In Q1 results posted this week, Facebook reported returning “stability” in advertising revenue after an initial steep March decline, whilst Alphabet reported a March slowdown but nevertheless a 10% growth in ad revenue year-on-year.
For Aaron Goldman, what’s worrisome is that brands may not be equipped. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CMO of 4C Insights – a marketing tech platform enabling advertising across TV, digital, social, and mobile – says the big platforms may soon be the only game in town.
Goldman’s 4C Insights is one of the software vendors aiming to unite advertisers’ oversight of ad campaigns across the walled gardens of TV and digital.
“Closed ecosystems are consolidating power during the pandemic,” he says. “Major platforms that have the controlled access so that consumers have to enter into the environment.
“Amazon with commerce and AWS are essential right now. Google with Meets and even Classroom (is) picking up additional steam. Even Facebook, I just bought a Portal for my family to help with a video chatting. You’re starting to see their tentacles expand into additional places.
“Pinterest searches are up 55%, new boards are up to 45%. If you look at Twitter, they’ve been saying that daily active users are up 23% in the first quarter. Even Snap recently came out with earnings and their advertising revenue was up 44%.”
And Goldman says even TV is following the same pattern, as major broadcast platforms grow their audience targeting capabilities, rolled up after a series of acquisitions that have given media corporations distinct advantages.
Time spent with media is booming. In a new report, eMarketer forecasts the average time US consumers spend with media will rise by more than 1 hour per day this year, to 13 hours, 35 minutes.
The pandemic has reversed the decline of TV viewership, whilst smartphone and video use are growing, but music and podcast use is coming under pressure from reduced consumer mobility.
For Goldman, the problem isn’t so much that the tech majors are gobbling the lion’s share. Rather, it is that their advertising tools are largely closed ecosystems that don’t allow ad buyers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns across the entirety of media.
Goldman says stats show 81% of time spent in digital media is with the major platforms, leaving 19% occurring elsewhere.
How COVID-19 is impacting media ecosystems https://t.co/NJNELUBEL1 via @4Cinsights
— Aaron Goldman (@AaronGoldman) April 16, 2020
“We’re seeing people anchor in systems and platforms that can address the closed ecosystems,” Goldman observes. “(But) you don’t need a DSP as the focal point of your (advertising tech) stack that’s blending in data into rolled-up CPMs.
“Now’s the time where you need transparency, you need to have control, you need to know how each dollar that you’re spending is moving into market, and you need to have the ability to take data and insights from one platform and on into the next.”
4C Insights is one of the software vendors aiming to unite advertisers’ oversight of ad campaigns across the walled gardens of TV and digital.
Its Scope self-service platform is integrated with the closed ecosystems.
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>#HaircutForHealthcare Let's get it trending! Post your DIY haircut and donate to healthcare workers fighting #Coronavirus https://t.co/6nUsFv9Lb9 pic.twitter.com/QZuPwjTv5I
— Aaron Goldman (@AaronGoldman) March 23, 2020
But how are advertisers adapting to the palette of options presented by OTT (over-the-top) and connected TV delivery?
In a panel called “Buy-Side Perspectives – The Big Asks” at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, four industry executives described how they see ad buyers adjusting:
Magna Global’s Anson said, when ad buyers make requests, “they don’t actually, they don’t know they’re asking for advanced TV”.
“First thing is, ‘I know I can get audiences, but I don’t really know how or why’,” she said.
“Second is OTT – they just know that there is a thing called OTT, they know they need to start spending there. And the number one thing that I get asked is, ‘What is the actual de-duplication between the offerings, between the Tubi, the Xumo, the Pluto? They may each have 20 million uniques per month, but how much of that is a crossover?’
“The third thing is probably putting it all together and that’s incremental reach. That is a big focus these days.”
DISH Media’s Sean Robertson said his company tries to clearly explain to ad buyers the over-the-top TV opportunity.
“The first thing is education and clarity in the marketplace about what offering should be utilised to solve what problems,” he said.
“When we enter the marketplace, we take a stance of ‘Let’s be very clear about what addressable is’.
“We talk about what OTT is and what our offering does and the skinny bundle versus the other competitors. We think that education in the marketplace helps us all. It truly is trying to raise all boats with the tide.”
Verizon Media’s Brett Hurwitz said ad buyers often “have a confused perception of what target they should really be using”.
“Fortunately, addressable television lets them kind of learn from their mistakes,” he said.
“For those that are really embracing it most fully, I think they’re looking to remove friction. They’re looking to bring down the walls and be able to have simplicity in the way that they’re achieving total reach.
“The process for (buying) a linear addressable (ad) is a lot more complicated than an ad in the traditional linear piece. And so I think we as an industry need to look toward simplification.”
The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?
Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.
But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?
A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…
Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:
“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.
“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”
Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.
Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”
From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.
“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”
The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:
“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.
“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.
“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”
But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”
Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:
“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.
“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“The theme for us continues to be to provide audience-driven solutions for marketers, where they can buy on an audience-basis inventory across linear TV, social video, over the top. Everything in one place,” says Chief Revenue Officer Anupam Gupta.
“One of the things that we hear from marketers again and again is the audience problems are getting solved,” he adds in this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018. “That’s pretty much in a good place now. But now they’re looking for more scale.”
4C’s most recent partnerships within linear TV are with a4, a unit of communications giant Altice, whose networks include A&E, CNN, The History Channel and Discovery, and AMC Networks’ MASS Exchange. 4C’s self-service platform facilitates live, real-time access to inventory avails in the scatter market and performance data, as well as audience-driven Upfront allocations.
“So that’s now integrated within 4C where you can start with an audience and you can add that to repertoire of NBCU inventory” that became available to 4C clients via a partnership crafted in 2017, Gupta says.
“Essentially what you’re seeing is more linear networks making their inventory available through the aggregator partnerships and platforms like that are integrating to provide more scale for marketers.”
On the TV-to-consumer side, 4C has new integrations with FreeWheel, SpotX and Telaria. “For us, it’s natural to add over-the-top inventory to our platform. I think the scale issue is being addressed through these collaborations and integrations.”
4C’s three priorities are giving marketers flexibility to use whatever data they wish, help them plan and buy across premium content and drive and measure business outcomes.
“Our goal is to stitch those three pieces together into one platform so that marketers can essentially make progress in the data driven world,” Gupta says.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>We may be far from a full industry conversion to that model, but many platform vendors have certainly begun pricing themselves purely on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis.
That is only fair, according to 4C Insights CEO Lance Neuhauser in this video interview with Beet.TV. He was interviewed during NYC Advertising Week.
“We are a SaaS software license tech fee,” says the boss of the buying platform operator. “We don’t believe that the next incremental dollar of spend should mean we should keep reaching into the pockets of the marketer. That doesn’t make any sense. The best and only way to do that is to ensure that it’s a flat fee, all encompassing.”
That is the model used by 4C, whose Scope platform allows marketers to buy campaigns across Apple News, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, NBCUniversal, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat.
The latest addition to that spectrum, though, was the behemoth that is now making waves in ad land.
In August, 4C added Amazon to its roster, allowing customers to buy Sponsored Product ads alongside formats with the other publishers.
Neuhauser says that “brings one of the most dynamic marketplaces in the world to the ad ecosystem”.
He says: “They, for all intents and purposes, have the ability to tie the equivalent of linear TV through search, social, which are product reviews, ecommerce, as well as offline sales, closed loop that entire process, with addressability at the individual level.”
]]>“I think it’s a really complicated challenge that the industry is in right now,” says Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment at GroupM agency Essence, who has spent nearly three decades on both the agency and publisher side.
“I think that a number of networks have been very vocal and, in many cases, very right about one of the challenges that exists in the marketplace today, which is consumers have lots of access to content in non-ad supported environments,” Gerber says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.
Migration to those environments is occurring “because the experience is better, the aggregation of content is monstrous, it’s a really easy and enjoyable experience for them,” Gerber ads.
Ad-supported TV in general—whether linear or across linear platforms like OTT or VOD or via digital video records—increasingly are “I don’t want to use the word painful but challenging to live through, especially if the viewing behavior moves from single show to binging, where you’re watching multiple episodes all at once.”
Given that viewers are more in control than ever, the longtime ad model has been under increased scrutiny.
“I think the initiatives that networks are taking to really address clutter ad pod length and some of the format issues with regard to traditional fifteens and thirties potentially being replaced by other more innovative formats are what’s needed,” says Gerber.
The challenge to publishers: how they make it pay out.
“Because if you decrease inventory, there’s an immediate challenge related to revenue,” Gerber adds. “If you’re a public company, it doesn’t help you to go into your boss and say we’re going to have a decrease in revenue because I’m making this change to our ad model.
“It think from the advertiser and buy side, there has to be a payout in terms of ROI and improvement in performance if we’re going to be talking about any kinds of changes to the pricing that we pay for our inventory.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>When studying big-spending, Silicon Valley brands the organization found some striking similarities, according to VAB CEO & President Sean Cunningham.
“We found it interesting that the biggest bet that the disrupters were making was, if you will, when it came down to the pivotal moment in their history when they really had to get big, they pushed in all the chips on television,” Cunningham says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.
“It seemed that they had grown as far as they were going to grow in a pure digital, pure play world.”
So when the time came to move from thousands to millions of customers and billions of dollars in revenue from millions, “The pattern was just so alarmingly similar.”
Cunningham says it was “alarming” to see the tightness of corollaries between a television schedule going on-air and resulting traction.
“The first set of outcomes that you saw immediately were the most obvious things: site traffic, search queries, a look at their online videos, that type of thing. We understood it as a real transactional medium in terms of driving productive leads. It happens quickly.”
According to the VAB research, 14 Brand Building “disruptors” increased their TV spending 59% in 2016 and saw total digital actions (search queries, social actions and total online views) rise by 184% year over year.
The VAB membership includes virtually all of the national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPD’s, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business. “By the end of the year, we’ll probably have members in every single video advertising format that exists,” says Cunningham.
The “simple description” of the VAB is that “we exist to answer the unanswered questions for advertisers and agencies,” including cross-screen viewership.
Among those questions are how to unlock the keys to “how do you add it all up how does it all work, what does it all do and how do we keep track of all the moving parts.
“The industry’s challenge now is to measure it all, count it all and find a way to fluidly assign the various roles and tasks, outcomes and attributes to each of it. I think that’s going to keep us more than busy,” adds Cunningham.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>“That tells me the future of TV is a blend of live and on demand viewing,” Hulu’s SVP of Advertising & Sales adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
It’s all part of the “inflection point” that is evident in the TV industry as viewer preferences are driving programming choices.
“The evidence is everywhere,” Naylor says during a break at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “You see a collapse of gross rating points, particularly against scripted content and even live content you’re seeing kind of a sand-papering down of a linear television experience.”
At the same time there’s the “explosion” of OTT subscriptions and usage, underscoring shifting viewing habits.
“The viewer’s expectations around television have changed. They want what how and when they want their TV and they expect it. Anything other than being in control and having all the choices they have is not desirable.”
In May of 2018, Hulu became the only pay-TV service to offer live and on-demand channels, original series and films, and a library of premium streaming TV shows and movies, all in one place.
Noting that some 4 million U.S. households had cut the pay-TV cord in 2017, Naylor says what felt like “a long, slow steady change has reached a fast and sharp inflection point of change and we’re seeing it everywhere.”
He dubs Hulu’s ad sales approach as the best of TV meeting the best of digital.
“We are happy to transact with the TV community against their fifteens and thirties with their conventional campaign parameters, like age and demo and geo. No problem.”
For the more digitally inclined, there’s more of a focus on impressions, targeting and data-informed media buys.
“The automation that we’re seeing take off in the browser space for conventional display is absolutely made its way to the video space. We use Telaria as our SSP and we’re plugging into all the other on-ramps of demand.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>4C Insights calls it “enhanced audience targeting and analytics for premium channels including linear television, over-the-top (OTT) television, social, and digital media”.
Back in January, the ad intelligence company, whose Teletrax unit monitors 2,100 channels across 76 countries for both presence of program content and advertisements at the play-out end, announced it was plugging in data from Inscape, the division of TV manufacturer Vizio whose automatic content recognition (ACR) technology monitors the device end for actual viewer behavior.
What does the combination mean? Essentially, advertisers will be able to confirm not only that a certain ad or show has played out but also that a certain viewer has consumed it. In this video interview with Beet.TV, 4C chief product officer Anupam Gupta says advertisers will have two new benefits…
For Gupta, the announcement comes at the same time the opportunity within so-called “advanced TV” – with which advertisers can target individual viewers of connected video devices using more granular data – reaches a tipping point.
“Early adopters are moving toward the early majority,” he says. “We just saw some research from Forrester which said more than 50% of marketers are going to put advanced TV on their plans in 2018. Clients are deepening their usage.”
And amongst the most exciting newer trend lines Gupta sees is empowering marketers to use their own data for ad targeting.
Whilst TV ad targeting has historically been done on an age- and gender-targeted basis, advertisers are getting excited about bringing new, publicly-available datasets in to the digital TV targeting platforms now on offer.
But the ability to plug in data from their own customer databases – be it sales data, loyalty card data or more – could help advertisers both be more specific with TV spend and extend TV campaigns from TV to other digital devices when campaigns reach a maximum reach of known consumers, according to Gupta.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>That goal is “to be to find the right segment and then create all these different creative executions for the ads to resonate at higher rates,” says Jamie Power, COO of addressable inventory aggregator one2one Media.
Right now, “the majority of clients are only using addressable as a means to increase frequency against high-value households simply because they can’t afford to do four spots,” Power explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “And it works.”
But it works even better when advertisers create multiple spots. “We see that it resonates at higher rates and we see higher ROI. But then when you factor in the cost of the creative, then the ROI goes down. So we just need to work out the creative model.”
The traditional creative model “doesn’t work because creative is too expensive. So I think there’s going to have to be modifications made to efficiencies around creative so we can have different segments against different creative units.”
Over the past half-dozen years, addressable has been expanding to ever-larger scale “but it’s been challenging for advertisers to execute,” Power says.
one2one Media aggregates inventory that can now be targeted to some 63 million households and, by the end of the year, to 70 million. It has data from 7.5 billion impressions that can be mapped to every type of business outcome.
“I’m able to understand what a brand wants to do and then I can start a plan at an optimal place. We also have integrations with all the providers to get the back end media delivery.”
The company still works mostly with agencies but as some marketers take programmatic media in-house they are considering programmatic addressable. “The clients that we work directly with, they put that in their programmatic bucket,” Power adds.
She says addressable can work for any product/service category “As long as it’s the right use case. If a client tells us what they want to achieve, I think there’s an application for addressable.”
The plethora of data available enable Power to show sellers “what a client can pay to make sure that the ROI is going to pay out. A category like CPG is obviously going to pay a lower CPM than auto or financial.”
While addressable ads won’t be going the route of other media inventory during Upfront negotiations, “I think clients will hold money back for these data driven tactics in television.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>To CRO Rob Weisbord, Sinclair’s future road map will let advertisers extend reach from linear TV to “those cord cutters, cord nevers, cord savers through OTT solutions whether it’s through directly relationships with OTT providers or through an investment we have an in RTB company that is also buying excess inventory on the exchange level.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Weisbord says Sinclair will have an edge when offering addressable ads because of the breadth of pod lengths it plans to offer.
In addition to ramping up OTT service, “you’ll see us in the app format as well, more in a portal situation, amalgamating all our content and sourced content versus just trying to put one TV station over the top.
“The road map is we have our own content product team and they’ll be building apps and assets for connected TV as well as for the typical delivery services of Roku, Apple TV, Firestick and so forth. If you’re not on all platforms and if we’re not relevant on all platforms, our brand will be infringed,” Weisbord adds.
He sees ATSC 3.0 as overlaying IP technology with linear transmission and “the next step progression of one-to-one delivery, personalized content. And that will allow that delivery to connected cars, to mobile devices, and ultimately to the television sets within the home.”
Full rollout is three to five years. In the meantime, the Dallas test is aimed at generating proof of content and by validating any of “several business models that have yet to come to fruition that are on a whiteboard being framed.”
Asked about advertisers’ use of addressable TV, Weisbord believes that brands need to be developed through the use of mass media and then “finite the message.”
Noting that most MVPD’s allot two minutes of every programming hour to addressable ads—typically offering 30- and 60-second spots but not 15’s, “Depending on the demand we’ll open or close the supply. So we’ll have a mover advantage by being able to deliver fifteen’s.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>“If all we do as an industry is make television look like digital programmatic today and the mess of the supply chain that exists out there, then we will fail,” says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. “We need to keep the economics of TV today and leverage the targeting and the data available for digital but we need to do it efficiently.”
Wise sees convergence “as not necessarily a buying problem but a planning and measurement problem” that it has sought to help remedy with internal solutions and partnerships with 4C Insights, VideoAmp and TubeMogul, among others, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
Since Mediaocean’s sale in August 2015 to a private equity company, it has made six acquisitions, expanded globally and expanded its customer base, 90% of which had been agencies. It now deals directly with CMO’s on a planning workflow solution called Lumina and with TV broadcasters and publishers through Prisma for Sellers.
“Planning and buying need to come together and buying and selling need to come together,” says Wise.
He notes that 4C has done “an amazing job of creating platforms” to plan, buy, measure and optimize all in one system, through advanced data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“The tricky part is being able to respect what makes TV the most efficient media marketplace in the world today and it continues to be. While moving it into the digital future.” Wise thinks the next few years are going to be “very interesting to watch” in the measurement space.
“I think Nielsen has done a really, really good job of expanding their datasets to be more relevant in the digital age,” Wise says, adding that comScore “has actually created a nice, viable alternative.”
Others will follow as MVPD’s “are leaning into platforms like 4C and VideoAmp and potentially TubeMogul” to leverage set-top box viewing data “and what we’re seeing is the market is almost open to there being another player in that space.”
Then there is Oracle with its acquisitions of Datalogix and Moat. “We will evolve as the industry evolves,” Wise says.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>“We’ve been working with people like BrightLine for a long, long time, Innovid, true[X] and others,” Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit. “It think we’re at an inflection point because my volume of orders for all of last year I’ve already booked year to date. That’s two hundred, three hundred percent growth. Very smart growth.”
A few weeks ago, Hulu served video trailers for the Warner Bros and MGM movie “Tomb Raider” that were interactive ads to the extent that viewers could order tickets to a nearby theatre from Fandango. As Variety reports, part of the strategy was to lessen the time between people seeing a movie trailer and actually going to a theatre.
“So I think as people, viewers in particular, continue to expect that they can interact with TV ads, you’ll see marketers take advantage of the opportunity,” says Naylor. “It’s a real opportunity to go beyond a conventional fifteen or thirty and I don’t see why it shouldn’t continue to go up and to the right.”
Such interactive spots are priced at a premium “because the results are superior in terms of brand awareness and purchase intent and even just at the most basic level, time spent with the ad. These ads just get more attention and I think expectations are going to just continue to increase for the viewer.”
Interactive ads typically begin with a conventional spot and some kind of call to action. “Maybe it’s an overlay or some kind of creative element to alert the viewer that they can interact. Once they interact it can be a video library, it could be a photo library, or a transactional unit. There’s a whole hoist of opportunities once you get people to engage.”
It’s a “modest call to action that lets people know pick up your remote, pick up your phone you can play around with this and learn more.”
Naylor likens growing consumer engagement with interactive ads to the advent of touch screens and peoples’ evolved expectations to encounter touch screens just about everywhere.
“I think sooner or later people just expect, of course I should be able to transact with a set. It’s IP TV. It’s a connected environment.”
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>“Each source of viewing data has its own virtues and benefits. They have challenges as well,” says Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Levine puts those virtues and benefits into the context of the industry’s ongoing quest for more unified targeting and measurement.
Panels tend to be smaller than other options but can go deep in terms of being able to get a vast amount of information about the individual members of the panels. “Panels can typically go down in terms of Nielsen to the person level, and that is a powerful thing for the TV advertising ecosystem,” says Levine.
With cable set-top boxes, “what you’re doing to a certain extent is you’re moving away from person-level measurement to household level measurement.” This comes closest to census-level so that “you can get into the multiple tens of millions of households tracking what they’re viewing.”
The downsides to set-top boxes: they don’t capture over-the-air, over-the-top or connected-TV viewing behavior. “So that’s missing a lot of viewership potential,” says Levine.
Which leaves automatic content recognition, which provides second-by-second viewership information. “ACR by nature defaults to that very, very granular level.”
More granular than just having household mailing addresses, ACR provides “a different level of identity resolution and matching” owing to user registration information and home IP addresses.
“ACR not only allows viewership of what you’re watching through your cable operator it would potentially, provided your TV set’s connected to the Internet, allow you also capture over the air viewership,” Levine says. “But what’s even more interesting is combining that with connected TV viewership.”
Layered on top of panel, set-top box and ACR data are additional datasets for targeting purposes. “So it’s exciting, it’s diverse, it’s a little bit of a Wild West environment. It creates a lot of opportunity but it’s going to be a while for the industry to normalize and accept what is good and what is great,” he adds.
For now, a big focus is on figuring out how many impressions are available to sell and how many end up being delivered against precision targets, with unduplicated reach a key goal.
]]>“We have to continue to make steps forward in being able to ensure that we can tell marketers whether they’re reaching five different people across five different touch points or one person across five different touch points,” Neuhauser says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“And we need to be able to do that with a high degree of confidence.”
4C Insights’ mantra is to “empower marketers to behave more like consumers, which is multi-screen, multi-formatted,” Neuhauser adds while attending the Advanced Advertising Summit.
Whereas digital has long been considered a data-driven medium—owing to the availability of addressability, targeting and measurement—TV is on the move to close the gap.
“We knew it had premium, brand-safe environments. Now we finally get to see just how far down the funnel TV actually goes.”
Last year’s linkup between 4C and NBCUniversal, which made all of its linear inventory available via self-serve, programmatic buying on 4C’s platform, is an example of serving thousands of ad buyers “that are constantly looking to find their audience wherever, whenever they might be available to a brand message,” Neuhauser explains.
Publishers “want to be able to leverage their inventory, their audiences, the value propositions that they have to be able to once again stand in front of the marketer and say ‘you should be putting more money into my platform not less.’”
While the data ecosystem continues to evolve, a “hot topic” is the privacy compliant extraction of consumer data, according to Neuhauser.
“It puts the consumer right at the center to ensure that their information is being used appropriately and is only providing them back with better experiences, wanted experiences.”
While datasets continue to emerge, some will have to work together. But even then, complications will loom large.
“It requires a significant mathematics, significant amount of data science to be able to mesh some of these walled gardens, again at an audience level, so that it continues to improve the experience but also ensures that privacy is at the heart of all decision making,” says Neuhauser.
In the meantime, 4C will continue to “push the envelope on measurement and attribution so that marketers can continue to evolve their understanding of who they want to reach and when they want to reach them.”
This video was produced at the Advance Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>NBCU is making reductions in more than 50 primetime, original shows across its entire portfolio.
“Sometimes, a little bit less means a whole lot more,” said Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising and Client Partnerships. “The industry knows that television is already the most effective advertising medium there is, but we need to make the experience better for viewers.”
NBCU says it will unveil a suite of innovative new ad products including Interactive Picture in Picture and Social Commercials and Social First Pods. The new PRIME POD “combines the power of fewer, better, and more contextually relevant ads, and gives clients a unique opportunity to connect with audiences in the most effective, exciting, and efficient way,” the company announced.
Noting that contextually targeted ads fuel greater consumer conversion, the company will use a new artificial intelligence-based contextual content targeting product that “combs through scripts and data sources to make every ad that much more contextually relevant to its audience.”
The company has produced a video explaining its rationale. It’s titled We’re Creating More Prime Time Primetime.
Earlier this month, Krishan Bhatia, NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, explained to Beet.TV that improving the user experience is an “huge focus.” In light of today’s announcement about cutting commercial loads, we are republishing that interview.
NBCUniversal’s Total Audience Delivery is a first for its coverage of Winter Olympics and a model for what the company believes will be more acceptance of the way it is helping marketers re-aggregate fragmenting audiences. So far, one of the biggest takeaways from the PyeongChang Winter Games for Krishan Bhatia has been the acceleration of over-the-top and connected TV viewing.
“I think for the past few years we have continued to underestimate that potential,” says NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, who Beet.TV interviewed at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau several days after the opening ceremonies. “Once again, we believe that it’s going to blow through all of the estimates.”
As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCU figures showed that 28.3 million viewers watched the opening ceremonies, 27.8 million of them on television. Audience numbers for out-of-home viewing weren’t yet available. As of Feb. 13, half of U.S. television homes and more than one-third of the country’s population had watched the Olympics on the networks of NBCUniversal, according to fast cume data provided by Nielsen. Six days into the events, NBC Sports Digital’s presentation had been accessed by 6.6 million unique devices–higher than the 2016 Rio Olympics (6.0 million through the comparable date) and more than tripling the 2014 Sochi Olympics (1.8 million to date).
Bhatia says the company’s total audience measurement and delivery approach should apply to any content and consumer segment that is proliferating and fragmenting across multiple platforms along with time-shifting consumption. Given this backdrop, brands want to work with fewer, bigger partners to re-aggregate eyeballs.
“I think we will find marketers and agencies leaning more into this than they ever had,” Bhatia says of Total Audience Delivery.
Commercial ad load and viewer experience remain “another area of huge focus for us,” he adds. Having reduced ad loads on OTT and on-demand platforms by about 30%, NBCU continues to test new formats and develop new products as well as improving its contextual targeting solutions.
“We’re in a two to three week process of researching ad pod length and formats right now to really come up with what is the optimal solution both for the consumer experience and for how that drives marketer metrics,” says Bhatia.
As the company approaches its third year of enhanced audience buying, it doesn’t plan to “reinvent the wheel” but scale the business “and quite frankly making it more efficient for marketers and agencies to engage with us.”
As examples he points to NBCU’s work on facilitating better data interoperability for audience targeting and its automation capabilities. In the latter category is its API through which buyers can access TV inventory on the 4C Insights Platform, which is the subject of this interview.
“We think that’s a giant step towards making the buying and transacting of television significantly more efficient,” Bhatia says.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>As AdExchanger reported, on top of its Pivot advanced TV platform, Horizon is building a custom planning tool to marry behavioral, attitudinal and purchase data with viewership data.
4C Insights chief product officer Anupam Gupta explains how it works in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The core, it’s a software platform,” he says. “As an agency, as Horizon, you would log into that platform, you would define your target audiences. Different brands have different kinds of audiences they care about – some use my CRM data, my first-party data, use social data because it gives you real-time signals, use offline purchase data, or other things.
“There’s lots of different data types that have all been brought together in the 4C platforms. So, it makes it really easy to define a target audience that makes sense for a brand and to use that for linear TV, digital activation, social, etc.”
From 4C’s perspective, that data includes Nielsen TV viewing data, smart TV viewership data from 10 million US devices and offline attributes.
The company then connects that targeting data with a brand’s own customer data from its CRM records.
4C’s heritage was in enabling Twitter and Facebook ad buys. Nowadays, it also uses real-time broadcast network monitoring to help advertisers buy social ads in sync with their TV transmission.
This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.
The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.
Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.
“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.
Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:
“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”
Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”
Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.
Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”
Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”
Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:
“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.
“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Media technology provider 4C Insights cut its teeth on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. As it shifts into the linear television space to enable more precise audience targeting, it’s an instance of TV “borrowing a plan from the digital playbook,” says Chief Product Officer Anupam Gupta.
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Gupta explains some of the more important learnings gained from the social media space and reflects on the company’s programmatic venture with NBCUniversal.
Given their advanced advertising infrastuctures, which enable granular audience targeting, the big social media platforms provide fast measurement for campaign optimization.
“Those are good and those are learnings that I think you can apply to, let’s say, the world of TV where you want to target better, you want to have more programmatic tools and you want to measure and optimize faster.”
Another learning is that the data in social media “is huge and it’s real-time,” providing brands with consumer insights that can be used to identify the kinds of consumers they want to target. “We call it the unlimited focus group,” says Gupta.
The third learning he cites is the huge reach of social media. “So when you’re doing a true cross-channel campaign and if you need to find more reach or more frequency, you can use social media as an additive channel let’s say to television.”
Asked about the industry’s quest for uniform cross-platform audience measurement, Gupta says the focus should be on business objectives. Some brands are after upper-funnel lift, others actual sales impact and yet others everything in between.
“At the end of the day yes, there is a strong desire to measure things, but to has to tie back to the objectives that a marketer has,” says Gupta.
In a deal announced in October, the 4C platform has programmatic access to NBCU inventory that isn’t sold in the Upfront.
“Now you can bring the audience intelligence to bear against that inventory, build a plan that essentially hits the audience you’re going after and execute on that just like you do digital campaigns,” Gupta says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“We detect at the glass” attributes of content playing on-screen, says Inscape’s SVP of Marketing & Business Development Jodie McAfee.
Those attributes are considered a “video fingerprint” for detecting everything from movies to TV shows to games.
Inscape’s technology actually detects pieces of a screen and then reassembles them on an external server to identify a particular piece of content. The company licenses data, along with IP addresses.
There’s a reason Inscape detects at the glass. “A fairly solid percentage of the behavior on our footprint is non set-top box behavior,” McAfee says. “We see all of that behavior.”
Inscape’s reach is just over 7 million TV sets across the U.S. in what amounts to “fairly close to census-level” reporting. It ingests feeds from roughly 150 national broadcast and cable networks and about 150 local feeds from DMA’s; it’s aiming for all 210 DMA’s by mid-2018.
“We maintain a standing map report against Experian demographics that we run on a pretty regular basis so that we can give people a sense of what the footprint of Vizio owners looks like,” he adds.
Data are licensed on a use-case basis and reported every hour, although there is a three-hour gap between when something aired and when the resulting data are available. Applications range from analytics to retargeting and measurement for the buy-side and sell-side of the media business.
While there’s “no such thing as the perfect data set” because ACR technology can’t tell exactly who’s watching something within a household, “it’s household-level data at scale,” says McAfee.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>Things like attribution from set-top box data to blockchain technology for programmatic transactions are suddenly in the mainstream.
“These are all things that literally in the last year have gone from just general concepts to truly actionable items,” Hanlon says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Much of the change has been embraced by legacy TV and upstart digital players alike. As for the former, Hanlon points to Comcast “with lots of different toeholds” in the business, from NBCUniversal to ecosystem technology providers.
“Comcast is maybe the leading media company now with all of those assets under one roof. That is an exquisite position to influence how the future of advertising on television and or video looks and feels and is shaped,” Hanlon observes.
Then there is Google, a pure play digital adtech firm “wanting to get into the television industry in a big way.”
Although in some respects, Comcast and Google could be viewed as “two warring titans for the future of TV advertising,” they actually might need each other.
“That’s the exciting part of how the future of television advertising is evolving.”
Vertere provides consulting and advisory services to companies of all sizes “or financial folks in between who are trying to figure each other out.”
It could be a TV network struggling with adopting programmatic or incorporating data into its sales process. These clients might need to consider collaborating with startups “and companies on the outside.”
Conversely, early stage companies are “trying to get on the radars of some of these big media firms.” In between are “a ton of financial folks.”
The insights of a third party can help to marry assets and opportunities. “We spend more of our time having those kinds of conversations than we ever have before,” Hanlon says.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>Earlier this year, after Fox, Turner and Viacom announced the formation of OpenAP, details emerged about how comScore’s advanced audiences would be one of the first data sources integrated into the new system. And while OpenAP is just up and running, comScore’s Cathy Hetzel believes it’s a tipping point.
That’s because definitions of audience targets—say, automobile intenders—tend to vary. “What you find is that targets are defined differently” Hetzel, who is EVP of Commercial at comScore, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
One of the best things about OpenAP, according to Hetzel, is that the networks involved are using common definitions of audience targets as supplied by comScore. It can then “measure the effectiveness of that target on the back end and it’s exactly the same target. The advertiser is not having a slightly different definition of a specific target that they’re in the market to find.”
With everyone within OpenAP doing business off of a unified target, its “a true tipping where we have the opportunity as a measurement company to really see the power of big data sets working together,” Hetzel says.
She would like to see the concept expand to other media sellers, regardless of whether it’s under the auspices of OpenAP. Given the possibility of competing audience-targeting consortiums, “we’re happy to oblige, obviously.”
It’s also a good sign that the industry is thinking about ways in which it can reach scale because “We’ve always been about scale.”
OpenAP isn’t the only partnership in the advanced TV landscape, along with acquisitions and mergers and the vertical integration of networks and operators. Meanwhile, some newer startups are maturing and converging with one another.
“I think that’s good for the industry. There’s been a lot of noise the last several years and I think some of that noise is starting to settle down,” says Hetzel.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>The President of Investment for GroupM North America acknowledges that advertisers know more about TV households than ever before. “The plethora of data out there is tremendous,” Schwartz says.
The limiting factor to addressable TV advertising, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV, is not how many houses but “the amount of available inventory that we can use to reach those people. But I do believe that as the industry grows, more and more money will follow that.”
Targeted TV is different in that there are various ways to reach particular audiences and apply various data “to really hone in and value the inventory based on what your marketing clients are trying to achieve.”
Asked for his thoughts on the audience targeting consortium OpenAP, which Fox, Turner and Viacom began to roll out this month, Schwartz says the good thing is “is that the media companies are working together, which is something that’s positive. But I need to have more visibility on my side and be able to do stuff behind the curtains, you might say.”
Using household-level data from Rentrak is one tactic for advanced targeting in which price negotiation is still done based on demographics. Schwartz cites a “value differential” he can return to clients based on being able buy more of the impressions his clients actually want.
“I may have 10,000 customers but 3,000 drive 40 percent of my business, and I can now look into things like that,” he says.
A veteran of innumerable Upfront negotiating seasons, Schwartz says this year’s was better for sellers than some people had anticipated. “I think coming out of the marketplace, demand was a little bit higher than most pundits on Wall Street thought.”
A major challenge isn’t people shunning TV but not getting good measurement of how and where they are doing so. “We’re measuring too many times the device and not the content,” Schwartz says. “We have to move to the content and the ads that are in the content.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>With NBCU making its television inventory available via application programming interfaces, “it was pretty natural for us to come together,” says Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights.
Since its founding in 2011, 4C has brought data science together with workflow to facilitate smoother and more efficient media planning and buying, beginning with digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn. “We started doing that with social, but of course social is not the be all and end all,” Gupta says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we’re trying to get to is cross channels. TV of course is a big share of eyeballs.”
4C decided just over a year ago to expand beyond social, choosing linear TV as opposed to video. “In the TV case, some of the brands that we work with are bringing CRM data to linear TV, which hasn’t necessarily been done before.”
In a deal announced this month involving retailer Target, 4C has access to NBCU inventory “that is available to buy, let’s say, over the next couple of months. So therefore in the 4C planner you can plan a campaign and out comes a media schedule that says ‘here is how you want to allocate your budget to reach the goals that you have across the various programs on NBC,’” Gupta explains.
With the Mediaocean combination announced in September, 4C’s platform brings together inventory bought in both the Upfront and scatter markets. “It was very important that we cover both the use cases. We tap into the inventory, build an optimized plan and push that plan back into Mediaocean by integration.”
Gupta says that in the last six months or so, everyone is talking about applying “audience centricity” to linear television “and frankly television more broadly speaking. It’s the same thing that’s been done in digital advertising.”
Calling it the best parts of digital advertising now coming to linear TV, he welcomes the ongoing wave of buyers and sellers pushing the envelope of innovation.
“I think the people who are going to be successful down the road are the ones that are experimenting with these things now, getting the kinks out of the system, learning and then moving along,” Gupta says. “And I think next year you’re going to see a lot of the stuff happening at scale is my prediction.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>4C Insights, whose product suite already let advertisers buy ads on social media in sync with TV play-outs, has partnered with Mediaocean, the software platform for media buyers, to enable the integration.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, 4C strategic operations SVP Seif Hamid explains the deal will manifest across both of 4C’s main products:
Effectively, the partnership gives marketers a single place to manage and see the performance of social media campaigns alongside those of traditional and digital channels, whilst also giving media buyers audience recommendations for TV ad campaigns. Both elements are in pilot now and will be launched broadly in Q4 2017.
Says Hamid: “They’ve built very vibrant ecosystem. We bring a unique integration to that ecosystem. We’re the first to integrate social and TV.”
Earlier this year, 4C already launched 4C TV Planner, combining data for social, TV ad occurrence and offline attributes in to audience recommendations.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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