But an emerging school of thought has it that the next wave of digital ad targeting growth won’t come from national brands, it will come from the grassroots.
Could local advertisers benefit to the same tune, and does the local ad market add up to a market worth much to programmatic platforms?
“It’s big, almost as big as the national market,” says Frost Prioleau, CEO of Simpli.fi, a demand-side platform (DSP) trying to push the technology down to the local level. “But many advertisers or many platforms think, ‘Hey, it’s a pain because it’s really populated by high volumes of tiny campaigns’.”
Although Prioleau boasts Simpli.fi has as many as 85,000 campaigns on the platform at any one time, he concedes that “half of those are spending less than $3 a day”. But that is netted off by “others that are spending thousands of dollars a day”. That means one of Prioleau’s big challenges is efficiently scaling up and reporting on both kinds of customer equally.
So what would a programmatic campaign look like for a local advertiser? The use cases are two-fold:
Last year, Simpl.fi launched mobile capabilities, allowing advertisers to target people who have visited their location – or that of a rival.
Next up, Prioleau expects big growth in video and connected TV spending.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>But Ziff-Davis doesn’t want to leave its advertisers to rely on off-the-shelf “tech” audience segments to reach their customers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ziff Davis Senior Vice President, Strategy and Growth, Jason Sinnarajah explains that the company is keen on directly collecting audience data for itself to help those advertisers.
“We’re collecting about 200 million cookies, on average, across all of the Ziff Davis portfolio,” he says. “More and more marketers are looking for first party data. We (also) actually sell audience profiles in the ad tech ecosystem.”
Sinnarajah says that is “really attractive to advertisers like Best Buy, because they know that they can go and target those folks that are really in the market (who are) about to buy a television”.
Next up, however, Sinnarajah wants to tackle the growing challenge of changing consumer behaviour – the reality that many peopl enow consume the same media property across multiple different devices.
Piecing together the breadcrumb trails of those data, in to a single consumer profile, remains a tricky task for everyone in the industry – but one which several vendors now purport to have solved.
“Cross-device ID matching is probably … where the growth opportunities are,” he says. “For us at Ziff Davis, that’s something that we are definitely looking at. We have a wide range of email address information, lead gen information, that we’d love to match up with ID’s as well. And then being able to do it across devices.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>Among the use cases cited for blockchain in ad-tech is improving transparency by making transactions supremely recordable and viewable in an authenticated ledger.
That is also the pitch from Amino Payments, a startup founded by the former CTO and co-founder of Integral Ad Science.
“After I left there, I started to explore blockchain technology,”Amino Payments CEO Will Luttrell
“It occurred to me that a lot of the concepts around supplied chain provenance and tracking transactions as they flow through different systems could be directly applied to some of the challenges I knew still were outstanding in the ad tech industry.”
Amino Payment’s feature set includes:
So how do they fit together, and why? That depends on whether you are a buyer or seller.
“When a big brand puts in $10 million into a large ad campaign, we’re going to give you complete view into where all that money went all the way down to the publishers,” Luttrell adds. “As a DSP and SSP resellers, they’re all taking their cuts that you’ll get to see where every penny that $10 million went and to make sure that it wound up where you thought it was supposed to go. From the sell side, we represent fast reconciliations and fast payments.”
It would be tempting to consider it too early for concrete deployment of what appears to remain a peripheral technology, still swirling from association with turbulent tokens and crypto coins.
But Luttrell claims to have made strides.
“We have six of the top 10 global programmatic spenders either live on the platform or in verbal ‘yeses’ or in legal right now,” he says. “Where the source of the money is, is really what drives a lot of adoption throughout the rest of the ecosystem.
“Likewise, we have huge publishers that are signed on as well as a pretty significant presence growing in the long tail because they’re running their own tests and seeing dollars being siphoned off to people representing them in the exchange environment when it’s not actually them.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>But what if you could cut ad fraud by up to 600%? That’s what Mike Zaneis claims he can do, for companies that follow his organization’s recommendations.
Zaneis heads up the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a non-profit umbrella through which 500 companies are working on the issues which plague the industry.
TAG was established three years ago with a mission to fight criminal activity in the supply chain. It now has a membership across 26 countries.
“We were chartered by the leading trade associations, the IAB of course but also the Association of National Advertisers and 4A’s to bring the industry together to fight criminal activity,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Specifically, fraud, privacy and malware. But we also have this overarching mission to increase transparency throughout the ecosystem.”
Zaneis has previously told Beet.TV TAG’s goal is to put ad fraudsters “behind bars“.
Until then, he is helping media companies clean up their supply chain, by laying down guidelines platforms should follow.
“We come up with high standards,” he says. “We set really high bar.” Compliant companies earn a TAG Certified-Against-Fraud seal. And Zaneis says it is working.
“Our certification programs are proving to be very effective,” he adds. “It means you’re living up to the highest levels of fighting criminal activity.
“If agencies and marketers work with trusted actors that provide transparency and are certified against fraud then that TAG certified channel will eliminate 83% of all fraudulent traffic. More than 600% cleaner than the industry average. It’s a pretty good start.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>But what if you are a marketer that sells not to consumers but to businesses? Anudit Vikram has got you covered.
He is SVP at Dun & Bradstreet, the 176-year-old business data provider that has collected information on 290 million businesses around the world. And he wants to make it available in the advertising ecosystem.
“We have … identified and translated … the offline business records that we have into online identifiers,” he tells Beet.TV. “Whether it is a cookie, or device ID, or an IP address, and then figure out ways in which we could put that online data set to use for digital advertising use cases.
“If you are a B2B marketer, let’s say a company in the high tech space, and you’re selling servers, and you want to be able to reach all companies that have more than 5,000 employees, and have over $10 billion in revenue, you can come to us, and you can use the segments that we have created”
Vikram says there is $2.8bn worth of B2B data being bought and sold in the $10bn programmatic media environment.
His company’s Visitor Intelligence product lets companies customise web messages to visitors by analysing the company they are coming from as well as the user’s persona.
“Today, we can reach about two-thirds for all U.S. businesses, about 16 million or so of them,” he adds. “And about three-quarters of all U.S. professionals in the online space. You have a pre-defined set of segments that you can make available in the marketplace so for people to be able to buy.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>That is according to one ad exchange operator which reports a maturation in the questions marketers are asking of their platforms and publishers.
“So, the questions that we’re getting now is not so much that, ‘(Are) there no buy-side fees or undisclosed fees?’ – those have been table stakes for Index for a long time,” says Will Doherty, VP of business development at Index Exchange.
“But, they are actually (asking) ‘What are your fees? What is the actual rev split that Index shares with its publishers?’, because they want to understand how much of their media dollar is actually going towards working media.”
Doherty says that is a “level-up” of the transparency conversation that has raged over the last year or two.
And it is not before time. As Doherty says, as much as 30% to 40% of an advertiser’s media spend could be taken by intermediaries charged with simply delivering the impression. So Doherty says he sees it as his responsibility to drive down that cost.
“What our job at Index is, is to make the relative cost of each transaction, as low as possible – so low that you don’t even need to think about it anymore,” he says.
“And so largely, what we’re geared to do is create the efficiencies in the middle that return value to both the marketer and the publisher.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>As the company’s platform sales VP Kyle Dozeman tells Beet.TV in this video interview:
“The first was the removal of our buy-side fees”
“The second was our transition to a first price auction.”
Earlier in February, PubMatic declared it would not charge advertisers any fees for transacting across its platform – something that had become a bugbear for buyers keen on full visibility for pricing models.
That followed its announcement that it would end the historic programmatic practice under which winning ad bidders would pay less than their bid price. This situation has been complicated by the emergence of header bidding, because inconsistency across auctions and lack of transparency into how each auction operates has created an environment where buyers do not have visibility into whether auctions are being closed at first- or second-price. So PubMatic said it would only operate the first-price model.
“We spent a lot of time listening to our buying community, and ultimately came to the conclusion that those steps not only provided transparency, but also a level of consistency for these buyers across their different supply platforms, and that that consistency allows them to focus more on growing programmatic media spend, and delivering great campaigns versus studying our business models, auctions and things like that,” Dozeman adds.
But the transparency game is not over.
“For us, the next big wave starts to get into ensuring that each bid request is appended with as much possible data as possible so that the marketer understands exactly what they’re buying.
“Adding things like viewability metrics, adding brand safety scores and fraud scores within the bid requests on an impression by impression basis, I think is allowing marketers to better understand at a nuanced level exactly what’s happening, and I think that’s where this all will go.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>Like many in the industry, Watson Advertising believes there are too many tech players. With lots of partners in the digital media supply chain, there’s “lots of opportunities for things to potentially go wrong,” says Jeremy Hlavacek, the agency’s Head of Global Automated Monetization.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Hlavacek talks about wanting to trim away needless duplication while being sensitive to competitive realities.
“I think it is a complicated issue though, because you are at some point kind of digging into the real meat of how companies operate, and they are private companies, so I think there should be a little bit of a balance there,” says Hlavacek. “I for one would love to see a simpler, less complex supply chain, really making sure that the companies are adding value every step of the way.”
Formerly known as The Weather Company before its acquisition by IBM, Watson Advertising’s media holdings attract an audience that can be reached with dynamic ad insertion informed by weather conditions and other factors. The Weather Channel’s digital editorial team was nominated last year for two Emmy Awards for investigative series about the toxicity of Lake Okeechobee in Florida and child labor on Mexican coffee plantations, for which it partnered with Telemundo.
“We’re at a really interesting moment at Watson Advertising where we’ve got traditional publishing assets but we’ve also got a lot of new technology and data assets that make us more like a platform company,” says Hlavacek. “We also have an emerging data business where we’re now taking our weather and location data off of our properties and selling that to marketers.”
Partnering with IBM provides access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence, which links back to the issue of supply chain efficiency. Besides using AI to power a marketing planning tool called Lucy and a separate product for programmatic bidding, Watson’s voice and language-detection skills are being put to use to improve transparency.
“As marketers start to think about context and fake news and do they really want to be associated with the top story on a home page? Using some of Watson’s contextual tools could be very really interesting for them,” says Hlavacek.
Summing up his view of the supply chain, he hopes a year from now that the industry finds “the right level of comfort with all of this.” While the ecosystem has had some “growing up” to do, he’s ready to get back to more exciting things. “What’s the next great thing? Is it going to be AI? Is it going to be blockchain? The innovation is the fun part.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>But now that ‘TubeMogul’ has become Adobe Advertising Cloud, it’s no longer mostly a video advertising company.
In mid 2015, we started building our display offering and since then we’ve expanded into native audio and a breadth of other formats,” explains Jon Levinson, who was TubeMogul’s senior director for partner development operations.
“At this point, I think we were already headed in this direction before the Adobe acquisition but the Adobe acquisition has absolutely accelerated our move towards a multi-channel and multi-format DSP. At this point, a vast majority, or a large majority of our spend comes from formats outside of video.
“We look at ourselves, not just as a video specialist, but one who focuses on a lot of other formats as well.”
Levinson is now senior manager for business development on Adobe’s AdCloud, following Adobe’s 2016 acquisition of TubeMogul.
The Emeryville, CA-based company was acquired by the digital media powerhouse for $540m..
At the time, Adobe’s logic majored on video and TV. Levinson still sees growth potential in that area.
“I think overall in video, our focus now for a couple of years has been and will continue to be premium and getting as much spend out of open exchange as possible and into true premium video,” he says.
“The kind of stuff that broadcasters or a Pandora or a newspaper company might sell because that’s really the quality content that drives the best engagement when ads are in front of or in the middle of it.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Levinson also says he sees challenges in GDPR and connected TV data sets.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>It’s against this backdrop that Troy Young, Global President, Hearst Digital Media, views the ever-evolving role of the Interactive Advertising Bureau during a time of what he calls “incredible” change.
“I’m an advocate of the IAB because I think it plays an important role in the community, in education, our relationship with government,” Young says in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s Annual Leadership Meeting. Trying to figure out what comes next “is really complicated because marketing is so complicated right now.”
He refers to remarks by IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg about how “direct brands” have forged a new path, veering away from what Young describes as “industrialized communication through marketer to agency to publisher to consumer.” Now a new generation of companies is “empowered by the cloud and everything on demand to create direct relationships with consumers and sell products that people value,” he says.
“Everybody’s a content marketer right now and everybody needs close proximity to data. For a company like ours, how does that change us?”
Not that long ago, owning Hearst titles like Cosmopolitan, Country Living, ELLE and Esquire and housing them under the same roof as Rodale’s Bicycling, Men’s Health, Prevention, and Runner’s World would have meant more than adequate clout in the market. Now it’s more about speed, ease of use for advertisers and being as powerful as logging into the Facebook interface to buy ads.
“We have to react to that reality as a publisher. We define trends and understand consumers and create audiences. But we have to refactor our ad offering, essentially our market offering, to deal with the new realities,” Young says.
Hearst continues to enhance its programmatic capabilities while mapping user buyer behaviors and help brands produce content, which takes time and investment.
“We really have to listen to our customers and figure out how we can make selling a complex product much easier, because if you’re buying on Instagram it’s really easy today and I think that’s the reality we have to compete with.”
Buyers “still love our brands,” Young adds. “The buy-side loves our sophistication in creating content. “What we’re really focused on is how do we help marketers around the idea of actions. There’s no doubt that the entire market is becoming more performance oriented.”
It helps to “eat our own dog food” by creating content that “sells product and we make money doing that. We’re keenly aware of what leads to a transaction and it’s that insight that we create by doing it ourselves that we sell to marketers.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>Nowadays, the company’s ad offering encompasses Xbox, Outlook and a whole lot more.
So Microsoft enlisted AppNexus to be its supply-side platform (SSP), the software ued to automate the sale of a publisher’s ads at scale.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Microsoft monetisation director Kevin O’Donnell explains key considerations for the company when making its SSP decisions.
“We need a partner that can go with us in terms of that diverse portfolio, so properties that have very robust, cookie-based, and traditional ways to do user matching to less traditional ways in the desktop app space,” he says.
“The other thing that’s really important to us is making sure that we understand what’s going on across the value chain. So, when you think about an SSP and a publisher of the scale of Microsoft, we want to make sure that our costs are in line with what our buyers expect and that they can provide as much of the intermediary value in the value chain that a buyer would expect.”
The “value chain” aspect is one that has flashed red lights across the industry over the last year, as as sides of the advertising world have become agitated with insufficient transparency over buying decisions, as well as the growth in fraudulent behaviour.
“Both publishers and buyers have taken their eye off the ball a little bit in terms of what they’re selling, what they’re buying,” O’Donnell adds.
“What’s happened is, a buyer targets a certain price that they want to buy inventory at, and then little bits and pieces of that are taken out throughout the chain, and then the publisher doesn’t really know how much the advertiser actually values what they’re selling.
“As a publisher, getting a little more clarity on how much an advertiser values our inventory and understanding where those intermediaries are actually adding value in the middle is really important.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>As Oath sorts out the DSP solution, “We’re very sincerely aligned with wanting to go from a Wild West to a real, trusted environment,” DeVine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “We want to have an open platform and an open ecosystem where we bring technology that as an advertiser and as a brand builder you can trust.”
Such an open system means advertisers can bring to the table their own data, validation and measurement so that “we’re not grading our own homework so that you as an advertiser feel comfortable with the ROI, the results and the delivery of your message to our universe of users.”
The unified DSP is based mostly on the BrightRoll code base “but it pulls in ad learn and other features of the ONE by AOL DSP,” says DeVine. “We’re cross-coding right now the features and functionality of both into the combined platform.”
As The Drum has reported, Oath hopes to have the unified DSP by the end of 2018, along with two ad exchanges—one for video and the other for mobile.
According to DeVine, Oath is working on establishing “a common interface, features and functionality” between its Gemini native platform and the single DSP “so advertisers have one plug-in, one place to go.”
What Verizon has invested in with its separate acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo is growth. In addition to consolidating Oath’s tech assets, “We also know that growth starts with our consumer relationship and so our energies are going very aggressively toward that consumer interface”
Oath’s mobile-first regimen was bolstered in late 2017 with the addition of live-streaming NFL games, a five-year deal that Recode estimates will cost Verizon more than $1.5 billion.
“On the advertising side, we’re going to continue to push on creative ad formats. We want ads to be great for consumers and advertisers,” says DeVine.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>That means being “more conservative than aggressive” because of issues like brand safety and being sure that the ads that show up in Hulu’s environment are appropriate for our environment, Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. At this year’s event, brand safety was once again front-and-center.
“You’re never going to see our inventory in an open marketplace where anybody can bid on it,” Naylor says. “So far, the advertisers who are willing to engage with how we want to engage and keep them out of harm’s way, keep ourselves out of harm’s way, seems to be working.”
Like many Leadership Conference attendees, Naylor refers to the strident comments from Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed about how some digital platforms—particularly social media—need to clean up their content act.
“He threaded the needle by saying brands need to be marketing in trusted environment,” Naylor says. “It’s not about trust alone but it’s about reputation and brand safety is also budget safety. People are concerned where they spend their money, the company they keep.”
It’s a discussion that will continue to evolve “and you’re going to continue to see the adtech world play a role,” led by the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, the Trustworthy Accountability Group and the Media Rating Council.
Another big topic of discussion at the Leadership Conference was so-called direct brands, companies that have bypassed traditional supply and distribution channels to form direct relationships with customers. Naylor says the trend is a “wonderful way to reduce friction and increase a relationship” that is two-way as opposed to one-way in nature.
“Hulu resembles what we’re talking about. We have a direct relationship with million and millions of viewers who give us their time as well as subscription revenue,” says Naylor.
Direct brands stand to gain in the modern television and video world because of more precise consumer-targeting opportunities. “The old TV, a lot of people just can’t afford to advertise in the biggest sports or entertainment vehicles. But they can absolutely advertise and market with precision and targeting in the new game, the new arena. That’s enabling them to continue their growth.”
According to Naylor, the majority of Hulu viewers choose the ad-supported model.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“And that’s a huge part of what we do,” Brace says of her position at Fox in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “I think the fact that so many people in the industry have lost sight of that and we’re seeing that course correction happen right now is a good thing.”
She says clients’ expectations are to give them reliable information about exactly where their ads are running. “That we’re doing our best to give them real human attention that can transfer their message. We couldn’t be more aligned with what brands are asking for.”
Brace also spent more than two years in a senior sales role at true[X], the interactive advertising specialist tech firm that Fox acquired three years ago this month in an effort to reinvent TV advertising by giving viewers more choice. Just before last year’s Upfront season—a mix of presentations and negotiations for TV ad inventory—Fox announced it had reduced the advertising load on all of its digital FX Networks programming by 75% in an effort to enhance the viewing experience.
“We kind of shocked the market,” Brace recalls. “That is absolutely about taking that model of reduced ad load and high consumer attention that pays off for brands.”
She notes that not only has Fox leveraged the true[X] model on platforms where there is interactivity, it’s taken the concept to video as well. Advertisers can own a full break or a full-series video without sharing consumers’ attention with other brands.
“And we’re seeing great success with that,” Brace says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear more news from us extending that sort of format to other platforms as well outside of digital. So it should be really interesting.”
Interactivity generates higher brand recall, according to Brace, because “the more someone spends time, the more they remember, the more vested they are and the more relevant it is.” Brands have caught on. “I always like to say once we kind of get a brand into the format they never leave because…what they can accomplish there and the stories they can tell,” she says.
It does create more work on the creative side, as Brace is quick to acknowledge, but there are benefits. “There’s always challenges with a customized solution because there’s a little more hand holding in terms of getting creative. I think the people who dive in and really leverage the most that it has to offer are the ones who do the best.”
Brace cites FX research showing that 90% of people prefer interactivity. “That tells me that we’re on to something and that we need to absolutely provide choice for people wherever we can. We’re not going to win by just jamming more commercials into the system to try to monetize.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>When News UK, News Corp’s UK newspaper publishing arm, conducted a test in December, the results were shocking.
Though it removed the inventory of its The Times and The Sun publications from programmatic sources, for a period of two hours early in the morning of December 4, the company continued to see fake versions of that inventory in exchanges.
Specifically, according to its calculations, 2.9 million bids per hour were made on the fake inventory, meaning ad buyers are being duped in to wasting up to £700,000 ($972,000) per month on misplaced advertising.
It’s called a blackout test and, in this video interview with Beet.TV, News Corp’s SVP and global head of programmatic says the company is going to repeat the test in the US.
“We’re going to be running a couple of tests here in the U.S. around the same theme.
“Potentially, millions and millions of dollars are being sent towards these fraudulent sites from buyers. People want to advertise – sometimes they think they are, but instead, they’re showing up on God-knows-where, and supporting who-knows-what, in terms of where the money’s flowing.”
Back in December, News Corp announced News IQ, a platform uniting first-party data, brand data, media properties and data science tools to help buy ads across News Corp brands, powered by AppNexus.
Guenther says he hopes advertisers use it to work directly with News Corp publishers on a basis of trust, so that “they can come to us and have a shortened supply chain and get access to this audience”.
He says News UK has been talking with the SSPs behind its spoofing problem, though it did not name them.
The IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, allowing publishers to place a text file on their servers which list the buying platforms which are allowed to buy their inventory, is one tilt at a solution to the spoofing problem. Guenther sees it as ” step in the right direction, but not a cure-all”.
Speaking at the IAB’s own Annual Leadership Meeting – where, last year, P&G marketing chief Marc Pritchard gave a rallying speech demanding ad-tech transparency that has been seen as the industry’s most important speech in years – Guenther says not much has changed.
“I think its gotten slightly better,” he says.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“The cool thing is it’s working,” says CEO Brian O’Kelley.
That turns out to be an understatement considering that AppNexus is now one of the world’s largest video platforms. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the company signed as clients three of the biggest media companies in the world. From January 2017 to January 2018, its video spend was up 260%.
“So we saw this explosion of our video marketplace,” O’Kelley explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Besides working directly with premium publishers—more than 150 using the AppNexus Video SSP—one advantage has been its decision to charge “a very low take rate,” which O’Kelley pegs at “half of what the other video SSP’s charge.”
One thing has led to another, and now AppNexus is taking a closer look at the linear TV space.
“A year ago, I’d have said there’s no way we’re going to touch linear, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these worlds are converging so quickly that there’s actually a huge opportunity,” O’Kelley adds.
Some of the company’s biggest buyers are asking it to integrate with linear TV platforms. “And I think if we do that we can provide a holistic way to help these brands transition from linear to digital and help curate a digital environment that feels a lot more like TV in the sense of high quality content.”
He sees the company’s role as being able to provide “an alternative for Keith Reed or Unilever to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, where there’s really no way to know what’s going to happen next.”
His rationale: “Can you really afford to have your ad appear next to somebody who’s tasering rats on his balcony? That’s just not good for your brand, I don’t care what brand you are. Maybe if you’re a taser brand.”
While broadcast will always be different from addressable, one-to-one programmatic, where those worlds are converging is that “we’re having more and more capabilities, especially through IP and set-top boxes, to sort of bridge that gap. We can do insertions for more and more content down to the set-top, household level.”
He believes the United States is just three or four years from reaching the point where linear TV is in, say, the Netherlands, where “it’s just gone completely off the cliff. So I want to be ready. And I think to be ready we have to start helping those companies transition to programmatic and then to start shifting more and more to an audience-targeted model.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>The IAB announced this week that Schiller is the newly elected Chairman of the IAB Board of Directors. He has served in that position since October 2017 due to board executive changes, according to an IAB news release.
As was the case at last year’s event, when Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard and other brands were outspoken about the shortcomings of the digital ecosystem, this year that role was filled largely Unilever’s Keith Weed. Together they “set the stage at the high level of what the bigger, more established companies are thinking,” Schiller, who is EVP, GM, Marketing, Advertising & Client Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Meanwhile, smaller companies are always emerging on the landscape with their own hopes and needs. “The industry needs to work with this disparate group of companies,” he adds.
As regards the ecosystem, media sellers need to keep finding new ways to make dealing with them as smooth as possible. “We have to be more thoughtful in how we transact and we have to be focused on bringing results whatever they are to our clients,” says Schiller.
Sponsored content and the creation of branded content is becoming increasingly important “as so much of what we do in the media business is algorithmed or commoditized.” How advertisers find their way into content is critical for two reasons: It can enhance the consumer experience and “The money that comes from sponsorships is what ultimately fuels in large part great content,” Schiller says.
Asked about NBCU’s ongoing coverage of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he mentions its Total Audience Delivery solution and how the event has not only always been a “hotbed of change” but also “a great example of what’s going to happen.” The Olympics were the first place that “digital really came together with television.” Now the natural emphasis is measuring all viewers on all possible devices.
“From a programming and marketing perspective, you’re seeing us try everything with every platform that makes sense.”
Apart from the IAB, more discussion and education are needed to help everyone find their way forward, unlike the pre-digital advertising and media world.
“In the old days it was very clear. The brands did what they did, the agencies did what they did and the consumers ingested it. Today everyone does everything,” says Schiller.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>So far, one of the biggest takeaways from the PyeongChang Winter Games for Krishan Bhatia has been the acceleration of over-the-top and connected TV viewing. “I think for the past few years we have continued to underestimate that potential,” says NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, who Beet.TV interviewed at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau several days after the opening ceremonies. “Once again, we believe that it’s going to blow through all of the estimates.”
As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCU figures showed that 28.3 million viewers watched the opening ceremonies, 27.8 million of them on television. Audience numbers for out-of-home viewing weren’t yet available. As of Feb. 13, half of U.S. television homes and more than one-third of the country’s population had watched the Olympics on the networks of NBCUniversal, according to fast cume data provided by Nielsen. Six days into the events, NBC Sports Digital’s presentation had been accessed by 6.6 million unique devices–higher than the 2016 Rio Olympics (6.0 million through the comparable date) and more than tripling the 2014 Sochi Olympics (1.8 million to date).
Bhatia says the company’s total audience measurement and delivery approach should apply to any content and consumer segment that is proliferating and fragmenting across multiple platforms along with time-shifting consumption. Given this backdrop, brands want to work with fewer, bigger partners to re-aggregate eyeballs.
“I think we will find marketers and agencies leaning more into this than they ever had,” Bhatia says of Total Audience Delivery.
Commercial ad load and viewer experience remain “another area of huge focus for us,” he adds. Having reduced ad loads on OTT and on-demand platforms by about 30%, NBCU continues to test new formats and develop new products as well as improving its contextual targeting solutions.
“We’re in a two to three week process of researching ad pod length and formats right now to really come up with what is the optimal solution both for the consumer experience and for how that drives marketer metrics,” says Bhatia.
As the company approaches its third year of enhanced audience buying, it doesn’t plan to “reinvent the wheel” but scale the business “and quite frankly making it more efficient for marketers and agencies to engage with us.”
As examples he points to NBCU’s work on facilitating better data interoperability for audience targeting and its automation capabilities. In the latter category is its API through which buyers can access TV inventory on the 4C Insights Platform, which is the subject of this interview.
“We think that’s a giant step towards making the buying and transacting of television significantly more efficient,” Bhatia says.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“The swamp isn’t very transparent,” says Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed, whose speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting was intended to prod online platforms to foster inclusivity as opposed to divisiveness. In this interview with Beet.TV, Weed says that simply threatening to withhold advertising dollars from digital platforms while expecting them to solve their own content challenges isn’t the proper course for the industry.
“They all have their different challenges. All of them are seriously engaging them,” says Weed, adding that he wants to see “an acceleration and bigger commitment to this moving forward.”
He believes that, like Unilever itself upon its founding in the 1880’s, digital behemoths like Facebook and Google intended to make the world a better place, but the horse of progress has galloped off without the cart of good intentions.
“I think what’s happened with technology is the acceleration of unintended consequences has happened very rapidly,” Weed says.
He notes that even as negative headlines about the hygiene of the digital media ecosystem—both for advertisers and consumers—proliferated at the time of last year’s IAB gathering, Unilever did not walk away from the table. “Not only did we stay with YouTube, and we still are, we very publicly stayed with YouTube.”
Aside from its collaborative approach to problem solving with digital platforms, Unilever is actively harnessing technology to protect its own interests by experimenting with blockchain to achieve complete transparency on various kinds of online and offline transactions. In the everyday supply chain, the company has used blockchain to keep tabs on the path taken by tea as it makes its way from farmers in Africa to supermarket chains in the U.K.
“We’re finding it’s really helping us understand where the value exchange is and the different people” involved along the way.
If the same thing could be done with digital media transactions, it would solve lots of issues. “If you can manage to get each and every player to engage in the blockchain, this could take out a lot of the noise,” Weed says.
Unilever is working with IBM iX on its blockchain initiative, which the company’s EVP of Global Marketing, Babs Rangaiah, explains in this interview.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“Blockchain was built exactly for that kind of friction in a supply chain,” says Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing, at marketing services provider IBM iX, which is assisting Unilever in the blockchain project.
Unilever’s effort will come in several phases, the first “in the next few months” being reconciliation of digital data—from measurement to viewability and everything possible in between.
“One of the things that happens when you have so many middlemen is discrepancies become rampant,” Rangaiah says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Meeting, following a presentation by Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed. “And so you typically can’t reconcile that until the end of a flight, and by then it’s a mess. What blockchain does is allow you a single, unified view of how that media buy occurred, and there’s one number.”
Ultimately, Unilever would like to “put the payment system directly into the blockchain for a seamless buy” before moving on to using the technology in the real-time-bidding of digital ad inventory.
Another sought-after benefit is the high-quality, first-party, encrypted consumer data that blockchain will enable. The goal would be that “each member of a blockchain has the appropriate key for the data they can see, but the real advantage of the system is that you’ll get laser targeting like we are not able to do today.”
Even farther down the road, Unilever could use blockchain for various iterations of television media, including over-the-top, “bringing that all together and really putting a whole media buy through blockchain.”
In referencing Weed’s remarks to the IAB attendees, in which the CMO threatened to pull ad dollars from tech platforms that create societal division or don’t protect children, Rangaiah cites the term “In brands we trust.” He believes what will “improve and enable advertising to move forward is to get that trust back in the supply chain and that’s what blockchain does. This is a great solution.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“I think it’s going to have the effect of dramatically reducing hidden fees, hopefully eliminating them, and increasing the amount of spend from marketers that gets all the way to publishers,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Leadership Meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Trust means we have to provide transparency.”
Steps taken by AppNexus include publicly disclosing its “take rate” for its supply-side business, which it says is “by far the lowest in the industry.” It’s extending its transparency on take rates all the way through to the brand.
“So any brand who says ‘where did my money go through my DSP to AppNexus,’ we’ll tell you exactly how much the publisher made,” O’Kelley says.
Partners in this effort include Adobe and third-party auditor Amino Payments.
O’Kelley says the AppNexus DSP, called AppNexus Programmable Platform, is fully transparent for every fee.
“We should see publishers making more money, marketers seeing better outcomes and a dramatic reduction in the inefficient intermediaries that we’ve seen in this space for two decades now.”
He traces the path to opaque digital practices in part to the shift to audience buying in the last decade or so. Brands didn’t seem to care where their ads appeared as long as they were told they were targeting the right people.
That indifference has given way to extreme concern by brands large and small, most notably Procter & Gamble and Unilever, whose Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, used the occasion of the IAB gathering to issue a public threat to pull spending from digital platforms.
“Imagine you’re a marketer. You think you’re buying relevant data but it turns out that’s fraud. Really what you’re spending this on is terrible for your brand and having no known outcome.” O’Kelley says.
In the not-to-distant future, he foresees brands reducing the breadth of inventory they’ll buy, working only with quality publishers “maybe one hop away. But this multiple hops isn’t going to work.” They will also reduce their purchases of third-party data “unless it comes directly from a source” and there will be “a lot fewer intermediaries in the space. I think it’s going to be amazing.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>Other industry semantics need to be updated as well, IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg says in this interview with Beet.TV. The Annual Leadership Meeting takes place Feb. 11-13 at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Palm Desert, CA.
“The time has come to get rid of this notion of sell-side and buy-side. It is deficient and it actually harms everybody because it makes it seem as if brands and their partner organizations are in kind of commander service relationships,” says Rothenberg.
IAB research shows that in the Direct Brand Economy, buyers and sellers come together in “vital integrated supply chain relationships that the brands cannot live without and nor obviously can publishers and others live without.” Thus buy-side, sell-side linguistics constitutes “awful language and ought to be banished for all time.”
The same research casts new light on the notion of “brand safety” in digital advertising environments, according to Rothenberg. Among other things, the research proves it has nothing to do with that “soft thing” called brand reputation but everything to do with unfettered access to first-party data.
Data fuels every function of the brand enterprise, from new-product development to figuring out what to charge individual customers. It’s all done increasingly in real time with decisions made on feedback loops.
“Companies need continuous access to first-party data, which means that it requires the complete trust of its consumer base. No trust equals no data equals no company,” Rothenberg says.
Therefore, brand safety isn’t optional. “It is essential to the future of a brand.”
The IAB has been a major proponent of the need for greater transparency on digital advertising platforms. Rothenberg says 2017 was probably the best year ever in terms of the progress that has been achieved. He points to comments by Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, in an interview with Digiday in which Pritchard says the drive for a more transparent digital ecosystem is “80 percent complete.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg explains why incumbent brands that have been dominant for more than a century need to be more directly connected with their customers and the role publishers play in that interaction. The Annual Leadership Meeting takes place Feb. 11-13 at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Palm Desert, CA.
“The center of gravity is changing,” says Rothenberg.
Brands have traditionally created value by erecting high barriers to entry for competitors and by relying on capital-intensive, owned-and-operated supply chains. Today’s direct brands create value with low barriers, are capital flexible and avail themselves of leased or rented supply chains.
Moreover, indirect brands extract value “not through this very cumbersome, indirect process of working through multiple third parties. Advertising agencies, publishers and retailers. But they extract value increasingly through the direct relationship between the company and the consumer,” says Rothenberg.
Direct-connections with consumers go far beyond being able to interact with them on, say, Twitter, according to Rothenberg. Direct connections generate reams of first-party data.
“And at a modest degree of scale, that first-party data fuels every other function of the enterprise. Product development, service development, customer value analysis, pricing, pricing mechanics. These are the things that modern companies need to compete.”
Not all legacy marketers are lagging on this competition curve. Rothenberg cites Nike as “a perfect example” with its projected 2X increase in direct-to-consumer revenue “in just the next three years.” Procter & Gamble is behind in this regard but is actively “orienting some of their strategy in this direction,” he adds.
Asked about the role of publishers in the modern marketing mix, Rothenberg points to the necessity to “step outside the impressions-based economy” and work to create direct relationships.
“Clearly, publishers always have and will continue to play a role in helping all brands acquire new customers. It’s just happening in many different ways than it used to happen before.”
One reason why popular brands like Madison Reed in hair coloring and Warby Parker in eyeglasses need content marketing to differentiate themselves is that they cannot simply blast out billions of ad impressions.
“Because these companies are drawing promiscuously from the same set of available supply chain resources, they are as subject to and potentially more subject to commoditization perceptions as offline companies,” Rothenberg says. “That makes it very difficult for them to differentiate on the basis of price or function. It needs to be on lifestyle, psychographics and demographics.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
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