This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
We have already seen the annual upfront TV ad sales season delayed, and a new call for a further delay plus significant reform, as advertisers and agencies grapple with the realities of limited spending visibility and a poorer content roster.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Cara Lewis, EVP for video investment at Amplifi USA, the innovation and investment arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, says, at a time of adaptability, she is searching for change.
“We need flexibility and we need that more than ever because there’s so many still unknowns,” Lewis says.
“We want to get the best pricing obviously, but we also want to get the best content.
“Content being so unknown and sports (programming) being so unknown, it’s definitely on top of mind … clients have to have the flexibility and they want to have the time to be able to make these really large decisions.
“If we can’t advertise, then the networks don’t have our money if we are in a client in the future.”
The traditional TV UpFronts events have been cancelled or have gone virtual. Negotiating in this climate has proven challenging to the nation’s marketers as they assess TV ad investment.
Now the ANA, representing ad buyers, has demanded upfront sales, which were due to be for ads airing between October 2020 and September 2021, should occur this fall for ads transmitting starting 2021.
Amid the turmoil, Amplifi’s Lewis sees brands leaning into personalization.
“We were on the phone with a couple of vendors this week, just talking about M1 and partnering together to get them in as a PAM (Publisher Addressable Marketplace) partner and I think we’re hearing from a couple that they’re more interested to do it now than ever,” she says.
She is talking about M1, Dentsu Aegis Network’s people-based identity and data platform, and its Publisher Addressable Marketplace, which provides insights on person-level marketing results through programmatic platforms.
Lewis is also seeking other changes in the way agencies engage with programmers.
“We would love to integrate into more content and not have it be costing millions of dollars to do so,” she says. “(For example), how can we partner when we’re giving you a car on set that costs our company money?
“And maybe that flexibility is within the actual partnership and within the actual parent company group, since there’s seven or eight big companies that own the majority of the impressions out there.
“But I think really being flexible, honest, trusted, and allowing us to not have to spend the same amount of money that we did pre-COVID, is very important.”
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
Amplifi is a unit of the Dentsu Aegis Network.
Companies have gotten better at using data to identify clients’ most valuable audiences, and it’s important they don’t lose perspective of where those ads should run. Instead, it’s crucial to holistically focus on finding the right people in the right place, which is where this mix of targeting tools and contextual marketing becomes all the more crucial.
“It is really critical that we bring those two things together so we think about contextual alignment matched up against audience definition when we’re placing our buys across all channels,” Law says.
In order for Amplifi to do this, the company utilizes the M1 tool in partnership with Merkle as well as other data platforms. But a big part of finding success is for data analytics companies to forge partnerships with media owners that have vast content libraries and use them to inform the most appropriate buys.
Law added that audience-based guarantees are increasingly becoming a bigger part of the picture, too, as the industry moves from demographics to audiences. Access to greater data has meant greater precision in reaching people, and this idea of reach is particularly important looking forward.
“Reach is a big story in today’s marketplace,” Law said. “To make sure that we’re using the data not just to think about audiences per se, but how do we think about audiences defined by light TV viewers as much as we’re thinking about audiences as those most likely to buy a car, those most likely to shop at a retail outlet, those most likely to make a purchase in a bar or a restaurant?”
For these reasons, Law argues that the industry needs to move away from legacy behaviors, and trend towards reaching people in real time to drive business outcomes.
In these particularly trying times, Law says that Amplifi has been working off of a framework but with a recognition that the current obstacles are unlike anything before. Their course of action is to gather as much information as possible and be in frequent communication with partners to gather an understanding of their current challenges.
“Right now, we’ve just been in a hyper-communicative state, trying to share as much as we can,” Law says. “Consistency of communication, transparency of communication, partnership, and making sure we’re sharing all we can and making the best decisions for each and every one of our clients to get through this.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Analysis from nScreenMedia suggests U.S. Netflix viewers, by substituting free viewing for subscription video-on-demand, are missing 2 billion ad views every day, totaling missing ad sales estimated at between $3 billion and $6 billion annually.
So what’s an ad buyer to do? The woman in charge of helping one major ad agency plan the future destination for billions of dollars says the industry wants to get better understanding.
Maggie Zhang, SVP on-linear video research and insights at Amplifi, the media investment arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, had this video interview with Beet.TV
In it, Zhang says: “In order to understand the audience shift from linear platforms to OTT-connected TV platforms, we need to drive further understanding of the audiences that are viewing ad-supported content on OTT platforms as well as the impact of SVOD, which is ad-free subscription-based OTT services, and the subscribers and also understand the impact of linear TV ratings as a result of the increasing amount of SVOD subscription.
“We have done a lot of analysis and internal research on these audiences and the impact on linear ratings. We are having more in-depth analysis of OTT ad-supported viewers as well as SVOD viewers on the OTT platforms. And potentially, the insight will be able to drive and inform at lot of our cross-platform video investment decisions.”
Earlier, eMarketer had forecast US TV ad spending would this year dip below the $70bn mark as audience viewing behavior shifts more and more toward OTT options, with the number of OTT viewers growing 2.7% to reach 198.6 million.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We’ve really been optimistic about the space,” says Law, who is EVP, Managing Director, US Media Investment, Amplifi (Dentsu Aegis Network). “I think the innovation and the technology the scale of the number of people we can hit and the improvement of data sources across the board has made addressable that much more viable on a media plan.”
In addition to more scale, there’s more data to provide understanding about consumer behavior and the best ways to target them, Law explains in this interview with Beet.TV. at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.
“And then on the back end, being able to understand did they actually follow through, make a purchase, go to a store, follow them throughout the full process,” Law adds.
Asked about the workload required for addressable TV, Law says it takes commitment and harnessing different resources. “I think you need to work with your analytics teams, you need to work with your clients very closely about what their goals are. So it is bringing a lot of people together on both sides.”
On the program distributor side, each vendor can represent a silo of sorts, so “it’s really our responsibility to bring that together to think about how can we maximize what we’re getting out of this.”
Part of the process is helping clients determine how addressability fits into their overall planning, given its utility in targeting specific households. “As we think about it, you have reach happening across the marketplace, but in traditional television and across other channels we’re really getting to the top of that reach curve very quickly now and then it’s frequency and we’re just kind of running rampant at the top of the reach curve.”
In moving TV into the lower part of the funnel, it’s less about brand awareness than it is getting closer to consumers—right now at the household level. Law describes a “one ad in one room versus in another room” approach “the ultimate dream, although we’re not quite there yet.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>But while there seems to be “a lot of innovation on the supply side,” unfortunately there’s “not as much as we would like in the traditional broadcast area,” Cridland says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We are always looking for good, quality inventory and the way to access it, and we’re trying to find a route to market that’s valuable, measurable and accountable for our clients.”
One desire among those clients is for better access to data from broadcasters, according to Cridland. He views a “big disconnect” between what Amplifi can obtain in alternative content environments for premium video with regard to “the data going in and the data coming out.”
That represents “a gap we’ve got to close in broadcast.”
On the issue of flexibility, he points to the traditional UpFront TV negotiating period as representing “an 18-month forward buy” that leaves little room for tactical maneuvering.
He finds addressable TV advertising at scale in broadcast “very exciting” even though it represents a small portion of client spending. Barriers to expansion include continuity across providers of addressable ad inventory.
To Cridland, addressable isn’t about making traditional metrics like CPM’s cheaper. “That’s not the end game in this environment. It’s about targeting and eliminating wastage difficult to do in a broadcast environment,” he says.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
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