According to Brian Wallach, svp and CRO of advanced TV at FreeWheel, which is owned by Comcast, local TV used to be the black sheep of the industry. That’s changed, as a more fractured market has made marketers reconsider how they reach the audiences they’re targeting. FreeWheel is working with MVPDs to aggregate their local inventories, as the most advanced part of the business is household addressable, where premiums are up to 15x the rate, Wallach told Beet.TV in an interview with Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester, at the Beet Retreat hosted by Publicis Media in New York.

“People are jumping in to buy the same local inventory, proudly to declare they’re using household addressable, and that local inventory went from, ‘Ick, ew, I don’t want to be next to that,’ to ‘Wow, this is really powerful inventory when you can understand you’re reaching the consumer,” says Wallach.

While national television is regularly upheld for its reach, providing fast access to a mass audience, local TV is more aligned with personalized targeting that marketers are increasingly looking to supplement their video advertising strategies with.

“Most people make decisions locally,” says Wallach. “It’s really high quality, valuable inventory.”

FreeWheel’s core role is to help marketers find audiences at scale across the different platforms and programming where they’re consuming content. The company makes it more efficient to find the right places to advertise across different networks and streaming services by modeling desired audiences and offering next-day reporting.

It’s a work in progress, says Wallach, trying to make the process of buying ads and targeting more customers more efficient. According to Wallach, it will be an industry-wide effort to get it right.

“I’m really excited about partnering across the industry in terms of data. We work with Vizio, and Inscape, to try to expand what that offering is and find real scale for these audiences really easily, that’s critical,” he says. “When you have great data and insights, and great supply, you can connect the dots and make an impact.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted by Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Attribution technology is rising in prominence, as programmers seek ways to show agencies the effectiveness of new-wave, data-fuelled advanced TV ads.

But an executive at the center of the emerging capability says a foundational element before attribution is ensuring that ad creative can be placed for the right viewers in the first place.

“Everyone always wants to look at sales,” says Brian Wallach, FreeWheel SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And if you’re a publicly traded company, you’re looking at sales quarterly, and some companies weekly and daily.

“From a business perspective, the media and advertising industry has really been about matching up audience with an advertiser’s message. And I still think, foundationally, the attribution plays a role in it, but our job in the ecosystem is to make it as easy as possible to find those audiences. Yes, using data, and then (to) deliver that message whatever screen the consumer’s watching on.

“I think if we do our job of matching up those audiences, the outcomes will be what the outcomes need to be, based on that creative, and that messaging, and that offer, and the value prop that the marketer is presenting to all of us as consumers.”

He was speaking with Janet Balis, global leader of EY’s media and entertainment practice.

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.

“From a measurement perspective and understanding viewership and consumption, we are partnering with Inscape to complement our Comcast set-top box footprint,” FreeWheel’s Brian Wallach says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We will be the largest footprint where you can actually get an understanding of deterministic viewership and consumption of digital video content across every screen.”

The SVP and CRO of Advanced TV says FreeWheel is “leaning into being able to show incremental reach” to advertisers using a national campaign or a targeted one on linear TV “and also the complementary digital delivery that’s happening in our footprint and across the Inscape footprint as well.”

The goal is to be able to determine whether someone watched a program on TV or digital and did an advertiser reach them in one or both environments because “there’s light TV viewers, heavy TV viewers, all types of consumption that’s happening across screen,” Wallach says.

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, every advertiser is different. Some are as simple as brand metrics measured with the help of research studies while others are looking for down-funnel conversion.

“As a marketer defines what their KPI’s are, we help them with different providers to match up whether or not the media that was shown to those consumers actually drove that behavior. That’s a growing trend.”

According to Wallach, some marketers could look to seek different audience guarantees from publishers that are based on campaign outcomes, as “guaranteeing delivery of impressions is somewhat not enough these days. Obviously, this is important for our publishing partners as well.”

He describes TVSquared as “a very valuable attribution partner for us. They really help us understand how to optimize a campaign and try to drive impressions against inventory that is yielding good results.”

While campaign performance beyond mere impression delivery has traditionally taken “months and months,” TVSquared provides “a rolling report on information that’s happening with those interactions, where we can actually optimize a campaign, maybe move inventory from one publisher to another based on performance” and do creative optimization.

Better analytics at the local level means that search no longer gets 100% local attribution, according to Wallach.

“We have data that can show exposures across TV, exposures across digital and then the corresponding interactions with search where they’re getting a location or address for a particular store and then visiting it,” says Wallach.

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.

FreeWheel is teaming with Data Plus Math and other attribution solutions providers to deliver faster insights into campaign performance. “A lot of times, you get information about how your campaign’s doing, especially around attribution and it’s far too often six months or even longer after a campaign’s over. It doesn’t allow you to optimize a campaign or in any way shape or form improve the performance during the flight,” says Wallach, who is SVP/CRO, FreeWheel Media.

To further enlarge its audience viewing data beyond Comcast’s huge footprint, FreeWheel is adding Inscape’s data set for “even more robust reporting capability,” particularly in the streaming video space. Data from more than 10 million opt-in Vizio smart TVs will be available to better target specific demographic and audience segments in TV ad deals, as Advertising Age reports.

“Since Vizio does go outside of the Comcast footprint, we can now start to model incremental reach and other access to consumers outside of our footprint,” Wallach adds.

FreeWheel will work with Adobe to help overcome the complexities of programmatic transactions in premium video. Given that most demand-side platforms were built to handle display ads, “Now you bring them into the living room and it creates a different type of environment. We’re working closely with the DSPs to solve for this and we’re leveraging our Drive platform to be able to promote audiences to them through Deal IDs so they can transact programmatically,” Wallach says.

“The reality is most DSPs try to use data from their side. They have different data arrangements and then they try to find the audiences in that live movement when the bidder is working.”

FreeWheel will “package up that inventory on a pre-bid basis, based on our insight and our data set having access to the ad server and the information that’s coming from there,” thereby leveraging the capabilities of DSPs “to bid appropriately on that supply.”

The latest partnerships enhance FreeWheel’s ability to talk to customers holistically about video in all its forms, according to Wallach.

For buyers of linear TV who also need to find audiences on OTT and CTV, “we’re able to help guide them and put together the right solutions for them.” For digital pure-play buyers looking for more reach beyond FreeWheel’s digital supply, “we can start to package in TV if they’re looking for audiences and impressions in that environment as well.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined.  For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.   

“We’re trying to put this all together, create scale and apply data and measurement so it’s a really transparent, easy to execute environment for buyers,” says Brian Wallach, SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, FreeWheel Markets.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference, Wallach explains how partnering with Nielsen also benefits digital media buyers and talks about the big rise in live digital TV viewing and the challenges ahead for reaching those audiences.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth in live TV consumption on apps and connected TV devices. That’s a huge opportunity. That’s probably one of the biggest areas that we see growing quickly,” he says.

Unlike some people, Wallach doesn’t believe that the trend of viewers migrating from linear TV is a catastrophe. “I think there’s still plenty of scale in linear TV. We’re just all trying to focus on the new living room and the TV being a device rather than it being the distribution means,” he says.

“It’s really exciting to us because linear TV buyers are asking how to do their linear campaigns with age and gender and GRPs and also tap into this new supply in OTT,” Wallach adds. “And we’re the only people in town really that have this kind of scale on full-episode inventory across the TV programmer universe versus a whole bunch of clips or long-tail websites that are trying to mimic that experience.”

Nielsen’s DAR provides a comprehensive view of digital audiences in a way comparable to linear TV. Using FreeWheel’s proprietary methodology, DRIVE enables marketers to assess total TV reach across linear and digital viewing, control reach and frequency, and ultimately, tie outcomes to anonymized, household-level data, according to a FreeWheel news release. Wallach says the need for DRIVE’s capabilities spans both linear TV and digital media buyers.

“As you start to explore different measurement types and all the different data partners that we’ll work with out there, making scale against this inventory isn’t just a TV buyers need. Digital buyers are looking for this type of need as well and they have all sorts of psychographic data that they want to target against and we’ll be able to unlock that on this inventory at scale within the next couple of months.”

Looking ahead, Wallach summarizes the challenges related to the rise in viewing of live programming via non-linear means, namely the way it’s delivered. With a traditional digital video ad campaign, there’s a start date and an end date, with everything in between evenly paced over the course of the flight.

“Live happens when live happens. So it’s going to take some time to create a difference in planning and execution and people acknowledging that it’s still great quality inventory and it’s actually really good scale in digital as a complement to TV.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

While the national addressable TV footprint grows bigger with each passing year, many advertisers are making use of household targeting to hone in on specific audiences. And those capabilities are getting more sophisticated, as Brian Wallach, SVP, CRO, Advanced TV at FreeWheel, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Advertisers can either buy a full avail—meaning serving a different message to every household in the footprint—or a split avail, “Where you can buy households that are just the consumers that you’re looking for,” Wallach says.

Taking things a step further, there is “a real opportunity” in leveraging data to find audiences at high indices for products and services. This involves choosing programs, networks and daypart mixes that have the highest concentration of consumers that meet an advertiser’s needs.

FreeWheel, the industry’s most complete advertising management solution, aggregates avails from distributors’ two minutes of local ad inventory to create a national, addressable footprint. “Generally speaking, we’re looking not to compete with the local advertising, so we don’t sell local or regional avails, even though our technology affords us the opportunity,” Wallach says.

The biggest TV advertisers still do direct deals with programmers. But when they need to augment particular audiences, reach them with higher frequency or, say, launch a new product, they don’t necessarily need a full schedule on one particular network, according to Wallach.

“They can leverage a platform like ours that can apply the data and buy across every single cable network that’s available in our footprint at the network and daypart intersection level.”

This is where automation comes into play by providing campaign reporting in near real-time. “The next day, we know where our commercials ran for our specific advertisers, at what network and daypart intersection, at the DMA level,” Wallach says.

“We’re at this place where you actually can leverage this information and tie it back to any performance metrics that you have as a marketer to see if this is working or not working. Because of our automation, we’re able to optimize the campaigns to help drive those KPI’s.”

This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.