But new research undertaken by a team of sell-side TV companies and intermediary tech suppliers channels’ ad buyers concern and confusion.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nick Troiano, the CEO of a company which funded the research, explains what is wrong – and how to fix it.
Era Of Addressable was carried out by Forrester for DISH Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, INVIDI Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia.
It has found the buy side calling for change:
“Executing adjustable TV is very complex. Less than four out of 10 respondents believe that their organisation is equipped to handle addressable TV at scale,” Troiano adds. “That is not a good metric for the industry, it’s something we need to work on.”
Troiano’s Cadent provides brands and agencies with solutions to find incremental reach in the expanding addressable TV ecosystem, which holds shining promise but which is also rendered complex by a proliferating series of new viewing services and different means to access their audiences.
When it works, Troiano says addressable TV is powerful.
“Addressable television as a platform for solving some of the CMO challenges of today – reaching an audience, delivering an outcome at the right price – is a proven solution,” he asserts. “The research highlights the actual effectiveness of addressable TV. Respondents from the research identified that addressable TV is a valuable component.
“But it’s complex, and they question their organization’s ability to deliver against it. That’s a call to action for us as a community, that’s a call to action for us as a group.”
The Forrester report says this complexity and lack of education is holding back advertiser demand for addressable TV. According to the research:
“They often encounter challenges with understanding and mastering the landscape of platforms, distributors, tools, and measurement standards that operate within the addressable landscape.
“In turn, this can complicate their abilities to advocate internally for these addressable programs in the first place.”
Forrester surveyed 522 decision makers at brands and agencies, supplemented with six further buyer interviews.
Forrester’s report recommends buyers:
For Troiano, the solution is in adding more technology – to make technology less complex.
“The lessons learned I think are really rooted around automation,” he says. “How do we reduce complexity for the media, for the buy side and the supply side, to deliver a scalable solution to the marketplace for addressable TV, whether addressable is used as a reach extension, or a specific addressable solution to deliver a KPI, it’s a viable medium and a viable solution in a fragmented marketplace?
“It’s certainly a time for everyone to recognise that, if we don’t do it now, I think the opportunity for adjustable television will pass.”
]]>In Q2 2020, that seems to be the emerging wisdom from a wave of executives.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the boss of a company fresh out of acquiring a big ad-tech player says the media industry needs to think on its feet.
“I think the marketplace has to be more flexible,” says Nick Troiano, CEO of Cadent, the company helping customers use software to buy and sell TV ads.
“Whether that’s a changing upfront dynamics to allow for rolling upfronts or flexibility in terms of purchasing and the ability to react quickly to purchasing behaviour or consumer behaviour in terms of your media strategy.”
The upfront ad sales season is the time of year when programmers traditionally tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.
But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.
That could push a change in the historic relationship – from upfront to agile. Troiano says flexibility needs to be shown.
Change is always constant, but nothing has ever prepared the industry for this level of change,” he says.
“A lot of our partners’ businesses are driven around using data to optimise for future performance and future expected outcomes. Unfortunately, a lot of the data that we use, historical data, has kind of been thrown out the window when you see massive changes in the marketplace.”
TV has evolved into a multifaceted tool that can be used to connect with consumers throughout their journey to purchase. https://t.co/ASTWDpNt88
— Cadent (@CadentTV) April 11, 2020
In January, Cadent acquired 4INFO, a software provider with a platform including “audience graph” technology that links together multiple TV-viewing devices into a profile for a single household.
The pair had already been partners, and 4INFO was integrated into Cadent’s buy-side TV planning and activation platform. Cadent uses data partners like TransUnion on the process.
Speaking with Beet.TV, Troiano says the acquisition has given Cadent two things:
“Audiences are fragmenting even more so than they ever have,” he adds. “So the inclusion of a proprietary graph to map video viewing to households, coupled with our ability to reach OTT and connected TV platforms to those hard-to-reach audiences, has really been a significant success and boon for Cadent as we try to provide valuable solutions for advertisers.”
An updated eMarketer forecast shows how it now expects US consumers’ daily media time is evolving.
In aggregate, digital media time will be up significantly this year, but TV is also a big winner, whilst radio and print time will continue to diminish.
In some ways, the pandemic is merely accelerating slightly some audience trends that were already occurring.
One of them is consumers’ flight from traditional pay-TV packages. In earnings reported last week, companies revealed large-scale loss of subscribers, Videomind writes.
Comcast has warned of a significant revenue downturn for Q2, having lost 388,000 residential video subscribers in the first quarter.
AT&T reported 897,000 premium TV subscribers had churned, along with 138,000 over-the-top subscribers. And Verizon last week reported it lost 84,000 video subscribers.
At Cadent, we know it's important to strike a balance as we adapt to the new normal. As a team, we're sharing tips on how to #WFH with kiddos, like how to keep them engaged with virtual learning and finding fun craft activities to pass the time. #thenewnormal #remotelife pic.twitter.com/qCyehVmzQO
— Cadent (@CadentTV) April 23, 2020
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Cadent, a company helping deliver addressable ads to connected TV and data-driven ads to linear TV, announced it will acquire 4INFO, a company whose software supports the creation of identity graphs, linking together distinct parts of audience members’ scattered profile data.
Writing about the deal, Cadent CEO Nick Troiano says 4INFO enhances Cadent’s ability to work with inventory partners, gives advertisers better tools for data activation and OTT, and, whilst the company thinks about “TV-first”, it gains a programmatic bidder that will help it create more dynamic advertising campaigns.
This acquisition follows the recently-announced merger of Rubicon Project and Telaria, which also brings together two tech suppliers with historic specialisms on cross-channel targeting and TV-specific delivery.
That seems to be the driving imperative behind the current crop of M&A – empowering connected TV ad sales with all the targeting capabilities that have grown up in digital.
“The real opportunity for us … is to be able to bring to television what we’ve been bringing to the digital world for the last seven years,” says Tim Jenkins of 4INFO in this video interview from May 2019, which we are republishing here.
We’re now seeing a lot of advertisers really embrace finally this one-to-one addressability in TV. I’m glad to see advertisers are finally starting to insist on accountability from the various providers in the space, and I think the ability to prove the real attractiveness of television in this one-to-one addressable world.”
]]>Keith Kryszczun, president of global sales at Cadent, a technology company which enables the practice for broadcasters, says addressability is on the march.
“You’ll see a lot of demand for the addressable inventory,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “There’s been limited availability of inventory for addressability. In the US market, it’s been limited to the two minutes (per hour), so far. You’re going to see that expand across the rest of the eight, 10, 12 minutes of traditionally broadcast, or network-owned spots.”
“In the UK market, a really big thing is not only Sky now having access to do this across their own footprint, but Virgin Media’s. Also, they announced a deal with Channel 4.
“Carol McCall, the CEO of ITV, said): ‘Still 85% of our viewing is on linear’. So I think you’ll see a normalized workflow between addressable, linear, and VOD. If you’re competing for new ad dollars to television against Google and Facebook, to not use the linear scale of your TV business is like fighting with both arms behind your back.”
Sky, the UK’s largest pay-TV provider, operating primarily over satellite, launched AdSmart in 2013, storing ads on satellite subscribers’ set-top boxes for subsequent targeted playback. It has since spearheaded the UK’s addressable TV revolution, and has become known as a global pioneer in addressable TV enablement.
Rival Virgin Media, despite its advantage of delivering via cable, was relatively late to offer targeted TV ads, which it had previously done in limited fashion. But, as we reported in mid-2017, signed a deal with Sky which extends the AdSmart capability to Virgin Media’s TiVo set-top boxes.
Those boxes, as well as Virgin Media’s network infrastructure, are enabled by Kryszczun’s Cadent technology.
Keith Kryszczun, Cadent SVP of Global Sales, Technology, gives an overview of the addressable linear advertising market in the EU with @Beet_TV in London. pic.twitter.com/gdDwR6qAKj
— Cadent (@CadentTV) December 9, 2019
“We’re integrated with the broadcast streams,” he says. “There are markers around the linear spots, and we have an integration that picks up those markers and we can say, ‘All right, we’re going to splice an ad, in real-time, into that linear viewing spot’.
“That ad can be personalised, it can be optimized, it’s in the context of other non-addressable linear ads. We’re obeying policy restrictions as well, so, (for example), we won’t put an addressable car ad against another car ad that’s been in the linear stream that is not addressable.”
Kryszczun says Cadent worked on “sophisticated integrations” between the Virgin Media and Sky technology to enable the link-up.
Sky also recently announced further deals:
+ Sky will carry BBC's iPlayer app – relenting on integrating BBC VOD in its own, fake-iPlayer UI.
+ Sky's AdSmart targeted-ad tool will be used to serve personalised trailers for BBC shows.
+ BBC Sounds soon for Sky and Now TV.
= TV is disaggregating in to broadcaster-led apps. https://t.co/unesfhMn6q— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) November 11, 2019
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to an executive who thinks critics of the emerging opportunity are wrong.
Addressable TV, which gives brands the ability to buy ads targeted at the household level, has made particular in-roads in certain local cable operators and in particular OTT services or TV devices.
Mike Bologna, the former president of GroupM’s MODI Media advanced TV unit who later co-founded Cadent’s one2oneMedia addressable TV arm, says there are two ways of assessing addressable TV’s deployment:
“Getting the national inventory into play addresses the scale issue as it comes to impressions available,” he says. “That’s the part that we need to focus on so this can really start to take a chunk out of that $70 billion (total US TV ad spend) that everybody’s chasing.
“How do we get all of the national TV networks? How do we get their inventory, which is the bulk of the television inventory, enabled so they can start offering up an addressable option to advertisers?”
Doing so won’t necessarily be straightforward. Whilst many new OTT entrants are offering dynamic addressable ads out of the gate, incumbent national TV networks still have their traditional direct-sold ads business to manage, often going through cable operators.
“(National broadcasters) don’t have the ability to light up the inventory,” Bologna explains. “It’s not within their control. No national network can light up the inventory by themselves.
“They have to create a relationship, make a deal with either a cable system, a set-top box maker or a smart TV because, for the foreseeable future, dynamically-inserted commercials over live linear programming is going to happen either through the set-top box or through the smart TV.
“Then they need to go through the calculations and figure, out of their programming, which is best suited for an addressable insertion and where are they going to generate the most yield?”
He was interviewed by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel.
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.
]]>The CEO of the advanced-TV platform cites pay-TV operators like Comcast, AT&T/Xandr and Charter making considerable technology investments “to support this national addressable solution, to bring that kind of accountability to television.”
On the demand side, “the agencies and advertisers are starting to rethink their strategies for television. It’s true that TV as a medium is working very well. I think it’s also true that social and digital, which was a big push for the last five years, works but also lacks some of the scale that television brings,” Troiano says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.
Combining the two trends brought both sides together to “start thinking about how to build addressable business models. We’ve seen that grow pretty significantly,” to about $2 billion in addressable spending. “From a Cadent perspective, we see addressable growing really thirty to fifth percent year over year.”
He describes Cadent, whose heritage is in national TV solutions, as figuring out “How do you bring a fragmented marketplace in the traditional television sense to brands and advertisers in a way that complements their current TV strategies.”
Among the major pay-TV operators offering addressable, “each one has their own solution set, technology infrastructure and capabilities. So Cadent’s role in this marketplace today is to aggregate the addressable inventory across all those pay TV providers and make it simple for an advertising agency to execute a national campaign.
“So that’s simplified TV formats, simplified reporting, simplified planning. And it’s those kind of simplifications that have made traditional TV work that is fundamental to help drive the demand, move from traditional television dollars to addressable,” Troiano says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.
The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:
“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.
Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”
Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.
“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:
“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”
The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):
“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”
But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”
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.
]]>“What I think that we should focus on more is the value proposition of addressability. If you plan your segment properly, if you pay the appropriate price and most importantly you measure it accurately, you will see a return on your investment that far exceeds the work required to get there,” Bologna adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
Putting the considerable work involved aside, would it be better to just pitch addressable as a smarter way of buying than traditional age/sex demographics? Only if advertisers are willing to accept the math at face value, according to Bologna.
As an example, he cites an advertiser that thinks it’s paying a $25 CPM to reach women ages 25-54. But if its real target is women 25-54 who have two children and purchase a particular brand of yogurt, that $25 can end up being $75. “So if you can hit that target at thirty-seven dollars in an addressable manner, you’ve far exceeded the value. And then you tie it back to sales and you measure the lift. And nine times out of ten, it’s going to wind up in your favor.”
While there’s plenty of brands for which addressability doesn’t make sense, even categories like toothpaste and shampoo might try it in search of market share shift. “There’s so many strategic approaches, which goes back to some of the logistical challenges.” Given the work and time involved, “many agencies and advertisers don’t have the bandwidth or the skillsets set up internally to execute it on.”
One major hang-up is the desire for some common denominator to arise “and there just isn’t one. “So where we’re all looking for universal media execution, measurement and analytics we’re pretty far from that.”
With some 20 years of agency experience behind him, Bologna’s advice is “You can’t stop the train. “The television train is going to continue to move and all we can do is evolve it as it continues to move with some of these new tactics as opposed to stopping it and rebuilding it along the way.
“And I think that approach is what we need to apply to addressability. Figure out how it works for you, use it to the best of your ability, use it as a means to increase your frequency against your core customer segment without the burden of the waste, and then do the best you can to extract the learnings and apply it to the larger television campaign.”
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.
]]>Although the cable distribution method, coupled with its use of a connected TiVo set-top box, seemed to offer distinct advantages, it was not until relatively recently that Virgin Media began offering addressable ad targeting capabilities.
For that, it can partly thank Cadent. On top of announcing, this week, that Virgin Media has signed on to its new Cadent Advanced TV Platform to power addressable ads over broadcast and VOD, the advertising technology firm has been working with Virgin Media owner Liberty Global for five years.
“We basically integrate our technology into the Virgin Media infrastructure and we’re enabling them to dynamically target ads into live viewing in a set top box with just-in-time download of those creative assets to the set top box that will then be spliced into the stream,” says Cadent global sales SVP Keith Kryszczun in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“So our infrastructure’s managing how creatives are pushed out to those set top boxes, how the targeting is enabled for the ads against those set top boxes and households, and the campaign execution of that based on all the campaigns that are being managed across all the different viewerships.”
That capability would be enough for some TV services. But, whilst Virgin Media is the UK’s leading cable TV operator, its customer footprint is dwarfed by that of satellite rival Sky.
So the pair last year partnered to dovetail Virgin’s offering with Sky’s pioneering AdSmart addressable TV ad buying service, allowing advertiser to buy across both.
“This will give about 10 million homes – 30 million viewers, is what Virgin Media and Sky – are saying, for them to now addressably target, and that’s very meaningful scale,” Kryszczun adds.
Whilst the leading UK cable and satellite TV operators, which are also both telcos and TV channel owners, now offer addressable linear and VOD ad targeting, free-to-air – which is popular in Europe – is farther behind.
Digital terrestrial consortium Freeview now has its Freeview Play standard, but that is really just a means of hot-linking viewers to distinct channels’ own-brand VOD players. The YouView smart TV standard, offering Freeview plus IPTV via broadband providers, has seemed to stagnate. It all leaves the individual channel operators – like ITV and Channel 4 – ploughing on with offering their own ad targeting through their own-brand players.
That puts Cadent’s customers in the driving seat when it comes to offering cross-platform scale.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
]]>Just over a year ago, Sky and Virgin disclosed their intent to team up on addressable TV ads by adding Virgin Media’s customer base to Sky’s addressable TV offering, Sky AdSmart, as The Drum reports. In this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp. Founder & CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Future of TV Advertising Forum, Ranger provides an update on the alliance.
It’s been a few years since Cadent began working with Virgin to deploy VOD dynamic ad insertion on its Qam system. Cadent has also enabled VOD on Virgin’s IP system in the UK and Ireland “and now we’re looking at linear as well,” says Ranger.
“What’s been less talked about is the fact that it’s Cadent technology providing the system which is going to allow them to do that,” he adds of the Sky/Virgin initiative.
To be GDPR compliant, Cadent is “effectively creating a walled garden, which means Sky are abstracted away from all of the Virgin subscriber information and keeping it GDPR compliant from that perspective.
“We’re managing the exchange of the campaign data from Sky, because obviously Sky are very sensitive about handing over campaign information as well. We’re acting as the mediator between the Sky media campaign information and the Virgin subscriber data,” says Ranger.
In Canada thus far, Cadent has worked “specifically” with Rogers Cable, enabling VOD dynamic ad insertion for its 1.6 million subscriber households to pay-TV, along with Corus Entertainment and Bell Globemedia.
Ranger sees the role of Cadent as two-fold: being pioneers and educators in the interested of advanced television advertising.
“And we’re looking at it from a technology perspective as well,” he says. “One of the things that we don’t want to create is a whole load of siloed systems that make it very expensive to operationalize these new kinds of advertising.”
Priorities include normalizing data, making ad ops as efficient as possible and creating “a common technology product across multiple BDU’s that the major programmers can tap into and use to drive new revenue streams,” he says, referencing Broadcast Distribution Undertakings—satellite TV operators, as they are known in Canada.
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>That’s how Mike Bologna sizes up Sorenson’s “somewhat unique” position in the addressable marketplace in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he discusses the lack of consistency in executing and measuring campaigns and the financial hurdle of producing multiple creative iterations.
Sorenson uses automatic content recognition to discern what’s happening on smart-TV screens, paving the way for advanced audience targeting and measurement.
“Sorenson’s product introduces a little bit of a new proposition to where the gatekeeper is really the smart TV and the inventory could be either cable or broadcast, national or local,” says Bologna, who is President, one2one Addressable, Cadent. “That’s a little bit of a different spin on it and I think it introduces some addressable diversity to the marketplace, which is a good thing.”
Meanwhile, “business is booming” at one2one Addressable (formerly one2one Media), according to Bologna owing to the company’s efforts to simplify a marketplace that is totally lacking in consistency, from data to tech pipes.
“There is no standardization when it comes to addressability. There’s no standardization, there’s no automation, but what there is is a very high valuation proposition and a very high return on investment,” Bologna says.
“The lack of standards generally translates into complexity. What we do is we simplify the addressable business in the absence of agreed upon industry standards.”
What has changed recently is that advertisers and agencies are spending less time “picking apart all the different data sources” that can be used for advanced TV targeting and “refining how that data can be used to fill a strategic objective of a particular brand.”
For the most part, “The creative remains as is,” meaning addressable campaigns are still largely the domain of campaigns created for traditional, broad TV audiences, according to Bologna.
“We love to send different pieces of creative with different messages to the appropriate audiences and then tie that back to sales analyze accordingly. But in many cases, the cost to produce the creative outweighs the value of that small segment.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event, Ward pegs the spot TV universe at about $30 billion in advertising sales, with the NCC-aligned MVPD’s representing roughly $6 billion. “We actually think there’s a terrific opportunity to grow that spot business by bringing to the table many of the attributes that are going to drive the addressable marketplace around data, targeting and measurement,” he adds.
As with the new NCC division, which is expected to launch in June, the overall concept is to move away from traditional Nielsen age/gender audience measures and “deliver audiences in a more robust manner than traditionally has been afforded” to the local TV marketplace.
Across the 60 or so cable networks “that we insert advertising in each of our markets, that aggregate impression pool is about sixty to seventy percent of total viewing,” Ward explains. With two-thirds of viewing and one-fifth of dollars spent, “We think there’s opportunity to grow that core spot business by layering on increased levels of data, targeting and measurement focused in the spot environment.”
Although the sales structure of the new NCC division will rely on a “very much independent sales effort focused on the national addressable marketplace, we think the work we will be doing in that environment will also fuel the spot marketplace.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>NCC Media is owned by Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications.
“Really what we’re talking about is all of MVPD inventory in the live linear environment, the on-demand environment as well as the digital environment,” Ward adds in an interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event.
“That’s really one of the primary drivers behind the creation of the enterprise. How do we begin to federate those solutions” in a horizontal manner.
Comcast Media 360, Comcast Spotlight’s former national advertising sales team, will form the foundation of the new unit together with resources from NCC Media, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, NCC media said in a news release.
The second goal—data consistency—will address such advertiser concerns as audience segment definitions, which can vary from one media company to the next. Ward also wants to extend that consistency to analytic and data partnerships to bring uniformity to “what is currently an irrational marketplace.”
Simplification will require structuring “an end-to-end solution” to ensure that transacting national addressable TV campaigns is profitable for advertisers.
“Nobody doubts the sound strategy of using richer data to more precisely deliver audiences and measurement those audiences in more robust ways,” says Ward. “But we’ve got to encase that transaction in elegant architecture from pitch to pay, such that the process is simplified.”
The new unit within NCC Media will use viewers privacy compliant, non-personally identifiable data. This is not an issue because the companies involved are subject to 1980’s rules that Ward characterizes as “probably the strongest consumer protection language in the marketplace.”
All of the aforementioned goals have one common thread: To move national TV targeting, measurement and attribution into the future.
“We don’t fundamentally believe that the future of television planning, buying and measurement will sit on top of an age/gender definition and on top of a panel-based survey methodology,” Ward says.
He takes a broad view of the term “addressable” and points to other forms of audience targeting, including by geography. “Our addressable strategy is part of an overarching targeting approach that also takes into consideration various lenses. Context, device, geo and ultimately household,” Ward says.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“We’re a one-stop-shop for national addressable scale,” Bologna adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “We package everything together.”
To improve simplicity and reduce complexity, “Our business is, for the most part, identifying a particular segment, dynamically inserting a television commercial to that household via that segment, and then tying that ad exposure back to a sale.”
In describing the addressable marketplace, Bologna depicts a landscape with multiple systems, technologies, data sets and reporting scenarios.
“In the absence of a single platform that ties all of that together, it makes the process laborious, cumbersome, sometimes monotonous and frankly difficult and frustrating.”
To execute addressable TV at scale typically entails “making phone calls to eight, ten different systems,” among them MVPD’s, satellite operators, telecom companies and smart-TV providers.
“You’re applying multiple different data sources, you’re integrating multiple different measurement systems. That’s where the bandwidth comes in and that’s where the complexities come in,” Bologna says.
So even if there’s no question that if executed properly, the return on investment is there with addressable, sometimes that return “from a time perspective might not necessarily be there and that’s what we solve. We have everything already aggregated together.”
The majority of one2one Media’s inventory derives from the local two minutes per hour of cable inventory that is owned and operated by MVPD’s. While some national TV networks also make addressable inventory available—the majority of it VOD—along with some broadcast inventory via smart TV’s, those two sources comprise “less than ten percent of the inventory in the business right now.”
One indication of the value of addressable TV, according to Bologna, is that more than 95% of one2one Media’s advertisers “come back and they usually come back at a higher budget because they see the results.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>These trends will help to change the TV business “more in the next two years than it has in the last fifty,” says Jamie Power, Chief Operating Officer of one2one Media.
In addition to aggregating linear TV inventory, one2one does the same for addressable video supply. “Anyplace we can apply the same data and then get the measurement on the back end we’ll do it,” whether it’s OTT, mobile or desktop, Power adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
Goals vary by advertiser needs—from sales lift, web traffic or foot traffic to physical locations. “We can even tie addressable exposure back to social media chatter.”
Post-campaign analysis indicates return on ad spend. One2one knows by category and advertisers “how much they can pay and we’re able to go back and adjust the pricing,” Power adds. “So you’re able to finally ad some transparency to television and see what works, what doesn’t work.”
Knowing what doesn’t work is valuable feedback “because you’re able to go and make adjustments to future campaigns.”
In the simplest terms, MVPD’s that are able to offer addressable advertising have invested in technology to make their set-top boxes function like digital ad servers.
One2one is “starting to look at matching the smart TV device ID, IP address and ACR technology” to make addressable TV perform more like digital media, which will enable in-flight campaign optimization. Legacy systems cannot do this because “it takes a couple of weeks to populate the set-top boxes and get the right messages to right households,” Power says.
For brands with very broad consumer targets, addressable might not make sense unless, say, those brands want to conquest against competitors. Many advertisers start testing addressable by working with one TV provider then scale up from there.
Power cites the example of an online retailer with which one2one has worked for four years. At the beginning, the retailer’s total targeted households were 700,000 and it achieved a return on ad spend of $300,000. This year, its campaign reached more than seven million households and its return was in excess of $6 million, according to Power.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>As advertisers increasingly seek better audience targeting and efficiency, “The marketplace has kind of come our way,” says the company’s President of Advertising Sales, Jim Tricarico.
Less than five years ago, Cadent was “a DR product,” Tricarico explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan. “It was a way for people to get inexpensive GRP’s. But we knew that in order to evolve, we had to create a network-like solution.”
That solution is used by a host of premium brands, including Amazon, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble.
Tricarico says Cadent can access network inventory for advertisers at a 30% to 50% discount from direct-network buys. “We’re never out there saying we’re better than network, we’re instead of network. We really just want to be a complement to network and solve some of those problems that are going on in the marketplace.”
Cadent has access to inventory on all networks and such major sporting events as the Olympics and NCAA tournaments.
A TV veteran whose background includes stints at MTV Networks, Viacom and Screenvision, Tricarico smiles while noting that some people talk about data as though it never existed before. “Every plan has data behind it. The question now is how deep is that data that they’re using,” he says.
Noting that Cadent eschews “walled gardens,” Tricarico says the company does what data tells it to do.
“Whereas when you go to a network group, they actually optimize to their portfolio because they don’t have access to every network. We buy directly against the data and optimize to the data and not to the portfolio.”
In addition to its own data, Cadent has partnerships with companies like 605, which has access to Charter Communications’ 10 million set-top boxes, and with Adobe and Videology. Cadent can cross-reference advertisers’ data with that of 605, “or we become more of an execution arm where we work with the Adobes and the Videologys of the world to execute on the fact that they’ve already put data over their plans and they use us as the inventory source.”
To broaden its footprint on the local broadcast side, Cadent has spent the past year hiring an internal buying group and now has relationships with more than 600 local TV stations, according to Tricarico.
“People are so desperate to find efficient GRP’s that even in cable there’s not enough reach to find them all. What’s growing so much right now is both news and syndication on the broadcast side.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“We have knowledge and capabilities to essentially put dollars to work over three-, six-, twelve-month campaigns like we do in Upfronts,” the CEO of Cadent and one2one Media adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has.”
At this month’s Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan, the sister companies brought together industry leaders to discuss the state of advanced and addressable TV, along with end-to-end solutions encompassing mobile and over-the-top viewing.
Troiano shares two takeaways from the event: TV’s standing in the media hierarchy and the evolving role of data in driving brand engagement.
“With all that’s happened in the marketplace and the changes over the last couple of years, TV still is a dominant medium for brand advertising and will continue to be so,” he says. “Second, the use and influx of data is forcing evolution and change within our industry. Facebook, Google certainly have some of the best data in the space, but data isn’t what drives brand engagement. TV does.”
While the evolution will take time and will be accompanied by “bumps in the road,” the best way to achieve it is through collaboration by advertisers, programmers and technology/platform companies.
“I think if we keep true to the value of television, what it means for our advertisers and for our clients, and find ways to take advantage of what technology and data offers, we’ve got a bright future,” says Troiano.
Troiano says no one questions the value of addressability and the application of data to bring digital-like capabilities of ROI to TV. “The challenge that the industry has encountered is how do you actually make it easier to simplify that process to execute addressable television across a national footprint.”
In the past year since one2one Media joined Cadent under the Cross MediaWorks umbrella, “we’ve invested tremendously in technology and workflow. It’s exactly what we did with Cadent over the past three to four years where we brought scale and stability and ease and transparency to an unwired base of inventory.”
Asked to look ahead, Troiano thinks data-driven television “will continue to be a much bigger play for next year, a percentage of the media buy for the Upfront. The evolution of addressable will follow the same evolution that I think advanced TV has. Two years ago they dabbled with it. This year it’s going to be a significant part of the upfront, at least the upfront discussion.
“Whereas next year I think there will be a larger percent of the transaction in the Upfront for advanced TV, addressable we expect to be the same thing for next year.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“For us, it goes back to the simplicity of understanding the consumers really well,” says the company’s VP of Brand Marketing, Tim Goldsmid. “As a small advertiser company, we have to do that better than larger companies. We don’t have the scale.”
Smaller brands “need to be very clear about what it is you want to accomplish, and then once you’ve got your media plan together or your plan of attack, you want to make sure you’re measuring and learning,” Goldsmid explains in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
Jack Link’s identifies specific needs and then matches up the appropriate consumer targets with the most appropriate media channels. “We do a lot of measurement and read on the back side and then scale from there. So we have a lot of little tests going on to see how we can connect with consumers and then move it forward from there,” says Goldsmid.
If the chosen medium is TV, Jack Link’s will shoot “multiple amounts of content and then we’ll optimize and get feedback. We have a partner that can tell us which spots or which creative is running, whether it be digital or TV, and then we optimize from there.”
One of the brand’s partners is Cadent “because they bring a solution that allows us to be much more efficient in the marketplace that we couldn’t get if we weren’t working with a partner like them. If we were going straight to networks.”
By working with Cadent, Jack Link’s is able to localize because Cadent buys media on the local level and offers “different solutions and products that allow us to go into different markets.”
Having worked with other small brands, Goldsmid says it’s all about testing, learning and then scaling.
“You need to basically be scrappy and push your agency or partners to find different solutions, like a Cadent, like other partners that are out there,” he says. “Because it’s not a one size fits all solution anymore. There are very different ways that you can put your marketing model together.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”
Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.
“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.
As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.
“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?
“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”
At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.
“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”
OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”
When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”
That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event, the media veteran talks about the three buckets of TV ads—broad distribution, indexing by overlaying data and “served”—along with the risks of not doing addressable well.
The “served” bucket “can be digital, but addressable fits into served, which is we’re sending an ad right to the household or person that we want to receive that message,” says Schwartz. “That area over time is growing and the distribution capabilities are growing.”
Many marketers are very targeted, something has limited their use of traditional television advertising. “They can’t afford it because their target may be one or two percent of the United States,” Schwartz says.
Addressable “allows us to serve those ads to that small population and allows our communications options to grow for those type of ads.”
Another benefit to addressable is that it can facilitate lots of testing, according to Schwartz. “By looking at people, you no longer have to go county-to-county or state-to-state. We can do on-off right next door to each other and make sure that the people are very similar.”
Nonetheless, addressable will likely never constitute 100% of an advertiser’s spending “because you still want to feed the top of the bucket. But when you get to the actual sales and last step, last quarter mile, addressable focused in that manner seems to have a very good return,” Schwartz adds.
He’s still optimistic about the growing penetration of addressable TV, as more MVPD’s warm to it, despite current constraints on the available volume of inventory.
“So I just think that this area is going to continue to grow, and as the economies and capabilities grow and technology is dispersed in the United States, it will have a tremendous upside potential.”
Schwartz cautions that “potential” can be “a very dangerous word.” In the context of addressable TV, one challenge is learning how to use it “in the right manner and make sure that it’s an appropriate use of the vehicle.”
This is because with addressability, “you’re either going to hit the person or not. And if the targeting is off, the person’s not going to get any impressions. That’s why I only think that addressable is going to be a component of the communications platforms used, not the sole.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“Certainly the more partners that join OpenAP the more it allows us to really have that standardization across a greater amount of networks within the portfolio,” Bosetti says in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
When Fox, Viacom and Turner announced OpenAP in March of 2017, Bosetti says Initiative was excited by the opportunity “because one of the challenges that we’ve had with audience buying is the limitations to optimize within different walled gardens versus trying to optimize across the entire cable or broadcast landscape.”
On April 19, NBCU disclosed that it has decided not only to participate in OpenAP but will bring its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation.” the sales chiefs at Fox, Viacom and Turner said in a joint statement.
Bosetti sees advanced audience targeting as a complement to the traditional way of buying primetime shows and daypart mixes, something that isn’t about to change.
“But layering on an audience-based approach allows us to extend that reach across other channels or other platforms that we not be reaching them through those more traditional, fixed-TV buys,” she explains.
OpenAP also offers transparency into buys instead of a “black box” approach to reaching audiences. This gives advertisers increasing confidence to continue investing in advanced TV targeting.
“Clients more and more obviously want to make sure that every dollar that they’re putting their investments into places that are driving the most effectiveness to drive their business,” Bosetti says.
In an interview with Beet.TV one year ago this month, NBCU’s EVP of Business Operations & Strategy, Krishan Bhatia, expressed support for OpenAP while underscoring his company’s efforts to help advertisers target audiences beyond traditional Nielsen demographics.
Bhatia said NBCU was “generally supportive of any efforts that help the TV ecosystem go above and beyond the traditional age/gender based way of measuring and transacting on audiences, including this one,” a reference to OpenAP.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“TV shouldn’t be looking at Facebook or Netflix and saying they’re stealing our revenue,” says Alfieri. “TV should be saying what are Facebook and Netflix and Amazon and Google providing that the customer, the marketer, needs today and how can we also provide that.”
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Alfieri also posits that brand marketers that do not take control of their data and have in-house data science capabilities are going to lose to those that do.
Alfieri is a recent addition to Cross MediaWorks, the network composed of video specialty firm Cadent, full-service agency TCA and one2one Media. He’s returning to the TV side from technology platform company Turn and admits to a particular “bias” for marketing, of which he learned the classic version in pre-digital college.
He cites a gap between people like himself who graduated from college in the early 1990’s and recent grads who possess more data chops and affinity. That gap has posed a problem for many brand marketers that “don’t understand the importance of a data foundation or a technology foundation in their own shop.”
Going forward, marketers that lack control and ownership of their data—along with the in-house capabilities of continually gathering data to comprehend the changing needs of their audiences—will be left behind.
“You’re going to lose to those companies who can. If you’re outsourcing those activities and you don’t have those core competencies internally, you’re ultimately going to fail,” Alfieri says.
He adds that it’s incumbent upon marketers to stay on top of data and technology so that they are in a position to drive change in the industry. They can “put pressure, positively, on the marketplace to be creative and start working together.”
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.
]]>Last spring, one2one Media set out to leverage an integrated set of systems and technology to drive efficiency and yield by automating workflows and providing a unified reporting approach for addressable video. Six months later, President Mike Bologna voices no regrets.
“Our thought process has been spot on. There’s huge demand in the market for what we’re doing and the reception from agencies and advertisers has been fantastic,” Bologna says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
One-to-many could well describe advertisers and agencies “having to communicate and talk to 12 different systems using 40 different pieces of technology and 100 different data partners,” Bologna adds. “We do that all for them.”
Right now, the primary source of addressable video right comes via the two minutes of ad inventory each hour that MVPD’s serve up either through linear or the video-on-demand stream. This represents most of one2one Media’s campaigns, with the other 30 percent extending out on to connected television, tablets and smartphones.
“Because we use the same data sets and the same matching agents, we’re able to create an unduplicated reach and frequency of the ads delivered to those specified segments and then tie it back to sales,” Bologna says.
Advanced TV company Cross MediaWorks launched one2one Media in April of 2017, adding to a portfolio that consisted of creative and media agency TCA and video solutions provider Cadent.
“Over last six months alone we’ve seen an increase in customer billings by over 50 percent. That leads me to believe that the industry is really starting to tie together the value of a one-to-one video spot and the sales attribution associated with it.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>But that’s all changing now, as new technology allows ad-tech platforms to show live data and let clients respond by tweaking campaigns mid-flight.
That’s according to one ad-tech exec whose company helps advertisers use data segmenting to target linear TV ads.
“We’re seeing a lot of companies using data in ways that haven’t been used before,” says Cadent CTO Stephanie Mitchko in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Data has really become actionable. Companies are using it not just to create reports and post-buy analysis to tell clients what happened in the past, but using data in real-time to actually adjust campaigns, use campaigns in ways they haven’t been used before.”
Cadent’s offering takes cable set-top box viewing data and adds in first- or third-party behavioral data to let ad buyers target viewers more precisely.
Mitchko says attribution and measurement transparency is the hot topic for 2017, as ad-tech customers increasingly look to peak behind the curtain at the numbers behind the numbers.
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Troiano shared these and other observations during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016.
“We in this space do a disservice to ourselves when we try to apply digital to television,” says Troiano. “We should define come up with our own definition and terms and not try to retrofit television into digital, because it really does a disservice to everything we’re doing.”
Automation and technology are two elements to “making things easy to buy,” according to Troiano, but there’s also an oft forgotten component.
“There’s a people side to this business,” says Troiano. “We’re unearthing local inventory and aggregating it up for a national buy. There’s education, there’s communication, there’s information.”
And then there is transparency into advertising inventory.
“The problem we have is, if you just put everything into a technology discussion and you co-mingle it with digital, you lose the value of the inventory. You lose the actual discussion,” says Troiano.
“Let’s stop talking about automation ands programmatic and talk about what is value and how do we actually help the industry move forward in terms of transparency,” he adds. “What are people buying? What’s the inventory? What’s the value.”
Lastly, there’s scale, without which Troiano says it’s not worth all the effort. He points to Cadent’s direct-sell approach as a key underpinning of the company’s progress since the TelAmerica days.
Back then, 85% of its advertisers back then were direct response, while about 10% to 15% were brand marketers. Today, it’s about 90% national advertisers and 10% direct response.
“It’s because the team has communicated and educated national television buyers of the value of local inventory aggregated up,” says Troiano. “And that would never have happened if all I did was slap a screen in front of them and said you can actually aggregate this just like you do digital.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
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