention on the table. That’s according to one demand-side platform CEO.
“On the buy side, there’s a lot of excitement around connected TV, the idea of reaching that consumer in the living room with that sight, sound and motion, doing it through programmatic is really exciting,” says Ari Paparo, CEO of Beeswax.
“I think people are taking that maybe a little bit too far. I made a joke on Twitter that ‘a lot of people skipped mobile’… (they) went from desktop video, which has some pluses and minuses, to connected TV and, meanwhile, there’s a whole generation of consumers who are experiencing video advertising in-game, in-application, in-mobile and many brands forgot about that. So I think that’s a missing opportunity for people to extend their reach.”
For Beeswax, the opportunity changed in January, when it raised a $15 million Series B investment round.
The company is four years in to offering its “Bidder-as-a-Service” technology, which allows ad buyers to bring their own algorithms in to trading for added customisability.
Why was the next round needed? Paparo says Beeswax will be spending on product, engineering and sales staff.
“We’re also looking to expand more in our European presence where we have five people in London currently, as well as looking into Asia Pacific as a region we can put some people on the ground,” he adds.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>NCC Media’s Bob Ivins says the industry is “at the beginning stages” of so-called household-level “addressable TV”, the collection of technologies which allows ad buyers to target, deliver and measure ads against individual households.
Why “beginning”? “The media owners, they have the reach, the programming reaches a lot of people, but they don’t have the first party relationships,” says Ivins.
“They don’t have the technology and the infrastructure to be out and execute. So they’re out there …. Viacom bought Pluto, or NBC has their own application. They’re trying to move their first party relationships into third party relationships.”
NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks. Now it is setting out to repeat the trick in the new, internet-connected era.
Three of Ivins’ five last roles have had “data” in the name. He joined after stints as Mindshare’s chief data officer, comScore and Slice Technologies.
“The distributors, they’re the ones with the first party relationships, but they don’t really have the reach,” Ivins continues. “So I think they need to combine all their initiatives, they’re all kind of doing something as a one off.”
He says he wants them to “work together in an open environment and build a platform” to move addressable forward.
says Bob Ivins, NCC Media , in this video interview with Beet.TV
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>In seven years a Pivotal Research, a Wall Street equity analyst firm, Wieser carved out a reputation – as senior research analyst – for sharp insight in to the worlds of media and advertising.
Now he has been hired by GroupM, WPP’s media investment arm, as global president for business intelligence.
So, how will things be different for Portland-based Wieser?
“Maybe not so different in some ways than the work I did when I was at Pivotal Research,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But much more centered around what our clients need – which is to say, many of the world’s largest marketers.
“I’ll never claim to know as much as the individual practitioners about what they do on a day to day basis, but I hopefully helped to put it all together in a big thematic view about how everything is evolving.”
GroupM is tasking Wieser with expanding its “thought leadership practice”. According to the company’s announcement: “He will collaborate with GroupM’s agencies and WPP’s broader network to gather, analyze and distribute actionable marketplace intelligence that gives clients insights on markets, audiences, partners and platforms, and supply and demand dynamics.”
Wieser’s affection for agencies isn’t news. Last year, while the market turned bearish on under-pressure agency groups, Wieser told Beet.TV the agencies are “cockroaches, not dinosaurs” – meaning, they will survive.
“I do think that, as they’ve been investing more against what clients really need, that there is an opportunity to resume growth back towards kind of a normal level that we used to see in prior years,” he says.
“Even when I had ‘sell’ recommendations on all of the stocks in the sector, I think there were temporal issues, if you will, and that played out. Most of the group has established something different, or at least they’ve started to invest more heavily (to match clients’ needs).”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>So often trailed as “the next big thing” in media and marketing, the format remains challenged by measurement issues, but is growing in popularity and in corporate interest, according to Edison Research and Spotify’s recent acquisitions of Gimlet Media and Anchor.
A leader of the IAB, which organizes the annual event at which digital publishers pitch their new offerings to brands, says this spring’s upcoming event is likely to be different.
“I’m hoping that we’ll see a lot of great OTT content (at the Digital Content NewFronts),”says Anna Bager, IAB mobile and video SVP and GM, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“I think we’ll see quite a bit of podcasting. It isn’t the ‘Digital Video NewFronts’, it’s the ‘Digital Content NewFronts‘. So, I think we’ll see other forms of content as well. Podcast was pretty big last year, and I think it’s going to be big this year again.”
Major publishers have been falling over themselves to launch podcasts over the last year. Much-replicated formats have been true crime documentary series and daily news analysis.
Advertisers are being beckoned by audience consumption that isn’t exploding but growing solidly.
And Bager hopes that a new kind of advertiser can fit this new medium, amongst others.
After a year in which the industry has been talking about the rise of so-called “direct-to-consumer” brands like Airbnb, now publishers are being urged to go after smaller direct-to-consumer brands which are nevertheless poised to be big spenders on advertising.
The IAB has been undertaking several activities around the prospect.
Last year, it worked with Dun & Bradstreet to produce research illustrating the trend. The pair’s IAB 250 Direct Brands To Watch showed the extent to which many new brands are foregoing intermediary retail going direct to consumers and the extent of competition within that set.
Now its new report, How to Build a 21st Century Brand: 2019, hopes to sign-post eager publishers to a new wave of upstart direct brands, like Allbirds, BaubleBar, Brooklinen, Dagne Dover, Dirty Lemon, Kopari, Madison Reed, Peloton, and Plated.
“That’s a list of … really a prospect list, potentially, for a lot of our members,” says Anna Bager, IAB mobile and video SVP and GM, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“These are companies you can go after who have very healthy businesses and are very interested in advertising.”
To unite buyers and sellers, the IAB has decided to admit brands to its membership.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Products under the Post’s “Arc Publishing” studio include many more than when Beet.TV last wrote about Arc two years ago:
They were built not just to service the Post itself, but are offered to all comers – beginning with university newspapers, then growing through small papers, US metropolitan titles and around the world.
Then, in December, Arc announced it would be branching in to broadcat, too – powering websites and apps for 39 Raycom Media stations.
Arc Publishing (@wapoarc) to power 42 websites and 39 native apps for Raycom’s TV and radio stations: https://t.co/Va5kjDCa1w. @WapoEngineering
— WashPostLife (@WashPostLife) December 13, 2018
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Shailesh Prakash, Washington Post CIO, explains Arc’s, well… arc.
“It’s a CMS (content management system), if you will – but it’s an end-to-end set of tools that are loosely coupled together,” Prakash says.
“And ‘loosely’ is important because you don’t have to buy the whole thing in order to take advantage of it. You could still use your own editor and use our planning tool, or you could just take the video tools that some of our broadcast customers have taken, or you could take advanced services like content generation, automatic content generation, or recommendation engines.”
In adopting some of Arc’s offering, Raycom joins other users like Willamette Week, Alaska Dispatch News, La Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Inquirer, La Parisian in France, El Pais in Spain, Infobae in Argentina and NZME in New Zealand.
But Raycom’s use of Arc’s tools isn’t just about powering its CMS text. Prakash says its ownership by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has helped it branch out.
“We are fortunate that we have a very strong tie-in with Amazon, given that we know somebody there,” he explains.
“Our video suite under the covers is powered by Elemental, which is a company that Amazon bought. It’s a startup, a video startup. And what that helps us do is to build on top of Elemental and offer broadcasters a very quick way, a seamless way to get their broadcast content onto the web and on to their apps. So, the cycle is more efficient, and it’s real-time clipping of what they do in broadcast.”
Raycom won’t be the last stop Arc makes on the video journey.
“We haven’t announced yet, but we have another large broadcaster that we’ll announce shortly,” Prakash hints.
Welcome Graham Media Group! Arc Publishing signs another large US broadcaster with affiliates in Houston, Detroit, Roanoke, San Antonio, Orlando and Jacksonville @WapoEngineering @wapoarc https://t.co/UrMeFxmS4F
— Shailesh Prakash (@sprakash007) February 14, 2019
Following this interview, Arc announced it would serve Graham Media Group, which said it would use Arc’s tools to enable journalists to quickly and efficiently cut and publish live video to the web, mobile, social media and other channels, as well as publish breaking news video during a broadcast.
“And we have a very large broadcaster called RTL in Germany that’s using Arc. And we hope that broadcast is a vertical that can benefit from some of the video technology we have powered, we’ve partnered with Amazon to bring up for them.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>The online TV provider last month announced it made $1.5 billion in ad revenue last year, a rise of 45%, increasing it advertiser base by 50%.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Doug Fleming, Hulu head of advanced TV, says that the company aims to put programmatic, automated sales methods “on equal footing” with ads sold directly by its human staff.
“When we look at the landscape, you can see this march towards automation,” Fleming says. “We’re not going to get in the way of that. We’re going to embrace that.
“We now have enough inventory and enough access that we have decided to create a team under me to go out and affect those agency trading desks and those folks that have decided to bring programmatic buying in-house.”
Hulu uses Telaria’s VMP (Video Management Platform) – which supports decisioning, demand delivery and analytics – to measure and manage its ad monetization. Prior to that, the TV service used Live Rail.
Both vendors offer technology to help the sale of ad space using automated systems.
But Fleming’s Hulu shares something in common with many other publishers that have embraced these methods – a modicum of control.
At the start of the year, it launched an invite-only private marketplace, meaning it gets to pre-specify the kinds of demand sources it will open its ad inventory to. That is in contrast to the way in which programmatic made its debut, as a free-for-all auction for unsold display ads.
“We’re going to do it in a very private, curtailed way,” Fleming adds. “There is no concept of a remnant provider, reselling our inventory. Everyone has to be blessed and driven through the Hulu process.”
“We identify the brands before they come in, so that they’re attributed to the appropriate seller on our side.
“We can category block appropriately, so people maintain their category exclusivity within pods.
“There’s no semblance of a DSP (demand-side platform) just hanging on and reselling, and an always-on situation.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Anne Frisbie, InMobi SVP programmatic, says InMobi continues to enjoy live data on telco consumers.
“It’s current,” she says. “It’s updated daily, I mean we run a telco-grade DMP (data management platform) that actually processes all the network carrier-level data.
“We anonymize that to protect the privacy of these consumers. It is opted data from these consumers, especially when that comes from an audience targeting standpoint. There’s different uses for the data, but it is all actively and currently processed.”
At the time of the deal, AdExchanger reported: “No Sprint data is being exchanged in the deal, just Pinsight’s tech stack.”
Despite Pinsight having hoped to grow in to a $1 billion business, last year it was sold to InMobi, the veteran mobile ad company, in an all-stock deal that kept Pinsight’s employees located in Kansas City.
Across the industry, telcos have been building up their ability to use subscriber data to power advanced ad targeting, going on a series of acquisition sprees to build in-house capabilities.
But, although it offloaded the unit, Sprint gained new powers to monetize that data across InMobi’s publisher network.
Frisbie says the potential for carriers helping advertisers leverage their data has been underwhelming so far, and trumpets the value of an “independent” vendor.
“It’s passive data and it gives you a holistic view of that consumer, a much more holistic view because – as you know – the first wave of kind of digital insights and from surveys… has really been on the browser side of the business,” she says.
“This kind of (data) gives you a holistic view of that from location and from all their content consumption.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>So says one executive whose company felt so strongly about that issue, it split in two.
Telaria spun off its division serving ad buyers back in September 2017 to focus only on providing a programmatic advertising tech platform to publishers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, video publisher ad tech maker Telaria’s CEO Mark Zagorski explains why, by continuing to be beholden to both the buy side and the sell side, big platforms like Google can mislead customers.
“Those guys have content that they can compete against,” he says. “Their platform competes against the people that they’re selling technology to.
“Same thing with Comcast. Comcast creates content and they have a platform they’re trying to sell to other content producers, so every dollar you pay them, they’re going to take that dollar and use it to create competing content.
“It’s a big deal and I think it’s becoming a bigger deal as CTV and OTT become a bigger part of people’s businesses.”
The playing-both-sides question has been an industry issue in recent years. Over time, many suppliers try to hit scale by aiming to serve both sides of the ad coin.
The transparency debate has changed that, to some extent, with more platforms concluding that, to maintain customers’ trust, they need to make the best impact for just one kind of customer.
For Zagorski, a former Nielsen executive, doubling down on ad sellers comes at a time when those sellers are trying to respond to the rise in multi-screen video consumption, over-the-top TV delivery and the infrastructure requirements needed to capitalize on the power of “addressable” connected TV targeting.
“When I started (at Telaria), that part of our business was less than 3% of our revenue, and now it’s approaching 30% of our revenue,” he says. “It’s a big development. It’s a big part of our future.
But TV’s embrace of new-style “programmatic” selling techniques comes different from the way in which the tactic arrived in display ad media. Zagorski says private programmatic marketplaces, allowing sellers more control over to whom and for how much they sell their precious ad space, are more commonplace than real-time auctions.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Now Sir Martin Sorrell, the man who used to run the world’s largest ad agency holding group, WPP, is reborn, as executive chairman of his S4 Capital Group, an investment-driven operating company that already acquired creative house MediaMonks for $350m to offer content and which in December merged it with MightyHive, a company with both programmatic and creative services in a $150m deal.
Asked if further investments are on the horizon, Sorrell tells Beet.TV, in this video interview: “We’ll make further acquisitions.”
But he’s not getting ahead of himself. “I think we have to demonstrate that the concept, or the idea, works,” he says.
Still, S4 and MediaMonks have already been taking contracts. “We’ve won some very significant global and multinational business,” Sorrell says. “Procter & Gamble, Braun has been talked about publicly. There are three other major assignments that we’ve received in the last month of similar nature to P&G and Braun – digital projects around content and programmatic.
“And what we’re seeing is, when we start to develop a content approach or a programmatic approach, we can combine the two. Not effortlessly, but clients want to explore how they can integrate the two into one.”
Sorrell’s S4 is already well capitalised for further deals. Having only been formed in summer 2018, after Sorrell’s exit from WPP, the company has a market cap of roughly £470 million (around $605 million) at time of writing.
That exit happened controversially for corporate reasons, but also seemed like the crescendo of a couple of years in which ad clients became frustrated with historic pricing and operating models of large ad agencies, some of whose many sub-agencies had become labyrinthine and unwieldy.
If Sorrell sees S4’s efforts as a response to that, he isn’t saying so overtly. But, in the new group’s companies, he says he will offer “no earn-outs”, ” a single brand” “with transparency in the full sense of the word”. No sprawl here, it seems.
“In a funny way, we’re reuniting creative and media,” he tells Beet.TV, acknowledging that brands want to “take back control”.
“We will want to see the holding company model survive and succeed. But the pressure is intense. That pressure’s likely to intensify, and give more opportunity to the disruptors in the business.”
Is S4 one of the disruptors which will challenge the likes of WPP?
“It doesn’t have the scale of what I’m used to,” Sorrell says. “But maybe we can remedy that in time.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
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