While pursuing these topics can lead to circular conversations—everyone agrees on the need for change but no one thinks it won’t happen soon, if at all—such discussions actually help to clarify a very complex landscape. This was the goal of a panel at Beet Retreat Miami 2017 featuring executives from FreeWheel, one2one Media and digital-first agency Essence.
Moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink, kicked things off by asking for specific suggestions that would remove roadblocks from the advanced TV space. What follows are a sampling of responses.
Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America Essence: “Everyone’s got different agendas. The MVPD’s don’t want to allow me to bump my first-party data up to their set-top boxes unless I’m buying local media through them. That’s not a long-term success for anyone in this business, to link business models that don’t need to be linked. On the distribution side, there are affiliate agreements that restrict national networks from selling local inventory. That’s going to cause a problem if we’re talking about moving to an addressable model where national networks want to be able to sell.”
Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media: “Unfortunately, I agree with a lot of what you said. It really comes down to how we articulate change in our business. Everybody around here knows that nothing moves quickly in this business when it comes to change. We’re all used to thinking cheaper is better. So in terms of moving this along, it’s about identifying how something might cost a little bit more but the return on it might be more than the X factor of that cost.”
Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel: “We’re living in a world where video sits in two worlds, basically linear TV and digital video, and these are still two silos and they’re run separate at the agency level but also at the publisher level. We think that needs to become a lot simpler, it needs to become one pool of inventory, it needs to become one way for the buyer to find their viewers, as opposed to two different ways.
So how long will silos hold back progress, asked Spiegel.
“I think we are going to continue to see it rise in silos because there isn’t one person that can actually snap their fingers, make a decision and bring it altogether,” said Bologna. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth doing all the work and working through all those silos if the return pays out, which can be demonstrated with the proper data.”
Gerber pointed out that consumers want two things: live and on-demand programming. Delivery mechanisms are irrelevant. “They don’t give a rat’s ass whether it’s through a DVR, through their VOD platform, through a connected TV app, through any other number of mechanisms that get the content to their screen,” said Gerber. “It’s not about platforms it’s about experiences and it’s about delivering an ad in those experiences.”
Organizational malfunction isn’t going away anytime soon, noted Bologna. “It exists at agencies, it exists at media companies, it exists at the brands. In my opinion, the best we can do is work within the organizational malfunction and do the best we can.”
Gerber cited the status quo of how brand portfolios do business, beginning with their budgeting processes, explaining how it works against an addressability model. Using the hypothetical example of a telecommunications company, he said it should be able to message across various product suites based on what it knows about its customers.
“But if they’re building their brand budgets and their campaigns from the product level up, addressability doesn’t scale,” said Gerber. “Because what you want to be able do is push addressability from the top down. When you know about a consumer and they’re in a particular mental state in terms of purchase you want to serve them the right product. Serving them the right product that’s out of flight because it doesn’t align with the brand budget doesn’t work. So client org structures have to completely flip in terms of how they manage their marketing budgets for this to work.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>To hear panelists at the recent Beet Retreat Miami explain it, lunar landings might be easier to achieve than getting TV broadcasters en masse to quickly embrace the future.
Asked by moderator Ashley J. Swartz to explain the implications of ATSC3.0, Rob Weisbord, who was recently named Chief Revenue Officer of Sinclair Digital Group, stepped up to the dais from the audience and said, “It’s taking IP technology, layering it over the linear transmitter so it gives you a hybrid approach. It puts broadcasters into a bit business.”
While that sounds exciting, reality quickly set in. Mike Kubin, EVP, Media at Invidi, explained how his company began working in 2003 with distributors to get its software into digital set-top boxes.
“It took us forever to make that happen,” Kubin said. “Right now we are in five terrific distributors in the United States. Our goals are to go international, but there’s only so much we can do. At the end of the day, they tell us what we can do or what we can’t do.”
SintecMedia CEO Lorne Brown cited a “future of TV survey” his company did in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters in which just 30% of respondents said they were ready for advanced TV. “Of those 30 percent, 60 percent said they were going to rely on legacy, in-house, home-grown technology to deliver advanced TV,” said Brown. “So only 30 percent are ready and 60 percent believe they can pull it off with the stuff that they have in house. I think that’s a major problem.”
Said Swartz: “All I’m hearing is more increased complexity.”
Jennifer Koester, Director of Global Partnerships for Google, took a positive approach. “I think the dichotomy that we keep talking about between linear and digital, it’s going away. I think we need to kind of step back from that and talk about solutions and technology that bridges the gap.”
She listed among the industry’s needs simplifying the ecosystem, making cross-screen reach and frequency easier, plus driving more value and being able to show it with regard to premium video inventory. That led to this exchange:
Koester: “The shift is going to happen and when it does, I think it’s going to happen very quickly.”
Brown: “I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a slow, painful…”
Koester: “I think we’re in the slow painful part right now.”
Brown: “I think even ATSC3.0…”
Koester: “That’s going to be slow.”
Brown: “And so how fast can Comcast roll out addressable boxes? All of this is really, really slow.”
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development for Videology, explained the complexity involved in trying to “be nimble” when dealing with integrations with systems for order entry, decisioning, trafficking, billing and CRM systems. While noting that media companies leverage Videology’s software to optimize the planning of data against media, it’s not always used for programmatic transactions.
“As an example, we just landed the press about Fox, a great partner client of ours, they use it for direct sales. They’re not using it in a programmatic fashion,” said Yi.
Swartz related a recent visit to a broadcaster to discuss a solution from her Furious Corp., only to experience a “not made here mentality.” She concluded that the meeting was a waste of time.
Brown summed up the differences between programmers and operators. “If I’m a national programmer, my strategy has to come from legacy linear outward. Versus if I’m an operator I can lean much more into advanced TV and impressions because I control the pipes and I have the data. Legacy linear for a national programmer is foundational and that’s really, really hard.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.
“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”
These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.
Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.
“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”
TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.
“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”
This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”
Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.
“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>The CEO of linear TV and video yield optimization provider Furious Corp. probed the panelists for their thoughts on how bring together all the players that are required to advance the TV and video ecosystem in a way that benefits brands and consumers.
What follows are some of the more salient dialogue and exchanges from Brian Katz, VP of Advanced TV Insights & Strategy at Eyeview; Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer at Alphonso; Tore Tellefsen, VP of TV Solutions at dataxu; and Neil Smith, SVP, Markets at FreeWheel.
On the need for speed of data delivery:
Alphonso has an always-on, real-time index of every program and ad airing across over 200 broadcast and cable networks and major OTT services, so buyers can see the number of units plus reach and frequency for their clients and competitors. “You don’t have to wait six months any more or six weeks anymore. You can get that in real time. And that’s something that TV buyers have never had before. In real time. Speed is key,” said Gall.
On the need for speed in personalized creative:
“We’ve made the process very simple for our clients,” said Katz. “We don’t show every single creative to the creative team. We storyboard the process with their ads, we show where we’re going to come into play with various creative and then we activate it.”
Asked by Swartz whether all clients are so trusting, Katz explained, “It’s not all marketers, all brands. And that is the challenge for us to educate and to develop that trust with clients and marketers.”
How does one get people who are very comfortable with traditional TV media to embrace more data-driven decisioning? “The short answer is patience and repetition,” said Tellefsen. “What we try to focus on or try to push and emphasize is get as many people to the table as possible and not focus on sort of specific point solutions or specific capabilities but spending a lot of time talking about the art of the possible. Here’s how other people are employing it.”
Said Smith: “We want to bridge that gap between marketers and consumers. We consciously work across the value chain. We do tons of education and advocacy to brands, agencies, agency trading desks, buy-side technology companies, data companies.”
Asked how much of an influence fear has on peoples’ ability to change, Katz responded, “I haven’t seen any fear out there. I think it’s just a lack of education and the unknown that people fear and maybe the way certain businesses are set up sort of the fear of losing certain budgets or influence over decision making.”
Will vertical tech stacks become horizontal ones in the desire for a more unified TV and video ecosystem?
“Right now in the TV to mobile targeting business or the attribution business it’s still probably in the innovation or early adoption phase of our industry and we have to really work together,” said Gall.
So is it the gradual consolidation of the largest media companies that will bring the tipping point to the industry or the power of advertisers to demand faster change? “What is going to have a greater influence on us thriving and not just surviving for scraps as an industry through the current storm that we’re in,” asked Swartz.
Katz: “I think it’s a combination of consolidation and collaboration.”
Tellefsen, speaking about the impact of companies like Amazon and Netflix, called those digital upstarts “tremendous competitors and tremendous forces in the industry. And it’s forcing everyone in this room to rethink how they do business, who they do business with and how they’re going to remain relevant to brands and advertisers for the future.”
Smith: “I think it’s the ability to put all the pieces together to deliver that that’s been the challenge that we’re working through. I think that gets a lot easier when you have consolidation and you have a critical mass to bring those solutions to market in ways that they can connect together and actually work.”
And on the need for greater collaboration: “I think the marketers are demanding it,” said Gall. “Within three years if you don’t deliver it, you’re dead. So I really think they’re pushing the piece.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Some thinking holds that video is video, regardless of the platform, as sellers are more frequently combining video and TV “and selling them as one type of advertising,” says Joan Fitzgerald, a consultant who specializes in advanced TV and cross-platform data.
“But the reality is, I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of this convergence between linear television and digital video,” Fitzgerald adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
One reason for the remaining distance is that consumer experiences “are fundamentally different” depending on how they are consuming TV/video.
Fitzgerald, whose background includes stints at Arbitron, comScore and TiVo, cites Fox’s experimentation with six-second ad units in the industry’s quest for greater understanding of the value of unit lengths.
“The reality is, you can’t just simply say that a six-second spot is worth less than a fifteen or a thirty because it’s shorter. There are many more dynamics in play from the consumer experience,” says Fitzgerald.
Meanwhile, impression metrics still reign supreme, even though advances are being made to link exposure to advertiser business outcomes. The key is being able to place a tangible value on viewer attention.
“We haven’t yet as an industry gotten beyond this notion of opportunity to see and an impression as a metric to something that might be more meaningful to the marketer,” says Fitzgerald.
Asked about video completion rates as a barometer of viewer attention, she says there’s “really a question as to how often a completion actually occurs on a fifteen or a thirty or a sixty just because the measurement tools that we’ve traditionally used really don’t measure that granularity. There are companies trying to measure completion rates, but it’s an art and not a science at this point.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>With over-the-top and set-top box viewing at about 50%, the big TV screen still accounts for four out of five hours daily. But shifting viewing habits pose challenges for buyers and marketers, according to Herve Brunet, GM, FreeWheel Markets.
“We still plan in a very siloed fashion,” Brunet says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have planning processes for TV and planning processes for digital video.”
A single inventory pool would make things a lot easier.
“You can do things like de-duplicated reach, you can do frequency capping across linear TV and digital devices,” Brunet says.
A typical example would be someone watching a program on linear TV who can then be targeted with ads on an OTT device, which is connected to the same TV set.
“And we actually know that we’ve been targeting you twice. One time in a linear fashion and one time in an OTT fashion. So that’s a real value for the marketer.”
On the matter of currencies, transacting on a mix of gross rating points and impressions holds back progress in unifying inventory pools.
“As the TV world evolves more toward like digital decisioning, it’s going to evolve into an impression-based world. It’s going to be easier to unify the currency towards probably an impression-based currency or unit-based currency,” Brunet adds.
Asked about the evolution of the Comcast Advanced Advertising group, which includes FreeWheel, Brunet talks about helping to transform linear TV and digital video into one industry.
“I think the only way to make this industry work is look at the entire value chain, from the viewer to the marketer. And I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to address as a group.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Overall, the Principal Analyst believes that things are moving from “conversations about how the TV industry is evolving to action in the TV industry,” O’Connell explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
“It’s a massive industry. It was been very, very slow to change. And I think it’s still moving relatively slowly in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the energy this time feels meaningful, as though we are graduating to action.”
Because of her grasp of the complicated adtech ecosystem, it’s easy for her to boil things down when the issue is consolidation of players. She notes that some companies are interested in owning the full technology stack, “everything from data management and analytics and data as an asset” through to execution.
Then there are “the other set of companies who, at least so far, seem less interested in getting into the execution game. When you look at consolidation, to me that’s the most interesting dynamic,” O’Connell says.
The bottom line: will execution inevitably become “part of these massive clouds? It sort of feels like it will. And yet if you ask them, some of them deliberately take a stance that it won’t.”
While she appreciates the efforts of media companies like NBCUniversal to accelerate the shift from buying demos to audiences, O’Connell believes that things can only progress so quickly. There’s a lot of inertia in basic business dynamics.
For example, the traditional, procurement-driven practice of “getting CPM’s lower than the CPM’s that the agency achieved the prior year. Which is insane. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a crazy model.” A model of “rewarding efficiency and effectiveness needs to become more of the norm,” she adds.
Asked whether Netflix will go the ad-supported route, O’Connell evokes the chicken-and-egg causality dilemma. Are consumers demanding ad-free services like Netflix, or is the company driving change that consumers embrace?
Either way, Netflix has made some companies up their game, according to O’Connell.
“So when we are in an ad-supported model, it’s one that consumers don’t hate but actually find valuable. Let alone not annoying, can you imagine if they actually found it valuable?”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>dataxu started down the road of expanding its OneView audience management platform some four years ago. Back then, the focus was to “solve the problem around mobile advertising” and being able to tie digital and cookies with mobile devices.
“What dataxu did at the time is they had designed the platform and the system with an eye toward TV in the future. So we built in the notion of household and individuals,” Tellefsen says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
With OneView, a variety of marketer’ data, when combined with mobile data about consumers, facilitates targeting people at the household level for connected-TV.
Another key piece of the solution pertained to inventory. This involved working with publishers and demand-side platforms “to bring to bear all of the best publishers and apps that are available across the connected TV universe and make it available on the platform for our clients to activate against,” Tellefsen says.
It represents a shift from contextual buying of connected-TV to deciding which audiences are most attractive and “do that across connected-TV and online video and mobile video.”
Tellefsen cites the example of a dataxu mobile streaming client that’s using its device ID’s and targeting those customers on connected-TV to do subscription upgrades. Other uses are taking first-party data—people who have visited a website or signed up for a subscription—translating that into digital audiences “and then reaching those same consumers with offers around their product and their service.”
Given the paradigm shift from context to audience targeting, educating advertisers and agencies requires “patience and repetition,” says Tellefsen.
“It’s not so much about describing the Swiss Army Knife and what it can do but how have other people employed these tools and these capabilities to solve business challenges.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>For both, the question becomes “How can we enhance the speed of change,” says Matt Spiegel, Managing Partner at MediaLink.
Thus the strategic advisory and business development firm grounds its marketer clients in a basic reality.
“We often say that if you’re going to participate in new things, you’re going to have to start with new measurement models,” Spiegel says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “What a lot of marketers are going through is what often is called the precision marketing journey.”
That voyage begins with accepting that measuring reach and frequency and exposure “is not going to be the sufficient metrics of the future in order to try new advanced things,” Spiegel says.
The new media world values a much more complex list of things. “That transition is semi easy to say and very hard to do.”
Choices must be made on the TV side as well. A major challenge common to traditional broadcasters is that their revenue streams “are much more finite and refined” than newer players like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix.
“They benefit from seeing the creation of content and monetization, i.e. the ad business, the media business, being a secondary or tertiary revenue stream to their core business,” Spiegel says. “That has a huge implication for how you think about the economics of funding content development and the decisions you’re able to make in that business.”
The question for big, traditional broadcasters: what is the role they think they can play? Do they use other companies’ technologies, go direct to consumer, try to handle their monetization options?
“I think there’s a future where not everyone that’s premium, high-end content creators will be in the ad sales or ad monetization business,” Spiegel adds. “They’re likely to choose other partners to help with that potential piece of the pie. That’s years out there. But I think those are the plates that have to shift.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“For every single one we actually underestimated how fast and how rapid the growth and adoption of OTT and connected TV would be,” says the company’s CEO, Andre Swanston. “Ad-supported, connected TV adoption is growing way faster than I think anybody predicted.”
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Swanston insists that the future is right now for OTT and connected-TV viewing and explains his company’s impending rollout to consumers of a data opt-out solution for advanced TV.
His future-is-now stance rests on the belief that it’s not lack of technology that’s holding back advanced consumer targeting via new and emerging venues. To Swanston, It’s “more of a speed of adoption across leading advertisers and networks and logistical and bureaucratic things that are kind of slowing momentum down.”
Want to use third-party data sources on indexed linear buy and then use that same data source for your addressable set-top buy? It can be done, along with using that same data source across desktop and mobile and connected TV. Attribution of commercial exposure to store visits and purchases? That, too, can be done.
“There’s just very little that an advertiser can want to do now across advanced TV that we can’t actually do,” Swanston says.
Despite the growth of OTT and connected-TV viewing, no industry association has thought to provide consumers with a way of opting out of the data collection associated with advanced targeting. So Tru Optik is leading the charge behind OptOut.TV, a one-stop solution.
“We just thought that it made more sense to be proactive in terms of trying to allow for consumers to have those type of privacy and opt-out controls as opposed to waiting for some issue, some lawsuit to happen or the government to put in place some sort restriction or barrier that really hampered the business,” Swanston says.
In January 2018, when OptOut.TV becomes available to consumers via the Web and through an array of OTT apps, Tru Optik will only support data providers, demand-side platforms and publishers that are compliant with OptOut.TV.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Thus says Tracey Scheppach, the former Publicis executive who spent upward of 15 years charting the future of more one-to-one targeted TV before forming Matter More Media. “At this event, what I have heard over the last three days is lots of talk about collaboration. And that is really encouraging because the infrastructure is getting there,” Scheppach says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have the tools to make media more efficient, more precise and now it takes the ecosystem to work together.”
One of her business goals is to bring more money to the TV space. She suggests catalogers take a page from marketers that have long known the power of the medium.
“They’re taking a list, they’re sending an asset which happens to be paper and putting it in a mailbox. Here we’re taking a list, we’re taking an asset that happens to be video and putting it into a set-top box or over the top in some IP-delivered way,” Scheppach says.
The 2018 TV Upfront “is going to be I think a watershed moment because the data is available and the programmers are starting to cooperate,” she adds. “We all know that TV works but they’re going to be able to prove it in a way that the Facebooks and Googles have been able to prove it to clients. Now TV is at that place.”
Looking back at the naming of her company just over a year ago, Scheppach recalls a meeting with Maurice Levy and other Publicis executives in which she presented “the future of addressable and data-driven television and what creatively Publicis needed to do.” When she made “waste less” one of her talking points, Levy chided her by advising “don’t ever say waste. That makes our clients feel like we were wasting their investment before.”
So she tried to make a positive out of it with Matter More. “We’re moving to a more precise one-to-one conversation that’s a progression. That’s the more part. You can’t just matter now. The world didn’t just change over night. It’s a progression to be able to matter more,” says Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Two of the company’s newest products are a measurement solution for local broadcasters and addressability for linear TV, according to VP of Advertising James Shears.
Using automatic content recognition, “We understand what’s on the screen and we can actually measure what people are doing on the TV,” Shears says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “It’s not panel based, it’s not leveraging set-top box data. It’s just doing something that’s not been done in market before.”
Use cases for local broadcasters include informing their promotional activity and bringing insights to newscasts, both based on the entire life cycle of viewers. “During the newscast or local broadcast, did they leave the channel when a particular story was coming on or did they come back and stay and were heavily engaged? Maybe they need to push happier stories or do something they hadn’t really thought about.”
This represents a more holistic approach “where there has been a hunger for measurement that’s a little more informed and a little more second by second,” Shears says.
With addressable, Sorenson Media “takes out the traditional and starts understanding how you can leverage the digital ecosystem to do something that has been done in the linear TV side, but maybe not at the speed with which we can perform. The key for our platform is that we’re essentially creating an ecosystem.”
Because of everything it sees on TV screens, the company says it’s in a good position to “think about the stream itself” and improve viewers’ experiences. That could involve shrinking the 18 minutes of commercial time per hour and other ways “we can think about breaking the paradigm.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>When location-data marketing platform NinthDecimal studied the connection between digital assets and offline sales, it found that mobile generated a higher incremental lift in store visits than mobile and desktop. “So it’s really about that consumer shopping journey,” says Brian Kilmer, the company’s SVP of Advanced Television & Central Region Sales.
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Kilmer explains how the same location data is being used to plan and buy television based on exposure to TV commercials and subsequent behavior.
Using patented technology, NinthDecimal “looks at the physical outlines of 103 million U.S. households and we look to see the signals from a mobile device” within a precision of four feet. In its recent study with marketing agency Ansira, NinthDecimal measured the effectiveness of organic web visits, paid search web visits and media as it relates to driving store traffic.
In addition to underscoring the strength of mobile, the study showed that paid search drove the highest website-to-store conversion rates (1.7X greater than direct site traffic) and direct site traffic drove the highest lift in incremental store sales. Based on the study, NinthDecimal expanded its offline attribution platform, Location Conversion Index, into a website-to-store attribution solution called Website LCI.
Via various data partnerships, NinthDecimal can examine linear and OTT TV commercial exposure data for households. “We then look at the consumers based on all of the places that they go and see if the exposure to a TV ad drove them in-store more,” Kilmer says.
Those same data are used to create audience targets and push them onto to TV planning and buying platforms. Even traditional print media like magazines can be assessed for the impact their ads have on driving consumer behavior, according to Kilmer.
Just because someone saw a particular ad then visited that marketer’s store doesn’t mean one caused the other. “That actually doesn’t measure ad effectiveness. That measures did you target someone going to my store,” says Kilmer.
So NinthDecimal uses more than a year’s worth of historical consumer data to surface incremental behavior, as in did someone “go more than someone who looks just like them who did not see that ad.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Media technology provider 4C Insights cut its teeth on digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. As it shifts into the linear television space to enable more precise audience targeting, it’s an instance of TV “borrowing a plan from the digital playbook,” says Chief Product Officer Anupam Gupta.
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Gupta explains some of the more important learnings gained from the social media space and reflects on the company’s programmatic venture with NBCUniversal.
Given their advanced advertising infrastuctures, which enable granular audience targeting, the big social media platforms provide fast measurement for campaign optimization.
“Those are good and those are learnings that I think you can apply to, let’s say, the world of TV where you want to target better, you want to have more programmatic tools and you want to measure and optimize faster.”
Another learning is that the data in social media “is huge and it’s real-time,” providing brands with consumer insights that can be used to identify the kinds of consumers they want to target. “We call it the unlimited focus group,” says Gupta.
The third learning he cites is the huge reach of social media. “So when you’re doing a true cross-channel campaign and if you need to find more reach or more frequency, you can use social media as an additive channel let’s say to television.”
Asked about the industry’s quest for uniform cross-platform audience measurement, Gupta says the focus should be on business objectives. Some brands are after upper-funnel lift, others actual sales impact and yet others everything in between.
“At the end of the day yes, there is a strong desire to measure things, but to has to tie back to the objectives that a marketer has,” says Gupta.
In a deal announced in October, the 4C platform has programmatic access to NBCU inventory that isn’t sold in the Upfront.
“Now you can bring the audience intelligence to bear against that inventory, build a plan that essentially hits the audience you’re going after and execute on that just like you do digital campaigns,” Gupta says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“This is happening so quickly. What we now realize is it’s leading to a very different kind of relationship we have with the end user marketer and their agency,” Rosen says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
Data has always been an integral part of the TV-buying process, but its usefulness was limited, if not suppressed, by the traditional ways of doing business.
“What would happen over the course of the process from media plan to buy, a lot would get lost in the translation,” Rosen says. “It would get dumbed down from being a pretty precise target that would be informed by data into just the lowest common denominator of age and gender.”
Now it’s common for agencies to present “some incredibly rich” first-party data from their marketer clients. Their desire is to “be able to empower that data to help be a part of the decisioning for what media they purchase from us.”
NBCU has made available $1 billion of its inventory for advanced audience targeting, an effort that Rosen says has been embraced by the marketplace. It’s an example of what he terms the “best advertising environment” of TV and premium video becoming even better.
Asked to define the term programmatic, Rosen says “it’s the automation and data infusion of things that used to be done in a very packaged, managed process by us based on business rules that haven’t changed in decades.”
The approach taken by NBCU is one of being agnostic. This means advertisers can avail themselves of the company’s optimizations—informed by data from Comcast set-top box data from 22 households—or avail themselves of NBCU inventory via demand-side platforms or private marketplace transactions.
“As long as better data, better data segmentation informs the buy, we know it will work harder. We know it will be more effective.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Furious Corp. began operations in 2014, with Nielsen as its largest investor. Swartz says the plan was pretty straightforward: create a yield optimization solution based on data from a few media sellers, from Nielsen and from other sources, that could be used across the board. It didn’t quite work out.
“What we ultimately found, and what we found about television, is that every client, specifically every media company or seller of advertising, is a snowflake,” Swartz explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “What we found is that using that small subset of a few clients, some anonymized emulated data, wasn’t enough.”
So Swartz and her team took a step back and regrouped. In 2016, Furious on-boarded more than 15 media companies, mostly from North America, including the largest ones, onto the platform. It chose seven of the 15 to use in a revenue linkage analysis involving at least a year of transactional data—campaign-level and in some cases spot-level—to examine pricing and inventory utilization.
“Across most of those clients, what we found was that ultimately, pricing inefficiency and the lack of optimized pricing was what was driving a lot of the cannibalization of yield or the revenue that was leaking as a result of it,” Swartz explains.
One surprise in particular was based on the presumption that media sellers still cling firmly to their advertising rate cards.
“But ultimately, when you start to unpack consistently every client you see such extreme volatility in pricing, and that is ultimately what is driving the opportunity cost of not maximizing yield,” with the exception of syndicated TV, says Swartz, .
The company’s message to the companies involved in the analysis was to show what might have been had yield optimization been place.
“With those clients, we have found that when you look at both inventory and pricing optimization combined to provide yield optimization, we have not found less than a 9.5% lift in topline revenue, had a portfolio level yield optimization solution like ours been place.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“I think the time is now,” says Videology’s Tony Yi. “Facebook video impressions are growing exponentially. Amazon is out there in full force.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Yi explains the need to counter things like last-click attribution and suggests that when it comes to TV audience targeting, the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom won’t be the only option.
Yi’s message is simple: Traditional TV players need to move fast to adjust to changing viewing behavior lest they fall victim to what has happened in the digital publishing world, where giants like Facebook and Google rule the revenue roost. “What we can’t do is wait for the perfect system to meld itself together across different silos, linear, VOD, addressable, or everything going to IP.”
Videology has been investing in its “data spine” because it understood early on that “we’ve got to get down to the respondent level. Even to the device level.”
Seeing about six billion ad requests daily, “We amplify the signal that we’re getting at the respondent level to the currencies so we can help our clients better forecast and plan media against the currencies,” says Yi, who is GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development.
Complementing the data spine is developing an understanding of clients’ data needs in order to drive outcomes.
“Only then can we actually measure how is that attributable to traditional television,” Yi says. “Because if leave that up to the digital giants, the barbarians at the gate, they will define things in terms of search and last click, things that don’t behoove the traditional media companies.”
He’s seeing more impetus for media sellers to move past early “protectionism” of their inventory and cooperate with competitors, along with “reaching across the aisle to the buy-side and create platforms where they can agree upon and share the right data sets, the right outcomes and attribution methods.”
Yi calls OpenAP “a great step,” one that Videology supports “both from a client standpoint as well as from a market messaging standpoint. We know there are a number of great initiatives under way, some that are more public like OpenAP and others that have yet to be disclosed.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“That is certainly one of the objectives for us as well as for a number of partners that we work with in the space, and it certainly seems like it’s going to require a number of stakeholders to get to where the industry wants us frankly to be,” says Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud.
With 97 of the top 100 US advertisers and slightly less of the top 100 globally, there’s very little in the way of data that Oracle hasn’t seen on the digital side. Now a core focus, according to Harrison, is to “deliver solutions to all flavors of TV, from national linear to addressable VOD, linear to connected and OTT.”
Oracle doesn’t lack for partnerships in the TV space, counting Hulu as an early collaborator and also The Trade Desk, DataXu and TubeMogul, all of which have been “investing quite a bit to solve for TV through their own initiatives so we are working to align closely with them,” Harrison says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
The first time that Oracle Data Cloud enabled its purchase-based audiences for linear national TV was through a linkup with Simulmedia, something company founder Dave Morgan called “a defining moment in the transformation of TV to a data-driven, audience-targeted business.”
Asked about the quest for unified, cross-platform measurement, Harrison says clients are indeed looking for a more holistic approach to planning and activating both digital and TV. That would mean no longer having to ““drop that digital audience that you’ve customized and invested a lot of time and effort into at the gate and then pick up a totally different audience derived very differently to solve for it in, let’s say, TV and other media.”
A second priority for Oracle’s clients is measurement, i.e. what’s really driving lift, and to bring its digital methodology to the TV space. “That’s where again you come up against the uniqueness of each of these different media types and the need to address them first in and of themselves and then in a more overarching way across media.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Because it’s a wired network that doesn’t rely on satellite technology, “we have closer to a real-time connection to the household,” says Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV at Oath, the new Verizon subsidiary.
When the Fios addressable offering became available in the fall of 2016, it added some 4.5 million homes to the addressable TV ecosystem—increasing it by about 14%, Hurwitz explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
“We have great representation in areas where some of the other players in addressable are under-represented, particularly in major cities where satellite dishes are a little less commonly seen,” says Hurwitz.
Speed has its advantages, among them the ability to deploy campaigns in days as opposed to weeks, swapping out creative quickly and swiftly generating data for back-end campaign attribution.
“We also have reporting from 100% of set-top boxes,” says Hurwitz. “So there’s no modeling when attribution studies are done within our household addressable footprint.”
He’s seeing roughly two categories of marketers taking up addressable TV: those with specific audiences that are thought to be in-market for certain products or services, and some that have broad targets and aren’t readily inclined to pay a premium for addressable inventory.
“But what we’re seeing a bunch of innovators do is take a portion of their linear TV budget, spend it in addressable and through the backend reporting that’s possible through addressable use that information to inform their linear TV buying,” Hurwitz says.
This can help to unearth audience insights from data showing number of impressions delivered on specific networks and particular times of day. For example, “I never realized that my target audience watched a lot of Bravo.”
Part of the educational aspect of addressable TV is explaining and rationalizing CPM’s and ECPM’s. “That’s a process for advertisers to go through as well as the agencies,” Hurwitz adds. “Some agencies are further along in arming their teams to work with clients to explain the value of addressable television.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In the U.S., “We work with 28 of the top programmers,” from sports content to networks like CBS and AMC, says Jennifer Koester, Director, Global Partnerships at Google. “As digital video becomes a larger part of how they reach their viewers, we actually do the back end adtech for them and with that is the monetization.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Koester explains some of Google’s newest products in the streaming video realm and declares that “we’re one and the same” with traditional TV content creators. “Let us help you. We’re in it for the long haul.”
Recent projects include assisting AMC enable cross-screen addressability spanning all of its networks regardless of devices to produce “a single view of the user and the ability to make a better ad experience as they consume content.”
As an example of innovation, she cites fiber technology, which has a “very small footprint” but has been engineered to do what coaxial cable cannot.
“The fiber engineers built an ad stack that essentially does a lot of what we’re trying to do in a traditional infrastructure,” Koester explains. “You’ve got linear streaming that essentially takes real-time tuning data and fuels ad decisioning. So something very digital-like but actually on a linear TV service.”
Google’s new suite of products includes, via DoubleClick, cross-screen monetization simplification (“That concept of VOD versus linear versus digital kind of goes away and our platform enables you to do better pacing and forecasting.); better inventory monetization with its BigQuery cloud offering; machine learning to drive better utilization of bandwidth; and improving search and discovery of programming for viewers.
“We need to embrace change,” Koester says. “We need to recognize that everyone’s got some form of competition out there, but partnership will actually serve that better user experience. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Target Media Director Nick Jezarian was one of the keynote speakers at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. He shared his views on how Target envisions a more effective ecosystem, the company’s in-house data capabilities and the addressable television venture the company is pursing with its agency, Team Arrow, and NBCUniversal in response to questions from moderator Tracey Scheppach, CEO & Co-Founder of Matter More Media.
To collect and interpret data, Target has “a big group of in-house developers and analysts” but it’s open to and supportive of collaboration with a variety of partners.
In Jezarian’s words: “The goal of what we’re building is not to alienate or isolate Target from the rest of the marketplace. We’re bringing it in-house because we’re trying to thread together and make some more sense of the chaos that is in the marketplace right now. But we believe that’s going to require a lot of deep partnerships and relationships.”
He described the need for more than just a couple of creative executions for campaigns, which has been the norm in TV for a long time. The retailer’s in-house unit, Target Creative Studio, complements its work with Team Arrow and other outside partners.
Creative “is the number one thing that we’re focused on” and “not just letting an investment level or a production budget dictate how much content you’re going to create,” he said. “So we’re actively trying to figure out how to become more nimble to create more content so that we can be more relevant.”
Target hasn’t prioritized research into over-the-top viewing versus linear TV, according to Jezarian. But given the prevalence of binge and marathon watching behaviors in OTT, “Actually we need to pay attention to that because that’s where you can show up in a really tone-deaf way if you’re not thinking about your content and your experience very well.”
Team Arrow and NBCUniversal are partners with Target on addressable TV ads, an effort that Jezarian describes as “not the entire end game” but something that can help to inform creative and program choice decisions. “It’s a place where content really matters” while creating “some resource challenges that you need to figure out as well to really go deep in that space and be successful.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>These are some of the network’s recent activities as outlined by Mel Berning during an interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
“TV has taken a little bit of an undeserved hit in the last couple of years because digital has always used the model that basically focuses on last click attribution” to claim that digital ads drive sales, says the President of Revenue at A&E.
The network and others are working with Data Plus Math Corp., a company founded in 2016 by John Hoctor, formerly of Rovi and IntegralReach, and Matthew Emans, formerly of IntegralReach, to develop a multi-touch attribution model “that we think is a real step forward.”
A+E and some 10-12 networks have talked about the attribution model with individual marketers and the Association of National Advertisers. They also hope to gain the endorsement of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement.
“What this leads to is the ability for us all to get behind attribution modeling and talking about the higher value, the higher return that TV really contributes an advertiser’s marketing campaign,” Berning says.
With regard to VOD addressability, he identifies the goals of the network’s testing with Comcast as eliminating waste for advertisers and improving the viewing experience for consumers via reduced ad load.
In addition, “We’ve been in discussions with a couple of other companies who are looking to actually get into the market also of doing national addressability,” meaning ad inventory beyond the two minutes of local time that cable providers now offer to advertisers for household targeting.
Like other TV networks, A+E continues to refine its audience optimization efforts in order to “go back to advertisers with a pretty pure mix of the targets that they want to reach,” Berning says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Take low-penetration brands. Advanced targeting is challenging “because you may not find the reach that you want, but you can certainly find the audience,” says Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “We can deliver the audience and if you’re using real data, which we are, we can ensure that these are actual buyers and not bots because buyers go shopping, bots don’t.”
As O’Grady goes on to explain in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, a high-quality buy sometimes means less reach. “Advertisers are used to certain CPM’s and certain reaches, so it’s different. Everyone’s got to be willing to put up with the disruption that goes along with that change.”
Categories like food and beverages, which traditionally spend large amounts on TV, have already taken the plunge with advanced targeting. But brands that probably need it the most—low-penetration, niche players—typically don’t have the resources.
“But the bigger brands, particularly in the salty snacks and beverage categories, which are highly competitive, for any percent or micro percent of a share, they’re using it quite actively,” O’Grady says.
While most agencies “listen intently” to a discourse on advanced targeting, many “are really tightly strapped, but the creative ones are looking for ways to buy those audiences.”
One of the biggest unspoken challenges: the size of the buy and its cost per thousand impressions, given that many marketers are used to paying what they have in the past.
“You might have a far greater sales lift, but they may not want to put up with the tradeoff of lower reach,” says O’Grady.
While Nielsen Catalina is knee-deep in consumer segmentation data, it’s not about simply selling segments. “They’re just not buying a heavy Tide buyer. You also will understand the reach and frequency,” says O’Grady. “That’s nirvana I believe for the advertiser because that will bring the accountability and disciplines that a lot of the CMO’s in the CPG space have been very vocal about.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>With this year’s reorganization, Forte is SVP, Disney|ABC Sales & Marketing. In this interview with Beet.TV at last week’s Beet Retreat 2017, Forte talks about advanced audience targeting, being able to reach viewers in “every life stage” and upcoming live televised events.
“Coming together as one team really has challenged everyone to think differently about the business. We think about it as holistically how can we create solutions for our clients across the entire portfolio,” says Forte.
He cites examples ranging from music to kids programming as the underpinning of the combined sales offerings unified by the reorganization. They include the Country Music Awards, the American Music Awards, The Good Doctor in primetime and The Bold Type on Freeform.
“We re-launched one of my kids’ favorite shows, Duck Tales, on Disney Channel. There’s a lot of great ways that we can think about content differently,” Forte adds.
Add to the mix American Idol, which will re-boot on March 11 “and it’s going to be bigger and better than ever before.”
Recent advertiser integrations include Mitsubishi’s Eclipse and the historic lunar spectacle, Google with Modern Family and Whole Foods on Freeform.
ABC|Disney is seeing “a lot of demand” for audience targeting beyond traditional age/sex demographics. “It’s what all of our clients are talking about. They want to understand the direction that we’re going.”
Asked for his view of the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP (Fox, Turner, Viacom), Forte says it’s “an answer” but not necessarily “the answer.”
Nonetheless, he’s excited that OpenAP is happening and about where the industry is moving. “Because I think it’s very important for our future.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
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