But two trends are making it a reality:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz says US retailers are sitting on a treasure trove of first-party shopper data.
Swartz says large retailers’ ability to utilize data on their own customers to activate media buys, both for themselves and for others on their network, makes them powerful like Facebook and Google.
“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Swartz says. “(With) such significant shift in spending, moving to online from direct retail… these are walled gardens.
Very large retailers that were specifically allowed to stay open during lockdowns … are building (advertising data) walled gardens.
“Amazon’s retail data set is used to ultimately sell and direct media and target media and re-target media within their platform and their advertising solution, and that’s really its core focus.”
Roundel’s Kristi Argyilan: Shopper Marketing Is the “New Black”
Swartz also says the several vendors which actually mine consumers’ anonymized credit card behaviors adds additional richness to targeting capability.
“In the US in particular, we’re able to see their shopping behaviours, their consideration set, what is in their cart, et cetera,” she says.
“And so it’s been a whole new world, and I think in some ways it’s immense opportunity.”
Last year, Target Media Network was rebranded as Roundel, offering:
It is an example of the new trend in which a large retailer is also a kind of publisher – offering an audience of purchase-focused consumers to brands that may even already be distributed through the company.
The kinds of data such retailers can offer on their customers within those media buys – for example, purchase and browsing history – it is thought, could help brands hone in on the buyers with the highest intent.
Roundel’s Hovorka: Tech Companies Need Humility When Working with Brands
“First-party data can be used to target and to reach specific audiences, and to actually implement what is a very thorough user journey of targeting, retargeting, coming back and around to make sure that you follow through to try and get to do what is ultimately a purchase or some type of action for a consumer to take,” Swartz says.
In the offline retail world, following an ad exposure through to purchase was relatively more difficult, Swartz explains. But that has changed.
“Now that purchasing is online, there is much greater certainty and confidence and reliability and measurability in the data to ultimately see whether or not that consumer has taken an action and made a purchase.”
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
]]>At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:
Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.
“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.
“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”
Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”
As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.
“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.
“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.
“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”
VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.
“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”
However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.
“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”
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.
]]>Caroline Horner says she is used to hearing openness from people in the internet industry, who will say ”
“I’m going to put the data out there because it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to evolve the place”, “What if we try this?” and “Can we do this?”
The SVP of products for ad-tech firm 605 understands the reluctance.
But she thinks computing power – plus a little cajoling – can help ad buyers to see the benefits.
“We listen really hard on what the issues people have with their data,” she says. “What they’re willing to do and what they’re not willing to do. Then you go with what they’re willing to do, and you start there.
“Things like AWS (Amazon Web Services), a lot of the ability to use computing power at this point … whereas we had a lot of technology and advancements through the years, we only had certain data structures and sizes and the servers could only handle so much.
“Now, we can get to an existence where everything can be calculated on the fly. That means all these data sources can relate to each other very quickly and have all those permissions. ”
The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.
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.
]]>Those were some of the questions being asked at the recent Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, when Julian Zilberbrand stepped up.
Zilberbrand, EVP of audience science at Viacom, was asked by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz about marketplaces.
“Marketplace is very important,” he said. “We were a founding member of OpenAP. We probably do more advanced TV than most because we believe in what it is and we believe in and how to make that work, and we believe that that’s a value for the market.
“Within the structure of that, we think that it makes sense to kind of create multiple opportunities for different ways to kind of invest with us. If you want to invest with us traditionally, we’re more than happy to do that. If you want to invest with us in advanced way with data at the centre, we’re more than happy to do that as well.”
Zilberbrand went on to describe multiple “variations” of marketplace.
The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.
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.
]]>That is the view of one software vendor aiming to bring simplicity to a local TV supply chain he says is too complex.
“The biggest problem with local (TV) is it’s historically been too hard to buy (ads),” says Eric Mathewson, CEO and co-founder of WideOrbit. “The (ad) agency has not made money buying local and hence it’s just not that exciting to recommend to your marketer client.
“You should buy more local. It’s very effective because it’s geo-targeted and you buy programmes, so on and so forth – but it’s not been effective to the bottom line of the agency.”
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
WideOrbit’s programmatic TV open marketplace lets ad buyers make automated, data-informed offers in more than 1,000 stations and networks.
“With our system, instead of taking 50 (agency) people to buy 70 markets over two weeks in local, four or five people can buy it in a couple of days,” Mathewson adds.
And WideOrbit has scale.
“We’re now live in 93% of TV stations in the US, about a third of cable nets, half of radio, 75% of sports nets,” Mathewson says.
“We’re processing $37 billion in ad spend from order entry through receipt of cash.”
Matthewson was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.
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.
]]>In this townhall discussion for Beet.TV, Michael Scott, Samsung Ads’ head of brand sales in North America, was asked what role mobile plays in his connected TV offering.
“We’re in the process right now of trying to really understand how to work with our mobile team, both in terms of data as well as in terms of inventory,” Scott says.
“There are some exciting announcements that are coming down the pipe later this year that I’m not at liberty to discuss right now, but I think you’re about to see some additional executions that we’re able to augment.”
Launched back in 2015 as “Samsung Smart TV Advertising”, Samsung Ads, a unit inside the giant Korean electronics manufacturer, tracks what audiences are watching on Samsung Smart TV screens, in order to provide targeting data to marketers.
The business unit is able to understand actual viewing, whether it be linear or OTT, by running automated content recognition (ACR) on Samsung Smart TVs, to identify content that is actually being consumed.
Now it claims to have 60% of the consumers visible via industry-deployed ACR technology, whether they ware watching live TV, VOD or playing a console game – in all, around 220 million connected devices, 45 million TVs in 38 million US homes.
“It’s tough to compete on beautiful screen quality when you walk into any retailer and you see this wall of black glass in front of you,” Scott adds. “That’s where content and services really comes in.”
The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
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 the emerging focus on “attribution” and “outcomes” doesn’t come as easy as it sounds.
“Data is not sexy,” Hinnant says, in this Beet Retreat townhall interview. “It’s really a tough business. And the more you have, the more that you know that, Hey, there’s more work to be done to clean it up and to make it usable and intelligible in order to make business decisions off of it.
“So there’s a lot of datasets out there, a lot of closed loops, a lot of people coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we have measurement’. But it’s really trying to figure out, ‘How do you decipher that and how do you aggregate it, bring it together so it can be actionable data at a large scale?’
“It’s one thing to do outcome-based measurement. It’s another thing to say, ‘Okay, now I’m going to take that outcome and I’m going to plan and try to optimise off of them’.”
At the same event, 605’s Noah Levine also said much of attribution is a “house of cards” due to insufficient focus on data provenance.
Hinnant was in January promoted to chief revenue officer after working in national ad sales for Comscore.
Comscore merged with TV measurement firm Rentrak in 2016, creating a company with capabilities across both TV and online channels.
Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.
The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
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.
]]>“There’s this dark side of addressable with many challenges yet to be addressed, and we can only solve them as an industry, as a collective,” says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, in her wrap-up of the February 2020 Beet Retreat in San Juan. “It’s not through any one individual large company that we’ll break through to the other side and find a tipping point of growth and acceleration for addressable television and video.”
Consumer privacy is one such challenge, Swartz observes, since more regulation to put guardrails around how sellers leverage data for targeting and delivery of ads is inevitable. The industry needs to coalesce around standards for using data with integrity, without violating the sanctity of consumer relationships.
Ultimately, users need to be put first, and sellers have to prioritize their experience.
“It’s important to come back to that as we evaluate how best to shepherd change toward more audience-based, addressable delivery of premium inventory and formats,” she says.
As they ramp up their addressable businesses, sellers also have to contend with a rising “ad tax” that results from data and technology providers getting a cut of their transactions. This is a long-standing issue within digital media but has only recently become acute for sellers of linear TV. It underscores the importance of developing a marketplace that creates economic value for buyers, sellers and intermediaries alike.
“Currently, the cost of doing business and of serving addressable ads may actually exceed the incremental revenue to be had in the short term,” Swartz says.
]]>In an interview with Beet.TV, Swartz explained that digital, digital targeting and social media will continue to be important, but after a tumultuous 2016 experience, many dollars will go back to the medium that has been relied upon by political campaigns for decades.
“The reality is that in the final mile, people buy television,” says Swartz.
Digital platforms are reacting accordingly, too. Google and Twitter have already announced that they will not be taking on political advertising in 2020 and the world is waiting to see what Facebook will do. The social network has come under fire for letting misleading and false claims run in political advertisements on its site.
“Although historically we’ve seen cycle over cycle growth in those [social] platforms, I think we will see it slow or just sort of flat if not even decline this year,” says Swartz.
This means increased opportunity for television to be a game changer. According to Swartz, local TV is always the biggest winner because they can target geographically and can aggregate local inventory on a national scale. She says that advertisers are doubling down in preparation for the upcoming election in order to maximize their return and yield for the political cycle. Television will be a large part of their focus.
She defines local TV as both local stations and local cable systems run by national operators. She points to emerging local TV ad platform Ampersand, the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter as one of key movers in 2020. Others in the advanced local TV mix include Comcast’s Effectv.
“I really think this is an opportunity for another resurgence or renaissance of television,” says Swartz. “Not only in that we will see an increase in aggregate dollars and spend for political and TV comparatively over the last election cycle, we will also see a great level of confidence and assuredness and trust, most importantly in television, that is not able to be achieved given what has transpired over the digital and social platforms over the last few years.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Swartz spent time in London interviewing industry executives based in the UK and the rest of Europe for Beet.TV ad the Future of TV Ads global forum. What stuck out to her during those conversations was the market’s willingness to work together. “It is in the DNA of the European market and the UK to cooperate,” Swartz tells Beet.TV. That cooperation includes following Open AP in the US, setting up audience segments, definitions and data sets across sales houses and standardizing the operations of addressable throughout the process. That has positive results.
“What I see ultimately is the sell-side of the value chain and the technology enablers and the sales houses are willing to do the work for buyers to make addressable actionable and meaningful faster. That is a lighthouse for us in the US if we look forward.”
Industry-wide privacy and security policies like GDPR are also having positive benefits for the ad market in the UK, says Swartz. Instead of limiting or holding advertisers back, it’s set universal standards that advertisers have the freedom to function within. That’s better than the alternative of privacy standard fragmentation, which is at risk of happening in the US. If California passes GDPR, Swartz points out, that could cause a chain reaction of state-by-state privacy laws that would be a headache for the huge market in the US. The incentive for every company to differentiate by building their own individual data sets only exacerbates fragmentation.
“We don’t see a concerted initiative across the US market to make addressable media easier for buyers and for brands, which I believe is going to continue to hold us back,” says Swartz. “We’ve seen incredible consolidation, so even though we have one-stop solutions and one-stop marketplaces, that maybe are aggregating more inventory, we haven’t necessarily made it easier for buyers and brands.”
Swartz believes that progress could be made as we enter 2020, a year set to break the record for political advertising dollars spent at an estimated $10 billion. “I’m hopeful that the collaborative spirit will come to the US because of the opportunity that lies in 2020 with political,” she says. “We’ll see a change of mindset going forward.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The panel participants were Tim Jenkins, CEO of 4INFO, and Walt Horstman, SVP/GM of Advanced Advertising at TiVo, whose companies have launched a new partnership, along with moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
4INFO’s roots date to 2011 when it built a platform that provided proof that ads on mobile devices could drive sales. “TV came along and presented us with a whole new opportunity,” namely the creation of an identity graph tying mobile to other connected devices within households, Jenkins explained.
While Nielsen GRP metrics remain the major TV currency, ever more granular set-top box data are opening up new insights. “The most important thing is having the rights to that data to match it to an identity graph like Tim’s so then we can truly take all of the viewership experiences in linear television and understand how they are impacting other media,” said Horstman.
“I fundamentally think the big news with the identity graph is television is now playing nicely with the other children in the media ecosystem, which has not historically been the case,” Horstman added.
The new partnership between 4INFO and TiVo, according to Jenkins, will allow brands “to be able to use all of this viewership data that’s been captured via traditional linear delivery models…on a one-to-one basis at scale. It’s not a panel, it’s a whole bunch of households that you have actual viewership data on.”
As TV targeting, measurement and attribution continue to evolve, buyers fall into two camps: those still grounded in GRP’s and those using addressable and connected for one-to-one targeting and measurement.
“We try to treat them the same but have to talk to them completely differently,” Jenkins said. “One of the biggest challenges we have is helping people who are traditional digital buyers who know how to buy what we sell work with traditional TV buyers who don’t understand the measurement piece alone.”
“How are you making marketers better, faster stronger in regards to being able to deliver outcomes?” asked Swartz.
“Our fundamental goal has been to make all of this TV viewership data and traditional linear television very accessible to programmatic and digital buyers and DSP’s,” said Horstman. “The uptick is happening. It’s been a big education process.”
Amid comments about “stone age” TV versus more advanced digital media, Horstman said he believes broadcast linear TV still should serve as the foundation for media campaigns given the economics involved. That’s because road-reach TV CPM’s are still very efficient compared to more expensive, highly targeted buys, although a mix of both is appropriate.
“That’s the way that as an industry we should be thinking about this. Understand the economics of what you get across all these different properties and learn how to get the most from them,” said Horstman.
Asked about the increasing complexity that accompanies advancements in TV targeting and attribution, Jenkins said that orchestration is everyone’s responsibility. “At the end of the day, I guess the ultimate responsibility is with the brands. The brands need to really understand what’s available, they have to push their agencies to be able to buy it, be able to explain it and they need to definitely hold platforms accountable to deliver it.”
Swartz wanted to know how, with so many constituencies vying for their place at the table, “How do we make the economics work for everybody?”
Horstman cited the recent report from the 4A’s and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement showing the existence of “at least twenty different companies in the TV attribution world. So all this data has now enabled a whole new industry.”
It’s up to the buy-side to look beyond the obvious incentives that sellers have to provide their own means of attribution and be able to attribute value to each link in the chain, according to Horstman.
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>To help shed more light on the subject, Beet.TV will conduct a half-day forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5. It will be hosted by Viacom at the company’s offices at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan and sponsored by 4INFO, a provider of identity graph technology. Swartz will be one of the event’s moderators.
In this video, Swartz explains the complexity of determining who is watching what content on what device and when they are doing so. It starts with the myriad ways that individual TV viewers can be tracked—including mobile apps that can hear what’s being watched, digital IP-enabled devices, mobile device ID’s, automatic content recognition and watermarking.
Then there are companies like Nielsen and Comscore that are “trying to develop currencies that leverage all these technologies to actually track what is real reach for a specific piece of content delivered to an audience across an ecosystem and broad reaching selection of devices and platforms,” Swartz says.
So how does it all become real? For Swartz, it boils down to being confident about the data involved and data providers working together, because no one media company has an audience with the “order of magnitude of the breadth of an audience and the reach of an audience that television provides.”
Ultimately, “multiple data providers and platforms and content recognition providers are going to have to come together to marry their data sets to maximize the total audience within an identity graph they make available,” she says.
“The data I get has to be reliable, easy to use and integrated into ad delivery systems to plan against and has to be easy to buy. Not just easy to buy from the perspective of understanding the value of the inventory and what you’re getting for your dollar or what the effective CPM or effective rate is. That’s complex.”
At the Beet.TV event on March 5, Swartz will be joined by moderators Howard Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now a consultant, and Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting. The entire program will be taped before a studio audience for publication on Beet.TV.
]]>“It’s interesting that somebody would try to separate television from the broader identity ecosystem,” Jenkins says in this interview with Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
“When we talk about a TV identity graph, what we really mean is the ability to be able to get to all the devices, including connected televisions as well as digital devices, within the same household using something other than cookies to get to it,” says Jenkins.
“It allows you to do that one to one identification of all of those devices that people are actually viewing TV content through and being able to pull them together into a single audience.”
4INFO acts as “connective tissue” across some 500 million screens in 92 million households while serving as a match or onboarding partner for marketers.
Founded in 2004 with a focus on mobile search via text messaging, 4INFO will sponsor the Beet.TV half-day Leadership Forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5, hosted by Viacom at the company’s studios at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan. It will feature about a dozen industry leaders and an invitation-only audience of fewer than 100.
Jenkins says 4INFO’s overriding goal at the event is to educate the marketplace.
“What we’re really hoping we can do from a thought leadership standpoint is just trying to get people to understand how to use an identity graph to make what we call addressable TV space successful,” he says. “What we have found is there is a real lack of understanding about the scale in the space, how you actually make it work, what kind of business outcomes people can measure and what role identity plays in pulling all that together. We hope to be able to educate folks at a much deeper level.”
]]>In this interview, Swartz, a longtime Beet Retreat attendee and unofficial dean of the proceedings, sums things up thusly: “We’re trying to race F1 with a Datsun.”
Furious Corp. was founded in 2013 to provide linear TV and video yield optimization. It’s seen recent transactional data from the trafficking systems of operators and local station groups showing anywhere from five to 15X premiums on ad pricing, according to Swartz.
“Right now is an interesting time because although we’re talking about the challenges and the fear, uncertainty and doubt in TV, we’re coming off one of the best political seasons we’ve had,” she says.
That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that it’s typical for clients of Furious to be using “software that was released in 1990. They’re running their ad businesses with Excel.”
As a result, the desire and need to move things forward is hindered by friction in the workflows of revenue and inventory management, causing revenue leakage. “The driver of revenue leakage is different depending on the TV product you’re selling, and whether you’re using a Nielsen guarantee for spot or impression-based sale,” Swartz explains.
With traditional, spot-based linear, the greatest revenue leakage is driven by pricing variability, implies inefficiency. Bringing uniformity and consistency to the rate card process “is in incredible opportunity to improve revenue” by three to 10% in a 12- to 24-month period, Swartz says.
For impression-based, addressable ads, “It’s actually about inventory utilization and allocation, and so the business challenge changes. The need to look at the other level of yield, which is inventory management, as a different part of that workflow to focus on in order to ensure that, as you’re introducing new products, you still continue to utilize your assets and inventory as efficiently as possible.”
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.
]]>“We realized very quickly after the first evening that we needed to level set with definitions,” Swartz explains. “It’s interesting that our industry is still at a place it continues to be where language is something that holds us back in having conversations that help us move the agenda forward.”
Parsing the various interpretations of complicated subjects like addressable TV, audience targeting and advanced TV served to “really help us make sure that we were at the table having the same conversation with the same intention,” Swartz adds. “What was so great about this event more so than any other is that the entirety of the value chain was represented.”
Attendees included programmers, broadcasters and MVPD’s “that are taking risks and really starting to figure out how to tackle the challenge of looking at audiences instead of spots or GRPs to actually productize their inventory and take it to market with a different value proposition for marketers.”
As always, a big topic of discussion was data and whether, as Swartz puts it, it’s “actually becoming a product.” The industry was “data rich, insights poor” not that long ago. Or, as Retreat participant Jesse Redniss of Turner quipped, “I think we’re data rich, we’re insight rich, now we’re outcomes poor,” Swartz noted.
By the final day, “We were so oriented around business outcomes and it was incredibly refreshing for us to get there as a set of peers and thought leaders who are making it happen.” She also is encouraged by a common sentiment of “how do we start to transact” that goes “beyond the handshake to actually forging partnerships that are driven by and defined by qualitative, measurable business outcomes.”
Swartz says she departed with the sense of a shared set of values, needs and desired outcomes. “There’s no us versus them anymore. It’s just how do we get better, faster and stronger.”
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.
]]>“We’re very lucky here in Canada,” adds the company’s SVP of Media Sales. “We are a vertically integrated company.”
But even with the rights to National Hockey League games and its ownership of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, the clock is ticking at Rogers the same way it is at its Canadian competitors and the 50 states located below. While 85% to 90% of Canadian households subscribe to pay TV, that is slowly eroding.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Future of Television Advertising Forum in Toronto, Dark says it will probably take the next three years to “flip” 50% of its approximately 2.4 million cable households to advanced TV options. In the meantime, data is opening new doors.
“What we’ve found is there’s a real opportunity to open up new products and services for both marketers and companies that are looking to make different types of business decisions based on the data we can provide them. Location being a massive opportunity,” Dark says in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp.
By marrying consumer data from cookies and set-top boxes “we can really start to define some really interesting audience segments and really understand the behaviors of these segments.”
Left behind will be contextual selling, to be replaced by “focus on a very niche audience, or as niche as a customer wants it to be, and approach marketing in a different way.”
A big step in this direction is the platform called Rogers Enabled Data (RED) that aggregates anonymous consumer data so companies can target specific audience segments. So someone watching Rogers GameCenter Live on an iPad will get “a very different set of messages throughout the game than what your neighbor is getting next door if he’s watching it on SportsNet, for instance,” says Dark.
It’s all part of Rogers’ race to stake its claim to the Internet of things on the connected-home front, a strategy has centerpiece is “really controlling the home from a full-pipe perspective.”
Amid all the change, Dark acknowledges the reality is that over-the-air television isn’t going away anytime soon.
“So we still want that mass reach. But if you can have specific messaging for a specific customer and we can find that customer within the ecosystem and serve them a different experience that is customized versus an OTA setup, I think there’s an enormous opportunity for us to capitalize on that.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Powered by consumer segmentation data, set-top box data and TV-specific data, the self-serve platform for live avails is in the beta stage, Marcus says in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum.
“There were a couple of pain points from a TV buying perspective that we wanted to address. There’s a lag in posting that media buyers just aren’t used to in the digital world. There’s an ease of use with other products and so we wanted to address some of those things,” Marcus says.
Among other changes, transactions are in net dollars as opposed to traditional gross dollars. “We think that lines us up nicely for a multi-platform use in the future.”
Early feedback has been positive. “The market has basically come down on what we thought they would. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s a little bit more powerful than they’ve had in the past and they like the timely, useful information.”
Looking forward, Marcus hopes the rest of the industry embraces such platforms and common audience segmentations. “The days of heavy competition between broadcasters has diminished and we need to think of ourselves as a platform to compete against other platforms,” he says.
Marcus cites three hurdles to scaling addressable TV advertising, the first being regulations requiring such ads on specialty stations must be for national advertisers and national campaigns. “Very hard to break up a spot in addressable,” he explains.
The second hurdle is that cable companies in Canada are investing heavily in the next generation of set-top boxes, something that will make addressable easier, but “no one’s investing a lot of money in the current set-top boxes and so we sort of have to wait until that scales until we start making addressable easy.”
Lastly, growth of addressable TV in the U.S. market has been driven by the two minutes per hour of local time that cable providers have been able to use to monetize their investments in technology like new set-top boxes. This is not the case in Canada, so there’s “no direct way to monetize addressable inventory.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>“So what we need to look at here in Canada is are these platforms going to be North American? If they are, we need to find a way to carve Canada into that,” says Colette Watson, SVP, Television & Broadcast Operations, Rogers Media. Watson has held a variety of ascending roles since starting at Rogers in 1990.
“In terms of program acquisition and program commissioning, we’re now looking at how do we participate in a North American market as opposed to a Canadian market,” Watson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum.
As recently as a couple of years ago, Rogers would compete against Netflix and Amazon for a program hour and come up empty, Watson explains in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp.
“But today I find that’s not the case. Studios are now holding their programming back from big global suppliers, not all of it obviously, but they’re looking to create their own over the top products” like CBS All Access.
In addition to the second season of Bad Blood on Oct. 1, Rogers has a variety of its own shows in development, but they’re not 100% exclusive. “Right now, the way the Canadian market works is we create and commission for Canada but we partner on Bad Blood, for example, there’s an international distribution sale with Netflix,” Watson says.
Asked by Swartz whether Rogers approaches original programming first from a linear TV mindset and if it considers going digital-first, linear is still the first step by a margin of roughly 80% to 20%.
“Mostly because producers who come to us still get most of their funding through linear applications. As regulations and legislative frameworks evolve, that will change. It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in terms of how financing works in Canada.”
There is a mix of ad-supported and subscription models, the former represented by two new products from Rogers in October: Citytv NOW and FX NOW.
“As revenue streams change and evolve, you need to add more and more revenue streams,” says Watson. “Creating a good viewer experience, primary. But also creating a good advertiser experience is paramount. And so that’s how we’re looking at our development.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>This “interesting construct of a market” with huge geography and “not a lot of people” still has more than 75% of households using cable TV subscriptions. “And it’s not eroding at the same rate we are seeing in the U.S.,” Swartz explains in this conference recap interview for Beet.TV.
A frequent Beet.TV contributor, Swartz is CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization and has clients in Canada. She says that research shows similarities in Canada to audience behaviors in the United States and Western Europe, “Which means there’s a huge opportunity for brands here to take lessons they’ve learned in other markets that may have more data, may be more mature, be introducing audience-based products sooner and bring that to Canada and execute with great precision sooner.”
She cites as examples a real-time buying platform by Corus Entertainment that encompasses 25 of its specialty TV networks and the introduction of the data-enabled RED solution from Rogers Media.
“Both of them are innovating and bringing new products to market that are elevating the value and ROI of television,” Swartz says. “Stepping on the traditional business models of an Upfront-driven marketplace and taking risks in order to innovate and deliver more ROI.”
Although she hears complaints about the amount of friction required in buying TV and media overall, Swartz believes the sentiment exists in Canada to collaborate, plus a “hunger to innovate and a desire to continue to grow this market.”
She doesn’t see the kind of industry protectionism that exists in the United States, where “fear and uncertainty” still prevail.
There is much to be learned from the growth of advanced TV in other markets as Canadian broadcasters pave their future, according to Swartz.
“I think that creates a Petri dish of opportunity for brands and marketers for their agencies to begin to start to spend dollars in different places or allocate net new money in different ways as these sellers are coming to market with new opportunities and new innovations.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Just over a year ago, Sky and Virgin disclosed their intent to team up on addressable TV ads by adding Virgin Media’s customer base to Sky’s addressable TV offering, Sky AdSmart, as The Drum reports. In this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp. Founder & CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Future of TV Advertising Forum, Ranger provides an update on the alliance.
It’s been a few years since Cadent began working with Virgin to deploy VOD dynamic ad insertion on its Qam system. Cadent has also enabled VOD on Virgin’s IP system in the UK and Ireland “and now we’re looking at linear as well,” says Ranger.
“What’s been less talked about is the fact that it’s Cadent technology providing the system which is going to allow them to do that,” he adds of the Sky/Virgin initiative.
To be GDPR compliant, Cadent is “effectively creating a walled garden, which means Sky are abstracted away from all of the Virgin subscriber information and keeping it GDPR compliant from that perspective.
“We’re managing the exchange of the campaign data from Sky, because obviously Sky are very sensitive about handing over campaign information as well. We’re acting as the mediator between the Sky media campaign information and the Virgin subscriber data,” says Ranger.
In Canada thus far, Cadent has worked “specifically” with Rogers Cable, enabling VOD dynamic ad insertion for its 1.6 million subscriber households to pay-TV, along with Corus Entertainment and Bell Globemedia.
Ranger sees the role of Cadent as two-fold: being pioneers and educators in the interested of advanced television advertising.
“And we’re looking at it from a technology perspective as well,” he says. “One of the things that we don’t want to create is a whole load of siloed systems that make it very expensive to operationalize these new kinds of advertising.”
Priorities include normalizing data, making ad ops as efficient as possible and creating “a common technology product across multiple BDU’s that the major programmers can tap into and use to drive new revenue streams,” he says, referencing Broadcast Distribution Undertakings—satellite TV operators, as they are known in Canada.
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Canada is a “fascinating market and for many reasons,” Astley says in this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp.’s Ashley J. Swartz at last week’s Future of TV Advertising Forum in Toronto. Foremost among those reasons is that Canada has one of the world’s highest rates of pay-TV subscriptions, at some 85% to 90%.
“So that means obviously you’ve got boxes in living rooms, in pretty much every living room in Canada. Which is a pretty good base to start for an addressable TV business,” Astley explains.
The challenge is that many set-top boxes are older-generation devices not equipped with modern ad-serving capabilities. Currently, Ericsson and Comcast are rolling out new boxes with all of the latest technology.
“That’s going to change a lot because it’s going to create a new universe of addressable boxes in Canadian homes and we hope that will scale pretty quickly,” Astley says. “Where there’s been a lot of VOD inventory available in Canada historically but with no real ad insertion capabilities, suddenly that will unlock over the next year or so.”
Until quite recently, Canadian broadcasters have not really been under “a huge amount of threat from international distribution businesses,” he adds, but this year and going into next year “the threat is very real.”
Netflix adoption in Canada is “incredibly high. We’ve seen OTT start to grow massively.”
Launched a year ago in the U.K. to serve as a single access point to inventory across different broadcasters and operators, Finecast sees three pillars to the success of addressable, with an ecosystem being the foundation. Those are advertiser demand, content distribution and content.
“We think collaboration across those three areas is really important because what a marketer really wants is scale against unique addressable segments,” Astley says. “To achieve that scale you’ve got to collaborate on data and you’ve got to collaborate on a multi-broadcaster basis to really achieve that scale.”
While the transformation in Canada won’t happen overnight, “the change is there and I think over the next six to twelve months, we’ll start to see some pretty interesting developments.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>“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.
]]>Meanwhile, because linear television hasn’t given up the Upfront negotiating mainstay, it’s still going to have a longer purchase cycle than other media, Horstman explains in this one-on-one interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.
Swartz senses that the buy-side and sell-side are comfortable blaming each other for a lack of progress.
“People are using data as a mechanism or an edge to try to get a competitive advantage whether you’re a buyer or a seller,” replies Horstman, who is SVP GM, Advanced Media & Advertising at TiVo.
When the sell-side embraces advanced TV, “they want to use data to find inventory that surfaces for a targeted audience to actually make it more valuable.” On the buy-side, it’s akin to arbitrage in the search for “opportunities of inventory that that sell-side doesn’t understand is as valuable as it is. But I’ve got some insider proprietary data that I’m using to find those opportunities.”
With this dynamic as a backdrop, Horstman sees more flexibility on the buy-side.
“For the sellers, there may be a little bit of risk aversion to say what inventory are we going to promote as data-driven because we want to sort of control how much gets used and control the messaging and control what data gets put against it,” he says. “But if you’re a buyer, you can apply it to everything.”
One of the brightest spots that Horstman sees in the agency world is within the digital ranks. “Because for the first time, they don’t view TV as this mysterious media vehicle which has only been posted or measured or targeted using just your traditional Nielsen panel. Now they can get incredible insights around the matching of data from TV to their digital campaigns, social, mobile, connected TV, all the linages they can now have converged measurement and targeting.”
Digital practitioners “are taking a leadership role in this world” because they’ve not only lived with data and analytics but are used to doing things like attribution and media mix modeling very quickly, according to Horstman.
“Now for the first time, they’ve got access to what’s been going on over in the TV world and can understand the influence of what’s happening in TV on their digital campaigns and start to influence it.”
Asked by Swartz where the industry is on the overall timeline for advanced TV, Horstman says it depends on the speed at which different types of media can be transacted.
“We still have the Upfronts we still have a longer purchase cycle within linear television compared to digital, connected TV, what have you.”
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.
]]>“The future of how TV is being delivered is changing. We believe all or virtually all what we now call television impressions will be addressable,” says Brett Hurwitz, Oath’s Business Lead for Advanced TV.
At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Hurwitz sat down with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz to discuss the path to that advanced-TV future and how more big-brand marketers are embracing addressable TV.
“I still believe that indexed-based television is smarter for marketers than traditional TV buying,” says Hurwitz. “But Oath has made the decision that with the changes that are taking place in the way television’s delivered, having an offering in that space is not something that makes sense for us to be investing in.”
Instead, “We’re investing in what we see to be the future of premium video and the future of television.”
The Fios TV addressable offering was launched in the fall of 2016 and initially ran in parallel with One TV, as Multichannel News reports.
While the term “household addressable” has mainly been the province of MVPD-based offerings, advanced TV encompasses a broader set of solutions. They include index-based offerings by networks (for example OpenAP) along with OTT and connected TV.
Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., whether the ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to use the same dataset to target audiences across all platforms, Hurwitz says it goes beyond that basic application.
“Going a step further, you can do things like based on a certain level of exposure to a television commercial then place a target on a digital kind of lower-funnel activation tactic,” Hurwitz says.
So will Oath’s previously programmatic offering revert to direct-sold inventory?
“I think the way we’re beginning to view these types of pieces of inventory is as super premium video, and so ultimately having that type of inventory available in our video programmatic environment is something that we’re exploring,” says Hurwitz.
He believes there will always be a place for the Upfront negotiating season and does not see the future becoming “one audience, one price.”
What Hurwitz is seeing right now is advertisers that originally were staying away from addressable now starting to come in.
“Because what they’re realizing is the data that you can get from addressable campaigns has tremendous application to what creative you run on your larger linear campaigns,” Hurwitz says.
“The kind of conventional notion that the only advertisers who should pay a premium CPM to work with addressable television are advertisers who have a relatively small target we’re seeing really start to change.”
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.
]]>With more than a decade in the media industry, including interactive TV pioneer Canoe Ventures, Schaffer likens his role to bringing “fire to cave men” in this interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City on June 6 in Manhattan.
What has long been done in other industries—process automation—has proven to be “very challenging” in the media industry because of its deep legacy infrastructure, closed systems and “a lot of challenges to being able to transact business electronically with trading partners,” Schaffer says.
Having “started life as a Price Waterhouse CPA,” Schaffer thinks the media industry is going through the latter stages “of what we have been studying for a long time and expecting. This notion of convergence. This notion of linear television becoming digital.”
With so much change being forced on the industry because of the way consumers are receiving and consuming content, the future must be one of “open systems, open communication, more efficient delivery of transactional information back and forth among trading parties. It seems to me it’s time to harmonize and streamline the transaction process.”
And it’s not just between buyers and sellers of media but within media companies themselves, according to Schaffer.
“There’s still the requirement of dealing within very siloed business units that are very, very separate, and there’s very little connecting those various systems inside an entity that allow them to transact with outside third parties in a more effective way,” he says.
Asked by Swartz whether change involves simply “chasing platforms,” Schaffer says it goes well beyond what consumers have largely become indifferent to: how they consume content.
Along with more open systems and data-driven decision making, “new measurement tools are going to be required, harmonization, being able to deal with multiple different measures and multiple different currencies.”
Asked to cite three major challenges facing media companies, Schaffer identifies becoming platform agnostic, achieving more efficient distribution and gaining scale. “Scale is incredibly important to media companies as we’re seeing a lot of pressure for each of them to become larger and frankly more global,” Schaffer says.
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.
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