“Our vision is to provide the best independent platform for agencies and for advertisers for omnichannel buying,” Anupam Gupta, chief product officer at Mediaocean said in this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. “We know that in order to traverse all these different ecosystems, you need consistency in different aspects of campaign management.”
The omnichannel universe has expanded to include over-the-top (OTT) services as more households connect their TVs directly to the internet. Streaming platforms like Hulu, Pluto TV, Peacock and Tubi are seeking a bigger slice of ad market, while social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have added more video programming to attract more media dollars from major advertisers.
“Converged TV, or as we’re calling it, ‘next-gen TV,’ is one our top priorities,” Gupta said. “No longer can you do TV or and OTT or addressable in different silos, especially given the pandemic. Consumer behavior is changing rapidly.”
Avoiding wasteful media spending among those channels requires data-driven insights into audiences. Mediaocean provides automated buying a selling of advertising inventory.
“You need to appropriately allocate the budget across those different channels using a lot of data science and machine learning and historical information,” Gupta said. “The way you buy TV is changing, but still is very different than real-time, option-based buying in some of the digital ecosystems.”
The company, whose roots go back to the 1960s with Donovan Systems, has been aggressive about buying software companies that CEO Bill Wise has described as “mini Mediaoceans” in other markets. The acquisitions include MBS and Symsys to expand into Europe, and PIN Systems and BCC AdSystems to push into the Asia-Pacific region.
You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.
]]>But how are advertisers adapting to the palette of options presented by OTT (over-the-top) and connected TV delivery?
In a panel called “Buy-Side Perspectives – The Big Asks” at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, four industry executives described how they see ad buyers adjusting:
Magna Global’s Anson said, when ad buyers make requests, “they don’t actually, they don’t know they’re asking for advanced TV”.
“First thing is, ‘I know I can get audiences, but I don’t really know how or why’,” she said.
“Second is OTT – they just know that there is a thing called OTT, they know they need to start spending there. And the number one thing that I get asked is, ‘What is the actual de-duplication between the offerings, between the Tubi, the Xumo, the Pluto? They may each have 20 million uniques per month, but how much of that is a crossover?’
“The third thing is probably putting it all together and that’s incremental reach. That is a big focus these days.”
DISH Media’s Sean Robertson said his company tries to clearly explain to ad buyers the over-the-top TV opportunity.
“The first thing is education and clarity in the marketplace about what offering should be utilised to solve what problems,” he said.
“When we enter the marketplace, we take a stance of ‘Let’s be very clear about what addressable is’.
“We talk about what OTT is and what our offering does and the skinny bundle versus the other competitors. We think that education in the marketplace helps us all. It truly is trying to raise all boats with the tide.”
Verizon Media’s Brett Hurwitz said ad buyers often “have a confused perception of what target they should really be using”.
“Fortunately, addressable television lets them kind of learn from their mistakes,” he said.
“For those that are really embracing it most fully, I think they’re looking to remove friction. They’re looking to bring down the walls and be able to have simplicity in the way that they’re achieving total reach.
“The process for (buying) a linear addressable (ad) is a lot more complicated than an ad in the traditional linear piece. And so I think we as an industry need to look toward simplification.”
The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?
Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.
But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?
A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…
Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:
“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.
“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”
Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.
Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”
From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.
“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”
The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:
“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.
“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.
“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”
But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”
Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:
“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.
“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”
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.
]]>“The theme for us continues to be to provide audience-driven solutions for marketers, where they can buy on an audience-basis inventory across linear TV, social video, over the top. Everything in one place,” says Chief Revenue Officer Anupam Gupta.
“One of the things that we hear from marketers again and again is the audience problems are getting solved,” he adds in this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018. “That’s pretty much in a good place now. But now they’re looking for more scale.”
4C’s most recent partnerships within linear TV are with a4, a unit of communications giant Altice, whose networks include A&E, CNN, The History Channel and Discovery, and AMC Networks’ MASS Exchange. 4C’s self-service platform facilitates live, real-time access to inventory avails in the scatter market and performance data, as well as audience-driven Upfront allocations.
“So that’s now integrated within 4C where you can start with an audience and you can add that to repertoire of NBCU inventory” that became available to 4C clients via a partnership crafted in 2017, Gupta says.
“Essentially what you’re seeing is more linear networks making their inventory available through the aggregator partnerships and platforms like that are integrating to provide more scale for marketers.”
On the TV-to-consumer side, 4C has new integrations with FreeWheel, SpotX and Telaria. “For us, it’s natural to add over-the-top inventory to our platform. I think the scale issue is being addressed through these collaborations and integrations.”
4C’s three priorities are giving marketers flexibility to use whatever data they wish, help them plan and buy across premium content and drive and measure business outcomes.
“Our goal is to stitch those three pieces together into one platform so that marketers can essentially make progress in the data driven world,” Gupta says.
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.
]]>“A lot of the conversations now are not such much about the promise of all the stuff we talk about. Data-driven, advanced TV, whatever. But it’s about how to practically make it happen,” he adds in this interview during a break at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City.
“And the challenges that people are facing who kind of said, ‘hey okay, I want to do this, now let’s roll it out to teams and what’s the process and how do you educate teams that have been doing it a certain way.’”
Asked by Beet.TV contributor Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal of Prohaska Consulting, to recap the progress of 4C, which was founded in 2011 under a different name to operate in the social media space, Gupta says it’s been a journey on disparate platforms.
“So we started out in paid social, we extended to TV, toward the ultimate dream that what marketers need is really one platform to do audience-driven, cross-channel marketing,” says Gupta. “That’s really kind of what we’ve been moving towards.”
What he’s seeing now in the market is that brands and agencies alike “absolutely get it. They know that these media need to work together. They know that it can’t just be silos.
“So they get it but we’re in the process of deploying it. People, process, technology. How all these need to work together.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>4C Insights calls it “enhanced audience targeting and analytics for premium channels including linear television, over-the-top (OTT) television, social, and digital media”.
Back in January, the ad intelligence company, whose Teletrax unit monitors 2,100 channels across 76 countries for both presence of program content and advertisements at the play-out end, announced it was plugging in data from Inscape, the division of TV manufacturer Vizio whose automatic content recognition (ACR) technology monitors the device end for actual viewer behavior.
What does the combination mean? Essentially, advertisers will be able to confirm not only that a certain ad or show has played out but also that a certain viewer has consumed it. In this video interview with Beet.TV, 4C chief product officer Anupam Gupta says advertisers will have two new benefits…
For Gupta, the announcement comes at the same time the opportunity within so-called “advanced TV” – with which advertisers can target individual viewers of connected video devices using more granular data – reaches a tipping point.
“Early adopters are moving toward the early majority,” he says. “We just saw some research from Forrester which said more than 50% of marketers are going to put advanced TV on their plans in 2018. Clients are deepening their usage.”
And amongst the most exciting newer trend lines Gupta sees is empowering marketers to use their own data for ad targeting.
Whilst TV ad targeting has historically been done on an age- and gender-targeted basis, advertisers are getting excited about bringing new, publicly-available datasets in to the digital TV targeting platforms now on offer.
But the ability to plug in data from their own customer databases – be it sales data, loyalty card data or more – could help advertisers both be more specific with TV spend and extend TV campaigns from TV to other digital devices when campaigns reach a maximum reach of known consumers, according to Gupta.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>As AdExchanger reported, on top of its Pivot advanced TV platform, Horizon is building a custom planning tool to marry behavioral, attitudinal and purchase data with viewership data.
4C Insights chief product officer Anupam Gupta explains how it works in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The core, it’s a software platform,” he says. “As an agency, as Horizon, you would log into that platform, you would define your target audiences. Different brands have different kinds of audiences they care about – some use my CRM data, my first-party data, use social data because it gives you real-time signals, use offline purchase data, or other things.
“There’s lots of different data types that have all been brought together in the 4C platforms. So, it makes it really easy to define a target audience that makes sense for a brand and to use that for linear TV, digital activation, social, etc.”
From 4C’s perspective, that data includes Nielsen TV viewing data, smart TV viewership data from 10 million US devices and offline attributes.
The company then connects that targeting data with a brand’s own customer data from its CRM records.
4C’s heritage was in enabling Twitter and Facebook ad buys. Nowadays, it also uses real-time broadcast network monitoring to help advertisers buy social ads in sync with their TV transmission.
This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>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.
]]>Media technology provider 4C Insights cut its teeth on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. As it shifts into the linear television space to enable more precise audience targeting, it’s an instance of TV “borrowing a plan from the digital playbook,” says Chief Product Officer Anupam Gupta.
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Gupta explains some of the more important learnings gained from the social media space and reflects on the company’s programmatic venture with NBCUniversal.
Given their advanced advertising infrastuctures, which enable granular audience targeting, the big social media platforms provide fast measurement for campaign optimization.
“Those are good and those are learnings that I think you can apply to, let’s say, the world of TV where you want to target better, you want to have more programmatic tools and you want to measure and optimize faster.”
Another learning is that the data in social media “is huge and it’s real-time,” providing brands with consumer insights that can be used to identify the kinds of consumers they want to target. “We call it the unlimited focus group,” says Gupta.
The third learning he cites is the huge reach of social media. “So when you’re doing a true cross-channel campaign and if you need to find more reach or more frequency, you can use social media as an additive channel let’s say to television.”
Asked about the industry’s quest for uniform cross-platform audience measurement, Gupta says the focus should be on business objectives. Some brands are after upper-funnel lift, others actual sales impact and yet others everything in between.
“At the end of the day yes, there is a strong desire to measure things, but to has to tie back to the objectives that a marketer has,” says Gupta.
In a deal announced in October, the 4C platform has programmatic access to NBCU inventory that isn’t sold in the Upfront.
“Now you can bring the audience intelligence to bear against that inventory, build a plan that essentially hits the audience you’re going after and execute on that just like you do digital campaigns,” Gupta says.
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.
]]>During a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016, Gupta explains the 4C product suite, which includes activation on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter as well as TV-synced ads across digital display, mobile, search, social and video.
“We have figured out, by looking at each and every platform that we’re integrated with, the right metrics and have the whole closed-loop optimization kind of built in,” he says in response to a question from moderator Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.
4C Insights doesn’t want to be known as just another data provider, according to Gupta. “For us, it’s about connecting data and activation. Those two things happen side by side,” Gupta says.
The company also provides advertising and content analytics leveraging its Teletrax global TV monitoring network and proprietary social affinity database.
Mixpo developed a modern enterprise cloud platform to help media companies, advertisers and agencies run advertising campaigns, with an emphasis on the proper creative elements. “I absolutely believe that as ad tech and marketing tech com together, and you think about what the challenges and opportunities are for marketers, targeting and creative go hand in hand,” Gupta says.
Asked whether there are specific winning formulas for specific social media platforms, Gupta says, “There are so many different things. Direct response campaigns. Direct mapping to conversion versus branding campaigns. There’s no one answer to that.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>4C Insights’ Anupam Gupta calls it “affinity targeting”, and he says the new technique could be powerful.
“So, if you think about what’s happening on social from each of us as a consumer, right, everything we do on social media, whether it’s a tweet, a post, a comment, a like… that is an active action, right?,” Gupta tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“So if you tap into that, right, there’s extremely rich data in an observed setting, right? Completely real data, real people, right, that you can kind of mine to get some real insights.”
Rated highly as an employer on Glassdoor, 4C Insights offers advertisers activations and analytics including ads delivered in social media that are linked to real-time TV play-out.
In September, the outfit took on a $26m Series C investment designed to fuel expansion across the world and in its product line-up – specifically, in the kind of affinity targeting delivery Gupta is talking about.
So what’s an example? Gupta explains: “Last year, we found that people who are following Santa Claus around a holiday timeframe, right, also had a very strong what we call ‘affinity’, right, you know, with a nicotine gum.
“Sometimes it comes up with extremely, you know, non-obvious, you know, kind of scenarios. You say, ‘Hey, listen, you know, people spending time with their kids and families are making a decision or trying to quit smoking at the time’.
“A marketer could take action very quickly on social media to run campaigns with the right creative etcetera to exactly those people who express this kind of behavior. The key here is combining signals, right, you know, from, let’s say. social media or other affinity sources.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matt Prohaska, CEO of Prohaska Consulting.
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