But how are advertisers adapting to the palette of options presented by OTT (over-the-top) and connected TV delivery?
In a panel called “Buy-Side Perspectives – The Big Asks” at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, four industry executives described how they see ad buyers adjusting:
Magna Global’s Anson said, when ad buyers make requests, “they don’t actually, they don’t know they’re asking for advanced TV”.
“First thing is, ‘I know I can get audiences, but I don’t really know how or why’,” she said.
“Second is OTT – they just know that there is a thing called OTT, they know they need to start spending there. And the number one thing that I get asked is, ‘What is the actual de-duplication between the offerings, between the Tubi, the Xumo, the Pluto? They may each have 20 million uniques per month, but how much of that is a crossover?’
“The third thing is probably putting it all together and that’s incremental reach. That is a big focus these days.”
DISH Media’s Sean Robertson said his company tries to clearly explain to ad buyers the over-the-top TV opportunity.
“The first thing is education and clarity in the marketplace about what offering should be utilised to solve what problems,” he said.
“When we enter the marketplace, we take a stance of ‘Let’s be very clear about what addressable is’.
“We talk about what OTT is and what our offering does and the skinny bundle versus the other competitors. We think that education in the marketplace helps us all. It truly is trying to raise all boats with the tide.”
Verizon Media’s Brett Hurwitz said ad buyers often “have a confused perception of what target they should really be using”.
“Fortunately, addressable television lets them kind of learn from their mistakes,” he said.
“For those that are really embracing it most fully, I think they’re looking to remove friction. They’re looking to bring down the walls and be able to have simplicity in the way that they’re achieving total reach.
“The process for (buying) a linear addressable (ad) is a lot more complicated than an ad in the traditional linear piece. And so I think we as an industry need to look toward simplification.”
The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>Moderated by consultant Matt Prohaska, the discussion touched on the eternal reality of supply versus demand in making sales decisions, along with the prospects for the OpenAP audience targeting consortium.
“We still have bifurcation in linear programmatic and digital, so that’s always something that we have to navigate,” said FOX’s Noah Levine. “We’ve seen a maturity begin to develop in the linear programmatic TV space, which is quite nice.”
From the sell-side, programmatic is “primarily about automating the buy and being able to empower the agency, the buyer, to do more. That’s a good thing for us as sellers,” Levine added.
“The fact that we still need to look at linear programmatic as kind of a separate beast is something we should all start to want to reconcile and maybe have some degree of concern about,” said Brett Hurwitz of OATH, the Verizon unit. And if all TV inventory becomes available on an IP-based delivery platform, a major concern will be getting “enough of a premium on the highly desirable target folks to make up for the fact that some of your other impressions are going to probably be going at a much lower price.”
The issue of brand safety still holds sway and stands in the way of 100% data-driven decisions, according to Mike Law of Dentsu Aegis Network. “We need to find the right balance of that, because some brands hold that way too close to them and some buyers hold that way too close to them,” said Law. “They fear that if I don’t say something then this computer will do my job for me or somebody will do it for me.”
Sellers have obvious concerns about total automation when optimizing their inventory across the multitude of buyers. “In linear, there’s a lot of pressure on the inventory. There’s a huge amount of demand,” said Levine.
“It’s true, the private marketplaces are really the path forward for the most part when it comes to especially linear television inventory,” said Hurwitz.
Given some marketers’ desire to cherry pick ad units versus having the ability to transact via automation, “There’s a very healthy tension between those two models that we’re seeing in the marketplace,” Levine noted. And while being able to leverage programmatic technology to access inventory and re-optimize plans “is a very desirable state for us to reach in the future,” it’s tough to do for sellers that don’t have lots of unsold inventory. “That’s one of the challenges.”
Asked by Prohaska about the prospects of the OpenAP targeting consortium launched by FOX, Viacom and Turner, Law said its premise “remains really strong and positive.” The missing piece to him is being able to transact collectively across all members.
And OpenAP is in a crowded space.
“There’s OpenAP and then I’ve got actually all the partners included in OpenAP trying to sell me their own platform, plus fifteen other networks trying to sell me their platform as well,” said Law. “And then I’ve got Simulmedia calling me, I’ve got Adobe calling me, I’ve got Videology calling me.”
OATH experienced its own version of too many choices upon the merger of AOL and Yahoo, Hurwitz recalled, given the existence of “I’m going to say eight DSP’s between the two companies” plus a number of DSP’s. OATH decided to sunset its linear TV programmatic platform, which Hurwitz called “a fantastic product,” because “we felt was going to serve the industry for some period of time and then perhaps not be the tool the industry needed.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“The future of how TV is being delivered is changing. We believe all or virtually all what we now call television impressions will be addressable,” says Brett Hurwitz, Oath’s Business Lead for Advanced TV.
At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Hurwitz sat down with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz to discuss the path to that advanced-TV future and how more big-brand marketers are embracing addressable TV.
“I still believe that indexed-based television is smarter for marketers than traditional TV buying,” says Hurwitz. “But Oath has made the decision that with the changes that are taking place in the way television’s delivered, having an offering in that space is not something that makes sense for us to be investing in.”
Instead, “We’re investing in what we see to be the future of premium video and the future of television.”
The Fios TV addressable offering was launched in the fall of 2016 and initially ran in parallel with One TV, as Multichannel News reports.
While the term “household addressable” has mainly been the province of MVPD-based offerings, advanced TV encompasses a broader set of solutions. They include index-based offerings by networks (for example OpenAP) along with OTT and connected TV.
Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., whether the ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to use the same dataset to target audiences across all platforms, Hurwitz says it goes beyond that basic application.
“Going a step further, you can do things like based on a certain level of exposure to a television commercial then place a target on a digital kind of lower-funnel activation tactic,” Hurwitz says.
So will Oath’s previously programmatic offering revert to direct-sold inventory?
“I think the way we’re beginning to view these types of pieces of inventory is as super premium video, and so ultimately having that type of inventory available in our video programmatic environment is something that we’re exploring,” says Hurwitz.
He believes there will always be a place for the Upfront negotiating season and does not see the future becoming “one audience, one price.”
What Hurwitz is seeing right now is advertisers that originally were staying away from addressable now starting to come in.
“Because what they’re realizing is the data that you can get from addressable campaigns has tremendous application to what creative you run on your larger linear campaigns,” Hurwitz says.
“The kind of conventional notion that the only advertisers who should pay a premium CPM to work with addressable television are advertisers who have a relatively small target we’re seeing really start to change.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For companies more used to selling the context of their content to advertisers, the hot new possibility – in the over-the-top TV era – is to instead sell individual viewers, thanks to the myriad data points on offer.
But which are the most viable revenue opportunities, and which choices should distributors leave on the table?
In this panel debate convened at the Beet Retreat, executives from several publishers and distributors weighted up how they tackle the wealth of new options available.
NBCUniversal sales and strategy EVP Mike Rosen:
“I like the word ‘balance’. The culture of our company should be about content-plus-audience. We’re not abandoning content. We don’t want to go to our agencies, our advertisers, and make them choose between the two.
“We sort of see that balance, where, yes, you’re going to sponsor some shows, because your brand belongs there. But, at the same token, there may be other strategies that involve looking across our entire portfolio, and finding the audiences. The two, I think will coexist for a really long time.”
Fox Networks Group Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions Noah Levine:
“A year ago, I was very digitally focused. I’m very convergence focused right now. My team is probably spending about 70% of its time focused on linear. My team focuses on audience, and programmatic solutions across linear, addressable, set top box VOD, and digital.
“A lot of my time, and my leadership’s time, is spent socializing these concepts internally, getting buy-in, developing excitement around these initiatives, because part of our job is to be disruptors, to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been using age, gender as a way to guarantee for very long time’.”
Acxiom VP, Television Partner Development, Craig Berkley:
“I think most of the organizations in traditional TV are aware that this needs to happen, that we need to move towards addressable, and audience based buying, and incorporate all of these into our platforms. Different organizations are in different stages in accomplishing that internally.”
Oath Business Lead, Advanced TV, Brett Hurwitz:
“I kind of go through work each day, wondering ‘What are the obstacles’? There’s obstacles, I think, on the supply side. I think there’s obstacles on the demand side. I think we have to, as an industry, as leaders in the industry, really start breaking down those issues, and tackling them one by one, because I think the evolution is happening remarkably slowly.
“I think traditional linear television delivery has a certain amount of life ahead of it. It doesn’t make sense to me that money is still being spent the old way.”
A+E ad sales president Mel Berning:
“We have all sorts of balls up in the air right now. We would all prefer to get to a world where we’re talking about (advertising) outcomes.
“Until clients, agencies, and all of us are able to get into a real dialogue about what is the right metric to gage the effectiveness of the medium, I think we’re in a difficult spot.”
The panel was moderated by MediaLink A+E managing director Matt Spiegel.
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.
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