Cadent, a company helping deliver addressable ads to connected TV and data-driven ads to linear TV, announced it will acquire 4INFO, a company whose software supports the creation of identity graphs, linking together distinct parts of audience members’ scattered profile data.
Writing about the deal, Cadent CEO Nick Troiano says 4INFO enhances Cadent’s ability to work with inventory partners, gives advertisers better tools for data activation and OTT, and, whilst the company thinks about “TV-first”, it gains a programmatic bidder that will help it create more dynamic advertising campaigns.
This acquisition follows the recently-announced merger of Rubicon Project and Telaria, which also brings together two tech suppliers with historic specialisms on cross-channel targeting and TV-specific delivery.
That seems to be the driving imperative behind the current crop of M&A – empowering connected TV ad sales with all the targeting capabilities that have grown up in digital.
“The real opportunity for us … is to be able to bring to television what we’ve been bringing to the digital world for the last seven years,” says Tim Jenkins of 4INFO in this video interview from May 2019, which we are republishing here.
We’re now seeing a lot of advertisers really embrace finally this one-to-one addressability in TV. I’m glad to see advertisers are finally starting to insist on accountability from the various providers in the space, and I think the ability to prove the real attractiveness of television in this one-to-one addressable world.”
]]>But, what is an identity graph and why does it matter?
Simply, an identity graph is the collection of data points from disparate devices that, when pieced together, add up to indicate a single person’s holistic media behavior.
Identity resolution is the practice of doing that stitching together – and, increasingly, that stitching involves data from online TV consumption, according to Mari Tangredi, SVP of audience solutions and advanced TV at 4INFO, an identity resolution vendor.
Add to that mix conventional cookies from web browsers and the likes of 4INFO have what Tangredi, speaking with MTM co-founder Jon Watts for Beet.TV, calls a “pinwheel” of audience data.
4INFO itself uses what it calls Custom Connected Identity Maps (CCID) and its Bullseye ID, which starts by mapping a mobile device to a home address, a match key for other devices, too.
Whilst 4INFO’s underbelly is in mobile, the company had previously branched its identity graph system out to other platforms, like the new wave of TV devices.
Now the outfit has branched out from just offering its demand-side platform (DSP). Eighteen months ago, it decided to break out its identity technology, Tangredi.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>That’s a person-level frontier that FreeWheel plans to tackle, according to Claudio Marcus, the GM of the company’s Data Platform. In this interview with Beet.TV, Marcus recaps FreeWheel’s progress on TV advertising planning and attribution, calling measurement “a huge challenge.”
On the attribution side, FreeWheel took on the role of TV advocate in 2016 when it conducted research “just to understand the impact that TV advertising has on different types of clients’ business.” There followed secondary research in which FreeWheel hired a firm to find any study that touted cross-channel or multi-touch attribution.
“The more interesting part was actually the secondary research,” Marcus notes. That’s because out of some 164 studies, “only twelve actually included TV. So here is TV, the biggest communication channel in the world and it basically wasn’t getting its due credit when it came to cross-channel attribution.”
Since then, FreeWheel has provided to “qualified attribution firms” household-level ad exposure data, free of charge, “so that they could include that in their cross-channel studies and their ability to measure television more effectively. That’s been a big success.”
FreeWheel has also been working with the programmer members of the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP to understand de-duplicated reach across those members. “Because as things get more and more fragmented, advertisers want to be in those new places where there are audiences, whether it’s different channels or different platforms. But they also want to make sure that they’re not hitting the same people that they were hitting by going in traditional linear TV.”
Earlier this year, FreeWheel licensed VIZIO smart-TV data from Inscape and built a nationally representative model “which is really a co-mingled data set between the Comcast set-top box data and the smart-TV data.” Among other things, the data helps programmers that sell on national basis. “They want something that’s more nationally representative. They want to be able to forecast national impressions. They want to be able to measure on a national basis,” Marcus says.
There are disparities in data gathered from boxes and smart TV’s. Within Comcast Cable’s footprint, there’s an average of about 2.6 cable boxes compared to about 1.1 devices in homes with smart TV’s. “What that means is that there’s some viewing that you’re missing.”
Meanwhile, smart TV’s have their advantages over boxes. “It has lower latency, it covers OTT as long as it’s content that has been previously fingerprinted on linear,” Marcus says.
As IP-delivered content proliferates, so do devices that receive the content. Problem is, not all of the devices that connect to WiFi “are associated with people in a specific home” because some belong to visitors.
“As we think about moving TV measurement from a household level to an individual level, it helps us to understand who’s home and who’s not. So that we can start to get better models when it comes to what’s called viewer attribution.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“I think we’ve got a lot of bets in motion right now,” says Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader, Media & Entertainment, at professional services provider EY.
“Some bets are bringing things together and other bets are creating more walled gardens. Right now it remains to be seen how it all plays out, but I think we’re going through this open and closed ecosystem debate,” Balis adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
She lauds the efforts of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium as “a great step in that direction” of industry unification. Meanwhile, consumers are dabbling with a preponderance of OTT and streaming television choices while “the entire industry is playing catch-up mode” in figuring out how best to reach those viewers.
Referencing this year’s TV UpFront season, Balis sees a mix of legacy mindsets and behaviors and the reality of a shifting landscape. “I would imagine that next year’s UpFront will look quite different. I think right now it’s sort of got a foot in both worlds.”
Aside from media and technology companies, brand managers face major hurdles just trying to take advantage of audience segments in advanced TV. “Once we change all of those models, they have to change the entire infrastructure within their companies,” says Balis.
She sees a future in which marketing and customer experience, which today are often separate departments, will have to come together. “We have to build a smarter experience for consumers because that’s their human expectation of brands.”
Advertisers won’t be focusing just on the ROI of individual campaigns but “total lifetime value to get loyalty, retention and value from customers. Fundamentally, what that requires is embracing first-party data, enhancing it with second- and third-party data.”
Asked about her expectations for the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Balis recognizes an underlying “tension” but reminds that, “Ultimately, Cannes Lions celebrates creativity and we have to remember that. It’s about the art of the craft and really celebrating the stories that are told.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Midha provides details about how the use of a one-question survey in a TV ad pod with the true[X] Uplift product can provide a myriad of insights about viewers in relation to their status in the purchase funnel.
Formerly a unit of FOX Networks and now owned by Walt Disney Co., true[X] is used across most broadcast and cable networks plus the Twitch gaming platform and OTT services, among others. “We really focus on high-attention environments. Places where there’s a really engaged consumer on the other end and where we think we can make the experience better,” says Midha.
Calling CTV an “incredibly rich canvas,” she talks about engagement ads for a variety of brands from Amazon to Lego to Harley Davidson to consumer packaged-goods, “which shows that this is a format that works for any number of categories.” A voice-enabled, engagement ad for Amazon’s Echo used speech-to-text conversion so that viewers could verbally interact with the ad.
Whereas ad attribution “only tells about a sale,” when brand lift occurs “you usually will see conversion down the chain,” says Midha, adding that because not all viewers are always in market for something, all ads provide value to brands.
“It’s still seeding an awareness, it’s still driving perception and it may even be creating preference so that when that consumer is in market, they will convert for that brand.”
The company is working with “several partners to use Uplift to measure video performance on their own sold campaigns” via the Uplift technology but apart from true[X]’s own engagement-ad units, according to Midha.
Giving viewers a choice of their ad experience and collecting the resulting data at scale can turn a one-question survey into a gold mine of information, she says.
“You can imagine it’s not very hard to get a lot of people to choose to take that survey, especially when it’s only one question. We let consumers place themselves on the purchase funnel by asking them how they would describe their relationship with a brand.”
A “control and expose group” can number 500-plus within days of a campaign launching, “and we also are able to make sure that the cohort for exposed looks like the cohort for control, both of which look like the cohort that was actually targeted for the campaign. So your survey group mirrors your campaign targeting.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“If you think about advertiser demands, they increasingly are becoming focused on addressable,” Zagorski says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent LUMA Partners Digital Media East event. At the same time, advertisers want to know “how do I reduce the friction between me and the seller?”
As a video management platform, Telaria works with virtual MVPD’s, broadcasters and app-based companies in CTV and OTT. “I think where we see a ton of growth is the app-based world. That‘s where consumers are just starting to experiment,” says Zagorski, who joined the company two years ago.
He believes that virtual MVPD’s “are going to get so much of a share,” about 10% of audience versus cable, “and the broadcasters are going to have to catch up on what they’re doing in the online space.
“So the guys in the middle, which are the app-based companies that came digital first, provide a really interesting opportunity for advertisers” because they’re relatively untapped.
Overall, CTV and OTT have “rapidly gone from the discussion being what is it to how do I get it to how do I make it better,” Zagorski explains. “And I think we’re on the verge of that how do I make it better discussion. Which is how do I make it more addressable. How do I make reduce the friction, how do I create more transparency in the buying process.”
Those are three areas “that we’re going to be pushing conversations in” at the upcoming 2019 Cannes Lions confab. “How we make it more relevant across the board for advertisers and consumers and make a better experience for them.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>“So we see the advertisers as actually driving the marketplace forward on bringing business outcome type of thinking to the television world,” Muller adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.
It’s symptomatic of a shift from digital media to TV regarding accountability, according to Muller. “But television is difficult. It’s extremely hard to measure television” given its various iterations—linear, time-shifted, on-demand and syndicated. “It’s very, very, very complex.”
iSpot.tv has spent the last seven years “reinventing measurement for TV,” starting with the ability to do it in real time and at scale and then adding the capability to connect ad exposures to business outcomes. In other words, “using how television is bought without sort of reinventing how television is bought. Because that’s hard to change.”
The company’s proprietary ad catalog automatically tracks every TV ad on more than 120 networks and layers on meta data, according to Muller. “We then track airing schedules for every single TV ad so we know when every program and every ad airs.”
Four years ago, iSpot.tv added smart-TV data to the mix “so we’re actually the first company to commercialize smart TV data in a major way.” When all of the data are combined with U.S. Census demographics and geography data, the result is “a fully processed and cleansed and accurate TV side.”
Almost all (85%) of the company’s revenue is brand-direct, with the remainder coming from TV networks.
“We have 200 large advertiser clients that use the platform “to really bring their TV strategy in house, have transparency and then use us for everything from competitive measurement to attention to attribution and lift measurement,” Muller says.
“What I will say though is that advertisers are much further ahead in the marketplace in attribution than the media companies and even the ad agencies.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>One of Prohaska Consulting’s top services this year is helping buyers, sellers and technology providers “take more ownership and control and command of their own first-party data, and then bridge appropriately into second-party across every channel imaginable or at least possible today,” the CEO and Principal says.
These actions are partly defensive and partly offensive, Prohaska explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent LUMA Partners Digital Media East event in Manhattan.
Defensively, it’s the “one-two punch of Google and Apple’s news over the last few weeks” and for offensive reasons “you might want to figure out this deterministic footprint because Google, Facebook and Amazon have been crushing you here in the states and BAT has been crushing everybody else in China and elsewhere.”
His reference to BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) relates to “obviously the largest deterministic footprints in the world.”
As for traditional publishers being skeptical about the “speed bump” of having people log in so their data can be efficiently harvested, “Facebook’s kind of gotten over that over the last ten years and Google and Twitter and others have as well,” says Prohaska.
“For firms that can own their own identity, be able to collect their assets and then engage appropriately through proper regulation and opt in environment and recognized respecting the consumer first, where they can monetize either coupling or decoupling their identity data with their own inventory, those are the folks who are going to win for years to come.”
He recalls saying six months ago that “the world is going to move fully deterministic, fully opt-in across all media channels” by the end of 2025. “And we’re on track now.”
Before then, there will be “this major blowback, appropriately, with regulation and consumer fear understandable.”
But when consumers have full transparency over what’s happening to their data “and really what’s not happening to their data” there will be a tradeoff “around free content and services in exchange for a little personalization so we don’t serve punch the monkey ads for the next ten years.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>The CEO of the advanced-TV platform cites pay-TV operators like Comcast, AT&T/Xandr and Charter making considerable technology investments “to support this national addressable solution, to bring that kind of accountability to television.”
On the demand side, “the agencies and advertisers are starting to rethink their strategies for television. It’s true that TV as a medium is working very well. I think it’s also true that social and digital, which was a big push for the last five years, works but also lacks some of the scale that television brings,” Troiano says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.
Combining the two trends brought both sides together to “start thinking about how to build addressable business models. We’ve seen that grow pretty significantly,” to about $2 billion in addressable spending. “From a Cadent perspective, we see addressable growing really thirty to fifth percent year over year.”
He describes Cadent, whose heritage is in national TV solutions, as figuring out “How do you bring a fragmented marketplace in the traditional television sense to brands and advertisers in a way that complements their current TV strategies.”
Among the major pay-TV operators offering addressable, “each one has their own solution set, technology infrastructure and capabilities. So Cadent’s role in this marketplace today is to aggregate the addressable inventory across all those pay TV providers and make it simple for an advertising agency to execute a national campaign.
“So that’s simplified TV formats, simplified reporting, simplified planning. And it’s those kind of simplifications that have made traditional TV work that is fundamental to help drive the demand, move from traditional television dollars to addressable,” Troiano says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>So a little more than two years ago, Tru Optik launched OptOut.TV to make it possible for consumers to opt out of data capture and control how data about them is tracked across devices. “It’s a mandatory part of every contract and partnership deal we’ve done over the last two years,” Swanston says.
Later this year, Tru Optik plans to divulge details about consumer participation in OptOut.TV, in addition to doing “a lot more consumer-facing advertising for that, as well along with some of our partners.”
In the meantime, Swanston says that “a significant percentage” of those who avail themselves of OptOut.TV or other data-control opportunities associated with Tru Optik, “many people aren’t actually opting out at all. They’re going in and adjusting their data. They’re giving more information” because they don’t want see things that are inappropriate or irrelevant.
Swanston’s take is that people just want their data to be used with transparency in a privacy compliant manner, along with the ability to opt out in a way “that actually enhances their experience.”
Asked about the business of tracking consumer identities for advertising purposes, he points to three permutations, the first two being device graphs yielding probalistic models, and work done by such data onboarders as TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. Then there is Tru Optik, which goes beyond a sole focus on individuals as it relates to TV because anyone in a household can be watching it at a given time.
He says advertisers want to know if they’re reaching the right type of household based on such factors as age and gender and the propensity of someone in the household being in the market for a product or service.
“Who cares on television about frequency capping just to your Roku or just to your Samsung TV?” Swanston says. “I want to frequency cap in the household. And so I think when we talk about identity, it’s really important not to just talk about individual identity but also understanding the makeup of the household, which is where Tru Optik uniquely sits in the market right now.”
As the discussion turns to workplace diversity, Swanston says Tru Optik is ahead of that particular societal curve because it’s in the company’s DNA.
“We would never have or need a Chief Diversity Officer. We don’t have one VP or SVP in the company that’s not a female. Almost forty percent of our engineering team are minorities. Half of our employees are first-generation Americans or immigrants.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>4INFO has long made custom identity graphs for Premion to identify certain audiences, Wilson explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent LUMA Digital Media East conference. “In many cases, it’s as simple as an auto intender. Or in other cases, it’s piecing together different audiences to create a psychographic.”
Having built its CTV business over the last couple of years, “we have a connected-TV device graph that we built with MadHive,” a company in which Premion is an investor in addition to having a stake in 4INFO.
“Both of these identity graphs allow us to not only reach audiences but to do it with a high level of accuracy.”
Asked about local versus national audience targeting, Wilson cites a case study about a national automotive advertiser that wanted to work with Premion because of its scale in connected TV and OTT plus its 125-network reach.
“They wanted to reach a national audience with one piece of creative, which we don’t do, our partners do that. We met with them and frankly convinced them that although they should think nationally, they should act locally,” Wilson says.
“What we did instead was we built out market-by-market programs with them that allowed them to look at the ROI by markets, look at attribution and traffic that was driven by market. I think we’re going to see more of that. I think we’re going to see more national brands looking at how they can execute locally.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>He sees tremendous opportunity in the power of television advertising to target local audiences. “We’re looking to aggressively tackle the opportunity that we see in the local market to bring to bear more audience-driven selling for our advertisers,” says Greenwald.
Then he refers to a white paper titled The New TV issued in March by Comcast Spotlight that examined the range of TV options—from linear to OTT and several other advanced iterations. For example, primetime viewing.
“Today there’s a point of view that so much viewing is captured just in primetime. But really that’s only about a third of viewing and you can still capture a large portion of the audience where two thirds of viewing is happening outside of primetime,” says Greenwald.
He points out that about 87% of total TV viewing happens live and that Comcast can “help you find them on a linear schedule” so that “you can reach as much of them as possible in a premium, brand-safe environment.”
Comcast Spotlight has a “huge local business” wherein advertisers can target audiences in specific zones. In a DMA like Philadelphia, “we can carve that up into a number of smaller zones and let an advertiser that might be a smaller business that only operates in a portion of the Philadelphia market just reach the potential customer base that they have in that zone.”
Also at the LUMA Digital Media Summit, the head of NCC Media, Nicolle Pangis, talks about “chapter two” at NCC, which is the national cable sales group owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. Referring to NCC, Greenwald says, “We see a real opportunity in conjunction with our partners to bring a lot of new offerings to market that we think are going to be very valuable to advertisers.”
Asked about Comcast’s FreeWheel, he cites publisher-side projects coming to market for Comcast’s programming and MVPD partners. In particular, he mentions pilot tests with NBC focusing on unification, bringing digital and linear together in a single execution. “These pilots enable us to remove the linear schedules from their traffic system and optimize within FreeWheel’s ad server/decisioning system before flowing back into the linear traffic system for execution.
“We’ve seen that yield meaningful results for NBC and we believe that’s a real proof point in the market for us as we work to unify audiences across all screens,” Greenwald adds. “And that is a real core competency for FreeWheel and something we’re laser focused on.
“We believe it brings a lot of value to the marketplace for our immediate customers but also for marketers. It enables them to buy an audience across all screens with one single order as opposed to a siloed execution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>“We’ve provided the opportunity for people to toe dip into connected TV. So we see that as really a big part of our future,” George says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.
Referred to in some circles as “the trade desk for walled gardens,” Pixability’s foundation is in helping advertisers target audiences within YouTube and Facebook. “We are the only technology platform that has access to what is really the largest video inventory, and we get to leverage the unique capabilities for targeting and so forth on YouTube and Facebook,” George says.
In recent years Pixability has extended its footprint to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify. “Were uniquely positioned at the moment in really what’s a super exciting space.”
During most of his tenure at Facebook, George led the Mobile Publisher Solutions team, which drove rapid growth for Facebook’s Audience Network, according to a Pixability news release. His video software experience includes stints at Celtra, KickApps and Maven Networks, which was acquired by Yahoo.
“Think of us as a tech player that sits on top of the Google stack as well as Facebook.”
Asked about consumer data, George says, “We can leverage first-party data from clients, but it’s less of a challenge because we live within the walled gardens. All the data is available to us.”
As part of the YouTube Measurement Program, Pixability gets access to “a bunch of data that brands will use for insights about the audiences, and it obviously helps us with helping them find their audiences on these platforms.”
One of the company’s main focuses right now is around planning capabilities for targeting down to “micro audiences. That doesn’t exist in the market outside of Pixability.”
“They’ve been our trusted partner for many years and we’re one of their largest partners there,” he says of YouTube. “But now also having a cross-platform story that now will extend into connected TV.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>“We had always been in local and we’ve seen the definition of local start at the DMA level, go to city level, go to ZIP level,” says Prioleau. “And then we rolled out addressable, which is really household-level targeting.”
Furthering its position in the OTT/CTV market, Simpli.fi recently announced a partnership with FreeWheel Advertisers to execute their OTT/CTV buys, making it easy for Strata users to buy OTT/CTV programmatically, similar to the way they buy digital media, according to a news release.
OTT/CTV advertisers, including those who work with Simpli.fi through the FreeWheel Advertisers division, can upload to Simpli.fi a list of up to one million street addresses “and then just target those particular households with ads, and also do attribution against those households to see what sort of foot traffic those ads drove to local retailers.”
Just as cable companies have been targeting different households with different ads, “We wanted to bring that same capability to programmatic over-the-top advertising” to leverage “a huge trove” of offline data associated with physical household addresses.
In this manner, for example, a Mercedes dealer can target households within a 15-mile radius that have a minimum household income of $150,000. “And so they can pick out the houses within the neighborhood they want to target, whether they’re a high tendency to be a luxury goods purchaser or auto intender or have a car coming off of lease.”
Many of Simpli.fi’s buyers are multi-location brands in categories like quick-serve restaurants, financial services and real estate that have hundreds or thousands of offices. “What they want to do is both unique targeting around each one of their offices, and they also want to have unique messaging around each one of their offices where they might want to show the contact information or the address for the local store.”
Expanding beyond OTT/CTV, Simpli.fi leverages unstructured data to offer buyers a clearer look at the data driving their campaigns to better inform their choices and empower their mobile, video, display and native campaigns at the localized level.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>Finding a common ID across platforms for networks that run websites, apps, linear content and other venues is the only way they can prove true, one-to-one audience targeting, Jenkins says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference in Manhattan.
“I think the real opportunity for us and what I’m excited about is to be able to bring to television what we’ve been bringing to the digital world for the last seven years” Jenkins says of 4INFO, whose patented device match method creates a Connected Identity Map for every consumer.
“We’re now seeing a lot of advertisers really embrace finally this one-to-one addressability in TV. I’m glad to see advertisers are finally starting to insist on accountability from the various providers in the space, and I think the ability to prove the real attractiveness of television in this one-to-one addressable world.”
Jenkins calls identity mapping “our sweet spot in particular, but also in the sweet spot of several players in this market that aren’t called the duopoly.”
In light of the nascent California Consumer Privacy Act and other data-related initiatives, identity becomes “a great opportunity and also now has some pretty serious challenges in terms of privacy,” he adds. “We’re seeing more and more companies adopt what they believe is going to come out of the California Consumer Privacy act.”
What it all means is that TV providers are going to have to respect consent and consumers are going to have greater control over their data, “which is how it should be.” 4INFO’s platform was built “from a privacy centric standpoint that it’s a great opportunity for us to shine in that environment.”
As regards Internet-delivered TV, Jenkins calls it “a unique challenge” for a lot of publishers that must contend with cookie- and opt-in compliance, in addition to trying to decipher multiple, anonymized IP addresses used to service the same household.
“Given all the issues around privacy, I think first-party data is going to become king,” Jenkins says. “I think the ability to work with first-party data without a lot of third-party data overlays because of the privacy issues and concerns people have around how a lot of that third-party data was collected is going to be a great opportunity for us.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>That is the view of one ad-tech exec who says the emerging imperative is not to get more audience data but, rather to tie together existing available pieces in a better way.
“I think more data probably isn’t required,” Mari Tangredi, SVP of audience solutions and advanced TV at 4INFO, says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“I think we’re at a place where maximising the data that you do have is kind of job one. I do think there is enough data probably out there now and tying it together accurately is probably the best thing to do.”
Tangredi was speaking as 4INFO announced a partnership with Inscape, a company which uses automated content recognition (ACR) to collect data on real TV show and ad viewership.
The tie-up means 4INFO will get to use specific show or ad viewing data, generated at a consumer’s device, and match it to any data set in near real-time.
Whilst 4INFO’s underbelly is in mobile, the company had previously branched its identity graph system out to other platforms, like the new wave of TV devices.
“Mobile is that person-based device,” Tagredi adds. “Going from mobile and then connecting all the other devices in the household, you’re starting at person-based, and then you can go up to household.”
]]>The panel titled Making Identity a Reality in a Multi-Screen World brought together Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media.
Moderator Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting, kicked things off by asking about the much desired “leap forward” from household to individual person addressability.
“I think we’re still in the early days of that as an industry,” said Krepsik, who believes the quest for a curated, omni-channel experience rests on “insuring that we have that common view of an individual person, regardless the screen or the device that they’re watching content on.”
No one seems to think that’s on the immediate horizon. Hinnant touted the actionable nature of household data, saying, “We’ve had great progress with it. I think it does come to scale at that point.” When used at scale, “it actually proves to have better results.”
Asked to quantify where the industry stands on achieving true one-to-one targeting and suggest a wish list of improvements, Ivins said that while for TV advertising spending “flat is the new up,” digital has been going up for 25 years.
“We should have seen it coming. What were we thinking? I think the industry is now woken up to that,” Ivins said. “All the media owners, they have the reach,” but that alone isn’t not enough.
“NBC can reach almost any household in the country if they wanted to because of their portfolio of products, but they don’t have the first-party relationships or some of technology. And the distributors have the technology and first-party relationships but they don’t have the reach,” Ivins added.
“TV as a platform, we have to get there,” said Hinnant. “We’ve got to stop the silos that are merging and I get that data privacy is an issue on that. But if we can come together as a platform, then we could actually compete.”
Five years ago, technology was a common barrier to advancement, according to Krepsit. Now cooperation is a bigger hurdle.
“The hardware manufacturers are beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in this ecosystem as well,” he said. “So it’s moving beyond the set-top box and actually moving to the actual devices. I think it’s only going to get more complicated.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It seems likely there won’t be one central identity graph for each person judging from comments by Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media at the forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World. The panel was moderated by Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting.
“If you don’t have consumer trust, it does not matter what technology solutions we put in place, the device graphs, the different partnerships, or any sort of math or data science we put behind it,” said Krepsik.
He cited regulations like GDPR in the European Union and the nascent California privacy act known as CPPA as being guiding forces. “I think just throwing technology and math at a problem without actually winning the trust of consumers sets our industry back,” Krepsik added.
Hinnant agreed with Krepsik and underscored the need to move beyond rating points to audiences in media transactions. “We have to help that conversion for all the ecosystem to go through and it’s the identity graph that helps that or the panels that help do that,” said Hinnant.
Prohaska mentioned the sharing of user phone numbers by Facebook without consent as one extreme, while observing that many people have been satisfied with a value proposition that involves the use of their data. “We’re in a bifurcated world,” he said.
“You have some people that will go one way and maybe a vast majority to the other,” said Hinnant. “But if we can help communicate what the value is to the consumer and educate them on what it means to be able to protect their privacy, I think that would be helpful.”
Ivins related the frustration of having to provide his credit card number while buying an airplane ticket online from a company with which he had done business before. “What do you mean you don’t store my credit card? I’ve been doing this for so long. It’s one of these things that you want to know who has what.”
With regard to Facebook and other digital advertising giants, Ivins said “there’s a message being sent there” by a backlash characterized by a decline in user engagement. “Whether they listen to it or not is TBD.”
From NCC’s perspective, “One of the issues that we’re looking at is I don’t want to be single threaded through one ID graph. I think that’s dangerous,” said Ivins about relying on one company. “I think we need to have some flexibility in that situation.”
Krepsik talked about people regardless of age or gender having to watch commercials for erectile disfunction products.
“What’s the biggest differentiation between me and my daughter? I’m a male, she’s a female. My son, he’s ten now. He doesn’t really even need to see an erectile dysfunctional ad at the age of ten. So you need his age.”
There needs to be a foundation that provides “a view of real people to underpin that measurement to build trust,” Krepsik said. “You can’t just live with one identity graph. We have different sources of information around people, around persons. And so it does have to be persons-based, but more importantly it has to be distributed. There’s not going to be a magical decoder ring where all the data’s going to sit in one spot.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The panel participants were Tim Jenkins, CEO of 4INFO, and Walt Horstman, SVP/GM of Advanced Advertising at TiVo, whose companies have launched a new partnership, along with moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
4INFO’s roots date to 2011 when it built a platform that provided proof that ads on mobile devices could drive sales. “TV came along and presented us with a whole new opportunity,” namely the creation of an identity graph tying mobile to other connected devices within households, Jenkins explained.
While Nielsen GRP metrics remain the major TV currency, ever more granular set-top box data are opening up new insights. “The most important thing is having the rights to that data to match it to an identity graph like Tim’s so then we can truly take all of the viewership experiences in linear television and understand how they are impacting other media,” said Horstman.
“I fundamentally think the big news with the identity graph is television is now playing nicely with the other children in the media ecosystem, which has not historically been the case,” Horstman added.
The new partnership between 4INFO and TiVo, according to Jenkins, will allow brands “to be able to use all of this viewership data that’s been captured via traditional linear delivery models…on a one-to-one basis at scale. It’s not a panel, it’s a whole bunch of households that you have actual viewership data on.”
As TV targeting, measurement and attribution continue to evolve, buyers fall into two camps: those still grounded in GRP’s and those using addressable and connected for one-to-one targeting and measurement.
“We try to treat them the same but have to talk to them completely differently,” Jenkins said. “One of the biggest challenges we have is helping people who are traditional digital buyers who know how to buy what we sell work with traditional TV buyers who don’t understand the measurement piece alone.”
“How are you making marketers better, faster stronger in regards to being able to deliver outcomes?” asked Swartz.
“Our fundamental goal has been to make all of this TV viewership data and traditional linear television very accessible to programmatic and digital buyers and DSP’s,” said Horstman. “The uptick is happening. It’s been a big education process.”
Amid comments about “stone age” TV versus more advanced digital media, Horstman said he believes broadcast linear TV still should serve as the foundation for media campaigns given the economics involved. That’s because road-reach TV CPM’s are still very efficient compared to more expensive, highly targeted buys, although a mix of both is appropriate.
“That’s the way that as an industry we should be thinking about this. Understand the economics of what you get across all these different properties and learn how to get the most from them,” said Horstman.
Asked about the increasing complexity that accompanies advancements in TV targeting and attribution, Jenkins said that orchestration is everyone’s responsibility. “At the end of the day, I guess the ultimate responsibility is with the brands. The brands need to really understand what’s available, they have to push their agencies to be able to buy it, be able to explain it and they need to definitely hold platforms accountable to deliver it.”
Swartz wanted to know how, with so many constituencies vying for their place at the table, “How do we make the economics work for everybody?”
Horstman cited the recent report from the 4A’s and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement showing the existence of “at least twenty different companies in the TV attribution world. So all this data has now enabled a whole new industry.”
It’s up to the buy-side to look beyond the obvious incentives that sellers have to provide their own means of attribution and be able to attribute value to each link in the chain, according to Horstman.
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Such guaranteed optimization could emerge by late this year or early 2020, Turner’s Dan Aversano explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.
By combining behavioral and viewing data from AT&T’s digital and television assets “we can now add in some fairly simply analytics to understand when and where people are exposed to ads and then use causal analytics to actually prove that they’re taking an action,” says the SVP of Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions.
An example in the auto industry could be “being able to prove the visitation that’s driven to a particular auto dealership because of the campaign they ran on TBS or a campaign they ran on CNN Go,” says Aversano. “That’s step one. Step two, where this data gets really interesting is how we start to make it actionable.”
Many advertisers are unsure exactly who they should be targeting or uncertain when it comes to building audience segments. Those in themselves have typically consumed many weeks of conversation.
“Now that we have these analytics that we’ve built and we’re automating them so they’re fast and fairly inexpensive for us to run, we can do that at scale.” Analyzing historical campaigns to understand who actually converted provides a “seed set” that can be modeled up. “Now I have an ROI-defined segment,” Aversano adds.
Moving even higher up the value chain is the ability to optimize media campaigns based on output. “This is where you forget about the who for a second.” Historical data from Turner media can show “when I put this brand’s ad here, how many people go to the dealership, two people for this unit, three people for this unit.
“So all of a sudden, now I’m building a media schedule not based on how many impressions or GRP’s it’s going to deliver against a demo or segment, but based on how many actual physical location visits you’re going to get. It’s optimizing for the actual outcome.”
If all goes by plan, Turner could end up providing outcome guarantees by the end of this year or early next year.
Asked by interviewer Howard Shimmel, President of Janus Strategy and Insights, how all the data can help to inform advertising from top to bottom of the purchase funnel, Aversano says “Putting that puzzle together is really, really tricky.” Backed by a lot of proprietary research into, among other things, consumer journey mapping, “We’re pushing hard on it.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this event recap, Prohaska, CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting, talks about identity as it currently stands, the rise of companies seeking to help track it and the industry’s progress to date.
On identity: “It was impressive to see that in an industry where there are, let’s say some headwinds around data privacy, and if you read broad business and consumer press there are a lot of landmines and a lot of places where people would think ‘oh my god I can’t do this, I can’t do that. I don’t want even think about targeting in anyway possible.’”
Players in the space: “There were at least fifty companies represented today in this room that are on offense and recognizing there is a proper path to do it, if you have proper transparency, if you have consumer opt out, if you have consumer opt in before the entire engagement begins, whether it’s through hardware or software. To be able to identify folks not just even at the household level but to the unique individual. We all know the pitfalls that can happen when creative goes to the wrong place.”
On determining identity: “It was encouraging to see that processes are getting a little more cleaned up. I heard people talk positively about second-party data for the first time in six months, that was a great sign to see. And the individual buying leaders that are either taking over entirely new organizations and coming from a data practice where they’ve run it, creative and media. To be able to tie that all together.”
Where the industry stands: “We now are getting closer. Most folks talked about maybe three of four on scale of one to ten and getting there. Optimistic for sure because we were in the ones and twos maybe even six months ago. Whole lot of promise and a lot of upside for the industry.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Comscore’s seat at the table was its “data-centric, panel-informed” data assets across digital media, TV and OTT, according to Carol Hinnant, who is EVP, National Television Sales. “We bring that together in a single-source panel and then we really use that to drive our outcomes,” says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.
NBCU had the benefit of data from Fandango, the movie ticket business of which it is majority owner. STXFilms was guaranteed that NBCU and its Audience Studio team would produce ticket sales and searches for information about the movie, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
With Comscore’s matching its digital and TV data with Fandango’s data, “those outcomes were based on Fandango ticket sales and online searches for the film. So we really were able to tie that entire marketing ecosystem and have it be outcome based on how we actually drove that,” says Hinnant.
Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., how agencies and marketers manage to bring together all the data needed for outcomes-based campaigns, Hinnant says “it really takes a collective effort of everybody.” She cites Comscore’s relationships with such third-party data providers as Polk, Experian and IRI.
“We also invite first-party data to come in. In the case of Universal, they brought in their Fandango data set, we did a match on that.”
So what is required to reach a tipping point of sorts for similar campaigns? “I think that you have to get the ecosystem to be able to accept those outcomes. So it’s not only just looking at those audiences but you have to have that be able to flow through the whole planning and posting cycle and we’re starting to see more and more of that happen.”
Although planning based on outcomes is “at kind of a small scale today,” Hinnant observes that Viacom is “winning with their advanced audiences structure so I think we’ll see more and more of that as these media networks and publishers have more success with that.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>From a tactical standpoint, getting marketing data into mobile ad ID’s, IP addresses and connected TV ID’s will deliver “that targeting and measurement capability that you saw in digital into the TV space and then bridge the two to get at the cross-screen mechanism,” the SVP & GM, Audience Solutions, says in this interview at this week’s Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.
Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., if a TV identity graph applies only to advanced, IP distribution platforms versus traditional linear TV buying that extends through additional platforms, Tangredi cites the creation of a universal ID.
That ID says “it’s this household with this persona who’s watching on a regular TV, a mobile device, maybe their desktop, maybe a PlayStation or a gaming console. So it’s creating that linkage.
“Think of it as linkage of bringing that altogether and hitting that person based on where they choose to watch,” Tangredi adds.
Swartz also wanted to know whether a tipping point where identity graphs drive more planning decisions will be driven by traditional TV buyers “expanding their skillsets and being curious and seeking to learn more” or by digital folks playing a more active role in television. “I think there’s a little bit of a turf war going on for that right now,” says Tangredi. “Certain TV companies or organizations will come out on top and certain digital folks will come out on top. But there definitely is a turf war right there right now.
“Which is good. It creates that desire to move things along faster.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Most marketers now understand the importance and the power of acquiring, segmenting and targeting against distinct audience data characteristics.
But, as they jump in, many skip over the strategy part. That is according to one ad ad-tech vendor’s boss.
“You need a data strategy,”says Tim Jenkins, 4INFO CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV, at the Beet.TV Identity Forum, where he was a speaker.
“How sophisticated and complex completely depends on your business, but what we find with most brands is it’s the number one thing they lack, a real understanding of data in general, how to use it, but more importantly, what data they have.”
The application of consumer data in marketing has remained one of the hottest topics in the last couple of years.
New regulatory limits on indiscriminate ad targeting have accelerated the coming-together of ad-tech and mar-tech. Now there is a growing realization of the importance of customer or prospect profile data. That places a greater emphasis on CRM.
“What we encourage brands to do at the outset is to take a step back, understand the data they have before they start buying a lot of third party data, and trying to put together, stitch together data assets to go activate in this new media model,” Jenkins adds.
“Understand what data you have, customer data, how it relates to your objectives.”
4INFO uses what it calls Connected Identity Maps and its Bullseye ID, which starts by mapping a mobile device to a home address, a match key for other devices, too.
But the company has also branched out to other platforms, like the new wave of TV devices.
Jenkins says 4INFO supplies Connected Identity Maps to “a number of large players in both the addressable and OTT television space”.
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, at Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>To help shed more light on the subject, Beet.TV will conduct a half-day forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5. It will be hosted by Viacom at the company’s offices at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan and sponsored by 4INFO, a provider of identity graph technology. Swartz will be one of the event’s moderators.
In this video, Swartz explains the complexity of determining who is watching what content on what device and when they are doing so. It starts with the myriad ways that individual TV viewers can be tracked—including mobile apps that can hear what’s being watched, digital IP-enabled devices, mobile device ID’s, automatic content recognition and watermarking.
Then there are companies like Nielsen and Comscore that are “trying to develop currencies that leverage all these technologies to actually track what is real reach for a specific piece of content delivered to an audience across an ecosystem and broad reaching selection of devices and platforms,” Swartz says.
So how does it all become real? For Swartz, it boils down to being confident about the data involved and data providers working together, because no one media company has an audience with the “order of magnitude of the breadth of an audience and the reach of an audience that television provides.”
Ultimately, “multiple data providers and platforms and content recognition providers are going to have to come together to marry their data sets to maximize the total audience within an identity graph they make available,” she says.
“The data I get has to be reliable, easy to use and integrated into ad delivery systems to plan against and has to be easy to buy. Not just easy to buy from the perspective of understanding the value of the inventory and what you’re getting for your dollar or what the effective CPM or effective rate is. That’s complex.”
At the Beet.TV event on March 5, Swartz will be joined by moderators Howard Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now a consultant, and Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting. The entire program will be taped before a studio audience for publication on Beet.TV.
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