In the latest example, VideoAmp has extended a deal through which it uses data from 18 million VIZIO smart TVs for planning, measurement and TV ad sales.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp chief strategy officer Nick Chakalos explains why this kind of collaboration is the way forward.
We are thrilled to announce our renewed partnership with @VIZIO, where we will maintain access to their Inscape ACR data for planning, measurement and TV ad sales use cases. Check out the full story here: https://t.co/DXY9O0zVvX pic.twitter.com/7VjajdABOP
— VideoAmp (@Video_Amp) October 6, 2021
Actual viewing behavior
“We gain access to a world-class data set that really helps us bring to market a new currency and a new data set that can be utilized by buyers and sellers to transact in whatever means they want to and whatever KPI or performance indicator that they want to – whether that’s on a basic demo(graphic), an advanced audience, or on something more sophisticated like attribution,” Chakalos says.
The deal, announced this month, is an extension of VideoAmp’s existing use of VIZIO’s Inscape automatic content recognition (ACR) data, which takes viewing behavior from VIZIO smart TV owners, which had been due to expire at the end of 2021.
Now the deal runs to the end of 2025, with an option for VideoAmp to extend.
VideoAmp’s platform enables audience data, ad insight reports and investment activation for new TV ad buyers.
ViacomCBS Teams With VideoAmp To Explore Alternative TV Ad Currency – Deadline https://t.co/xZKLEUPa9i
— Nick Chakalos (@NickChakalos) October 5, 2021
Join the dots
For Chakalos, it is all about collaboration the industry needs to connect up disparate systems.
“We certainly are looking at this from the standpoint of having a data set that can enable measurement that’s required across OTT, across linear TV, across social and other forms of media consumption,” he explains.
“We’re headed towards a place that’s fairly exciting. It’s about ensuring that TV ad spend is accurately measured and that publishers can understand their yield a bit better and gain credit for the audiences that they have.
“We are proceeding collaboratively towards that.”
]]>This month, Yahoo announced Tubi is extending its use of Yahoo’s supply-side ad software (SSP) to also connect with its demand-side platform (DSP).
As Iván Markman, chief business officer of Yahoo, explains in this video interview with Beet.TV, that means Yahoo ad buyers now have access to one of the biggest connected TV destinations.
Expanded partnership
“They’ve been leveraging our SSP for about three years,” Markman says.
“Advertisers and agencies can now access the high-growth inventory and engagement opportunities that Tubi has to offer in those ways, above and beyond the ways that they have been able to access them in our exchange.
“We are lighting up a unique set of capabilities in our DSP to enable advertisers and agencies to access supply in unique ways and better ways.
“Programmatic guaranteed deals reporting and planning gets amplified within the DSP.
“A result of that for Tubi is to drive greater growth as they can transact.”
From cathode-ray to Tubi
Now owned by Fox, Tubi has been on a tear.
Reportedly, usage has doubled in the last year, whilst upfront commitments have tripled.
Now Fox wants to spend even more on streaming TV.
Fox Corp.’s streamers will get a cash boost in the coming year as the media company looks to lean further into its growing portfolio of ad-supported and subscription streaming services like Tubi. https://t.co/nmCvI5T1UQ
— Adweek (@Adweek) August 4, 2021
Creative canvas
Markman is clear why he thinks Tubi is growing.
“There’s quality content that is very relevant ,” he says.
“(It is) a great kind of creative canvas, if you will, when it comes to the consumer experience.
“When you think about upfronts as an example, it really helps everyone participate in those opportunities in much more valuable ways.”
]]>The chief marketing officer of Mastercard’s health business says the quest for user privacy is right-on.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rajamannar explains which replacements may work best, and how advertisers should respond.
Privacy is right
“I completely agree with a statement which Tim Cook had made brilliantly, ‘Privacy is a fundamental right’,” he says.
“There are so many data breaches that are happening. If you guys don’t know how to protect my data, you have no business collecting my data.
“As a marketer, I have to behave in a very responsible way to my consumers.
“I think it’s a good decision that they have taken, but we need to find solutions.”
Congratulations to Mastercard CMO @RajaRajamannar for on not only being awarded the @Adweek Brand Genius Award, but also being recognized as the Grand Brand Genius for your creativity, leadership & #marketing innovation. https://t.co/VIWHgTy8jy
— Mastercard News (@MastercardNews) September 27, 2021
Safety in numbers
Vendors across the industry are racing to cook-up alternatives to third-party tracking cookies – not only as Apple has reduced its own identify offering but with Google’s deprecation of Chrome cookies now looming by 2023.
Rajamannar sees three categories of replacement emerging:
Cohorts – “It is one step better than blindly bombarding all consumers with all kinds of ads. It’s a step better, but still not good”
Vendor-specific alternatives – “You’ve got companies like Trade Desk, LiveRamp and a whole bunch of other companies out there, they’re coming with their own solutions, which we need to see how they are.”
Broad-based initiatives – “ANA is working on some solutions at the industry level, which I think is the smartest way to do, taking advantage of the scale that all of us collectively bring to the table.”
I am excited that my book, Quantum Marketing, is now published in Korean, and reaching more people as we head into this next paradigm of marketing! pic.twitter.com/LrI3khvVHl
— Raja Rajamannar (@RajaRajamannar) September 7, 2021
How to act
Regardless of what comes after the cookie, the Mastercard CMO thinks brands don’t have to wait; they can take two key steps now:
1. Minimise the collection of data
“What information do you really need to know about the consumer? Do you really need to know all this stuff? Or can you actually come up with the same decision, with the same precision, knowing a lot less data?”
2. Reach the user right
“How do you then track the consumer, or how do you contextually serve the right advertisement in a non-intrusive non-repetitive fashion that makes sense to the consumer?”
Production Notes: This video is an except from an extended conversation which will be published 10.11 on the BeetCast, the podcast. The BeetCast is sponsored by TransUnion.
]]>“The goal of the product would be to drive higher conversions at a lower total campaign cost,” Ryan Horn, senior vice president of marketing at Simpli.fi, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We look at this as being able to go after that upper funnel – the awareness and the branding – with the CTV ads, and then hammer that lower funnel in conversion with a variety of the other creative types.”
The streaming audience has grown in the past year with more than three quarters (82%) of U.S. TV households owning at least one CTV device. Amid growing demand for CTV ad placements, Simpli.fi this year has run more than 32,000 CTV campaigns for more than 8,200 unique advertisers, according to the company.
The addition of its retargeting product comes as Simpli.fi continues to grow with the backing of private-equity firms. Blackstone Group in June announced an investment in Simpli.fi that valued the adtech startup at $1.5 billion. Blackstone joined private-equity firm GTCR as majority shareholders in Simpli.fi.
With the approach of the holiday shopping season, Horn foresees retailers using retargeting strategies to lead consumers toward buying gifts online or at brick-and-mortar stores.
“It’s an automated process to nurture leads throughout the funnel,” he said.
]]>Amagi, which helps bring streaming channels to CTV platforms, is partnering with IRIS.tv, whose technology mines video for data that can be passed as ad targeting signals, to enable contextual targeting for some of its channel partners.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, IRIS.tv co-founder Richie Hyden explains what is happening, and what they future looks like.
Excited to work with @amagicorp to provide streaming TV with seamless onboarding of their video data, so it can be activated for contextual targeting across connected devices and smart TVs. #connectedtv #programmatic #adtech #contextualadvertising https://t.co/yt37w2JhKY
— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) September 9, 2021
Enabling contextual CTV
“The partnership is built to enable transparency between both buyers and sellers, simply as to the content that a consumer is watching on a connected TV device, and most importantly, what they’re watching at the time in which an advertisement is shown to that consumer,” Hyden says.
The deal means Amagi channel partners – which currently include the likes of Vice Media, Bein Sports and Fremantle – will get to use IRIS.tv to pull out video-level contextual and brand safety signals, information that describes the inner meaning of their content. (Announcement).
This can then be activated through the streams enabled by Amagi, which delivers to like destinations like Samsung, Roku, Vizio, Xumo and Pluto TV, plugging in SSPs and DSPs to enable programmatic advertising.
In other words, it enables contextual advertising for linear and on-demand TV play-out over connected TV.
Inside video
Amagi recently raised $100 million in new funding.
IRIS.tv is all about peering into the inner meaning of videos, pulling out contextual labels that describe the content and making them available as signals for ad buyers and platforms.
It uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.
Hyden says information about videos typically lives in a publisher’s content management system. He aims to make meaning of it, and help distribute that information to ad-tech systems.
Tune into the webinar, 'Instant gratification: The exploding opportunity of FAST TV' to learn how content brands & platforms are working on growing their audience base & ad revenues in Free Ad Supported Streaming TV!https://t.co/fgpW0PkSOt#Amagi #OTT #Cloud #FAST #AVOD #CTV
— Amagi (@AmagiCorp) September 15, 2021
IRIS.tv’s roadmap
Usually, these kinds of innovations are offered to sell-side operators. But Hyden’s says IRIS.tv’s roadmap involves embracing ad buyers, too.
“We’ll be expanding that to the buy side, leveraging our persistent ID that we call the IRIS ID,” he says.
“That will enable brands and agencies to enable traditional pre-bid targeting out of their DSP of choice in a very similar way that’s done for page-level analysis and targeting based on text on the page.
“You’ll see more announcements for us working with our DSP partners there, and then also enabling the data to be used for post-campaign reporting and verification, something that we know is really important to the brands and agencies.”
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, TransUnion’s EVP of marketing solutions and media vertical Matt Spiegel explains why his company is making the move for one of the major ad data providers.
November 2020:
Experian + Tapad: $280 millionSeptember 2021:
TransUnion + Neustar: $3.1 billionIdentity is becoming expensive.https://t.co/4VZjixO3s4
— Giulio S. (@astaniscia86) September 13, 2021
Why buy?
“We’ve seen a really good complimentary set of capabilities – at the core mission, they really fit nicely,” Spiegel says.
“They built up what they call their OneID technology platform, a great cloud-based, AI-integrated, well-connected technology platform for resolving identity in real-time.
“They’ve got a clearly market-leading suite of measurement solutions, very importantly, focused on marketing performance measurement versus other types of measurement.”
Spiegel says TransUnion, which has a $23 billion market cap, is buying Neustar’s risk, communications and marketing solutions offerings, but not its security business.
TransUnion's acquisition of Neustar is a game changer in the MarTech sector. @mspiegel and team have executed on a killer identity strategy! https://t.co/HjwV9vFJ6l pic.twitter.com/XUjYC3od3T
— Terence Kawaja (@tkawaja) September 13, 2021
From information to identity
To many, TransUnion may be best known as a provider of consumer credit information.
Under Spiegel, TransUnion has been making in-roads becoming an audience data provider.
Neustar would be its latest acquisition in that space after TruSignal (2019), Signal (2020) and TruOptik (2020).
$3.1 billion — that is what your data is worth https://t.co/TBMmAEj9SB
— Josh Sternberg (@joshsternberg) September 13, 2021
Making complex simple
“We feel strongly that the era of identity (will) underpin marketing ecosystem, one that’s focused on enabling personalised marketing in both the household and individual level,” Spiegel adds.
He says the death of the cookie, the lack of mobile IDs, the increasing of streaming and the digitization of the world has made the ecosystem increasingly complex.
“In a world of multiple digital identity signals, multiple different touch points of consumers and worlds, where there are “walled gardens”, there isn’t just open access to all data.
“To have the accurate underpinning of identity is a complex data science problem
“The more technology you put behind there, the more data sourcing rules and regulations you put behind there, the more data governance you put behind there … all those things really create the ecosystem that allows you to build from a strong foundation.”
]]>The value of the transaction has not been disclosed.
We spoke with Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise about the new investors. He explains it as a natural cycle in private equity where Vista held ownership for over six years. Vista made its investment in Mediaocean in 2015.
With the new ownership, the path ahead means “aggressive” via organic growth acquisitions.
TA is the the firm that owned Flashtalking, which Mediaocean acquired for $500 million earlier this year. Today, that deal closed. CVC is Europe’s largest private equity firm.
]]>VideoAmp will work with Snowflake, a cloud data storage company, to offer “multi-party cloud environments” for data collaboration – effectively, a way of pooling audience data with rules and privacy baked in.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp CEO and co-founder Ross McCray explains how it works, and why.
The trouble with agreements
“In today’s best practice and approach, what we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of contractual commitments in trust-based systems, where you sign a DocuSign, you’re saying, ‘I won’t do this. I won’t do that with your data’,” McCray says.
“(You) send it to some third-party identity partner who is a trusted source to get all the raw data to create these anonymous based systems and send it back across the wire.
“We don’t believe that’s putting the consumer first. There’s a lot of holes with that approach.”
Holistic, safe data view
VideoAmp has already been using multi-national Snowflake for more than three years to run analysis.
Now it is joining Powered by Snowflake, a partner program, which will see it use the cloud computing resources to change the way data expectations are forged,
“A lot of the legacy measurement systems haven’t been able to really accurately count in those more modern ways of digital and streaming,” McCray says, “and to look at it in a more holistic view, which should increase their yield and opportunity for where their audiences are going.”
He adds: “The way that we’ve architected this system with Snowflake is that we’re able to do a multi-party computing join – there’s never a circumstance where the data that’s owned by the publishers has to be shared with someone else.
“We’re unable to ever process the individual-level data, but we’re able to get much more accurate in terms of how we’re doing the identity resolution.
“(That) allows for advertisers and agencies and media owners to process secure data in a way that allows us to get access to things that you wouldn’t have in more of a trust-based system.”
‘No quick bucks’
Seven-year-old VideoAmp’s platform offers software and more for linear TV, over-the-top and digital video, including TV viewership data, campaign performance insights and buy optimization.
This year, the company raised up to $75 million from Capital IP, comprised of $50 milli0n in debt with an option on a further $25 million.
Although its valuation is now increasing, McCray says he has no intention to join the latest wave of ad-tech sales.
“We’ve seen a lot of companies sell early and cut themselves too short,” he says. “We really want to be able to create a long-term vision of creating a new system and alternative currency of how media is bought, sold and valued.
“We’ve been approached over the years, many times for acquisitions, but it just doesn’t make any sense. We really want to win, and we want others to be able to count on us for that long-term vision.”
]]>He joined Samba TV, the provider of omniscreen advertising and analytics, in July as vice president and head of agency development after a 27-year career in media buying. His agency experience includes leadership roles at Dentsu Media, IPG’s Initiative and Publicis’ Zenith, Optimedia and DeWitt Media.
Magel sees an opportunity to transform the way advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and improve audience targeting.
“I have just been so fascinated and so excited by the amazing amount of transformation and evolution happening in the television industry,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The hot spot of where all that is happening is in the addressable and advanced video sectors, specifically being led by connected TV.”
Data Insights for Advertisers
Amid the fragmentation of the media landscape, advertisers have grown more reliant on first-party data to hone their messaging and create a
“Marketers are absolutely much more focused on building their repositories of data about their customers,” he said, “and leveraging knowledge and insights and understanding from that data to improve and connect all of their brand experiences. A big part of their brand experience is their advertising and media presence.”
Improvements to measurability will help advertisers to avoid showing ads too frequently to the same audiences. Such saturation creates a negative experience for viewers, and is wasteful for advertisers.
“It’s an undeveloped space. The experience isn’t optimal yet. The industry hasn’t matured,” he said. “There’s been a huge change in viewing behavior by the consumer. The amount of insight into what viewers are actually watching between linear and streaming is limited.”
Automatic content recognition (ACR) data that capture what appears on smart TV screens provide more details about viewership for linear and streamed programming. With that information, marketers can implement frequency capping, reach deduplicated audiences and measure their return on investment (ROI).
“When you’re going to market utilizing audiences that have been built by such a granular set and individualized set of data, you need to be able to measure viewing of those audiences,” Magel said. “That is what the data that Samba does provide enables.”
Greater Media Transparency
Advertisers also face challenges as media outlets develop closed systems, also known as “walled gardens,” that limit their ability to measure whether they’re reaching the same consumers among different platforms. Improved cross-platform measurement can help to improve the effectiveness of media buys, driving additional investment that improves the ecosystem.
“Intermeasurability is a critical step the industry needs to take,” Magel said. “All boats can rise with that tide if there is an ability to see across all of those partners. That’s good for viewers. I think that’s good for marketers, and I think that’s good for media companies.”
]]>The company had acquired Tru Optik, Signal Digital and TruSignal, as it built out its own ambition to provide consumer and household data to power ad targeting. Now it is bundling them into a single suite, TruAudience.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, EVP Marketing Solutions, Head of Media Vertical at TransUnion, explains the rationale.
Triple whammy
TruAudience has three legs:
- TruAudience Identity: With data on individuals, devices and homes
- TruAudience Data Marketplace, formerly Tru Optik: Features audience segments from dozens of partners including Kantar, Comscore, IHS Market, Lotame, and NCSolutions.
- TruAudience Platform: Dubbed “a rapid audience creation and management system leveraging multikey matching and machine learning to onboard first-party data and model audiences”.
Post-cookie readiness
“Our focus has been on really making sure we’re ready for the next wave of personalization underpinned by an accurate view of identity that was fundamentally fundamentally built in a post cookie world,” Spiegel says.
“It’s not just about individuals. It’s not just about devices or just about households. It’s actually fundamentally about all three.”
On TruAudience Data Marketplace, specifically, Spiegel says: “Now, whether you want to use TransUnion data or comScore data or IHS data or Kantar data, it’s, it’s a marketplace available right now to connect you to get to 80 million connected homes.
“That’s a higher match rate, more accuracy than a lot of the other solutions available on market for all that money being spent in streaming media.”
Building up
Under Spiegel, TransUnion has been making in-roads becoming an audience data provider, not just a consumer credit information provider.
It recently began powering OpenAP’s identity solution and began injecting identity into Blockgraph, a TV industry initiative.
According to Spiegel in TransUnion’s product announcement: “The marketing and advertising sector is on the precipice of reinvention with the demise of third-party cookies, the rise of privacy-centric solutions and the overarching need for brands to break down silos and communicate to consumers across channels — from connected TV and audio, to direct mail and linear TV.”
]]>But, whilst CTV purports to enhance reach and control the frequency of ad exposure, what is the reality?
That is the question CTV ad software supplier Innovid set out to answer when it undertook research into the area, conducted with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
Research highlights
The resulting output, a report called Decoding CTV Measurement, tells the story.
Introducing "Decoding CTV Measurement"
In partnership w/ @ANAmarketers, we conducted an unprecedented study across 20 leading advertisers to uncover the truth behind reach, frequency, and ROI. Here's what we found: https://t.co/ItOgGgVW9g pic.twitter.com/CWiAXY1K4J
— Innovid (@innovid) July 20, 2021
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin summarises the results from a study that heard from 20 brands with a total of $35 million in spending.
“We wanted to go out to the market and learn, what is the optimal reach and frequency?,” Chalozin says. “And even more than that is that, ‘when you buy media right now, what are you actually getting?’ ‘What’s the real duplication in the market right now?'”
According to the study:
- “Across our study, the average campaign reached only 13% of the available U.S. CTV households, indicating that we’re only scratching the surface of unique reach.”
- “Average frequency was just 4.6 across all campaigns. While high levels of frequency can exist in pockets, frequency is not universally high in CTV.”
- “The average eCPM of the campaigns in our study was $23, which sits between the average CPM for U.S. primetime TV ads for broadcast and cable ($36 and $19, respectively, according to eMarketer).”
Avoid overlap
Chalozin opened up on other findings.
“When you buy media from multiple media companies, we’ve seen that the average overlap between two media companies is 33%,” he says.
So, what’s the takeaway?
“Yes, people are tuning into streaming, cutting the cord, it’s definitely a tremendous transition,” Chalozin notes. “However, with the help of technology, you can do a much better job on making your money work harder.”
]]>IAS announced it had acquired Publica, a CTV ads server platform, for $220 million in cash and stock.
Now it plans to launch “a comprehensive brand safety and suitability solution for CTV advertisers and publishers in the coming months”.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, IAS CEO Lisa Utzschneider explains why her company is following the road to connected TV ad verification.
The four reasons
Utzschneider explained four reasons IAS is acquiring Publica.
1. The M&A template works
“We have a successful formula in place when it comes to acquisitions. We’ve done this already two times while I’ve been at IAS.”
2. Leaning in to CTV
“It’s the first inning of a long game with CTV. And, given that Publica has a leading CTV classification platform, (it) is just such opportunity for IAS.”
3. Spreading to the sell-side
“They have deep strategic integrated partnerships with some of the leading video publishers. Publishers, like Samsung, Philo, Fox. The majority of our business is with advertiser-direct. The combination of bringing together a robust buy-side and sell-side, there’s just so much opportunity to innovate together.”
4. Team talent
“The exceptional talent at Publica. They have a really strong engineering organisation and a really strong leadership team.”
Publica’s stack
Publica is a five-year-old connected TV ad-serving company that has grown to have employees in LA, New York, London and Paris.
It employs server-side ad insertion, as oppose to playing out ads from client devices themselves.
It built its technology with header bidding from the start. That is the technology that lets publishers entertain bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, rather than in a “waterfall” fashion, thereby reaping a better yield from a larger auction.
It also unifies bidding via direct sales and programmatic sources.
The CTV odyssey
Today we acquired @getpublica for $220M as IAS continues to transform the future of CTV advertising. It’s the first inning of a long game in CTV. Where the consumers go, the marketers go…it just enables us to really accelerate that CTV opportunity. https://t.co/SsGeDE8xsM pic.twitter.com/TnSeuX0ym9
— Lisa Utzschneider (@Lisa_Utz) August 10, 2021
Utzschneider says IAS – which helps ad buyers around ad fraud, brand safety and suitability, contextual targeting and viewability – is growing fast.
“We are seeing lots of interest in demand from global marketers to partner with IAS, and we’re signing agreements that are two to three years long with some of the major global iconic marketers like Coke, and Nestle, and GSK, Adidas,” she says.
EMarketer estimates that advertisers will invest over $13.4 billion into CTV this year, growing to surpass $24.7 billion by 2024.
Utzschneider says Publica reports publishers using its platform have seen on average a 30% lift in yield for their CTV inventory.
The buy gives IAS access to Publica’s unified auction, over-the-top (OTT) header bidding for programmatic buying, audience management, campaign management, server-side ad insertion (SSAI), ad pod automation, and advanced analytics.
IAS’ feature set already includes a verification solution for global invalid traffic (IVT) and viewability across programmatic.
]]>With today’s news, we have republished our interview with Publica CEO Ben Antier who explains the company’s offering which is largely around ad serving for publishers.
The deal was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
]]>The announcement was made today. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Late last year we spoke with Lee about publisher uses of “identifiers” in audience targeting. We have re-published that video and story with today’s news.
Our report from November:
Little by little, inventions and partnerships are working to heal a digital advertising world wounded by the erosion of third-party identity tracking.
In the latest, MediaMath’s Source buying DSP is integrating another identity solution, purporting to support the identification of consumers across devices on premium publishers’ sites, without cookies.
The solution is Merkury, the ID graph from Dentsu’s Merkle. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Merkle’s John Lee outlines the opportunity.
From third to first base
A recent Digiday survey found 38% of publishers will not have a solution for identifying audience targets after third-party cookies are turned off.
“Identity has been really third-party conversation in the past – third-party cookies, device IDs, things that could be rented and managed by a few companies that maintain these big identity graphs,” Lee says.
“With cookie deprecation, with increasing consumer privacy regulation depending on which market we’re talking about, the ability to rely on these third-party identifiers is obviously becoming obsolete.
“So the conversation’s needing to shift inherently for the buy and the sell side of the equation, the clients, the brands and the publishers to take ownership of their own identity, which is primarily based on first party data as we go forward.
“We are transitioning towards a world in which brand and publisher ownership of first party identity is going to be the key to maintaining addressability in the ecosystem.”
Identity crisis
Merkle has recently been building out its identity chops, off the back of its Merkury, an identity graph platform covering 96% of US adults aged over 18 that includes associated email addresses, device identifiers like cookies and device IDs.
It recently acquired 4Cite Marketing, bringing in a first-party identity engine, allowing Merkury to incorporate first-party data like web and email traffic, helping ad buyers and publishers enable personalisation and targeting.
Lee hails it as “a huge step forward” in a world where traditional third-party identifiers are drying up. More than that, in MediaMath’s Source, ad buyers have more extensive information available about their ad supply chain.
“The marketers can go in and see how all the different pieces connect and where all the handoffs are,” Lee says. “That applies not just to the programmatic bidding pipes, but it applies to the identity pieces as well.
“So with Source, MediaMath welcomes us to say, ‘Hey, bring your Merkury ID into source and we will use it being a cookie-less ID as the currency that we allow advertisers to use to manage reach frequency’.”
Here is the press release on today’s news.
]]>That’s why NBCUniversal has announced it will adopt Ad-ID, a kind of “bar code” identifier for advertising, as its standard for managing ad asset in-flow through its One Platform suite.
Ad-ID was developed and is jointly owned by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
In this video interview with Beet.TV, NBCUniversal’s Brad Epperson explains what is happening.
A unique code for ads
“As we’ve got commercials across our linear television channels, everywhere on all of our digital platforms plus Peacock, this allows us to have a growth strategy that adds the commercial quality and the commercial creative as the centre with one standard of a naming convention attached to all of them,” Epperson says.
Ad-ID uses 11-digit versions of the ISCI alphanumeric codes the TV industry has been using the identify its ad assets since the 1970s.
Since 1992, the ANA and 4As have been responsible for setting standard ad asset coding. Ad-ID, launched in 2002, is a replacement for ISCI, which had previously been used for that purpose but which the bodies said was “unregulated” and non-standard, leading them to make the full migration in 2007.
The code can resolve metadata which, Epperson says, “can be scheduled or facilitated in a way that allows us to really improve the viewing experience, and it gives us a whole new set of technological capabilities that just have never existed before”.
NBCUniversal secured $500 million in upfront ad commitments for its streaming platform Peacock, the company revealed today. https://t.co/BD7XrjnMAe
— Ad Age (@adage) July 15, 2021
Peacock has already been requiring ad buyers register with Ad-ID and assign a valid Ad-ID code to each creative prior to submission of advertising creatives.
The announcement represents the extension of Ad-ID to NBC’s other properties, and the first major-media company signature to lean into the standard.
Supporting scale and new features
For Epperson, whose NBC channels are broadcasting this year’s Olympic Games from Tokyo, it means: “When we’ve got that one associated Ad-ID connected to the creative, we can actually start to look into ‘What’s the creative impact?’
“In any supply chain in any industry, the greater amount of standardization you have, the easier it is for you to just scale that business.”
For viewers, the hope is that it will lead to a better viewing experience.
Epperson says the metadata connected-to by Ad-ID helps NBCUniversal better achieve frequency capping, to ensure viewers are not exposed to ads too many times, across both linear and digital channels.
It also ends up driving competitive ad separation, delivery reporting, ad decisioning, storage de-duplication and collision control.
]]>But what if those agencies wanted to buy or change their campaigns during the competition?
NBC has partnered with video ad-tech firm Innovid to ensure that ads delivered through NBC’s digital streaming platforms can be tweaked in real-time, rather than in weeks.
Enabling third-party ad serving
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin explains why this move represents a change for the way US Olympics TV rightsholder NBC has always done things.
“The advertiser needed to send a file via email and wait for confirmation in email and a lot of massively manual process, which created massive delays,” he says.
“Changing creatives in real-time, as the campaign goes, was close to impossible, let alone any advanced capabilities like rotation.
“From an ad-tech standpoint, there was no third-party ad serving into the Olympics.
“Now, for the first time ever … we will have actual third-party ad serving using an open standard like VAST available within the Olympics.”
In theory, that means advertisers could change the creative in their pre-purchased slots to reflect the performance of Team USA athletes, for example.
If you watch any streamed content during the #Olympics2021, the ads you see were served by @innovid across all digital/mobile/CTV platforms https://t.co/cK3xdQYiGk
— Rich Greenfield, LightShed (@RichLightShed) July 15, 2021
The everywhere Olympics
Chalozin says the tech hook-up is available across everywhere NBC is streaming Olympics, including NBC Sports, Peacock, syndication sources like Twitch.
Innovid customers get the NBC inventory out of the box, and there is a new self-service ad-buying portal ad OlympicsAdManager.com.
With this year’s Olympics held in Japan, for US viewers, many events will be happening in the early hours of the morning or otherwise the day-time.
Olympics’ CTV year
Since viewers mostly flock to live sport drama, that poses a challenge to NBC. Of course, it’s a challenge that the broadcaster – the IOC’s long-running US broadcaster – regularly has to contend with, as the Olympics routinely relocates to different continents.
But this year represents something different – a year when on-demand viewing via connected TV (CTV) services could help non-live viewership to swell.
In Olympic years gone by, on-demand viewing was largely confined to desktop and mobile services. But consumers’ CTV behavior has exploded in the years since the last games in Rio in 2016.
If NBC can attract viewers to its Olympics CTV content, it will also want to take advantage of the medium’s advertising advantages in order to realize the best commercial opportunity from it.
But the move also represents big mindset shift for broadcasters, which have long treated such tentpole events as a big opportunity to secure ad commitments long in advance.
In a pre-Olympics pandemic year when advertisers’ business planning went haywire, there was value in becoming more responsive than that.
New global hire
"Dominic is a proven leader and his combination of strategic know-how and deep technical expertise of the advertising ecosystem makes him the ideal candidate to shepherd CTV growth across our markets." – @zvikanetter. Welcome to the team, Dominic! https://t.co/9uG5orDzXB pic.twitter.com/e1TgBr5WMc
— Innovid (@innovid) July 15, 2021
Innovid’s Olympics news also comes alongside another announcement – the appointment of Dominic Satur as VP of global brand partnerships.
Based in London, he will be responsible for expanding relationships with global brands and leading advertising transformation across channels.
Satur was previously with ad-tech company Flashtalking, which is due to be acquired by MediaOcean, for 10 years, most recently as VP of business development in Europe. He had helped that company build its European client base.
His role will involve counselling brands on how to take advantage of the new CTV opportunity.
]]>Venuto joins Progress during a dynamic period in the industry, and as the bank is expanding its offering with a new venture fund, a SPAC, and expansions into other sectors including automotive.
We interviewed the adtech veteran of VivaKi/Publicis, The Weather Channel, and Amobee about the new job and opportunities on the road ahead for the bank.
]]>That is Ivan Markman’s view. As chief business officer Ivan Markman at Verizon Media, Markman just signed a deal to launch a new Unified TV Report, using Nielsen and Vizio data to help advertisers understand both linear TV and digital campaign performance across Verizon’s own DSP.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Markman explains the rationale.
Connecting the dots
Verizon Media and Vizio already announced a partnership back in April which saw Verizon Media’s DSP gain access to viewing data on 18 million TVs from Vizio’s Inscape, giving new buying opportunities to its DSP customers.
In the latest, Unified TV Report will combine Verizon Media’s ConnectID people-based audience database with data from Vizio and Nielsen, totalling up to 148 million logged-in users.
“Now we’re bringing it to life to create a way for advertisers to connect the dots between, linear TV and connected TV,” Mark says, “and to connect the dots with, say, native advertising, more traditional video, advertising, display digital out of home.”
From TV to CTV
As linear audiences wane, ad buyers are getting excited about the opportunity to combine digital-style ad buying, targeting and measurement through internet-connected TV, despite persistent gripes about the complexity of doing so.
Those gripes include measuring across a proliferating range of media channels.
Markman acknowledges that consumer behavior is shifting from linear TV to connected TV (CTV).
He sees the ad world dividing up between “haves and have-nots” – those that have first-party identity data and those that do not.
Connecting the world
He says Verizon Media is offering up ConnectID, with data from 152 million unique users in the US.
But combining that with new CTV data from Vizio and linear viewership from Nielsen begins to make the combined offering sound like a relative powerhouse.
“We can help connect the dots and provide views into incremental reach, the duplicated frequency, the kinds of planning that is typically the happening within the TV landscape, and be able to do that seamlessly across both mediums,” he says.
]]>Mediaocean agreed to acquire ad server Flashtalking for $500 million.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Flashtalking CEO John Nardone explains why he hopes it means liberation from industry giants.
Another brick in the wall
“Google, Facebook and Amazon are such dominant forces, advertisers need their own ad tech system with some weight and scale and, importantly, independence to be able to manage across all of those environments,” Nardone explains.
“(This) sets Mediaocean up now to be that end-to-end system of record, an independent ad-tech that is not at all committed to or controlled by the walled gardens.”
Mediaocean said it expects to process about $200 billion in annualized ad spend this year. It says: “The announcement comes at a critical inflection point for the advertising industry as marketers seek trusted, independent solutions to manage the rise of big tech.”
Mediaocean to Buy Flashtalking for $500 Million as it Preps IPO, WSJ
Mediaocean’s bigger boat
Mediaocean provides a suite of tools for ad agencies to be able to manage the planning, buying and billing of media across traditional media channels as well as digital.
Beet.TV’s Robert Williams writes that Mediaocean, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies, including MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region. It also acquired 4C Insights recently to extend into social media environments.
We've joined forces with @TeamMediaocean to become the most trusted independent platform for #omnichannel advertising! Read more via @WSJ @alexbruellhttps://t.co/ai843R9wwU
— Flashtalking (@flashtalking) July 13, 2021
For Nardone, adding Flashtalking closes the circle.
“Mediaocean plays at the beginning of the process in terms of the planning and managing the buying workflow,” he says. “And then they come in at the end with the billing and reconciliation of the publisher invoices, but traditionally they haven’t had a lot in the middle of that process.
“Acquiring Flashtalking and adding that now gives Mediaocean a full end to end capability for managing digital, including the development of the creative assets, the verification, the campaign management, and set up the tracking, the advanced analytics.”
Mediaocean is reportedly planning an IPO – something Nardone says ad-tech companies more than ready for after a few “failed” attempts several years ago.
The scale for scale
For Nardone, the half-a-billion sale is the culmination of a six-year-long diversification strategy.
He joined from Rocket Fuel in 2015 and was charged with giving Flashtalking, well, some rocket fuel.
“At the time, it was clear that just having dynamic creative at the heart of the platform was not going to be sufficient to have clients want to move off of DoubleClick,” he says. “We realised that better data was going to be the key to enhancing the offering.”
So Flashtalking went on its own acquisition spree, buying capabilities to give it primary ad serving dynamic, creative cookie-less tracking and advanced analytics.”
“We are now, the largest ad independent ad tech company,” Nardone claims. “We are the last ad serving platform of global scale and multi formats that are independent of any media buying platform are not owned by Google or owned by Amazon.”
]]>Piece by piece. That’s how Lauren Wetzel sees it.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the North America president for ad-tech company InfoSum, explains how the new privacy imperative is driving brands and media players to delve deeper into data.
At the forefront
“The past handful of years, following really notable security breaches and very public misuse of data and data leakage, consumers just have a heightened awareness of a basic question, which is ‘what are you doing with my data?’,” Wetzel says.
“Privacy has to be at the forefront, just given that wave of consumer sentiment and heightened awareness.”
InfoSum’s software allows companies to connect up their customer data sources, including with those owned by other companies.
But Wetzel says privacy is key, even when enabling companies to share customer data.
Don’t lose control
“The moment that you actually send that data and you centralise it, not only is the privacy and security of that personal data at risk, but the data owner, whether that’s the brand or the media owner can actually lose control of the data,” she says.
“We at InfoSum empower companies to collaborate across that first party data, but without having to sacrifice that control.”
InfoSum allows those companies to join datasets without actually moving their data.
It is a capability now used by global companies like ITV, Channel 4, eBay, Experian and The Telegraph, all of which are building out their own data-driven consumer ad targeting capabilities and all of which are adapting to a world without rudimentary cookie targeting.
Growing performance
“Brands have been on a journey and shift to become more data centric companies for a while (and) have been investing in CRM or CDPs or DMPs,” says InfoSum’s Wetzel. “We help to enable those brands to collaborate.
She says brands want to better understand their own consumers, so have to make better meaning of scattered internal enterprise data, and some also want to partner up with other companies’ datasets.
Reasons, Wetzel says, could include richer consumer engagement with a brand and more relevant ad experiences driven by better knowing customer profiles.
“When you’re technology, and you’re not a data entity, I think that’s very important so you can be objective and neutral and agnostic to the solutions,” Wetzel adds.
“What we’ve seen is first party data leads to better performance. Activation of first-party data can drive more subscribers, higher awareness. (We’ll see) more performance advertising.”
]]>That is according to a veteran media agency executive who has been observing the long arc of supply and demand toward a profound shift.
In my interview with former GroupM global chairman Irwin Gotlieb talks about how connected TV is re-shaping the TV upfront ad sales season.
We start our conversation with his personal take on the responsibility of the media industry on the impact of the media on society.
Media’s pincer move
Gotlieb sees two big dynamics.
1. Shift from linear to non-linear content
“In a linear world, you can use programming strategies – things like lead-ins, lead outs, hammocks, tent poles, that kind of stuff. You can use the built-in promotion schedules… In a nonlinear world, it’s much more challenging to create awareness. If you can’t create awareness, your audiences are going to, by default, be smaller.”
2. Growth of subscription content
“In a world where subscriber support is growing (relative to) advertiser support, what you have is a situation where you have supply diminution and that is inflationary on CPMs. There’s almost no way to offset that, and that’s a huge challenge.”
The future of the future
Irwin’s tenure at GroupM parent WPP began in September 1999 when he joined the company as Chairman and CEO of Mindshare Worldwide. He launched Mindshare North America by consolidating the media resources of JWT and Ogilvy,
His ad industry career, however dates back to 1970. In 2007, he was named one of the media industry’s top 25 most influential leaders by TV Week and inducted into Broadcasting & Cable Magazine’s Hall of Fame.
Now Gotlieb says the big media shifts are creating a big moment in the evolution of TV advertising.
He says the upfronts are a “futures market” and, with TV ad supply decreasing but demand continuing to be high, “there is in fact a tipping point”.
“I’m not suggesting in any way that upfronts are going to go away,” Gotlieb points out. “I don’t think they ever will. Futures markets will always exist in some form in the media world. Will they exist in their present form? I’m not certain.”
Dollars to dimes?
Of course, all TV and video companies are heavily invested in transitioning to the digital, non-linear world of which Gotlieb is talking.
But he thinks a clean conversion that protects all revenue won’t be possible – because it won’t be possible to protect all ad inventory and all views.
“The commercial loads that are going to be acceptable in AVOD in the nonlinear world are going to be one third of what they had been in the linear world,” he says.
“There is only one potential solution to that – refined targeting and addressability … something to be blunt that hasn’t developed at the pace that it should have.
“Today, I think the media sell side has to deal with the reality that they have lower commercial loads and audiences are drifting inexorably in that direction.
“The buy-side is either going to be faced with skyrocketing cost per thousands or improved targeting and addressability solves the problem for both (sides).”
]]>“We look forward to collaborating with the Magnite team and their clients on product development and new features that will ultimately move the CTV advertising industry forward,” Joe Hirsch, the former CEO of SpringServe who is now general manager of SpringServe for Magnite, said in a statement.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, which was taped before the deal announcement, Hirsch describes how innovation in CTV advertising is improving the viewer experience. Delivering video ads programmatically requires a combination of technologies including an ad insertion platform, video ad server, sell-side platforms (SSPs) demand-side platforms (DSPs).
The goal is to create a seamless experience for audiences by avoiding delays in ad delivery that were associated with waterfall auctions of CTV ad inventory. The limitations of waterfall auctions have spurred a shift to unified auctions.
“In a unified auction, everything is called simultaneously, and you only have eligibility to serve if your price is the winning price,” Hirsch said. “The community at large has rallied around the unified auction as the victor of the war between the waterfall and the unified auction.”
Revenue per second metrics are part of the evolution of decisioning within an auction, but have pitfalls when comparing the value of different lengths of ads.
“If you’re paying $15 for a 15-second spot, and you’re paying $16 for a 30-second spot, revenue per second is going to make the ‘loser’ win — that is, the person with the lower bid is going to win,” Hirsch said, explaining that the lower bid wins because value per second for a 15-second spot is higher than for the 30-second spot.
“It’s much more granular and fine-tuned approach for the sell side, and for the buy side, I think what it means is that if you have a longer creative, and you’re not getting the delivery that you want, you need to increase your bid in order for your revenue per second value to be competitive with shorter ads,” he said.
Challenges of Fragmentation
The fragmented media landscape has challenged advertisers to make sure they’re reaching audiences while avoiding excess frequency of ad placements. Digital platforms have become “walled garden” with their own first-party data about consumers.
“The big players have decided that if you want to buy their audience, and you want to use their data, you have to go to them directly as a mechanism to get to a larger percentage of the media dollar that’s being spent,” Hirsch said. “The fragmentation itself is kind of a great challenge for the ecosystem, and it leads to innovation within adtech as a whole.”
The innovators include TripleLift, a native advertising technology company that has partnered with SpringServe. TripleLift offers an SSP that connects to SpringServe’s publishers for traditional commercial breaks. It also offers dynamic product placement ads that appear within video content, including shows appearing subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms that don’t have commercial breaks.
“TripleLift has been a great partner for us,” Hirsch said. “Early on, TripleLift saw the value of being an auction participant using the server-side header bidding methodology. They came from a background in AppNexus where they got a first-hand view of where the market was going before CTV was dominant.”
Hirsch foresees more growth in CTV advertising as brands seek to reach audiences that have either canceled cable service, or never signed up for it in the first place.
“Dollars will continue to migrate from traditional linear onto CTV, and the targeting capabilities and the reporting capabilities and the monetization features for publishers will meet the needs of consumers as they stream, the buy-side as they buy and the sell-side as they desire to make more money,”he said.
]]>Xandr, where Martin is director of product management, forecasting and inventory management, just launched a tool he says will bridge the gap.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Martin explains the idea is applying digital logic to linear media, uniting the two channels.
Bridging the gap
The tool, converged inventory analysis, is a sub-product inside Yield Analytics that unifies audiences and ad systems across linear addressable and OTT.
Xandr says the aim is to sooth a fragmentation that has occurred as a result, with a “consolidated advertising and analytics system to manage distributors’ digital and linear addressable businesses, enabling the identification of a single
audience across channels”.
Martin says: “We’re really trying to break down the silos, so that the planning isn’t done within addressable linear and then replicated or done a second time within digital silos, but just done one time so that I understand where my best yield optimization levers are and where the most competition for that inventory exists.”
Xandr today announced the launch of a first of its kind technology that is aimed to help the largest TV distributors better manage and sell addressable inventory holistically.
More here: https://t.co/szRYQtGYzi
— Xandr (@xandr) June 29, 2021
Building on logic
The product is build out of Yieldex, a company Xandr’s earlier AppNexus acquired back in 2015.
Martin says the team added advanced forecasting capabilities for the ad server. Now that is being offered to TV teams, with benefits claimed on both sides:
- Buyers: “You’re just buying a single audience … instead of having to go interact with two different teams that might exist within the same company.”
- Sellers: “Taking into account that addressable linear lens that needs to be applied, which is a little bit more schedule-based, and which spots are going to be opened up to addressable and how that audience overlays it.”
It’s all in pursuit of enabling a “holistic” approach to media, whether buying or selling, Martin says.
]]>Beyond aligning with a variety of social causes, the second half of COVID-19’s first year seemed to create a realization that media buyers did not need to have blocked out virus news in the name of “brand safety”.
Now the coalescing of these issues and more is crystalizing in to a sharp question for brands and buyers: what does it mean to behave responsibly in media these days?
Bigger issues
“The issue of responsibility is significantly broader than most people tend to frame it,” says former GroupM chairman Irwin Gotlieb in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s not simply a matter of ensuring that bot fraud is minimized, that appropriate content association is maintained, brand safety, all of those things.”
Future responsibility
Now there is a groundswell in which brands want to be seen as active participants in bringing about a better future.
“It’s critical for all the players in the media environment to contemplate their impact on society,” Gotlieb says.
So how do they do it?
Gotlieb suggests they ask a robust series of questions, like: “Are we promoting hate? Are we promoting disunity? Are we supporting players who do that? Are we associating our brand with negative aspects of society? Are we maintaining the appropriate levels of diversity?”
]]>But, under the hood of the TV industry, local players still have tremendous value.
So says a man whose technology is helping local TV providers bring more value, in turn, to their advertisers.
Value in local
“If we help the broadcast groups that are working with local media and linear get into the streaming world where humans are going, their businesses will flourish, and so will ours,” says Adam Helfgott, CEO of MadHive.
Helfgott’s company sells enterprise software to broadcast companies traditionally working with linear TV workflows.
“The local station groups and the products that they provide their consumers are such a value-add and would be a real shame if everything got homogenised into one large system,” he says.
“Their work is providing very value-add news and insights into communities themselves on a detailed level, which would normally get overlooked.”
Local reach extension
To continue advancing that news and insight into a digital viewing world, MadHive offers what it calls “local reach extension”, offered to customers like Tegna, Fox, E.W. Scripps and NBC.
“What isn’t changing is the consumers need to understand what’s going on in their community and be able to have the culture of their community be represented in the media at home,” Helfgott says.
“I’m really proud to be part of continuing that legacy.
“As humans are moving to streaming, they want their sales forces to sell this new product. It’s called local reach extension, and … fits really, really nicely in with the enterprise workflows of big broadcast groups.”
]]>