In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference, Muldoon says that after hearing talk about consumers, data, technology, reach, engagement and quality content “it’s really coming together more than it’s ever have before.”
Accordant became part of Amnet Group following Accordant’s 2016 acquisition by Dentsu Aegis Group. Amnet is Dentsu Aegis’s global programmatic unit.
Muldoon says the “exciting challenges” ahead are on the creative side, the engagement side and also on the consumer side. “We realize that consumers are more educated than ever about advertising and how they engage with advertising.”
With entities like Xandr taking shape, the industry has “more options than we ever had to really make that mission of brand engagement to be a reality.”
Having cut his teeth on the digital side, Muldoon sees the immersive storytelling properties of television intersecting with engagement. “It’s really coming into play that the programmatic capabilities and TV immersion are at an intersection and a crossroads.
Asked about Xandr’s stated desire to be a catalyst for change on both the buy-side and sell-side of advertising, he says the company is emerging at a time when there’s a track record to the evolution of DSP’s and DMP’s.
“It’s pretty exciting if you’re Xandr I’m sure right now to see all the ingredients you have and the opportunities to do things right from the start. So it’s a great time for them.”
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.
]]>Within the next 12 months, Xandr envisions having “aggregated significant amounts of supply. We will have enabled AT&T’s first-party data to be used on the front end of a buying tool to create segments and target. And then we’ll have a marketplace up and running that monetizes not only for AT&T’s owned-and-operated premium inventory, but for that of multiple publishers throughout the industry,” says Mike Welch, Xandr’s SVP of Strategy & Business Development. “Our vision all along was to create this marketplace for premium advertising centered on video.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference, Welch says the Altice and Frontier partnerships increase Xandr’s addressable TV footprint by 20% and explains how the acquisition of AppNexus will ramp up Xandr’s cross-screen targeting capabilities.
Reflecting on the conference itself and taking the pulse of conference attendees, Welch says it’s gratifying to see such widespread and supportive response. “The interesting thing for me and I think for all of us has been the feedback has been so positive. People are pulling for us,” says Welch “They’re saying the industry really needs this, we think you guys are going to bring a much needed alternative to some of the options that are out there.”
For cross-screen addressability, “This is where AppNexus really, really helps us and becomes a key part of our portfolio,” Welch adds. While AT&T via DirecTV has been a leader in addressable TV for six years, it was limited in reach since it was limited to television homes.
“You sort of plug and play AppNexus into what Xandr already has and you can now take a custom list or AT&T first-party data, build a segment from that and reach those same target audiences not only on the inventory on the television screen but the premium inventory that AppNexus has throughout their platform. It opens up another door for us to extend the reach of our addressable targeting capabilities.”
AT&T has never been supply constrained for addressable television. “In other words, we’ve been able to fulfill our campaigns and frequency tap our campaigns across the households that DirecTV could always reach. But what addressable really needs is extended scale of household reach and that’s what Altice and Frontier bring to us.”
Those providers will increase Xandr’s household reach by about 20% so that it can now reach 20 million households with an addressable ad in a live television stream “and it’s just a first step towards that aggregation that I think will ultimately drive dollars from digital back to television,” says Welch.
“We’ll probably start with a concept we call versioning. An advertiser would still buy a full unit that runs across the entire distribution that a particular cable network or broadcast network has, all TV households.”
However, in the portion of those households that are enabled with addressable technology, Xandr can deliver a different version of the ad.
“One household gets the Millennial version of the ad the other household might get a Baby Boomer version of the ad. So it makes the ad a little more relevant to them.”
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.
]]>“I think it’s incredibly exciting to see that some of the leaders in the marketplace and the biggest players are bringing together content with distribution and now technology and, most importantly, data to enable it all to happen,” the CEO & Founder of Furious Corp. says of the event on September 24-26 in Santa Barbara.
“The Relevance Conference is an amazing agenda because it’s elevating the conversation beyond the how to the why. And it’s very forward looking,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
She credits Kirk McDonald, CMO of the soon to be renamed AT&T Advertising & Analytics, for bringing together a diversity of players and viewpoints where they can share their thoughts and business goals.
“We’re very insulated. We sort of live in this bubble and we don’t do a good job of looking outward to really understand and to help lay the course and the foundation for how we progress,” says Swartz.
With Time Warner Media and AppNexus now under its wing, AT&T has “this incredible portfolio of asserts that enables them to activate the wealth of data and information they have as ultimately what their legacy DNA is ,which is as a telco.”
Now she believes the new entity represents pieces that have come together “through the lines for traditional television to digital and addressable media overall.”
The word renaissance resonates amid all the technological change that the TV industry hopes will power its next iteration—one marked by an advanced understanding of audiences and brands can best engage with them.
“I’ve taken a contrarian position in the industry that I’m doubling down on television thriving not just surviving” by getting better at activating the hearts and minds of audiences, says Swartz. “For me, relevance is really about hearts and minds. You could end that conversation by simply talking about content, and you could end it with the acquisition of the broadcast networks and the portfolio of content they just acquired.
“But when you extend that story for The Relevance Conference and you start to leverage the data and information about audiences and you actually really get to know them, it enables you to deliver experiences, whether they’re ads or it’s content itself that means something. That activates hearts and minds.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”
At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.
“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.
Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.
“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.
“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”
To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”
At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners will be one of some 250 industry leaders attending The Relevance Conference hosted by AT&T in Santa Barbara on Sept. 24-26. On the opening day he will join Otter Media’s Tony Goncalvez and others on a panel titled Putting A Price On Content that will explore the “happy medium” between paid subscription models and ad-supported media.
While AT&T has planted a very large flag in acquiring some of the biggest content and adtech assets, it all comes down to brands changing the ad experience for consumers who have lots of choices, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
“It will be very exciting to see a company with deep pockets, very, very capable, pursue the dream that is convergent television,” he says of AT&T in the wake of its bringing Warner Media and AppNexus under its communications, content and advertising umbrella. “It’s great for ad tech but forget that, it is great for media and marketing writ large. This is a company that demonstrates that it’s not afraid to put its money where its mouth is and get the very, very best.”
At base level, relevance can have meaning with respect to targeting, personalization and other tactics, but with today’s consumers there is a much higher level at which the term needs to be considered, according to Kawaja.
“Netflix has trained them that they can get premium content without interruption,” he says, and “with the training that these paid models have got us all used to, now it’s hard to go back, either once you have the skip button on an ad or just don’t see any ads at all. The ads have to have a different nature.”
Noting that the advertising industry is one “built on the premise of interruption,” he adds, “I think we have to get away from that.”
He cites as an admittedly “extreme” example paid search, where unlike other advertising, consumer intent means everyone involved can win.
“If I’m looking for a Thai restaurant in St. Louis and I enter that search result, I’m going to get back a bunch of media with ads in it. Turns out the ads are facilitative of my original intent of pursuing that media.”
More in the mainstream realm, he mentions ads in The Weather Channel app that don’t block the experience because they’re in the background, juxtaposed with current weather conditions. “The ad is, in fact, additive to the content. At the core we need less advertising, certainly less interruptive advertising and the notion of relevance I think gets to that acknowledgement that we need a better consumer experience.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>One of the big reveals at the conference will be the new name for AT&T Advertising & Analytics. “Relevance is going to be a great conference,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
Among the featured speakers will be AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson. “He’s been very articulate about his hopes and expectations for how we put these pieces together and I think it’s going to be a great conversation,” O’Kelley adds.
“If you look at the assets that AT&T has assembled, they have this incredible connection to consumers, especially in the U.S. and Latin America,” says O’Kelley. “Now with Time Warner they have some of the best TV assets on the planet and I’m incredibly excited about the idea of taking all of our technology and plugging it in with the media and data and leadership that they have.
“I think we can do something that really no one’s ever done before, which is create a new kind of television advertising that should be transformative.”
According to O’Kelley, relevance is the confluence of creative, an emotional connection and the right medium to deliver messaging. He doesn’t think that’s particularly been the case with banner ads and “a lot of the mobile advertising we’ve seen can’t convey that emotional impact.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>AppNexus, Index Exchange and LiveRamp created The Advertising ID Consortium last May in an effort to reach scale versus the two big giants of digital advertising. It is trying to advance two pieces of technology:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, AppNexus marketplace partnerships SVP Patrick McCarthy provides an update on the consortium’s roll-out.
The progress has been really good. We’re almost done, kind of completing the consortium set-up as a legal entity with all the right bylaws and agreements,” he says.
“AppNexus is very close to finishing our portion of the tech that helps power it, and Live Ramp has finished their version of the tech, so if AppNexus and Index will go live with Identity Link-enabled supply using the Open Ad ID in Q2, so that’s really exciting.
“Then we (will) continue to sign up platforms that would like to join the consortium and participate. We (have) started evangelizing it to publishers and marketers. For the most part, publishers and marketers don’t have to do anything technically.”
Google and Facebook control 60% to 70% of US digital ad spending, according to an analysis of several sources’ figures by Digital Content Next, the pro-publisher group campaigning against the pair’s dominance.
But competition is not the only reason for The Advertising ID Consortium’s creation.
“The effort is to really solve two problems,” McCarthy continues:
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.
]]>NBCU is making reductions in more than 50 primetime, original shows across its entire portfolio.
“Sometimes, a little bit less means a whole lot more,” said Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising and Client Partnerships. “The industry knows that television is already the most effective advertising medium there is, but we need to make the experience better for viewers.”
NBCU says it will unveil a suite of innovative new ad products including Interactive Picture in Picture and Social Commercials and Social First Pods. The new PRIME POD “combines the power of fewer, better, and more contextually relevant ads, and gives clients a unique opportunity to connect with audiences in the most effective, exciting, and efficient way,” the company announced.
Noting that contextually targeted ads fuel greater consumer conversion, the company will use a new artificial intelligence-based contextual content targeting product that “combs through scripts and data sources to make every ad that much more contextually relevant to its audience.”
The company has produced a video explaining its rationale. It’s titled We’re Creating More Prime Time Primetime.
Earlier this month, Krishan Bhatia, NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, explained to Beet.TV that improving the user experience is an “huge focus.” In light of today’s announcement about cutting commercial loads, we are republishing that interview.
NBCUniversal’s Total Audience Delivery is a first for its coverage of Winter Olympics and a model for what the company believes will be more acceptance of the way it is helping marketers re-aggregate fragmenting audiences. So far, one of the biggest takeaways from the PyeongChang Winter Games for Krishan Bhatia has been the acceleration of over-the-top and connected TV viewing.
“I think for the past few years we have continued to underestimate that potential,” says NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, who Beet.TV interviewed at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau several days after the opening ceremonies. “Once again, we believe that it’s going to blow through all of the estimates.”
As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCU figures showed that 28.3 million viewers watched the opening ceremonies, 27.8 million of them on television. Audience numbers for out-of-home viewing weren’t yet available. As of Feb. 13, half of U.S. television homes and more than one-third of the country’s population had watched the Olympics on the networks of NBCUniversal, according to fast cume data provided by Nielsen. Six days into the events, NBC Sports Digital’s presentation had been accessed by 6.6 million unique devices–higher than the 2016 Rio Olympics (6.0 million through the comparable date) and more than tripling the 2014 Sochi Olympics (1.8 million to date).
Bhatia says the company’s total audience measurement and delivery approach should apply to any content and consumer segment that is proliferating and fragmenting across multiple platforms along with time-shifting consumption. Given this backdrop, brands want to work with fewer, bigger partners to re-aggregate eyeballs.
“I think we will find marketers and agencies leaning more into this than they ever had,” Bhatia says of Total Audience Delivery.
Commercial ad load and viewer experience remain “another area of huge focus for us,” he adds. Having reduced ad loads on OTT and on-demand platforms by about 30%, NBCU continues to test new formats and develop new products as well as improving its contextual targeting solutions.
“We’re in a two to three week process of researching ad pod length and formats right now to really come up with what is the optimal solution both for the consumer experience and for how that drives marketer metrics,” says Bhatia.
As the company approaches its third year of enhanced audience buying, it doesn’t plan to “reinvent the wheel” but scale the business “and quite frankly making it more efficient for marketers and agencies to engage with us.”
As examples he points to NBCU’s work on facilitating better data interoperability for audience targeting and its automation capabilities. In the latter category is its API through which buyers can access TV inventory on the 4C Insights Platform, which is the subject of this interview.
“We think that’s a giant step towards making the buying and transacting of television significantly more efficient,” Bhatia says.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>It’s against this backdrop that Troy Young, Global President, Hearst Digital Media, views the ever-evolving role of the Interactive Advertising Bureau during a time of what he calls “incredible” change.
“I’m an advocate of the IAB because I think it plays an important role in the community, in education, our relationship with government,” Young says in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s Annual Leadership Meeting. Trying to figure out what comes next “is really complicated because marketing is so complicated right now.”
He refers to remarks by IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg about how “direct brands” have forged a new path, veering away from what Young describes as “industrialized communication through marketer to agency to publisher to consumer.” Now a new generation of companies is “empowered by the cloud and everything on demand to create direct relationships with consumers and sell products that people value,” he says.
“Everybody’s a content marketer right now and everybody needs close proximity to data. For a company like ours, how does that change us?”
Not that long ago, owning Hearst titles like Cosmopolitan, Country Living, ELLE and Esquire and housing them under the same roof as Rodale’s Bicycling, Men’s Health, Prevention, and Runner’s World would have meant more than adequate clout in the market. Now it’s more about speed, ease of use for advertisers and being as powerful as logging into the Facebook interface to buy ads.
“We have to react to that reality as a publisher. We define trends and understand consumers and create audiences. But we have to refactor our ad offering, essentially our market offering, to deal with the new realities,” Young says.
Hearst continues to enhance its programmatic capabilities while mapping user buyer behaviors and help brands produce content, which takes time and investment.
“We really have to listen to our customers and figure out how we can make selling a complex product much easier, because if you’re buying on Instagram it’s really easy today and I think that’s the reality we have to compete with.”
Buyers “still love our brands,” Young adds. “The buy-side loves our sophistication in creating content. “What we’re really focused on is how do we help marketers around the idea of actions. There’s no doubt that the entire market is becoming more performance oriented.”
It helps to “eat our own dog food” by creating content that “sells product and we make money doing that. We’re keenly aware of what leads to a transaction and it’s that insight that we create by doing it ourselves that we sell to marketers.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>As Oath sorts out the DSP solution, “We’re very sincerely aligned with wanting to go from a Wild West to a real, trusted environment,” DeVine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “We want to have an open platform and an open ecosystem where we bring technology that as an advertiser and as a brand builder you can trust.”
Such an open system means advertisers can bring to the table their own data, validation and measurement so that “we’re not grading our own homework so that you as an advertiser feel comfortable with the ROI, the results and the delivery of your message to our universe of users.”
The unified DSP is based mostly on the BrightRoll code base “but it pulls in ad learn and other features of the ONE by AOL DSP,” says DeVine. “We’re cross-coding right now the features and functionality of both into the combined platform.”
As The Drum has reported, Oath hopes to have the unified DSP by the end of 2018, along with two ad exchanges—one for video and the other for mobile.
According to DeVine, Oath is working on establishing “a common interface, features and functionality” between its Gemini native platform and the single DSP “so advertisers have one plug-in, one place to go.”
What Verizon has invested in with its separate acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo is growth. In addition to consolidating Oath’s tech assets, “We also know that growth starts with our consumer relationship and so our energies are going very aggressively toward that consumer interface”
Oath’s mobile-first regimen was bolstered in late 2017 with the addition of live-streaming NFL games, a five-year deal that Recode estimates will cost Verizon more than $1.5 billion.
“On the advertising side, we’re going to continue to push on creative ad formats. We want ads to be great for consumers and advertisers,” says DeVine.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>That means being “more conservative than aggressive” because of issues like brand safety and being sure that the ads that show up in Hulu’s environment are appropriate for our environment, Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. At this year’s event, brand safety was once again front-and-center.
“You’re never going to see our inventory in an open marketplace where anybody can bid on it,” Naylor says. “So far, the advertisers who are willing to engage with how we want to engage and keep them out of harm’s way, keep ourselves out of harm’s way, seems to be working.”
Like many Leadership Conference attendees, Naylor refers to the strident comments from Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed about how some digital platforms—particularly social media—need to clean up their content act.
“He threaded the needle by saying brands need to be marketing in trusted environment,” Naylor says. “It’s not about trust alone but it’s about reputation and brand safety is also budget safety. People are concerned where they spend their money, the company they keep.”
It’s a discussion that will continue to evolve “and you’re going to continue to see the adtech world play a role,” led by the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, the Trustworthy Accountability Group and the Media Rating Council.
Another big topic of discussion at the Leadership Conference was so-called direct brands, companies that have bypassed traditional supply and distribution channels to form direct relationships with customers. Naylor says the trend is a “wonderful way to reduce friction and increase a relationship” that is two-way as opposed to one-way in nature.
“Hulu resembles what we’re talking about. We have a direct relationship with million and millions of viewers who give us their time as well as subscription revenue,” says Naylor.
Direct brands stand to gain in the modern television and video world because of more precise consumer-targeting opportunities. “The old TV, a lot of people just can’t afford to advertise in the biggest sports or entertainment vehicles. But they can absolutely advertise and market with precision and targeting in the new game, the new arena. That’s enabling them to continue their growth.”
According to Naylor, the majority of Hulu viewers choose the ad-supported model.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“And that’s a huge part of what we do,” Brace says of her position at Fox in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “I think the fact that so many people in the industry have lost sight of that and we’re seeing that course correction happen right now is a good thing.”
She says clients’ expectations are to give them reliable information about exactly where their ads are running. “That we’re doing our best to give them real human attention that can transfer their message. We couldn’t be more aligned with what brands are asking for.”
Brace also spent more than two years in a senior sales role at true[X], the interactive advertising specialist tech firm that Fox acquired three years ago this month in an effort to reinvent TV advertising by giving viewers more choice. Just before last year’s Upfront season—a mix of presentations and negotiations for TV ad inventory—Fox announced it had reduced the advertising load on all of its digital FX Networks programming by 75% in an effort to enhance the viewing experience.
“We kind of shocked the market,” Brace recalls. “That is absolutely about taking that model of reduced ad load and high consumer attention that pays off for brands.”
She notes that not only has Fox leveraged the true[X] model on platforms where there is interactivity, it’s taken the concept to video as well. Advertisers can own a full break or a full-series video without sharing consumers’ attention with other brands.
“And we’re seeing great success with that,” Brace says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear more news from us extending that sort of format to other platforms as well outside of digital. So it should be really interesting.”
Interactivity generates higher brand recall, according to Brace, because “the more someone spends time, the more they remember, the more vested they are and the more relevant it is.” Brands have caught on. “I always like to say once we kind of get a brand into the format they never leave because…what they can accomplish there and the stories they can tell,” she says.
It does create more work on the creative side, as Brace is quick to acknowledge, but there are benefits. “There’s always challenges with a customized solution because there’s a little more hand holding in terms of getting creative. I think the people who dive in and really leverage the most that it has to offer are the ones who do the best.”
Brace cites FX research showing that 90% of people prefer interactivity. “That tells me that we’re on to something and that we need to absolutely provide choice for people wherever we can. We’re not going to win by just jamming more commercials into the system to try to monetize.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“The cool thing is it’s working,” says CEO Brian O’Kelley.
That turns out to be an understatement considering that AppNexus is now one of the world’s largest video platforms. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the company signed as clients three of the biggest media companies in the world. From January 2017 to January 2018, its video spend was up 260%.
“So we saw this explosion of our video marketplace,” O’Kelley explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Besides working directly with premium publishers—more than 150 using the AppNexus Video SSP—one advantage has been its decision to charge “a very low take rate,” which O’Kelley pegs at “half of what the other video SSP’s charge.”
One thing has led to another, and now AppNexus is taking a closer look at the linear TV space.
“A year ago, I’d have said there’s no way we’re going to touch linear, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these worlds are converging so quickly that there’s actually a huge opportunity,” O’Kelley adds.
Some of the company’s biggest buyers are asking it to integrate with linear TV platforms. “And I think if we do that we can provide a holistic way to help these brands transition from linear to digital and help curate a digital environment that feels a lot more like TV in the sense of high quality content.”
He sees the company’s role as being able to provide “an alternative for Keith Reed or Unilever to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, where there’s really no way to know what’s going to happen next.”
His rationale: “Can you really afford to have your ad appear next to somebody who’s tasering rats on his balcony? That’s just not good for your brand, I don’t care what brand you are. Maybe if you’re a taser brand.”
While broadcast will always be different from addressable, one-to-one programmatic, where those worlds are converging is that “we’re having more and more capabilities, especially through IP and set-top boxes, to sort of bridge that gap. We can do insertions for more and more content down to the set-top, household level.”
He believes the United States is just three or four years from reaching the point where linear TV is in, say, the Netherlands, where “it’s just gone completely off the cliff. So I want to be ready. And I think to be ready we have to start helping those companies transition to programmatic and then to start shifting more and more to an audience-targeted model.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>The IAB announced this week that Schiller is the newly elected Chairman of the IAB Board of Directors. He has served in that position since October 2017 due to board executive changes, according to an IAB news release.
As was the case at last year’s event, when Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard and other brands were outspoken about the shortcomings of the digital ecosystem, this year that role was filled largely Unilever’s Keith Weed. Together they “set the stage at the high level of what the bigger, more established companies are thinking,” Schiller, who is EVP, GM, Marketing, Advertising & Client Partnerships, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Meanwhile, smaller companies are always emerging on the landscape with their own hopes and needs. “The industry needs to work with this disparate group of companies,” he adds.
As regards the ecosystem, media sellers need to keep finding new ways to make dealing with them as smooth as possible. “We have to be more thoughtful in how we transact and we have to be focused on bringing results whatever they are to our clients,” says Schiller.
Sponsored content and the creation of branded content is becoming increasingly important “as so much of what we do in the media business is algorithmed or commoditized.” How advertisers find their way into content is critical for two reasons: It can enhance the consumer experience and “The money that comes from sponsorships is what ultimately fuels in large part great content,” Schiller says.
Asked about NBCU’s ongoing coverage of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he mentions its Total Audience Delivery solution and how the event has not only always been a “hotbed of change” but also “a great example of what’s going to happen.” The Olympics were the first place that “digital really came together with television.” Now the natural emphasis is measuring all viewers on all possible devices.
“From a programming and marketing perspective, you’re seeing us try everything with every platform that makes sense.”
Apart from the IAB, more discussion and education are needed to help everyone find their way forward, unlike the pre-digital advertising and media world.
“In the old days it was very clear. The brands did what they did, the agencies did what they did and the consumers ingested it. Today everyone does everything,” says Schiller.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>So far, one of the biggest takeaways from the PyeongChang Winter Games for Krishan Bhatia has been the acceleration of over-the-top and connected TV viewing. “I think for the past few years we have continued to underestimate that potential,” says NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, who Beet.TV interviewed at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau several days after the opening ceremonies. “Once again, we believe that it’s going to blow through all of the estimates.”
As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCU figures showed that 28.3 million viewers watched the opening ceremonies, 27.8 million of them on television. Audience numbers for out-of-home viewing weren’t yet available. As of Feb. 13, half of U.S. television homes and more than one-third of the country’s population had watched the Olympics on the networks of NBCUniversal, according to fast cume data provided by Nielsen. Six days into the events, NBC Sports Digital’s presentation had been accessed by 6.6 million unique devices–higher than the 2016 Rio Olympics (6.0 million through the comparable date) and more than tripling the 2014 Sochi Olympics (1.8 million to date).
Bhatia says the company’s total audience measurement and delivery approach should apply to any content and consumer segment that is proliferating and fragmenting across multiple platforms along with time-shifting consumption. Given this backdrop, brands want to work with fewer, bigger partners to re-aggregate eyeballs.
“I think we will find marketers and agencies leaning more into this than they ever had,” Bhatia says of Total Audience Delivery.
Commercial ad load and viewer experience remain “another area of huge focus for us,” he adds. Having reduced ad loads on OTT and on-demand platforms by about 30%, NBCU continues to test new formats and develop new products as well as improving its contextual targeting solutions.
“We’re in a two to three week process of researching ad pod length and formats right now to really come up with what is the optimal solution both for the consumer experience and for how that drives marketer metrics,” says Bhatia.
As the company approaches its third year of enhanced audience buying, it doesn’t plan to “reinvent the wheel” but scale the business “and quite frankly making it more efficient for marketers and agencies to engage with us.”
As examples he points to NBCU’s work on facilitating better data interoperability for audience targeting and its automation capabilities. In the latter category is its API through which buyers can access TV inventory on the 4C Insights Platform, which is the subject of this interview.
“We think that’s a giant step towards making the buying and transacting of television significantly more efficient,” Bhatia says.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“The swamp isn’t very transparent,” says Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed, whose speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting was intended to prod online platforms to foster inclusivity as opposed to divisiveness. In this interview with Beet.TV, Weed says that simply threatening to withhold advertising dollars from digital platforms while expecting them to solve their own content challenges isn’t the proper course for the industry.
“They all have their different challenges. All of them are seriously engaging them,” says Weed, adding that he wants to see “an acceleration and bigger commitment to this moving forward.”
He believes that, like Unilever itself upon its founding in the 1880’s, digital behemoths like Facebook and Google intended to make the world a better place, but the horse of progress has galloped off without the cart of good intentions.
“I think what’s happened with technology is the acceleration of unintended consequences has happened very rapidly,” Weed says.
He notes that even as negative headlines about the hygiene of the digital media ecosystem—both for advertisers and consumers—proliferated at the time of last year’s IAB gathering, Unilever did not walk away from the table. “Not only did we stay with YouTube, and we still are, we very publicly stayed with YouTube.”
Aside from its collaborative approach to problem solving with digital platforms, Unilever is actively harnessing technology to protect its own interests by experimenting with blockchain to achieve complete transparency on various kinds of online and offline transactions. In the everyday supply chain, the company has used blockchain to keep tabs on the path taken by tea as it makes its way from farmers in Africa to supermarket chains in the U.K.
“We’re finding it’s really helping us understand where the value exchange is and the different people” involved along the way.
If the same thing could be done with digital media transactions, it would solve lots of issues. “If you can manage to get each and every player to engage in the blockchain, this could take out a lot of the noise,” Weed says.
Unilever is working with IBM iX on its blockchain initiative, which the company’s EVP of Global Marketing, Babs Rangaiah, explains in this interview.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“Blockchain was built exactly for that kind of friction in a supply chain,” says Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing, at marketing services provider IBM iX, which is assisting Unilever in the blockchain project.
Unilever’s effort will come in several phases, the first “in the next few months” being reconciliation of digital data—from measurement to viewability and everything possible in between.
“One of the things that happens when you have so many middlemen is discrepancies become rampant,” Rangaiah says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Leadership Meeting, following a presentation by Unilever Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Keith Weed. “And so you typically can’t reconcile that until the end of a flight, and by then it’s a mess. What blockchain does is allow you a single, unified view of how that media buy occurred, and there’s one number.”
Ultimately, Unilever would like to “put the payment system directly into the blockchain for a seamless buy” before moving on to using the technology in the real-time-bidding of digital ad inventory.
Another sought-after benefit is the high-quality, first-party, encrypted consumer data that blockchain will enable. The goal would be that “each member of a blockchain has the appropriate key for the data they can see, but the real advantage of the system is that you’ll get laser targeting like we are not able to do today.”
Even farther down the road, Unilever could use blockchain for various iterations of television media, including over-the-top, “bringing that all together and really putting a whole media buy through blockchain.”
In referencing Weed’s remarks to the IAB attendees, in which the CMO threatened to pull ad dollars from tech platforms that create societal division or don’t protect children, Rangaiah cites the term “In brands we trust.” He believes what will “improve and enable advertising to move forward is to get that trust back in the supply chain and that’s what blockchain does. This is a great solution.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“I think it’s going to have the effect of dramatically reducing hidden fees, hopefully eliminating them, and increasing the amount of spend from marketers that gets all the way to publishers,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Leadership Meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Trust means we have to provide transparency.”
Steps taken by AppNexus include publicly disclosing its “take rate” for its supply-side business, which it says is “by far the lowest in the industry.” It’s extending its transparency on take rates all the way through to the brand.
“So any brand who says ‘where did my money go through my DSP to AppNexus,’ we’ll tell you exactly how much the publisher made,” O’Kelley says.
Partners in this effort include Adobe and third-party auditor Amino Payments.
O’Kelley says the AppNexus DSP, called AppNexus Programmable Platform, is fully transparent for every fee.
“We should see publishers making more money, marketers seeing better outcomes and a dramatic reduction in the inefficient intermediaries that we’ve seen in this space for two decades now.”
He traces the path to opaque digital practices in part to the shift to audience buying in the last decade or so. Brands didn’t seem to care where their ads appeared as long as they were told they were targeting the right people.
That indifference has given way to extreme concern by brands large and small, most notably Procter & Gamble and Unilever, whose Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, used the occasion of the IAB gathering to issue a public threat to pull spending from digital platforms.
“Imagine you’re a marketer. You think you’re buying relevant data but it turns out that’s fraud. Really what you’re spending this on is terrible for your brand and having no known outcome.” O’Kelley says.
In the not-to-distant future, he foresees brands reducing the breadth of inventory they’ll buy, working only with quality publishers “maybe one hop away. But this multiple hops isn’t going to work.” They will also reduce their purchases of third-party data “unless it comes directly from a source” and there will be “a lot fewer intermediaries in the space. I think it’s going to be amazing.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>That is according to one ad-tech company exec thinking through the effects of the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The new law gives European consumers significant new powers to stop companies anywhere in the world from collecting and processing their personal data, including the right to stop automated decisioning- something which much modern advertising technology depends.
“While the broad outlines of the legislation are reasonably well understood, there’s an awful lot of detail that’s still going to need to be worked out and tested over time,” says AppNexus publisher strategy SVP Tom Shields in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Anyone who tells you they’re 100% prepared, knows exactly what they’re doing, probably doesn’t fully understand exactly what the situation is right now.”
GDPR came in to effect back in 2016, updating prior consumer data protection rules in a significant way. Now any global company which deals with EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, chiefly tighter consent conditions for citizens’ data to be collected.
Breaching the new rules risks incurring a fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover, up to a maximum of €20 million.
“We’ve invested tremendous time and resources in being prepared for GDPR,” AppNexus’ Shields says.
“There certainly have been doomsayer predictions who have said that the result of this is only going to be that the large companies get larger, and all the small companies die out. I don’t think that’s the case.
“AppNexus is putting a lot of our code into open-source, so that we can enable smaller publishers and smaller technology providers to continue to be able to survive and thrive in this new world.”
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But, whilst the technology is now getting more widely deployed on display ads, arrival in video ads will take some time. That is according to an exec from one of the leading ad-tech firms.
“Header bidding has really taken off for display and has driven all commoditization of supply there,” AppNexus senior product line manager Lindsay Van Kirk says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Video and other formats are a little bit more nascent for header bidding. I think there’s a ton of opportunity there and there’s some really positive results coming from some tests. We have some publishers who are using it. We’ve had some demand partners who are doing video header bidding.
“But those marketplaces are unique in a lot of ways because of the volume of supply and because of the value of the ad units and the value that goes into actually creating the ad units for video. There’s a lot more production work that goes into it, and so, naturally, those things were going to transact at higher rates.”
Applying header bidding to video is challenging for a number of reasons. One is that the VAST and VPAID tags on which client-side video depend impose time-out limits that can add extra latency to the process of calling multiple SSPs, which is the raison d’etre of header bidding.
With awareness of the basic header bidding techniques still gathering pace, applying it to video may not come quickly. A January 2017 survey of US agency and marketing professionals conducted by Advertiser Perceptions found only a quarter of respondents had a “good” or “very good” understanding of header bidding, eMarketer writes.
“They might take a little bit more time before we see a full adoption of video heading bidding,” Van Kirk adds. “Although I think there’s a lot of promise there for video publishers who want to get the most for the video impressions that they have, as opposed to having to continue to manage a waterfall.”
This segment is part of a Beet.TV series on innovation in programmatic advertising around header bidding and wrappers. The series is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At its customer summit in New York, the company made three announcements it hopes will make it easier for advertisers to buy ads in over-the-top and connected TV environments:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, AppNexus’ video technology SVP Eric Hoffert opens up on the new developments.
On the Tru Optik deal, Hoffert says: “They’re like a specialized, over-the-top DMP. Effectively, they allow the ability to take IP addresses for connected TV supply, and map them and convert them into what they call the ‘OTT household graph’ that allows for the use of traditional audience segments for audience targeting.
“That’s really powerful because, on connected TV, a lot of programmatic buyers want to be able to do the kind of programmatic buying they do on the desktop and mobile apps. But because connected TV’s supply, 85% of it is lacking a device ID, you need a solution like Tru Optik’s.”
Lastly, Hoffert says AppNexus’ new SDK for Apple TV enables ad insertion on the client side, including pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll and video ad pods and commercial breaks.
This interview took place at the AppNexus customer summit in New York.
]]>A whopping four years in the making, the ad-tech company finally unveiled the “AppNexus Programmable Platform” (APP) this week. But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, CEO Brian O’Kelley says he thinks APP will be worth the wait.
APP introducing machine learning – currently the buzz-phrase du jour in the ad-tech industry, but one which O’Kelley thinks will help ad buyers automate more of the process than ever before.
“Traders will save a bunch of time,” he says. “Over the next year, we’ll migrate all of our current customers to this new platform and we think that they’ll see significantly better results.”
That may be true. Speaking with Business Insider, a Xaxis executive who has been testing AppNexu’s new APP says large advertisers tens of millions of dollars programmatically will now be able to bid at the right price on the right slot.
APP also sees AppNexus now competing more squarely in the video space with the likes of DoubleClick, Comcast and SpotX.
In France, Lagardère already uses AppNexus for ad serving to its IPTV properties.
“(In) the new APP, we can actually buy all of this really high-quality connected and OTT and other premium video (inventory). There’s no doubt that the video space is going to be programmatic.”
This interview took place at the AppNexus customer summit in New York this week.
]]>Swanston will be one of more than three dozen featured speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat Miami, where industry executives will gather to discuss the coming of age of targeted TV advertising. (See speaker list below.)
With the new partnership, connected TV buyers and sellers using AppNexus’ platform will be able to segment and target audiences based on data offered through the integration of Tru Optik’s OTT Marketing Cloud, according to a news release. AppNexus and Tru Optik will be able to facilitate audience delivery across 75 million OTT households in the U.S., on any connected TV device or publishers regardless of whether the publisher has registered user data.
“It’s going to be the first time in the industry that publishers can pre-segment their connected TV inventory, even outside of registered user data, against third-party segments, demos from comScore, their own first-party data, and then have private marketplace deal ID’s to control who has access to that inventory,” Swanston says.
The shift from linear to connected TV is growing faster than the shift from desktop video to mobile video, according to Swanston. “So that just gives people an idea of how tremendous the opportunity is that’s coming across connected TV.”
As he looks ahead to Beet Retreat Miami, Swanston hopes that the discussions will focus on the here and now of targeted TV.
“Everything people have been talking about over the last few years about what they hope they’ll eventually be able to do on connected TV you can do right now. Today,” he says.
In the next 90 days Tru Optik will be revealing more partnerships, in keeping with its original go-to-market strategy. Among other things, this strategy negates the need to build “a massive sales force” to ensure growth.
“Going into 2018, the majority of audience based programmatic advertising across connected TV, on both the buy side and the supply side in the U.S. for sure, will be powered by Tru Optik. And that’s really exciting for being still a relatively young and small company.”
Here are are the speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat:
Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen, Cadreon/IPG
Jonathan Bokor, Director of Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange
Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605
Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology
Nick Jezarian, Media Director, Target
Raghu Kodige, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder, Alphonso
Jakob Nielsen, CEO, Finecast, GroupM
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group
Kelly Abcarian, SVP, Product Leadership, Nielsen
Dan Aversano, SVP, Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions, Turner
Anna Bager, SVP/GM Mobile & Video, IAB
Craig Berkley, VP. Television Partner Development, Acxiom
Mel Berning, President, Revenue, A+E Networks
Michael Bologna, President, one2one Media
Jason Brown, VP, National Sales, AT&T AdWorks
Lorne Brown, CEO, Sintec Media
Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel
Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
Peter Dolchin, Strategic Partner Lead, Google
Marco Forte, SVP, ABC Network Sales
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso
Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America, Essence
Michael Glantz, VP, Business Development, Simulmedia
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions, Oracle Data Cloud
Jason Harrison, President, Team Arrow Partners (GroupM)
Cathy Hetzel, Executive Vice President, comScore
Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising, TiVo
Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Oath (Verizon)
Brian Katz, VP, Advanced TV Insights & Strategy, Eyeview
Rob Klippel, SVP, Advanced Products & Strategy, Spectrum Reach (Charter)
Jennifer Koester, Director, Global Partnerships, Google
Michael Kubin, EVP, Media, Invidi
Marcus Liassides, CEO, Sorenson Media
Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group
Adam Lowy, Director, Advanced TV & Digital, DISH & Sling TV
Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development, Inscape
Matthew O’Grady, CEO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions
Mike Rosen, EVP, Portfolio Sales, NBCUniversal
Neil Smith, SVP Markets, FreeWheel
Andre Swanston, CEO, Tru Optik
Ben Tatta, President & Co-Founder, 605
Tore Tellefsen, VP, TV Solutions at DataXu
Nick Troiano, CEO, Cross MediaWorks
Rob Weisbord, SVP, COO, Sinclair Digital Group
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development, Videology
Moderators:
Steve Ellwanger, Contributing Editor, Beet.TV
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Tracey Scheppach, CEO & Co-Founder, Matter More Media
Matt Spiegel, Managing Director, MediaLink
Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer & Founder, Beet.TV
This is one of the concepts behind comScore’s rollout of its new Activation suite, an offering that enables cross-platform targeting based on audience segments while drilling deeply into website content.
“One of the keys there is safety can have a different specific meaning depending upon whom you are as a brand,” says Aaron Fetters, SVP National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore.
“What our capability enables is for a brand to be very specific as to I’m okay showing up against this type of content but not this type of content,” Fetters adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
“Our data’s ability is to go down into the actual text level within a page and say this is what this page is about and it’s a place that I’m okay to be.”
comScore Activation incorporates both digital and television viewing data along with contextual and verification technology to account for brand safety, viewability and invalid traffic. It is currently available in more than 15 leading ad tech platforms, including Adobe, AppNexus, Centro, Salesforce, Tru Optik and Videology.
At the ANA confab, Fetters says he’s heartened to see that advertisers have not just embraced the pursuit of a cleaner digital media ecosystem but that they’re thinking beyond that goal to focus on campaign effectiveness. One of their priorities is the balance between digital reach and efficiency.
“It’s great to know I have a clean supply chain. But the next step is to say am I maximizing the reach of my message to an audience,” says Fetters. “Am I capping frequency at a level that I want to, or is this just a strategy that’s not working for me?”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>Asked about his company’s commitment to machine learning, AppNexus president Michael Rubenstein tells Beet.TV, in this video interview: “We’ve made deep, deep investments at AppNexus over a multi-year period in helping brands and traders to be able to unlock the full value of their data through a variety of means.
“Our optimisation technology has been something we’ve invested in for many, many years. We are excited to be seeing fantastic results, consistently, for brands using the platform.”
What is machine learning and how can it be used in ad targeting? Put simply, it’s the ability of computer algorithms – which, in advertising, are already used to automate ad trading – to continually learn from discovered data points, reinvesting those learnings in to future transactions for incrementally better effect.
Or, as AppNexus puts it:
“By creating a seamless feedback loop between a brand’s decisioning logic and its consumer touchpoints, AppNexus is combining data and machine learning to build campaigns that actually grow smarter over time. The result is hyper-personalization at scale, a world where marketers can deliver targeted ads to tens of millions of users, spread out across billions of interconnected devices, all over the world.”
AppNexus’ technology investment is such that it has seven open positions for engineers at time of writing.
“It’s going to continue to be one of the major areas for unlocking the true value of digital advertising in the years ahead,” Rubenstein adds.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
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