“The reason the panel remains critical is because we need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The combination of using the panel data with the larger data set allows us to inform person-level assignment – and with that, the ability to view co-viewing as well.”
Digital video ad exposure is important for some of the more advanced campaign-related metrics, he said. Those measurements include how often viewers saw an ad, if at all, or were overexposed to it.
The information offers “the ability to understand reach and frequency, not from a traditional perspective where we had an estimated reach and a related calculated average frequency, but instead to actually understand what I would call the deterministic reach and frequency distribution curve,” he said.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the cross-screen measurement track presented by Nielsen:
1. Unified measurement for multiple screens
Marketers face bigger challenges in measuring media consumption among different viewing devices, including mobile phones and smart TVs, to get a more unified view of consumers. The goal is to marry bottom-up measurement that’s common among digital advertisers with top-down modeling, said Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
2. Consumer panel provides more in-depth insights
Brands have access to troves of data about how their ads were delivered, but measuring their effectiveness on consumers takes another level of research. TV ratings company Nielsen has multiple data sources that complement its consumer panels, which are comprised of representative samples of the broader population.
“The beauty of the panel is it allows us to have a representative sample of measuring total consumption within a home,” said Kimberly Gilberti, senior vice president of product management at Nielsen. “For things that can’t be measured by the data sets that we have, we can fill in those blanks.”
Claudio Marcus, vice president of strategy at Comcast Advertising, agrees that panel information is critical for in-depth insights.
“The reason the panel remains critical is that you need the means to calibrate for national representativeness as well as for calibration against key demographic variables,” he said.
3. Measurement includes outcomes
“In addition to measuring delivery, we need to measure the impact. That can be complicated, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it or that we shouldn’t try to evolve that measurement,” said Nancy Beekman, group director of data sciences at Wavemaker.
Measuring impact includes an analysis of how different media touchpoints help brands to achieve their objectives in terms of sales, awareness and brand consideration.
“It has a lot more to do with understanding the level of engagement and attention that a viewer has with content,” said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence. “We’re at the early stages of developing measurement solutions that really help us understand that into the media model.”
There’s room for experimentation in achieving results as measurement will never achieve a “perfect” level of insights, said Vinny Rinaldi, head of investment and activation at Wavemaker, GroupM
“We won’t have perfect, but we have to come at this from the lens of what is the best option for this campaign,” he said.
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>
Taken together and coming off the back of consumer privacy policy changes, it represents the biggest threat to the accepted norms of digital ad targeting in years.
But the demise of these identifiers is prompting new interest in “first-party” data, that which marketers and publishers obtain from consumers with permission.
More accountability
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comcast Advertising’s Claudio Marcus says the new focus on first-party is giving marketers super-powers.
“Audience segmentation is starting to shift from this reliance on third-party data to using first party data to develop both customer and prospect segments that can be used to build more direct relationships between brands and consumers,” Marcus says.
“First-party data is in some ways more accountable in that it more directly ties the marketing investments to measurement, and then you can track changes in consumer behaviour and also the related impact on business performance or KPIs.”
More measurable
Gaining data on real, consented users makes measuring far more accurate, Marcus thinks.
“Large retailers such as Target and Walmart and Kroger have begun to use their data to enable new types of shopper beta programmes that make their marketing efforts of some of their supply chain partners – mainly the consumer packaged goods companies – more precise and more measurable,” he says.
“They are able to generate insights using that data to support data-driven planning, better-informed campaign targeting, and even things like closed-loop attribution that lets them then measure the campaign performance.
“And that’s applicable not just to digital, but also to traditional linear TV, as well as addressable TV, and then of course their own marketing channels, whether those are digital or physical.”
More choice
Marcus says that larger marketers are going to have “a lot more power” and freedom to combine and enrich respective datasets with partners.
“Smaller advertisers, SMBs, are more likely to be at the mercy of large digital companies like Google and Facebook, but larger marketers are going to have a choice,” he says.
“They can opt to develop their own first-party-driven initiatives and then be able to work with a broader set of partners, which could include other major publishers who may also have their own first-party data or large retailers that have first-party data.
“(Then they can) combine their efforts to be able to work across a variety of traditional and digital marketing channels.”
More familiar
Marcus says the industry is evolving to use first-party data to better measure not only connected TV but linear TV, too.
That is transforming addressability, and helping ad buyers come to connected TV, where they see a familiar medium.
“Traditional marketers like that connected TVs is more akin to a normal TV viewing experience,” Marcus says.
“TV buyers that are willing to pay a premium to reach those folks that are becoming harder to reach via traditional TV.
“Where we’re going is essentially using data to better understand across linear, traditional TV, and both addressable and connected TVs ‘Who am I reaching and whether that reaches incremental or whether I’m just building more frequency’.”
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
]]>That is according to Comcast’s strategy VP Claudio Marcus.
In the marketing world, software is increasingly allowing consumers to tailor the kinds of content they want – and allowing marketers to build personal profiles of audiences they want to target.
But, in this video interview with TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel, Comcast’s Marcus says that value exchange needs to be recalibrated.
Post-pandemic personalization
“I think we are going to see some acceleration (of personalization) due to the changes in conditions and a greater understanding of the role that data plays,” Marcus says.
“One of the ways that we can support that acceleration is to remove … some of the concerns that people have about abuses of data, privacy and security of data.
“(We should be) adopting standards as an industry or even agreeing to some degree of regulation.
“We can put our best foot forward and start to recognize the things that get in our way of actually having a more fruitful value exchange for both consumers and marketers.”
New insights from @FreeWheel on premium video viewing trends:
80% are spending more time with video since physical distancing began
See @bcbeat for more: https://t.co/HPRz8IVKzI pic.twitter.com/qOrXi5NPfN
— FreeWheel, A Comcast Company (@FreeWheel) April 28, 2020
Value exchange
Modern advertising capabilities allow marketers to target individuals by a plethora of data points, even down to their shopping activities as reported by their credit card provider.
In return, they can receive more relevant content and more relevant ad messaging.
Marcus says: “If we have a common understanding of what ads you’ve been exposed to, we can then limit the number of times that you’re exposed to a particular ad.
“That’s a good value exchange for the marketer in sense of not delivering too much frequency of ad exposure. And it’s a very good value for the consumer that doesn’t want to be overexposed to the same ad over and over.”
The quest for control
Consumer sentiment makes the importance of that relationship clear to advertisers. Harvard Business Review recently reported:
“A 2019 survey conducted by Cisco of 2,601 adults worldwide examined the actions, not just attitudes, of consumers with respect to their data privacy. The survey reveals an important new group of people — 32% of respondents — who said they care about privacy, are willing to act, and have done so by switching companies or providers over data or data-sharing policies. We call this group privacy actives and, to our best knowledge, this is the first time such a group has been identified.”
But, whilst this active group is relatively comfortable with the trade-off of privacy against value, those who are less active are less comfortable.
In other words, for that relationship to be put on an equal footing, more consumers need to be given more levers of control.
Go high-value
Regulation has already begun to do that, with marketers in many markets now required to obtain explicit opt-in for use of consumer data.
But Comcast’s Marcus thinks something else needs a reboot.
“We need to be respectful and have people understand also that when we talk about personalization,” he says. “Even though the benefit to the consumer is a more personalised experience, from a data perspective, what we’re doing is aggregating data sets to understand groups of people that share some common interests.
“That’s kind of lost in the way we execute things today. We need to establish that value exchange where people understand.”
“(We should) get rid of ads that follow you around, or that you’re exposed to over and over. Just a few very core, very high-value applications for consumers could help us illustrate the case that we do take these things into account and that we’re trying to focus on creating more value by delivering more relevant content, more relevant products, without being annoying about it.”
]]>In a deal announced today, Discovery Inc, which already was a FreeWheel customer, says it will now take on FreeWheel’s “unified decisioning platform to enable holistic advertising management for Discovery’s full roster of cable networks”.
Discovery wants advertisers to be able to reach viewers across:
- Discovery Go, its own-brand player.
- Discovery’s channels through cable or satellite providers’ own apps.
- Traditional linear broadcasts
- Other VOD.
“Measurement of addressable (TV) had been limited to the addressable campaigns (alone),” FreeWheel’s data platform GM Claudio Marcus, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“What’s new here is the ability to combine the addressable exposures with the linear exposures, perhaps with digital video exposures.
“Let’s say that we already knew that a household that was in our target had already been reached enough times with linear – well, then I wouldn’t necessarily want to target them with an addressable expression, because the CPM on an addressable impression is much higher.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>That’s a person-level frontier that FreeWheel plans to tackle, according to Claudio Marcus, the GM of the company’s Data Platform. In this interview with Beet.TV, Marcus recaps FreeWheel’s progress on TV advertising planning and attribution, calling measurement “a huge challenge.”
On the attribution side, FreeWheel took on the role of TV advocate in 2016 when it conducted research “just to understand the impact that TV advertising has on different types of clients’ business.” There followed secondary research in which FreeWheel hired a firm to find any study that touted cross-channel or multi-touch attribution.
“The more interesting part was actually the secondary research,” Marcus notes. That’s because out of some 164 studies, “only twelve actually included TV. So here is TV, the biggest communication channel in the world and it basically wasn’t getting its due credit when it came to cross-channel attribution.”
Since then, FreeWheel has provided to “qualified attribution firms” household-level ad exposure data, free of charge, “so that they could include that in their cross-channel studies and their ability to measure television more effectively. That’s been a big success.”
FreeWheel has also been working with the programmer members of the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP to understand de-duplicated reach across those members. “Because as things get more and more fragmented, advertisers want to be in those new places where there are audiences, whether it’s different channels or different platforms. But they also want to make sure that they’re not hitting the same people that they were hitting by going in traditional linear TV.”
Earlier this year, FreeWheel licensed VIZIO smart-TV data from Inscape and built a nationally representative model “which is really a co-mingled data set between the Comcast set-top box data and the smart-TV data.” Among other things, the data helps programmers that sell on national basis. “They want something that’s more nationally representative. They want to be able to forecast national impressions. They want to be able to measure on a national basis,” Marcus says.
There are disparities in data gathered from boxes and smart TV’s. Within Comcast Cable’s footprint, there’s an average of about 2.6 cable boxes compared to about 1.1 devices in homes with smart TV’s. “What that means is that there’s some viewing that you’re missing.”
Meanwhile, smart TV’s have their advantages over boxes. “It has lower latency, it covers OTT as long as it’s content that has been previously fingerprinted on linear,” Marcus says.
As IP-delivered content proliferates, so do devices that receive the content. Problem is, not all of the devices that connect to WiFi “are associated with people in a specific home” because some belong to visitors.
“As we think about moving TV measurement from a household level to an individual level, it helps us to understand who’s home and who’s not. So that we can start to get better models when it comes to what’s called viewer attribution.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Much of the in-depth studies that FreeWheel has done to on the impact of creative have centered on program promotions, Marcus explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. This is because there’s more variance in the absence of having to deal with issues like talent rights.
“So you have a lot more versions that tie to the different episodes and you can see the impact over time,” says Marcus, who is GM of FreeWheel’s Data Platform. “When you look at the impact of creative from that perspective, you get insights that are almost impossible to gain by just looking at the creative.”
Even an art director or a producer looking at the two pieces of promotion might say “these look solid. But when you do the attribution, which is really an aggregated analysis based on millions of homes, you can discern the fact that one of the promos actually had an outsized impact.
“It might have been because it didn’t wear out as much or because it had an emotional connection that the other one didn’t,” Marcus adds. “To the untrained and certainly even to the trained eye, you might not have been able to understand that by just looking at the creative.”
A lot of attribution today doesn’t even take into account the difference in creative, partly because so many campaigns rely on a single creative iteration. “So the attribution solutions have not focused too much on having different creative, and even when you have different creative, there’s another layer to this, which is it’s not just which creative wins.”
It may be that different creatives are better suited for different types of audiences. So with a program promotion for a romantic comedy, the more romantic version of the promo may work better with women while the more comedic part may work better with men.
FreeWheel began its research with linear television attribution “because we thought that was the biggest gap. Billions and billions of impressions on linear TV that were not being properly credited for their impact in terms of effectiveness and their contribution to the marketing performance,” Marcus explains. The company is now expanding that to include both linear and cross-platform addressable TV.
Because creative may have a different impact with different segments, sub-segments or context, “the digital side, the addressable side, allows you more flexibility in being able to act on those insights than the linear side. At the end of the day, even if I have a romantic comedy, no matter where I place it I’m not going to be getting a one hundred percent romance focus or a one hundred percent comedic focus. But when I’m in an addressable context, I can have the right creative with the right context targeting the right segment or sub segment,” says Marcus.
]]>Could voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home be the next big technology to light up the data-collection opportunity?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comcast’s FreeWheel data platform GM Claudio Marcus discusses four categories of data-collection opportunity – and says the best approach is blending multiple of them to overcome individual weaknesses.
- Smart TV
- Set-top box
- Automated content recognition
- Voice assistant recognition
“Smart TV data makes it possible to understand OTT viewing of TV content that has already been fingerprinted,” Marcus says.
“We see some of these other data sets as complementary, but not really substitutes, and that’s because they bring different attributes to the table.
“Automated content recognition, primarily audio-based, (is) basically devices that listen for what’s in the background. (But) those devices are very dependent on the quality of the audio conditions.
“The newest entrants are some of the voice recognition applications for the home, like Google Home, for example, right? What we know is, because the X1 set-top box for Comcast has audio-based controls, we know that, in our Comcast subscriber homes, about 15% of all the commands are via voice. The rest are still via the traditional remote.
“If you’re relying 100% on voice-command data, you’re going to be missing out a lot of the viewing data. You may be able to pick up … what other types of programs people are so engaged with that they actually call them out by name. But, at the same time, you’re not capturing the full breadth of the viewing data.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>