LiveRamp acquired the company back in July. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Allison Metcalfe, the GM of LiveRamp’s TV offering, explains what new capabilities she has acquired.
“We’ve been working with those guys for six months now and we are aggressively expanding the scope of measurement to include not only outcome-based measurement but total cross-screen measurement in total,” Metcalfe says.”
“What’s unique about Data Plus Math is the outcome-based (aspect). Traditional measurement in TV has been much more about reach and frequency. We are actually now able to tie a business outcome – whether that be a store visit or a purchase or a website visit – to the impression of the TV advertisement.
“Marketers are truly able to understand the true business outcome of the investment that they’ve made in TV. That is something that the industry has embraced frankly with the advent of what Facebook and Google have been able to offer marketers and now it’s being demanded across all channels.”
At the Consumer Electronics Show, LiveRamp announced that former TubeMogul and VideoAmp exec Jay Prasad is joining as chief strategy officer for its TV division.
LiveRamp Welcomes Industry Leader Jay Prasad to the LiveRamp TV Team
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.
]]>Now the business of marrying different consumer data sets is a big deal, and identity solutions are the glue that helps advertisers smartly target consumers across different media channels.
But one of the technology vendors helping enable that opportunity is having to counsel TV broadcasters how to shed concerns and embrace the future of audience-based ad buying.
In this video interview for Beet.TV, LiveRamp Video GM Allison Metcalfe explains what her company is doing to help.
“You have data tied to CTV IDs, you have data tied to a Comcast ID or a different kind of PII,” Metcalfe says. “We need to break down the silos, enable those data sets to be joined together, commingled for every use case that is possible.
“We have built a product specifically to help the sell side push audiences to their platform.”
The system is two-fold:
Such a combination could help broadcasters sell actual audiences, not just rough demographics, to advertisers.
But, speaking with Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell during “The Scope of LiveRamp TV and the Promise of Convergence“, a chat at Beet Retreat In The City, Metcalfe said she has to encourage broadcasters to do so.
“The last great divide for us is working with the sell side to get them comfortable to enable us to give that information to the buy side,” she explains, saying many distributors grumble: ‘I don’t like the idea of people being able to, in essence, query my data’.
“I understand that,” Metcalfe says. “We actually have some headway. We’ve gotten a couple of agencies that are in a beta with our product working with certain publishers and MVPDs to give them access.”
Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year and kept the LiveRamp name for its remaining services.
The duo had already been helping companies meld audience data for digital ad buying strategies. Then it began looking at TV.
After Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships
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.
]]>Myth 1: Advanced TV is addressable TV – if you don’t have a niche audience, it is not for you.
According to Metcalfe, this is false. “There’s an application of advanced TV for every brand out there,” she tells O’Connell. It starts with how companies define advanced TV: LiveRamp defines it as using data and automation to buy, sell, optimize or measure TV investment. Addressable TV is one component of that, but it’s not limited to addressable TV. New capabilities around data-driven linear TV have helped advertisers figure out how to address the right audiences in more traditional channels.
Myth 2: CTV is not resolvable to identity.
Connected TV is resolvable, says Metcalfe, and it’s an area where LiveRamp has been investing in the last two years. The company matches its network partners with connected TV IDs – essentially earmarking a household for audience targeting purposes – and is able to derive demographic data of consumers and the content they’re watching.
Myth 3: LiveRamp is only an identity graph.
This used to be true, but not anymore, says Metcalfe. While the identity graph is still LiveRamp’s core product, the company has evolved its offerings alongside the evolution of the industry. Today, it also offers a platform that matches the sell side to work with distribution clients directly, as well as a measurement platform and a platform for second-party data sharing and distribution.
Myth 4: Unduplicated reach and frequency is not possible.
This one’s complicated.
“Kinda true, kinda false,” says Metcalfe. “Technically, unduplicated reach is entirely possible. It’s more of an issue where the owners of the data are nervous and hesitant to give that type of information to the buy side.”
LiveRamp is working on a solution that involves building trust and collaboration between both sides of the fence that would encourage more data sharing, resulting in clearer reach measurement.
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.
]]>This theoretical game isn’t going to be won by the emergence of one overriding supply side platform, Pangis predicted in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Moderator Tracey Sheppach asked what it is that buyers can ultimately expect to see. “Once we move through this innovation, do I have two logins to two different systems Xandr and NCC? Is that what it looks like?” said Scheppach, the CEO & Founder of Matter More Media.
“I think the future of collaboration in television is a much different discussion than what a lot of people are having, which is like ‘come on my platform and then you can use my demand-side’…that is not the way we’re going to get far fast,” responded Pangis. “It’s how do we connect with one another and sort of bring each of our super powers together, and the demand side is always going to want to do something a little different.”
Allison Metcalfe, GM of LiveRamp TV, explained that about two years ago, LiveRamp began to focus on automation to better serve the sell-side. Last fall, the company sold Axciom, the data provider that had itself acquired LiveRamp in 2014. “Life has changed pretty dramatically since then,” said Metcalfe.
Along the way, LiveRamp figured out that it needed to pay more attention to the buy-side. “The reality is that LiveRamp sits on the CRM’s of close to four hundred of the largest brands in the US and internationally. Those brands rely on us for people-based marketing strategies. It’s very natural that they would look to us to help them understand what’s possible in TV,” said Metcalfe.
Easier said than done, she went on to explain. Her team of four full-time people whose daily mission is to evangelize advanced TV to brands typically come away from meetings with “a list of twelve questions” regarding how to reach those brands’ audiences across platforms “and it takes us months to answer those questions.”
Even when such discussions lead to a purchase order, the entire process can take six months. “If we could get that to maybe two or three months, that would be a win for both Nicolle and I.”
One advantage of distancing itself from Axciom is that it dispels doubts about perceptions of LiveRamp’s neutrality, according to Metcalfe. “We are a technology platform with a data marketplace.”
Under the leadership of Grant Ries, LiveRamp is helping companies that have data assets but never considered themselves to be data suppliers. Metcalfe cited the example of travel data co-op Adara, which came to LiveRamp because it wanted to get into TV.
“So now we’re able to offer some really unique targeting capabilities to the travel industry, which historically wasn’t a really big buyer of advanced TV strategies,” Metcalf said. “We’re seeing a lot of trends like that.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>As an example, he explained during a panel discussion at the recent Beet Retreat in the City the process involved in NBC executing dynamic ad insertion. “Through FreeWheel, there’s probably 700 right now end points of where we have to integrate into in order to be able do that. But it can be done,” said Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales.
That’s the good news. However, more than 90% of NBC’s impressions are still delivered in a live, linear fashion.
“It’s going to involve programmers and distributors, MVPD’s, virtual MVPD’s coming together both to solve for the tech as well for the business rules. We are a business of legacy. It’s hard to change that but the will is there,” said Rosen.
Moderator Laura Desmond, who until recently was CEO of Starcom, asked whether the traditional value exchange between content providers, consumers and advertisers is “broken.”
Vikram Somaya of ESPN said the value exchange “isn’t good enough. For a long time, everybody in the system was making money and it made it very hard to change. We’re getting to the point now where everyone in the system is not making the money they used to make and suddenly we have to look in the couch cushions a little more than we had to.”
Desmond described the efficiency and effectiveness of TV advertising before describing a scenario that is destined to become as antiquated as rabbit ear antennae on top of a TV set. “You push a button, the commercial goes out, it airs, time delay, you post it, done. That’s a pretty simple and easy model.”
So is lack of education inhibiting the adoption of addressable TV ads? “The ad-supported experience needs to change,” responded Rosen. “Limiting commercials, but also it is about relevancy. We do know that ads that are more relevant to the user are going to be less annoying or perhaps not annoying at all or even welcome. Data’s going to help us with that.”
Asked by Desmond about the role of automation, Metcalfe, who is GM of LiveRamp TV at LiveRamp, said technology isn’t the problem. She recalled that before LiveRamp was acquired in 2014 by Acxiom, companies like Facebook “weren’t really interested in working with us yet. We didn’t have the reputation we needed, etcetera. Acxiom brought that to us.”
LiveRamp was in the early stages of powering custom audiences for companies like Facebook, but it wasn’t easy working with them because they wanted to control every last detail. “And it’s very similar to what I’m seeing now working in the TV industry today because it started to ramp up and become a larger part of their business. Everybody has to get comfortable with losing a bit of control.”
Asked by Desmond whether ESPN parent Disney is ready to compete in direct-to-consumer content delivery with the likes of Roku, Hulu and YouTube TV, Pandit said one of the joys of sports is that “no matter where you go you will get advertising.
“We can’t put our heads in the sand and say we should not go down the DTC route because we’ve done very well with pay TV and very well with digital. We have to be open to what consumers want us to do,” said Pandit.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“People are still pretty confused about what’s possible and how it works,” Metcalfe explains in this interview with Laura Desmond at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose.
LiveRamp helps several hundred brands make the best use of their CRM data to implement people-based marketing across more than 500 publishers and digital marketing platforms, “and so there’s a natural extension in talking about television as well,” says Metcalfe.
In March, LiveRamp extended its IdentityLink platform to the TV space. Its Connect Select solution is designed to empower MVPD’s on the sell-side.
Educating LiveRamp’s brand clients has sparked a “tremendous movement on their behalf. I think we’ve got 40 brands that had never been in addressable TV working with us and executing campaigns in the last two quarters alone,” says Metcalfe.
Desmond was one of the early pioneers of addressable TV while at Starcom, beginning with a trial in Huntsville in 2005 with Charter and Comcast followed by more trials in 2009 and 2012.
“We actually were the mover that put DirecTV into the addressable business,” Desmond recalls. “In all four of those use cases, what we saw was a tremendous business case. Zapping was down by 33 percent, engagement increased anywhere between ten to forty percent. Yet the dollars aren’t flowing.”
Says Metcalfe, “There’s overwhelming evidence this works.” She notes that MVPD’s and companies like one2one Media “talk about how the majority of their business is repeat business. They have such high retention rates because once you try it, you see how well it works you come back.”
Underlying hurdles to adoption include brand procurement people not understanding why a CPM for an addressable campaign may be higher even though the effective CPM can be lower. Using a hypothetical household CPM of $25 for a non-addressable campaign, Desmond says, “It’s a good buy, it’s targeted but it comes with waste.” And while reducing waste can mean a higher effective CPM, “People have a hard time wrapping their arms around that.”
In a recent earnings call, LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe CEO said the company’s addressable TV unit is growing at a rate of 70 percent this year. What are the drivers of the growth?
“The activation of the buy side, I just can’t underplay that enough,” responds Metcalfe.
Another priority at LiveRamp is bringing TV-specific identifiers into its identity graph.
“Currently, our graph is PII based and email and mobile ID and device ID. We need to get to a point where we have IP to household that scales as well as the Roku ID or the Hulu ID or the Chrome stick ID. To really unlock those connected-TV cases to empower the networks to have a better understanding of true viewership of their content as well as the advertisers,” says Metcalfe.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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