But what if machines did it for them?
That’s a future Scott Braley sees emerging. Speaking on a Beet.TV panel, the Ooyala ad platforms GM explained the idea.
“We’re seeing some broadcast customers who use analytics from the player to inform ad load on a little bit more of an optimised basis,” he said.
“We’re moving in that direction where there’s more machine feedback that automates the different number of breaks you can have, the load per break and what-not … adjusting the pod length, the number of breaks per hour.”
Turner has already been experimenting with running fewer, longer, better ads in its breaks, and other TV firms are examining how to make ads more engaging. Braley thinks algorithms can customise the deployment of TV ads for different audiences.
“Certain audiences have a different predilection for consuming content,” he says. “Certain content will attract more affinity from users. Certain devices will generically have different user experiences.
“Looking across those three and figuring out, at any moment in time, if there’s an optimal ad load based on what you know about the user and the audience and the content, then informing the advertising platform to adjust its setting.”
But, also appearing on the panel, Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine thinks linear TV is “a way’s away” from the prospect, whilst Viacom data strategy SVP Gabe Bevilacqua said acceptance of higher ad load comes down to targeting.
“It’s quantifiable, it’s clear – when you are in-target, you’ll watch more of the ads,” he added.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>But one of the partners says the move was just baby steps in what will become a much more full-fledged affair.
OpenAP is a way of introducing commonality around the ways the TV companies describe the many audience characteristics that are now targetable by advertisers through their platforms.
Until now, advertisers who were embracing the new TV targeting opportunity were getting confused by dissimilarities in those characteristics, when all they wanted to do was to to find their intended viewer.
“With OpenAP, we’re taking a first step here,” says Viacom data strategy SVP Gabe Bevilacqua in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Right now, we’re building a foundation, built on consistent audiences, giving the advertiser and agency power and control over who sees their segment, where and how.”
Bevilacqua says OpenAP was a response to ad buyer demand.
“(We) are seeing a ton of demand in the market for ‘let’s do TV a little bit differently’,” he added.
“Pick-up truck intenders with (Fox) is a little bit different from pick-up truck intenders with (Viacom).”
OpenAP is powered by Accenture.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Big computing providers like IBM and Microsoft already have significant cognitive services suites, available to developers through APIs, to perform tasks like text analysis.
But what if those services could also see inside videos? What if they could understand the content of video, so that TV and video platforms could automatically tag their content?
That is what IBM’s Watson and Microsoft’s Cognitive Services are doing. And video ad-tech platform Ooyala just upgraded its own software with tools from the latter, to help its customers do just that.
“The emerging area of investment for our platforms is … the application of cognitive sciences for the specific use case of brand protection,” Ooyala ad platforms GM Scott Braley said in this panel discussion organised by Beet.TV.
“It’s very difficult for anybody who owns a lot of content, who has a broad network of consumer-generated content, to label and categorise that at scale so that brands can know what they’re buying and where they’re buying it.
“The application of these cognitive science platforms are a phenomenal use case for sealing out brand safety.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That may be an intriguing possibility. Indeed, on many over-the-top devices, it may even be the norm.
But, for a television industry whose infrastructure has been built up around the concept of the household, that may be about as granular as advertisers can get, or should want to get.
That was a view expressed at a panel Beet.TV convened to discuss the new techniques.
“Television is bought and sold at the household level,” Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanton said. “You don’t necessarily know who in the household is consuming the content at that time. That is ‘solutions 2.0’ to figure out.”
And Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed that view, saying current currencies for measuring TV ads were built to fit a model based on households, not viewers.
“Nielsen has done a beautiful job in the linear television market,” Leine said. “It’s an extremely trusted currency. There is no equivalent outside of linear television.
“… It’s less important to have a very specific currency for very specific data segments, of which there could be thousands. But there must be an evolution so that we solve for unduplicated reach, cross-platform.”
Regardless of the level of targeting precision, there will be value simply in TV ad delivery over new connected devices, said Ooyala ad platforms GM Scott Braley.
“Television ads are not being viewed, they’re not being seen, they’re not impacting me at all,” he said. “So unskippable OTT inventory is actually pretty sizeable opportunity from a viewability and impact standpoint.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That was the verdict of several executives on a panel of industry folk assembled to discuss TV companies’ response to the burgeoning new multi-screen future.
The key question – how to approach ad sales when platforms are proliferating – leaves many with a sore head. But executives suggested one response: embrace chaos.
“We have to provide consumers with choice,” said video ad-tech firm Ooyala’s ad platforms GM Scott Braley.
“The broadcasters really need to be thinking about it holistically, and deploying analytics sitting across the licensing of content, subscription services, AVOD businesses and connect all of that together to produce a holistic content ROI across all of those models.”
Braley said his company is helping deliver that right now to clients in France, Germany and Sweden.
Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed the view.
“My crystal ball is foggy,” he conceded. “(But) the future is one where there can be multiple eventualities, multiple currencies, flexibility to support (many advertiser choices), different types of datasets and so forth.”
And Viacom data strategy SVP Gabe Bevilacqua said his firm thinks the future will look similar, but more so.
“We are investing in the belief that a transition is happening,” he said. “There is a rate of change that you can’t necessarily, granularly predict.
“But the way you want to address that transition is, ‘Ok, so what do marketers want to buy, how do agencies want to buy this?’ Where the audience is in 2019 versus 2021, I think there’s going to be a lot of similarities in the way a marketer wants to address them.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>“We figured out how to measure peer-to-peer sharing – hat was difficult because there’s no cookies, device IDs or SDKs,” CEO Andre Swanston tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We realised there’s this huge capability gap in connected TV and over-the-top where the legacy data management platforms and solutions that were used to cookies and device IDs were lost. The biggest growth for Tru Optik has been as we’ve shifted away from P2P.”
That has led the Stamford, CT-based business to offer what Swanston says is the largest third-party data marketplace for the medium, including tie-ins to LiveRamp, Experian and Neustar.
This year, Tru Optik even began doing the doing data management and audience segmentation for video ad-tech vendor Videology.
Another recently-inked deal allows advertisers to do super-attribution – establishing whether a viewer who saw a TV ad actually visited a physical store location.
Swanston says: “Our partnership with Ninth Decimal allows people to say, ‘this household that saw an ad on Apple TV, Xbox or Samsung Smart TV … did one of the inhabitants of the household, anonymously, with their mobile device – if they saw an ad for Sears, did they go in to Sears? If they saw an ad for a Yankees game, were they at Yankee Stadium?
“Being able to show that real-world offline attribution, location-based, we are seeing some big brands start to take advantage of.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>The deal took place in November at a reported $200mn value, combining a technology approach that encompassed both TV and digital media advertising.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lorne Brown – Operative’s founding CEO, who became SintecMedia president – says TV networks have to make big changes to respond to a world in which advertisers want to buy more specific audiences.
“If I’m a network, I need to change a lot of the things I’m doing,” he says. Brown says networks want to sell inventory in a mix of ways – traditional prime-time GRPs as well as new pockets of inventory like in a multitude of digital platform partnerships.
“Networks have to take every piece of supply and add on new supply, like a partnership with Apple and Snapchat, and pull it all together – that requires a new way of thinking about workflow. It’s a whole new way of thinking about your inventory and how you’re going to sell it.”
For its part, the new-look SintecMedia is focusing on three core areas following the Operative buy.
Universal product catalogue.
Automation
Optimisation
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That’s the view according to Steve Murtos, an ad agency executive who co-founded a digital video activation practice to help advertisers take advantage.
“We’re counting upwards of 60n households in the marketplace, which puts us at more than 50% US coverage,” Matter More Media co-founder Steve Murtos tells Beet.TV in this video interview, referring to the current deployment footprint of addressable TV, the name given to a range of technologies that let advertisers target TV ads at the household level.
“The conversations are starting to change. Advertisers are starting to think strategically about how to link all of their audience data together.”
But Murtos wants more. Addressable TV advertising could revolutionise the game in local markets. But local pay-TV providers remain limited, only able to sell two minutes of ads per hour for themselves.
Asked if he thinks that will change, Murtos says: “I hope so.
“There’s a lot tied up in the carriage agreements between MVPDs and networks. We’ll start to see solutions coming over the top, which are already in the market today, that will help change that dynamic. As we look cross-screen, beyond the TV space, there will be opportunities in that space as well.”
Matter More Media was founded last year by Murtos and Tracey Scheppach to offer advice on next-generation, data-driven video and TV advertising strategy.
The company is focusing much of its efforts on bringing to TV direct mail marketers and mid-market brands—described as having smaller budgets and including “savvy digital marketers”—that have never before embraced the medium.
Last month, the pair announced an engagement with Tapad that includes the use of Tapad’s Device Graph to measure the actual performance of media across channels.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>But the proliferation of consumer devices – from phones and tablets, to consoles and connected TVs – has changed all that.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, comScore national TV sales SVP Carol Hinnant explains how the company has upgraded its cross-platform media measurement – and what’s coming next.
“We have invested in a total home panel,” Hinnant says.” It’s the first time that comScore has invested in data from hardware – it is a meter device that is installed in homes we’ve recruited to be part of the panel.
“It goes in to their WiFi router, to pick up all activity in a household – and we mean all activity. It picks up Internet Of Things in addition to gaming devices and streaming and sticks and everything you can think of.”
Specifically, comScore has installed the hardware in 12,500 homes, giving it sight of around 150,000 consumer digital devices when at home.
The quest? To understand where modern audiences are spending their time.
The router-based panel is in addition to comScore’s far larger general panel.
And comScore bundles its cross-platform media measurement in to two offerings – Xmedia and ExtendedTV, a new product due to launch that will specifically measure TV content across an array of screens.
In testing for a year, Hinnant says ExtendedTV will launch this Q2 or Q3.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>But, as the demands of delivering TV-like experiences at scale grow, now it is also tapping Adobe technology to go large.
Before NAB Show, the company announced a deal with Adobe to integrate its own platform with the larger company’s technology.
At the event, Adobe business development head Kevin Towes explained the detail to Beet.TV.
“Ooyala has a great customer set that goes across the globe in all kinds of segments,” he said.
“They’re working with our TV SDK on Adobe Primetime.
“Adobe Primetime creates incredible TV-like experiences that for media and entertainment companies.
“Ooyala is bringing Primetime in to its Ooyala player on the Ooyala platform. Their customers are going to have access to the great, high-quality playback experience with ad insertion.”
Ahead of the show, Ooyala chairman Stephen Elop also named Jonathan Huberman its CEO, formerly CEO of Syncplicity.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Well, those days are gone. Now, television networks want to deliver round-the-clock TV channels over the internet – and the quality can be even better than cable TV, according to one technology exec.
“The internet was never built with the whole notion of having live, linear 24/7 channel on it,” Noreen Hafez, global product marketing director of network optimisation company Akamai, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
But Akamai has recently rearchitected its offering, launching a suite called Media Services Live that includes UDP acceleration and remaps content around network congestion bottlenecks – and which Hafez says can stream TV in higher definition than, well, TV.
At NAB Show, Hafez was showing visitors a comparative demo of one channel delivered, respectively, over cable and over the new technology.
“We’re watching the quality and the latency between the two,” she says. “We’re way better in quality – higher bit rates, crisp picture, resolution – we’re two to three seconds ahead of traditional broadcast cable television.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adobe professional video editing senior product manager Al Mooney explains he wants to offer something to please both the high end and the low.
“The type of people who want to tell stories with video is very different to five years ago,” Mooney says. “We’re seeing a whole new generation of people who want to make video. Not all of them have the skills. Our high-end services can be daunting.
“Every release, we improve the first-start experience, we try to guide users through and demystify it. We think a lot about helping users without deep skills. More and more you’re seeing lighter-weight applications of devices, think about Premiere Clip, a simple editor that runs on iOS and Android.”
In a world traditionally dominated by Avid, Adobe Premiere Pro is now rising in Hollywood, used to cut movies like Gone Girl.
And Mooney used NAB Show to announced a new version of the Pro product that includes new tools for color grading, easier sound effects and new options for integrating motion graphics.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Others may observe how TV networks themselves are now launching head-long in to offering audience-based ad-buying solutions.
But Nielsen says it has been doing that for years.
“We’re very supportive of OpenAP and all these initiatives that are rolling across the networks,” says Nielsen Media Research product management SVP Kelly Abcarian, referring to the partnership between Fox, Turner and Viacom to offer targeted ad buying for linear, as well as similar plans from NBC Universal and A+E Networks. “We’ve been doing this for decades.”
Referring to Nielsen Catalina and Buyer Reports data services the firm launched back in 2014, Abcarian adds that Nielsen can help TV networks offer buyers the granular and individual viewer data they want.
“We have historical benchmarks and data that allow the industry to rapidly move against this new television season, to transition from age/sex buying to true audience segmentation buying,” she says.
Nielsen’s new method for measuring cross-platform viewing of TV and digital content using a single metric, Total Content Ratings, was delayed again after key client NBC Universal dubbed it “bad, inaccurate and misleading”.
But the firm isn’t done trying to enhance its TV measurement products. “We’re going to be enhancing the size of our panels dramatically, 2x across the top 44 DMAs, as well as bringing set-top data that enriches our in-market panels … to truly reflect that consumer,” Abcarian concludes.
“That will be rolling out … over the back half of this year… we’ll look to take that out to currency in 2018.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>The media measurement firm’s local TV EVP says local TV has suffered from absent and spotty data that would show increasing overall consumption across devices. Now he sees better times.
“Local is a $22bn industry,” Walsh tells Beet.TV in this video interview, “and it’s only going to get larger as a result of two things:
Walsh says comScore’s 100 million-person US panel is going to be merged with a tagged approach to measurement so that TV operators can count viewers, even if they are watching from out-of-market using a digital device.
comScore merged last year with TV measurement firm Rentrak to bring the universes together.
“There’s been a lot of missed dollars locally,” Walsh adds. “We’re going to be able to report on a TV station’s total audience across all platforms.”
That may shine a light on local TV viewing that, Walsh says, is healthier than sceptical reports make out.
“People talk about TV viewing going down – nothing could be further form the truth,” he concludes. “TV viewing is going up. It’s just not being measured completely.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That’s the view of one ad-tech vendor exec whose company is currently considering which data sets to opt for.
Asked to snapshot the current lay of the land in targeting ads for connected TV boxes, Neustar TV and video partnerships head Anthony Slyter tells Beet.TV: “Together, agency and media sellers are actively trying to educate marketers on the 101 of all things advanced television. It is a different vocabulary and language. Some education needs to take place. Some things from digital translate and some do not. The proof is in the pudding at this point.”
Neustar is an ad-tech company offering data management platform, customer data intelligence, marketing analytics, activation, compliance solutions and fraud detection.
It is one of those approaching the problem, for brands, of unifying customer data inputs to achieve better results. And it is assessing its role in data-fuelled TV ad planning in linear.
“The piece still upcoming for us is linear television,” Slyter adds. “We can and do work with TV viewership assets (like) Simulmedia …
“But Neustar is actively evaluating which TV data sets should we plan to be working with in the future to do indexed or data-informed linear TV buys, so we’re truly cross-channel from cookie, mobile, connected, addressable and in to linear TV.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>TiVo’s VP of Product Management & Business Development says the moves are revolutionizing the planning and buying of TV ads – but only thanks to advanced software that using predictive audience assessments.
“It’s all about audience buying and selling on linear TV,” Joan FitzGerald tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Broadcast, cable network, national premium advertising … , for the first time, is going to be guaranteed based on those audience targets.
“In the old days, it was (planned using) a network daypart grid. The new daypart is using data science and machine learning to predict the presence of the audience in future inventory. When you’re selling inventory now, you have to deliver it at some point in the future.
“So these new systems such as TiVo’s Audience Management Platform have very powerful prediction engines that enable clients to leverage TV big data in ways that they haven’t been able to do before.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Mike Bologna and Jamie Power – who were CEO and managing partner, respectively, of Modi Media – now become president and COO of one2one Media, a company helping agencies to plan, implement and measure advanced TV advertising on multi-channel video programming distributors.
“This is the third job of my life,” Bologna tells Beet.TV. Prior to that, I was with GroupM and WPP for 19 years and, before that, I was pumping gas at Texaco gas station.
“What the industry lacked was an independent entity to bring together all the various constituents to make this a one-stop shop. Taking data, matching it against subscriber files and sending different ads to relevant households and tying it back to sales… that’s a lot of work, and a specialised skill set.”
one2one sets out to aggregate addressable inventory and create a managed service so that, instead of talking with multiple MVPDs and working with multiple different data sets and trying to stitch together measurement and sales data, it can all be done by one2one.
The move connects back to Bologna’s association with Nick Troiano, the former CEO of advanced TV advertising company BlackArrow, whose acquisition by Cross MediaWorks in 2015 also made Troiano CEO of the group, which serves as a holding group to Cadent, The Cross Agency and now one2one.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>So far, video has remained a black box – what little data there is about its content and context tends to be added manually and is partial.
But now the machine learning titans have brought their cloud software to pitch to TV companies at NAB Show.
We have already heard how Microsoft’s Cognitive Services has a new video API, used by Ooyala, that can bring facial analysis, voice recognition, spoken word recognition, written word identification, on-screen word understanding and in-motion object detection to bear on digital videos.
And now David Mowrey, head of product in IBM Watson’s media division, no less, tells Beet.TV his machine learning tool is touting the same capabilities.
“It’s about finding all the unstructured data that’s in video, pulling that out in to something that can be used,” Mowrey says. “Once you have that, then you feed that in to a personalisation engine or your ad optimisation products, and really we can increase the value of that video.”
Mowrey says IBM’s Watson magic, when worked on video, can read and deliver:
text recognition
closed captioning
audio sentiment analysis
scene markers
keywords of content
event understanding
face recognition
character recognition for logos and text in videos
“We can leverage that both on the buy and the sell side – find audience for it and get it in front of the right audience at the right time,” he adds.
Media and entertainment is a relatively new client area for IBM to explore.
Looks like video is heading in to a new era of automatic recognition and tagging, one which could help both publishers and ad companies alike.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>But how are marketers really looking at the opportunity?
Ad-tech firm Videology commissioned a survey from Advertiser Perceptions to find out. The result gives an indication in to advertisers’ concerns, priorities and viewpoints.
In this video interview with Beet.TV at NAB Show, Videology CEO Scott Ferber summarizes three key findings:
1. A tipping point
“75% of those who responded felt that advanced TV was critical for them in the next 12 months. We felt that was a tipping point.
“When we saw that information, we felt that now was the time to deploy an advanced television planning tool that allows agencies and marketers to use beyond age and gender data against linear TV planning…”
2. Scale is too small
“77% said the number one issue was finding premium content. 63% said they need those environments at scale. The big challenge right now is … it’s not covering the entire spectrum of premium content and it’s not quite at the scale marketers and agencies want.
“So we deployed a consortium concept that allows us to bring together multiple networks and publishers.”
3. Cross-screen analytics are key
“44% of all campaigns for the next 12 months, they expect to be doing on a converged basis .. across screens with linear and digital at the same time. That’s a pretty big deal.
“We think it’s become critical … to understand the cross-channel panel and digital-linear.
The rest of the study is available from Videology.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>So Microsoft has brought its Cognitive Services machine learning suite to bear on video. Hosting a booth at NAB Show, Microsoft Azure Media Services principal program manager Martin Wahl explains to Beet.TV it means cloud technology used to power features like:
These are some advanced tools. Azure was already powering a computer vision API to understand static images and a face API to detect faces in photos, as well as various other APIs like speech and translation.
Now it is joining them with a video API, currently in preview, claiming to produce stable video output, detect motion, create intelligent thumbnails and detect and tracks faces.
Not only that, but Wahl says the tech can work in real-time – so that content owners can and advertisers can make real-time decisions, translate to another language or develop interactive apps around videos, as they play out.
Ooyala has integrated with the technology for an intelligent video suite it announced ahead of NAB Show.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That is the view of one consultant helping broadcasters navigate a path through international waters.
“Each individual geography is moving at its own speed,” says MTM London co-founder Jon Watts in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“In the UK, we’re moving to a new measurement panel system, which will do a much better job at taking account multi-platform viewing. In the US, you have two big measurement providers both adapting to do multi-screen.
“In other markets, it’s more uneven. In central and eastern Europe, the panels are much smaller, the broadcasters fund them much less well, the underlying infrastructure is pretty poor quality, it’s much harder to do (these) kind of things.”
That, Watts says, poses a challenge to big global channel operators that just want to template their operations from country to country.
“If you’re, say, Viacom … it means you don’t really have an option to do a one-size-fits-all solution,” he adds. “You’re going to have to do it different in every market.”
Watts’ MTM put together a just-out research paper from Videology, which examines the state of addressable TV across European markets.
It puts the UK at the most advanced with Spain lagging behind at the bottom. The report says effective measurement is not an essential pre-requisite for the development of addressable TV advertising, but can help to unlock significant extra value when the right kinds of investments are made.
Watts adds: “You would like to be able to unlock pan-regional campaigns more easily. We’re seeing a lot of fragmentation. Fragmentation is increasing, not decreasing.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>The roots of OpenAP, an unusual collaboration among longtime competitors, can be traced to information conversations about a growing desire on the buy side, according to Noah Levin, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks.
“What ended up happening was Fox, Turner and Viacom would bump into each other in the lobbies of agencies and the agencies were talking to us all about the same thing,” Levine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show. “Hey, I actually want to move beyond age and gender. I want to be able to target high-income households. I want to be able to target my first party data.”
Buyers’ desire was borne out of frustration at having to deploy advanced audience targeting piecemeal.
“It made it very, very difficult to be able to allow that agency and that buyer to understand the results in a consistent manner,” Levine says.
“While demand for audience targeting has grown significantly, adoption has been limited by the fact that audience buying is not as transparent, as consistent and as easy as traditional guarantees,” the founding OpenAP members said in a joint statement on March 15. “It doesn’t need to be that complicated. That changes today.”
The first phase of OpenAP enables buyers to consistently onboard precision audience segments across its participating members for easy activation and receive third-party campaign reporting. So far, Accenture, comScore and Nielsen are providing support to the consortium.
“One of our favorite things to talk about at Fox as an example is self-actualizing truck intenders. You could take the self-actualizing segment and take truck intenders and do a fusion of the two,” Levine says by way of example.
Phase two of OpenAP is still in the defining stage, according to Levine, but it will involve additional datasets and panels for targeting purposes and it “will also include a focus on digital.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>While “it’s early days” in such use of AI, “it’s an exciting solution to bring to market,” says Scott Braley, GM, Advertising Platforms, Ooyala, which recently announced a partnership with Microsoft’s machine learning platform.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 NAB Show, Braley outlines the potential benefits of machine learning for helping advertisers steer clear of unsafe environments. He also suggests a “do over” in which the best practices of linear and digital television would be brought to bear on engaging viewers in the quickly expanding OTT space.
There is some labeling and metadata associated with individual pieces of content, but the process usually doesn’t go far enough, according to Braley. “Certainly when you get into user-generated content, it’s very difficult to get all of that labeled properly,” he says.
AI can be deployed to score, label and categorize content “at scale and with more efficiency.” This would pave the way for more content available programmatically “without having to deal with armies of people just reviewing content manually.”
As more consumers opt for alternatives to pay subscription TV models, younger audiences in particular are flocking to OTT viewing. Common traits among this cohort are media gratification and choice.
“We think from targeting standpoint, the OTT environment is a great hybrid opportunity to do over in a sense,” says Braley.
Combining the best practices of the digital and television worlds would mean not deploying the hyper targetability and addressability of digital and eschewing “index-based measurement models like Nielsen for TV.”
Braley sees this approach involving targeting on a household level using as much census-level data as possible and “decisioning dynamically but maybe not with the one-to-one, user-base that we’re doing in digital today.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>“Monetization is certainly front and center,” Jeremy Helfand, VP, M&E Industry Solutions, Adobe, and VP, Adobe Primetime, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
He likens the shift in focus from audience fragmentation to broadcasters exercising a new muscle. “They need to think more like retailers, understanding who their audiences are,” says Helfand.
This involves having a business model that supports advertising not only of a digital nature but “converged advertising across both linear and digital,” he adds.
With the recent addition of video demand-side platform TubeMogul to its various cloud offerings, Adobe is looking to connect the buy and sell sides for “a common definition of audience to increase the value of advertising,” regardless of what screen it’s delivered to.
More recently, Adobe and video monetization technology and services provider Ooyala formed a partnership that will enable Ooyala to “leverage the playback and ad insertion capabilities of Adobe Primetime to help enhance their suite of products,” Helfand explains.
“Pairing our IVP solutions with Adobe gives even more insight into analytics and measurement, building common data sets across every function of video all with a single goal. To grow your business,” Ooyala Co-founder and SVP of Products and Solutions, Belsasar Lepe, said in a statement announcing the partnership.
Adobe’s latest report on digital video shows that “TV everywhere” has doubled in size over the last two years. “What’s really interesting is as we watch consumption of that content, TV is coming back into the living room,” Hefland says.
The highest concentration of daytime consumption is happening on mobile devices, but from 4-9 p.m. connected TV devices are dominant, according to the Adobe report.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>This is easier said than done in a world marked by the proliferation of skinny programming bundles and rampant cannibalization. The capital demands of investing in infrastructure and platforms can be a dizzying maze for established broadcasters to navigate while trying to cling to their audiences and generate new ones.
Seeking to be the tour guide for this trip is Accenture, which just weighed in with its annual road map called Bringing TV To Life, which provides strategies for both traditional video content distributors such as TV networks and programmers, as well as content aggregators such as pay TV operators.
“The interesting thing about a broadcaster is that they are a B to B business generally but at the same time they have B to C capabilities,” Sef Tuma, who is MD & Global Lead at Accenture Digital Video and the author of Bringing TV To Life, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
“In their old world it was very broadcast capabilities. The fact is they don’t have any of the CRM, one-to-one or any sort of relationship-based capabilities in their operating model,” Tuma says.
The delicate balancing act is one of retaining and growing the value of each of household while investing in generating engagement and, most important, reach. “Because reach is really what their competitors care about, whether that’s Google or Facebook. They care reach that’s unbounded by infrastructure,” he adds.
Tuma cites as one example BBC, an Accenture client that “took power of all of their digital capabilities and put a personalization platform under it to be able to start creating new ways of having conversations with the audience.”
Broadcasters need to understand their audiences not solely for the traditional purposes of advertising, but to inform decisions about content investment and “be able to find their most valuable audience.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>