You are watching “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio. For more videos, please visit this page.
“Interestingly, we have been working with the streaming television publishers and partners to bring it more and more into a performance play for our clients,” Minnie Dimesa, executive vice president of advanced media and marketing at Icon Media Direct, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “All the media dollars that we invest and we spend on their behalf have to have a return on investment.”
Metrics like cost per order and cost per acquisition are more feasible with CTV and over-the-top (OTT) channels. As a result, Dimesa has seen some advertisers move their television budgets entirely into streaming video.
“In the last three years, this area has exploded, especially for performance marketers as measurement capabilities have come into place,” she said. “We are now at the point where many of our clients have integrated streaming TV into their evergreen strategy.”
Pixel-Based Measurability
Tracking pixels are a key part of measuring ad campaigns on streaming video, similar to digital platforms that rely on the technology to measure when a view takes an action in response to a marketing message. Streaming video also provides marketers with the ability to deliver richer media experiences to consumers on the biggest screen in their households.
“It is pixel-based, which is beautiful because it’s one-to-one, so very much like digital where you understand exactly who and where your ad impressions are being served to,” Dimesa said. “I always like to refer to streaming television as the beautiful intersection of linear television and digital advertising.”
Alternative to Social Media
As advertisers seek greater efficiencies in their media spending and broader reach, some are supplementing their social media campaigns on streaming platforms or looking for other options, Dimesa said.
“We do have quite a number of our clients who have come to us because…Facebook isn’t working for them anymore, or it’s gotten cost-prohibitive or maybe they’ve hit their cap on how much they can scale on Facebook,” she said. “Now, they’re looking for an alternate channel. We do see some of our clients actually diverting funds from, say, what would traditionally be a Facebook budget to a connected TV, streaming TV channel.”
Source: eMarketer/Insider Intelligence
Paid search advertising will continue to remain viable as a way to engage consumers in the lower part of the purchase funnel.
“When your consumers are now searching for your brand, you’re there to be found, and you’re essentially answering their call,” Dimesa said.
Like digital platforms, streaming video offers greater flexibility in automated media buys. Marketers can choose from private marketplaces (PMPs) with a curated selection of media outlets, or try different strategies to get the right inventory most efficiently through demand-side platforms (DSPs).
“The beauty of DSP/programmatic platforms like Roku is that it gives you access to pretty much all the publishers out there,” Dimes said. “How you’re purchasing that inventory could be different.”
She recommends testing platforms to find the best method to reach audiences and possibly generate a response if that’s the goal. because you’re now then beholden to a certain spend amount, or you’re not having to commit to four weeks
“DSP/programmatic platforms allow you to do that in a low-risk situation,” Dimesa said. “Rigorous testing and continuous testing is very critical in terms of being able to find success within the streaming TV platforms.”
You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But how prevalent does data-driven buying need to be in the new-look TV, and how are different agencies finding value?
That is what eight executives discussed during Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next, a recently-wrapped Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. Here are the highlights.
1. Spend can be reallocated to incremental audiences
Amobee chief commercial officer Jack Bamberger says his new product CTV Allocator forecasts incremental reach to a linear TV schedule across the ecosystem’s CTV supply space
“We’re able to see a desired reach against strategic audience of 14% less cost for a brand. We were able to put that back into the platform and reallocate those funds to target incremental audiences on behalf of the brand.”
Amobee to “Optimize” The Buy and Sell Side with Tim Spengler and Valerie Bischak
2. Business easy as ACBC
Paul Woolmington, CEO of independent ad agency Canvas Worldwide, says he is heeding what he calls his law of “Accelerated COVID Behaviour Change,” ACBC.
“With a lot of change that we’ve seen in our industry over the decades, you don’t actually viscerally see it. But I think we’re seeing it viscerally in the last 12 months. We need a greater degree of unification … and alignment behind incumbents versus challengers.”
Omnichannel Strategy Demands Agency Integration: Canvas’s Paul Woolmington
3. Alcohol agents look to CTV
Amy D’Souza, Senior Director, Media & Digital Marketing at Constellation Brands, an agency representing beer, wine and spirit brands, says breweries hope connected TV can help make up for declining linear TV audiences.
“Linear TV has played an important role for broad-reach brands like Corona and Modelo in the past. We continue to increase our investment and our overall share towards streaming platforms to really help continue to deliver that broad reach and scale.”
Alcohol Brands Tap CTV To Find Lost Linear Viewers: Constellation’s D’Souza
4. Beer makers double-down on loyal drinkers
Brad Feinberg, North America vice president of media and consumer engagement at Molson Coors, says challenges with audience-based targeting mean he is now using more first-party data from the most loyal audiences.
“We are really ramping up our ability to have a view of consumers that have raised their hand that want to know about our brand (and understanding their) key behaviours or attitudes, then kind of going out and finding them.”
‘We’ll Look for Flexibility at Ad Upfronts’: Molson Coors’ Brad Feinberg
5. Upfront season is evergreen
Despite industry shifts, Dani Benowitz, president of U.S. at Interpublic Group’s Magna Global, says the traditional upfront TV ad sales season is “still an important part of a video mix”.
“We’re a big proponent of the calendar year. Flexibility still remains to be very important to our clients, (but) you’ll see people come back to the upfront as the world is opening up and budgets are becoming more sound.”
Ad Spend Will Diversify During Upfront Sales Season: Magna’s Dani Benowitz
6. Agency data must branch out
Ed Davis, chief product officer of OpenAP, says, whilst media agencies have invested in building their own audience data platforms, they cannot stand alone.
“Breaking that sophisticated knowledge out of their walls and turning it into something that can be actioned on with publishers or with buying systems, that’s always been the friction point.”
Identity Graphs Are Learning To Talk To Each Other: OpenAP’s Davis
7. TV’s ‘monster evolution’
Jay Askinasi, Chief Growth Officer, Publicis Groupe United States, says TV ad planning now has many more buying cues than just date and time.
“The way that inventory is being packaged, the way that you can access it, the channels with which you can access it through and even the definitions of the media types… in the upfront process, you’ll see more so than ever before those worlds coming together a little bit more.”
Endless Endpoints: Finding & Overcoming CTV Ad Complexity With Publicis’ Askinasi
8. Disney’s data builds a broad platform
Lisa Valentino, executive Vice President, Client Solutions & Addressable Enablement, Disney Advertising Sales, says Disney is selling its footprint using data.
“We’ve unified eight networks and many ad-supported addressable platform, Hulu being one of them – which is no easy feat, but it has given us, I think, a great ground to grow and build a future model.”
]]>Rebooting Reach: Disney’s Valentino Combines Scale With Smarts
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.”
]]>For some in the industry, that is a blessing but also a curse.
In this video interview with editorial advisor Jon Watts for Beet.TV, Comcast Technology Solutions’ VP and GM Richard Nunn explains why current systems need to connect up to manage the coming expansion.
Ad expansion coming
“What we’re seeing from a numbers perspective is, over the next three to five years, about a 7X increase in ad volume, driven by obviously a lot of the emerging channels that we’re now seeing, OTT and CTV and addressability,” Nunn says.
“If you throw on personalization on top of that, those numbers get very, very large indeed. The current manual processes that you allude to really are struggling to deal with that scale.
“That challenge of scale, which is a challenge that the industry has to face and become a lot more standardised.”
Changing it up
Comcast’s footprint includes NBC and Sky, a cable division and ad-tech including FreeWheel.
The division offers a host of solutions to bring infrastructure to the digital TV world.
Comcast Technology Solutions recently published a report, What’s Next For TV Advertising?, detailing four changes that will happen in the next five years:
- Addressable becomes a reality
- Workflows get automated
- Standards are helped to scale
- Data will differentiate measurement abilities
The world of TV advertising is changing quickly, and businesses must adapt to keep up. explore the major drivers behind the changes: https://t.co/w8V9CA0Geb #TVAdvertising pic.twitter.com/VWILtW09dd
— Comcast Technology Solutions (@ComcastTechSoln) August 19, 2021
Thirst for scale
“Today it’s very siloed where you have linear and digital technology,” Nunn continues. “You can start to bridge that divide for sure.
“But the opportunities really are about the automation that will drive the solutions to deal with that advertiser volume, as well as advertiser scale as well, and bringing together a lot of these point-based solutions in an aggregated platform that gives you complete transparency around where and what an asset has done, where it’s landed.
“It really helps solve that challenge of scale, which the industry has to face and become a lot more standardized.”
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>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.”
]]>Not only do ad agencies have to get their own corporate practices straight, they also have to represent wider society in the work that they bring to the world.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Engine Group CEO Kasha Cacy explains what her company is doing and why it matters.
Diversity drives innovation
“There’s a business advantage to diversity,” says Cacy. “The reason Florence flourished was the Medici family brought in so many different kinds of people, artists and scientists and philosophers.
“That cross-section and that intermingling of ideas is what drives innovation.
“If we don’t have a company that represents the US, then there’s no way we can market effectively to the US.
“The history is that many, many, many agencies have not had representation in terms of women, not had representation in terms of black and brown people.”
"If you step back, it’s easy to understand why emotion matters. Brands that connect emotionally are humanized – classified differently," states Jim Nelson, SVP at @ENGINEInsight. Explore his blog on how brands can succeed in a post-COVID world. https://t.co/EweWy4fba1
— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) July 7, 2021
Equality on the agenda
Over the last year, the industry has stepped up initiatives to enhance diversity.
- Dentsu UK launched Dentsu Together, a scheme to better reach underrepresented communities using contextual and geo-targeting tools.
- GroupM has said it is creating “inclusion PMPs (private marketplaces)”, directly aimed at putting money back into the hands of underrepresented voices like LGBTQ+ and black groups.
- Disney’s Hulu launched Onyx Collective, a content brand for people of color; announced an ABC News strand called Voices Of Change and pitched The Undefeated, a news site covering race and sport.
Of course, doing so isn’t just a nice-to-have. Cacy’s view is that speaking better to distinct communities can enhance results, too.
We are proud to partner with @NYWICI to conduct a national research study (https://t.co/kptrcYKxeT) to understand how COVID-19 has affected women across all demographics in the field of communications. Participate in the study at the link. https://t.co/kptrcYKxeT #WomenHeard pic.twitter.com/NVzldlx0Px
— ENGINE (@ENGINEWorldwide) August 20, 2021
Everlasting diversity quest
But Engine’s CEO has had to make internal changes to get there.
“What we’ve been doing over the past year is really pushing our employees to understand the core issues of equity and systemic racism,” she explains.
“So we’ve had lots of really tough conversations facilitated by some great folks in the company, things around the historic inequity in terms of housing and mortgages and financing of housing and how that affects wealth over generations.”
For Cacy, diversity is not just a one-and-done, box-ticking exercise.
“In years past what I’ve seen is we do unconscious bias training once a year, and then it’d be one and done and you’d go off and focus on other things,” she says. “This is something that we’re talking about if not monthly, more frequently
“It really takes that kind of consistency and persistence to see those changes happen.”
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Google may have delayed its switch-off for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome until 2023.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Yieldmo’s CEO Mike Yavonditte says the erosion of targetability presents a problem that must be addressed.
Missing address
“Right now, only about half of all inventory is addressable using a cookie … merely half of all adults,” Yavonditte says.
“A lot of the people that use iPhones, for instance, are not in that target set. They tend to be among the most coveted from a demographic standpoint, yet most, most marketers can’t reach them.”
He says that will get worse when Google switches off cookies. “Addressability will go from 50-50 to about 20%,” he adds. “Brands and agencies and advertisers are going to have to start testing and experimenting with other types of systems.”
After cookies
Did somebody say pumpkin spice? Let Yieldmo's custom Halloween deals help you deliver stronger campaign results with less hassle, all while maintaining access to a quality, safe supply. Learn more: https://t.co/oyFwqK6ptJ pic.twitter.com/M8Sa8HbtyY
— Yieldmo (@Yieldmo) September 15, 2021
Yavonditte says potential alternatives include privacy compliance systems and alternative identifiers.
The industry has been racing to plug the addressability gap left by the wave of pro-privacy measures, with a plethora of candidates more diverse than traditional cookies.
Yavonditte’s own company, Yieldmo, which powers an ad marketplace, thinks it has a unique take.
It has a supply-side platform (SSP) technology with an opinion.
The data difference
“Most SSPs do not do not provide targeting and optimization because most of their customers come with their own form of targeting, but we decided to invest in it,” Yavonditte says.
“We spent about $25 million in the last six years, just on the infrastructure required to collect trillions and trillions of the data events every month.
“We take the entire open web… We collect a bunch of information that a lot of other companies like motor IAS or DV360 collect but we also collect dozens and dozens of different kinds of events, every 200 milliseconds, that we believe no one else in the world collects.
“All that data gets organised in very interesting ways, and then gets fed into machine learning models that best correlate to the KPIs of all advertisers that spend money in this marketplace.”
Performance and growth
Faced with ad fatigue and new #privacy laws, #marketers relying on #personalization might need a new plan. Thankfully, Yieldmo has the plan.
Our GM of Analytics, Lisa @lisabradner shares more here and on @IHAForum blog: https://t.co/16QCEECJSQ
— Yieldmo (@Yieldmo) September 21, 2021
Yavonditte hopes that tech will help Yieldmo build self-service tools that can increase advertiser performance by 80% to 100%.
The company has been hiring hard over the last year and recently announced integration with LiveRamps Authenticated Traffic Solution.
The company raised a further $2 million in Series C money in mid-2020.
You’re watching “Diversifying Spend: Buying Beyond Audiences” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Yieldmo. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>We were not there this year to cover, but heard great things. There was a smaller crowd on hand than normal, but many more folks participated virtually. It was probably the biggest and most successful hybrid marketing industry event so far. Congrats to Bob Liodice and to his team at the ANA for pulling this off.
One of the conference keynote speakers was Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Mastercard.
For this #BeetCast podcast, I spoke with Raja earlier last week for a preview of his speech and about “purposeful marketing,” the big changes underway for CMO’s, as well the emergence of new media platforms and a chat about the future of identity.
Raja is always enlightening and provocative. And he is making a big global impact with his book Quantum Marketing which is on several business book best sellers lists, being sold in over a dozen countries and just translated into Korean, he tells me.
Congrats Raja on the success of the book. And thanks for taking the time to speak with me for this podcast.
And big thanks to the BeetCast sponsor TransUnion.
And thank you for listening, I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>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.
]]>“A lot of people use the data that the OEMs have in their measurement,” Cara Lewis, executive vice president and head of U.S. investment, Dentsu at Amplifi USA, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Measurement is such a key talking point now in television in general. It’s important to have the data that the OEMs have, and to be partners with them.”
Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence
Her agency has developed a CTV Playbook to provide a deeper look at ad inventories among different video channels. The goal is to avoid overexposing audiences to the same commercials, which is negative for consumer experience.
“Our approach is to be screen-agnostic, to make sure that we are building in and layering where frequency capping is happening,” Lewis said. “We’ve done an amazing analysis, our team, in terms of an overlay of who’s selling whose inventory.”
Combining the CTV Playbook with its Ampower optimization platform helps to see a more complete view of the television landscape and find the right balance between traditional linear TV and CTV for advertisers.
“We want to make sure that every impression that we’re landing is getting to that, meaning identity and getting to the root of who the consumer is and what they want to see,” Lewis said.
You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“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.
]]>Many who have dabbled with advertising through streaming TV services know that its lack of cookie identifiers has historically been a problem. But the deprecation of third-party cookies in web browsers is proving to be a great leveller.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Michael Zacharski, CEO of ENGINE Media Exchange (EMX), the supply-side platform linked with Engine Group, says he is betting his company on CTV being the fulcrum for the advertising future.
CTV for cookie-less
“We went completely cookie-less in the top of 2021, and we were still testing both a cookie and non-cookie model back in the middle of 2020,” Zacharski says. “And so we’ve tested both and we found that we liked the cookie-less future.
“We found that solutions that work in CTV can be extensible to their environments. And we’re big believers that the TV is going to continue to be the centrepiece of the household, the primary medium around which families gathered together
“So we’re centering our offerings around that premise and making sure that we can deliver in CTV and omni-channel media.”
The new stack
EMX’s platforms include:
- RTBx, a real-time bidding exchange.
- BiddR°360, a header bidding wrapper for publishers.
- Exchange BI, a campaign reporting and insights dashboard.
- Local Marketing Cloud, for brands with a lot of brick-and-mortar retail locations.
In February, it also launched Device Graph+, an offering supporting CTV and omnichannel media placement using data from EMX, Engine Insights and data partners bringing ACR, cross-device data, location data and identity resolution.
“We found we are able to not only deliver audiences and even hard to reach audiences and tough DMAs in CTV, but we can also target those same households and create meaningful omni-channel campaigns for clients who are looking to reach the household,” Zacharski adds.
Quest for identity
EMX is a member of prebid.org, contributor to swan.community, testers of Flock and has dozens of different identifiers that are passed through the UID field, through the OpenRTB protocol.
That is testament to show companies are trying out many options for post-cookie identity.
“There’s a need to understand that change is happening and innovation is happening,” he says. “We want to be prepared to look at any new technology, make sure that as our partners look at new solutions, we have the engineering and tech teams on standby and ready to go.”
Re-tooling for tomorrow
But, for Zacharski, moving fast is not only about pivoting toward new integration partners.
Zacharski says agility has had to be internal, too.
“We actually rebuilt our entire ad tech stack,” he says. “We started back in 2018, built prototypes 2018 and 2019. And we moved our entire business to a modern infrastructure thinking about things like making sure that we’re prepared for CTV and even things like 5G where consumer latency expectations are going to continue to be such that things need to load fast and increasingly faster while as things are loading faster.
“Now there’s more signals that everyone has to sort through.”
You are watching “The Media World Accelerated: What’s Next?” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by ENGINE. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>John joined OMD in 2017 from the global creative agency BBDO where he was CEO.
In this conversation, he speaks about managing brand’s media investments during the time of COVID.
He talks of the high wire act that marketers face with the ebb and flow of the pandemic, where hope turns to despair as the virus reemerges and hope inches back.
He addresses the “new normal” of the workplace, and the challenges of keeping the agency focused, trained and inspired in the home/office hybrid.
And he speaks about the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and explains the recently launched training program for people of various backgrounds.
A longtime volunteer in the not-for-profit sector,John says that commitment to community action and philanthropy is essential for both brands and for each of us in our lives. John lives this credo as the Chairman of the Red Cross of Greater New York.
Great, inspiring conversation. Thank you, John.
Thank you to our series sponsor TransUnion.
And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>Amid these changes, brands want to see more indications that their campaigns are producing results. That means looking beyond digital outcomes like cost per click, cost per landing page view and cost per completed view.
“When we talk about outcomes, we talk about real-world outcomes,” Simon Stone, general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa for ad-tech startup LoopMe, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Those outcomes include brand awareness, purchase intent, store visits and physical, offline sales.”
Measuring Brand Lift
LoopMe last week introduced PurchaseLoop Measurement to provide real-time measurement of consumer brand lift and other analytics. The tool is aimed at ad agencies, brands and publishers to measure media effectiveness and to help make quicker adjustments to campaigns while they’re in flight.
“We’re giving the ability for clients to look at all the partners on their plan and assess how they’re performing,” Stone said. “We’re able to measure across multiple screens. That includes mobile, desktop, audio and now connected TV. We’re also looking at multiformat as well, that could be video, rich media or display.”
LoopMe is working with major agency groups and brads to adopt its artificial intelligene (AI) technology with the goal of becoming the industry standard in brand measurement.
“In digital, it’s shifting away from being predominantly performance, and we’re finding a lot more dollars are being invested into brand advertising,” Stone said. “Now, there’s that full-funnel approach where it’s not just purely for the lower-funnel conversions. You can actually build a brand online with the formats of video and rich media.”
You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“Contextual advertising feels a lot like ‘back to the future’ in the sense that we have been talking about it forever,” Joshua Lowcock, executive vice president and chief digital officer of UM Worldwide, said in this interview Beet.TV. “We pivoted to data-driven advertising and somewhat forgot about contextual until brand safety emerged as a challenge.”
He is optimistic that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will improve contextual targeting while also respecting consumer privacy.
“My biggest hope for contextual is that it opens the door to people thinking more intelligently about the mindset certain people are in when they’re consuming certain kinds of content,” Lowcock said.
Power of Publishers’ First-Party Data
Lowcock recommends that publishers harness the first-party data collected directly from their audiences to boost the value of their advertising inventories by helping marketers reach targeted consumer groups.
“Publishers are still the owners of first-party data and will be for the foreseeable future,” he said. “Blend contextual data with your first-party data, and that enables you to leverage the power of both contextual and first-party data for a better result at more efficient scale.”
Strategies for Brands
Brands must align their ad creative with the surrounding content to optimize the effectiveness of contextual targeting.
“One of the things we don’t often talk about is from a purely media perspective is the creative message,” he said. “Most of the challenges that you have when contextual advertising goes wrong, it’s because the ad messaging itself is not as respectful of the contextual environment.”
Better Than Blocklisting
AI technology can help to provide a more nuanced approach to contextual targeting that considers the reputation of a media company and the specific content it publishes. That approach is more effective than key-word blocking that can prevent ads from appearing alongside appropriate content.
“One of the greatest failings that contextual had in the past was that it was a blunt-force object, and it really was key-word targeting,” Lowcock said. “If we can move away from seeing key-word targeting as equaling contextual targeting, and use AI to mean semantic analysis, that’s when AI becomes a powerful part of the contextual toolset.”
You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“Our secret sauce is our authenticity in storytelling. We really enable and bring brands to life, give them a platform where they can really tell their story,” David Apostolico, senior vice president of platform strategy, development and distribution at Qurate Retail Group, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We look at these other platforms where we can stream and have content – it’s just a natural fit for us.”
Entertainment and Shopping
Video commerce is a core competency for QVC and HSN, not an ancillary service for other retail channels.
“What we offer is that video commerce experience that’s very different. It’s not a utilitarian experience. It’s really an experience that allows us to totally engage our customers,” Apostolico said. “We’ve had some terrific partners such as Roku. They were the first to launch our streaming service. They really helped guide us in audience development opportunities to attract both existing and new customers.”
Qurate is seeking additional opportunities to collaborate with brands as they seek to stand out from competitors in a crowded market. Its merchandising teams continually hunt for brands and products that are a good fit for its video commerce channels.
“One of the things we are exploring is how we can partner with more people to help … combine these entertainment and shopping opportunities,” Apostolico said.
Amid the growth in social commerce, Qurate has extended its presence on more digital platforms to engage consumers when they’re ready to shop.
“We can broaden that audience through so many different platforms. Our social team does a terrific job with engaging with some of the newer platforms,” Apostolico said. “Our TV platform is a rich experience with decades of history of bringing products to life, but we think about some of these other platforms where we can just do more.”
You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But now, new techniques offered by connected TV platforms promise a lot more.
In Elevated Video, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by TripleLift, eight executives explored what that opportunity looks like.
1. Content ad insertions lighten the load
At TripleLift, the native ad company that has launched a connected TV offering in beta, advanced advertising GM Michael Shields says formats like ad insertions into TV shows, split-screen ads and other overlays “allows publishers to lower ad loads”.
“Unscripted, lighthearted comedies… you’ve probably seen our units in a lot of cooking shows – we think that that’s going to be the future ad model for a certain kind of programming.”
Native Advertising Has Key Role in Future of Ad-Supported TV: TripleLift’s Michael Shields
2. Post-cookie, context soars on data
At Havas’ Media Group’s health practice, managing partner Peter Sedlarcik welcomes the greater finesse available in contextual ad data.
“Contextual has really had a renaissance. We’re using more contextual data streams in order to inform strategy. There’s more of a balance now between purchased based data sets that have been kind of pre-eminent in a lot of the planning that we’ve been doing as an agency.”
3. Dentsu’s quest to demystify media
Dentsu Media U.S. media partnerships EVP Sarah Stringer says buying connected TV is still “very convoluted”.
“A lot of different people sell a lot of the same channels, which means that we’re not getting that single point of view. You’re not getting the efficiencies that you want. How do we demystify the marketplace?”
Immersive Ad Experiences Promise Optimized Results: Dentsu’s Sarah Stringer
4. Tastemade’s Imberman likes CTV’s flavors
At cooking video producer Tastemade, Jeff Imberman, head of sales and brand partnerships, says connected TV manages to combine the best qualities of TV and digital.
“It’s traditional yet progressive all at the same time. You’re still able to serve 15 and 30-second ads the way a linear network can – but what makes it really compelling is it’s delivered in a digital format across digital pipes, so it allows for very unique targeting, contextual especially.”
5. Brand insertions bring viewers organic delight
For Team Whistle, a digital sports content producer, Anthony Susi, vice president of over-the-top sales, says audiences give positive feedback to brand partnerships in its content.
“Picture Bear Grylls wading through the water with a Powerade ad behind it, things like that. We do it in an organic way and not really force down your throat.”
Branded Content Helps to Engage Younger Audiences: Team Whistle’s Anthony Susi
6. Brands pick from new-wave measurement menu
MediaScience CEO Duane Varan says the advertising world is no longer about everyone using a “one-size-fits-all” paradigm of buying 30-second ads using traditional currencies.
“That model is flawed in a lot of ways. All brands are not the same. All categories are not the same. Our objectives are not the same. Every brand needs to discover the best in class measures delivering against those specific communication objectives.”
‘There’s a New Paradigm for Brand Integrations on TV’: MediaScience’s Duane Varan
7. Native can solve ad load aversion
Srinivasan KA of Amagi, a company that helps enable linear ad-supported streaming channels, says changing consumption patterns mean media must change.
“Nobody just has the patience for sitting through 10 minutes of advertising on a per hour basis. You’re going to have much more integrated ad formats. Native advertising on connected TV would kind of blend both content and advertising in a seamless fashion.”
8. CTV can kick-start the sequence
Liza Davidian, EVP of investment and activation at GroupM, says connected TV can be the start of a sequenced conversation with consumers.
“If it speaks to me again on a more personalised device like your Instagram or any type of social media on my phone, I applaud an advertiser who further digs deeper into the funnel and makes their message a little bit more customised.”
]]>Customized Ads at Scale Are Key to Optimized Video Campaigns: GroupM’s Liza Davidian
But now the set of capabilities and consequences produced by that data is changing shape.
What will the future look like? That is what “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” our recent Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio, set out to uncover.
In these highlights, hear the takes of nine advertising executives on the issue.
1. Mobile brings a TV boost
Joao Machado, marketing SVP at Sabio, a company which powers connected TV ads using mobile data, says the combination is a win.
“The mobile device is the perfect mirror of a person’s affinities, their likes, where they are in their life stages,” Machado says. He wants to “couple it with the promise of what CTV digital television offers”.
Reborn, QR Codes Are The Glue Between Mobile & TV: Sabio’s Machado
2. TV is getting richer
When it comes to new-wave TV, AJ Kinter, head of advanced video strategy at Publicis Media Exchange (PMX), says the opportunities are burgeoning.
Kinter draws a distinction between “programmatic CTV” and “direct CTV”. “Since the CPMs have started to become much closer to programmatic CTV, you now have a linear, addressable TV and programmatic CTV kind of range in the same type of CPM,” he says.
Data Tell Story of Changing Viewership Habits: PMX’s AJ Kintner
3. Fusing media and mobile
Device data needs to inform media buys. That is why Aziz Rahim, Sabio CEO, says his company also started an app analytics division.
“Sabio is focusing on the media aspect of the industry, providing a deeper, unique targeting, reach and capabilities, and then along with creative capabilities,” he says. “The App Science side is to provide agnostic analytics and insights on CTV and OTT, along with mobile campaigns.”
After IDFA, Mobile Is Identity Gold For CTV: Sabio & App Science’s Rahim
4. Double-down on de-duplication
Ad buyers need to avoid exposing consumers to the same ad across multiple devices, says Dave Kersey, executive media director at GSD&M.
“Duplication is certainly a challenge in the industry,” Kersey says. “(We need to be) understanding the entire consumer journey across all video platforms.”
Mobile Data Help to Avoid Ad Duplication: GSD&M’s Dave Kersey
5. Data helps post-pandemic ad recovery
At MBuy, a unit of Mediaocean, media strategy and operations SVP Michael Parent is using data to welcome back travel brands that want to resume spending.
“We’re taking the data that we’re getting — everything from geography to programming to dayparts to the response that we’re getting,” Parent says.
CTV Data Provide More Insights for Ad Targeting: MBuy’s Michael Parent
6. Real-time duplication monitoring
At Sabio’s App Science, EVP Helen Lum says ad duplication is starting to worry more ad buyers.
“I think a good way to solve for that is actually to track and reduce that duplication and monitor that reach and frequency across partners and publishers, so that advertisers can reinvest those wasted dollars in real-time for their buys,” Lum says.
CTV Offers Faster Data Insights Than Linear TV: App Science’s Helen Lum
7. Mobile is the key to e-commerce
Mobile is evolving toward becoming an e-commerce driver for TV ads, says Jeff Liang, head of digital product at WPP’s MediaCom.
“We’ll eventually get to a point where we’ll be able to allow for comparison shopping on CTV and give consumers the ability to transact within that single remote device rather than driving people to their mobile phones,” Liang predicts.
Mobile Data Enable Audience Targeting on CTV: MediaCom’s Jeff Liang
8. Understand TV & mobile together
It’s no longer an “either-or”. Kelly Metz, managing director of linear activation at Omnicom Media Group, says ad planners must understand how consumers use mobile and TV in tandem.
“The way we choose to manage that or support that from a planning perspective is by emphasizing holistic campaign planning and holistic campaign measurement,” she says.
Mobile, TV Data Provide Holistic Audience Insights: Omnicom Media Group’s Kelly Metz
9. TV can target the right patient
The ability to target TV ads can revolutionise healthcare advertising, according to Starcom’s EVP Melissa Gordon-Ring.
“We can double-down on things like connected television or addressable television, and have a higher likelihood of reaching our patient in their household, versus hoping that this is the right target audience for us to be purchasing against,” she says.
Mobile Data Support Personalized Healthcare Marketing: Starcom’s Melissa Gordon-Ring
Many are finding the legacy model of age and demo are not adequate. Seizing the opportunity are several new entrants in the measurement sector.
Adding to the acceleration and uncertainty is the changing role of Nielsen which has lost its MRC industry accreditation but promises a cross platform solution in two years time.
How measurement is changing and what lies ahead is basis of two conversations with industry leaders, hosted by industry consultant Jon Watts w. He speaks with Jo Kinsella president of TV Squared and Jonathan Steuer of EVP of VideoAmp.
The #BeetCast podcast is presented by TransUnion.
]]>“I can say with confidence that we finally have this at scale,” Raghu Kodige, founder and chief executive of LG Ads, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “That’s mainly because of the connected TV environment, where it is possible to place your ad on the big screen, but also make it addressable and targeted to individual households – and measure the outcome as well.”
Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence
LG Electronics this year launched LG Ads as the consumer electronics giant rebranded its Alphonso adtech and analytics platform. The company this month introduced a smart TV operating system called River OS to support a more personalized viewing experience for consumers.
Audience Data Consolidation
The market for audience data is consolidating as the major original equipment makers (OEMs) including LG Electronics reduce the distribution of automatic content recognition (ACR) information about what appears on TV screens. Brands now can get the reach they want on traditional linear TV and over-the-top (OTT) platforms by working with a smaller group of OEM ad networks like LG Ads.
“It helps the market overall use the data better,” Kodige said. “Even for things like enforcing frequency across linear TV and OTT, if you’re working with a few large players who have the scale, you can achieve that.”
You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>How can they best respond? By uniting their previously disparate business strategies and thinking on their feet, according to one veteran marketing agency leader.
In this video interview with Engine Group’s global chief commercial officer Scott Schiller for Beet.TV, Carl Fremont, CEO of marketing agency Quigley-Simpson, opens up.
Unite the silos
Fremont says it is a problem that most marketers’ are set up to address distinct parts of the traditional marketing funnel, often in blissful isolation.
“There are certain teams that focus just on acquisition and teams that focus on CRM, building that relationship with that customer over time – that needs to be all united,” he says.
“There are separate teams that don’t necessarily share the same objective and they work independently.
“You’re not developing a single consumer experience and it could impact each of their KPIs.
“It’s most important that we look at the value of a customer over time, it’s lifetime value. If you’re only looking at it from the front end, in terms of the initial acquisition and the initial revenue opportunity, you’re not looking at what’s the potential of that customer over time.”
Celebrating our 19th anniversary! Much thanks to all our clients, employees and partners for helping us grow from a few people to a team of over 150. pic.twitter.com/wPPj4gFalQ
— Quigley-Simpson (@Quigley_Simpson) September 3, 2021
Reading the past
Quigley-Simpson’s recent client work credits include United, The Art of Shaving and LAPD.
The agency’s thesis is “the unification of brand and demand” – in other words, helping marketers get to results quicker, using media, technology, data, insights and creative content.
Fremont was a long-time Wunderman executive who has since held several further agency positions and board roles and who believes in embracing the future with learnings from the past.
That is why he sees 2021 as being so instructive.
In this interview, Engine Group’s Schiller says major events had been bellwethers for media consumption:
- Fractured audiences have shown the difficulty in bringing messages together.
- The pandemic which exacerbated media trends.
- Streaming is disrupting both the revenue models, subscriptions and advertising, as well as the way consumers consume media.
Flexible future
Fremont sees the moment.
“There’s one word to describe it and that’s ‘flexibility’,” he says.
“We need to, as marketers, be flexible in terms of how we’re engaging consumers – looking at it from cross-platform, looking at it from inventory sources – because nothing is exactly predictable the way we would like it to be.
“We have to have contingency planning … not only from the marketing side, but from the media side as well, because we’re in such a state of flux.”
]]>“Canadians are looking at how to re-evaluate where they can trim their expenses. An easy way to do that is looking at cutting cable,” Christina Summers, Roku’s country manager for Canada, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We find that consumers appreciate the value exchange that comes with ad-supported content.”
More than three quarters (77%) of Canadians, or 29.3 million people, said they watched streaming TV by the end of last year, according to a study by Fuse Insights on behalf of Roku. Almost half (46%) of survey respondents said they had signed up for a new streaming service in the prior 12 months.
Bridging Linear TV and Digital
AVOD services typically have half the ad load of traditional linear television, helping marketers to stand out among their rivals. That’s especially true among younger consumers who are among the early adopters of new consumer technology.
“[Streaming] creates an opportunity for marketers to reach these new audiences that we’re finding in the ad-supported space,” Summers said. “It’s going to bring the TV and digital worlds together. Viewers are still watching on the biggest screen in their home, but the delivery of the advertising happens digitally, providing deeper targeting abilities and measurement.”
Roku recently introduced its programmatic ad-buying solution, OneView Ad Platform, to Canada as part of a collaboration with agency holding company Interpublic Group.
“Through our partnership, we were able to get them up as our first test partner within the Canadian marketplace for one of their advertisers so that they could evaluate the benefits of the OneView platform,” Summers said.
As consumers shift their viewing habits to AVOD services, advertisers need to be there to remain relevant.
“Audiences have already moved into streaming,” Summers said. “What we need to do is to showcase to the marketplace and our partners as to why they also need to shift within the space or risk being left behind.”
Roku this week launched an app that lets Shopify merchants to build, buy and measure TV streaming advertising campaigns. The app is available in the Shopify App Store.
You are watching “How Marketers Can Go TV Streaming First,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Roku. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The new pandemic had startled brands, causing many to press the pause button on ad spending – particularly upfront ad buys.
Fast-forward, however, and Michael Falco doesn’t think the upfronts are dying. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the chief revenue officer at Fox Corporation says they have learned new tricks – and Fox has seen an “influx” of buyers back to upfront sales over the last year.
Upfronts reborn?
Falco offers two reasons why:
1. Evolution, not revolution
“There’s still the need for a futures market,” he says. “In reality, what the last year and a half taught us was not that we needed to get away from the upfront, but that the upfront needed to evolve.”
2. Upfronts for streaming
“This notion that the upfront is just a linear television event is completely, completely wrong,” Falco argues. “Case in point for Tubi – we nearly tripled our revenue year-over-year in the upfront for TV, and we almost doubled our clients year to year.”
Pandemic panic
Falco isn’t ignorant of the effect the pandemic did have on upfront ad sales.
He says Fox had to figure out how to present its programming and ad products at a time when most potential customers would have been gathering in New York to hear its pitch.
But ad buyers, he says, fell into three camps:
- Those which had to bail on upfront commitments.
- Those which had products useful during a pandemic, which continued.
- Those which flexibly stepped back with a view to later going after targeted media.
Tubi lights the way
Fox acquired Tubi, an ad-supported streaming TV service, for $440 million just as the pandemic panic was kicking off in early 2020.
Having Tubi in the stable has enabled Fox to make the kind of offering that ad buyers – during the pandemic or otherwise – were gravitating toward, namely choice, flexibility and audience targeting.
Tubi made more than $100 in ad revenue in the last quarter, more than $400 million over the year, according to its latest filing.
Data-driven TV
Falco says data-driven TV ad targeting is key. Fox has wrapped together its offerings under banners called “One Fox” and “Fox Next“.
“It’s going to allow us to move into that more audience-based selling, which I think is something that we’ve been looking forward to for quite some time,” Falco adds.
“Now that we have Tubi in the fold, it’s really going to give us the wherewithal to do that.”
You are watching “A Marketplace Transformed: The TV Ad Industry Powered by Automation,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Matrix. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Tracking cookies have been a key part of ad targeting for decades, but fewer makers of web browsers are supporting the technology. Contextual advertising makes sense in that marketers want to reach consumers who express their interest in a product by seeking related content.
“Sometimes we try to push away content because we were so focused on targeting individuals at that cookie level,” Joshua Palau, chief media and activation officer at Omnicom’s PHD, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The construct of reading a piece of content that you’re interested in and then seeing a product that’s related to that content does still hold true in the way that consumers look at products.”
Data Signals and CTV
Advertisers have a wide variety of data signals that help to determine how to reach target consumers and measure the effectiveness of their media spending. Privacy-compliant data sets and identity graphs based on location, demographics, purchase history and search histories are an important resource.
“You can still be effective, efficient and look at performance,” Palau said. “You could also be aligned with content that lines up with your brand values.”
Connected TV (CTV), which has always been cookieless, provides marketers a way to target audiences with more personalized ads, while also avoiding wasteful spending on repetitive media placements.
“Another great thing about the connected piece is having those things in place so that you can minimize that waste piece and get more targeted in terms of that audience,” Palau said. “The way that you manage these things is starting to become a lot clearer. Contextual has a nice seat here in the TV world.”
You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is why the company is becoming so interested in advertising through connected TV (CTV) channels.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, JPMorgan Chase’s chief media officer Tracy-Ann Lim explains why she can bank on the new medium.
Targeting the under-served
As more ad buyers switch on to the targeting capabilities in CTV, Lim is one who believes that power can help target specific cultural groups.
“We do love the idea of being able to tailor our messages, access newer audiences with different types of ads that we may have traditionally only caught through social or other digital locations,” Lim says.
“So this is a really interesting opportunity for us, especially as I start to think about our D&I goals and reaching the underserved communities and bringing new products and services to those groups. I think that this is a really great tie in to those strategies.
Impact from clarity
Lim, who once bought TV ads in an agency role herself, has been with JPMorgan Chase since 2019.
She recognizes that consumes are flocking to CTV partly for choice and a reduced ad load. But that, Lim thinks, can work to her advantage.
“It’s done with less ad clutter, it’s not as noisy,” she says. “People are more engaged and there will be more recall.
“The combination, that one-two punch of recall and engagement, should result in stronger business outcomes.
“We hope to see that shake out as we continue to study market by market audience, by audience, and really start to see that outcome.”
You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.
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