That is according to a man who has just leaped from helping big TV distributors sell digital ads to helping advertisers analyze and optimize new-wave TV ad spending.
“COVID’s accelerated the fragmentation of audiences – and I think that really, really forces a new measurement paradigm for television,” says Bob Ivins, the former Ampersand chief data officer who became chief strategy officer at TVSquared in September.
In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts, Ivins says the game is on amongst upstart vendors who say they offer a far better way to measure than TV than the big competitors ever did.
We're excited to welcome Bob Ivins as our Chief Strategy Officer! He says, "TVSquared has not only built a world-class, always-on platform, but has also worked tirelessly to push the industry out of its comfort zone to change it for the better." https://t.co/Z4LkcFwUQm pic.twitter.com/3ijKdQ8Fga
— TVSquared (@tvsquared) September 21, 2020
“I think TV is reinventing itself in front of our very eyes,” Ivins says. “Cable subscriptions are down. Streaming activity is up. I think legacy research companies are kind of struggling.
“So it gives, I think, an opportunity for innovative measurement companies like ourselves to sneak in there.”
TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.
One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.
The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.
“We have a direct to brand business that’s scaling quickly,” Ivins says. “We work with big ad sellers or big ads selling organisations. And we’ve trained 2,000, 3,000 people in a matter of weeks. And they’re out there delivering quantifiable evidence that TV drives business outcomes.”
Ivins’ new employer has recently been striking deals to extend its capabilities.
In one, TVSquared has partnered with Blockgraph, the blockchain-powered attempt to use Bitcoin-like technology to create a trusted ledger of actions in an ad transaction.
They say it will use Blockgraph’s identity and viewer authentication technology plus TVSquared’s attribution technology to offer “omni-channel TV measurement and audience activation”.
Ivins tells Beet.TV: “Blockgraph is this peer-to-peer ability to kind of re-aggregate all those audiences. That’s exciting, especially because an advertiser who launches a campaign, they’re not going to do it in one walled garden – they’re going to do it across the entire media landscape.
“You need to be able to give them metrics like cumulative unduplicated reach that cuts across platforms.”
]]>But is full attribution really available today – or is it just a mirage?
In a spicy panel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a trio of executives disagreed on whether the relative absence of such strategies in the TV industry today is the fault of lack of technology – or lack of willingness:
They were led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis.
Kinsella of TVSquared’s, whose platform helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites, took issue with sentiment expressed on an earlier panel – that measuring TV ads based on real outcomes, like sales, should not take precedence.
“That boggles my mind,” she said. “Why am I going to give you money if you can’t prove that it’s going to work? I’m not going to believe that bullshit. Currencies and GRPs? Just stop! We have the data, we have the technology – and people are getting in the way. It’s time to stop being scared. Use the data, use the tech, drive results. Simple.”
Bob Ivins of NCC Media – the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter – that is measuring set-top box viewing data – said measuring “outcomes” is not so simple.
“You’re measuring an outcome, one outcome – and there’s a bunch of different outcomes,” he explained. “An outcome could be to ‘go to a website’, an outcome could be ‘do a transaction’, an outcome could be ‘do a search’. There’s a bunch of different outcomes.
“Unless you have all those outcomes with the metric on them that you can monitor with real-time and at scale the way you are, then we’re just doing one at a time. And I think when you think attribution, it’s not one thing.”
Wallach of Comcast-owned FreeWheel said the new technology allows ad buyers to change how they buy inventory in the middle of a campaign – a vast change from previously.
“A year ago, it would be six months after a campaign was completed before you first look at a report,” he said. “(By then), everything has changed – consumer behaviour has changed, the product may have even changed or the sales channel, etc.”
Kinsella said being able to do that across TV devices required consolidating from multiple distinct software platforms to one that gives a holistic overview.
But NCC Media’s Ivins replied: “There’s a long journey though, until we can do that executionally in linear TV.
“I mean, there’s a long, long road ahead of us. It’s hard. I think it’s (because of) technology, I think it’s people, I think it’s just the cable plan itself is hard to work with. There is legacy infrastructure on the agency side and the brand side and the technology side.”
But TVSquared’s Kinsella disagreed with the “no”: “Just say ‘yes’. (People say) ‘there’s still so much’, ‘no, it’s hard’, ‘we can’t do that, the systems are old, what about Nielsen? I can’t fire that many people’.
“Just say ‘yes!’. Just say ‘yes’. We are doing it today. It’s happening. It’s real.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Next year’s presidential election will move the needle back up, but most people agree that TV ad spending is plateauing somewhat.
What can restore positive momentum? Showing advertisers how TV advertising really works, according to one man at the center of doing just that.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bob Ivins, NCC Media chief data officer, talks about how new attribution technology allows broadcast platforms to help brands truly understand the linkage between ad viewership and consequential outcomes like website visits, store visitation and eventual sales.
“Digital has had this narrative for the last 20 years,” Ivins says. “We’ve kind of just let it play out in front of us, from a TV perspective.
“Now for the first time, we’re passively collecting … set-top box data, actual viewing data from millions of households.”
Attribution technology comes in various forms. It relies on IP-based viewing devices and tracking for viewers’ consequential actions, including mobile geo-location tracking, all linked by identity resolution that bridges the gap.
Operated by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications, NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks.
The organization is repeating the effort for the reams of data now available to its owners in digital viewing devices.
“Intuitively, we all kind of know TV works, but now we can measure it,” says Ivins. “We as an industry need to be able to provide these metrics. Otherwise, flat is going to be the new up for a long time.”
He was speaking with Janet Balis of EY’s media and entertainment team.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“I think we’ll get to the day where it’s always on, real-time measurement,” says Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer of NCC Media.
Not that long ago, MMM was the sole answer to advertising/marketing attribution, when sales were seen as a function of everything. “Distribution, price, promotion and TV activity. You would get all of the data into one spot,” Ivins says. “You would harmonize it and then you would run regression models against it and that would be a year-long project, and that would cost a lot of money.”
Now activity data—ranging from ad exposure, website visits, point-of-sale transactions and more—are passively gathered at scale. “So it’s not a modeling exercise but a lining up exercise and making sure you can attach ad exposure at a household level to an activity.”
Asked about partners with which NCC works on determining ad attribution, Ivins cites TVSquared among others. “Especially for the DTC space or to advertisers that want to drive people to an online activity, they’re a fantastic partner.”
As for the differences between local versus national advertisers’ goals, Ivins says they are pretty much the same, with the exception of scale. If Ford Motor Co., for example, wants to send out a national brand, it wants to drive awareness, traffic and sales.
“If I’m a local car dealership, I want to drive awareness, I want to drive traffic and drive sales. They’re just doing it at a different level. So it’s a different part of the same campaign, but it’s at different stages of the customer journey.”
NCC Media is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned in partnership by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Because it reaches some 85 million U.S. households, the ongoing election cycle is of particular interest.
“I think there’s going to be a big pot of money that’s going to be spent early next year. I think that will put pressure on inventory as we think about advertisers trying to squeeze themselves into the pressure coming from the political arena,” Ivins says. “Unless the economy falls apart, we should have a good year both the Olympics and the political year.”
On a macro level, he thinks the traditional TV industry recognizes the need to neutralize the competitive advantage that digital media have in data, targeting and measurement.
“NCC Media feels that we need to work together as an industry to make this happen rather than have a walled garden.”
These will among the topics covered on August 7 when Ivins takes to the stage at the Beet Retreat in the City, “We Are Going Local.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.
]]>The panel titled Making Identity a Reality in a Multi-Screen World brought together Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media.
Moderator Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting, kicked things off by asking about the much desired “leap forward” from household to individual person addressability.
“I think we’re still in the early days of that as an industry,” said Krepsik, who believes the quest for a curated, omni-channel experience rests on “insuring that we have that common view of an individual person, regardless the screen or the device that they’re watching content on.”
No one seems to think that’s on the immediate horizon. Hinnant touted the actionable nature of household data, saying, “We’ve had great progress with it. I think it does come to scale at that point.” When used at scale, “it actually proves to have better results.”
Asked to quantify where the industry stands on achieving true one-to-one targeting and suggest a wish list of improvements, Ivins said that while for TV advertising spending “flat is the new up,” digital has been going up for 25 years.
“We should have seen it coming. What were we thinking? I think the industry is now woken up to that,” Ivins said. “All the media owners, they have the reach,” but that alone isn’t not enough.
“NBC can reach almost any household in the country if they wanted to because of their portfolio of products, but they don’t have the first-party relationships or some of technology. And the distributors have the technology and first-party relationships but they don’t have the reach,” Ivins added.
“TV as a platform, we have to get there,” said Hinnant. “We’ve got to stop the silos that are merging and I get that data privacy is an issue on that. But if we can come together as a platform, then we could actually compete.”
Five years ago, technology was a common barrier to advancement, according to Krepsit. Now cooperation is a bigger hurdle.
“The hardware manufacturers are beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in this ecosystem as well,” he said. “So it’s moving beyond the set-top box and actually moving to the actual devices. I think it’s only going to get more complicated.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It seems likely there won’t be one central identity graph for each person judging from comments by Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media at the forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World. The panel was moderated by Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting.
“If you don’t have consumer trust, it does not matter what technology solutions we put in place, the device graphs, the different partnerships, or any sort of math or data science we put behind it,” said Krepsik.
He cited regulations like GDPR in the European Union and the nascent California privacy act known as CPPA as being guiding forces. “I think just throwing technology and math at a problem without actually winning the trust of consumers sets our industry back,” Krepsik added.
Hinnant agreed with Krepsik and underscored the need to move beyond rating points to audiences in media transactions. “We have to help that conversion for all the ecosystem to go through and it’s the identity graph that helps that or the panels that help do that,” said Hinnant.
Prohaska mentioned the sharing of user phone numbers by Facebook without consent as one extreme, while observing that many people have been satisfied with a value proposition that involves the use of their data. “We’re in a bifurcated world,” he said.
“You have some people that will go one way and maybe a vast majority to the other,” said Hinnant. “But if we can help communicate what the value is to the consumer and educate them on what it means to be able to protect their privacy, I think that would be helpful.”
Ivins related the frustration of having to provide his credit card number while buying an airplane ticket online from a company with which he had done business before. “What do you mean you don’t store my credit card? I’ve been doing this for so long. It’s one of these things that you want to know who has what.”
With regard to Facebook and other digital advertising giants, Ivins said “there’s a message being sent there” by a backlash characterized by a decline in user engagement. “Whether they listen to it or not is TBD.”
From NCC’s perspective, “One of the issues that we’re looking at is I don’t want to be single threaded through one ID graph. I think that’s dangerous,” said Ivins about relying on one company. “I think we need to have some flexibility in that situation.”
Krepsik talked about people regardless of age or gender having to watch commercials for erectile disfunction products.
“What’s the biggest differentiation between me and my daughter? I’m a male, she’s a female. My son, he’s ten now. He doesn’t really even need to see an erectile dysfunctional ad at the age of ten. So you need his age.”
There needs to be a foundation that provides “a view of real people to underpin that measurement to build trust,” Krepsik said. “You can’t just live with one identity graph. We have different sources of information around people, around persons. And so it does have to be persons-based, but more importantly it has to be distributed. There’s not going to be a magical decoder ring where all the data’s going to sit in one spot.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>NCC Media’s Bob Ivins says the industry is “at the beginning stages” of so-called household-level “addressable TV”, the collection of technologies which allows ad buyers to target, deliver and measure ads against individual households.
Why “beginning”? “The media owners, they have the reach, the programming reaches a lot of people, but they don’t have the first party relationships,” says Ivins.
“They don’t have the technology and the infrastructure to be out and execute. So they’re out there …. Viacom bought Pluto, or NBC has their own application. They’re trying to move their first party relationships into third party relationships.”
NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks. Now it is setting out to repeat the trick in the new, internet-connected era.
Three of Ivins’ five last roles have had “data” in the name. He joined after stints as Mindshare’s chief data officer, comScore and Slice Technologies.
“The distributors, they’re the ones with the first party relationships, but they don’t really have the reach,” Ivins continues. “So I think they need to combine all their initiatives, they’re all kind of doing something as a one off.”
He says he wants them to “work together in an open environment and build a platform” to move addressable forward.
says Bob Ivins, NCC Media , in this video interview with Beet.TV
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“Historically, we were seen as just an ad rep organization and what we’re trying to do is build adtech underneath it that supports it and drive operational efficiencies into that space,” says NCC Media Chief Data Officer Bob Ivins. In this interview with Beet.TV, he discusses how NCC hopes to unify audience targeting transactions across TV distributors and shares his thoughts on viewer data and privacy.
“I think that the cable operators have all operated in their own swim lanes,” Ivins says. “They’ve taken their subscriber files, they’ve appended variables to it or attributes to it, they’ve used that within their infrastructure to do zone-based addressability, but they’ve all been kind of one-off.”
Some operators are versed in video on demand and digital but there’s no uniformity.
“You end up with this bingo board of distributor and capabilities and there’s no one line or one row that matches for everybody. What NCC is trying to do is we’re trying to harmonize, standardize and federate those capabilities so that you can actually do one buy, one place and have national capabilities within an infrastructure.”
Consumer TV and digital data from NCC owners Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications forms the basis of a converged data set that NCC says will represent “the largest data set in television,” as CEO Nicolle Pangis explains in this video interview.
Ivins joined NCC in July 2018, having played a pioneering role in the development of the data-driven advertising ecosystem for three decades. He held executive roles at comScore, Mindshare, Comcast, Yahoo and Nielsen.
Noting that “we rationalized the irrational going back in time,” Ivins refers to a period when executing a local spot cable buy in a market like Philadelphia required transacting with anywhere from four to six operators.
“It was really hard to do an operation like that. NCC stepped in, they harmonized the process so you had one order, they distributed the execution, you had one set of affidavits that went back to the client,” Ivins says. “We’re kind of doing the exact same thing, but now instead of in that environment we’re doing it a new environment and hopefully we’ll extend it to cross-platform.”
Asked about data and privacy, Ivins believes the industry recognizes its responsibility in ingesting and understanding behavioral data. Given the head start that digital media companies have in advanced consumer targeting, “I think it’s now time for the TV industry to really take advantage of that.”
Consumers should have an “active opportunity” to understand what companies like NCC intend to do with their data, according to Ivins. “And I think that notice and choice needs to get really solidified in the industry and if it does, I think we should have the rights to do it. As long as the consumer knows what we’re doing with it.”
]]>