In this video interview with Beet.TV, Senior Vice President, Advertising Sales at A+E Networks, describes two trends focusing on the home:

• Household-level TV ad targeting, and the quest for even more precision.
• TV show hosts and production crews making and broadcasting content from their own homes.

The new at-home media revolution

“The last 10 months have been really fundamentally groundbreaking in terms of personalization,” Heftman says.

“The idea that, instead of going out into the world, we’re bringing things into our home now that we’ve never been able to bring into our homes before – whether that’s the food we eat, whether that is the products that we buy and certainly the media that we consume.

“The reality is that we’re going to a world where content will be available in the home in the same way that it’s available out in a movie theatre or in other places like that, and the expectation by the consumer is that they can bring whatever they want into the home, whenever it is, that they want it.

“So the speed with which the media world has had to adapt to that, I think has been one of the most amazing things to come out of this COVID environment.”

CTV growing

US cable networks posted strong viewing increases for 2020, after a tumultuous year forced millions of Americans to stay at home.

It was a year in which connected TV services – both SVoD and AVoD – soared to new heights, and in which its demographic profile broadened, as elder viewers switched on.

Beside the SVoD boom, the growth in new ad-supported channels is drawing advertisers with capabilities like targeting, frequency capping and programmatic buying.

As a result, eMarketer expects 2021 connected TV ad spend to grow by 401.% to $8.11 billion, 3.5% of total US media ad spending.

As well as SVoD operations, A+E’s Heftman has a growing raft of ad-supported carriage with the like so Roku, Tubi, Pluto and Samsung.

Identity crisis

Next up, Heftman wants to go beyond household-level targeting, and he wants even highly-targeted ads to look seamless, like traditional commercial breaks – but that’s going to be difficult.

“Identity is both the billion-dollar opportunity and also the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” he says.

“There’s a big challenge going from a household identity down to individual person identity, and to get to an addressable future. That is something that really needs to be solved and it’s something that there’s a lot of progress being made on.

“Identity remains really, really challenging. Getting household IDs quantified and standardised across all of the different CTV providers, that is something that is very challenging.”

Heftman is hoping 2021 is the year when identity solutions, already being created to solve for the deprecation of third-party desktop cookies, will also lend a hand to connected TV targeting.

And he wants such things standardized.

Talent at home

Until then, it’s not only viewers who remain at home. TV talent, too, is back to being home-bound.

“(It is) very challenging from a content perspective,” heftman says. “California just announced another production shut-down. Jimmy Kimmel is going back into his home starting this week.”

But, whilst shows may be different, the new limitations have also forced a new creative approach to production.

“The flip side with that is the technology advancements making that possible,” Heftman adds. “Just because you can’t produce in a high-volume way out in the world, doesn’t mean you can’t produce in a high-volume way from the talent’s home.

“It’s really helped us streamline our production capabilities. The days of sending 20 people on a production shoot probably are over for companies like us, because we can produce so much more efficiently with iPads and with Zoom and the quality remains very, very high. I think that, that continues to move forward into the future.”

You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a relationships business.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Roseann Montenes, VP, Precision & Performance Ad Sales, A+E Networks, explains why she is focusing on people.

Connecting people

In November, Montenes’ A+E joined Crown Media Family Networks, representing Hallmark, in selecting Xandr’s Invest TV suite to help sell national linear inventory.

She says it helps facilitate relationships between buy and sell side.

“The way that Invest TV has it set up is that we have direct communication with the actual client or the agency, or whoever’s activating the buy, which is most important to us because we are maintaining that relationship,” Montenes explains.

“While a client is submitting the buy and activating through it on the actual Invest TV platform, I’m the one that’s having the conversation, my team is the one that’s having the conversation direct with the one that’s activating that campaign from start to finish

“So it does make it very easy for us to be able to maintain relationships. And like I said, keep that dialogue going because without dialogue comes a failed campaign.”

TV Automation Is Critical: Xandr’s Mitchell Takes ‘Invest TV’ Up To 90% Coverage

Guaranteed outcomes

A+E Networks was relatively early to announce it would offer its advertisers guaranteed business outcomes.

And, now more than ever, Montenes says it is important to help marketers “move some of those products off of shelves for our clients”.

“We’re listening to our clients in what they need for their KPIs, whether foot traffic into store locations, website visitation, and most recently talking about attention measurement and doing a guarantee against attention,” she says.

A+E’s Roseann Montenes: With Client Expectations, There’s No ‘One-Size-Fits-All’

New prospects

Montenes says A+E Networks is using platforms to new business.

“We already do a ton of business with (Xandr-owned) Clypd on a day-to-day basis in terms of utilising them as our day-to-day optimizer,” she says. “So to partner with Invest TV was just our natural progression in terms of our partnership.

“So us, having that kind of exposure on their platform allows us to open doors to new partnerships, new relationships, and really have access to clients that maybe we weren’t having that conversation with originally that now we are having that conversation.”

You are watching Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, a Beet.TV series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page. 

Now advanced connected TV platforms are getting in on the “attribution” act.

Plain old linear TV can promise advertisers the same power – but more complex attribution techniques need to emerge over time, says one TV ad sales leader.

“At A+E, we are trying to move from a world where the only data that matters is Nielsen age and gender demos,” says Ethan Heftman, Senior Vice President, Precision & Performance Advertising Sales at A+E Networks, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We’re trying to move into a world where outcomes, actions, those are the things that matter for our business. It’s a conversation that linear television can have a major impact in. At A+E, we will guarantee two very specific results (from advertising):

1. “We will guarantee foot traffic into a store location.”
2. “We’ll guarantee web attribution.”

Heftman has previously observed that many in the industry are already staring to price guaranteed ads on a CPW, or Cost Per Whatever, basis.

A+E Networks, which operates channels A+E, History Channel and Lifetime, is accomplishing attribution by partnering with an array of technology and data providers, like LiveRamp, whose RampUp event Heftman was speaking from.

Ultimately, Heftman wants to guarantee advertisers more outcomes than just physical or web traffic – but therein lays more complexity.

“Where you begin to get into more difficult scenarios is where there are more steps in the sales process, in the funnel,” he says. “It just becomes a lot harder.

“There are a lot more steps in the chain between an ad exposure and a sale, steps that we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page and we’re all partnered for the same thing.

“There are a range of vendors and suppliers that can all do individual discrete things. Piecing those vendors together and paying them each individually is a challenge for our business.”

The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.

This video is part of  Beet.TV’s coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

Lively Place is a scheduled collection of library programming from A+E’s roster of unscripted lifestyle shows, for free with ad support.

It is available via Samsung TV Plus, Samsung’s own gateway to over-IP TV services on its TV sets.

“It’s the first of what we hope will be more fast channels, free ad-supported streaming television channels that we will curate using our library,” says Mark Garner, A+E Networks’ EVP, Digital Content Licensing & Business Development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Lively Place is a channel that has some of our most recognised and award-winning content that’s in our library in the lifestyle space. We have taken an opportunity to build out a new lifestyle brand, Lively Place, and chose to launch with Samsung on Samsung’s TV Plus as our first partner.

“It’s not often where you get to launch a new channel and a new brand in this environment, but I think that’s one of the things that OTT and this emergence of new viewing options is afforded a company like ours.”

Lively Place ads are sold by Samsung Ads, Samsung’s own smart TV targeted ad sales house, but A+E has the option to take ad sales in-house.

Garner describes the plethora of new OTT TV options coming out, in particular from subscription providers.

But he also speaks positively about the new wave of ad-supported OTT services following in their wake, from the likes of Tubi and Pluto.

“You’ll find A+E content on many of those platforms, and we’re finding a great opportunity and revenue that’s being generated in our content that perhaps four or five or six years ago, the opportunity to monetize wasn’t as great,” Garner says.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page. 

Kim says that the availability of new data sets has helped their corner of the industry, especially as they’ve found their footing with tune-in marketing.

“Not only now can we actually get feedback on a more granular tactic-level basis,” says Kim. “But now we can actually action on those things.”

Kim points out that the availability of A+E Network’s data has been a huge advantage, saying “It’s pretty rare that a brand is sharing access with their agency partners, but that’s been a great opportunity for us.”

Taylor adds that the flexibility goes both ways, and Horizon’s ability to see what sticks keeps both parties moving forward.

“They’re not plug and play,” says Taylor. “They’re not continuing the same way we used to as things are changing, they’re really at the forefront of trying and learning new stuff.”

Kim says that this is all possible because of A+E Network’s patience, their efforts in providing as much data and transparency as possible, and their desire to continue building up their database in both digital and linear.

But this partnership doesn’t come without new challenges. While both Kim and Taylor are optimistic, Taylor explains that tune-in makes immediate decision-making more difficult.

“I think the biggest challenge about tune-in marketing is that the show has to premiere, and then it’s premiered, and then you have to get the data, and it either comes back the next week or it doesn’t.” Taylor says. “It is hard getting the data and turning it around fast enough to make actionable insights immediately.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“The biggest challenge is the breadth of content available,” Taylor told Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media earlier this month. Additionally, marketing strategies have to consider not only what audiences would be right for the content A+E Networks is promoting, but also what audiences watch live TV at all, a problem that’s been exacerbated by cord-cutting and the rise of DVR.

“It’s really important for us to find people who are interested in our shows, or interested in shows that are similar to our shows, who are live TV viewers, and pull them in to watch our content,” says Taylor.

A+E Networks uses “tune-in marketing” to drive people to its live showings, a tactic that involves promoting content as must-see events and driving people – the aforementioned people who are likely to watch live TV – to their TVs at the right time. “We want people engaging with our brand, whether they’re DVRing or time shifting, or streaming on digital, but right now the goal of linear tune in is that live in premiere view,” she says. Partners like Alphonso help A+E Networks identify live TV viewers the network can target, while Samba helps attribute conversions to marketing strategies. Attribution, Taylor says, has come a long way in five years.

“Attribution exists in a way it didn’t five years ago,” she says, when the network was able to understand success in terms of what drove ratings. Only in the past three to four years has the network been able to work with measurement partners to understand not just ratings, but what tactic helped to hit them.

In 2020, Taylor believes that data-at-scale will be the skill to master for marketers.

“As we move into 2020, how do we scale that data? First-party data is not as large as you’d like, and even third-party data isn’t always as scaled as you’d like. So what’s the balance between leveraging first-party data and leveraging scale with our paid campaigns?” she says.

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

But buyers need to be walked through the transition, and an ultimate conversion to 100% addressable may not be the end outcome regardless.

In a panel at Beet Retreat In The City, “What Programmers & Brands Want from Advanced TV”, three industry executives were asked why around 10% of national TV ad spend goes toward advanced TV targeting, rather than around 50%:

• A+E Networks – SVP, precision, Ethan Heftman
• LiveRamp – John Hoctor
• NBCUniversal – Dominick Vangeli

They were questioned by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel..

Transition is hard

A+E’s Heftman said: “The reality is, doing business outside of Nielsen age, gender demos is time consuming.”

NBCU’s Vangeli agreed: “The process of onboarding a first party data set … think about how much more complicated that is than transacting on adults (aged) 25 to 54.

“There’s a legacy business with decades and decades of a specific way to transact, and then all of a sudden all the viewership behaviour started to change and fragment.”

No race to bottom-funnel

Although connected TV and advanced targeting capabilities hold the potential to use attribution methods in order to offer performance-driven TV ads, A+E’s Heftman thinks assuming that will be the norm is a misconception.

“Sophisticated marketers at brands and at agencies have always known the value of television for upper funnel, awareness and consideration metrics,” he said. “And now we’re finally able to put lower funnel, foot traffic sales, those types of metrics against it.

“I think the fear of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the idea that we’re all just going to focus on the lower funnel value of television at the expense of the upper funnel… that’s really overblown because we’re all pretty sophisticated.”

Learn to love incomplete

LiveRamp’s Hoctor warned advertisers not to over-estimate the powers of the new medium.

“You have to go into the problem realising you’re never going to have all the data,” he said. “You have to know that out of the gate. Because you’re never going to know if your neighbour recommended the car, or something like that. That’s just not something that’s publicly available, or even privately available for you to do analytics against.

“We have to really calculate a baseline and what would have happened in the absence of the media that we’re measuring”

Context optimizes inventory

NBCU’s Vangeli detailed how NBCU is offering advertisers the ability to buy inventory adjacent to particular show moments, based on machine learning analysis of scripts and closed captions, plugged in to ad sales platforms.

“Let’s pretend a movie is starting to segue into a commercial break, and there’s a great scene where James Bond is shaving in the mirror,” he said. “And this is exactly something that we saw and we tested internally.

“Well then right after that, why is there not a Gillette ad or Dollar Shave Club ad? And so there’s a way to bring context at greater scale on a lot of the programming.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is the message from one leading advertising exec at US TV company A+E Networks.

The company, which operates channels A+E, History Channel and Lifetime, says it is now beginning to sell ads whose prices are guaranteed on viewers completing certain actions that take place after the ad is viewed.

“Right now, the two that we trade on specifically at A+E is web attribution and foot traffic,” says Ethan Heftman, Senior Vice President, Precision & Performance Advertising Sales at A+E Networks, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Those are the two areas based on automated content recognition (ACR) and measurement algorithms that work with multi-touch attribution.”

In the traditional model, TV ads are used to merely reach the right groups of viewers, defined by age and demographics, in groups of thousands, priced on a CPM (cost per mille) model.

In the emerging opportunity, software would track which viewers were exposed to which ad, link that record to brands’ own data and draw a line between the two, attributing real, end business results to the initial ad exposure.

How do you price that? Heftman says some in the industry are starting to refer to it as CPW, or Cost Per Whatever, because the desired end outcome may be different for each advertiser.

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. 

A+E’s core sales team handles linear, set-top box VOD and on-demand digital, Demarco explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“We also then started to extend partnerships into the local station groups and MVPD’s…and tapping into DSP’s and SSP’s,” says DeMarco, who is VP, Programmatic & Audience Solutions. “When you look at all of those different pieces in one kind of pie, each represents a specific percentage that doesn’t necessarily overbear on the other pieces.”

As a result, “We’re not too reliant on any specific piece of the demand makeup, which allows us to run a yield management tool and process and strategy to maximize the revenue efforts.”

The higher frequency of opportunity for advertisers arises “as we look at all inventory and make it available to everyone. Lastly and most importantly, it also helps the user experience.” This is because ad frequency that might have originally emanated from 100 advertisers in a given month can balloon to 1,000 or even 10,000 across different DMA’s and regions.

“What we’re doing is limiting the amount of repetitive ads that someone may see while they’re enjoying our content in a time-shifted, on-demand experience,” says DeMarco.

Asked about partnering with local station groups like TEGNA, it’s easy if the technology is unified. “That’s the way the TEGNA piece has operated for us. We’re both FreeWheel clients, so it’s truly a server-to server ad-server integration that allows us to avail inventory to them as if they were any other seller or partner within our network.”

DeMarco welcomes the transformation from several years ago when advertisers were “looking purely at data and wanting to be targeting a person, and that was the main KPI.”

Now putting the right ad in front of the right person at the right time is still key, but “they have to be paying attention and engaged. If we think about the connected TV environment or time-shifted, appointment viewing, someone is in the comfort of their own living room, they’re relaxed and enjoying full-episode type content, so it’s the right environment to have your brand associated.”

This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.

“They’ll be putting demand into our marketplace and doing audience extension to find their audiences on other premium content in service of their advertisers and their advertisers’ goals,” says Geoff Wolinetz, SVP Client Relationships, FreeWheel.

“This fits in very, very nicely with FreeWheel’s strategy of television as a platform,” Wolinetz adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

OTT represents the plurality of adds that FreeWheel serves at any given time. The impact for Hearst is a sign that it, too, is committed to TV as a platform, according to Wolinetz.

“They want to expand their reach in any way that they possibly can also while adjusting to where the users are actively consuming the content. What they get to through us is leverage our ad server and our ad decisioning technology to find the right audience, in the right supply, for their demand, at any given time.”

Hearst gains access to “the universe of FreeWheel programmers” that participate in its marketplace from the supply side. “Your premium broadcasters, cable companies, distributors, folks that have inventory and have premium audiences that Hearst can leverage on their end to use their demand to fill,” Wolinetz says.

According to a news release from FreeWheel and Hearst, the new integration enables “an improved connection to premium inventory from natural partners such as A+E Networks,” which is a joint venture of Disney-ABC Television Group and Hearst. In addition, it’s the first step designed to enhance the value of local broadcast inventory, with next stages focusing on “the co-development of initiatives to further the unification of digital video and linear TV inventory, an area of focus for both companies.”

From the Hearst perspective, “I think they’re realizing that they can find their audiences in a lot of different places. Not just on their live linear broadcasts but also on over the top devices,” says Wolinetz.

Now ad-tech firm FreeWheel is effectively uniting the “shampoo” and “conditioner” of TV ad sales – creating a unified product in which A+E Networks can manage two different kinds of ads.

Comcast-owned FreeWheel has worked with broadcast company A+E to give it a “unified ad decisioning engine”, uniting the previously separate tools which handled:

• management and scheduling of direct-sold ad inventory
• management of programmatic demand through a supply-side platform

FreeWheel says that historic separation has led to “pricing conflicts, TV-compliance issues and negative user experience impacts”. But the unified system “allows A+E Networks to holistically consider the full pool of demand, including direct sold buys, and optimize across all business rules and requirements”.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Geoff Wolinetz, FreeWheel SVP client relationships, says: “Effectively, we’re talking about changing the way that we decision advertising.

“When you have a bunch of different demand sources in play, typically what happens is there will be an SSP that does an auction, and then they will pass a winner along to an ad server who then does another set of decisioning to figure out which is the right ad to serve.

“In this case, what A+E is going to do is send us all of their demand. We’re going to put it into one big pool, and we’re going to arbitrate one auction that allows us to pick the most fit ad.

“Think of this as survival of the fittest for an advertisement that comes through.”

FreeWheel plans to offer the system to other companies beside A+E this year.

Here is the company press release.

Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.

That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.

A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…

The big reduction that wasn’t

The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”

Peacock’s cut is coming

Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”

Linear is hard to change

Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…

Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:

“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”

Tech can solve for excess

If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”

Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:

“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”

Viewers are revolting

Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…

Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:

“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”

Re-think the ad unit

Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:

“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”

Proof of the pudding

Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…

Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:

“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, Heftman elaborates on networks’ mediator-like role in trying to please both advertisers and agencies in an increasing complex, consumer-led TV universe.

Brands are talking about business results like topline growth, better metrics and greater ROI. “When we talk to agencies, obviously agencies are intimately involved in that but ultimately agencies are also judged on a cost efficiency basis,” Heftman says. “And so that necessarily creates a bit of friction in the conversations that we have between brands, agencies and ourselves.”

Increasingly, the seller’s role “is being a bit in the middle of that,” he adds. “Making sure that we are delivering the cost efficiency and proper business rationale to our agency business partners, while working with brands to try and convince them that television in particular is a driver of their business. We never really had to do that historically. The agencies took care of that for us.”

He isn’t suggesting that some agencies don’t tell that story to their clients. But given the roadblocks that exist to connecting television to business outcomes, “it’s not necessarily the best decision to let somebody else do that for us. We have to take some of the lead on that ourselves.”

Heftman sees more marketers than agencies leading the way on innovating new forms of ad products, one reason being it’s not a skill set that one necessarily finds within agencies. “Sometimes it is faster to go straight to the client and work with them on something that works for their business.” This is particularly true for newer, direct-to-consumer brands that might not have a legacy relationship with an agency. “They simply have different expectations from television, and part of working with them is that it has gotten us up to speed in talking more about outcomes and different types of creative and different types of executions that are going to get use there.”

He’d like to see two things going forward. First, realistic acknowledgement that big changes aren’t going to happen overnight, and second an understanding that TV serves certain purposes that can be “a little bit dual” in nature. “I would like to see clients and agencies spend more time thinking about their funnels and really being honest about the places where TV fits into the funnel and things that it has to do to succeed there,” Heftman says.

“I think the sooner we get to a place where we are honest about what each different format can do, that’s going to get us closer to where we’re headed.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, A+E’s EVP of Ad Sales discusses why advertisers haven’t taken the full plunge into advanced targeting and the likelihood that the ad-supported model is in the future for companies like Amazon, Netflix and the planned Disney service.

He says advertisers are “getting so pressured to prove the effectiveness of every nickel they spend. Everyone’s known for a long time TV works, especially on the upper-funnel metrics of awareness and all that. But there’s been like a vagueness to that. It doesn’t really tie back to ROI as cleanly as some other things.”

Being able to more closely tie TV ad exposure to tangible business results “gives the ammunition that the marketers need to keep recommending premium video as that centerpiece and not be shifting money somewhere else,” Olsen says.

Advertisers are looking to strike a balance “between what digital is claiming it can do and what we’ve always known TV could do, and then just really getting to kind of the right balance to answer on the effectiveness of both,” he adds.

It’s worth noting that while age and gender has been the transactional TV demographic for years, secondary targets have been available for more than three decades, Olsen observes. TV networks have the tools to go beyond, say, trying to reach everyone ages 18-49 to more strategic targets.

“Clients I think are interested but they’re not jumping in with both feet yet” given questions about data quality and scalability. “So I think it’s finding the right balance between what is still mass, what is targeted and then you take it a step further, what should go to addressable, et cetera.”

Then there’s the viewer balancing act. While many are seeking to avoid ads, that comes with a higher cost.

But Olsen points to signs of hope. “Some of the stuff we’ve seen, though, isn’t as daunting as it may look right now,” he says. “Some of the S-VOD penetration is kind of hitting a ceiling here in the U.S. and I think those companies are actually looking at ad models themselves.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix has an ad model, Amazon, the new Disney service. All those things eventually have ad models as part of that product. I think they will be more tailored ads and more personalized will be kind of the magic to it.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

Horizon’s client roster includes A&E Networks, Scripps and Turner, in whose category “in terms of driving viewership and tune-in to programs that we’ve seen a lot of success with addressable TV because you can really hone in a specific audience,” O’Connor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You can really identify who the target is, see how that target performed when you delivered the message and then also see how that target performed when you didn’t deliver the message. We’ve seen that there can be a lift of twenty, thirty percent in terms of tune-in, which is obviously a huge lift when you’re trying to drive next day ratings.”

For clients in other categories, addressable is not as easy a sell. It all begins by deciding on particular campaign results, according to O’Connor.

“We have to dig in and look at the target we’re trying to reach. Is it worth going the addressable route? Is there enough waste there? Is there a specific enough target that we can deliver a message to, or are we okay with kind of the spillover into a larger buy?”

Although advertising inventory of the various virtual MVPD’s is “still a pretty small portion of the overall universe,” it does have its values.

“We do have clients that are reaching out and buying those specifically, particularly a lot of our digital-first accounts, whether it’s ecommerce or brands like that. We use that to drive down costs to some degree,” says O’Connor.

He sees huge opportunity for the VMVPD’s “particularly when you think about something like a DISH and a Sling, is where you can supplement something like an addressable TV buy and you can use the Sling as a portion or complement to what you’re doing through the traditional or satellite set-top box.”

A constant thread regardless of the platform is more advanced audience targeting. “I don’t think that there are many advertisers out there saying ‘just give me adults eighteen to forty-nine,” says O’Connor.

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.

The President and CEO of A+E Networks views cross-platform opportunities through the lens not of a TV company but “as a great content company” constantly honing its capabilities and execution.

“Historically, we’ve had to think in increments of 30 or 60 minutes. And now we have to think in increments of six seconds to six hours and everything in between,” Dubuc says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Knowing one’s audience is of paramount concern because it’s now more crucial than ever to know who you are speaking to and how you’re speaking to them, according to Dubuc. “It’s not enough just to put great television shows out anymore,” she says.

The question of balancing content and ad load gets lots of attention at A+E, but there’s only so much progress to be made given things on the agency and advertiser side. Dubuc cites a pace of change that’s “still lumbering” despite advances on the supply side.

“There’s a lot of friction between the publishers, the agencies and the clients. Unnecessary friction in some instances,” Dubuc says. “We know it goes back to the capabilities conversation.”

The concept of preferred clients and preferred partners “I think will take hold in the future,” she adds, “in that there’s just going to be too many publishing options, too many distribution options and too many options in general for brands to try and market their product.”

That’s when frictionless ease of use, along with brand and content safety, plus quality of content “will be key in differentiating yourself as one of those preferred partners.”

This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.

The result, as moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink termed it during an MEC-sponsored panel discussion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, could well be dubbed “myth busting.”

The A+E project involved some 350 million ad-exposure records for 40 million addressable-TV-enabled households over a few months matched with transactional data to produce indices, according to panelist Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605.

While it’s true that a network like Lifetime is a great venue for reaching buyers of health care, beauty and packaged-goods products, digging deeper unearthed some interesting insights, said panelist Mel Berning, A+E’s President and Chief Revenue Officer.

“What we’re also finding out is that it’s a wonderful environment for reaching women who are the principle decision makers for buying cars. Or investments,” Berning explained.

“One of the things that was really interesting was that across the board for all of the A+E Networks, responsiveness to TV way over-indexed versus the average television viewer,” said Tatta.

Now for the myth busting. It turns out that Lifetime over-indexed both for viewers who are particularly weight conscious and those who are burger lovers. Men’s apparel was among the top-indexed categories for Lifetime viewers, while A+E overall “indexed high against younger families,” running counter to “today’s myth that younger audiences are migrating off the dial,” said Tatta.

As the discussion turned to how a company like A+E balances programming across platforms with the most appropriate ad formats, Berning separated out linear. For those nearly 100 million households, “The quality of the viewing experience is such a key factor to the environment on those networks,” he said. “We’re thinking about ad loads, we’re thinking about the ability to reduce clutter, to deliver a more engaged audience to the ad.”

With cross-platform, advertisers are at “different places in terms of the way they’re thinking about building their media plan across platforms,” Berning said. “It’s very easy to engage advertisers in terms of their requirements for linear. As you then engage them on what are your requirements on other platforms, there is a huge organizational effort to bring all of those pieces together.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

He sees these trends as a welcome sign that the industry is moving beyond traditional age/sex demographics for audience targeting and defends the broadcast TV environment against newer platforms.

Whereas targeting traditionally has been the province of the advertisers, they have been “very protective of their data and very protective of sharing information about who their real target is,” Berning says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I don’t think any of that is going to change.”

However, he perceives “much more of an appetite to work together in terms of advertisers, data suppliers and networks like A+E” for a deeper understanding of audiences.

This involves moving beyond the concept of, say, women 18-49 who buy certain products to “women who live certain kinds of lifestyles or who have certain mind frames use products for a bunch of reasons, and it’s really delving into those reasons.”

He says marketers have long chosen certain types of content based on their intuition that scripted content might be appropriate for certain brands and unscripted “because it’s very energetic” for others.

“But now we have a lot more data that proves that certain kinds of people with certain kinds of likes and dislikes and different amounts of receptivity to messaging are all part of the audience,” Berning says.

The big difference between an A+E and newer content providers, according to Berning, “is really the quality of our content.”

From an advertising standpoint, “We think there’s a pacing and a quality to the environment because of the content that we provide that really makes the audience more receptive.”

He points to Viceland, History Channel’s scripted series Vikings and SIX and Live PD as standouts at A+E.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“There was a mature measurement system in place for TV. As we moved into mobile and connected device and set top box, we experienced some real challenges,” Boykoff confesses. “That has been a pain point, although it looks like the industry is making strides in that area.”

What were those pain points, exactly? Boykoff says: “I think there’s been some friction on the buy side because they’re not sure who owns the budget… is it digital, is it linear? In the next few months, we’ll be able to start measuring it with third parties to validate who we’re reaching, but over the last year or two we haven’t been able to do that.”

A+E encapsulates channels for A+E, History Channel, Lifetime, LMN, FYI and H2. The company moved in to catering to connected devices in 2014.

The firm is now working with Nielsen’s digital content ratings (DCR), comScore’s third-generation VideoMetrix and with Rentrak on video measurement.

“We’ve heard from our buyers that they want to understand unduplicated reach and frequency across platforms,” Boykoff adds.

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

The panel was moderated by Nielsen’s precision and planning SVP Eric Solomon.

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