Beachfront recently completed a pilot program to deliver addressable TV ads among local and national media in a collaboration with Vizio. The test included single advertiser slot optimization (SASO) that lets an advertiser target a specific demographic group or designated market area (DMA) with different versions of ads, also known as “creative versioning.”

“We place an OAR watermark on the programming feed, which is distributed to stations in 125 broadcast DMAs across the country,” Frank Sinton, president and founder of video ad management platform Beachfront, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The program ran across 3 million Vizio TVs equipped with the OAR spec.”

Beachfront now has the opportunity to work more closely with OAR steering committee members including Disney’s Media Networks, Warner Media, Comcast NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Hearst Television, AMC Networks, Fox Corporation, Scripps, Vizio and Univision — along with agency advisory committee members including Publicis Media, Omnicom Media Group, GroupM, IPG/Magna, Dentsu Aegis Network, Havas, Horizon Media and RPA.

‘MASO Is a Reality Today’

The goal of Project OAR is to transform non-addressable TV into an addressable platform, applying consumer data to target more specific audience segments. That evolution includes the development of multiple advertisers slot optimization (MASO) that replaces a national spot with a commercial from a different advertiser.

“MASO is a reality today. It’s just a matter of getting the programmers to now use the platform, and start experimenting,” Sinton said. “We’ve already proven out the SASO model, and it’s going toward more of a MASO model.”

Beachfront’s unified decisioning engine handles different kinds of media buys including direct-sold, programmatic-sold or private marketplaces (PMPs), with real-time ad insertion for video on demand (VOD) and connected TV (CTV).

“Beachfront is one of the last pure-play, CTV- and TV-focused sell-side platforms,” Sinton said. “We’re the only player that covers all TV screens, whether it be linear, set-top box VOD or CTV.”

Looking ahead, Sinton sees greater convergence among linear TV and digital video platforms, giving advertisers more flexibility with their audience-based media buys. Advertisers also can implement rules for frequency capping and separating their commercials from those of competitors.

“Converting legacy TV to programmatic is going to be really key. There’s been a big transition to connected television over the last couple of years. This year is really the year for addressable TV, and we’re seeing that today,” he said. “Making CTV more like TV, and TV more like CTV is really the future of where things are going, and where Beachfront is focused.”

Started in Japan in the mid-nineties, they were initially popular with the countries NTT DoCoMo mobile carrier, but then never quite took off until they were baked into the cameras of iOS and Android.

Recently, however, practices like contactless ordering from restaurant menus have seen QR codes become even more popular, and a clutch of companies has been trying to embed them in TV shows, too.

Flowcode is amongst them. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Flowcode chief revenue officer Jim Norton explains what is going on.

TV traction

“Brands and businesses want direct connections with their consumers and consumers want to have those direct connections directly with those brands and content providers,” says Norton, a former ad sales exec with Tribune Broadcasting, Google and AOL.

“We’ve seen a lot of traction with TV networks, publishers out of home, and then even individual brands and businesses who are looking to make the connection from, you know, some sort of physical consumer experience to digital assets that they may have.

“QR codes have become ubiquitous. As the world has moved to this contactless environment, the opportunity for brands and businesses to create an enhanced consumer experience through the universal scan on both iOS and Android devices.”

Cracking the code

Use of QR codes inside TV ads or overlaid on TV shows is one way broadcasters hope to give advertisers a method with which viewers can easily open a mobile web link for messages seen on TV.

That is a practice that has been around for several years now. But Flowcode is working hard to introduce easy-to-create code images that don’t expire, can have custom appearances and can be placed on a multitude of different destinations. It provides templates for a range of on-screen placements.

One of them is Good Morning America’s “Deals And Steals” slot, which is using Flowcodes to let viewers see product listings for featured items.

“We work with a number of local networks and sports regional sports networks as well for individual games, whether that be NBA or, or MLB,” Norton adds.”

Future flows

Norton says Flowcodes now wants to position itself as more than just a QR code enabler – rather, a provider of attribution data to advertisers.

“We’ve already seen scans from over 130 countries, all 50 states,” he says. “We’re working with tens of thousands of creators on a regular basis.

“We will continue to focus on the scale and scope of different creators. That could be a church or an individual proprietor with a small business all the way up to the largest of fortune 100 companies and everything in between

“If a brand is doing a direct mail campaign or a print campaign, and they want to test an offer or a call to action or creative, we can create unique codes that the brand or business can then look back and say ‘Okay, well, we know that 20%-off resonated at a much higher rate than free-shipping’ and, therefore, giving that publisher or client and opportunity to optimise towards the better performing messaging.”

Many in the industry with the scars from trying to make it happen would tell you a different story.

That is why, in the last two years, we have seen a series of initiatives and consortia aiming at harmonizing the spaghetti-like system of understanding and buying across a growing plethora of platforms.

Now another initiative, the TV Data Initiative, is launching, to tackle what it says is a “mess”.

New Initiative

In this discussion recorded for Beet.TV, the two people behind TV Data Initiative discuss what is happening:

• Jon Watts Executive Director, The Project X Institute
• Jonathan Steuer (former OMG chief research officer who has joined VideoAmp as EVP of TV strategy and currency)

In essence, the initiative is a thought leadership exercise that aims to help light the path to a more joined-up future.

Members include DISH Media, Blockgraph, TransUnion with TruOptik, MadHive, TVSquared, Eyeota and VideoAmp.

“Our plan is really to engage pretty wide in deeply with the industry over the months ahead and put together a really thoughtful diagnostic of the market,” says Watts.

“It’s going to be a big all-inclusive project, lots of engagement with the industry, lots of thoughtful research events and seminars.”

The Problem

So, why are the two Jons getting involved?

“Our research early on when we were piecing this together, suggested that it’s not working as well as it could do, and there’s huge opportunity to improve,” Watts says.

Steuer goes farther. “This is a mess,” he says.

• “There are many different data sets that can be used to enhance the impact of, of television, but they’re hard to get to, they’re hard to use, and they’re even in many ways hard for advertisers to understand.”
• “The ecosystem is very fragmented and poorly defined. There are tons of different inventory pools that are, in some cases, solved by multiple different providers, but the buy-side doesn’t necessarily understand that there’s no real independent auditing of data and no unified cross-platform measurement solution today.
• “(Data targeting) is still cumbersome and difficult and expensive … this is happening in a world where there are growing concerns about consumer privacy and security and changes to the data landscape.”

The Solution

The pair aim to help by conducting research, holding talks, seminars and workshops, Watts says:

• “(We will provide a) really clear overview of the landscape to look at the different relationships between the different participants in the ecosystem.”
• “We’re particularly going to look at the use cases, the data, and unpack what needs to happen from a workflow point of view to execute around those.”
• “We’re going to have to assess some of the barriers and blockages and look at the scope for collective action to address and unpack those.”

“Hopefully by the summer, we’ll have a really useful thoughtful piece of work that can really help industry to move forward.”

“The Hispanic market should be a foundation in your marketing plan. It is a business imperative,” Donna Speciale, president of sales and marketing at Univision, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “You’re only going to be able to grow your business if you include it.”

Speciale is a seasoned veteran of the media and marketing industries, having led advertising sales at WarnerMedia and overseen investment, activation and agency operations at MediaVest Worldwide. She joined Univision in January amid the American Spanish-language broadcaster’s expansion into streaming media.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing some due diligence and looking a lot at the advertiser base,” she said. She found that more than 1,900 brands run ads in English, while only 400 do so in Spanish — and segments like pharmaceuticals were underrepresented.

“That was shocking to me, given the inequities in what is happening with our healthcare,” Speciale said. “I’m working really hard to get to those clients, pharma specifically, and trying to educate them on why our Hispanic audience is so important, because we’re 60 million people and growing.”

As big as the Hispanic market is, marketers shouldn’t look at it as a uniform group of consumers, Speciale said. She sees opportunities for more granular audience segmentation based on other attributes including behavior.

“We have a really big segment of Afro-Latinos, we have LGBTQ — then you dive into behaviorals with auto intenders and stuff like that,” she said. “You can dissect the Hispanic audience just like you do segments within English-language. Audience targeting levels the playing field.”

As more Hispanic consumers watch video on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones, Univision is now rolling out Prende TV as its ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service. The broadcaster last month bought Spanish-language streaming service VIX to round out its digital  offering.

“We will be the only destination for streaming for Spanish-language in the country,” Speciale said. “That is a powerful statement to say.”

As one of the architects of OpenAP, a collaboration among major media companies to define audience categories in a more uniform way for audience-based ad buys, Speciale is well familiar with advanced TV.

“We will be building our audience capabilities. They will be ready for this upfront to be diving into, and cross-platform will be part of that initiative,” she said.

The deal sees FreeWheel become the technology enabler for Fox channels including its AVOD service Tubi to display addressable ads to viewers of Xfinity X1, Xfinity Fles and Cox Contour boxes.

In a release, the pair call it “an industry first for a television company”. The Trade Desk is the first demand-side platform (DSP) integrated to support the buying.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Larry Allen, VP and GM of addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising, explains why it is important.

Streamlined sales

“We’ve basically enabled that inventory for Fox so that they can now go and work with their marketers to transact on a DSP and buy addressable video on demand inventory at scale,” Allen says.

“Video on demand inventory has been really kind of in the middle, between linear TV and digital.

“And so, for a programmer like Fox, they’re now able to take a high-value asset, very high-quality inventory, and now package that with audience addressability and make that available for sale to their marketers.

“I think this now enables the programmer to streamline their sales activity, meet the buyers where they want to transact, and be confident in the inventory that they’re selling so that they’re able to either eliminate waste or increase yield, or deliver value for a marketer, leveraging an audience that is either elusive or hard to reach, or they want to scale up.”

Growth opportunity

EMarketer forecasts US connected TV programmatic display ad spending will reach $6.93 billion in 2021.

Programmatic trading of CTV ads is expected to make up 61% of the total, which is a significant 52.9% up from the year earlier.

The connected segment has seen tremendous growth over the last year, as new ad-supported service and new viewer demand have coalesced, presenting an opportunity for new ad spending.

In connected TV, achieving scale has long been considered a sticking point, thanks initially to insufficient inventory and also to a fragmented range of buying channels.

But, bit by bit, the industry is working through each of these problems.

NBCUniversal, which today is hosting its One21 event to showcase its One Platform that gives advertisers a way to reach target audiences at scale, has made a big push into mixing content and commerce. Its platform marks a convergence among a variety of technologies that encompass linear and streaming TV, connected devices, online payments and high-speed internet.

‘From Passion to Purchase’

The technologies make it “possible to drive that experience where you can see something in a piece of programming and at that moment of inspiration decide that you want it, and in a couple clicks have it on the way to your home,” Evan Moore, vice president of commerce partnerships at NBCUniversal Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

“That’s what we’re here to do with One Platform Commerce, which is our suite of integrated commerce capabilities, is to drive those transactional moments, to drive from passion to purchase with NBCU content, wherever that content appears,” he said.

The company distributes content through linear, digital, streaming, Spanish-language, local TV stations and social media. On social networks like Facebook and Instagram, NBCUniversal provides a way for consumers to buy products directly with instant checkout features.

“We’re providing a platform for a retail partner to come in through a single point of entry and drive commerce through our content across the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that we have with viewers and consumers,” Moore said.

Shoppable TV Moments

Its Shoppable TV platform integrates programming with e-commerce by showing QR codes that viewers can scan with a smartphone camera to visit a shopping site. In the past year, NBCUniversal gave viewers of the French Open tennis tournament a way to buy the jersey worn by star player Novak Djokovic, and to order a “blonding brush” in the show “Very Cavalleri.” During the holiday season, viewers of the “Today” show on its Peacock streaming platform could buy products featured in a “steals and deals” segment.

“We can also drive commerce experience across the web through either our articles or interactive videos,” Moore said. “You can be reading a shoppable gift guide or watching a piece of video content and actually clicking on the products that are featured in that content in real time, add them to a shopping cart and purchase all without leaving the NBCU content experience.”

The company plans to widen the interactive platform beyond the current number of seven properties, which include the Today.com, E! Online and Telemundo.com websites.

“We’re going to be expanding across the rest of the portfolio this year, including national cable networks like USA, but also across all the local stations as well,” Moore said. “When I look at these new tools, it’s really changing the types of experiences and content that we create for consumers and the value we can bring to them through that experience. There’s a lot to be gained for us, for consumers and for brands.”

“We are unifying all our products into an omnichannel advertising platform,” Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at Mediaocean, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We have three areas — media intelligence, media management and media finance — and then wrapping all that with an omnichannel data warehouse that will ultimately provide a single view of the customer and campaign performance.”

The unified platform combines the features of its software brands — such as Spectra for traditional media, Prisma for digital, Lumina for planning and Aura for time tracking — with 4C’s Scope platform for closed ecosystems, which are commonly called “walled gardens.” As part of the introduction for its unified platform, Mediaocean unveiled a redesigned logo.

For more than 50 years,  Mediaocean, formerly known as Donavan Data Systems, has been the software solution of choice for both TV advertisers and sellers., powering ad management, inventory and billing. With the acquisition of 4C, Mediaocean became a cross-platform company that expanded beyond its roots to planning, optimization and measurement.

‘We’re Not Built on Cookies’

Its move to unify those systems comes as consumer concerns about privacy lead technology companies like Google and Apple to give people more ways to avoid online tracking. Google next year plans to end support for third-party cookie tracking in its popular Chrome browser, and recently announced it won’t support cookieless technologies. Apple soon will update the software that runs iPhones and other devices to warn customers when apps want to track their online activities.

“We’re not built on cookies, we’re not a programmatic platform. We are truly omnichannel, and we built out a ‘graph of graphs’ with partners such as Transunion that’s anchored on offline identifiers and can be applied across channels through our unified platform,” Goldman said. “Advertisers need an independent and interoperable platform to work across. That’s how we’re anchoring Mediaocean.”

In addition to developing a unified ads manager for closed ecosystems, the company is providing a unified approach for linear and CTV channels.

“You can’t have linear and CTV in siloes. There needs to be a uniform way to plan and buy audiences, and reduce overlap,” Goldman said. “That’s what we’ve built. It’s a solution for the buy-side that’s adopted by the sell-side.”

‘Reducing Adtech Toll’

With more consumers shopping online, retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target and Kroger have opened their websites to advertisers that seek to reach consumers when they’re most ready to buy products. Those retailer ad networks are seeing rapid growth.

“It’s a massive opportunity that we’re unlocking for both the buy- and sell-side,” Goldman said.

He also sees Mediaocean as a key resource for advertising agencies that seek to strengthen ties to their clientele of marketers and brand managers.

“You have agencies under more pressure than ever to be accountable, efficient, transparent,” Goldman said. “Our platform helps bring these parties together and restore trust, and allow people to really focus on what they’re great at, which is building amazing campaigns without having to worry about managing approvals, payments and reconciliations.”

Mediaocean has a global footprint with 1,200 employees working in 20 offices worldwide. About $150 billion in yearly media spending goes through its platform, or about a quarter of the global total.

“Our vision is to empower a world where marketers can market the way consumers consume, which is seamless across channels and devices. A big part is removing the friction in the lumascape, if you will, and reducing adtech toll at each step,” Goldman said. “The scale is there, and now as we put everything into one place, we can really unlock that full value. It’s a transformational moment for Mediaocean.”

Amid the demand for streamlined work flows, Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) this month began a technology integration with ad-serving and analytics company Flashtalking. The integration helps to unify media buy systems, creative asset libraries, rights management and traffic and delivery engines into a single platform.

The integration “allows us to…bridge that linear and digital divide,” Richard Nunn, vice president and general manager of advertiser solutions at CTS, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Then we tap into Flashtalking, which then allows that creative asset in the right format to be sent and served by Flashtalking across all the digital endpoints that they cover.”

The integration also gives advertisers a holistic view of their video advertising on linear and digital channels.

“This is a great jumping-off point because what it will do then is with the real-time nature of digital, we might see a specific ad version in the digital space,” Nunn said. “That can start to inform maybe what linear ads we’re then serving in terms of speed and response. We’re starting to get into that virtuous positive circle of addressability and performance.”

“The reality is that within the industry, there’s a siloed approach with the linear world and the digital world. We’ve bridged that gap,” Nunn said. “All the conversations we’ve had in the industry, both brand-direct and agency — it solves a massive pain point for them.”

Agnostic Platform for All

Although CTS is owned by cable and media giant Comcast, it provides solutions to the buy-side and sell-side of multiplatform global advertising.

“We’re completely agnostic. It’s a technology play,” Nunn said. “There’s a lot of point-based technological solutions out there, so we’re trying to be a unifier.”

Nunn foresees further development with addressable advertising that will make it more personalized and responsive to viewers, giving advertisers more insights into how to optimize their campaigns across linear and digital platforms.

“That is the next bastion to crack in a world of emerging addressability across channels,” Nunn said. “We’re really excited about that next hurdle.”

The deal brings a robust offering of ACR (automatic content recognition) from Nielsen to an existing ACR operation at Roku. It also brings Nielsen’s dynamic ad insertion tools to Roku.

The solution is for the Roku “glass” – meaning  TVs that use the Roku operating system.

In its most recent earnings report, Roku said it was the number one smart TV OS sold in the U.S. and Canada, citing NPD’s Weekly Retail Tracking Service. Roku held 38% of the market share in the U.S. and 31% in Canada, the company said, citing NPD.

Late today, we spoke with Louqman Parampath, VP of product management at Roku, about the deal and its implications for marketers and national programmers.  He explained that the new scenario will bring fundamental change to linear TV advertising by allowing advertisers to target consumers on a household or regional basis with specific advertising.

He calls the development a “transformational” moment for programmers and marketers.

The deal also expands the collaboration between Roku and Nielsen around cross-screen measurement.

Later in the morning, Beet.TV did this video interview with Magnite CEO Michael Barrett about the deal and what it means for the industry.

The adtech veteran reflects on the industry’s ups and downs, including unsuccessful IPOs that turned off investors. Also hampering investment had been a widespread perception that Google and Facebook would dominate and there would be no room for big, independent players in adtech. The Trade Desk has proved them wrong, he notes.

The combination of the two companies, which are primarily known as Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) will become an industry powerhouse in a technology which provides video and television programmers and publishers with software to make inventory available to advertisers in an automated, programmatic manner.

RTL acquired SpotX in 2017, after owning a controlling interest since 2014.

The public markets have embraced today’s acquisition news enthusiastically, with share price soaring some 25% to $55, increasing the valuation of the company by $1 billion in today’s trading (as of noon EST.)

And now LG is levelling-up its own capabilities, by making an investment to take a majority stake in Alphonso.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Alphonso’s Raghu Kodige says the tie-up is not just about unlocking ad data.

Couldn't be happier to be kicking off 2021 in partnership with LG! @LGUS https://t.co/oZt20ogAqb#connectedtv #tvdata #tvadvertising #OTT #streamingtv

— Alphonso, Inc. (@AlphonsoInc) January 6, 2021

Improve the experience

“How do we benefit consumers?,” he asks. “Unless you provide consumers with benefits, you really can’t collect this kind of deep data about what consumers are watching and what they are looking for and things of that sort.

“For us it’s actually a sort of an onward journey of what we’ve been doing all along, which is building more and more consumer features powered by the data that we collect – whether it is recommendations of what content to watch, both on linear TV as well as OTT.

“That’s actually becoming more and more important. There’s so many streaming services available that it’s like TV used to be in the past, where you switch on TV that are hundreds of channels and you don’t know what exactly you should be watching.

“Solving that problem for consumers, making the availability of content much more easier (is important).”

Solving Local TV’s Ad ‘Blind Spot’: Alphonso’s Upadhyay

Solving fragmentation

Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on what they are watching on TV.

It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes, monitoring more than 200 cable networks.

Alphonso has also previously brought solutions like voice search to bear on a connected TV viewing experience that has become highly fragmented.

Kodige says that is the sort of tech LG wants to tap – but Alphonso will continue to serve other TV makers, too.

Wall Street Journal reports: “LG is investing almost $80 million for a nearly 60% stake in Alphonso, which had a pre-money valuation of about $125 million, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Accelerating 2021

He says Alphonso’s own roadmap will be “accelerated” by the LG investment.

The company added five European countries to its footprint last year and goes like in India this year.

The company started by using automated content recognition (ACR) to create data out of consumers’ viewing behavior.

For the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, which serves primarily the island’s poor, some 80 percent of club members don’t have suitable access to learn online.

The organization, which has served for decades as an after school supplement, has created study plans which families can bring home with their food pick-up, explains Olga Ramos, President of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico in this interview with me.  We spoke over Zoom.

Ramos, a former senior Walmart executive, is inspired by the work of the Clubs’ staff and volunteers during a time when the island’s education system is failing, she notes.

It’s been an extraordinarily hard time in Puerto Rico now,  it is a “Dire Emergency” as reported in The New York Times.

As many  of y9u know, I have been personally involved with fundraising and media outreach for this important organization since 2017.  If you’d like to help, please let me know.

If you can support the work of the Boys & Girls Clubs, please give what you can.  All contributions are tax deductible.

Note:  This video was originally published in July of this year.  We are republishing  today it as one of the most important stories of this year.

Samsung Ads, a platform for placing ads using Samsung smart TVs, has announced Samsung Measurement, designed to show the combined impact of both linear and streaming TV ads, claiming General Motors’ Cadillac as a first customer.

It follows the announcements of both Nielsen ONE and iSpot.tv’s demographic upgrade in December, after a year in which marketers grew interested in connected and advanced TV advertising, but wrung their hands over fragmentation and cross-screen measurement concerns.

Problem solved

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Justin Evans, Global Head of Analytics & Insights, Samsung Ads, says advertisers have reported three major challenges:

1. Measuring linear television and streaming television together.
2. Lower-funnel measurement for TV.
3. Quantifying what the impact of TV audience targeting.

So Samsung Measurement aims to quantify the effectiveness of linear and streamed ads’ vehicle sales, in GM’s case.

“It enables advertisers to turn around, use the insights from Samsung and measurement, and immediately activate on that information,” Evans says.

Next sectors for Samsung Measurement after automotive will be financial services, telecom, retail and quick-service restaurants.

Keepers of the screen

As connected TV advertising evolves, it seems the OEMs whose screens are being viewed are sitting pretty on top of primary user behavior data. Vizio leverages such data through its Inscape subsidiary, and Samsung is sitting on a treasure trove.

The company uses automatic content recognition (ACR) to identify what viewers are watching, including ads.

“We are the largest dataset in North America that captures both linear and streaming,” Evans says. “We cover tens of millions of households. Clients are able to convert the insights into a targeted ad campaign.”

But he doesn’t just want to tell marketers how their on-demand or digital-video ads worked. Samsung’s position at the center of the screen, a screen whose software can follow viewers from ad exposure all the way to the car lot, means Evans can also tell marketers when their standard TV ads really work.

Samsung’s Oh Finds ‘Unfindables’ & Heavy Gamers With ACR

Welcome AVOD boost

In a media world that has finally leaned somewhat toward paid content, Samsung Ads’ Evans says the growth in advertising-supported streaming services (AVODs) will drive much-needed reach for brands.

“We’re seeing ad supported streaming AVOD grow at a rate that should be encouraging to advertisers,” he says.

“Up to 70% of our users are watching AVOD. That means there’s a really substantial reach opportunity for advertisers who need to manage both linear and streaming.

“It’s good timing. If we didn’t see that AVOD lift, we might be in a bit of a crisis because advertisers would be in a world where they had to reach a lot of consumers to sell products but there was nobody there to watch the ads.”

So Mediaocean, whose software helps advertisers automate their operations, is launching new tools to bring further efficiencies to what it says is still a highly manual process.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mediaocean’s Drew Kane explains the rationale.

New tools

In November, Mediaocean announced two new tools for local TV buying will be added to its Spectra and Prisma software suites:

• Pre-buy: helps buyers automate manual pre-buy tasks, leverage historical and predictive intelligence, and integrate planning with buying and billing.
• Performance Management: automates the posting predicted verss actual performance, pulling air times from WideOrbit and PremiumMedia360, then marrying them with Nielsen overnight data to show buyers how their spots are pacing on a daily basis.

Letting the artists paint

“Local (ad sales) is a highly specialised process,” Kane says.

“The folks that are working in local are experts at their craft. There is no luxury to be bogged down in performing manual processes.

“We are automating steps that have classically been repeated in a very manual way, so that we can make room for the artists of their craft to light up the canvas up with art.”

Local is back

In the COVID-19 pandemic, many ad industry execs have been saying that the prevalence of home-bound customers has forced national advertisers to think like local advertisers.

Local TV news has been the most consumed content, according to Nielsen.

For Kane, however, that is no longer just about a traditional cable TV news feed.

“We’re no longer in a world where it’s (just about) local linear,” he says.

“You still have local execution, you still have national execution … but we need to be able to enable it all in a converged manner.”

Mediaocean sets sail

Mediaocean, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies that CEO Bill Wise has described as “mini Mediaoceans” in other markets.

The company acquired marketing technology firm 4C Insights, whose focus is on audience data, media planning and analytics for streaming video and social networks.

Other acquisitions include MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region.

Last week, it announced that its FreeWheel ad serving tech unit had begun unifying its technology set, with a first stage meaning NBCUniversal now using FreeWheen’s dynamic ad decisioning capability to drive linear TV schedules.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ryan McConville, EVP of Ad Platforms and Operations at NBCU, explains what is happening, and why.

Better together

“Traditionally, FreeWheel has been our digital ad server,” he says. “So its duties have been kind of relegated to doing the ad decisioning on our digital footprint.

“NBCU is both a digital media company and a linear media company. On the linear side of the house, there’s another set of technology called a log scheduler. Historically, the information that’s housed in the TV log scheduler – all the information about our linear schedules and our linear audiences – is separate from all the information that’s housed in our digital ad server.

“So there is not one ad decisioning brain behind the company that is both aware of what’s going on in linear and what’s going on in digital.

“We made the decision that we needed to pick a piece of technology that would have intelligence about both pools of inventory.”

.@FreeWheel is now the lead ad decisioning technology across all of @NBCUniversal's inventory through its new AutoScheduler tool, which analyzes ad breaks and dynamically replaces ads, helping marketers make addressable TV buys. #FreeWheelEmp https://t.co/ydiA4e7yUo

— Antony Bar (@AntonyBarLDN) December 2, 2020

Speeding the switch

That now changes with the introduction of AutoScheduler, the name for the combined toolset.

It analyzes ad breaks within linear campaigns, as well as other business parameters, and automatically fills the complete schedule for advertisers, enabling the automatic placement of ads and dynamic placement of spots across NBCU’s footprint.

“All of now of our linear inventory is inside FreeWheel,” McConville says.

It is another example of ad-tech folks’ favorite hobby – breaking down silos. McConville says this latest blurring of the line would make it easier for advertisers to change strategy from linear to streaming, as many did early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

.@NBCUniversal and @FreeWheel have very closely aligned visions for the future of TV, and we are proud to be coordinating closely with them as they build One Platform, an all-in-one ad system. https://t.co/pmv6jLatel

— FreeWheel, A Comcast Company (@FreeWheel) January 9, 2020

Toward One Platform

It is also the latest step in the consolidation of FreeWheel after its 2014 acquisition by Comcast.

The companies are now engaged in an initiative called One Platform, aimed at bringing together their ad platforms.

McConville says viewers don’t differentiate between content by channel type, so he is trying to similarly unify the experience for advertisers.

“One Platform is our desire and our technology roadmap to bring together linear and digital ad serving, so that we can optimise advertising to find the most relevant audience for an advertiser,” he says.

“(That is) whether they’re watching that piece of content through a streaming platform, which is served digitally or through a traditional cable subscription, which is served linearly.”

The roadmap

AutoScheduler is the first step along the One Platform journey for McConville.

He says the next steps won’t necessarily come in 2021, but rather 2022 and beyond.

He imagines: “If they find an audience in linear that they had booked in digital, they can move those spots back and forth.”

Addressability allows ad buyers to target ads at particular groups of viewers – sometimes even individual households – thanks to viewing platforms’ audience identifiers.

But Harry Harcus, the managing director of GroupM’s specialist advanced TV buying unit Finecast, says the many connected viewing devices and programming providers nevertheless makes for complexity.

Fragmented opportunity

In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts, Harcus says: “The barrier to entry (to TV) is just lower than it used to be.

“In a year of the pandemic, we’ve seen small – often, direct-to-consumer brands – coming through with much lower budgets, still able to produce fantastic TV creative, but able to target an audience that’s very specific to them, whether that is demographically, geographically or around very specific behaviors and sections of the audience.”

Our Head of Engagement, @ClaxtonKristian spoke alongside @DLGroupMedia's Sam Taylor @Campaignmag #Media360 earlier this month demonstrating why addressable is the future of TV advertising. Here are 6 reasons https://t.co/2HQflo3N2a

— Finecast (@Finecast) October 8, 2020

“To reach them at the moment, the problem is it’s become a very fragmented ecosystem. You’d have to go to each (UK) broadcaster in turn to reach their on-demand audience and, by the way, not able to reach their linear audiences on an addressable basis yet.”

In Harcus’ native UK, Sky’s AdSmart technology powers addressable linear TV ads across its own distribution platform and has inked a deal with rival Virgin Media, while ITV and Channel 4 now sell targeted on-demand ads in their cross-platform viewing apps.

“You’ve got the new CTV suppliers coming in as well,” Harcus adds. “So in terms of where the audience are and the content that they’re viewing, they’re pretty scattered.”

Direct to TV

New-look TV’s ability to serve a new generation of brands has been documented, for example, in research by VAB.

D2C Brands Are ‘Outcome-Obsessed’: VAB’s Cunningham

Finecast’s Harcus says such digital brands have, online, enjoyed the ability to do fine-grained audience targeting and measurement, but have not been called to TV due to the absence of such attributes.

Connected TV changes that, however, and is now beckoning a new generation of brands that want to build their names using digital-style targeting on the main screen in the house.

“TV is probably the most loved advertising medium and one that most people can relate most easily to,” Harcus says.

Research exercise

Finecast is a major buyer of connected TV advertising. That also makes it a major partner for brands attempting to pick their way through both the fragmentation and the opportunity in front of them.

Finecast has recently learned a lot more about both thanks to research carried out by Dipsticks Research Group (DRG) and University College London (UCL).

Harcus says the research has an important takeaway – there is a difference between relevant targeted TV ads and personalized ones.

“The good news is that what the research did show – through surveys, through ethnography studies and through neuroscience – is the relevance of advertising messages does make a difference,” he explains. “It leads to higher engagement and ultimately greater effectiveness of advertising.”

We launched the results from our #ThinkingInsidetheBox research last week with DRG and @ucl.

Take a look at how TV advertising has changed and how new mechanisms could help brands to advertise on TV effectively https://t.co/a41Pt2uKu1#addressabletv #BVOD #AVOD #SVOD #lineartv pic.twitter.com/LCLoAsB8Uc

— Finecast (@Finecast) October 5, 2020

But TV is now a medium that can drive results even for upstarts, according to a new piece of research.

The Halo Effect, a report from VAB and Comcast Advertising’s Effectv, examined direct-to-consumer (D2C) and 50 other brands to discover the effectiveness of launching a TV ad campaign.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, James Rothwell, Comcast Advertising’s  VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations, explains the findings.

RELEASED TODAY Our new report in collaboration with @effectv, "TV as a Growth Engine," and the latest in #TheHaloEffect series, provides a rich analysis of the impact that TV has on a brand’s digital storefront and platform. https://t.co/3OLobcyBZY pic.twitter.com/GZeFcec6Ww

— VAB (@VABintel) November 17, 2020

Traffic driver

“On the month of that TV launch, all brands, no matter what their age, saw double digit growth,” Rothwell says.

• “The younger brands saw the largest jump of around 23% increase in their total unique website visitors.”
• “When they weren’t on air there was a halo effect of TV’s impact with younger brands, they were able to sustain some growth through those channels, reinforcing the TV messaging.”
• “Those that were able to stay on air they had the resources to do so with an ongoing TV campaign were able to see 80% growth in digital engagement while on television.”

“The real takeaway for us was – it doesn’t matter how old the brand is; if you have the opportunity to invest in television early, you can exponentially grow your business very, very quickly.”

For example, eco-friendly cleaning products company Blueland saw a 65% jump in website traffic after launching a TV ad campaign, the report found.

Future of D2C

EMarketer analysis suggests D2C ecommerce sales would hit $17.75 billion in the US in 2020, up from $14.28 billion in 2019 – 2.6% of total ecommerce.

But eMarketer thinks growth rate will tail off in the emerging economy as many items are non-essential and customer acquisition costs are rising.

To gain cut-through, many D2C brands are turning to TV. That is different for a category that has traditionally built its name in online, social media. Indeed, the “D” in “D2C” may as well stand for digital.

Why wait?

But many D2C brands that turn to TV are finding the reach and impact, indeed, provides the platform they need.

“Typically, (it is) around eight years before a DTC brand invests in television,” Rothwell adds.

“But, more and more, we’re seeing brands are accelerating that up in their timeline and accelerating their TV investment strategies because they’ve seen what it’s been able to do. (It can) catapult them to that next level of growth much quicker than maybe if they’d waited.”

Rothwell cites targeting as one capability that addressable TV can bring, helping new, digital-side marketers see a pathway to TV. He says “it’s a great time to do test and learn”, starting with basic messaging and working toward real-time optimization.

Because few of them manage to bring together a consumer’s entire consumption in a unified system, according to Joanna Drews.

Drews is the CEO and co-founder of HyphaMetrics, a new measurement solution provider she says will offer a wide view of consumption from getting user data at the source.

Veterans for ‘zero-party’

HyphaMetrics’ metre technology includes:

• “Visual analysis of incoming video signals being displayed on the TV … content, ads, brand recognition”.
• It employs a “device is hooked up directly to the TV, with cable boxes and OTT devices routed through the meter to the TV,” Drews tells Beet.TV.
• The system can see viewers’ content journey with a TV UI, meaning it can see programme guide behaviour like live selections versus DVR.
• That gadget also collects data for every IP-enabled device in a house.
• It’s all done on a panel basis wherein participants can remain passive viewers.

HyphaMetrics is founded by Drews, a former Comscore and GroupM exec, together with Mike Bologna, previously president of GroupM’s MODI Media advanced TV unit and president of one2one Media.

The company has a $2 million early-round investment. In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts, Drews explains how it works.

“Our entire ethos is to leverage next-generation technologies, merge them with industry-accepted and expected best practices in order to produce what we call ‘zero-party data’,” she says.

Measuring the glass

Specifically, HyphaMetrics’s ClearView Metrics offering is measuring on-device media consumption from a panel of 5,000 homes.

“Our technology is able to measure what I like to say the ‘glass layer’ of the TV,” Drews adds. “We are not listening to what is occurring on the TV, we are watching what is occurring on the TV, and we are able to measure everything that’s occurring.

“So it doesn’t matter if you’re watching through an OTT device, a video gaming console, playing a video game, using a set top box, we are definitively measuring all of those environments directly on the TV.

“And then we’re also measuring the other devices in the home, all in association with the people within the home. So as a result, the data is coming from a single source.

“We should be able to figure out exactly what is occurring on the TV in an unduplicated fashion between set top box, linear streaming, etcetera.”

Pilot Program

HyphaMetrics aims to make its consumption data available via “licensing to TV networks, media agencies, digital media platforms, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), and other research companies”, MediaPost reports.

Drews says it could be used to understand program-level measurement of Netflix consumption or compatible viewing of different streaming services or data on ad loads on YouTube.

ClearView Metrics is in development. “We are focused right now on a pilot program that we will announce very soon before the end of the year,” Drews says.

“And the intent is really to truly understand at a granular level, at a definitive level, what is occurring in the home? What media are people exposed to, whether it’s content or advertising, and which devices those exposures occur on?”

Nielsen recently began working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable advertising technology for linear TV. Then Univision joined A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s SVP for product management in advanced video advertising and identity, Jessica Hindlian, says that partnership is “foundational” to what will now be an imminent fuller launch.

Identity graph for TV

Tru Optik brings an “identity graph” of information on 80 million US connected TV households. That has now enriched the data of Nielsen’s own solution.

“The partnership with Tru Optik is very important because it will provide a baseline from which we can match our OEM smart TV device footprint to a strong identity backbone to really allow us to target at scale on our own footprint addressably,” Hindlian says.

“With the combination of our device footprint and Tru Optik’s graph, we can ensure that there are real households at the other end receiving the message.”

Consumer data company TransUnion recently said it would acquire Tru Optik to build out its own media targeting business.  That deal has closed.

TransUnion to Acquire Tru Optik To Bolster Connected Identity Matching

Smoothing the path

Nielsen’s is the latest initiative aimed at simplifying access to addressable TV ad-buying, which is splintered across many devices and services.

Its linear capabilities may be particularly appealing for connected TV, which, despite the growth in VOD, also boosts live linear as a strong suit.

Other consortia include Vizio’s Project OAR and the On Addressability consortium.

Almost a year ago, eMarketer forecast 2020 US connected TV ad spend would reach $8.88 billion, growing to $14.12 billion by 2023. But a plethora of companies is working to iron out what can often be bottlenecks in buying.

Bringing first-party to the party

Hindlian says Nielsen’s offering makes it possible for brands to bring their own CRM data to enhance targeting.

“Our clients are really looking for the ability to use a single audience segment, a single audience target and activate that segment or target across a variety of different addressable platforms,” she says. “That’s really what we’re driving towards right now.

“Our partnership with Tru Optik allows us to very quickly onboard client’s, brand’s, and programmer’s first party data in order to use that data to actually to target.

“And we do expect to see demand for first-party data from an addressable targeting standpoint increase significantly as we get through our beta period.”

Nielsen’s Addressable TV Beta Focusing On ‘Mechanics’

SpotX says the elections for president, House Of Representatives and Senate is a watershed for the channels.

Previous elections have been called, if crudely, “the first internet election” or “the first social media election”.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, SpotX’s Allan Welch says November 2020 is “the election of OTT and CTV”.

“A lot of political advertisers have really begin to understand the power of CTV and OTT,” Welch says. He describes five main driving factors.

1. More channels = more voters

“A lot more streaming platforms that are ad-supported have been being developed and released for consumers,” Welch says. “That’s been really helping political advertisers understand the power of where they can reach their voters again.”

2. Candidates go beyond news

“(They are) using their data and using their information to find their voters where they are,” Welch says. “It’s been traditionally news publishers, news sites, news, media or owners that they’re interested in working with because that’s really where the most interested voters will be. But (now) it could be on any publisher. Sports is very popular (for campaigns). ”

3. CTV is no longer an after-thought

SpotX’s Welch says connected TV advertising is no longer just being used by campaign advertisers when traditional TV inventory runs out, as has historically been the case. “Now it’s going to become an integral part of their actual media buy from the very beginning,” he says.

4. Switch from social

Facebook’s decision to cut off political ads a week before the election is causing some campaigns to switch to advanced TV. “Talking to our clients, we have seen some movement of budgets over to CTV and OTT,” says Welch. He thinks some of that spending is coming from many ad buyers switching video ads from social media to CTV.

5. Lockdown is boosting attention

Whilst COVID-19 is a societal health crisis that has also robbed TV networks of spend from newly-averse brands, for those which can provide effective audience targeting, the US election comes as blessed relief. Welch says the use of CTV ad targeting for the election has been bolstered by enhanced viewing thanks to stay-at-home measures. According to Nielsen, streaming grew to more than 25% of total TV minutes viewed in the second quarter of 2020 alone, compared to 19% in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Discovery Communications, whose network brands include Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network and TLC, is working to provide audience-based buying to advertisers and media agencies in several ways. Most recently, the company launched OneGraph to unify audiences among its linear and digital platforms, while also providing data-driven targeting with its Discovery Engage platform for advanced advertising.

“We’ve doubled our client base almost every year,” Sam Garfield, vice president of data strategy and advanced audience platforms at Discovery, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re definitely seeing recurring clients, and new clients still coming in and testing. We really see the future as cross-platform and addressable.”

Those platforms not only include linear TV, but also the growing audience for connected TV (CTV), mobile and web video programming. Targeting audiences and measuring incremental reach among those omnichannel platforms are especially promising.

“Everyone’s trying to understand, ‘if I extend my buy from linear into digital, what kind of reach am I getting?’ That gives us the foundation to look to the future as we add in linear, addressable and other platforms,” Garfield said. “For us, it’s looking at how we can aggregate across all those footprints and bring a scaled solution to the advertisers.”

Piloting Addressable Ads

Addressable advertising promises to let marketers reach different households as they watch the same TV program. After years of developing the technology and common measurement standards, cable operators are preparing to expand their addressable advertising offerings in the next year.

Discovery participates in the major industry groups to develop standards for addressable advertising, including the On Addressability consortium from Comcast, Charter and Cox; the Vizio-led Project OAR; and Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising effort.

“There’s a lot of demand, and in our initial conversations, there has been interest expressed in participating with these pilots,” Garfield said. “Each of them is at its own stage, but we continue to progress and hope to be in the testing phase with each of those in the next quarter or so.”

Discovery has compiled more than 60 case studies to demonstrate how its data-driven Engage platform delivers results to advertisers. Garfield expects addressable advertising will become stronger at demonstrating business outcomes in the next few years.

“When we start talking about outcome-based guarantees, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to understand the methodologies of each of the platforms that are calculating these outcomes as well as historical benchmarks,” Garfield said. “Then there’s the basic business questions that we all have, which is, ‘if it’s the same audience and the same creative, why would there be a different result across programmers?'”

Data-Driven Approach

Discovery has worked with partners including audience measurement firm 605 to provide more insights for advertisers seeking to measure results at all stages of the sales funnel. Television has almost unrivaled power to connect with consumers at the top of that funnel amid its broad reach.

“In this conversation about outcome-based guarantees, we lost track of part of the power of TV historically, which has been the largest reach vehicle to create brand awareness or brand consideration.” Garfield said.

As a result of its collaboration with 605, Discovery offers the largest footprint in TV with data from Comcast and 605’s data from 40 million set-top boxes.

“That gives us the ability to really look at smaller sample sizes that you in the brand awareness studies and really grow that sample size to a place where you can look at how that overlays with outcomes,” Garfield said.

That’s the view of Jeremy Hlavacek, chief revenue officer of IBM Watson Advertising.

The division of IBM leverages the company’s Watson intelligence engine on advertising use cases.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hlavacek explains how AI could make a step-change.

AI = Ad Infrastructure?

“A number of players in the ecosystem – ad-tech companies, publishers, marketers – they’re starting to understand how AI can help them predict what actions their consumers are going to take when they don’t have all the data that they’re used to having,” he says.

“AI is a new category of advertising and it’s really going to change everything that we do, much of the way programmatic changed everything that close to a decade ago happened in the digital space.”

A great day for @WatsonAds! Fantastic sessions at #aw2020 and huge steps forward with product partnerships at Magnite, Xandr, LiveRamp, Beeswax, Nielsen, Influential. Great client and agency partnerships with State Farm ® and Eight…https://t.co/VRIeoOSMkK https://t.co/AhJXTJSk05

— Jeremy Hlavacek (@jhlava) October 5, 2020

So, what is AI really?

More specifically, machine learning – as a key pillar of AI – involves algorithms, trained on data sets to identify patterns, predicting future events from similar streams of input data.

“It’s the ability to continuously learn, predict outcomes, be flexible in challenging situations,” Hlavacek adds.

“Whether that’s a pandemic or even just a change in consumer behaviour, having real-time learning allows a marketer to adjust on the fly and not having to stop campaigns and recalibrate.”

But Hlavacek says IBM needs to “educate” the ecosystem for the new world of AI ads.

AI’s new tricks

During Advertising Week 2020 in October, IBM Watson Advertising announced several new products, as well as a number of partnerships.

IBM has got pick-up for the features in ad-tech platforms from Xandr/AT&T, Magnite, Nielsen, MediaMath, LiveRamp and Beeswax, meaning AI capability will really be available in some of the most common buying and other ad-tech infrastructure.

1. Extensions for IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator

Launched in January, Advertising Accelerator, powered by Watson, assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions. Now it will encompass OTT and video.

“We found in our kind of research that customers are still not getting the right message from advertisers, even with all of the targeting data that’s available,” Hlavacek says. “Accelerator does that using AI capabilities from natural language processing, image recognition, all of those kind of things in the AI toolbox.”

2. IBM Watson Advertising Attribution

IBM is launching an ad attribution software in beta over the next few months.

“This is a long-standing issue for marketers about how to understand which media is working for which campaigns, and we have a really good solution that we’re bringing to market later in Q4 and into ’21 for attribution,” Hlavacek says.

3. IBM Watson Advertising Predictive Audiences

IBM wants to use prediction to create audience segments, “progressing beyond ‘look-alike’ to ‘do-alike’ segments”.

“We actually use AI and data ingestion to forecast or predict which audiences are going to be most receptive to a marketer’s message,” Hlavacek tells Beet.TV.

Samsung DSP gives programmatic buyers access to proprietary data, audiences and inventory for 45 million U.S. households, letting manage reach and frequency for video campaigns on linear TV, connected TV (CTV), mobile and desktop.

“Opening up Samsung DSP to our advertising partners in a self-service fashion is the natural evolution of our business,” Joe Melaragno, head of platform sales and agency development at Samsung Ads, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We know that advertisers want to have full access to use our data to activate in a self-service fashion.”

Samsung DSP grew out of the company’s acquisition of AdGear Technologies, a startup based in Montreal, four years ago.

Reaching Cord-Cutters

The portion of households that cancel cable and satellite TV service was forecast to grow to 27% by 2023 from about 20% this year, according to researcher eMarketer. As millions of consumers connect their TVs directly to the internet, their viewing choices are growing among a wider variety of services including advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) platforms that are free to watch.

“We have seen a dramatic increase in streaming activity, especially in ad-supported environments like Samsung TV+, over the last seven months since we’ve all been working from home and spending much more time in our homes,” Melaragno said. “We haven’t seen that drop off as things have settled into the ‘new normal.’ It’s easier to find them and reach them with digital ads served on the largest screen in the home.”

Samsung Ads gathers video data from smart devices including smart TVs equipped with automated content recognition (ACR), giving advertisers an exclusive source of audience information for targeting.

“The buyer can log into Samsung DSP, and they can build those audiences themselves, and they can find that incremental audience in a programmatic fashion without have to call their salesperson on the phone,” Melaragno said. “We don’t license our ACR data out to any partners. The DSP gives advertisers an additional way to do that.”

Resurgence in Demand

The U.S. advertising marketplace is showing signs of rebounding after a deep slump as coronavirus lockdowns went into effect in March and April. While some industries like airlines and hospitality have struggled to recover, others are bouncing back and boosting their marketing spending during the second half of the year. Increasingly, those ad budgets are going into digital media platforms.

“They’re reallocating those budgets from linear into digital TV because it’s the most effective way to reach viewers and it’s easier to reach them than ever before,” Melaragno said.

Samsung’s proprietary inventory sources include Samsung TV+, a subscription-free platform with more than 100 channels, and the Samsung Content Network which consists of ad placements in native apps that viewers install on their smart TVs. Buyers also can access sell-side platforms (SSPs) or exchanges that make inventory digitally available to programmatic buyers.

“We are seeing more and more advertisers who are doing programmatic upfronts, whether it’s activation in a private marketplace (PMP) or programmatic guaranteed fashion, or through a demand-side platform like Samsung DSP,” Melaragno said. “We do think the business will continue to grow, and we’re leaning into where buyers we believe are going.”

His father was an activist among migrant Mexican farm workers in Colorado.  Marc said the profound effects of seeing how migrant farmer workers lived has had a lifelong impact on him,  he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

This personal experience helped shape his commitment to equality.  He says he is fortunate to be in his position and be an advocate for change.

Earlier this week, he was on an Advertising Week panel about women’s equality and the work of the #SeeHer organization where he serves as a vice chair.

In this video, he shares the progress made in the Gender Equality Measurement (GEM) score at P&G and his aspirations for the industry.

(Today 10/11   #SeeHer celebrates the International #DayofTheGirl

On the issue of racial equality, Pritchard says that while there is a clear business imperative, it is essential for humanity.  He shares various several P&G campaigns that are meant to foster understanding.

The most recent initiative is aimed at the majority of white people what to help drive racial fairness  but don’t know how, This has lead to The Choice  from P&G.

As seen with the recent demand by Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, that media channels become more transparent to advertisers in the next year, improved metrics are a must.

Pritchard isn’t alone in asking for improvements that encompass the entire omnichannel universe, which has grown more fragmented as people access content on a wider variety of connected devices. That change in behavior is challenging for all marketers looking for ways to compare traditional media with newer digital platforms.

“[Marketers have] become increasingly impatient with getting ad impression data out of the big digital platforms, and having the ability to ‘de-dupe’ those impressions so they can really understand unduplicated reach and frequency,” Jane Clarke, chief executive and managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), said in this interview with Beet.TV. The coalition is a trade group founded in 2009 by television providers, media agencies and advertisers to explore ways to measure U.S. audiences.

Speaking to Jon Watts, an editorial advisor to Beet.TV, Clarke said the increased fragmentation of the media environment is driving a demand for improved measurement.

“It’s becoming more and more urgent as there’s more and more fragmentation and as the current measurement companies can’t catch all the fragmentation,” she said. “Once you start changing measurement and changing currencies in the way cross-platform media is bought and sold, it has huge business implications. It’s not just a technical issue for researchers.”

‘Putting It All Together’

Marketers have access to more viewership data than ever before, but comparing those data sets is a challenge without common standards among the growing number of TV media outlets.

“Even within television and premium video, most people now believe there are so many different data streams from linear to addressable to data-driven linear to VOD to AVOD to OTT to all forms of digital video,” Clarke said. “The challenge is not only getting all that data normalized and standardized, but putting it all together.”

Clarke said the coalition found in a recent study that TV measurement has many pitfalls and potential inaccuracies without a common method of tracking viewership.

“The weird thing in the U.S. is we don’t have an ad measurement system right now.  All our television measurement is based on the ‘C3’ rating by Nielsen, which averages all the ads in an entire show, regardless of pod or position,” she said. “That’s starting to fall apart with this whole fragmented world.” Nielsen introduced C3 in 2007 to measure average commercial minutes in live programming and playback by digital video recorders (DVRs) up to three days later.

Despite the challenges in measurement, she foresees improvements as media channels work to meet the demands of marketers. After all, they control billions in media spending.

“Technology and consumers move faster than the standards in the auditing and transparency that follow,” she said. “It will follow because the marketers will demand that all of these new evolving services and sources of data become normalized and standardized and comparable.”