Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.
Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.
“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”
She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.
The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.
“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“What we’ve done is we’ve created a further opportunity beyond enhanced ads at scale for brands to buy household addressable and targeted ads across the entire OTT landscape,” says Jacqueline Corbelli, who is Founder, Chairman and CEO of BrightLine.
In so doing, BrightLine has focused exclusively on major broadcast and cable networks, building a national footprint for full scale across the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, A&E, AMC, Turner and Viacom, among others. Hulu, which represents approximately 70% of ad-supported streaming, is a “very important partner,” Corbelli says in this interview with Beet.TV.
DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example, automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be delivered to those households.
For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.
“In addition to providing enhanced ads, we are now able to provide a targeting and household addressable solution that is as simple to buy as a thirty-second commercial has been all these years,” says Corbelli.
Because of the way that BrightLine has brought its new technology to market and the data it is able to collect, it can map devices to a home and create “a now 68-million household graph that allows for this type of targeting to occur. And the reason it’s important is it’s a reach extension for household addressable that is bought on the linear side of the TV equation. It brings that OTT layer to the opportunity for brands to get increasingly targeted.
“We talk about one to one. But in the home and where TV is concerned, household addressability is really a much more appropriate way, as advertisers believe, to reach their audience. And that’s what we’ve built,” says Corbelli.
This segment is from a Beet.TV series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.
]]>As the President of Global Media for the Essence agency surveys the video ecosystem, he sees its constituent parts operating differently with regard to what advancements they can deliver. “If I’m talking about the national TV ecosystem or marketplace, what’s achievable there is very different from what I can do today at scale within local cable avails that MVPDs control,” says in this interview with Bee.TV.
“If you consider OTT and digitally distributed content through FTP players as advanced TV, there’s a whole other spectrum of capabilities that exist in that space.”
Those capabilities should go well beyond data and targeting, according to Gerber, whose background includes positions at Brightcove and ABC and agencies MediaEdge and Mediavest. Last month, Gerber was promoted to his current position at the GroupM agency from VP of Investment for North America, as MediaPost reports.
“It’s about everything from the business strategy that the client is trying to execute against, to how they envision messaging and delivering creative versions to different segments of their audience, how that ties back to the business strategy and how you apply data and targeting within that construct.”
Gerber sees a near-term need for uniformity in understanding how consumers choose their video experiences across any and all formats. “I think we have to stop defining things in terms of traditional linear programming, short form content, etc.,” Gerber says. “We need to understand how viewers are choosing to engage with video content regardless of content length or distribution platform.”
Pragmatist as he is, Gerber acknowledges the difficulty in reaching such an understanding. In the meantime, “I think that were going to continue to have to work in a world where we use proxies where we make assumptions for the gaps that can’t be measured.”
He believes marketers are at a disadvantage if they only focus on things “that are truly measurable, because I think many of the opportunity areas are in places where if you apply a little bit of common sense and you kind of understand what’s happening, I think there are opportunities in those environments.”
This is not to condone negligence in execution, according to Gerber, citing the need to evaluate the opportunity, how you implement it and what solutions to use to determine success.
“I think we are probably a ways off from having a truly vibrant and consistent and market-wide measurement solution for us to use on the predictive side of where are people watching,” Gerber says. “The other side of measurement has to do with how we measure outcomes and actually performance, and I think that is a completely different subject.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Midha—whose background includes ABC, Viacom and Dow Jones—was one of the featured speakers along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this one-on-one interview, Swartz asks about the utility of voice assistants in what she terms the “straddling of platforms and experiences.”
To Midha, it comes down to “breaking down that third wall. You want to bring someone into your ad creative. That’s when you really get to create that emotional connection that makes the difference between a product and a brand.”
Given the rise of in-home, voice-activated assistants and other ways consumers can talk to digital devices like laptops and mobile phones, Midha explains how the technology can induce viewer participation.
“So you can say, ‘turn off the lights.’ And the lights are going to turn off in the scene that you’re watching. You could say, ‘turn on the TV,’ and the TV inside the scene you’re watching of a living room is going to turn on and play your show.”
Asked by Swartz whether engagement with interactive ads is a generational thing, Midha says it’s all about the most appropriate creative. Her view is supported by the more than 10,000 engagement ads true[X] has executed in virtually every category “and pretty much every advertiser KPI we can think of.”
true[X] will be rolling out a new set of what Midha terms “engagement blueprints” based on “really strong database insights and learnings. So that’s how we see ourselves scaling.”
With the company having proven the efficacy of engagement ads in on-demand programming, she sees a huge opportunity in live programs like sports events and awards shows.
“Nothing captures people like live. What hasn’t evolved is the fact that we are streaming so many of these events and great moments on digital platforms and taking advantage of none of the capabilities that these digital platforms offer.”
One aspect of human behavior while watching live events is to pause the content. “When they come back, we give them the opportunity, if they’ve been gone long enough, we say ‘would you like to engage for thirty seconds or do you want to just pick up where you were?’”
If a viewer decides to engage for 30 seconds, they can skip the next commercial break and catch up in real time to where other viewers are with the game or program. “We have done a little bit of testing in terms of focus grouping the concept, we’ve built a live demo, we got really strong feedback,” says Midha, adding, “I just love the idea of not accepting live for what it is and saying, ‘this is already an amazing experience, let’s make it better.’”
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.
]]>So while “we’re taking a lot of first steps in lots of different directions,” sometimes there’s progress in the TV space and sometimes not, says the EVP, Director of Strategic Investments, for Havas Media.
“The data conversation is I think somewhat overblown right now,” he says by way of preamble. “We have been buying using data for years. It’s not something new to us.”
What’s interesting to Kanefsky is the fact that TV networks “are trying to infiltrate that space,” and “they’re charging to infiltrate that space.” He notes that the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom designed to unify audience targeting for advertisers is seeking “a 10 percent up-charge on your media cost.”
He’s not disputing the need for a more unified currency across multiple networks. “With that said, we have a long, long way to go to solve the data issue.”
Kanefsky believes the best way to make TV buying more efficient is to actually have more ratings points available to buyers and that using data to optimize media is not a new concept.
“What we need the networks to do is find more ways to put more rating points back in the market, not necessarily from C3 to C7 but to actually perform better,” he says. “We’re in a marketplace that’s driven by supply right now. But what’s driving marketplace inefficiencies is the fact that supply is down so much.”
Advertisers still expect big ratings impact great content but would like to be able to obtain both while reaching audiences in difficult time frames like 8-11, according to Kanefsky.
Asked what he’d like to see most from the networks, Kanefsky says “a strategy” that would provide a vision of “how are we going to get from point A to point B.”
To his mind, ABC is the closest to having such a strategy, NBC is “all over the place” and CBS “has their model built out kind of perfectly.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Like other media executives whose content is distributed on an ever-increasing number of platforms, Debra O’Connell “would like to see it move faster. We continue to help drive that discussion” about cross-platform measurement.
In the meantime, Disney has made it easier for advertisers to avail themselves of opportunities across a content portfolio that offers “something for all life stages,” the EVP of Sales & Marketing for ABC Television Group says in this interview with Beet.TV.
While ESPN maintains a separate sales organization, as Variety reports, “When clients want us to work together or we have a great opportunity to align both groups we will continue to work together,” says O’Connell. “Actually, having Disney ABC sales as one portfolio makes that streamlining even easier.”
Disney was an early proponent of enabling brands to target desired audiences beyond traditional Nielsen age/sex demographics. “There’s absolutely an appetite for it,” she says. The company’s recommendation for many advertisers is a balance of branding at scale and targeting a particular audience segment “for a particular solution that they’re looking for or key performance indicator that they’d like to see as a return on investment for that campaign.”
She believes the industry is “not quite half way there” on uniform cross-platform measurement but that in the next five years there will be more than one option.
Having a few measurement solutions “as opposed to just one individual monopoly” would provide variety while maintaining “some kind of standardization of what that measurement needs to look like” to provide a true picture of audience and viewership.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Speaking on this Beet Retreat panel, representatives of the networks explained their strategy.
The recent announcements included:
NBCUniversal advanced advertising SVP Denise Colella:
“We’re going to avail up to $1bn in inventory to be traded on non-Nielsen guarantees, or audience guarantees.
“Our clients are investing a lot in data, they really want to put that to use. We’re willing to put our money where our mouth is. We’re not reserving inventory per se. We’re making all our inventory across all of our networks available for audience.”
Turner Broadcasting ad innovation and programatic VP David Porter:
“OpenAP does three things – helps define audience segment, allows an advertiser to choose wha publishers they want to share that segment with, and aggregates reports. That solves a lot.
“There will be no commingling of inventory in this platform, this is not a transaction platform. This is just a way to get a consistent definition. Then the advertiser can send that definition out to any publisher.”
Viacom audience science EVP Julian Zilberbrand:
“It is uber-complicated to have different methodologies when you have one data set you’re working off of.
“This is about enabling the advertiser to have an easier experience.”
ABC TV Group programmatic VP Michael Dean:
“We’re excited about it and we’re supportive. This is all the right things to do. Removing friction, removing cost, lowering complexity is absolutely where all of us want that market to go – as long as we can make differentiation, that’s the key.
“The devil is in the details. For Disney Company, it’s about ‘How do we bring our unique data assets – what we know about families, homes, from the parks, from our games network?’”
605 president Ben Tatta:
“It’s great news. We felt, for a while, that there will be a shift to more audience-based buying, selling and measurement – but that starts by moving off a panel, which is really just a large focus group. It drives demand for census-based data. The market is demanding that more granular attributes, other than age and gender, are available.”
Panelists also discussed the emergence of addressable TV advertising technologies and amateur versus premium video.
This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>When Accenture Strategy did a deep dive on some $12 billion of its clients’ marketing spend in a multiplatform television effectiveness analysis for ABC Disney, “One thing we found is that digital is largely saturated,” says Craig Macdonald, Accenture’s MD of Communications & Media Vertical.
Asked to elaborate, he adds, “I’m very precise in the way I say that. There’s lots more inventory that advertisers can go buy when it comes to buying other digital ads, but their ability to actually drive more sales is largely gated right now.”
Accenture concluded that the only way advertisers can get more yield out of, say, Google or Facebook is by combining investments in those channels with investments in multiplatform TV.
“Multiplatform TV popped out of the study as being by far the most powerful way to create a lot more top-of-funnel demand that would ultimately trickle down and make digital media more effective,” Macdonald says in an interview with Beet.TV following a presentation at the 6th Annual Cross-Platform Media Measurement & Data Summit of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement.
Another noteworthy finding derives from a normalization wherein Accenture evaluated the higher cost of advertising impressions on multiplatform TV versus cheaper digital inventory.
“If you compare it just to Google, its average price per thousand impressions is almost twice on a per unit basis, but it’s giving almost three times the sales efficacy,” Macdonald says of multiplatform TV. “This was actually a very surprising finding.”
There’s typically a big difference between the attributed value of a media channel and what is absolutely measured, according to Macdonald. For example, while paid search in isolation can yield a very strong ROI, it would not be nearly as effective without leveraging multiplatform TV at the same time.
“It gives me a very different view about how to budget for those two together and how I as an advertiser should think about using them together so I can actually maximize my overall media budget, not just my single-channel media budget,” says Macdonald.
The ABC study encompassed anonymized marketing spend for a three-year period across more than 20 leading national brands representing six industry categories. It found that on average, 18% of the ROI typically attributed by marketers to search, display and short-form video is actually driven by multiplatform TV. Conversely, the ROI typically attributed to multiplatform TV should actually be increased by an additional 10% on average, according to the analysis.
]]>ABC and Accenture began by redefining what is TV and what is “digital,” according to Steve Whittington, Exec. Dir., Consumer Data & Analytics, Disney ABC TV Group. In the multiplatform TV bucket they placed long-form video experiences via live, DVR, VOD, online, app and OTT, while digital consisted of search, display and short-form video.
“One of the drawbacks around some of the studies that we’ve seen thus far is that they’re primarily based on syndicated data,” Whittington says in an interview with Beet.TV following a presentation at the recent 6th Annual Cross-Platform Media Measurement & Data Summit of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement in Manhattan. “We also felt that it was time to readdress the way that we’ve defined the different media channels today.”
Among the findings: Multiplatform TV advertising amplifies paid search and display in particular, along with short-form video ad performance. Specifically, digital ROI was overstated by about 18% and the ROI for television was understated by about 10%. “It was sales that had been incorrectly attributed solely to digital when the reality was it is the effect of the two working together that was really driving that,” says Whittington.
Most media mix models tend to look at short-term windows, for example a campaign period, a quarter or a year. “But we know that television by its nature is designed to drive brand awareness and drive the health of a brand over time,” he adds. So Accenture created a model to look at a three-year horizon and found that a dollar spent on multiplatform TV in year one “continues to work in fact in some cases an additional 1.3X factor across a three-year period,” Whittington says.
This long-term effect, if not accounted for properly, could tempt marketers to shift spending to digital because it’s cheaper and shows short-term impact, according to Whittington.
“But once you look at the full, long-term effect, the actual ROI across a three-year period can actually be lower because you’re kind of stealing from your outer years and some effectiveness of the brand in order to fund more conversion within a short-term time frame,” he says.
Phase two of ABC’s engagement with Accenture will dig deeper into the $12 billion worth of ad spending to parse out insights from “a lot of unanswered questions,” Whittington says, including dayparts, ad lengths, primetime versus daytime and 30- versus 15-second spots.
]]>Always keep an eye on how she is changing. That’s the advice on how to thrive and survive in the media business from a veteran and a luminary who has shepherded TV networks, designer goods e-commerce sites and now a venture fund.
“I am always struck by how much has changed, not just in my lifetime but in the last decade,” says Susan Lyne, President of BBG Ventures at AOL, in this interview with Beet.TV. “The biggest shifts in consumer behavior have taken place as a result of smart phones and social networks and neither existed 10 years ago,” she says, adding that some of the biggest changes in the media business have occurred in just the last five years, considering the impact of personal devices and the Internet of things on media and advertising. “Keep your eyes on the consumer and watch what she is doing and be a part of it,” she says in her advice to newcomers.
Lyne offers this tidbit for what might come next — a resurgence in magazines. Consumers are starting to read them again, particularly those created for a so-called “narrowcast” audience. “Think about reimagining old forms and making them new again,” she tells us.
Lyne has had a long and storied career in media, having co-lead ABC Entertainment and helmed Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She also built Gilt Group. During her time in entertainment and media, she’s mentored many young women and has also seen opportunities for women expand. “The year I graduated from high school, the most senior female at Time Inc. was a researcher. By the time I was appointed president of ABC [in 2002], four of the five people running entertainment networks were women. So that’s huge progress.”
However, there is plenty of work to be done, since most CEO positions at media firms are not held by women. “There still seems to be that barrier, Especially in digital media,” she says. That’s one of the reasons she took on her new post with in AOL, where she now leads a venture fund that is focused on women-led digital startups.
This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Lyne was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
]]>“Some larger national brands will use a variety of content and programming dayparts as the upper funnel, and on the lower lower funnel are advertisers that want to do opening weekend in a specific city or push end of the month car sales, for instance” she says.
Because of that range, ABC has aimed to be across platforms, including both its own sites online as well as places like Apple TV. “We continue to innovate on new delivery platforms,” she says.
O’Connell was interviewed for Beet.TV by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp, at the Mediaocean evcnt at Consumer Electronics Show.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all the coverage here.
]]>“We’ve already seen some of the stickiness increase,” the group’s video products and technology VP JR Grant tells Beet.TV.
“(They place) an emphasis on getting more content types and activities for kids to interact with to improve engagement in the app.”
The Watch services for Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior were updated with new designs and new features, notably games. “What was primarily a video experience is now a more immersive experience,” Grant added.
We spoke with him at the TV of Tomorrow conference. He was interviewed for Beet.TV by Furious Minds CEO and founder Ashley J. Swartz. You can find more videos of our coverage here.
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