I am grateful to Kirk McDonald and my other dear friends, along with so many new acquaintances, for having spoken so candidly and personally about what is like to be Black in our industry and for sharing their anguish and hopes in this time of racial injustice and social unrest.
Simply put, we’re having conversations we’ve never had before.
Several of the executives in the series speak of needing a “safe space,” a place where fellow people of color can freely share about who they are and to discuss difficult issues in their work experience.
Well, Beet.TV is now that “safe space.”
I hope that the series will help to foster understanding and progress. The series is far from over. We will produce more videos in the months ahead.
As a publisher, we are determined to bring more people of color to regular Beet.TV industry coverage. And we have made progress. Much more to come.
I am very moved by Kirk McDonald’s words about my work. I have published this short video on this page. Thank you Kirk, my friend, for opening the conversation. We all need to take a few steps forward.
Update: Since we published this video, Kirk has been appointed CEO of GroupM North America. Congrats Kirk.
Here is our series to date:
This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here.
]]>In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them.
Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies, they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.
An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
In a panel interview at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis, two executives were asked how they are reconfiguring to service D2Cs…
In October, NBCU partnered with the agency Giant Spoon, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, to start Direct To Scale, an advertiser offering specifically geared toward helping D2Cs.
Norris says it “is really designed to help brands that were typically born in social scale beyond social – they hit a ceiling and they need something a little bit bigger.
“What we ended up finding is that these brands spent so much time on segmenting their audience, coming up with a really sound strategy for growth,” Norris said. “They spend a lot of time, money, effort, consideration, and then when it’s time to execute, they go buy a DR (direct response) schedule.
“The brand will have to retrofit their strategy to fit the inventory that’s available. We kind of didn’t think that that was the right way to go about it.”
Norris and Lee agreed that, just because ad buyers can now laser-target ad campaigns at cohorts of individual households, that doesn’t mean they always should – at least, not in isolation.
WideOrbit’s Lee said: “We’re allowing you to buy by daypart, by specific market programme, and it really is getting a lot more granular and giving them the capabilities to really see how they want to carve up their campaign based on the results they’re seeing.”
Norris said: “There’s a place for both (precise targeting and mass reach). Especially with direct-to-consumer brands, it’s not just good enough to do one.”
Lee agreed: “We can get too granular with that data. I think we have to find that balance. The more precise we get, you’re shrinking that funnel and you’re missing that whole audience… You need to make sure that you’re not trying to get so precise that you’re missing out on the big picture.”
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.
]]>But it turns out those same capabilities may also trickle up to the big brands that were more commonly thought of as TV advertisers.
That is according to one long-time TV ad exec who recently added a three-letter acronym to his role.
NBCUniversal ad sales senior vice president Brian Norris recently took charge of a “D2C” push.
“These brands were born in social, and they get to a point where they need to scale their businesses,” he told EY’s Janet Balis during Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
Norris was talking about how advanced TV ad capabilities allow emerging direct-to-consumer brands to get the appeal of TV whilst also enjoying the measurability of digital.
But, asked if those same capabilities can be used by more than just the “emerging” set, he said: “These brands are primarily thinking about how do they succeed against their KPIs. When you’re looking at brands that are new to television and you’re looking at established brands, the one thing that they have in common is that they have to achieve against KPIs.
“Whether that KPI is site conversion (for new brands) or brand lift (for mature brands), they have to achieve against those.
“There’s really no difference in success when you’re thinking about a direct-to-consumer brand and a legacy brand. We ultimately, we need to perform for those brands in order for them to grow and ultimately stay with our platform.”
In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them. Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies ,they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.
An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
All of which places Norris and his peers under greater pressure to prove the effectiveness of TV as a medium.
“I get the question pretty often, ‘Why did you leave direct response?’,” he says. “Part of my answer is around attribution… not really believing (until now) that television was getting the credit that it deserved for attribution.
“I think that it’s really important to give television the credit that it deserves and not just have that value siphoned off by a social platform.”
Comcast, owner of Norris’ NBCUniversal, has developed and acquired its way to offering such a solution, including taking on AdSmart through its acquisition of Sky and its earlier acquisition of video ad-tech software FreeWheel.
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.
]]>Brands would buy ads and, with little insight in to who really watched what, would need to unleash a slew of media mix modelling tools to understand what exposures may have led to which purchases.
That imprecision has led the industry to focus on the half-full glass – TV is an amazing medium for building mass initial awareness, if not for closing a deal with a customer.
Now that over-the-top TV services and addressable TV advertising technologies, which allow for precision targeting, are coming on stream, the industry is contemplating changing the way it trades ads, like offering guarantees on business outcomes, measurable with digital attribution.
For an industry that is worth north of $70 billion in the US alone, the change could be profound. But how quick is it happening? What will the real nature of ROI look like? And who stands to gain?
At Beet Retreat, a panel representing all sides of the value chain – brand, agency, programmer, and technology supplier – was convened to thrash out the issues, concluding three days of debate in Puerto Rico. Here is what they said…
The panel was cautioned against comparing the emerging technology of addressable TV to forebear marketing channels, just because it exhibits similar one-to-one qualities…
Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover
“There’s going to be this inherent reaction to treat addressable TV like it’s direct marketing or direct mail. But, if you benchmark the performance of, let’s say, addressable TV from an ROI perspective, from an effectiveness perspective, it’s never going to perform similarly to direct mail.”
Addressable and OTT TV ads can laser-guide creative to individual households or even individual viewers, just like digital – very different from conventional mass broadcast. But reaching that mass is still important…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Awareness matters. The high-funnel stuff, brand-level marketing, actually really matters. In a rush to try to make everything accountable in a direct markety, outcome-based way, you end up minimizing the value of all that high-funnel stuff. We’ve done that largely because we never thought of making TV accountable at all. ”
With so many technological possibilities at play, and the emerging possibility of selling ads only when an attribution can prove they have led to a purchase or other action, the whole notion of return on investment (ROI) is up in the air. But all sides of the value chain are playing the game…
John Hoctor, CEO & C0-Founder, Data Plus Math:
“Agencies, marketers, media folks (are now) partnering on (defining) ROI, which is kind of interesting. We’ll go on a lot of sales calls as the tech provider, as the glue that’s kind of holding it all together, to talk about what sort of outcomes can we measure for this particular advertiser. There’s some advertisers where the outcome is pretty clear, and you can measure it. There’s real budgets going against it. But it has not displaced the GRPs that are out there. But everyone is leaning into it. We’re in tons of these meetings with all of these folks. It’s a super hot topic.”
New technologies offer advertisers the ability to buy ads on TV in a manner consistent with digital – transacting not just for precise targeting but also buying specific business outcomes. But that is going to need the TV industry to change decades of habit…
Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal:
“TV has been transacted in a very similar way for the last 50 years or more. We’ve been really vocal about transitioning away from legacy measurement. Marketers by the way, are interested in that, and they’re leaned into it … (moving) into some sort of impact-, outcome-based measurement.”
Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp:
“But, still, 90% of your business is transacted against the Nielsen guarantee. $10 billion top line … moved against a currency that you and Linda (Yaccarino, Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships at NBCUniversal) and everybody openly express you feel needs to be refreshed. I guess maybe it’s also. ‘Guys, when is it worth the effort?'”
Beet Retreat heard frustration from attendees that many parts of the media-buying landscape still treat addressable TV advertising as a test-and-learn opportunity, with many holding back from significant investment. When could that change… ?
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer, VideoAmp:
“In 2018, a lot of it was research, so that you can prepare for how you want to start transacting moving forward. So by 2020, I’m hoping a lot of that volume, which is already pretty significant, is now moving into actual delivery, with measurement that is making buyers and sellers, both more effective in what they’re trying to do.”
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.
]]>Last month, the two companies launched Direct to Scale, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, as Campaign reports.
In the Giant Spoon partnership “we are focused mainly on direct-to-consumer brands that they represent, but not only that, the opportunity is really for us to expand our roster of advertisers beyond the current more traditional legacy advertisers,” says Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal.
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Norris talks about transitioning from traditional media currencies and embracing more outcomes-focused metrics. He explains how NBCU’s in-house Future of Advertising Group is focused on “changing how we interact with marketers in terms of making sure that ultimately, we’re providing the most ROI for them long term sustainable growth.”
That process starts with providing the best content for consumers that, in turn, produces better results and better environments. “We’re looking at currencies that measure impact and outcomes as opposed to traditional currencies, which ultimately we’re not able tie business results to traditional measurement currencies,” Norris says.
Having started in TV at Lifetime Television in 2003 before moving on to Viacom and then DISH Media Sales and Sling TV, Norris has a broad perspective of marketers’ evolving expectations.
“I suspect that many advertisers will have different KPI’s and it’s upon us to be as nimble as possible to be able to achieve those results for them.”
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.
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