If you are Comscore, you take a strategic investment round.
That’s what the measurement giant just did, taking an investment from Charter Communications, Qurate Retail and Cerberus Capital Management, which will jointly take $204 million convertible preferred stock. That money will be used to repay a $204 million debt to Starboard.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Kline, the EVP of Charter Communications and president of its Spectrum Reach division, explains that the deal is about more than just money – it’s about the future of media measurement.
Comscore nears a deal with Charter, Qurate Retail and Cerberus https://t.co/VXFmcWx007 pic.twitter.com/qBmH1OCxob
— CMO Today (@wsjCMO) January 7, 2021
According to the announcement, Charter will provide Comscore with “enhanced access to deidentified and aggregated data sources and rights (to) richer and more granular consumer-level data sets”, whilst Comcast also just extended a deal in which it provides data to Comscore.
“What we were trying to do is to give Comscore the opportunity to really have census-based data in virtually all their markets,” Kline says.
“Between the rights deals that we have with our data and their extension with Comcast in the Comcast markets, Comscore now has probably the most exhaustive set of impressions to help advertisers find their audiences in a more granular way, and to help them do backend analytics on attribution to see who actually saw the ad and who acted on it.
“We’ve got millions of set top boxes and connected devices with our app on it collecting viewership data – whereas in, say, a market like Cleveland, maybe Nielsen has 1500, if that, local people meters.”
Comscore’s announcement describes the deal as “a watershed moment in our history,”, saying it will help it pursue:
In recent years, Comscore itself has been investing to bring forward its media measurement infrastructure for the age of cross-media consumption, including through a merger with TV’s Rentrak.
The additional new challenge is tackling cross-device in a way that also promotes user privacy.
Charter’s Kline thinks the Comscore deal does that in a way that enhances local media buying.
“When you have Charter and you have Comcast, and then you have other data sets that Comscore already had prior to us – I believe it’s Vizio and Dish and AT&T – it means you can be more precise,” he says.
“On a national basis, there’s still a lot of set tops and a lot of apps being aggregated. But the first place, I think, for aggregation is on local. And then they’ll take that local number and they’ll bump that up, meaning Comscore, to a national sample.”
]]>“I think we’ll get to the day where it’s always on, real-time measurement,” says Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer of NCC Media.
Not that long ago, MMM was the sole answer to advertising/marketing attribution, when sales were seen as a function of everything. “Distribution, price, promotion and TV activity. You would get all of the data into one spot,” Ivins says. “You would harmonize it and then you would run regression models against it and that would be a year-long project, and that would cost a lot of money.”
Now activity data—ranging from ad exposure, website visits, point-of-sale transactions and more—are passively gathered at scale. “So it’s not a modeling exercise but a lining up exercise and making sure you can attach ad exposure at a household level to an activity.”
Asked about partners with which NCC works on determining ad attribution, Ivins cites TVSquared among others. “Especially for the DTC space or to advertisers that want to drive people to an online activity, they’re a fantastic partner.”
As for the differences between local versus national advertisers’ goals, Ivins says they are pretty much the same, with the exception of scale. If Ford Motor Co., for example, wants to send out a national brand, it wants to drive awareness, traffic and sales.
“If I’m a local car dealership, I want to drive awareness, I want to drive traffic and drive sales. They’re just doing it at a different level. So it’s a different part of the same campaign, but it’s at different stages of the customer journey.”
NCC Media is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned in partnership by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Because it reaches some 85 million U.S. households, the ongoing election cycle is of particular interest.
“I think there’s going to be a big pot of money that’s going to be spent early next year. I think that will put pressure on inventory as we think about advertisers trying to squeeze themselves into the pressure coming from the political arena,” Ivins says. “Unless the economy falls apart, we should have a good year both the Olympics and the political year.”
On a macro level, he thinks the traditional TV industry recognizes the need to neutralize the competitive advantage that digital media have in data, targeting and measurement.
“NCC Media feels that we need to work together as an industry to make this happen rather than have a walled garden.”
These will among the topics covered on August 7 when Ivins takes to the stage at the Beet Retreat in the City, “We Are Going Local.”
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.
]]>With the addition of Inscape data, 605 can measure more than 20 million households—slightly less than 20% of the TV viewing universe—in a further move away from panel-based research methodology.
“We think that it’s really important for the industry to move to more census-based measurement,” Tatta says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Among the things that Inscape, which is owned by VIZIO, brings to the table for 605 is helping to fill voids across set-top box and over-the-air and OTT metrics. By combining set-top data with Inscape’s automatic content recognition data “we’re able to get better cross-screen measurement on services beyond just pay TV.”
In addition to expanding its national reach, 605 gains faster data processing for its programmer and provider clients. “We basically get data in near real-time” with a delay of “an hour or two” versus “one to three days in general” for set-top box data.
605, started by Dolan Family Ventures, also gets viewing data from Charter Communications cable subscribers, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
Asked about audience duplication from the company’s data sources, Tatta says the duplication “is really essential because what’s interesting about the set-top box data is you’re actually capturing all viewing within the household, or at least what’s running through pay TV.
“Only until you have a full view of viewing in the household can you really get a sense in terms of where the viewing trends are,” for example share of consumption between pay-TV and OTT. “Or even just from one room to the next. Even though TV is bought at the household level kind of rolled up, being able to have a line of sight of viewership across all devices in the household is really important.”
Tatta adds that while advertiser focus on bottom-funnel or sales attribution is “incredibly important,” the industry should not neglect the “enormous contribution” TV makes to upper-funnel metrics, “whether it’s brand awareness, brand favorability and brand preference. Having a more holistic view of lift across the full funnel we think is really essential.”
]]>“That doesn’t mean that all media will be bought programmatically,” Jenckes adds in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018 in which he talks about the collaborative progress being made by NCC Media, in which Comcast is part owner. “Having those tools in our toolset, when you add them to the scale, quality and engagement of television, there’s no better marketing platform on earth.”
The best thing about NCC Media—whose other owners are Charter Communications and Cox Communications—is that “it is a collaboration across multiple players in the marketplace,” says Jenckes, who is President of Advertising at Comcast Cable.
“Historically, it focused on national sales for local media and that’s really good. It took it from something that was different in every market to a consistent way to buy across the U.S. and in doing that it created what is a six-billion-dollar local national market.
“I think ultimately, remnant or unwired networks will also work well at a national level. I think the ability to turn on addressability at the network level so it’s not just the distributors that do it will also likely happen through a vehicle like NCC.”
While infrastructure, programming rights and extracting data continue to pose challenges, there’s been a lot of progress over the past four years, according to Jenckes.
“Technology is now in place that helps unify audiences across screens and devices,” he says. “That was always one of the big benefits of television the unparalleled scale and fragmentation kind of fought against that a little bit.”
Now that marketers have figured out new ways to run campaigns across platforms and devices, “We aggregate the scale that allows people to find audiences.”
Asked about advances in data, Jenckes cites John Wanamaker’s oft-referenced complaint about not knowing which half of is advertising budget was being wasted.
“That’s just sad. It was the reality for a long time and I think TV got away with it because it was so effective as a medium that you could waste half and it was still okay. But I think the waste just needs to be addressed.”
By unlocking data to find household-based audiences across every screen “makes us much more competitive with digital than we ever have before,” Jenckes says. Household addressability is now available in 70% of TV households. “There’s still a lot to do around standardization, but the promise is there.”
Comcast has made big investments in attribution models because if TV can show it’s true impact for marketers, “everybody will see that the truth is on our side.”
We spoke with him earlier this week after his panel at Advertising Week.
]]>In this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Kline talks about bringing scale to addressable linear television and testing a self-serve platform for small advertisers to complement direct-sales efforts at the local level.
Charter this month launched household addressable TV in the Los Angeles market, to be followed by New York “and then rolling out throughout the rest of the country in our footprint over the next, I would say, twelve to eighteen months,” Kline says.
He thinks cable companies are “really, really well positioned to help not only their customers, but I think that same infrastructure that we’re building we’re going to be able to help some of our network affiliates as well.”
Noting that that the traditional linear business “is still several billion dollars for us and we’ve got to make sure that we bring that in and secure that,” Kline discusses the quest for scalable addressability and automated reporting.
“Ultimately, what we want have happen for our customers is they go on a secured website and they can see television, they can see online, they can see on demand, they can see on our IP streaming services how many impressions they got on each platform.
“That sounds lovely and it sounds easy, but it takes an awful lot of the organization’s attention and time to start to start to build those systems,” Kline says in response to interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, who is a Beet.TV contributor and CEO of Furious Corp.
Asked by Swartz to look out a few years, Kline says “we’re going to be selling impressions, we’re going to be selling them highly targeted, highly data infused. I think you’ll see not only us but other MVPD’s doing similar things to make advertising much more front and center than it is today as a revenue stream for their companies.”
While agencies are big users of cable interconnects for their clients, many local businesses have direct client relationships with Charter, “which is still for many of us billions of dollars worth of revenue.”
He mentions a test being done in Raleigh, NC, involving a self-provisioning platform “for very small customers that can go on, pick the schedule they want, pick the creative that they want and put in their credit card and be right on our air.
“Five years ago I would have said never. But with Facebook and Google and all these other self-provisioning platforms, small advertisers are used to this. And we think we can quadruple the number of customers we have at any given time.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018, Klippel scopes out the company’s growing cross-screen audience targeting and campaign attribution capabilities and talks about its collaboration with TV data specialty firm 605 in developing the new AudienceApp product.
Klippel believes there’s a misconception that only addressable TV campaigns can generate detailed data on linear-viewing audiences along with ad exposure data. Whether it’s a traditional spot schedule, an audience-optimized schedule for an actual addressable campaign, “We’re able to pull back the same level of audience, ad exposure and impression data to run detailed reach/frequency analysis, ROI and lift and attribution studies to get a comprehensive view of how a cross-platform campaign has performed,” Klippel explains.
Addressable linear TV is the latest complement to Spectrum Reach offerings spanning set-top box video-on-demand and other digital products. Buyers can buy linear schedules the way they’ve always done and deliver unique creative to different households.
“We’ll also be launching the ability to sell different audiences to different advertisers within the same break and deliver only the specific households that a particular brand is trying to reach,” Klippel adds.
Surveying the addressable linear landscape, which has been constrained by the walled operations of multiple operators and content owners, he likens addressable to the advent of interconnects that have helped to make buying local cable inventory easier.
“We’re going to start seeing a lot more collaboration and a cohesive approach around addressable TV, not only among operators like in the case of interconnects but even across operators and national programmers,” Klippel says.
The past 18 months have seen the melding of three companies—Time Warner Cable Media, Bright House Media Strategies and Spectrum Reach, which is the advertising sales division of Charter Communications—while unifying their product portfolios. While all of that was occurring, Spectrum Reach “managed to build and start deploying an audience-based platform that’s fundamentally changing the way we’re selling television,” Klippel says.
That platform is called AudienceApp and it was first activated in Austin, TX. With AudienceApp, buyers can can look at audiences and other key audience attributes to identify and target messages on TV in specific markets based on virtual, real-time access to household viewing data.
“One of the major reasons we were able to have the focus and deliver that in such a quick turnaround was our partnership with 605, who helped us develop the platform and has a management team of executives that are familiar with and have worked with set-top box data and linear optimization,” says Klippel.
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.
]]>“We’re happy to say that it’s a thriving business,” says Chris Pizzurro, Canoe’s head of business development, sales and marketing.
Thriving to the tune of having served more than 100 billion ads through its platform, Pizzurro explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
Canoe was originally formed by Bright House Networks, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable. Its daunting mission was to deliver interactive ads to households but, among other challenges, there were too many technological hurdles in dealing with cable and satellite operators.
When it pivoted to dynamic ad insertion, the emphasis was on casting a big footprint. “Since this is TV you need to have scale to matter,” says Pizzurro. Canoe now serves ads in video-on-demand programming to 36 million homes across Charter, Comcast and Cox. More than 100 TV networks make their inventory available through Canoe.
“We run an average of 4,000 campaigns through the platform for all those networks on any given month,” Pizzurro adds.
Canoe’s 2017 Q3 Insights Report shows 5.7 million ad impressions served in the third quarter, with the overwhelming majority of them mid-roll. Saturday and Sunday were the busiest days, followed by Monday and Friday. There were a total of 3,208 campaigns, 24% of them network tune-in ads. Overall, VOD ad impressions were up 49%, as Fierce Cable reports.
Beyond scale, Canoe started out touting its solution as “a trustworthy, transparent place to move dollars.” It was clear about the impressions it guaranteed delivery of and “that went a long way in the marketplace.”
As with other aspects of the advanced TV landscape, the delivery of impressions is increasingly accompanied by advertisers wanting to link those impressions to business outcomes. This has produced studies on brand lift, recall and other KPI’s that have helped to increase overall campaign volume.
Whereas an agency might have started by having one of its clients using Canoe, “Now we have seven or eight of their clients that are running through the platform. So it’s showing returns for everyone,” says Pizzzuro.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>So it was when Charter scooped up Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) just over a year ago. Since then, renegotiation of comScore’s agreement with Charter brought comScore from 22 million measured households to more than 35 million, according to Jeff Boehme, SVP, Television Research at comScore.
The bottom line: comScore ended up with about 75 million reportable television sets in use, giving the company greater insight into tuning behavior, Boehme explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“The importance is not just the tuning data. It’s the ability to match that tuning data with relevant audience consumer datasets so that not only can we track tuning we can track tuning we can track advertising and we can track consumption,” Boehme says.
Between its own data warehousing and relationships with companies like Experian, comScore can identify programs with high propensity of certain advertiser audience segments and match it to advertising campaigns in those programs.
“Now we can provide much more detail on the accountability of advertising, both in television as well as digital,” Boehme says.
comScore also has been on the ground floor of addressable TV advertising, given its own roots as well as those of Rentrak, with which it merged in early 2016. Early addressable players like DIRECTV and DISH relied on comScore and Rentrak to provide measurement capabilities.
One casualty of advanced audience measurement and correlation with consumer purchasers is waste, which has been a given throughout the history of TV advertising.
“Television now becomes more accountable because now what they can do is plan more effectively and deliver their segments with higher efficiencies,” Boehme says. “So no longer do we have waste factors that are standard among media buys.”
For programmers, the gains are mainly in the ability to better manage their portfolios “so the programmer understands what audiences now identified as consumers they need to attract and how.”
We interviewed Boehme at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.
]]>Panel moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., cites the lipstick and pig idiom as she asks Adobe Primetime’s Sr. Business Development Manager, Art Mimnaugh, about his customer’s cross-platform pain points.
“It’s hard,” says Mimnaugh. “You’re not going to have some of the standardized metrics across there” but programmers and operators are gaining more insights into their actual audiences.
“We keep getting into this chicken and the egg,” Mimnaugh adds. “As much as we want to transact on audiences in certain ways, if we don’t have the back end measurement in certain parts of it then people will say, ‘no I’m not really interested.’”
What it comes down to is the proper value exchange. “That value exchange looks different depending on the lens you’re coming from,” says Mimnaugh.
“I think you’ve got to take risk,” says Kevin Patrick Smith, SVP of Comcast Media 360. “Risk comes with key advertisers and their agencies going out of the box working with us on new media, new measurement, new integrating and realizing that it’s not perfect. But we’ve got to push the envelope and go out of traditional measurement and try new things.”
Asked by Swartz to describe the role of Google in the future of television, the digital giant’s Jennifer Koester says it’s an open platform devoted to data activation for advertisers via seamless direct and programmatic buys.
“Everybody is looking for this unified system that pulls in legacy and over the top and digital and lets you plan against that and optimize against that,” says Koester, Google’s Director of Telco & Video Distribution. “People just have to open their minds to new platforms and new platform partners to think about solving this.”
Rob Klippel says Charter Communications is focused on being able to consistently pull audience measurement data across its footprint and have a “common, consistent view” of its customers.
“I know that might seem mundane, but for us we’ve got three different versions of that all on separate physical networks right now,” says Klippel, who is SVP of Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy. “So trying to pull that all together right now is a pretty big task.”
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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