One expression of that is attribution technology that can link up a known exposure to a TV ad with a consequential outcome like website visit, store visitation or eventual transactions.
That’s the technology that 17 local CBS TV stations are adding to their toolset, by doing a deal with TV ad software platform Alphonso.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Alphonso’s senior director of product, Chaitanya Upadhyay, explains how it will work.
Join us this Wednesday for a discussion with @DBreunig of @PlaceIQ where we'll cover trends in foot traffic and TV – and best practices for using #locationdata and #TVdata for media planning, optimization and measurement in today's current climate. Register here:
— Alphonso, Inc. (@AlphonsoInc) April 27, 2020
“Because of our relationship with various TV OEMs, we’re able to identify households that were exposed to the ad and conversions that are happening from those households,” Upadhyay says.
“The station account executives, sales folks who work directly with the local advertisers in these markets, will be able to utilise the Alphonso TV data to show their local advertisers real-time attribution leading from exposure to their creatives that are playing out on the stations to website or location attribution.”
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’s journey began seven years ago when it began enabling real-time ad retargeting based on TV viewing segments. Four years ago, it began offering ROI-based TV ad buying at the national level.
But lately Alphonso has seen an opportunity in local TV.
“What we realised was that there was a blind spot where the local market was specifically just ratings based, and it was almost a $9.5 billion market where there was no ROI,” Upadhyay adds.
The idea is to bring the same kind of effectiveness and attribution to local advertisers that is now being enjoyed by a growing number of national advertiers.
In doing so, many will hope, it could help drive up ad revenue rates and overall business for local TV broadcasters.
In the COVID-19 economy, marketing budgets are being constrained especially at the top-of-funnel, awareness stage by many brands.
Many ad buyers, however, remain content to continue spending where they can see a demonstrable return on investment.
The challenge, then, is for for broadcasters to show ad buyers how the line can be drawn from exposure to consequential outcomes.
]]>That is according to one technology supplier who doesn’t, as some might, see local as back water – he sees it as an opportunity.
“One of the parts of the industry that hasn’t really been deeply touched by attribution … has been local,” says Ashish Chordia, Alphonso CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Local TV is a $20 billion industry … and it’s continuing to grow.
“The piece that was always hard to do for local providers was to be able to say, ‘I ran the ad for the local car dealership, or the local dentist, and I produced results’.”
So Alphonso, which already helped customers understand what content or ads consumers were watching by using automated content recognition (ACR) software in viewing devices, spent a year to build some new technology.
Chordia calls it “video AI” that tackles a “hard technology problem” – namely, how you can identify what people are watching when the fingerprints for that content are patchy.
A year after Alphonso began, local TV channel operator TEGNA recently disclosed that it had chosen Alphonso’s data and analytics to show the effectiveness of linear TV and OTT. That followed months of pilot testing that have produced encouraging results.
Chordia tells Beet.TV that Alphonso will announce more such partnerships.
“Fifteen million smart TV homes report data to us,” he says. “TV to digital retargeting is a concept we invented.”
A recent Alphonso integration with PlaceIQ grew its ability to correlate TV ad viewing with consumers’ subsequent visitation to a marketers’ retail location.
]]>So why are so many advertisers either spending so little or using addressable for a different purpose?
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat, a cast of “millennial”-aged companies assembled to discuss issues affecting the pace of roll-out of future TV advertising – and what advertisers really want it for…
The panel heard that what ad buyers really want is audience scale. This may seem to go against the inherent promise of addressable TV, which can make an audience far smaller but also far more relevant…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“There’s a lot of great data sets out in the marketplace. There’s 199 million homes. Get to half, you really have something. And then the strategy and the media planners will start funding that at a much, much higher rate than it does now.”
Today, connected TV even seems to mitigate against large-scale campaigns. One ad-tech exec said the promises aren’t quite living up to results achieved in limited trials – perhaps one reason so much advertiser spending in OTT is still considered “test-and-learn”…
Hardeep Bindra, Managing Director of Product, Sizmek:
“The general expectation from our digital-first customers is as we expand to CTV, OTT – and then adventuring to addressable and linear – is that we will continue that same (performance) approach in defining attribution. It works to a degree when it’s in a closed-loop testbed … But the minute you try and reach scale with it that’s when these systems start to either fall down or the delay in attribution breaks the existing models that we have in place.”
If connected TV advertising doesn’t yet have big scale, it may offer something else. Beet Retreat heard many executives talk about its ability to help cap the frequency with which viewers see a TV ad…
Frank Sinton, President & Founder, Beachfront Media:
“Connected TV but it hasn’t hit that 50% (penetration) mark yet. So we’re more like 10 or 15% penetration at this point. (In) connected TV, in particular, frequency (of ad exposure) is something that we’re looking really closely at.”
But the panel heard that using addressable TV to reach large audiences is possible. Two companies that have spent the last few years building out a patchwork of advertiser delivery opportunities, in very different ways, weighed in…
Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid:
Right now Innovid is 75 million households through nine different streaming devices across 1,000 different apps that are capable of delivering an interactive OTT ad. So the capacity is there. The systems and structure that we’ve talked about today is lagging that a bit. But we are continuing to focus on the largest potential audiences that can be lit up to be able to bring this reality to market.
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“One of the things that we’ve built over the last couple years is this local owned-and-operated station group opportunity which is, going back to we’re in 35 million homes, one out of every three TV homes, so we work with almost all the large station groups.”
Connected TV isn’t just about what happens on the TV. In a multi-touch consumer ecosystem, if you can track viewership and link it to outcomes like visitation and brand CRM data, you have the capacity to deploy sophisticated attribution that can prove the real value of connected TV exposure…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“We’re literally enabling them to prove that their local TV ads are actually driving to the website or actually driving to the store. We’re able to do that because we are literally bringing live placeIQ data and matching it against our IP and IDs. So, ‘Wou’ve seen the ad for the F150, did you go to the dealership?’ ‘Did you see the ad for Taco Bell, did you go to Taco Bell or to the website for TD Ameritrade?’We literally get live information.”
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.
]]>But the local market doesn’t have to be left on the sidelines, says one ad-tech provider.
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on TV-viewing cues. It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Alphonso chief product officer Chaitanya Upadhyay says that can lead to two benefits at the local level, too.
Planning: “To know what ads are playing at what point and on what networks. This allows us to give to the local broadcasters stations a tool in which they can compare how a local advertiser’s doing on their network compared to other networks.”
Attribution: “Until now, we were looking at attribution on a national level, someone exposed to a national ad walking into a store that’s nationally known. But … local mom-and-pop shops, local advertisers such as pest control and home services … they’re advertising on these local broadcasters. We want to be able to measure attribution for them. How can we do it? With our viewership data, knowing who’s being exposed to these local advertisers, what is the (conversion) for the local advertiser in visiting the website, or visiting the location.”
]]>Dentsu Aegis has gone full throttle on its custom platform, M1, the most recent data integration being with IRI. As announced early last month, M1 will now allow custom audience creation utilizing IRI Verified Audiences and/or IRI ProScores audiences linked to first- and/or third-party data.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Laurenzo explains why he is bullish on current and emerging data sources like automatic content recognition.
“Audience buying is definitely where we want to get to as an industry. Anybody you speak to on both sides of the desk would probably say our reliance on age and gender demographics for transactional purposes is really outdated,” Laurenzo says. “We have all this data that can tell us who’s watching what content, why can’t we transact on those more granular targets?”
Agencies are still “very much held accountable” to segments like adults 18-49 and the price at which they can transact for gross rating points. “It’s ‘as long as you get me this price on this demographic then you’re doing okay’ versus I want you to buy the audience that we need to hit and then if that audience then goes and makes some sort of action.”
Laurenzo says there’s no shortage of audience-based television advertising inventory in the marketplace. “Every network group has their own audience-based platforms that we can leverage and they’re making a lot of inventory available through those platforms.”
The question is what’s the right data to use and when would you use it, according to Laurenzo.
“There are a lot of partners now with ACR technology and I think that’s great,” he says, citing Vizio, Samsung, Samba and Alphonso. “It’s really changing the game in terms of measurement.”
He cautions that despite the plethora of data available, “It’s muddy. Not all the data’s perfect. You have to really go through the methodology of how they’re collecting everything. But I’m actually bullish on the data marketplace.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Within OpenAP, Nielsen and comScore are “locked in,” Ruby says in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “We’ve got their MRI fusion datasets, Catalina datasets, the MBI datasets all coming through. With comScore, we’ve got all of their syndicated datasets. So we feel like we’ve kind of got the right breadth of what is an industry standard could be within OpenAP today.”
What gets “really exciting,” according to Ruby, is being able to move beyond the traditional measurement providers. Options include set-top VOD data, “into more of the MVPD data that we can actually be leveraging, more specifically the IP connected data” along with data from smart TV’s.
“Really what it comes down to is we want to enable as many of these datasets as we can so that we can bring them all to an open playing field and then let brands and agencies determine where they’re going to see the most value,” Ruby says.
And then there is the promise of linear addressable, a key piece of the cross-platform puzzle. “We’ve managed to be able to really corner it with Hulu, we’re looking at Comcast set-top box VOD and really making inroads there. But more importantly, we’re starting to think about what we can do in the live, linear space and how we can actually start looking at ad versioning and addressable copy splitting in live linear.”
IP-delivered streaming content poses the potential for one-to-one relationships between brands and viewers. But it gets pretty complex with broadcast TV and in a primetime broadcast environment, according to Ruby.
“And I don’t think that’s a future that we’re going to see immediately, but it is one that we’re starting to really understand how the technology comes together.”
Audience targeting tends to be “bespoke” on a vertical-by-vertical category basis, with automotive in particular having a longer “tail to purchase” than others. “People aren’t necessarily going to see a couple of ads for a new SUV on TV and then immediately go and buy one,” says Ruby. “They actually need to be identified as in market and not just in market but likely to convert in market and even within that, there’s a much longer tail that you want to look at for performance.”
Fox is working with auto brands to figure out how to construct campaigns over time while monitoring both the performance of an individual campaign for a awareness of a new sedan model “as well as any particular behaviors of driving greater traffic into dealerships, all the way through to eventually a new lease or a new purchase.”
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.
]]>Former Starcom MediaVest Group advanced television specialist Tracey Scheppach has a foot in both of those spheres as CEO & Co-Founder of her agency, Matter More Media. Scheppach helps new advanced-TV technology providers while doing direct brand activation based on CRM and other data.
In this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018 conference, Scheppach refers to research presented by Forrester analyst Jim Nail showing that 15% of brand-side executives have executed addressable TV campaigns. “If you look at the law of adoption, we’re at the tipping point,” Scheppach says, echoing Nail’s conclusion.
However, the addressable TV work that’s been done so far has been derived from household address files. “Being at a digital conference with LiveRamp, the question is how can you bring digital data to household level addressable television. Which is hard because so far it’s built off a street address file versus an IP or cookie file or a device ID,” she says.
Scheppach points to emerging IP-based technology, noting that companies like Sinclair and Sorenson are pursuing dynamic ad insertion to smart TV sets. Then there is the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard for over-the-air broadcast TV.
With ATSC 3.0, transmission will be “IP-based, completely mobile, always on, census-level data, full addressability, which is going to open up more and more inventory to be addressable,” Scheppach says.
Since starting Matter More Media and being on the “front lines” with clients, Scheppach has a closer view of the impact of agency holding companies having separated their creative assets from their media operations. This can be a stumbling block to perfecting, executing and tracking the four elements of successful addressable TV campaigns: the idea, its production values, media channel selection and analytics, according to Scheppach.
“All four pieces work together, all four pieces should be at the table together, not in separate siloes not ever to meet. You just can’t throw the creative over the wall to the media people and just have them execute,” she says.
In its sell-side consulting work, the agency helps people “trying to bring product to market, like a Sinclair, like programmers. They have to figure out how to structure the technology and pitch it to clients.”
In the agency’s direct activation for clients, Scheppach is pursuing “anyone that has a CRM file. I think catalogers are just a natural fit.”
She thinks addressable can help marketers for whom the expense of traditional TV has been a barrier. Some brands with catalogs or direct-mail campaigns are trying to figure out “how do I make it more accountable? How do I make it more storytelling? How do I build my brand out of it? And sight sound and motion is going to do that better than paper.”
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.
]]>“I think we have to back up from that. What we’re really doing is talking about the integration of mass reach with sophistication of measurement, targeting and ultimately relevance,” says the Managing Director of strategic advisory firm MediaLink.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the RampUp 2018 conference, Spiegel talks about the “next wave” in identity resolution and why marketers should recognize the value of a blend of more granular targeting and pure scale.
“Identity is going to power the ad business and marketing, however you want to define it,” says Spiegel. “Identity is the underpinning of future success without any question.”
He observes that the gap between companies like Facebook and Google and big media companies in being able to more precisely target audiences is shrinking as the latter expand their digital footprints and seek better linear TV options. “You now have this whole more sophisticated level of targeting and measurement that the industry on the more traditional media side couldn’t have before.”
All the distribution points of content “built into that ecosystem is the power of identity, the potential of identity anyway, if they stitch it together the right data,” says Spiegel. That connected to “this massive world of linear television, which by the way is still really big and still a lot of money and still has a lot of value, those two things combined I think are huge.”
The trick, he adds, is understanding identity with sophistication. On-boarding data and employing device graphs is all well and good, but the hardest part is matching individuals to their households.
“We’ll keep talking about matching and on-boarding, and there’s value. But what we’ll really start to talk about is the applications built on top of a sophisticated identity resolution system. That’s what I think’s much more interesting.”
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.
]]>Over the course of many months, brands like Procter & Gamble “have really asked that we as an industry start being more introspective about what we’re actually providing,” Feigenson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “And I think what we’re seeing as a result of that is a group of companies that are spending more time making sure that their products are actually what they say they are.”
What are the end results? “That’s healthy for everybody. It’s going to grow digital, it’s going to grow use of data,” says Feigenson.
He observes that there are different uses for data—citing the top and bottom of the funnel—but that the industry has become “so obsessed with the tactics of media” that good brand strategy may have taken a back seat.
“Bad brand strategy won’t yield a result, good strategy will,” Feigenson says.
We’ve moved to a world where “we look at individual campaigns and those individual campaigns are used as a proxy for other strategies on or off. That translates into data as well.”
While large, deterministic datasets may be great for targeting, they’re not necessarily representative to a whole market analysis, according to Feigenson. He believes that more companies that have first-party data or rent large, third-party datasets “are going to calibrate that against panels to get a very holistic view of their consumer.”
Until recently, Simmons data were used to help plan media in a linear capacity. “We’re excited that after 60 years we finally realized that programmatic and we’ve on-boarded our segments through Acxiom and LiveRamp to be used in programmatic exchanges.”
The company’s game plan encompasses better technology plus “bigger and faster data.” The goal at the end of the day “is to get anybody to a game changing consumer insight about an audience quicker than they can get a cup of Starbucks coffee.”
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.
]]>But, when it comes to insights in to advanced TV advertising, one company is now bringing capabilities to Europe that it says have existed in the US for years.
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on TV-viewing cues. It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes. That underlying technology is now going global.
“What’s starting to happen now is, beyond U.S., some of these integrations are rolling out in some of the European countries, and it is a phenomenal new dataset unleashed in that market,” says Ashish Chordia, Alphonso CEO. “What was happening in the U.S. in 2014, 2015, is now going to happen in some of the European countries.”
Alphonso last year launched Insights, an offering giving in to the airings, spend and exposure for US TV ads. It can tell you, for instance, where Amazon has been spending its money to advertise its Echo speaker’s multi-room audio capability.
The global spread of the chips and tech that support Alphonso’s content monitoring means Insights, too, can go global.
“We are starting out with the UK first,” Chordia says. “We just released our Insights product in private beta couple of weeks ago for select set of partners. We anticipate that will be publicly available within the next 90 days.
“What that means is, for the first time in the history of United Kingdom, there will be a place where someone can go, insights-uk.alphonso.tv, and see every single ad that are on local broadcast or cable, whether they’re running on Sky, or Channel 5, or Channel 6, or Channel 4.
“They’re going to be able to see digital-quality insights, just like we do in the US now for UK ads available in UK.”
If the idea that their TV could be listening or watching for their viewing habits, reporting it back to tech companies and advertisers, is enough to spook some viewers in parts of Europe, Chordia says his practice is above-board.
“Because Alphonso is on the consumer device, has a consumer touch point, we’re actually in a much stronger position than most data companies, in that being able to collect the consent from the consumer in the right fashion,” he says.
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.
]]>The EVP of Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales at NBCU talks about taking an agnostic approach to more advanced audience targeting and why the Super Bowl and Olympics made for an “amazing” February in this interview with Beet.TV.
Providing a better experience for viewers and advertisers isn’t just about reducing the number of ads. “It’s making the ads work harder,” Rosen says during a break at RampUp 2018, the annual conference by LiveRamp. Using information about contextual targeting is one way that data can better inform relevance of advertising to specific programs.
“All that together should make for a better user experience for our customer, the viewer, and also therefore make the advertising work even better.”
He says advanced TV “keeps getting better and better” as more marketers build out their own data sets. By “plugging into our world of Comcast set-top box data” and privacy compliant identity matching, they are able to transcend “the general lowest common denominator of age and gender.”
So while TV still provides much-desired magnitude, “now it’s about mass targeted reach. So you still have scale, you still have premium brand safety content, but now we can apply data, which means that every dollar is working harder,” Rosen says.
He describes audience-targeting options at NBCU—on a managed-service approach or self-service—as making it agnostic when it comes to the preferences of agencies and brands.
“It’s not programmatic in the way that digital thinks of it, because the connotation there is that it’s remnant or bottom of the waterfall,” Rosen says. “In our case it’s all of our quality inventory across all of our scripted and non-scripted programming that is available for the decisions to be made at the program level across our portfolio.”
February was “an amazing” month for NBCU with the Super Bowl and Olympics. “There is nothing more powerful to unite the country as these sports events and the great storytelling behind it.”
Starting with the 2016 Olympics in Rio “we moved toward looking at total audience delivery as a recognition that yes, so much happens on that main linear screen, but so much of the viewing of this content is happening on every device that this content is available on.”
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.
]]>“So that’s been very successful and we have a large population of TV viewership data, beyond just from the TiVo devices but where we have software embedded across providers and even beyond that,” Horstman says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent RampUp 2018 conference by LiveRamp.
TiVo just announced that it’s reached two million active matched households across all DMA’s “and that number is growing quite rapidly.” The company’s goal is to reach three million “very shortly and then throughout the year scaling up to five to seven million plus,” Horstman says.
“The company TiVo today is much bigger than TiVo the device and that’s part of the story that we’re taking to market.”
He stresses that TiVo has unfettered rights to use the TV viewership data in matching with multiple datasets so that it can “understand the science of what is changing consumer behavior when a household is exposed to a TV campaign, and that is very exciting.”
All personally identifiable information about TV viewers is removed before it reaches TiVo, according to Horstman. Identifiers appended to the TV dataset can be matched across the advertising ecosystem for first- and third-party data.
In the wake of its launching the Targeted Audience Delivery platform, which sits atop all of the company’s TV data, TiVo has been meeting with agencies and advertisers about providing deterministic, exposed households to a specific TV campaign.
“What’s exciting about this is we can go to a brand and say ‘bring your first party data into a safe haven like LiveRamp match it to our TV viewership data.’ We can then run that against the campaign that you just did in the last quarter and then provide you the exact households that were exposed an unexposed to your TV campaign.”
Besides revealing whether TV ad exposure drove incremental activity through an existing customer group, brands can then use those segments to activate those same households “in any kind of digital, mobile or connected-TV activation as well,” Horstman says.
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.
]]>“There’s a lot of untapped opportunity in TV,” says LiveRamp Co-CEO Anneka Gupta. “It’s not very measureable.”
The IdentityLink extension was announced to coincide with RampUp 2018, the LiveRamp conference that attracted nearly 3,000 attendees in its six year of existence–up from 300 at the beginning.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Gupta talks about the industry changes that need to take place to free up more TV ad time for addressable campaigns and why it’s a win-win for different kinds of companies to exchange second-party data.
While LiveRamp and its parent company Acxiom have offered some TV solutions in the past couple of years, extending IdentityLink to TV is about “greater innovation and investment in the TV space. We now have a much larger dedicated group focused on this area,” says Gupta. IdentityLink for TV connects customer-based identities across channels by linking advertiser data with trusted third-party and TV viewership data.
LiveRamp is working to automate some of its existing addressable TV capabilities to make it easier for marketers to run such campaigns. It’s also looking beyond address to the broader TV market, including linear and OTT, “trying to work with the entire industry to make TV solutions and make TV advertising a lot more measureable and a lot more addressable.”
Gupta discusses working with MVPD’s to help brands target specific households with TV ads, for example retailers that want to reach consumers who have made purchases from them in the past six months.
“We can now take that audience of people, map it to the subscribers for each of these MVPD’s and actually run targeted ads to specific households that have those members of the audience in it,” Gupta explains. Instead of generic product messages, targeted viewers see ads “very specific to them and actually related to their experience and relationship with that brand already.”
She believes the industry must undergo an evolution encompassing technology, business organization structures, and business development relations that need to be spawned to open up more addressable beyond the two minutes of local time allotted to most MVPD’s.
“It’s not going to be just a twelve-month journey. It’s going to be a multi-year journey that we’re on together,” Gupta says.
LiveRamp would like to widen the participation of companies in the exchanging of second-party data to drive value for their respective businesses. “It can be a real win-win when you bring together complementary data sets to influence consumer interaction and make more personalized experiences,” Gupta says.
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.
]]>“They want to see that every minute of the day, every hour of the day, every day of the week. That’s really where I see a difference between how we’re working today and just a few years ago.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Data Summit, Alphonso’s SVP, Research talks about attribution in three phases: pre, during and post ad exposure.
On the pre side, it’s pretty much the way brands have used consumer databases like MRI or Simmons to help advise media and audience selection, according to Kelly. “We can do that directly with brands and their agency partners where we’re taking their CRM data, their first-party data, and creating an audience.”
One example could be an insurance company with homeowner policies coming up for renewal in the next 90 days wanting to know the media behavior of those policy holders. By matching data in a non-personally identifiable manner, Alphonso can provide “a complete analysis of the content they consume. Networks, programs, dayparts, frequency of viewership, that sort of thing.”
The “during” attribution phase involves “what we see in real time.” Exposure activity and the response to it inform whether a particular campaign is working and whether adjustments need to be made. On the post side, “that’s where the performance numbers come in for attribution.”
Alphonso’s biggest data set is its automatic content recognition footprint in 34 million households—roughly one out of four TV households. On the “ingestion” side, it “watches” 200-plus live national networks in some 10 DMA’s. Knowing what households are watching constitutes the “exposure” side and a match is done.
“From there we can understand audience size, ad interaction, and then connect that to all the other types of attribution that are possible,” Kelly says.
The company’s SDK resides not only within TV sets but also connected-TV devices and more than 1,000 apps in the United States. “Every few microseconds on the app side we’re tapping the microphone to see whether or not we recognize what’s on the TV. It’s about understanding what’s on the TV. We’re not listening to peoples’ conversations.”
This video was produced at the 4A’s Data Summit in New York. Please find other videos produced at the conference here.
]]>These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.
Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:
“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”
Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:
“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”
Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:
“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”
Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.
To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”
Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>To hear panelists at the recent Beet Retreat Miami explain it, lunar landings might be easier to achieve than getting TV broadcasters en masse to quickly embrace the future.
Asked by moderator Ashley J. Swartz to explain the implications of ATSC3.0, Rob Weisbord, who was recently named Chief Revenue Officer of Sinclair Digital Group, stepped up to the dais from the audience and said, “It’s taking IP technology, layering it over the linear transmitter so it gives you a hybrid approach. It puts broadcasters into a bit business.”
While that sounds exciting, reality quickly set in. Mike Kubin, EVP, Media at Invidi, explained how his company began working in 2003 with distributors to get its software into digital set-top boxes.
“It took us forever to make that happen,” Kubin said. “Right now we are in five terrific distributors in the United States. Our goals are to go international, but there’s only so much we can do. At the end of the day, they tell us what we can do or what we can’t do.”
SintecMedia CEO Lorne Brown cited a “future of TV survey” his company did in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters in which just 30% of respondents said they were ready for advanced TV. “Of those 30 percent, 60 percent said they were going to rely on legacy, in-house, home-grown technology to deliver advanced TV,” said Brown. “So only 30 percent are ready and 60 percent believe they can pull it off with the stuff that they have in house. I think that’s a major problem.”
Said Swartz: “All I’m hearing is more increased complexity.”
Jennifer Koester, Director of Global Partnerships for Google, took a positive approach. “I think the dichotomy that we keep talking about between linear and digital, it’s going away. I think we need to kind of step back from that and talk about solutions and technology that bridges the gap.”
She listed among the industry’s needs simplifying the ecosystem, making cross-screen reach and frequency easier, plus driving more value and being able to show it with regard to premium video inventory. That led to this exchange:
Koester: “The shift is going to happen and when it does, I think it’s going to happen very quickly.”
Brown: “I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a slow, painful…”
Koester: “I think we’re in the slow painful part right now.”
Brown: “I think even ATSC3.0…”
Koester: “That’s going to be slow.”
Brown: “And so how fast can Comcast roll out addressable boxes? All of this is really, really slow.”
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development for Videology, explained the complexity involved in trying to “be nimble” when dealing with integrations with systems for order entry, decisioning, trafficking, billing and CRM systems. While noting that media companies leverage Videology’s software to optimize the planning of data against media, it’s not always used for programmatic transactions.
“As an example, we just landed the press about Fox, a great partner client of ours, they use it for direct sales. They’re not using it in a programmatic fashion,” said Yi.
Swartz related a recent visit to a broadcaster to discuss a solution from her Furious Corp., only to experience a “not made here mentality.” She concluded that the meeting was a waste of time.
Brown summed up the differences between programmers and operators. “If I’m a national programmer, my strategy has to come from legacy linear outward. Versus if I’m an operator I can lean much more into advanced TV and impressions because I control the pipes and I have the data. Legacy linear for a national programmer is foundational and that’s really, really hard.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.
They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:
“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”
Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”
Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”
More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.
Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”
Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.
“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”
These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.
Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.
“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”
TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.
“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”
This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”
Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.
“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.
The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.
Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.
“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.
Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:
“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”
Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”
Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.
Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”
Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”
Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:
“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.
“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>The CEO of linear TV and video yield optimization provider Furious Corp. probed the panelists for their thoughts on how bring together all the players that are required to advance the TV and video ecosystem in a way that benefits brands and consumers.
What follows are some of the more salient dialogue and exchanges from Brian Katz, VP of Advanced TV Insights & Strategy at Eyeview; Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer at Alphonso; Tore Tellefsen, VP of TV Solutions at dataxu; and Neil Smith, SVP, Markets at FreeWheel.
On the need for speed of data delivery:
Alphonso has an always-on, real-time index of every program and ad airing across over 200 broadcast and cable networks and major OTT services, so buyers can see the number of units plus reach and frequency for their clients and competitors. “You don’t have to wait six months any more or six weeks anymore. You can get that in real time. And that’s something that TV buyers have never had before. In real time. Speed is key,” said Gall.
On the need for speed in personalized creative:
“We’ve made the process very simple for our clients,” said Katz. “We don’t show every single creative to the creative team. We storyboard the process with their ads, we show where we’re going to come into play with various creative and then we activate it.”
Asked by Swartz whether all clients are so trusting, Katz explained, “It’s not all marketers, all brands. And that is the challenge for us to educate and to develop that trust with clients and marketers.”
How does one get people who are very comfortable with traditional TV media to embrace more data-driven decisioning? “The short answer is patience and repetition,” said Tellefsen. “What we try to focus on or try to push and emphasize is get as many people to the table as possible and not focus on sort of specific point solutions or specific capabilities but spending a lot of time talking about the art of the possible. Here’s how other people are employing it.”
Said Smith: “We want to bridge that gap between marketers and consumers. We consciously work across the value chain. We do tons of education and advocacy to brands, agencies, agency trading desks, buy-side technology companies, data companies.”
Asked how much of an influence fear has on peoples’ ability to change, Katz responded, “I haven’t seen any fear out there. I think it’s just a lack of education and the unknown that people fear and maybe the way certain businesses are set up sort of the fear of losing certain budgets or influence over decision making.”
Will vertical tech stacks become horizontal ones in the desire for a more unified TV and video ecosystem?
“Right now in the TV to mobile targeting business or the attribution business it’s still probably in the innovation or early adoption phase of our industry and we have to really work together,” said Gall.
So is it the gradual consolidation of the largest media companies that will bring the tipping point to the industry or the power of advertisers to demand faster change? “What is going to have a greater influence on us thriving and not just surviving for scraps as an industry through the current storm that we’re in,” asked Swartz.
Katz: “I think it’s a combination of consolidation and collaboration.”
Tellefsen, speaking about the impact of companies like Amazon and Netflix, called those digital upstarts “tremendous competitors and tremendous forces in the industry. And it’s forcing everyone in this room to rethink how they do business, who they do business with and how they’re going to remain relevant to brands and advertisers for the future.”
Smith: “I think it’s the ability to put all the pieces together to deliver that that’s been the challenge that we’re working through. I think that gets a lot easier when you have consolidation and you have a critical mass to bring those solutions to market in ways that they can connect together and actually work.”
And on the need for greater collaboration: “I think the marketers are demanding it,” said Gall. “Within three years if you don’t deliver it, you’re dead. So I really think they’re pushing the piece.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Some thinking holds that video is video, regardless of the platform, as sellers are more frequently combining video and TV “and selling them as one type of advertising,” says Joan Fitzgerald, a consultant who specializes in advanced TV and cross-platform data.
“But the reality is, I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of this convergence between linear television and digital video,” Fitzgerald adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
One reason for the remaining distance is that consumer experiences “are fundamentally different” depending on how they are consuming TV/video.
Fitzgerald, whose background includes stints at Arbitron, comScore and TiVo, cites Fox’s experimentation with six-second ad units in the industry’s quest for greater understanding of the value of unit lengths.
“The reality is, you can’t just simply say that a six-second spot is worth less than a fifteen or a thirty because it’s shorter. There are many more dynamics in play from the consumer experience,” says Fitzgerald.
Meanwhile, impression metrics still reign supreme, even though advances are being made to link exposure to advertiser business outcomes. The key is being able to place a tangible value on viewer attention.
“We haven’t yet as an industry gotten beyond this notion of opportunity to see and an impression as a metric to something that might be more meaningful to the marketer,” says Fitzgerald.
Asked about video completion rates as a barometer of viewer attention, she says there’s “really a question as to how often a completion actually occurs on a fifteen or a thirty or a sixty just because the measurement tools that we’ve traditionally used really don’t measure that granularity. There are companies trying to measure completion rates, but it’s an art and not a science at this point.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Citing the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report for the second quarter of 2017, combined OTT, connected-TV device and set-top box VOD represented 49% of consumption in its ad management platform, says Neil Smith, SVP, FreeWheel Markets.
“It’s really shifted to the actual television screen,” Smith says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
It’s been about a year since FreeWheel and StickyADS.tv came together via acquisition. One of the biggest yields has been a unified solution for publishers that have traditionally sold most of their inventory through direct-sale insertion orders.
Now, having added a programmatic sales channel facilitates “a unified ad decision against any demand that publisher has access to,” says Smith.
As a result, there’s more unification of sales efforts as digital and linear work together. FreeWheel is seeing “a much bigger appetite and focus on programmatic guaranteed deals.” Switching from paper insertion order deals into programmatic pipes “but still fixed price guaranteed,” is how Smith explains it.
Being able to safely deliver programmatic executions in premium environments has led to more opportunities for sellers and buyers.
“We have a number of publishers that have major live sporting events and they’re now starting to use programmatic monetization in those events,” says Smith. “And the reality is it’s a great use case for it.”
For example, if a game goes into overtime, if a series runs to a seventh game, the ability exists to “tap into that impression by impression demand in a way that’s safe and doesn’t disrupt the user experience or cause sales channel conflict with direct-sold ads.”
One of FreeWheel’s main priorities has been extending the programmatic solutions it’s long offered for desktop, mobile, OTT and set-top box VOD into the traditional linear TV realm.
“We’ve got a good idea of what brands and markets are looking for as we move in the next generation of premium video and television. It’s really now a matter of execution,” says Smith.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>The Chief Revenue Officer of Eyeview says the desire for more predictability involves helping marketers figure out how various inputs—among them audience, calibration, media and creative—actually drive business outcomes.
“I think you’re going to hear a lot that brand advertisers want greater accountability, to manage that entire thing and how to be more predictable. To get performance and manage all of the variables,” Baadsgaard says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018.
Knowing the role that video plays in reaching consumers emotionally and rationally, Eyeview has “done some subtle changes to personalize and make that creative resonate,” including overlays, in-cards and maps, with “huge” results. That lead to this question: If small changes have huge results, what about big changes?
“We believe it’s changing the edit, in a brand friendly manner. Taking B-roll and other footage and editing it specifically to resonate with consumers,” Baadsgaard says.
One example would be touting the tech chops of an automobile in videos viewed by tech enthusiasts and promoting that same car’s eco-friendliness to viewers known to be eco-oriented. Eyeview calls it advanced storytelling.
“You can have a great brand message, you can have pieces that speak to the features that are going to resonate with the consumer and you can have your overlays and in-cards,” says Baadsgaard.
The fastest-growing part of Eyeview’s business is addressable television, and one of its more popular offerings is an integrated digital video and addressable TV campaign. Among other attributes, this solution provides scale that addressable TV alone typically lacks.
The company derives learnings about creative iterations from the digital video campaign side and then applies that creative “weekly to the addressable TV campaigns that we’re running.”
Baadsgaard believes that some measures have been successful in curtailing digital ad fraud but it’s still “a huge problem. It’s essentially theft and it’s a real issue for our clients. We spend a lot of time eliminating fraud. We have a zero tolerance belief structure around that.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>With over-the-top and set-top box viewing at about 50%, the big TV screen still accounts for four out of five hours daily. But shifting viewing habits pose challenges for buyers and marketers, according to Herve Brunet, GM, FreeWheel Markets.
“We still plan in a very siloed fashion,” Brunet says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have planning processes for TV and planning processes for digital video.”
A single inventory pool would make things a lot easier.
“You can do things like de-duplicated reach, you can do frequency capping across linear TV and digital devices,” Brunet says.
A typical example would be someone watching a program on linear TV who can then be targeted with ads on an OTT device, which is connected to the same TV set.
“And we actually know that we’ve been targeting you twice. One time in a linear fashion and one time in an OTT fashion. So that’s a real value for the marketer.”
On the matter of currencies, transacting on a mix of gross rating points and impressions holds back progress in unifying inventory pools.
“As the TV world evolves more toward like digital decisioning, it’s going to evolve into an impression-based world. It’s going to be easier to unify the currency towards probably an impression-based currency or unit-based currency,” Brunet adds.
Asked about the evolution of the Comcast Advanced Advertising group, which includes FreeWheel, Brunet talks about helping to transform linear TV and digital video into one industry.
“I think the only way to make this industry work is look at the entire value chain, from the viewer to the marketer. And I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to address as a group.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are moving from “conversations about how the TV industry is evolving to action in the TV industry,” O’Connell explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
“It’s a massive industry. It was been very, very slow to change. And I think it’s still moving relatively slowly in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the energy this time feels meaningful, as though we are graduating to action.”
Because of her grasp of the complicated adtech ecosystem, it’s easy for her to boil things down when the issue is consolidation of players. She notes that some companies are interested in owning the full technology stack, “everything from data management and analytics and data as an asset” through to execution.
Then there are “the other set of companies who, at least so far, seem less interested in getting into the execution game. When you look at consolidation, to me that’s the most interesting dynamic,” O’Connell says.
The bottom line: will execution inevitably become “part of these massive clouds? It sort of feels like it will. And yet if you ask them, some of them deliberately take a stance that it won’t.”
While she appreciates the efforts of media companies like NBCUniversal to accelerate the shift from buying demos to audiences, O’Connell believes that things can only progress so quickly. There’s a lot of inertia in basic business dynamics.
For example, the traditional, procurement-driven practice of “getting CPM’s lower than the CPM’s that the agency achieved the prior year. Which is insane. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a crazy model.” A model of “rewarding efficiency and effectiveness needs to become more of the norm,” she adds.
Asked whether Netflix will go the ad-supported route, O’Connell evokes the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma. Are consumers demanding ad-free services like Netflix, or is the company driving change that consumers embrace?
Either way, Netflix has made some companies up their game, according to O’Connell.
“So when we are in an ad-supported model, it’s one that consumers don’t hate but actually find valuable. Let alone not annoying, can you imagine if they actually found it valuable?”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
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