But many a native ad vendor has proved that theory wrong. These days, it is commonplace for native ads to be bought and sold through programmatic trading platforms. And the same can happen for native video ads, according to one of the platforms.
“The market has definitely adopted native as a standardized, programmatically-viable and programmatically-sellable medium,” says Sharethrough’s Dan Greenberg, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Programmatic is everything. There’s a component of our business, which is publishers selling directly, and even that’s shifting to programmatic … the future of that direct sale is private marketplaces and programmatic deals.”
Sharethrough has been one of the leading exponents of technology that lets advertisers and publishers deliver ad units that look like surrounding content in to a principally feed-based publisher environment.
It now helps the likes of CNN, Disney, Time and RollingStone.com do that. And last year it enabled an integration with Adobe Advertising Cloud, allowing advertisers to scale their ad campaigns.
In our interview, Greenberg speaks fondly about preserving an open web funded by both advertising and subscriptions, as a foil to the walled gardens which many advertisers and publishers are growing suspicious about.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Within OpenAP, Nielsen and comScore are “locked in,” Ruby says in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “We’ve got their MRI fusion datasets, Catalina datasets, the MBI datasets all coming through. With comScore, we’ve got all of their syndicated datasets. So we feel like we’ve kind of got the right breadth of what is an industry standard could be within OpenAP today.”
What gets “really exciting,” according to Ruby, is being able to move beyond the traditional measurement providers. Options include set-top VOD data, “into more of the MVPD data that we can actually be leveraging, more specifically the IP connected data” along with data from smart TV’s.
“Really what it comes down to is we want to enable as many of these datasets as we can so that we can bring them all to an open playing field and then let brands and agencies determine where they’re going to see the most value,” Ruby says.
And then there is the promise of linear addressable, a key piece of the cross-platform puzzle. “We’ve managed to be able to really corner it with Hulu, we’re looking at Comcast set-top box VOD and really making inroads there. But more importantly, we’re starting to think about what we can do in the live, linear space and how we can actually start looking at ad versioning and addressable copy splitting in live linear.”
IP-delivered streaming content poses the potential for one-to-one relationships between brands and viewers. But it gets pretty complex with broadcast TV and in a primetime broadcast environment, according to Ruby.
“And I don’t think that’s a future that we’re going to see immediately, but it is one that we’re starting to really understand how the technology comes together.”
Audience targeting tends to be “bespoke” on a vertical-by-vertical category basis, with automotive in particular having a longer “tail to purchase” than others. “People aren’t necessarily going to see a couple of ads for a new SUV on TV and then immediately go and buy one,” says Ruby. “They actually need to be identified as in market and not just in market but likely to convert in market and even within that, there’s a much longer tail that you want to look at for performance.”
Fox is working with auto brands to figure out how to construct campaigns over time while monitoring both the performance of an individual campaign for a awareness of a new sedan model “as well as any particular behaviors of driving greater traffic into dealerships, all the way through to eventually a new lease or a new purchase.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Many brands have spent years building up databases of their own customers. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale says the ad-tech world has historically operated differently – but now must meet marketers half-way.
“Marketers often think (about) CRM,” Casale says. “They know their customer. Ad-tech’s been very focused on IDs, collecting data – but hasn’t bridged the gap to the marketers’ data set in the way that I think identity will allow us to.”
Compared with targeting a set of known identities, the world of advertising technology is arguably more like finding needles in the haystack of the net. But, hand-in-hand ad-tech and mar-tech could light up new opportunities for brands.
Casale’s company is involved in initiatives to make it happen. Last May, AppNexus, Index Exchange and LiveRamp created The Advertising ID Consortium, a big initiative to create a single pool of user identities. The consortium is trying to advance two pieces of technology:
The aim is two-fold:
“If we try to solve this problem collectively together, there’s a very good chance that we can create an open, very democratized graph that achieves enough scale that marketers will take seriously.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Former Starcom MediaVest Group advanced television specialist Tracey Scheppach has a foot in both of those spheres as CEO & Co-Founder of her agency, Matter More Media. Scheppach helps new advanced-TV technology providers while doing direct brand activation based on CRM and other data.
In this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018 conference, Scheppach refers to research presented by Forrester analyst Jim Nail showing that 15% of brand-side executives have executed addressable TV campaigns. “If you look at the law of adoption, we’re at the tipping point,” Scheppach says, echoing Nail’s conclusion.
However, the addressable TV work that’s been done so far has been derived from household address files. “Being at a digital conference with LiveRamp, the question is how can you bring digital data to household level addressable television. Which is hard because so far it’s built off a street address file versus an IP or cookie file or a device ID,” she says.
Scheppach points to emerging IP-based technology, noting that companies like Sinclair and Sorenson are pursuing dynamic ad insertion to smart TV sets. Then there is the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard for over-the-air broadcast TV.
With ATSC 3.0, transmission will be “IP-based, completely mobile, always on, census-level data, full addressability, which is going to open up more and more inventory to be addressable,” Scheppach says.
Since starting Matter More Media and being on the “front lines” with clients, Scheppach has a closer view of the impact of agency holding companies having separated their creative assets from their media operations. This can be a stumbling block to perfecting, executing and tracking the four elements of successful addressable TV campaigns: the idea, its production values, media channel selection and analytics, according to Scheppach.
“All four pieces work together, all four pieces should be at the table together, not in separate siloes not ever to meet. You just can’t throw the creative over the wall to the media people and just have them execute,” she says.
In its sell-side consulting work, the agency helps people “trying to bring product to market, like a Sinclair, like programmers. They have to figure out how to structure the technology and pitch it to clients.”
In the agency’s direct activation for clients, Scheppach is pursuing “anyone that has a CRM file. I think catalogers are just a natural fit.”
She thinks addressable can help marketers for whom the expense of traditional TV has been a barrier. Some brands with catalogs or direct-mail campaigns are trying to figure out “how do I make it more accountable? How do I make it more storytelling? How do I build my brand out of it? And sight sound and motion is going to do that better than paper.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Could voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home be the next big technology to light up the data-collection opportunity?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comcast’s FreeWheel data platform GM Claudio Marcus discusses four categories of data-collection opportunity – and says the best approach is blending multiple of them to overcome individual weaknesses.
“Smart TV data makes it possible to understand OTT viewing of TV content that has already been fingerprinted,” Marcus says.
“We see some of these other data sets as complementary, but not really substitutes, and that’s because they bring different attributes to the table.
“Automated content recognition, primarily audio-based, (is) basically devices that listen for what’s in the background. (But) those devices are very dependent on the quality of the audio conditions.
“The newest entrants are some of the voice recognition applications for the home, like Google Home, for example, right? What we know is, because the X1 set-top box for Comcast has audio-based controls, we know that, in our Comcast subscriber homes, about 15% of all the commands are via voice. The rest are still via the traditional remote.
“If you’re relying 100% on voice-command data, you’re going to be missing out a lot of the viewing data. You may be able to pick up … what other types of programs people are so engaged with that they actually call them out by name. But, at the same time, you’re not capturing the full breadth of the viewing data.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But one tie-up that was not immediately obvious was video. Relative to modern consumption habits, video viewing had still not truly taken off, and video didn’t even garner a mention in the companies’ announcement.
Fast-forward, however, and video is all the rage and, last year, Acxiom and LiveRamp pooled several assets to make video advertising more effective.
As Craig Berkley tells Beet.TV in this video interview, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships with LiveRamp’s 500 digital and mobile integrations.
In addition, the pair pooled Acxiom’s InfoBase, PersonX and 1,000 propensity models with Data Store, a market for hundreds of third-party syndicated data sets.
Berkley, previously at Acxiom but now head of revenue for LiveRamp TV, tells Beet.TV: “There’s several value propositions for TV. One is now you’re not dealing with two separate identity graphs in the digital space and in the TV space. Now you have one seamless graph.”
The aim is to use a single set of connected data to help ad buyers deliver across mobile, digital and television.
“Now, we have over 500 of the biggest consumer marketing brands,” Berkley adds. “We have access to their CRM file, their customer database. So, in the event they want to use that for advertising, we can easily get it from point A to point B so that you can execute on it.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I think we have to back up from that. What we’re really doing is talking about the integration of mass reach with sophistication of measurement, targeting and ultimately relevance,” says the Managing Director of strategic advisory firm MediaLink.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the RampUp 2018 conference, Spiegel talks about the “next wave” in identity resolution and why marketers should recognize the value of a blend of more granular targeting and pure scale.
“Identity is going to power the ad business and marketing, however you want to define it,” says Spiegel. “Identity is the underpinning of future success without any question.”
He observes that the gap between companies like Facebook and Google and big media companies in being able to more precisely target audiences is shrinking as the latter expand their digital footprints and seek better linear TV options. “You now have this whole more sophisticated level of targeting and measurement that the industry on the more traditional media side couldn’t have before.”
All the distribution points of content “built into that ecosystem is the power of identity, the potential of identity anyway, if they stitch it together the right data,” says Spiegel. That connected to “this massive world of linear television, which by the way is still really big and still a lot of money and still has a lot of value, those two things combined I think are huge.”
The trick, he adds, is understanding identity with sophistication. On-boarding data and employing device graphs is all well and good, but the hardest part is matching individuals to their households.
“We’ll keep talking about matching and on-boarding, and there’s value. But what we’ll really start to talk about is the applications built on top of a sophisticated identity resolution system. That’s what I think’s much more interesting.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It has started to unpack its technology, making it available to a wider set of customers.
That started this month, when Nielsen launched Advanced Audience Forecasting, a tool for TV audience forecasting, built on Clypd technology.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Clypd’s Jason Burke explains the strategy.
“This is the first of several areas where we’ll start to take some of the core components of our platform and make them available for other use cases beyond ad sales,” he says.
“This is the first time we’ve started to decouple some of the features that were part of our end-to-end ad sales workflow for extending within the enterprise, within the companies, to extend to other stakeholders.”
Who could want to buy in? Burke is targeting ad sales teams, pricing inventory teams and industry analysts alike
For Nielsen, the tool will enable custom advertiser-defined segments and more than 80 pre-defined audience segments curated by the Advanced Targeting Standards Group (ATSG) across key advertising verticals including CPG, automotive, finance, and telecom, providing preliminary insights into the total addressable inventory on all measured US national TV networks.
“To allow audience-based buying and selling of TV to scale, the tools need to exist,” Burke adds.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Over the course of many months, brands like Procter & Gamble “have really asked that we as an industry start being more introspective about what we’re actually providing,” Feigenson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “And I think what we’re seeing as a result of that is a group of companies that are spending more time making sure that their products are actually what they say they are.”
What are the end results? “That’s healthy for everybody. It’s going to grow digital, it’s going to grow use of data,” says Feigenson.
He observes that there are different uses for data—citing the top and bottom of the funnel—but that the industry has become “so obsessed with the tactics of media” that good brand strategy may have taken a back seat.
“Bad brand strategy won’t yield a result, good strategy will,” Feigenson says.
We’ve moved to a world where “we look at individual campaigns and those individual campaigns are used as a proxy for other strategies on or off. That translates into data as well.”
While large, deterministic datasets may be great for targeting, they’re not necessarily representative to a whole market analysis, according to Feigenson. He believes that more companies that have first-party data or rent large, third-party datasets “are going to calibrate that against panels to get a very holistic view of their consumer.”
Until recently, Simmons data were used to help plan media in a linear capacity. “We’re excited that after 60 years we finally realized that programmatic and we’ve on-boarded our segments through Acxiom and LiveRamp to be used in programmatic exchanges.”
The company’s game plan encompasses better technology plus “bigger and faster data.” The goal at the end of the day “is to get anybody to a game changing consumer insight about an audience quicker than they can get a cup of Starbucks coffee.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But, when it comes to insights in to advanced TV advertising, one company is now bringing capabilities to Europe that it says have existed in the US for years.
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on TV-viewing cues. It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes. That underlying technology is now going global.
“What’s starting to happen now is, beyond U.S., some of these integrations are rolling out in some of the European countries, and it is a phenomenal new dataset unleashed in that market,” says Ashish Chordia, Alphonso CEO. “What was happening in the U.S. in 2014, 2015, is now going to happen in some of the European countries.”
Alphonso last year launched Insights, an offering giving in to the airings, spend and exposure for US TV ads. It can tell you, for instance, where Amazon has been spending its money to advertise its Echo speaker’s multi-room audio capability.
The global spread of the chips and tech that support Alphonso’s content monitoring means Insights, too, can go global.
“We are starting out with the UK first,” Chordia says. “We just released our Insights product in private beta couple of weeks ago for select set of partners. We anticipate that will be publicly available within the next 90 days.
“What that means is, for the first time in the history of United Kingdom, there will be a place where someone can go, insights-uk.alphonso.tv, and see every single ad that are on local broadcast or cable, whether they’re running on Sky, or Channel 5, or Channel 6, or Channel 4.
“They’re going to be able to see digital-quality insights, just like we do in the US now for UK ads available in UK.”
If the idea that their TV could be listening or watching for their viewing habits, reporting it back to tech companies and advertisers, is enough to spook some viewers in parts of Europe, Chordia says his practice is above-board.
“Because Alphonso is on the consumer device, has a consumer touch point, we’re actually in a much stronger position than most data companies, in that being able to collect the consent from the consumer in the right fashion,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The EVP of Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales at NBCU talks about taking an agnostic approach to more advanced audience targeting and why the Super Bowl and Olympics made for an “amazing” February in this interview with Beet.TV.
Providing a better experience for viewers and advertisers isn’t just about reducing the number of ads. “It’s making the ads work harder,” Rosen says during a break at RampUp 2018, the annual conference by LiveRamp. Using information about contextual targeting is one way that data can better inform relevance of advertising to specific programs.
“All that together should make for a better user experience for our customer, the viewer, and also therefore make the advertising work even better.”
He says advanced TV “keeps getting better and better” as more marketers build out their own data sets. By “plugging into our world of Comcast set-top box data” and privacy compliant identity matching, they are able to transcend “the general lowest common denominator of age and gender.”
So while TV still provides much-desired magnitude, “now it’s about mass targeted reach. So you still have scale, you still have premium brand safety content, but now we can apply data, which means that every dollar is working harder,” Rosen says.
He describes audience-targeting options at NBCU—on a managed-service approach or self-service—as making it agnostic when it comes to the preferences of agencies and brands.
“It’s not programmatic in the way that digital thinks of it, because the connotation there is that it’s remnant or bottom of the waterfall,” Rosen says. “In our case it’s all of our quality inventory across all of our scripted and non-scripted programming that is available for the decisions to be made at the program level across our portfolio.”
February was “an amazing” month for NBCU with the Super Bowl and Olympics. “There is nothing more powerful to unite the country as these sports events and the great storytelling behind it.”
Starting with the 2016 Olympics in Rio “we moved toward looking at total audience delivery as a recognition that yes, so much happens on that main linear screen, but so much of the viewing of this content is happening on every device that this content is available on.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That’s because agencies are best equipped to “understand people, what they do, how they buy, what they’re motivated by and brands. And how to connect media and brands in the right media environment together,” says Desmond.
In this interview at RampUp 2018, the annual LiveRamp conference, Laura Desmond, the former CEO of Starcom and now Founder & CEO of the new consultancy Eagle Vista Partners, talks about the tools and skillsets agencies will need to best leverage omnichannel marketing.
Referring to Tobaccowala as “my very smart old colleague,” Desmond says of his prediction, “I think broadly that’s right.”
In the days of the 15% media commission for agencies, the impact of such a spending decline would have had a different effect. Now it means that agencies must invest more not only in creativity but also in data and science.
“And agencies are without question in that space the undisputed leaders of putting that alchemy together on behalf of a client, on behalf of their brands. I don’t think that’s going to change,” Desmond says.
Agencies need data platforms and streams that encompass not only brand, media and buying but all kinds of data. This can range from weather to purchasing information “to how people use screens when they are in store, out of store, mobile, location,” she adds.
“All those data pieces and streams have to come together and agencies are going to need to use technology and software to better capture intelligence in an instant of time. Because people and human hands just can’t do all of that data crunching themselves.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>To CEO Tim Cadogan, the industry as a whole can succeed as well by adopting recent policies to address widespread quality issues.
“We think that the challenge now has a clear answer. Which is adopt the existing quality standards and run with them,” Cadogan says in this interview with Beet.TV while attending RampUp 2018, the annual LiveRamp event.
He’s referring to the ads.txt initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and standards promulgated by the Trustworthy Accountability Group.
“If a buyer buys based on TAG, buys based on ads.txt as P&G is doing, they solve eighty to ninety percent of the quality problems and they can trust the supply through which they’re buying,” says Cadogan.
OpenX is a new entrant in the video space. “We’ve benefitted from the fact that probably eighty percent of our buyers are existing buyers,” some of which have significant quality video inventory. “In the first two quarters of us working in video, about half of our leading partners are running video inventory through us.”
While announcing its 2017 financial results this week, OpenX said it would spend around $25 million this year on quality initiatives, up from $16 million last year, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
OpenX is the #1 ranked independent exchange for ads.txt, meaning the top 1,000 publishers rank Google first and OpenX second, according to Cadogan. Meanwhile, it’s put some distance between itself and competitors in dealing with the new overseas GDPR privacy regulations, “which puts all of our publishers in compliance with GDPR four months before the deadline.”
Cadogan is on the board of Acxiom, which owns LiveRamp, so he wore two hats at RampUp 2018.
“From an OpenX point of view, we are interested in helping buyers identify the users that they want to go after.” Two areas in particular are mobile and location data, “which we still think is a little bit sub-optimal, could be improved, and we’re very interested in ways to continue to prove identification more generally in the app environment.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is the view of one of the leading ad-tech platforms helping to inject ever-more video in to its historic programmatic operations.
“Connected television spend on our platform from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017 grew over 500%,”The Trade Desk inventory partnerships SVP Tim Sims tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Now, we’re starting to get into a territory of real dollars moving into the connected television channel in programmatic, which is really exciting as we look forward in the 2018, 2019 and beyond.
“Brands are starting to recognize the opportunity here where there is a gap of people that are just not able to reach on linear television anymore and connected television helps fill in that gap.”
In ad land for the last couple of years, much of the chatter has been about the risk that media agencies, which help brands develop plans for buying the right inventory at the right time, will be disintermediated. In other words, the new wave of programmatic platforms allow brands to operate their media-buying strategy all by themselves.
But, whilst Sims’ platform serves many brands directly, he doesn’t quite see it that way.
“We work with both agencies and marketers,” he says. “But, when we do work with the marketer, we (also) work with their agency. It’s become a really powerful kind of triumvirate of expertise when it comes to the programmatic channel.
“As programmatic continues to grow, it becomes a much more important strategy for everyone to understand how they execute the media dollar inside of the programmatic channel.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That’s a question IRI, a marketing data company, is posing to advertisers. Founded to capitalise on the advent of point-of-sale (POS) terminal scanners, IRI grew to ingest purchase data from consumer-packaged-goods retailers across the US.
At this point, it takes data from almost every POS transaction in the country, through knowledge of 350 million loyalty cards from 107 million households.
“We have multiple retailers in each household – it’s not just your grocery spend, but it’s your drug spend, it’s your specialty alcohol spend, it’s some of your club spend,” says IRI’s Nishat Mehta, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
What does that mean for brands? Mehta pitches that data as a chance to “measure whether or not they’re advertising actually worked, and what components of it worked best”.
Last year, IRI struck a deal with Alphonso, a company whose technology helps brands use internet-delivered TV advertising to spark interest – and track an actual offline purchase later down the line.
“We now have a panel of roughly about 14 million households for which we actually know their purchase behavior, and their television viewing behavior,” Mehta adds.
“That gives us an opportunity… to get down to the smallest of brands, to the fewest of exposures, to the lowest of frequencies, to the long tail of networks. Identifying …when (consumers) actually go to a store the following weekend to by their peanut butter, did the ad for Skippy actually have an impact? Is it that this household needs three views of the ad before it actually has an impact?
“Advanced TV certainly means that TV is not going anywhere soon.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>AppNexus, Index Exchange and LiveRamp created The Advertising ID Consortium last May in an effort to reach scale versus the two big giants of digital advertising. It is trying to advance two pieces of technology:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, AppNexus marketplace partnerships SVP Patrick McCarthy provides an update on the consortium’s roll-out.
The progress has been really good. We’re almost done, kind of completing the consortium set-up as a legal entity with all the right bylaws and agreements,” he says.
“AppNexus is very close to finishing our portion of the tech that helps power it, and Live Ramp has finished their version of the tech, so if AppNexus and Index will go live with Identity Link-enabled supply using the Open Ad ID in Q2, so that’s really exciting.
“Then we (will) continue to sign up platforms that would like to join the consortium and participate. We (have) started evangelizing it to publishers and marketers. For the most part, publishers and marketers don’t have to do anything technically.”
Google and Facebook control 60% to 70% of US digital ad spending, according to an analysis of several sources’ figures by Digital Content Next, the pro-publisher group campaigning against the pair’s dominance.
But competition is not the only reason for The Advertising ID Consortium’s creation.
“The effort is to really solve two problems,” McCarthy continues:
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“So that’s been very successful and we have a large population of TV viewership data, beyond just from the TiVo devices but where we have software embedded across providers and even beyond that,” Horstman says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent RampUp 2018 conference by LiveRamp.
TiVo just announced that it’s reached two million active matched households across all DMA’s “and that number is growing quite rapidly.” The company’s goal is to reach three million “very shortly and then throughout the year scaling up to five to seven million plus,” Horstman says.
“The company TiVo today is much bigger than TiVo the device and that’s part of the story that we’re taking to market.”
He stresses that TiVo has unfettered rights to use the TV viewership data in matching with multiple datasets so that it can “understand the science of what is changing consumer behavior when a household is exposed to a TV campaign, and that is very exciting.”
All personally identifiable information about TV viewers is removed before it reaches TiVo, according to Horstman. Identifiers appended to the TV dataset can be matched across the advertising ecosystem for first- and third-party data.
In the wake of its launching the Targeted Audience Delivery platform, which sits atop all of the company’s TV data, TiVo has been meeting with agencies and advertisers about providing deterministic, exposed households to a specific TV campaign.
“What’s exciting about this is we can go to a brand and say ‘bring your first party data into a safe haven like LiveRamp match it to our TV viewership data.’ We can then run that against the campaign that you just did in the last quarter and then provide you the exact households that were exposed an unexposed to your TV campaign.”
Besides revealing whether TV ad exposure drove incremental activity through an existing customer group, brands can then use those segments to activate those same households “in any kind of digital, mobile or connected-TV activation as well,” Horstman says.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a lot of untapped opportunity in TV,” says LiveRamp Co-CEO Anneka Gupta. “It’s not very measureable.”
The IdentityLink extension was announced to coincide with RampUp 2018, the LiveRamp conference that attracted nearly 3,000 attendees in its six year of existence–up from 300 at the beginning.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Gupta talks about the industry changes that need to take place to free up more TV ad time for addressable campaigns and why it’s a win-win for different kinds of companies to exchange second-party data.
While LiveRamp and its parent company Acxiom have offered some TV solutions in the past couple of years, extending IdentityLink to TV is about “greater innovation and investment in the TV space. We now have a much larger dedicated group focused on this area,” says Gupta. IdentityLink for TV connects customer-based identities across channels by linking advertiser data with trusted third-party and TV viewership data.
LiveRamp is working to automate some of its existing addressable TV capabilities to make it easier for marketers to run such campaigns. It’s also looking beyond address to the broader TV market, including linear and OTT, “trying to work with the entire industry to make TV solutions and make TV advertising a lot more measureable and a lot more addressable.”
Gupta discusses working with MVPD’s to help brands target specific households with TV ads, for example retailers that want to reach consumers who have made purchases from them in the past six months.
“We can now take that audience of people, map it to the subscribers for each of these MVPD’s and actually run targeted ads to specific households that have those members of the audience in it,” Gupta explains. Instead of generic product messages, targeted viewers see ads “very specific to them and actually related to their experience and relationship with that brand already.”
She believes the industry must undergo an evolution encompassing technology, business organization structures, and business development relations that need to be spawned to open up more addressable beyond the two minutes of local time allotted to most MVPD’s.
“It’s not going to be just a twelve-month journey. It’s going to be a multi-year journey that we’re on together,” Gupta says.
LiveRamp would like to widen the participation of companies in the exchanging of second-party data to drive value for their respective businesses. “It can be a real win-win when you bring together complementary data sets to influence consumer interaction and make more personalized experiences,” Gupta says.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re seeing a full circle here where digital used to influence TV,” says Raghu Kodige, Alphonso’s Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder.
Kodige was one of the speakers at this week’s RampUp 2018 conference by LiveRamp, which drew nearly 3,000 attendees. In this interview with Beet.TV, he details some of the work Alphonso has been doing with IRI, which has the largest database of shopper loyalty data.
To determine how television ads are working, Alphonso used the occasion of the 2018 Super Bowl to do some research based on data from a year earlier leading up to and including Super Bowl 2017. It involved a few different brands that were regular Super Bowl spenders.
For McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, Alphonso used location data to track post-ad store traffic. Working with IRI, it was able to attribute TV ad exposure to SKU movement, looking for lift before and after the big football game.
“We were trying to identify what kind of trends you see prior to the Super Bowl and after the Super Bowl. It was pretty exciting,” says Kodige.
One of the things that stood out was the amount of spending by Dunkin Donuts to influence Hispanic audiences on Spanish-language TV networks, particularly in the months ahead of the Super Bowl.
“We saw almost a twelve percent increase in foot traffic to Dunkin Donuts in the three weeks following the Super Bowl, which I thought was pretty significant considering that the Super Bowl reaches such a wide audience.”
Alphonso and IRI announced their data partnership in February 2018.
Alphonso’s research also uncovered insights into things like optimum TV frequency.
The 12 million households common to IRI and Alphonso produce data that facilitates TV tune-in attribution and sales attribution “down to the creative level,” says Kodige. If a brand is testing multiple creative iterations, “within a few weeks we start seeing this data flow into our dashboards with the IRI partnership” so that creative optimization can be done while the campaign is still in-flight, he adds.
The scale is such that it fills the gap in true, multi-touch attribution, according to Kodige. “The missing piece in most of these studies that have happened to date is the absence of large scale TV data.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“These numbers to me really indicate that we’re at that inflection point, and after all these years of talk and headlines, conferences about it, it’s actually going to start happening,” says Jim Nail, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
Nail presented the findings of the ANA/Forrester State of TV and Online Video Survey at RampUp 2018, the two-day LiveRamp conference. In this interview with Beet.TV, Nail explains why the annual TV Upfront ritual isn’t going away anytime soon and why marketers need to be “data detectives” in evaluating providers of advanced audience-targeting data.
According to the Rogers diffusion of innovations theory, once 15% of market participants have adopted a new innovation and 30% represent the early mainstream, “you’re at the inflection point, the proverbial hockey stick where the adoption accelerates rapidly,” Nail says.
In the survey, 28% of marketers reported being knowledgeable about addressable TV but haven’t yet entered the market, while 18% said they were aware of it but don’t know enough to use it and 6% said they were not at all aware of it.
While the industry is “not going to abandon the Upfronts anytime soon,” mainly owing to greater demand for primetime inventory than there is supply, advanced TV targeting is playing an ever-increasing role in negotiations, according to Nail.
Nail is “really excited” about some of the companies that are building the tools that buyers need to build TV schedules based on audience targeting beyond age and gender. “No buyer wants to be dependent on the data that the seller is telling them ‘here’s who our audience is.’ LiveRamp is certainly making a big contribution to the development of this area,” he says.
These data providers enable buyers to “let me do my planning myself and then go to the sellers and negotiate from that basis.”
He calls automatic content recognition technology that helps to track TV viewing and ad exposure “a very promising area of data.” Then he cautions that marketers entering the space need to become data detectives.
“All of those platforms promise a lot but you can’t take it at face value. You’ve got to ask who are these users that you’re getting this data from, how representative are they of the viewing audience as a whole.”
It boils down to “classic market research nuts and bolts methodology stuff to make sure that the data that you’re getting is really as high quality, as solid as the traditional data sets, like Nielsen, MRI and Simmons.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>