“The combination of these two products provides a unified view of CPMs across all classes of video including TV,” Ben Tatta, president of Standard Media Index, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

The company captures census-level billing data for more than $90 billion of ad spending in the U.S. market from media buyers. It recently expanded to Canada, and plans to roll out service in the United Kingdom this summer, followed by Spain, India and China.

Its new product suite includes TV eCPM for standard demo-based audiences and advanced audiences, based on TV unit-level pricing data from real agency spend, along with third party viewership and impressions data from leading measurement companies.

“What’s really important about our pricing intelligence product is the fact that it’s much more granular,” Tatta said. “In addition to just average CPMs, we also look at different dimensions around those buys, whether it’s targeting dimensions … or whether it has to do with some of those taxes on the CPM, such as ad-serving fees or campaign verification, ID resolution.”

SMI has a feature called “campaign composition” for every CPM to give buyers and sellers a sense of what went into that metric. It also helps to see the different forms of adtech that go into a CPM calculation to help compare campaigns on a like-for-like basis.

“There really is a huge void on the digital side of the house, in particular,” Tatta said. “The only kind of CPM insights that are available are either garnered through a survey or through some kind of qualitative research. It’s OK directionally, but doesn’t really help either the buyer or the sell-side in terms of optimizing on a like-for-like basis.”

“We’re coming out of 2020, where there was actually a tremendous shifting of dollars,” Ben Tatta, president of advertising intelligence company Standard Media Index (SMI), said in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of clients are interested in how those shifts are impacting their business and what areas are growing — whether it’s from a category level or whether it relates to media channels.”

The company currently tracks $90 billion of ad spending among all channels — including television, digital, out-of-home, print and radio — by compiling data from advertisers and their media agencies. SMI’s data can be broken down by unit cost, media owner, ad type, buy type, advertiser product category and other criteria.

“It was a tough year for the ad market, but when you drill down, you can see pockets of growth — digital, in general, but really digital video,” Tatta said.

Digital video encompasses a broader range of media channels, including the growing number of over-the-top (OTT) services from major network brands that sell ad placements in pods. Those include NBCUniversal’s Peacock, ViacomCBS’s Paramount+, Discovery’s Discovery+, AMC Network’s AMC+ and Disney’s Hulu and ESPN+. The OTT market includes platforms such as Pluto TV, the Roku Channel, Tubi, Vevo and Xumo, some of which were acquired by major media companies in the past two years to expand their reach.

“They have inventory across all platforms, and each platform is somewhat unique in terms of how it’s priced, and how it’s sold,” Tatta said. “In some cases, you could argue that [OTT] should be priced higher than linear because of the targetability and measurability of it. We saw OTT growing at a pretty significant rate, while every other channel was flat to down.”

Source: Standard Media Index

Media buyers can use SMI’s data for benchmarking the efficiency of their spending, which requires a more detailed analysis of common metrics like cost per thousand (CPM) viewers.

“What’s most important about pricing is making sure you’re comparing apples-to-apples,” Tatta said. “What we’ve found is that only until you dissect what goes into a CPM do you really understand the true value.”

In addition to helping advertisers measure the business outcomes from their media spending, SMI also seeks to help media networks and video publishers that sell ad placements to compare their pricing with rivals.

“There’s a whole lineup of new digital competitors that are in the premium video/OTT space,” Tatta said. “That’s an area that’s going to continue to grow in interest as more and more services hit the marketplace.”

You are watching “Seeing Around Corners: Media Decisions During a Period of Disruption,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Standard Media Index. For more videos, please visit this page.

Standard Media Index (SMI) has sight of 85% of all ad agency invoices, piped straight from booking systems – aggregated and anonymized. It then makes it available back to agencies, publishers and hedge funds as intelligence, to variously understand ad pricing, product trends and TV events.

This week, the company announced Ben Tatta, the former Cablevision Media Sales executive who had been president of TV data firm 605, was joining as its president.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tatta describes SMI’s expansion plans.

International expansion

“They collect data from about 34 markets internationally,” Tatta says.

“A big part of the growth is going to be international expansion and James (Fennessy, CEO) is really focused on that, (on) launching new markets.

“Recently, we launched in Canada, (our) dataset represents well over 80% of all the ad spend.

“The goal is to get upwards of a dozen pool markets launched over the next 12 months or so, so that we have a true international footprint.”

Standard Media Index is the most trusted source of advertising pricing and spend data in the world. Today we are excited to announce our official launch in the Canadian market with data capturing 94% of all national brand spend in Canada. #adspending #mediabuying #broadcastmedia pic.twitter.com/RHC4uJxFma

— Standard Media Index (@SMI_Data) June 3, 2020

Data in a down market

SMI was founded a decade ago. It sells aggregate, normalized ad pricing data back to agencies so that they can understand ad pricing within their market and can effectively benchmark spending levels.

The company also provides industry ad spend forecasts.

SMI recently reported how March national US TV ad spend in 2020 was 12.8% lower than a year earlier. By May, it was down 23%.

As advertisers have pulled back during the pandemic, broadcasters and publishers have dropped rates to win back business.

For some buyers, that has meant a lower-priced opportunity to keep spending. For others, the emerging economy means a new reluctance to commit to upfront ad buys.

Curious about COVID-19's impact on the advertising market? Read about it here. Thanks @MediaVillageCom! https://t.co/5Mj9L4GCzq

— Standard Media Index (@SMI_Data) June 5, 2020

Granular spend data

“The area where we see things going on a go-forward basis is to provide much more granular pricing data that could be used for emerging platforms, whether it’s on the buy or the sell side,” Tatta says.

He says that, previously, traditional TV ad prices were dictated by factors like the placement of a spot in the commercial break.

Now, in OTT environments, it is increasingly about the data used to target it.

So SMI wants to “dimensionalize’ pricing data to help buyers get a better handle.

National scale

Not only that, but Tatta imagines online TV evolving to adopt a digital media pricing play.

“This notion of using CPM as the standard metric to evaluate advertising across platform, we think, is going to take hold,” he explains.

That is significant, because some of the largest MVPD services are now reaching larger scale in deployment of addressable TV ad capabilities at national level.

Tatta thinks that will allow big brands to custom-target different TV ad creative at viewers in New York versus Los Angeles, for example.

Discovery, whose portfolio includes Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network and TLC, will work with 605, which provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 30 million devices across 12 million households.

With that added to Discovery’s own dataset, the combined footprint is “the largest ever utilized for a TV attribution study”, 605 says. It will be offered as Discovery Engage, what Discovery calls “a state-of-the-art data management and analytics platform for targeting, optimization and measurement beyond age and gender”.

We are excited to partner with @DiscoveryIncTV ! Utilizing our multi-source data set, they can now leverage nearly 40M households to provide full-funnel attribution metrics at a census scale. Read more: https://t.co/MtkWr8RFOf pic.twitter.com/5Qa5hWpA31

— 605 (@605Data) September 10, 2019

“It takes TV attribution to scale,” says Ben Tatta, 605 president, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“We’ll be able to measure across the full spectrum of brand metrics and sales metrics, outcome based measurement for campaigns that they sell through Engage.”

Tatta says the system will draw a line from ad exposure not only to eventual business outcomes like sales but also to more traditional TV branding goals, higher in the marketing funnel.

With the addition of Inscape data, 605 can measure more than 20 million households—slightly less than 20% of the TV viewing universe—in a further move away from panel-based research methodology.

“We think that it’s really important for the industry to move to more census-based measurement,” Tatta says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Among the things that Inscape, which is owned by VIZIO, brings to the table for 605 is helping to fill voids across set-top box and over-the-air and OTT metrics. By combining set-top data with Inscape’s automatic content recognition data “we’re able to get better cross-screen measurement on services beyond just pay TV.”

In addition to expanding its national reach, 605 gains faster data processing for its programmer and provider clients. “We basically get data in near real-time” with a delay of “an hour or two” versus “one to three days in general” for set-top box data.

605, started by Dolan Family Ventures, also gets viewing data from Charter Communications cable subscribers, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

Asked about audience duplication from the company’s data sources, Tatta says the duplication “is really essential because what’s interesting about the set-top box data is you’re actually capturing all viewing within the household, or at least what’s running through pay TV.

“Only until you have a full view of viewing in the household can you really get a sense in terms of where the viewing trends are,” for example share of consumption between pay-TV and OTT. “Or even just from one room to the next. Even though TV is bought at the household level kind of rolled up, being able to have a line of sight of viewership across all devices in the household is really important.”

Tatta adds that while advertiser focus on bottom-funnel or sales attribution is “incredibly important,” the industry should not neglect the “enormous contribution” TV makes to upper-funnel metrics, “whether it’s brand awareness, brand favorability and brand preference. Having a more holistic view of lift across the full funnel we think is really essential.”

“National advertisers don’t want 40 million. It’s a good start, but I think we’ve got some catch-up to play,” Kline says in this one-on-one discussion with Tatta at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.

Upon the sale of Cablevision to Altice, Tatta joined the startup 605, on whose board Kline now sits while also holding the roles of President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. Tatta is President of 605.

Asked by Tatta to define the state of addressable TV, Kline points to the traditional business model of the cable providers whose participation is needed to expand the national footprint by using their two minutes of local ad time.

“I think a big reason for that is many operators, many distributors are in the subsection television business. They’re not in per se the advertising business, and I think that perception is starting to change,” Kline says.

“They’re always going to be in the subscription business, selling video products and high-speed data and telephony and soon mobile phone service for some of us,” Kline adds. “Advertising has always sort of been, ‘hey we’ll take that money, it’s great high margin, but we’re not going to invest that much in it.’”

Having just launched linear addressable in Los Angeles, Charter’s “footprint in New York will be months away. I think it’s not moved fast. Maybe it’s moved fast in cable years, but it hasn’t moved fast in anything else,” Kline says.

On the way to additional scale, addressable is providing a foundation upon which TV networks can enhance the value of their national inventory, according to Kline.

“If they really want to make their network inventory more valuable, they need to get it better targeted. More relevant. And we have the platforms that can do that.”

In the meantime, he sees the model for networks as acquiring the widest possible amount of distribution and collecting license fees from distributors. “But I’m not naïve. We know that things will evolve and viewership will move to other places. But there is still a ton of viewership on what we would call traditional platforms, and I think that’s going to continue for quite some time,” Kline 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.

But Ben Tatta doesn’t think marketers should focus only on a single goal. He wants to ensure they can measure everything.

That is why the company he is president of, 605, last month launched a new product to do just that.

Called Impact Index, it aims to be a scientifically-based approach for measuring the impact of TV advertising on both branding and sales – essentially, uniting both the top and bottom of the marketing “funnel”.

“We found that most of the focus is on sales attribution,” Tatta tells Beet.TV. “(It) is a necessity and it’s really important to understand true ROI to measure sales.

“But what we’ve seen with the campaigns that we’ve measured is that television delivers brand impact more powerfully than any other platform. So, if solely measuring on the basis of sales attribution, you’re only really going to measure a portion of the value that television delivers.”

Impact Index is the productisation of work 605 had already been carrying out in analytics for Walmart and Uber.

It includes a database of 12 million households and survey data, matched against known household ad exposure.

The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City at the post event reception by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp.

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.

These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.

Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:

“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:

“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”

Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:

“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”

Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.

To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”

Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”

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 July, the pair announced 605’s methodology and technology would be used by Charter to fuel census-based TV measurement and analytics.

In this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat, Charter ad products and strategy SVP Rob Klippel and 605 president Ben Tatta discussed the partnership, and what comes next.

“While we’ve deployed this application that now allows us to sell TV in terms of audiences and impressions, we realized the larger value really, of being able to bring insights and value to the programmers, to the national advertisers and agencies,” Klippel said.

“And, while I think we have great data assets and a census level data to us, really the value of 605 is to be able to take our data, to pull it together with other data sources and to better serve the national marketplace.

So what has the partnership yielded? Specifically, a software platform that allows Charter to develop custom audiences for ad buyers, helping along the migration of TV ad sales from an old, demographic-based world to one which is based on targeting audiences more accurately.

The biggest hurdle, with both Charter and for all operators making the switch, Tatta said, is in adapting to the collect data from the fragmented cable TV ecosystem.

“In the case of Charter is you’re talking about over 80 plus markets, over 1000 ad zones each of which have their own inventory and rates information,” he said. “It’s a lot of data ingestion, a lot of the work was processing the data, getting it to a state that it could be acted upon very quickly with low latency.”

But Tatta and Klippel opened up on examples in which the ensuring product can help advertisers understand audience preferences at the local level.

“Austin South indexed 2x against BMW and then the adjacent market was like 1 1/2 times for Kia,” Tatta said, citing an automotive advertising example. “It’s things like that the local sales people have never been able to see before. What’s interesting is just to see how this kind of rolls out on a really local level and then obviously, our broader ambition is to nationalize this so we can do this on a much broader basis.”

Klippel says the new platform “has fundamentally changed the conversation that we’re having with our customers”.

“They can sit down real-time and create custom schedules that are tailored to a specific audience and the output is very transparent,” he added. Under the old model, if you need to make changes you kinda go back to your research and planning team and you start that multi day process all over again.”

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 deal involves Charter giving 605 access to its second-by-second TV nationaL viewership data, so that programmers and advertisers can better target their material. But it also involves 605 building an app to help Charter itself offer more refined ad targeting, and sees Charter making an investment in the group.

“They’re the second-largest MVPD in the country, collecting data from 41 states and 13 of the top 20 VMAs,” says Ben Tatta co-founder and president of 605.

“We have an audience app that we built with them that leverages set-top box data to allow their sales division to sell on a more audience-based (basis). That means moving beyond age and gender (criteria), to be able to sell on more granular attributes (like) car purchases or travel propensity, things that are more relevant to advertisers than just age and gender.”

Tatta previously had helped pioneer another cable operator’s approach to next-generation TV advertising, as a Cablevision executive. But he and partner Kristin Dolan left to form 605 as their own company, providing set-top box data to marketers.

Until lately, early advances in enabling addressable TV ad buying had been occurring in local TV ad markets. Now Tatta says the prospect is emerging of highly targeted TV advertising delivered nationwide, but doing so will require a footprint of scale.

“Our intent is to partner with any and every MVPD,” he adds. “Set-top box data has tremendous value.”

The result, as moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink termed it during an MEC-sponsored panel discussion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, could well be dubbed “myth busting.”

The A+E project involved some 350 million ad-exposure records for 40 million addressable-TV-enabled households over a few months matched with transactional data to produce indices, according to panelist Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605.

While it’s true that a network like Lifetime is a great venue for reaching buyers of health care, beauty and packaged-goods products, digging deeper unearthed some interesting insights, said panelist Mel Berning, A+E’s President and Chief Revenue Officer.

“What we’re also finding out is that it’s a wonderful environment for reaching women who are the principle decision makers for buying cars. Or investments,” Berning explained.

“One of the things that was really interesting was that across the board for all of the A+E Networks, responsiveness to TV way over-indexed versus the average television viewer,” said Tatta.

Now for the myth busting. It turns out that Lifetime over-indexed both for viewers who are particularly weight conscious and those who are burger lovers. Men’s apparel was among the top-indexed categories for Lifetime viewers, while A+E overall “indexed high against younger families,” running counter to “today’s myth that younger audiences are migrating off the dial,” said Tatta.

As the discussion turned to how a company like A+E balances programming across platforms with the most appropriate ad formats, Berning separated out linear. For those nearly 100 million households, “The quality of the viewing experience is such a key factor to the environment on those networks,” he said. “We’re thinking about ad loads, we’re thinking about the ability to reduce clutter, to deliver a more engaged audience to the ad.”

With cross-platform, advertisers are at “different places in terms of the way they’re thinking about building their media plan across platforms,” Berning said. “It’s very easy to engage advertisers in terms of their requirements for linear. As you then engage them on what are your requirements on other platforms, there is a huge organizational effort to bring all of those pieces together.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Speaking on this Beet Retreat panel, representatives of the networks explained their strategy.

The recent announcements included:

• Fox, Viacom and Turner teamed to form OpenAP, a system in which they will allow ad buyers to define audience segments that are targetable across the networks, not just individually.
• NBC plans to sell $1bn of its upfront inventory through its own Audience Targeting Platform.
• A+E followed with a similar announcement.

NBCUniversal advanced advertising SVP Denise Colella:

“We’re going to avail up to $1bn in inventory to be traded on non-Nielsen guarantees, or audience guarantees.

“Our clients are investing a lot in data, they really want to put that to use. We’re willing to put our money where our mouth is. We’re not reserving inventory per se. We’re making all our inventory across all of our networks available for audience.”

Turner Broadcasting ad innovation and programatic VP David Porter:

“OpenAP does three things – helps define audience segment, allows an advertiser to choose wha publishers they want to share that segment with, and aggregates reports. That solves a lot.

“There will be no commingling of inventory in this platform, this is not a transaction platform. This is just a way to get a consistent definition. Then the advertiser can send that definition out to any publisher.”

Viacom audience science EVP Julian Zilberbrand:

“It is uber-complicated to have different methodologies when you have one data set you’re working off of.

“This is about enabling the advertiser to have an easier experience.”

ABC TV Group programmatic VP Michael Dean:

“We’re excited about it and we’re supportive. This is all the right things to do. Removing friction, removing cost, lowering complexity is absolutely where all of us want that market to go – as long as we can make differentiation, that’s the key.

“The devil is in the details.  For Disney Company, it’s about ‘How do we bring our unique data assets – what we know about families, homes, from the parks, from our games network?’”

605 president Ben Tatta:

“It’s great news. We felt, for a while, that there will be a shift to more audience-based buying, selling and measurement – but that starts by moving off a panel, which is really just a large focus group. It drives demand for census-based data. The market is demanding that more granular attributes, other than age and gender, are available.”

Panelists also discussed the emergence of addressable TV advertising technologies and amateur versus premium video.

This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

As a “pure data play,” 605 doesn’t sell media or advertising, isn’t a media broker and doesn’t run an ad marketplace, according to President and Co-Founder Ben Tatta.

“Our goal is really to empower programmers and advertisers with data direct,” Tatta says in an interview with Beet.tv.

605 was formed this year by Dolan Family Ventures—which had sold East Coast MVPD Cablevision Systems Corp.—via the acquisition of Analytics Media Group, a pioneer in the use of set-top box data. Tatta had been President of Cablevision Media Sales.

The goal of 605 at CES is “to look at all the new devices that are out there, because ultimately these devices represent fragmentation, which present measurement challenges we can help solve,” Tatta explains.

By acquiring AMG, 605 enjoys access to data across roughly a half dozen MVPD’s. “Our goal is to build on top of that and also extend that beyond just addressable to programmers so they can do other forms of programming analytics,” says Tatta.

Given AMG’s roots, 605 has a deep perspective of the addressable TV landscape. So it’s more than familiar with the need for census-level data for more uniform audience targeting.

“The biggest challenge is that there isn’t a census level data set available,” says Tatta. “A lot of the data that’s used today is sort of pockets. Whether it’s a certain MVPD or certain device that might make their data available.”

Another limitation is the two minutes per hour of local ad inventory currently earmarked for addressable. While it’s beneficial to cable operators and local advertisers, it’s just not enough longer term.

“I think where over time this goes is addressable capability extending to the national advertising avails,” Tatta says. “That’s where it really starts to serve the programming interests well in the sense that they’re serving a national audience,” plus the ability to target based on discreet customer segments.

“This will take some time because it requires a lot of capacity to do addressable on a national basis, but I do think it’s coming,” Tatta adds.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

605 is the sponsor of Beet.TV’s upcoming coverage of CES 2017. 

The launch of 605 was announced on November 10 by Dolan Family Ventures at the same time that DFV said it had acquired Analytics Media Group, a pioneer in the use of set-top box data. In an interview with Beet.TV, 605 Co-Founder (along with CEO Kristin Dolan) and President Ben Tatta says the company will continue AMG’s work while branching out to assist TV programmers.

“Addressable was really focused on the two minutes of local time an hour and the national programmers really don’t necessarily have access to that because it’s been sold by the local cable systems,” Tatta says. “We think there’s also use and application of the data for curating programming and scheduling and getting better intelligence on how content should be distributed using this dataset.”

AMG’s work for certain clients has consisted largely of matching transactions against ad exposures to see which ads are the best performers. This involves processing “literally billions of records a week. It’s where the magic happens in terms of the real data crunching,” he says.

Turning its attention to programmers, 605 “is just scratching the surface on the applications beyond advertising,” but it envisions offering a full set of analytics solutions, Tatta explains in response to a question from interviewer Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. “Everything from tools and insights for the curation of programming, the marketing of programming to measuring things like tune in and tune in conversion, all the way to ad sales where this can be packaged for their own resale,” says Tatta.

The offerings will include ROI analytics programmers can show to their advertisers plus indexing of shows and networks based on audience composition.

Programmers have been “somewhat disenfranchised from all this data,” Tatta says.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

The move comes after Dolan’s Dolan Family Ventures acquired the existing Analytics Media Group (AMG), a data analytics firm with a background in politics, to immediately launch what Dolan is calling “605“.

That followed the acquisition of New York cable operator Cablevision by Europe’s Altice, leading Dolan and husband James Dolan, previously Cablevision’s CEO, to leave to form their venture investment vehicle AMG.

“Our experience in the industry tells us there are major gaps in audience measurement and television analytics in the current marketing and programming landscape,” Kristin Dolan, now CEO of 605, says in a launch press release.

“The acquisition of AMG and the subsequent launch of 605 immediately establishes a company with real scale, significant resources, profound analytic capabilities, extensive set-top box data and management experience.”

Earlier this year, at our Beet Retreat in Fort Lauderdale, Dolan told Beet.TV she was excited about dynamic ad insertion, which could apply not just to ads served from the cloud but also to shows already stored on DVRs.

Dolan will also be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Beet Retreat in Miami next week.

The NAB is has tabled a Digital Summit, including assembling a board to tackle the issue – namely, how to standardize measurement and reporting mechanisms for quantifying viewership of TV across a burgeoning range of new platforms.

“What hasn’t happened is a standard method of viewing the data and articulating the data in a common way,” says Cablevision media sales head Ben Tatta, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The first step is to fill in the holes of measurement.

“While sample-based methods might be sufficient in measuring the top 50 networks, we have several hundred channels on their dial. Typically that’s where the sample breaks down. (There is) a lot of viewing that just isn’t method.”

Cablevision introduced census-level audience data to its Total Audience ad suite three years ago, leading Tatta to conclude: “Sample-based methods aren’t sufficient enough in measuring viewing across the dial.”

That echoes a common concern across the industry, although the likes of Nielsen and comScore claim to be racing to account for cross-device viewership.

We interviewed him as part of our series on the need for standards around premium video advertising.  The series was produced around the NAB Digital Summit in Las Vegas.  This series on Beet.TV is sponsored by the NAB.

“It’s fascinating that of all the categories we work with, political probably is the most sophisticated in terms of the use of the data,” Ben Tatta, President, Cablevision Media Sales, says tells Beet.TV in this video interview, during a week in which the top Democratic and Republican presidential candidates descended on Manhattan, a prime market for Cablevision and its roughly 3 million customers. Although addressable advertising is more expensive, it’s definitely on the rise in the ongoing election season, Advertising Age reported.

According to Tatta, the choice of TV platform for political campaigns is not an either/or situation, because most are running campaigns simultaneously.

“They will use a traditional linear schedule to get the tonnage and mass message out, and use addressable to drill home very specific, issues-based messages to very specific voting constituents,” Tatta says. “Most of them are using sophisticated techniques to convey a message and those messages change daily based on news cycles.”

The new and interesting dynamic with political addressable is that copy changes in commercials are constant.

“Every couple of days we can be changing out copy. You can fine tune messages based on things that are in the news cycle and deliver it in two days,” Tatta says. “That kind of tempo is somewhat foreign to television, but with addressable we can deliver it.”

At the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London earlier this month, we interviewed Ben Tatta, President of Cablevision Media Sales, about the deal with and how the company will work with Modi.

Also in London, we spoke with Modi CEO Mike Bologna about the new agreement.  You can find the Bologna interview here.

These videos are part of a series produced in London about advanced TV advertising.  The series is sponsored by Xaxis.  Please visit this page for more videos.

But what does the future look like, now that operators are lighting up household targeting for connected TV ads?

Those two minutes could either get longer, or be more efficiently used, a Beet Retreat panel concluded:

• AT&T AdWorks ad sales VP Chris Monteferrante: “I think we’ve only just scratched the surface in terms of addressable and utilising the two minutes. Next year, you’ll probably see a 3x or 4x jump in terms of the number of advertisers coming on board and the dollars you’re gong to see them spend.”
• Dish media sales VP Adam Gaynor: “There’s a lot more to do in those two minutes. The two minutes becomes a lot more when you start to slice and dice the spot to reach that right audience.”
• Comcast Media 360 SVP Kevin Patrick Smith: “I don’t know who invented the two minutes. I don’t know if it’s the right amount. We’re also now getting access to their VOD inventory and IP digital video inventory.”
• Cablevision Media Sales president Ben Tatta: “Twenty-five percent of those two minutes an hour that we get were unmeasured up until we rolled out census-level measurement. You can see the billions of dollars that are just sitting there.”

Media General chief revenue officer Jamie Elden also joined the conversation.

The panel was chaired by industry consultant Tim Hanlon. 

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.