Caroline Horner says she is used to hearing openness from people in the internet industry, who will say ”
“I’m going to put the data out there because it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to evolve the place”, “What if we try this?” and “Can we do this?”
The SVP of products for ad-tech firm 605 understands the reluctance.
But she thinks computing power – plus a little cajoling – can help ad buyers to see the benefits.
“We listen really hard on what the issues people have with their data,” she says. “What they’re willing to do and what they’re not willing to do. Then you go with what they’re willing to do, and you start there.
“Things like AWS (Amazon Web Services), a lot of the ability to use computing power at this point … whereas we had a lot of technology and advancements through the years, we only had certain data structures and sizes and the servers could only handle so much.
“Now, we can get to an existence where everything can be calculated on the fly. That means all these data sources can relate to each other very quickly and have all those permissions. ”
The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>But what about advertisers who want to do the same across the whole TV and video landscape?
That need has become priority #1 in the new TV industry, as a raft of new initiatives and consortia launch to harmonize, pool and smooth the path to unified audience data and broader footprint scale.
in this video interview with Beet.TV, Caroline Horner, SVP of product management at 605, a technology company helping advertisers use data to better target TV ads, explains the blocker and the opportunity.
“Each MVPD doesn’t have a full look on a consumer,” she says. “Each digital (publisher) doesn’t have a full look at what all the television assets that people view. So it’s really important for folks to contribute all of their data together to form these partnerships.”
Horner says two concerns have held broadcast and video platforms back from pooling audience data:
But Horner says: “There are now many different ways of solving for privacy and for obfuscating any contribution from a single data source when you have a collaboration.
“This idea of grabbing on the data, holding onto it and not putting it into the pot to improve television advertising is sort of antiquated at this point. You might as well make money from it. When everything’s together, then you can understand how your data will not be seen and worked against you.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from
“What we’re doing at 605 is creating an environment so the various constituents can actually define the permissions that are being associated with their data,” Horner adds.
“Contribute your data, but you still decide on how it’s used, you decide on the level of obfuscation, you decide on how it collaborate, how it is commingled with other datasets.”
Horner was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>At the Beet Retreat in New York City in November, hosted by Horizon Media, Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz spoke to a panel of women currently navigating advertising’s continuing changes: Kim Norris, gvp of digital and advanced advertising sales at Spectrum Reach; Caroline Horner, svp of product management at 605; and Samantha Rose, svp of video at Horizon Media all discussed how data has changed the advertising industry, the challenges it’s raised, and what’s still to come.
“We’ll see evolution across all verticals”
Norris says that right now, “demand outstrips supply” when it comes to advanced advertising, but that the marketplace is catching up through experimentation and learning. As first-party data for tune-in viewership data has changed how tune-in marketing operates, “we’ll see evolution across all the verticals,” Norris says.
Horner, who saw through early digital advertising models during the dot com boom before moving on to positions on both sides of the market. Most significantly so far, Horner says, data and attribution marketing has changed the role of the marketer.
“It was incredible to see how fast real, deterministic data affected the marketer. We had to re-up relationships and sales processes because they saw real data,” says Horner. “That delight and experience – you know you’ve made a difference and that’s what data has done. We’ve been riding that over the last 15 years.”
Growing pains
While data has infiltrated advertising strategies, Horner’s observed that the sell side has been slower to adapt to new capabilities and approaches influenced by data. While marketers on the buy side quickly realized how data was making advertising work better for them – and how the money would follow – Horner says the sell side had to be “dragged into it,” but are now used to “heavier and heavier analytics.”
But when the agency’s jobs depend on convincing networks, platforms and marketers that the data will help, the stakes are high, says Rose. “What we don’t want to do is have something not work and then deter someone from moving forward. In this more addressable [market], whether it’s MVPD or digital, a wasted impression is wasted. In this area where we’re growing we want to get it right.”
Data-specializing partners, like Ampersand and 605, can help add a support network with the goal of getting advertising from operating like one-to-many fishnet to a one-to-one fishing line, says Swartz.
Where it’s headed
Rose adds that while one-to-one remains a goal to reach, addressable is still in its infancy, and some brands are looking for the mass reach that linear TV provides. “I hate to say it cause it’s a term we always use, but it’s not one size fits all,” she says.
As the space does mature, Horner notes that trust is going to be one of the most important factors when it comes to data sharing and making sure customers aren’t concerned about privacy. That will entail working with the right partners and legitimizing the industry and, as Norris adds, setting standards.
“We have to get standards,” she says. “We need to make sure we have clear definitions, that it’s as standard as possible.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the woman who runs product at a leading TV targeting data technology vendor says, after a long while on the hob, addressable TV is now ready to boil.
Caroline Horner, 605 product management SVP, says there has been an “Arc” of new data that have become available for use in TV ad targeting, data that was previously closed off.
“We’ve seen with the introduction of the Inscape data, more people have been able to get a hold of it and work with it,” Horner says. “It’s created such excitement about looking at what people are exposed to. The industry has been furiously running after all these new insights, back to one-to-one marketing, for television.
“Addressable (TV) … started off very slowly because each MVPD did their system one at a time and the marketers couldn’t really buy national for addressability, and there was such a small amount of inventory that was available for targeting. Fast forward to what’s happening right now … you have the data that can support it and now you have the systems that are collaborating and providing a national footprint for addressable campaigns.”
Horner was speaking ahead of Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media, an industry discussion event in New York on Wednesday.
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from:
Horner calls the new ability of precise viewer data to target TV ads “deterministic TV”.
“Deterministic is really about the absolute knowledge that a household is watching something, that the TV was on at that household at that time and the behaviors that are associated with that household,” she says.
“Deterministic TV data … can add in all that rich Experian data, all the transactions, psychographics, and to look exactly at how they watch, consume television and how they’re impacted by it.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“The streaming wars are literally raging right now. I believe that the next area for innovation is around the data and measurement that is surrounding television.”
In addition to Levine, 605 simultaneously hired Caroline Horner as SVP of Product Management. She previously led TV and cross-platform product innovation for Rentrak-comScore’s advanced measurement and optimization services and spearheaded new video product launches for comScore, according to a news release.
Levine says he was initially attracted to 605 because of its access to linear TV household viewing data, data rights and matching capabilities. “What I found upon deeper investigation was that there’s a very powerful set of technology infrastructure and process that 605 has put in place to support a multi currency future,” Levine explains.
Founded in 2016, 605 has mainly focused on working with brands and MVPD’s. “This year, we’re really expanding our focus into programmers and we also do work with agencies.”
While attribution is a “very significant focus,” but we’re not just looking at what was the immediate sales lift, what happened in the next seven days after someone saw an ad. We’re looking at full-funnel activity,” Levine says.
Such insights are the result of “looking at a large percentage of the U.S. population” instead of just focusing on 40,000 households “or having to take data and essentially match against a few million households and then model it out for the rest of the U.S. population. We’re entering an era where we can actually see for twenty or thirty percent of the U.S. population second by second what are they actually watching.”
He calls what 605 is doing as moving the industry beyond single-source viewing to what it calls multi-source. That means “taking the best of all the viewing datasets that happen to be available” from MVPD set-top boxes and comingling it with smart TV ACR data.
“We’re continuing that quest of building out a larger footprint of more MVPD data as well as additional ACR data so that we can see everything that’s playing back on the TV glass as well as throughout the home as there are multiple TV sets within the home.”
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