Aleck Schleider has joined Blockgraph from Amobee, where he was SVP of client and data strategy. The company announced today.
“We’re really talking to all the major players out there that are that are all trying to figure out the best way to collectively enable the industry in a collaborative effort where everyone benefits, but everyone has control,” he says to Beet.TV in this video interview.
“It’s the programmers and broadcasters who are now figuring out ways to make their traditional linear spots become addressable. We’re talking with all the major data partners, syndicated, or CRM companies that are managing first-party data, as well as the measurement companies.”
The initiative was launched in 2017. It uses peer-to-peer technology to let marketers, publishers and distributors match audience segments without sharing consumers’ identifiable information and without any technology intermediaries.
The idea of applying blockchain technology to advertising industry problems has been circulating for a few years.
We are excited to announce Comcast’s collaboration with industry partners on Blockgraph software to jumpstart the use of secure data sharing for Advanced TV Advertising: https://t.co/yks0mDtwVi #Blockgraph
— Effectv (@effectv) December 21, 2018
Exponents believe blockchain’s use of an “immutable ledger”, a record of every transaction and event, stored in unison by every node in the network, can give ad buyers deeper insight and more certainty into where parts of their spend are actually going.
“The core function of Blockgraph is really to support a collaborative solution platform, that allows the industry to excel in terms of removing a lot of friction for bringing data into an addressable environment,” Schleider says.
“If you think about Charter and Comcast as a whole, in a collaborative effort, their ability to actually bring data into the TV environment, across set-top box or across broadband, is a superior function. Blockgraph was developed to take advantage of that superior function.”
Blockgraph, which already included Comcast, ViacomCBS and Charter’s Spectrum Reach as partners, recently reconstituted as a joint venture, in which the three groups will take equal ownership. Jason Manningham, who was GM of the project, became CEO.
Comcast’s NBCUniversal also began integrating Blockgraph into AdSmart, the pioneering addressable TV platform it got when Comcast acquired Sky.
In forming as a JV, Blockgraph is another example of the collaborative approach that has taken hold in the TV industry over the last year and a half, as broadcasters have realized they need to come together to achieve scale.
Comcast’s Blockgraph Sets Up As A JV With Charter, ViacomCBS
“What we’re doing is facilitating for the companies that have and manage their own data assets, to control those assets, to rights-manage those assets, and to allow for the enablement within the control, without the data leaving their systems, to support the ecosystem who wants to utilise their data and their services for addressable TV,” Schleider adds.
“It’s all permission-based. We’re just enabling a more privacy-centric away to facilitate that direct conversation between the two partners without any middle man in place – better, faster, efficient, less expensive”
]]>But the explosion in new measurement techniques and providers is actually causing a headache for ad buyers who want an apples-to-apples analysis of their ad effectiveness.
No wonder so many are actually now calling for fewer, more reliable ways of measuring that smoothe out discrepancies.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Aleck Schleider, SVP of client and data strategy at ad-tech firm Amobee, says advanced TV measurement has been spurred on by Vizio’s smart TV ad unit Inscape making its automatic content recognition (ACR) data widely available to vendors.
“The ability to measure TV … has become a lot easier,” Schleider says. “That allows for companies to do to some pretty seamless marketing measurement.”
But that isn’t all good news.
“The fact is, there’s so much data, there’s so much fragmentation, that it just kind of creates a lot of confusion in the marketplace,” he adds. “Ideally there’s going to be some level of reset … it does require some truth-level data.
“There has to be commonality. We’ve got to pick these pieces off the floor of all this fragmented components, bring them together, put it together to have a common measurement.
“Brands don’t want to have to work with different broadcasters in their own measurement solutions.”
In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.
4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.
Schleider thinks the likes of Nielsen will be leaned on to boost ACR measurement with techniques like panels, plus its own ACR sources, to improve accuracy.
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.
]]>By working with Nielsen, and specifically with the company’s Gracenote ACR (automatic content recognition) data, Amobee has access to more granular viewership data that functions on the individual user level, rather than the household level.
“Nielsen recently rolled out user-level viewership data against their Gracenote ACR, about 4.5 million TV sets where they’re utilizing their national people meter panel to create models that are tied to the data,” Aleck Schleider, svp of data strategy and monetization at Amobee, told Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s really important – it’s the advancement of ACR data for planning and measurement.”
That advancement gives broadcasters and advertisers a better understanding of who is actually watching content, and on what type of device. Formerly, measurement systems tracked viewers on the household level by tracking TV sets. Big data, as part of the convergence of linear television and CTV, has raised expectations around what information is available.
“It’s a big step for the market because the market wants faster data. They want to understand it, given the fact that so much information is available from the ACR, and be able to utilize it,” says Schleider. “And so this advancement is really a milestone, a big step forward for the industry to adopt ACR data when it comes to planning linear television, ctv and convergence.”
At the center of this need for better, more granular data and measurement is the change in consumer habits and how people watch TV. In any one household, multiple people may be watching live TV, streaming content on a mobile phone, and plugging a casting device into a TV set to run apps. Nielsen and Amobee’s partnership will give advertisers more clarity into who is seeing their content and where. That level of visibility, while new for linear TV, has been available to advertisers in advanced TV.
“What Nielsen has done with this data set is take that smart TV device and break it down more granular to who’s watching that, and who’s watching on other devices in the home,” says Schleider. “It’s leveling the playing field in this world of devices.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But the “addressable” TV advertising opportunity doesn’t have to start and end simply with an all-targeting approach to a TV campaign.
Some marketers are using the new-wave of addressability features to support an old-fashioned linear TV ad campaign, too.
That is according to an exec whose company is helping them use connected TV in a spectrum of ways.
“Connected TV is for all brands,” says Aleck Schleider, Amobee SVP client and data strategy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We use a lot of connected television to help brands compliment their TV campaign. Addressable TV doesn’t mean (advertisers) have to reach only homes based on a certain (targeting) attribute – it also can mean (they) want to reach individuals who were not exposed to my linear TV campaign.”
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.
“It doesn’t always have to be about the application of an attribute to think about addressability,” Schleider continues. “It could be geotargeting … these broadcasters who have all these supplies … can start thinking about taking some local regional budgets. It could be about driving incremental reach.
“We work with many brands who are using CTV (connected TV) to drive incremental reach because they’re not getting it on television.”
The early throes of addressable TV ad trading have involved the emergence of real-time bidded inventory. But Schleider acknowledges the TV industry, even premium connected TV, will continue to rely on upfront ad sales.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight and TVSquared. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“We saw early on the continued growth of connected TV and OTT supply and obviously it continues to increase dramatically,” the SVP of Data & Client Strategy says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
“But the need to think about that supply in an addressable format really wasn’t available until Tru Optik came to marketplace bringing data assets and appending attributes to an IP address.”
Amobee’s integration with Tru Optik included the ability to do addressable targeting across connected TV but also support opt out, “which was a key factor around privacy and the needs for us to support a single opt out across all video devices.
“It wasn’t until our integration with TO that we really were able to start powering addressable powering across OTT and connected TV supply. It’s very much needed,” Schleider says.
One result was an increase of brands wanting to access that supply. Some weren’t going in that direction because in the digital world brands were used to being addressable on digital video and on mobile video and display.
“And so they really didn’t think about connected TV, OTT as an option until the addressable aspects really started growing and the ability to target against that supply became more available.”
As soon as that addressable targeting became available, “we found more brands adopting those channels because they could frequently cap and they use first- and third-party data to reach audiences on the big screen in an addressable format,” Schleider says.
Because of limited addressable linear TV across MVPD’s, “connected TV really filled a gap in the addressable linear side because of the IP-based capabilities that Tru Optik helped bring to marketplace.”
Meanwhile, Amobee has been quite active overseas. A week ago ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, announced an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on the ITV Hub. According to a news release, it will enable ITV to launch a new, fully programmatic, premium advanced advertising platform giving advertisers complete control over the purchasing of their campaigns across ITV’s premium VOD service, the ITV Hub.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
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