Launched in 2008 and backed by investors including Mark Cuban, the outfit works by having software embedded on the chipsets of millions of viewing devices which bundle Samba’s recommendation features.
Last month, Samba announced a deal with 605 to leverage the latter’s data set on millions of US households, enabling greater precision in addressable TV ad targeting.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Samba.TV’s Ashwin Navin explains what is happening.
Automatic content recognition (ACR) tools embedded within TVs and similar hardware listen or watch for viewing behavior, reporting it to service operators.
Until recently, some of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have also been licensing that data out. But, as privacy rules loom, that may be set to change.
“The privacy landscape is shifting very rapidly now,” Navin observes. “It started in Europe, but it’s spreading across the world – basically the regulatory bodies are starting to understand that their consumers care about privacy.
“Consumers are uncomfortable with how far the programmatic advertising world has gone and how the data universe has gone, creating this massive amount of data out there that we don’t, as consumers, really understand or feel comfortable with. So I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to see a lot more privacy regulation in the future.”
For Samba.TV, that risk validates its approach of operating its own ACR software embedded on others’ devices.
“It definitely is a sort of a reinforcing mechanism for the investments that we’ve made around building an app on the television, giving consumers complete control over their data footprint, what TVs can generate in terms of data and insight on viewership and, you know, maintaining a first party relationship with the consumer and their data,” Navin adds.
“We’ve never done anything less than opt-in. We’ve always been first-party with that consumer relationship so they can manage it in one place. What’s happening is that the industry that wanted to compete with us and compete with those that have first-party data with other people’s data are now basically having to surrender that data because they don’t have the first party relationship with the consumers and they don’t have, you know, a long-term relationship with the data controller.”
In previous years, Vizio drew action from regulators for collecting viewing data without users’ consent, whilst Samsung TVs were found to be listening to all surrounding activity without full disclosure. Articles have since cropped up, advising owners how to turn off the features.
In October, Vizio reorganized to integrate Inscape, its ACR business, into its main advertising and content business. Inscape, which has supplied its ACR data to other ad-tech companies, is now no longer independent.
“What we see in the first-party data landscape in response to the privacy landscape is that first parties are going to bring a lot of their data back closer to home,” Navin sees.
“And they’re going to build out more full-stack solutions to bring value to advertisers and other stakeholders replicating a lot of the full-stack capability that Sambas built over the years.
]]>Caroline Horner says she is used to hearing openness from people in the internet industry, who will say ”
“I’m going to put the data out there because it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to evolve the place”, “What if we try this?” and “Can we do this?”
The SVP of products for ad-tech firm 605 understands the reluctance.
But she thinks computing power – plus a little cajoling – can help ad buyers to see the benefits.
“We listen really hard on what the issues people have with their data,” she says. “What they’re willing to do and what they’re not willing to do. Then you go with what they’re willing to do, and you start there.
“Things like AWS (Amazon Web Services), a lot of the ability to use computing power at this point … whereas we had a lot of technology and advancements through the years, we only had certain data structures and sizes and the servers could only handle so much.
“Now, we can get to an existence where everything can be calculated on the fly. That means all these data sources can relate to each other very quickly and have all those permissions. ”
The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.
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 it will count for nothing if it is not underpinned by a solid data foundation.
So says Noah Levine, chief revenue officer at 605, a company helping advertisers buy smarter using TV data.
“As an industry, everyone’s aware that … attribution and outcomes are a huge shiny object in the room and there’s an increasing embracing of outcomes across the industry,” Levine says in this Beet.TV interview.
“Where I think we fall down is there isn’t enough focus on the viewership data that is being used to actually say ‘These households or devices were exposed to this ad’ and then marrying it up in a scalable, accurate, powerful manner to whatever the outcome is you’re trying to measure against.
“A lot of it is built on a house of cards.
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from
In February, 605 launched 605 Platform, a software system that will help programmers and advertisers plan, buy, assess and attribute advanced advertising campaigns.
It is the latest such platform to emerge offering ad buyers similar capabilities.
“This is our foray officially into the television measurement space,” Levine says. “We’re absolutely excited. We have launched pilot customers of Discovery and AMC with more to follow and it’s not only for programmers. It’s also for agencies and brand marketers.
“The reason why we named 605 Platform is we believe that the television marketplace needs to view itself as a platform in and of itself
The interview was conducted by Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell.
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 what about advertisers who want to do the same across the whole TV and video landscape?
That need has become priority #1 in the new TV industry, as a raft of new initiatives and consortia launch to harmonize, pool and smooth the path to unified audience data and broader footprint scale.
in this video interview with Beet.TV, Caroline Horner, SVP of product management at 605, a technology company helping advertisers use data to better target TV ads, explains the blocker and the opportunity.
“Each MVPD doesn’t have a full look on a consumer,” she says. “Each digital (publisher) doesn’t have a full look at what all the television assets that people view. So it’s really important for folks to contribute all of their data together to form these partnerships.”
Horner says two concerns have held broadcast and video platforms back from pooling audience data:
But Horner says: “There are now many different ways of solving for privacy and for obfuscating any contribution from a single data source when you have a collaboration.
“This idea of grabbing on the data, holding onto it and not putting it into the pot to improve television advertising is sort of antiquated at this point. You might as well make money from it. When everything’s together, then you can understand how your data will not be seen and worked against you.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from
“What we’re doing at 605 is creating an environment so the various constituents can actually define the permissions that are being associated with their data,” Horner adds.
“Contribute your data, but you still decide on how it’s used, you decide on the level of obfuscation, you decide on how it collaborate, how it is commingled with other datasets.”
Horner was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
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 that is the kind of optimism that is applied to every business sector that finds itself at the mind-expanding show.
Whilst at the show in January, Noah Levine, chief revenue officer at 605, a technology company helping advertisers use data to better target TV ads, reflected on the technology-driven pace of change in the TV and advertising industries.
He spoke about industry imperatives in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s about the audience and consumer experience with television,” he says. “It can’t (that) be 20% of the time spent during a program (is spent) watching ads.
“(Broadcasters must) retain that audience, when so much of the marketplace has the option of buying their way out of the ad support in the television ecosystem.”
Levine, most recently at senior executive at FOX Networks, was alluding to subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, which have experienced a rapid rise in popularity as a segment of the viewer marketplace has chosen to pay for ad-free programming.
All of that and more is keeping companies on their toes.
“And so, there’s a huge amount of dynamism in terms of the conversation and the solutions that are taking place, to really let television rise above, and to continue being the premium entertainment, news and advertising medium,” Levine adds.
“Television can do a lot more than what it has historically done.”
Noah Levine will be speaking at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5 to 7, 2020.
]]>During “Data Activation, the New Tool for Programmers”, a panel convened at Beet Retreat In The City, executives held a refreshingly frank discussion on the true state of two of the most talked-about tech…
They were questioned by Howard Shimmel of Janus Strategy & Insights.
This year, executives like Levine have started describing the ability of advertisers to truly know who they are targeting with connected TV as “deterministic TV“, a proposed label that is in its infancy.
For Discovery’s Garfield: “I think about it as known versus inferred (audience profiles). As a national programmer at Discovery for 30 years, what we really knew about our audience was on an anonymized basis … age, gender…. inferred from a panel.
“Today, through our affiliate agreements, we actually have access to known (ad) exposures on set-top boxes where they know that person, they know what they’ve watched.”
WarnerMedia’s Aversano cautioned against expecting that the capabilities enabled by “deterministic” will grow to account for all TV targeting tactics.
“As an industry there’s been a ton of lip service given to this idea of a pure deterministic world,” he said. “It just will never happen. You’re never going to have perfect census-level measurement of everything. I don’t think you will. We need to accept the fact it will never be perfect – (instead), just make it a little bit better.”
Levine, deterministic’s champion, agreed. “Deterministic data today, unless you have a hundred percent of the U.S population, it’s not going to work, which is why you have to apply the projection methodologies,” he said. “But deterministic data activation allows us to do things on television that historically have been very hard to do.”
Which brought the panel to the second much-lauded technology – the new ability to attributed advertisers’ intended brand outcomes (be it a purchase or a click) directly back to a viewer’s exposure to a TV ad.
New services allow a line to be drawn between those things. But WarnerMedia’s Aversano says the cost of real attribution is prohibitive.
He explained: “The attribution marketplace today… you have a handful of vendors who I think have really good solutions, but they are cobbled together from lots of different third-party datasets that they have to pay for in licence that they in turn then charge advertisers, agencies and media companies for. A typical attribution study that we run for a specific campaign costs $30,000 to $120,000 for one campaign.
“That’s a million-dollar campaign and we have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to measure it. That will never scale.”
Aversano said the reality of this kind of attribution measurement is, it isn’t effective enough.
“The state of the industry today and this ecosystem of vendors is … none of it is at scale and none of it is always-on, (it) almost makes that impossible,” he said.
Discovery’s Garfield urged publishers not to dive farther in to offering guaranteed outcomes against ad purchases.
“We just don’t have enough of that understanding or benchmarks around what’s driving these numbers to really start guaranteeing on that,” he said. “And I think we all have to take a step back and understand one step deeper around what’s driving some of these outcomes.
“If the same audience is seeing the same creative across a bunch of networks, then what really is the differentiator in that outcome? And that’s what we’re trying to understand and we’re working with vendors and talking obviously to agencies about helping us together to understand that.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>At the Beet Retreat in New York City in November, hosted by Horizon Media, Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz spoke to a panel of women currently navigating advertising’s continuing changes: Kim Norris, gvp of digital and advanced advertising sales at Spectrum Reach; Caroline Horner, svp of product management at 605; and Samantha Rose, svp of video at Horizon Media all discussed how data has changed the advertising industry, the challenges it’s raised, and what’s still to come.
“We’ll see evolution across all verticals”
Norris says that right now, “demand outstrips supply” when it comes to advanced advertising, but that the marketplace is catching up through experimentation and learning. As first-party data for tune-in viewership data has changed how tune-in marketing operates, “we’ll see evolution across all the verticals,” Norris says.
Horner, who saw through early digital advertising models during the dot com boom before moving on to positions on both sides of the market. Most significantly so far, Horner says, data and attribution marketing has changed the role of the marketer.
“It was incredible to see how fast real, deterministic data affected the marketer. We had to re-up relationships and sales processes because they saw real data,” says Horner. “That delight and experience – you know you’ve made a difference and that’s what data has done. We’ve been riding that over the last 15 years.”
Growing pains
While data has infiltrated advertising strategies, Horner’s observed that the sell side has been slower to adapt to new capabilities and approaches influenced by data. While marketers on the buy side quickly realized how data was making advertising work better for them – and how the money would follow – Horner says the sell side had to be “dragged into it,” but are now used to “heavier and heavier analytics.”
But when the agency’s jobs depend on convincing networks, platforms and marketers that the data will help, the stakes are high, says Rose. “What we don’t want to do is have something not work and then deter someone from moving forward. In this more addressable [market], whether it’s MVPD or digital, a wasted impression is wasted. In this area where we’re growing we want to get it right.”
Data-specializing partners, like Ampersand and 605, can help add a support network with the goal of getting advertising from operating like one-to-many fishnet to a one-to-one fishing line, says Swartz.
Where it’s headed
Rose adds that while one-to-one remains a goal to reach, addressable is still in its infancy, and some brands are looking for the mass reach that linear TV provides. “I hate to say it cause it’s a term we always use, but it’s not one size fits all,” she says.
As the space does mature, Horner notes that trust is going to be one of the most important factors when it comes to data sharing and making sure customers aren’t concerned about privacy. That will entail working with the right partners and legitimizing the industry and, as Norris adds, setting standards.
“We have to get standards,” she says. “We need to make sure we have clear definitions, that it’s as standard as possible.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>It is the new practice of attribution, and technology vendors like TVSquared are busy helping broadcasters prove to advertisers how an ad exposure can correlate in to a website visit, a drop-in to a store or even a purchase.
But, in this panel discussion with Beet.TV, one executive says “attribution” technology doesn’t only prove specific outcomes like that – it can also evidence the traditional metric of brand uplift.
Attribution is “being able to measure very specific outcomes, return on ad spend, actual conversions, mid-level activities, whether that is site traffic, foot traffic in the real world, but also to be able to measure the impact of what advertising does to the brand, what is the lift that it has on the brand”, says 605’s chief revenue officer Noah Levine.
But Levine says the same technology can be used for something more.
He says: “There is the lifetime value of a maybe a six-year-old who … sees a luxury car ad … that (ad) impression has an impact on that six-year-old to aspire potentially to something later in life saying, ‘Hey, I want this BMW. I want this Mercedes,’ et cetera.
“That’s something that, particularly with deterministic television and where we’re going with television measurement, we’re more and more able to do this.”
Brand uplift is the ill-defined and hard-to-discover outcome that advertisers have traditionally fallen back on seeking, given TV’s historic inability to measure specific audience behaviors.
Now TVs are gaining the ability to observe specific content and advertising viewing, whilst software platforms can link those profiles to consequential online actions. So, how would Levine use it to measure brand uplift?
He says his company’s technology enables “full-funnel” attribution, meaning it encompasses brand uplift, too.
“The way that you measure the impact on the brand is a qualitative exercise. And the nature of it being qualitative allows for it to be unique in every single application,” he says.
“Different brands will ask different questions in surveys that are delivered in different and through different modalities, digital, telephone calls, mail, and so forth.
“We’re moving away from the one size fits all currency and we’re moving towards providing the data, and technology, and solutions to be able to allow each agency, each buyer, each brand to come up with the way that they want to transact and measure, and the same thing on the sales side.”
Levine was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the woman who runs product at a leading TV targeting data technology vendor says, after a long while on the hob, addressable TV is now ready to boil.
Caroline Horner, 605 product management SVP, says there has been an “Arc” of new data that have become available for use in TV ad targeting, data that was previously closed off.
“We’ve seen with the introduction of the Inscape data, more people have been able to get a hold of it and work with it,” Horner says. “It’s created such excitement about looking at what people are exposed to. The industry has been furiously running after all these new insights, back to one-to-one marketing, for television.
“Addressable (TV) … started off very slowly because each MVPD did their system one at a time and the marketers couldn’t really buy national for addressability, and there was such a small amount of inventory that was available for targeting. Fast forward to what’s happening right now … you have the data that can support it and now you have the systems that are collaborating and providing a national footprint for addressable campaigns.”
Horner was speaking ahead of Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media, an industry discussion event in New York on Wednesday.
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from:
Horner calls the new ability of precise viewer data to target TV ads “deterministic TV”.
“Deterministic is really about the absolute knowledge that a household is watching something, that the TV was on at that household at that time and the behaviors that are associated with that household,” she says.
“Deterministic TV data … can add in all that rich Experian data, all the transactions, psychographics, and to look exactly at how they watch, consume television and how they’re impacted by it.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That means the technology of the future will depend heavily on the outcomes of the past.
But the effect, nevertheless, could be to unlock big future growth. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Gaurav Shirole of 605 imagines a future in which the predictions are informed by a body of personal effects research.
“Our dream is to be able to tie that back to qualitative research so that, in the future, we have our attribution outcomes mapped to a focus groups that might involve neuroscience data collection on skin response or temperature, eye tracking, and all of those things,” says the SVP of product and client analytics.
“If you can build a really, really big data set of the performance of ads and then go further up the cycle of creative production, hopefully there’s a future – in the next three to five years – where you might even understand the brand effect or the sales effect of a storyboard, based on thousands and thousands of campaign outcomes that have been mapped through a variety of different processes.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households.
It combines viewing data from:
The company was recently enlisted by Discovery Inc. to provide advertisers with outcome attribution for TV ads seen by 40 million households.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, 605’s chief revenue officer Noah Levine describes the value of that deterministic data, which connected TV devices can now supply.
“The key difference about what deterministic TV viewership data is, compared to others, is that there’s an ability to associate identity through a safe haven so that data can be activated at that individual household level,” he says.
Despite the existence of a fragmented TV ecosystem with distinct buying methods, that real viewing data will allow advertisers to buy seamlessly, Levine reckons.
“We have a national ad market, we have a local ad market, we have an addressable ad market – they’re all planned and transacted separately in silos,” he explains.
“Deterministic TV viewership data … allows for the types of insights at scale to be able to combine these three disparate television advertising markets.
“But also (you can) take deterministic digital data or deterministic CRM data or deterministic purchase data or whatever first-party data an ad seller or a marketer might have, or third party data… to be able to plan, activate, measure and perform attribution and then close the loop from an optimization perspective.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households.
It combines viewing data from:
But Levine says data isn’t enough. In TV, deterministic – which still isn’t captured by 100% of all TV sets – also depends on a projection model which can extrapolate out across the national footprint.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Discovery, whose portfolio includes Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network and TLC, will work with 605, which provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 30 million devices across 12 million households.
With that added to Discovery’s own dataset, the combined footprint is “the largest ever utilized for a TV attribution study”, 605 says. It will be offered as Discovery Engage, what Discovery calls “a state-of-the-art data management and analytics platform for targeting, optimization and measurement beyond age and gender”.
We are excited to partner with @DiscoveryIncTV ! Utilizing our multi-source data set, they can now leverage nearly 40M households to provide full-funnel attribution metrics at a census scale. Read more: https://t.co/MtkWr8RFOf pic.twitter.com/5Qa5hWpA31
— 605 (@605Data) September 10, 2019
“It takes TV attribution to scale,” says Ben Tatta, 605 president, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“We’ll be able to measure across the full spectrum of brand metrics and sales metrics, outcome based measurement for campaigns that they sell through Engage.”
Tatta says the system will draw a line from ad exposure not only to eventual business outcomes like sales but also to more traditional TV branding goals, higher in the marketing funnel.
]]>“The streaming wars are literally raging right now. I believe that the next area for innovation is around the data and measurement that is surrounding television.”
In addition to Levine, 605 simultaneously hired Caroline Horner as SVP of Product Management. She previously led TV and cross-platform product innovation for Rentrak-comScore’s advanced measurement and optimization services and spearheaded new video product launches for comScore, according to a news release.
Levine says he was initially attracted to 605 because of its access to linear TV household viewing data, data rights and matching capabilities. “What I found upon deeper investigation was that there’s a very powerful set of technology infrastructure and process that 605 has put in place to support a multi currency future,” Levine explains.
Founded in 2016, 605 has mainly focused on working with brands and MVPD’s. “This year, we’re really expanding our focus into programmers and we also do work with agencies.”
While attribution is a “very significant focus,” but we’re not just looking at what was the immediate sales lift, what happened in the next seven days after someone saw an ad. We’re looking at full-funnel activity,” Levine says.
Such insights are the result of “looking at a large percentage of the U.S. population” instead of just focusing on 40,000 households “or having to take data and essentially match against a few million households and then model it out for the rest of the U.S. population. We’re entering an era where we can actually see for twenty or thirty percent of the U.S. population second by second what are they actually watching.”
He calls what 605 is doing as moving the industry beyond single-source viewing to what it calls multi-source. That means “taking the best of all the viewing datasets that happen to be available” from MVPD set-top boxes and comingling it with smart TV ACR data.
“We’re continuing that quest of building out a larger footprint of more MVPD data as well as additional ACR data so that we can see everything that’s playing back on the TV glass as well as throughout the home as there are multiple TV sets within the home.”
]]>With the addition of Inscape data, 605 can measure more than 20 million households—slightly less than 20% of the TV viewing universe—in a further move away from panel-based research methodology.
“We think that it’s really important for the industry to move to more census-based measurement,” Tatta says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Among the things that Inscape, which is owned by VIZIO, brings to the table for 605 is helping to fill voids across set-top box and over-the-air and OTT metrics. By combining set-top data with Inscape’s automatic content recognition data “we’re able to get better cross-screen measurement on services beyond just pay TV.”
In addition to expanding its national reach, 605 gains faster data processing for its programmer and provider clients. “We basically get data in near real-time” with a delay of “an hour or two” versus “one to three days in general” for set-top box data.
605, started by Dolan Family Ventures, also gets viewing data from Charter Communications cable subscribers, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
Asked about audience duplication from the company’s data sources, Tatta says the duplication “is really essential because what’s interesting about the set-top box data is you’re actually capturing all viewing within the household, or at least what’s running through pay TV.
“Only until you have a full view of viewing in the household can you really get a sense in terms of where the viewing trends are,” for example share of consumption between pay-TV and OTT. “Or even just from one room to the next. Even though TV is bought at the household level kind of rolled up, being able to have a line of sight of viewership across all devices in the household is really important.”
Tatta adds that while advertiser focus on bottom-funnel or sales attribution is “incredibly important,” the industry should not neglect the “enormous contribution” TV makes to upper-funnel metrics, “whether it’s brand awareness, brand favorability and brand preference. Having a more holistic view of lift across the full funnel we think is really essential.”
]]>Norman, who recently retired from GroupM and is an Advisor to Beet.TV, kicked things off by noting a level of “sturm and drang” surrounding a desire in some circles to quickly abandon the traditional Nielsen demo-based ratings as a transaction currency. But will it actually happen?
Ray, who is President, Product & Innovation at Dentsu Aegis Network, said that it will, predicting a more addressable marketplace in 3-5 years and the accompanying changes in measurement that marketplace will bring.
As a former researcher, Schwartz painted a broad swath of change resulting from addressability. “It fundamentally changes how and what we do,” said Schwartz. “Because once you start getting to person–level addressability or even device-level addressability, the word research is out the window.”
Taking its place will be a mix of census, response and counting. “So we don’t have all those situations where the systems go down, the set-top box isn’t working or we have an underrepresentation. You’re seeing actual response and analysis,” Schwartz added.
The drawback? Not all households will be capable of being addressed, according to Schwartz, who is President of Investment, North America, GroupM.
Norman questioned whether those households will hold the least amount of value for advertisers. “I think some of them might be, but some of them might be all the way at the other end of the spectrum, that have the ability to be reached in a manner and not addressed. There’s the evolution of technology so I still believe that the top end will have a way to find out how to basically take themselves off the grid,” said Schwartz.
Ray predicated a bifurcation of how buyers and sellers look at video content. “The role of live content is going to be more valuable because it’s going to be tied to the cultural moments,” he said.
Asked by Norman whether all video is “born equal” and how advertisers should consider various screen sizes, Ray said much of that calculation depends on the desired outcome, be it click-through, engagement, response or “trying to change fundamental beliefs about the brand.”
Noting that hand-held screens are of better quality than some of the TV sets he grew up with, Schwartz said it’s not about size but environment and also proximity to what people are about to do, including buying something. “We have to take that all into account. So not all video is the same, but we need to know how and where to use it,” Schwartz said.
Norman wanted to know whether the industry is within “seeing distance” of a time when significant parts of the video market will be traded on business outcomes rather than exposure to commercials.
Schwartz said there is “a desire for a lot of people to get there,” but there are so many factors in the marketing spectrum “I don’t think we’re at the point where the buyer and seller want to predicate the price and the value on the return on investment yet.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>With a successful 13-year career at Walmart and having spent eight years on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, Ramos had decided it was time for a change.
“What I did was great in the business sector, but then I think that as a Puerto Rican myself I have to make sure that I leave a legacy and that I work to make a difference,” says Ramos, who was a featured guest at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. In this interview with Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services at GroupM, Ramos explains how the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico—which is affiliated with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and has just celebrated its 50th year—had decided to shift its focus in the face of an economic crisis that has lasted for more than a decade.
Several years before Hurricane Maria, “We decided that we needed to do things differently. In order to prepare our kids and youth to be prepared for what the future has in store for them.”
At one of its 13 club houses, the organization set about trying to change “the systemic conditions in which our kids live” by concentrating on training them to benefit from tourism. From ages six to 12, youths began to learn about the tourism culture. “When they’re teens, we work with them on entreprenuership. We start putting that seed in their minds that there are things you can think through, there are things that you can come up with. You can have your own business or you can work through another business,” says Ramos.
Part of the effort involved training parents and guardians as well. “It’s about home stability and changing the conditions for the kids. The kids do not choose to live poor or to be born poor,” she adds.
This is different than in the U.S., where the focus is mainly in children, notes Cowdell, who along with many other GroupM representatives became active in Puerto Rico relief efforts immediately after Hurricane Maria struck. However, in Puerto Rico, “You can’t just help the child, you have to help the parent as well,” he says.
Among the success stories at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, one in particular stands out to Cowdell and Ramos, who had mentored a young girl in her high school years and was determined to help her succeed through college and beyond. “We had to involve her mother because it was a single mother trying to let her only girl go out and study,” Ramos recalls. The girl had posted grades of 4.0 in both high school and college, where she studied chemical engineering and won summer internships to Harvard, Georgetown and Ohio State University.
She eventually made her way to NASA with assistance from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.
“Everyone has human potential,” says Cowdell. Then he asks Ramos about the future.
“I think there’s hope,” she says. “Puerto Ricans are resilient.”
At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised more than $20,000.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Meanwhile, because linear television hasn’t given up the Upfront negotiating mainstay, it’s still going to have a longer purchase cycle than other media, Horstman explains in this one-on-one interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.
Swartz senses that the buy-side and sell-side are comfortable blaming each other for a lack of progress.
“People are using data as a mechanism or an edge to try to get a competitive advantage whether you’re a buyer or a seller,” replies Horstman, who is SVP GM, Advanced Media & Advertising at TiVo.
When the sell-side embraces advanced TV, “they want to use data to find inventory that surfaces for a targeted audience to actually make it more valuable.” On the buy-side, it’s akin to arbitrage in the search for “opportunities of inventory that that sell-side doesn’t understand is as valuable as it is. But I’ve got some insider proprietary data that I’m using to find those opportunities.”
With this dynamic as a backdrop, Horstman sees more flexibility on the buy-side.
“For the sellers, there may be a little bit of risk aversion to say what inventory are we going to promote as data-driven because we want to sort of control how much gets used and control the messaging and control what data gets put against it,” he says. “But if you’re a buyer, you can apply it to everything.”
One of the brightest spots that Horstman sees in the agency world is within the digital ranks. “Because for the first time, they don’t view TV as this mysterious media vehicle which has only been posted or measured or targeted using just your traditional Nielsen panel. Now they can get incredible insights around the matching of data from TV to their digital campaigns, social, mobile, connected TV, all the linages they can now have converged measurement and targeting.”
Digital practitioners “are taking a leadership role in this world” because they’ve not only lived with data and analytics but are used to doing things like attribution and media mix modeling very quickly, according to Horstman.
“Now for the first time, they’ve got access to what’s been going on over in the TV world and can understand the influence of what’s happening in TV on their digital campaigns and start to influence it.”
Asked by Swartz where the industry is on the overall timeline for advanced TV, Horstman says it depends on the speed at which different types of media can be transacted.
“We still have the Upfronts we still have a longer purchase cycle within linear television compared to digital, connected TV, what have you.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>As an example, he explained during a panel discussion at the recent Beet Retreat in the City the process involved in NBC executing dynamic ad insertion. “Through FreeWheel, there’s probably 700 right now end points of where we have to integrate into in order to be able do that. But it can be done,” said Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales.
That’s the good news. However, more than 90% of NBC’s impressions are still delivered in a live, linear fashion.
“It’s going to involve programmers and distributors, MVPD’s, virtual MVPD’s coming together both to solve for the tech as well for the business rules. We are a business of legacy. It’s hard to change that but the will is there,” said Rosen.
Moderator Laura Desmond, who until recently was CEO of Starcom, asked whether the traditional value exchange between content providers, consumers and advertisers is “broken.”
Vikram Somaya of ESPN said the value exchange “isn’t good enough. For a long time, everybody in the system was making money and it made it very hard to change. We’re getting to the point now where everyone in the system is not making the money they used to make and suddenly we have to look in the couch cushions a little more than we had to.”
Desmond described the efficiency and effectiveness of TV advertising before describing a scenario that is destined to become as antiquated as rabbit ear antennae on top of a TV set. “You push a button, the commercial goes out, it airs, time delay, you post it, done. That’s a pretty simple and easy model.”
So is lack of education inhibiting the adoption of addressable TV ads? “The ad-supported experience needs to change,” responded Rosen. “Limiting commercials, but also it is about relevancy. We do know that ads that are more relevant to the user are going to be less annoying or perhaps not annoying at all or even welcome. Data’s going to help us with that.”
Asked by Desmond about the role of automation, Metcalfe, who is GM of LiveRamp TV at LiveRamp, said technology isn’t the problem. She recalled that before LiveRamp was acquired in 2014 by Acxiom, companies like Facebook “weren’t really interested in working with us yet. We didn’t have the reputation we needed, etcetera. Acxiom brought that to us.”
LiveRamp was in the early stages of powering custom audiences for companies like Facebook, but it wasn’t easy working with them because they wanted to control every last detail. “And it’s very similar to what I’m seeing now working in the TV industry today because it started to ramp up and become a larger part of their business. Everybody has to get comfortable with losing a bit of control.”
Asked by Desmond whether ESPN parent Disney is ready to compete in direct-to-consumer content delivery with the likes of Roku, Hulu and YouTube TV, Pandit said one of the joys of sports is that “no matter where you go you will get advertising.
“We can’t put our heads in the sand and say we should not go down the DTC route because we’ve done very well with pay TV and very well with digital. We have to be open to what consumers want us to do,” said Pandit.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But Kristin Dolan would like advertisers to get out of that siloed mindset. The former Cablevision exec, who jointly set up 605 to bring better ad insight to TV buyers, says the new age of advertising can support multiple goals. She discussed this during a fireside chat with Rob Norman at the Beet Retreat earlier this month in Manhattan.
“It’s a mix, it’s a media mix,” she says. “To say, ‘I’m going to do digital instead of television’, or ‘I’m going to do television instead of digital’, or … ‘I’m going to do subway or outdoor instead of digital’ … you have to really look at the entire mix.”
That’s why 605 last month launched a new product to help brands do just that. Called Impact Index, it aims to be a scientifically-based approach for measuring the impact of TV advertising on both branding and sales – essentially, uniting both the top and bottom of the marketing “funnel”.
“The goal is to help people understand the comprehensive marketing mix, so that it’s not just about sales, but it’s about brand, and building the brand out, so that when you are trying to drive people to an actual behavior you can get there,” Dolan says in this interview for Beet.TV.
605 has already been helping brands go further with their ad insights, Dolan said:
Nissan: “The brand resonates favorably with Hispanics. So we look at what Nissan is doing with their media schedule, and they do focus heavily on utilization of Hispanic networks for their media.”
AT&T: “We looked at AT&T, and they really had, they had a propensity, where people were much more inclined TVLAND viewers versus some of the other Viacom networks. They spend a ton with Viacom, they don’t advertise on TVLAND.”
Walmart: “What we were able to do is look and really see if the people exposed to the reputational ads, did their favorability increase? Then we took it another step. We were actually able to determine that the people that were exposed to the ad, their reputation perception increased, and also their spend in store increased.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City.
The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Overall, this year’s Upfront is “not all that different from a marketplace that’s reflective of a relatively healthy economic backdrop,” Geraci, who is President of National Video Investment at OMD, says in this interview conducted by OMD’s Ben Winkler at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. “There is a significant amount of pressure in certain areas, mostly due to supply dynamics in linear television and fragmented viewership, combined with some increased spending from advertisers that rely heavily on television,” says Geraci.
He pinpoints that reliance in large part as relating to older-skewing brands for which “television is still really the best place, the most fertile hunting ground.”
Asked about efforts by providers like Fox and NBCUniversal to roll out reduced ad-load offerings, Geraci responds, “Time will tell.”
While there are potential positives in making the linear TV experience more like what viewers can get with digital offerings, reducing commercial load comes with a big caveat. “When you restrict supply, there are going to be pricing issues, and we get that,” Geraci explains. “The astute buyer tries to pay the lower price and we’re making efforts in that regard.”
Asked by Winkler about the efforts by Fox and NBCU, Geraci says, “I don’t know that we’re there yet in terms of finding that price-value relationship, for at least the two being discussed now.”
Looking ahead, Geraci outlines his desired outcome. “Our hope is that over time, if the expectation is that the viewing experience is better, more people will interact with the programming, ratings will ultimately increase. That’s the hope is that if you improve the experience you’re going to ultimately further down the road build back supply simply by higher ratings of at last live or slightly delayed commercial television. That’s sort of the holy grail.”
As for his thoughts on OpenAP, the audience targeting consortium started by Fox, Turner and Viacom that both NBCU and Univision recently joined, Geraci calls it “sort of common ground if you will for the optimization systems. If you can bring standardization to anything that is not standardized, in general you create more interchangeability in the marketplace and basically a more level playing field, and you allow the advertiser to make better decisions and selections.”
Geraci notes that OpenAP is for planning using common audience target definitions across networks but not for actual purchasing of inventory. So buyers are still “forced to optimize within just their set of offerings. It’s not the completely fluid situation that we’d like to see.”
One thing that has changed for the better over the decades that Geraci has experienced the back and forth of Upfront dealings is the temperament. He says there’s “more of a sense of fair play I think nowadays than I think than there was in the earlier times.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“National advertisers don’t want 40 million. It’s a good start, but I think we’ve got some catch-up to play,” Kline says in this one-on-one discussion with Tatta at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.
Upon the sale of Cablevision to Altice, Tatta joined the startup 605, on whose board Kline now sits while also holding the roles of President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. Tatta is President of 605.
Asked by Tatta to define the state of addressable TV, Kline points to the traditional business model of the cable providers whose participation is needed to expand the national footprint by using their two minutes of local ad time.
“I think a big reason for that is many operators, many distributors are in the subsection television business. They’re not in per se the advertising business, and I think that perception is starting to change,” Kline says.
“They’re always going to be in the subscription business, selling video products and high-speed data and telephony and soon mobile phone service for some of us,” Kline adds. “Advertising has always sort of been, ‘hey we’ll take that money, it’s great high margin, but we’re not going to invest that much in it.’”
Having just launched linear addressable in Los Angeles, Charter’s “footprint in New York will be months away. I think it’s not moved fast. Maybe it’s moved fast in cable years, but it hasn’t moved fast in anything else,” Kline says.
On the way to additional scale, addressable is providing a foundation upon which TV networks can enhance the value of their national inventory, according to Kline.
“If they really want to make their network inventory more valuable, they need to get it better targeted. More relevant. And we have the platforms that can do that.”
In the meantime, he sees the model for networks as acquiring the widest possible amount of distribution and collecting license fees from distributors. “But I’m not naïve. We know that things will evolve and viewership will move to other places. But there is still a ton of viewership on what we would call traditional platforms, and I think that’s going to continue for quite some time,” Kline says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The future of how TV is being delivered is changing. We believe all or virtually all what we now call television impressions will be addressable,” says Brett Hurwitz, Oath’s Business Lead for Advanced TV.
At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Hurwitz sat down with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz to discuss the path to that advanced-TV future and how more big-brand marketers are embracing addressable TV.
“I still believe that indexed-based television is smarter for marketers than traditional TV buying,” says Hurwitz. “But Oath has made the decision that with the changes that are taking place in the way television’s delivered, having an offering in that space is not something that makes sense for us to be investing in.”
Instead, “We’re investing in what we see to be the future of premium video and the future of television.”
The Fios TV addressable offering was launched in the fall of 2016 and initially ran in parallel with One TV, as Multichannel News reports.
While the term “household addressable” has mainly been the province of MVPD-based offerings, advanced TV encompasses a broader set of solutions. They include index-based offerings by networks (for example OpenAP) along with OTT and connected TV.
Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., whether the ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to use the same dataset to target audiences across all platforms, Hurwitz says it goes beyond that basic application.
“Going a step further, you can do things like based on a certain level of exposure to a television commercial then place a target on a digital kind of lower-funnel activation tactic,” Hurwitz says.
So will Oath’s previously programmatic offering revert to direct-sold inventory?
“I think the way we’re beginning to view these types of pieces of inventory is as super premium video, and so ultimately having that type of inventory available in our video programmatic environment is something that we’re exploring,” says Hurwitz.
He believes there will always be a place for the Upfront negotiating season and does not see the future becoming “one audience, one price.”
What Hurwitz is seeing right now is advertisers that originally were staying away from addressable now starting to come in.
“Because what they’re realizing is the data that you can get from addressable campaigns has tremendous application to what creative you run on your larger linear campaigns,” Hurwitz says.
“The kind of conventional notion that the only advertisers who should pay a premium CPM to work with addressable television are advertisers who have a relatively small target we’re seeing really start to change.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>With more than a decade in the media industry, including interactive TV pioneer Canoe Ventures, Schaffer likens his role to bringing “fire to cave men” in this interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City on June 6 in Manhattan.
What has long been done in other industries—process automation—has proven to be “very challenging” in the media industry because of its deep legacy infrastructure, closed systems and “a lot of challenges to being able to transact business electronically with trading partners,” Schaffer says.
Having “started life as a Price Waterhouse CPA,” Schaffer thinks the media industry is going through the latter stages “of what we have been studying for a long time and expecting. This notion of convergence. This notion of linear television becoming digital.”
With so much change being forced on the industry because of the way consumers are receiving and consuming content, the future must be one of “open systems, open communication, more efficient delivery of transactional information back and forth among trading parties. It seems to me it’s time to harmonize and streamline the transaction process.”
And it’s not just between buyers and sellers of media but within media companies themselves, according to Schaffer.
“There’s still the requirement of dealing within very siloed business units that are very, very separate, and there’s very little connecting those various systems inside an entity that allow them to transact with outside third parties in a more effective way,” he says.
Asked by Swartz whether change involves simply “chasing platforms,” Schaffer says it goes well beyond what consumers have largely become indifferent to: how they consume content.
Along with more open systems and data-driven decision making, “new measurement tools are going to be required, harmonization, being able to deal with multiple different measures and multiple different currencies.”
Asked to cite three major challenges facing media companies, Schaffer identifies becoming platform agnostic, achieving more efficient distribution and gaining scale. “Scale is incredibly important to media companies as we’re seeing a lot of pressure for each of them to become larger and frankly more global,” Schaffer says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“A lot of the conversations now are not such much about the promise of all the stuff we talk about. Data-driven, advanced TV, whatever. But it’s about how to practically make it happen,” he adds in this interview during a break at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City.
“And the challenges that people are facing who kind of said, ‘hey okay, I want to do this, now let’s roll it out to teams and what’s the process and how do you educate teams that have been doing it a certain way.’”
Asked by Beet.TV contributor Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal of Prohaska Consulting, to recap the progress of 4C, which was founded in 2011 under a different name to operate in the social media space, Gupta says it’s been a journey on disparate platforms.
“So we started out in paid social, we extended to TV, toward the ultimate dream that what marketers need is really one platform to do audience-driven, cross-channel marketing,” says Gupta. “That’s really kind of what we’ve been moving towards.”
What he’s seeing now in the market is that brands and agencies alike “absolutely get it. They know that these media need to work together. They know that it can’t just be silos.
“So they get it but we’re in the process of deploying it. People, process, technology. How all these need to work together.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Time has proven that making the long-term bet is a good idea for both sides in the equation,” says Chris Geraci, President, National Video Investment, OMD.
Geraci was one of the featured speakers at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this video, they discuss the dynamics of the video marketplace and parse the semantics of what now constitutes “television.”
Geraci has seen lots of change since starting his advertising career in 1987 at BBDO New York. Yet amid a rapidly changing media landscape, the bedrock role of advertising hasn’t changed all that much.
“We support a crucial part of the entertainment industry by way of advertising dollars, that allows for production and better quality content to come forth if they can count on a longer term advertising commitment,” he says.
The economics of what is often referred to as a “futures market” remain in place during the negotiations that typify the Upfront.
“For the advertisers and agencies that service the advertisers, we know we’re generally getting a better deal by working in the Upfront model,” Geraci says. “It’s just more efficient from a cost-per-thousand basis, which is usually the metric that’s being used. It’s just a better deal in the Upfront.”
Asked by Swartz to describe the change he sees year to year, Geraci notes the increase in digital options available. “I think the consideration set keeps widening. We now have definitely more online opportunities to interact with what we consider to be premium content. So the choices are broader.”
Given a “solid economic backdrop,” Geraci says that with consumer marketers “having decent results” some are putting that money back into media. “There’s a little bit more supply in some areas, including sports, perhaps a little less in some of the linear TV dayparts. So that’s creating a little bit of pressure there.”
Asked by Swartz whether there remains a distinction between “television” and “video,” Geraci says he believes it’s all video right now.
“In fact, we removed the TV designation from all of our job titles to prove that point publicly. Television is simply a physical device as a way to deliver what quality content and ad-supported content is what we transact in.”
OMD’s clients have the same mindset, according to Geraci.
“For the most part, they’re in the same place,” he says. “I think it’s been very helpful that a lot of the linear TV based companies have sort of morphed what they serve the consumer to be a multiplatform experience.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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