“There has been a lot of talk over the past few years and many companies, partners and vendors have done a lot of great strides. But there hasn’t yet been a consolidating at a realistic level,” says a4 President Paul Haddad.
“There’s a lot of theory in there, putting the pieces together and making a national addressable TV solution scalable enough for advertisers. AT&T has taken a step with tangible footprints that are really addressable today and brought the best of the best, put them together,” Haddad adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference.
Launched in the spring of 2018, a4 was the culmination of Altice’s acquisitions of Cablevision, Audience Partners and Placemedia, as AdExchanger reports.
“AT&T has a very similar yet much grander vision and it’s very well aligned with ours. So we are helping AT&T on the national TV addressability aspect and in return they’re helping us on the national addressability from a digital perspective,” says Haddad.
A4 is Xandr’s addressable TV partner in the New York market. Xandr also announced a deal this week to aggregate and sell the national addressable TV advertising inventory of Frontier Communications.
“We are bringing our local addressable TV inventory to the party and AT&T is putting all these pieces together of their footprint and our footprint and creating a scaled national TV solution for their clients.”
Haddad says that when he sat down with Xandr CEO Brian Lesser to figure out “how can we bring these pieces together,” it was easier than expected.
“It didn’t take long for us to figure out that this is real, this is something that we could have up and running in the next couple of months,” Haddad says. “We decided that this is the right thing for Altice, this is the right thing for AT&T, this is the right thing for the industry. And we’re hoping that the results will show themselves in the next quarter or two quarters.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>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.”
]]>But what’s dynamic can also me added to what is static. New York cable operator Cablevision is eyeing up the application of dynamic ads to shows recorded via customers’ set-top boxes.
“What I get really excited about is also our DVR,” COO Kristin Dolan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The cloud storage DVR works exactly the same way as VOD does. It’s stored, and DAI works on DVR content as well.”
Cablevision’s cloud-based DVR was upgraded last April to support recording of up to 15 channels simultaneously. That’s because content isn’t recorded to a local disc at all, but to Cablevision’s own servers in the sky. That could be the perfect opportunity to serve up regular dynamically-inserted ads.
“We do 30 million hours a month of DVR recording for our customers,” Dolan adds. “(We can) present to an advertiser the opportunity to refresh that ad.
“It just opens up even more inventory and more opportunities for partners, particularly programming partners, but also other advertisers to refresh their media and refresh their advertising and retarget a customer in a very unique way. So, it almost feels like the amount of inventory we have with DAI becomes almost infinite, so that’s truly exciting.”
She was interviewed for Beet.TV by 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.
]]>“Once the sales reps see incremental sales revenue … they become converts. But bringing the horse to water required a lot of time and effort,” COO Kristin Dolan concedes.
The proof is now clear, though. “You can do almost a laser-like media schedule for an advertiser that has never done television advertising before because they didn’t think they could afford it,” Dolan adds.
Here are three examples of how local addressability can work on Cablevision:
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
The questions were asked by Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>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.
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“To me, we’re at a critical inflection point where the world is changing and we’re no longer a monopoly, and we’re a company that delivers the internet to people’s homes,” she says in an interview with Beet.TV. “And my goal is to wrap all that in a really good service product.”
An industry veteran who began her career in cable in 1990 at Cablevision’s programming division Rainbow Media (now AMC Networks), Dolan had an indirect route to business after majoring in English in college and working in publishing. She thinks the cable industry offers interesting opportunities for recent graduates, especially when they’re willing to go outside of their comfort zone and try different roles.
“Working in a call center might not sound glamorous, but when you think about the opportunities to lead a team, to embellish an experience for a customer, and to really cultivate technology and new perspectives on service into a job, things that might not on the surface appear interesting or appealing can actually become gateways to really interesting careers,” she says.
This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
]]>“We take that information to create customized schedules for advertisers. It’s everything you’ve been able to do on the Internet is available now for the television,” she says. This set-top box level targeting lets marketers target customers that fit particular trends, profiles, demographics and attributes, and they can also pair the Cablevision data with their own or third-party data, she says. ”
We are seeing some national advertisers redirecting some national dollars to regional because the match-back and targeting is so helpful.”
Cablevision harnesses this technology to sell the two minutes of cable network programming time it has access to each hour for local ads to deliver them to specific homes.
Dolan will discuss the topic of addressable advertising at session at Cannes Lions with Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM. The session is being organized by MediaLink.
We interviewed Dolan as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.
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