And now LG is levelling-up its own capabilities, by making an investment to take a majority stake in Alphonso.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Alphonso’s Raghu Kodige says the tie-up is not just about unlocking ad data.
Couldn't be happier to be kicking off 2021 in partnership with LG! @LGUS https://t.co/oZt20ogAqb#connectedtv #tvdata #tvadvertising #OTT #streamingtv
— Alphonso, Inc. (@AlphonsoInc) January 6, 2021
“How do we benefit consumers?,” he asks. “Unless you provide consumers with benefits, you really can’t collect this kind of deep data about what consumers are watching and what they are looking for and things of that sort.
“For us it’s actually a sort of an onward journey of what we’ve been doing all along, which is building more and more consumer features powered by the data that we collect – whether it is recommendations of what content to watch, both on linear TV as well as OTT.
“That’s actually becoming more and more important. There’s so many streaming services available that it’s like TV used to be in the past, where you switch on TV that are hundreds of channels and you don’t know what exactly you should be watching.
“Solving that problem for consumers, making the availability of content much more easier (is important).”
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on what they are watching on TV.
It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes, monitoring more than 200 cable networks.
Alphonso has also previously brought solutions like voice search to bear on a connected TV viewing experience that has become highly fragmented.
Kodige says that is the sort of tech LG wants to tap – but Alphonso will continue to serve other TV makers, too.
Wall Street Journal reports: “LG is investing almost $80 million for a nearly 60% stake in Alphonso, which had a pre-money valuation of about $125 million, according to people familiar with the matter.”
He says Alphonso’s own roadmap will be “accelerated” by the LG investment.
The company added five European countries to its footprint last year and goes like in India this year.
The company started by using automated content recognition (ACR) to create data out of consumers’ viewing behavior.
]]>“We’ve entered into a new era where people are not buying platforms. It’s not just TV is the only game in town,” Daigle says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re really looking to buy outcomes. You want to make sure that your local grocery chain or furniture store is actually making money, their businesses are thriving.”
Noting that media agency Horizon Media recently indicated a preference for 50% of its TV buys to be based on business outcomes over the next several years, Daigle adds, “That’s a big challenge for the agencies and I think the media community at large. But it’s indicative of where our clients are expecting us to go and so where we’re focused on going.”
In April, TEGNA disclosed that it had chosen Alphonso’s data and analytics to show the effectiveness of linear TV and OTT, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. That followed months of pilot testing that have produced encouraging results, according to Daigle.
“It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” she says.
The three KPI’s that TEGNA can now track are reach extension, website traffic and retail visitation using information about viewer location.
Alphonso uses data from smart TV’s in more than 30 million households to give a second-by-second view of where national ads appear and alongside which programs, among other insights. In Houston, for example, Alphonso’s footprint is some 800,000 households while Nielsen measures 800, according to Daigle.
“The amount of data is just mind boggling, so that’s one of the reasons we’re partnering with them.”
A standard local TV buy might reach one million households on linear, 200,000 on OTT “and maybe low single digits, four percent of TV viewers also saw OTT.” This shows 160,000 incremental homes by adding OTT. “It’s a pretty compelling case for why you need both.”
At this point, there’s far more data to corral beyond the three main KPI’s than can be used easily and instantly.
“Our goal is to make this really simple,” Daigle explains. “I don’t want to get kicked out of a car dealership by making it too complicated. It’s not a one-stop-shop solution. We’re not going to run a campaign, get the results and then turn everything we’ve ever known around just based on these results.”
While digital media like social and search are constantly being optimized based on ad results, “if every month we’re able to make tweaks here or there and increase the yields of all of our clients’ campaigns, they’ve been pretty excited about that idea.”
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. Premion is a unit of TEGNA.
]]>“We’re seeing a full circle here where digital used to influence TV,” says Raghu Kodige, Alphonso’s Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder.
Kodige was one of the speakers at this week’s RampUp 2018 conference by LiveRamp, which drew nearly 3,000 attendees. In this interview with Beet.TV, he details some of the work Alphonso has been doing with IRI, which has the largest database of shopper loyalty data.
To determine how television ads are working, Alphonso used the occasion of the 2018 Super Bowl to do some research based on data from a year earlier leading up to and including Super Bowl 2017. It involved a few different brands that were regular Super Bowl spenders.
For McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, Alphonso used location data to track post-ad store traffic. Working with IRI, it was able to attribute TV ad exposure to SKU movement, looking for lift before and after the big football game.
“We were trying to identify what kind of trends you see prior to the Super Bowl and after the Super Bowl. It was pretty exciting,” says Kodige.
One of the things that stood out was the amount of spending by Dunkin Donuts to influence Hispanic audiences on Spanish-language TV networks, particularly in the months ahead of the Super Bowl.
“We saw almost a twelve percent increase in foot traffic to Dunkin Donuts in the three weeks following the Super Bowl, which I thought was pretty significant considering that the Super Bowl reaches such a wide audience.”
Alphonso and IRI announced their data partnership in February 2018.
Alphonso’s research also uncovered insights into things like optimum TV frequency.
The 12 million households common to IRI and Alphonso produce data that facilitates TV tune-in attribution and sales attribution “down to the creative level,” says Kodige. If a brand is testing multiple creative iterations, “within a few weeks we start seeing this data flow into our dashboards with the IRI partnership” so that creative optimization can be done while the campaign is still in-flight, he adds.
The scale is such that it fills the gap in true, multi-touch attribution, according to Kodige. “The missing piece in most of these studies that have happened to date is the absence of large scale TV data.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“These numbers to me really indicate that we’re at that inflection point, and after all these years of talk and headlines, conferences about it, it’s actually going to start happening,” says Jim Nail, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
Nail presented the findings of the ANA/Forrester State of TV and Online Video Survey at RampUp 2018, the two-day LiveRamp conference. In this interview with Beet.TV, Nail explains why the annual TV Upfront ritual isn’t going away anytime soon and why marketers need to be “data detectives” in evaluating providers of advanced audience-targeting data.
According to the Rogers diffusion of innovations theory, once 15% of market participants have adopted a new innovation and 30% represent the early mainstream, “you’re at the inflection point, the proverbial hockey stick where the adoption accelerates rapidly,” Nail says.
In the survey, 28% of marketers reported being knowledgeable about addressable TV but haven’t yet entered the market, while 18% said they were aware of it but don’t know enough to use it and 6% said they were not at all aware of it.
While the industry is “not going to abandon the Upfronts anytime soon,” mainly owing to greater demand for primetime inventory than there is supply, advanced TV targeting is playing an ever-increasing role in negotiations, according to Nail.
Nail is “really excited” about some of the companies that are building the tools that buyers need to build TV schedules based on audience targeting beyond age and gender. “No buyer wants to be dependent on the data that the seller is telling them ‘here’s who our audience is.’ LiveRamp is certainly making a big contribution to the development of this area,” he says.
These data providers enable buyers to “let me do my planning myself and then go to the sellers and negotiate from that basis.”
He calls automatic content recognition technology that helps to track TV viewing and ad exposure “a very promising area of data.” Then he cautions that marketers entering the space need to become data detectives.
“All of those platforms promise a lot but you can’t take it at face value. You’ve got to ask who are these users that you’re getting this data from, how representative are they of the viewing audience as a whole.”
It boils down to “classic market research nuts and bolts methodology stuff to make sure that the data that you’re getting is really as high quality, as solid as the traditional data sets, like Nielsen, MRI and Simmons.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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