But, to make the opportunity truly soar, the new-look TV industry needs to work on harmonizing the way such ads are bought.
That is the view of Kristine Bayles, Vice President of Advanced Advertising Sales at AMC Networks.
In this video interview with Beet.TV senior adviser Jon Watts, Bayles sees the growth of addressable, which allows advertisers to target individual households, as familiar chaos.
“I was on the agency side with digital (advertising) was just starting to come up,” she recalls. “And it was truly the wild, wild west. There were no programmers that offered it the same from an operational standpoint. That was different, too. It was very confusing to buy. It was hard to understand there’s no checks and balances.
“The IAB came in, it brought everything together and really unified the industry to allow digital to scale. And I foresee the same thing happening with national addressable.”
Many conventional TV platforms have, in recent years, lit up addressable ad opportunities.
Alongside, apps and over-the-top (OTT) services are enabling connected TV (CTV) with digital-style TV ad opportunities.
AMC Networks launched its first national addressable campaign in late 2020. Now 30% of its linear viewership is addressable.
The prizes for advertisers include household targeting, frequency capping and digital-style measurement.
But Bayles thinks work is needed.
“We need to standardise and solve for measurement,” she says. “We need to figure out how to do holistic measurement and unified measurement with this.
“If they are standards, we’ll be able to scale addressable much quicker.”
Bayles draws a parallel with financial services, where the banking sector has a range of standardized practices for engaging with its customers.
“Every industry has standards,” she argues. “These standards are really just going to enable us to work with our clients and other programmers in a much more seamlessly seamless way.”
You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.
]]>On Evan Adlman’s holiday wishlist? Radically simpler infrastructure for selling addressable TV ads at national scale.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, AMC Networks’ senior vice president of advanced advertising and digital partnerships says the TV company is already enabling brands to do just that – but he hopes 2021 makes it easier.
I think next year is really (about) perfecting the technology that can bundle a lot of this together for us,” he says.
“Because, while we are delivering national addressable campaigns, there are still many different systems that we work with today and they all reach and provide the same capability – but they all operate a little bit differently.
“So coming up with a common standardisation or bundled way for us to traffic, those campaigns internally would be easier, I would say.”
Until now, it has mostly been offered by local cable operators, but growing capabilities from national operators are expanding the opportunity.
AMC, whose brands include AMC, IFC, Sundance TV and the British streamers BBC America and Acorn TV, is amongst them.
Adlman says AMC is enabling national-level addressable ad sales through pilots on two initiatives:
Adlman says the national approach is a big deal.
“Addressable advertising historically has been at the local level,” he explains. “We’ve been able to launch and deliver national addressable targeting on our linear channels.
“Now an advertiser doesn’t have to go to each individual endpoint to stitch together a national addressable campaign.
“They can come to AMC Networks and reach our entire footprint regardless of the platform that the consumer is engaging with the content.”
Even so, whilst things are getting easier for ad buyers, Adlman would still like it to become easier for networks to put the package together.
“It’s not easy, I’ll tell you that much,” he explains. “It’s important for us to figure out how to tie it all together. We’re kind of running a few different pilots today that cut across digital inventory and linear inventory.
“Our goal moving forward is stitching these products together to have a full addressable offering.”
A key part of enabling that will be SSPs, supply-side ad platforms that make it easier for such companies to offer up their ad inventory. Adlman says AMC uses several including SpotX and PubMatic.
“What we’re doing with SpotX today is supporting our IP-based addressable capabilities and trying to make that work within a programmatic marketplace,” he says.
In 2021, Adlman hopes industry agreement on measuring the channel will blossom.
You are watching “Addressable Advertising: A New Reality for Linear TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by SpotX. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re actually going through a huge change right now on the technology side,” says Robyn Goldman, Relationship Manager, AMC Networks. “We are looking for ways to consolidate our delivery process for our assets to make things more efficient, more streamlined.”
In addition to implementing Wide Orbit Program, AMC is working on a work order management system and a new automation system “that play very well together and are going to be highly integrated, so that our processes are more standardized, more automated, less risk and then we can get to the consumer faster,” Goldman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect Conference.
To achieve more fluidity on the sales side, AMC is using multiple WideOrbit products so as to combine linear and non-linear deals into one, according to Goldman.
“There are still some challenges with that because of the ability to track delivery for those deals and invoice those deals in a singular manager. But I think we’re moving toward that area where we can do things across the linear and non-linear platforms in a singular way.”
She recognizes the desire of buyers to execute a single buy across multiple platforms, but there need to be changes as well on the sell-side. That involves “being able to go to one person for a linear and non-linear deal and getting that done in one place as opposed to fracturing it.”
Asked about inventory offerings, on the linear side “things are pretty much status quo” with 15-, 30- and 60-second ads. “But being able to add in the digital platforms and being able to offer additional impressions on that level I think broadens the scope of what the buyers can achieve with their plans with AMC Networks,” Goldman says.
With media companies increasingly adding to the number of over-the-top platforms, and thereby consumer options, “To me it’s how are you providing content to the viewer that’s going to keep them tuning in to your content as opposed to somebody else’s.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>It can typically take several weeks for addressable linear TV campaigns to be created and activated, Catanzaro notes in this interview with Beet.TV. “The integration enables us to do an immediate activation. You can be live in half an hour. That’s really amazing.”
It’s all about reducing the barriers to entry for addressable so that more advertisers take advantage of its targeting and attribution aspects.
“These addressable TV campaigns used to be very manual. You have to use a significant budget to actually justify the amount of work,” says Catanzaro. “These days you can create a campaign for as little as you want, the campaign will go live and there is basically no humans in the loop.”
Embedded in TV sets, Sorenson’s technology can detect whatever is happening on the screen via automatic content recognition. From an advertising standpoint, everything happens in real-time, meaning buyers can start, stop or pause campaigns, or change target audiences, in seconds, as Sorenson’s Stefan Maris explains in this Beet.TV interview.
As it rolls out the Sorenson integration with agency partners, “We think this is going to help them activate much faster and be much more flexible. It also brings them control” in that campaign reporting doesn’t have to wait until the campaign ends. “Now you can actually start working on pacing, you can change pacing on the platform. You can also control frequency.”
Using dataxu’s cross-device targeting solutions, advertisers can allocate frequency by device and now include TV sets that have Sorenson’s technology. The company’s OneView identity and data management platform links consumers across all the devices they own while linking them to households.
“You’re linking that exposure to a commercial that may happen on a desktop or on a mobile device. Or actually somebody may walk by a store and can also connect those. And that happens organically.”
As the Wall Street Journal reports, AMC Networks signed on with Sorenson for targeted ads. Discovery Networks has been in pilot mode as well.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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