Addressable Ads Growing on Linear TV

Chris Maccaro, chief executive of Beachfront Media

“We’re most excited about accelerating addressability across traditional linear, and that’s where we see an enormous amount of growth, both this year and into the future,” Maccaro said. “Our focus has really been on enablement, building the infrastructure to enable that addressability to happen, and then bringing the ability to access that supply through automated channels,” Maccaro adds.

Addressable TV Is Bridge Between Linear, Streaming

Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio

“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”

Media Measurement Underpins Convergence

Beth Weeks, vice president and group director at Digitas

“Measurement becomes critically important as we’re losing reach on linear, but gaining in digital video,” Weeks said. “How are we validating the effectiveness of that holistic reach as we think about bridging those platforms, and being able to validate and verify that we’re achieving those critical KPIs and those business outcomes that our clients are expecting.”

Unification Means Greater ROI

Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery

“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” Kazi said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”

Video-on-Demand Offers Brand Safety

Chris Pizzurro, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Canoe

“We have a very well lit, brand-safe VOD environment today with the Canoe footprint,” Pizzurro said. “We absolutely need to maintain that quality, but we know we need to open up the pipes to programmatic so our programmers can sell 100% of their inventory…We’re up-and-running, and we look to turn up the heat this year.”

Brand, Consumer Experiences Are Key

Rob Christensen, vice president of advanced TV sales and distribution at Vevo

“As we’re running ad pods in multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands, it’s a great experience for users and of course, maximizing the monetization opportunities,” Christensen said.

Don’t Forget Frequency Capping

JoAnna Foyle, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk

“[Ad] frequency is a big challenge, that if you’re not using the right platform and the right tools – we see this as consumers while we’re watching content on mobile devices, on streaming services…the odds are frequency isn’t being managed very well,” Foyle said. “One of the things we talk to our buyers a lot about is making sure that they’re using the tools available to them.”

CTV, OTT See Data-Driven Innovations

John Vilade, head of ad sales at Premion

“We’re out right now doing a lot of education with marketers. Marketers are seeing rapid changes in the marketplace. There’s a lot of complexity and fragmentation. There’s a lot of nuance in terms of what you can do inside the connected TV space,” Vilade said. “I’m most excited about now is the data-driven innovations that we’re seeing inside of connected TV and OTT.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

The company two years ago formed the consortium to develop technical standards for addressable TV among the biggest media companies in the U.S. Those efforts are coming to fruition, with Vizio this year presenting at the Newfronts for the first time.

“Our partners are now moving into production. We are running campaigns,” Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “At the same time, we’re starting to build our own Vizio addressable business, and sourcing new types of inventory — both national and local.”

‘Some Further Ahead Than Others’

Gaynor, who joined Vizio last August, has been immersed in the effort to develop addressable advertising for most of his career in TV and digital advertising sales. His responsibilities include developing Project OAR, whose members include Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks.

“What I noticed when I came in nine months ago was that some of our network partners were further ahead than others — and those are the ones that really understood the technology that was in place, and were able to choose which technology to put in place,” Gaynor said.

At Vizio, his goals have been to help existing Project OAR members, attract new members and develop new sources of inventory for Vizio’s addressable TV business. In doing that, Vizio started working with ad-tech company Beachfront.

“Beachfront is now contributing to our own tech-stack solution,” Gaynor said. “They’re great partners who have visibility into the digital and linear world.”

11 Million Vizio TVs

Project OAR-enable software is now on more than 11 million Vizio TVs, giving advertisers a way to being running addressable campaigns.

“We now have a number of members that are in production and are running addressable ads,” Gaynor said. “There are a handful that are just on the cusp of going into production. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll see them move into production.”

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision in February joined Project OAR, which also collaborating with ad-tech vendors.

“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

Adam Gaynor, who this week was named vice president of network partnerships at Vizio, has been immersed in the effort to develop addressable advertising for most of his career in TV and digital advertising sales. In his new role, Gaynor’s responsibilities include developing Project Open Addressable Ready (OAR), a technology consortium led by Vizio, into a profit center for the electronics company.

“My goal in this role is to move Project OAR from project status to a business where Vizio can make money and the partners can make money,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’re getting to a point where we’re not talking about the consortium anymore because the consortium has done its job.”

Project OAR’s partners include media companies that are conducting live trials of a common technical standard for addressable advertising. In the past year, Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks have joined the effort that aims to transform how billions of media dollars are spent.

“When Project OAR was initiated in 2018, it was built on two founding principles: flexibility and scale,” Gaynor said. The two principles work together to “grow the footprint of available screens that can adhere to those standards,” he said.

Gaynor aims to build relationships with networks on Vizio’s SmartCast platform, which streams content to multiple devices, and its advertiser-direct business unit, Vizio Ads.

“Addressability has been talked about for a while, and it’s come in different stages,” he said. “Now, we have the opportunity with set-top boxes, smart TV glass and internet-connected devices to drive addressability forward.”

More than 50% of U.S. households own at least one smart TV, making the devices the most important way to consume video content at a time when viewing times are growing, according to a study by researcher Park Associates. With more households canceling cable and satellite TV service and hooking up smart TVs to the internet, video consumption has risen 40% to more than 20 hours a week this year from 2017 among U.S. broadband households.

Before joining Vizio, Gaynor was vice president of AMCN Agility, the data solutions sales team for AMC Networks. He also worked as vice president of media sales at Analytics for Dish Network, where he led the company’s media sales division that included addressable, interactive, programmatic and over-the-top efforts. His prior experience includes jobs at Game Show Network, Comcast and CBS.

That was after AMC Networks – whose portfolio includes AMC, IFC, SundanceTV, WE tv and BBC America – hired Adam Gaynor, the long-time DISH Network executive who oversaw media sales including addressable TV initiatives.

Fast-forward a year, and Gaynor says AMC’s addressable TV approach will involve partnership, evolution and complementary context.

Ad versioning

“At first when we launch addressability, we’re going to look at what I believe is versioning,” Gaynor, now VP of AMCN Agility, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “If an advertiser wants to come in, they can immediately have different messages to different parts of their core audience.

“As we each test out the systems, and the platform, and the capability, we’ll then – at our own pace, really – be able to evolve that to what we call aggregation or multi advertiser addressability, to really think about the best ways to help those advertisers reach the audiences.”

AMCN Agility is a data-driven sales team the network created early in 2018.

It includes AMC’s Aurora video targeting platform, which can utilize audience segments.

Partnership

To advance the opportunity, AMC has joined Project OAR, the addressable TV standards consortium that is “Open Addressable Ready” but is led by TV manufacturer Vizio and includes Disney, NBCU, Turner, CBS, AT&T’s Xandr and others.

“There are different pieces that have to bring addressability together,” Gaynor says. “So you need a decisioning system, you need a watermarking system, you need tags, you need a lot of tech that helps bring that product to life.

“Each of us are going down our own path of bringing those things together. We’re feeling really good about the partners that we’ve chosen to sort of stitch things together to bring this capability to life on our national inventory across smart TVs.”

Inventory

With the likes of AMC Networks joining the addressable TV advertising fray, many observers may be tempted to wonder – do they networks want to wrestle control of ad sales from under the noses of cable operators?

“The answer is ‘no'” Gaynor says. “I think everybody has talked for so long about needing more inventory and more capabilities. We look at complementing … that inventory.

“When you think about addressability, it really allows advertisers to find their consumers wherever, whenever. And so context gets removed from that equation. At the network level, we can bring context back into question.”

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

“We’re very excited to take this step into addressable television,” says Adam Gaynor, who joined AMC from DISH earlier this year in the newly created position of VP, AMCN Agility.

“For us, addressable television allows us to have new conversations with our existing clients and frankly new conversations with new clients. It’s really all about adding an enhanced layer to media mixes that allow our brands to reach their consumers,” Gaynor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

Sorenson’s technology, when embedded in Samsung TV sets, can detect and analyze everything that appears on the screen. The company works with publishers to help optimize advertising and shares some of the revenue with Samsung.

“Marketers have been embracing addressability for quite some time,” says Gaynor. “Addressability has just been growing in popularity. Our ability to add addressability technology into the national cable arena is an extra enhancement to an already growing addressable market.”

On July 26, Sorenson activated Sorenson Addressable and announced that AMC would be the first to use the new platform’s real-time ad replacement technology. Sorenson Addressable can be seen as a sort of over-the-top version of traditional addressable delivery controlled by MVPD’s because it enables households to receive targeted ads regardless of their choice of cable, satellite or telco TV provider.

“When we set out to try to add addressability to our tool kit, we took a look at what Sorenson had to offer. We make great content. And what we see is that they make great ad tech,” Gaynor says.

Working with Sorenson, an automaker that purchases a 30-second ad unit during the “Walking Dead” will be able to send a truck ad to the Samsung TV screen of a farmer in Illinois, and a sports car ad to the screen of a 20-something car enthusiast or in Los Angeles. The rest of the people watching the show at that time might see an ad for a standard four-door car or minivan, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Brands look at addressability as a part of their overall media mix. At AMC networks we now have the ability from start to finish to be able to really help advertisers from a broad demo reach to a more targeted reach and now to an addressable reach,” says Gaynor.

AMCN Agility was formed in early 2018, about a year after the company unveiled its Aurora Video Targeting Solutions platform. After testing it with a select group of advertisers, AMC decided to form a dedicated data sales team led by Gaynor.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In the United States, says DISH Network’s VP of Media Sales & Analytics, “When you ask 10 people what programmatic TV is, you get 11 answers.”

But in an interview with Beet.tv, Gaynor makes it clear that DISH knows exactly where it’s going with regard to advanced TV.

“Programmatic’s not a product,” says Gaynor. “It’s not even a product when you talk about digital. It’s a process. The way that we look at programmatic is a way to automate the use of complex data sets infused into television buying.”

Gaynor goes on to outline a three-stop process at DISH with the preface that the company’s programmatic offering is built on the foundation of its addressable TV platform.

Step one involved the untargeted impressions derived from full 30-second spots that had been “sliced and diced” for addressable ads. “We wanted to take some of those untargeted impressions and bring digital money back to TV,” Gaynor explains.

So DISH made them available to advertisers that were already buying impressions across every screen but TV. “Now they have TV impressions in their buy,” says Gaynor.

Step two will be to ultimately automate the use of addressable across all of the company’s addressable impressions. “It’s not designed to get rid of my sellers or to get rid of buyers,” Gaynor says. “It’s designed to make what’s really a complex process easier.”

Step three: “Take all of my inventory and let it be purchased programmatically,” he adds.

Asked for his thoughts on the acquisition of addressable advertising platform provider Invidi Technologies by AT&T, DISH and WPP, Gaynor cites the need to continue to push addressable forward.

“The parties that come together for this venture demonstrate the commitment of both the sales side and the buy side to drive addressability,” Gaynor says.

Returning to his earlier quip about 10 questions yielding 11 answers, he explains that it’s different in Europe. “In Europe when you ask 10 people what programmatic is, at least I’m only getting three or four answers,” Gaynor says. “It gives me hope that there’s an ability for that part of the business to move forward in our industry.”

We spoke with Gaynor at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s not just about brands finding Latino audiences,” Adam Gaynor, Vice President of DISH Media Sales, says in an interview with Beet.TV. “It’s about brands finding Latino audiences using Spanish-language creative. We’re lighting up Latino networks so that they can have those addressable messages.”

The networks are beIN SPORTS, Discovery en Españo, ESPN Deportes, FOX Deportes, Galavisión, Telemundo, Telemundo West and Univision Deportes, Multichannel News reports.

In 2012, DISH introduced household-addressable advertising, which currently reaches more than 8 million of the company’s approximately 14 million homes nationwide. “Right now DISH has 89 Networks that are lit up for addressable,” Gaynor says. “The more networks we have, the wider the audience we can find.”

He recalls the early days of addressable advertising when a trial would be conducted “in a little town of maybe 15,000 homes.” And people said, “If we could only have more,’” Gaynor says.

With a current addressable population of about 40 million households, “When you find the audience, you know you’re finding an audience with limited to no waste,” he says.

But what does the future look like, now that operators are lighting up household targeting for connected TV ads?

Those two minutes could either get longer, or be more efficiently used, a Beet Retreat panel concluded:

• AT&T AdWorks ad sales VP Chris Monteferrante: “I think we’ve only just scratched the surface in terms of addressable and utilising the two minutes. Next year, you’ll probably see a 3x or 4x jump in terms of the number of advertisers coming on board and the dollars you’re gong to see them spend.”
• Dish media sales VP Adam Gaynor: “There’s a lot more to do in those two minutes. The two minutes becomes a lot more when you start to slice and dice the spot to reach that right audience.”
• Comcast Media 360 SVP Kevin Patrick Smith: “I don’t know who invented the two minutes. I don’t know if it’s the right amount. We’re also now getting access to their VOD inventory and IP digital video inventory.”
• Cablevision Media Sales president Ben Tatta: “Twenty-five percent of those two minutes an hour that we get were unmeasured up until we rolled out census-level measurement. You can see the billions of dollars that are just sitting there.”

Media General chief revenue officer Jamie Elden also joined the conversation.

The panel was chaired by industry consultant Tim Hanlon. 

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

Once advertisers know enough about viewers to precisely target ads, will they also deconstruct their 30-second spots in to a million different permutations, for the many different consumers out there? Today, that’s not happening at significant scale. But a Beet Retreat panel discussed the prospect…

But “we will”, says SMG precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach. “The reason we don’t see more activity around versioning is because there’s significant amount of waste. We are in the process of wringing out the value that is created by better targeting. Once you get through that value, the client will want to continue to wring out value. You’re going to see creative come to play.”

An ad group veteran is excited about the prospect. “What’s the point of being able to slice and dice your audience if everybody’s going to see the same message?,” according to GroupM global chairman Irwin Gotlieb. “The new holy grail is likely to be relevance to a specific need state that the segmentation takes you to.”

Before we get there, how does the industry want to measure the effect of these new-wave ads?

“We measure success on whatever the results were that the client wanted,” saysDish media sales VP Adam Gaynor. “We’ve seen sales lift of 2%, 3%, I’ve seen sales lift in a category of 160%.”

But others caution against expecting significant uplift at the start.

“If you don’t see lift, that’s okay, too,” according to AT&T AdWorks national sales VP Jason Brown. “The product works. Clients sometimes don’t have their target right.”

Magna Global advanced TV VP Matt Bayner agrees: “Don’t expect a sales lift at first. We’ll be able to get some good insights to do it better next time. I can’t promise lift the first time. But we do promise a journey to get there.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, he says: “Advertisers no longer need to use content as the proxy to get to those viewers. We believe that buying an audience is the future.” That reflects the shift from a time when advertisers buy spots against specific TV shows because they pull relevant audiences by demographic, to buying those audience members wherever they happen to be watching.

So how about dynamically-served ads? “I think that will come at some point,” Gaynor adds. “Right now, we’re perfecting the process of reaching the right audience with the right message. We’ve got to grow that before we start adding more bells and whistle stop it.”

The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of  TV Advertising Forum in London  You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.

“To us, addressable and programmatic are two distinct words,” according to DISH media sales VP Adam Gaynor. “Addressable can be programmatic, but it doesn’t have to be, and programmatic is not addressable.

“To us, addressable gives us the opportunity to deliver specific messages to specific households. Plain and simple. What programmatic does is add a level of automation to that process.”

Gaynor says TV ad buyers used to request targeting of broad-brush customer demographics but are now beginning to get a lot more specific.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

Dish Media Sales is calling its launch “the pay-TV industry’s first impression-by-impression programmatic marketplace for linear television”. It follows Clypd’s launch of a TV ad-buying software platform.

Using it, advertisers can, internet-style, buy ads in linear TV using a real-time bidding system. But, although the bidding is real-time, it will still take a couple of days to deliver ads to users’ boxes, ready for airing.

The inventory will be available to buy through demand-side partners DataXu, Rocket Fuel and TubeMogul, says Media sales and analytics VP Adam Gaynor.

“This is a first for our industry, to be able to take linear television and apply the programmatic marketplace to it,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“(It lets us) reach out to brands that brands that traditionally spend in the digital marketplace.

Programming Note:  Gaynor will be speaking at the Beet Retreat next month in Florida about this and related topics.