Pooja is a veteran of senior advanced TV roles at Viacom, Disney and as CEO of trueX until earlier this year.

For all of us, it’s been a challenging time during the pandemic: For Pooja it has been an especially  tumultuous year that included the sale of TrueX, a pregnancy, the birth of a second child, and joining Comcast in a senior role.

In this session, she speaks about her experiences as a woman of color. She shares her hopes for a more inclusive, bias-free workplace. She reflects on her own journey and tells what she is doing to help others.

Commenting on the current state of advanced TV, she talks about the importance of interoperability of viewer identity and the work that’s being done by Blockgraph and others.

And she shares her vision for FreeWheel and Effectv, both units of Comcast Advertising.

Thanks Pooja for a great conversation.  And congratulations on the new job!

Thanks to the BeetCast sponsor Mediaocean.

And thank you for listening.

Hope you enjoy the episode.

The deal sees FreeWheel become the technology enabler for Fox channels including its AVOD service Tubi to display addressable ads to viewers of Xfinity X1, Xfinity Fles and Cox Contour boxes.

In a release, the pair call it “an industry first for a television company”. The Trade Desk is the first demand-side platform (DSP) integrated to support the buying.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Larry Allen, VP and GM of addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising, explains why it is important.

Streamlined sales

“We’ve basically enabled that inventory for Fox so that they can now go and work with their marketers to transact on a DSP and buy addressable video on demand inventory at scale,” Allen says.

“Video on demand inventory has been really kind of in the middle, between linear TV and digital.

“And so, for a programmer like Fox, they’re now able to take a high-value asset, very high-quality inventory, and now package that with audience addressability and make that available for sale to their marketers.

“I think this now enables the programmer to streamline their sales activity, meet the buyers where they want to transact, and be confident in the inventory that they’re selling so that they’re able to either eliminate waste or increase yield, or deliver value for a marketer, leveraging an audience that is either elusive or hard to reach, or they want to scale up.”

Growth opportunity

EMarketer forecasts US connected TV programmatic display ad spending will reach $6.93 billion in 2021.

Programmatic trading of CTV ads is expected to make up 61% of the total, which is a significant 52.9% up from the year earlier.

The connected segment has seen tremendous growth over the last year, as new ad-supported service and new viewer demand have coalesced, presenting an opportunity for new ad spending.

In connected TV, achieving scale has long been considered a sticking point, thanks initially to insufficient inventory and also to a fragmented range of buying channels.

But, bit by bit, the industry is working through each of these problems.

“Our roots are very much in local advertising,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “That said, we are not a local advertising sales business anymore. We are an audience delivery company.”

Rooke shared his thoughts in this first episode of two conversations with Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of video advertising trade group VAB. Beet.TV and VAB co-produced the video series.

‘Sports Audience Didn’t Go Anywhere’

The company has a vast trove of viewing data gleaned from set-top boxes that can be harnessed for audience-based targeting, instead of media buys based on TV networks and dayparts. The data have provided numerous insights, including how the temporary suspension of live sports during the coronavirus pandemic have triggered a shift in viewing habits.

“The sports audience didn’t go anywhere. They didn’t stop watching TV,” Rooke said. “Their viewership has moved elsewhere, in particular to places like news.”

That audience likely is to return as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League resume play — with TV offering the only venue to see games held in empty stadiums. The National Football League next month starts its regular season, which will be significant for linear TV viewership.

Strategies for Brands

With advertisers seeking ways to reach audiences more efficiently, audience-based targeting can help to expand the reach of campaigns and improve return on investment (ROI), Effectv’s Rooke said. The company recently analyzed more than 100,000 campaigns and 30 million commercial airings to find that campaigns airing on more networks had double the reach than on 10 or fewer networks, regardless of spending level.

The health crisis has had a significant short-term effect on media spending, including an expected 18% decline in U.S. TV advertising excluding political campaigns this year, as forecast by GroupM, the media-buying unit of WPP.  The firm expects a rebound of 5.9% in TV advertising next year as the economy continues to recover.

Comcast also has worked to develop content to connect advertisers with consumers at the local and national levels. As one example, the company developed a “Hometown Hub” on its Xfinity X1 platform to help viewers find local businesses, including ones that were opening as pandemic lockdowns were lifted.

At the national level, it created a virtual showroom for automotive brands seeking to reach homebound consumers, Rooke said.

He foresees the continuation of several shifts that will change how advertisers reach audiences on a broader variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets and TVs. Advertisers will measure reach based on impressions rather than gross ratings points, and will seek to measure how their campaigns affect business outcomes like sales.

“None of those things are groundbreaking insights, I know that,” Rooke said. “What I think is interesting is that the mindset shifts that have taken place in the last five months” of the pandemic.

It’s part of the changes taking place in the local cable TV marketplace during the pandemic, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV

This week, Effectv launched virtual auto showroom featuring 12 brands.  Not an e-commerce portal for dealers, it is a showcase for the OEM’s.

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

32% are watching “a couple hours more per week”

22% watching 1-2 hours per day more

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.”

NBCUniversal, also owned by Comcast, and The Trade Desk, a large demand-side buying platform, have both signed up to use FreeWheel’s new unified decisioning.

In a statement from NBCUniversal: “We enable marketers to reach key audiences across all screens with one simple solution powered by our One Platform offering,” said Krishan Bhatia, Executive Vice President, Business Operations & Strategy, NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships. “By incorporating FreeWheel’s unified decisioning into One Platform, we’re now able to combine direct sold and programmatic capabilities into one, making it even easier for clients to access all of our premium video inventory in whatever way works best for their business while allowing us to continue to improve the consumer experience. Since first incorporating this FreeWheel capability into our platform, we’ve seen 170% growth in programmatic video revenue, and we believe there is significantly more growth to come.”

The solution has been in pilot since April 2019 with A+E.

For an overview of the product and its roadmap, we spoke with Geoff Wolinetz, Head of Sell-Side Revenue at FreeWheel.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, James Rothwell, VP of global agency, brand and industry relations at Comcast Advertising, says the industry needs a universal ad ID to make ad transaction workflows more efficient, deduplicate ad creative storage, address ad quality issues and improve campaign delivery.

“Fragmentation has created huge obstacles and workflow challenges because now we have to serve these ads into 200 different endpoints,” Rothwell says.

“There’s a huge opportunity for the industry to align their incentives and get behind this initiative to use a persistent identifier throughout the entire value chain to manage creatives in this world of fragmentation.

“Ad-ID … enables a brand or an agency to be able to manage that campaign through all of those different endpoints.”

The Ad-ID system, begun in 2003, is jointly owned by the ANA and the 4As.

Rothwell, who also leads the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video at Comcast-owned ad-tech platform FreeWheel, says the technology can benefit two sides:

• Brands – “they’re able to understand the way in which their creatives are performing through all those different endpoints and can optimise their campaigns.”
• Publishers – “they can actually manage restrictions and collisions around industry categories and competitive advertisers, which creates obviously a much better advertising experience.”

Rothwell is concerned that Ad-ID has had too little traction. His Council conducted a survey of 250 brands and agencies which found only 16% using some form of universal Ad-ID.

“The good news is 3,000 brands already signed up with Ad-ID,” he says. “The other great news is VAST 4.2, which is the latest version of IAB (video ad-serving) standards, incorporates Ad-ID into it. Ad-ID will just become part and parcel of the workflow.

“We know there’s massive amounts of opportunity. We believe there’s maybe just a lack of awareness,” Rothwell adds.

Speaking at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” , Brendan Condon,  Comcast Spotlight CEO, said: “If you don’t have good creative, your ad’s not going to work … especially when you’re thinking about attribution to digital.

“In the tier of marketers that are mid- to smaller-size, either they don’t have good creative and they need some advice and insights or they don’t have television creative at all.

“We created a team and then we’ll be launching this officially in the next couple of weeks, whereby they’re exclusively focused on being a full-service creative agency for these marketers.”

Successive Beet Retreats have heard of mixed reception for advanced TV advertising techniques, with some large brands slow to put spend in to addressable TV. Lately, however, smaller, direct-to-consumer brands have been adding to their digital ad spend with TV, whilst local cable providers are getting tooled-up to support addressable tactics, including with technology that can attribute consumers’ online actions to their TV ad exposure.

All of that new toolset would seem to require some hand-holding. “In an effort to show that it’s not that hard, we can do that for you and therefore get you on to television,” Condon said.

The move follows a busy month from Comcast Spotlight. Condon spoke with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City.

Research: viewing booming

Comcast Spotlight just published its Q1 TV Viewership Report, finding TV viewership is at a two-year high, reversing the trend of decline that Comcast Spotlight has seen since it began tracking this data in 2017. The report analyzed nine billion hours of cumulative Comcast platform viewing.

“Not only are (viewers) watching it more but (also) for longer periods of time,” Condon said.” The average television viewer in the Comcast household is watching television for about six hours and 25 minutes every day. It’s remarkable.”

“In 2019, we saw twice the amount of volume in terms of VOD (versus 2016). And that’s up 36% over the prior year.”

Web attribution for TV ads

Spotlight just launched Instant Impact, an analytics software platform that shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission. Initially, Comcast Spotlight rolled it out to car sales advertisers. But now Instant Impact is about to gain wider impact, sold to other kinds of brands.

Condon said he wants local advertisers to start adopting a “marketing funnel” approach, the same way big brands do, which requires drawing a line between initial awareness and measuring an end sale.

“We went all the way down to the local marketplace as well and said, Hey, that should hold true for them as well.” Instant Impact was conceived to answer the question: “How do you prove that the funnel actually works?”

Political campaigns need diversity

With a 2020 presidential election season gearing up, TV ad campaigns will be a focus again. This time, more than ever, household addressability based on available voter data will be well-used tactic. Now couple that with attribution technology which can actually illustrate the online outcomes of candidates TV ads.

But, from its analysis of the 2018 mid-terms, Condon’s TV Viewership Report, showed a broad approach can work best.

“Actually, the winning candidates spent money and time on the top three news networks. They spent less money on the primetime day parts. They spent less money in terms of shorter campaigns. The winners … needed to diversify their network selection. They need to diversify the day parts.

“Fourteen percent of our viewers are watching only the top five networks. That’s 86% of watching everything else. On average, the households are watching 34 different networks in any given month.”

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.

That is the takeaway from a leading soothsayer at one of the US’ leading broadcast companies.

In the last couple of years, Comcast has built a significant technology portfolio and overhauled its own ad sales efforts to support data-driven, targetable advertising in both linear TV and digital video.

“What kind of data are we harnessing? The most beautiful kind,” says Andrea Zapata, Comcast VP research and insights, Comcast Spotlight, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We have viewership data across our platform. We started tapping into our (own) data in a very privacy-compliant way about two years ago.

“I will tell you, though, that we have really pivoted away from using a lot of third-party syndicated measurement to really using our data to help inform what happens across our house.”

Zapata was speaking with Maryann Halford, senior advisor at MTM Consulting, for Beet.TV.

Comcast Spotlight is publishing some top-line data from its Comcast platform through its quarterly TV Viewership Report, the latest in a long line of insight products that has also integrated all the publications its FreeWheel unit was producing.

“They’re watching in ways that may be fairly surprising to you and actually might break some of the ideas that you have, the contracts that you have and how you reach your customer,” says Zapata.

“It’s not just prime time, it’s not just a handful of networks. In fact, it’s probably networks that you don’t even know but your customer is watching and values.”

She says Spotlight offers advertisers the initial big reach that goes with mass, data-driven linear TV, perfect for upper-funnel goals, followed by lower-funnel approaches which use addressable TV capabilities.

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.

Over a sustained period, across platforms and using a targeted approach, according to James Rothwell, Comcast VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations for Comcast Spotlight, which is Comcast Cable’s ad sales unit.

His recommendation is based off a just-released analysis of 36 media and entertainment campaigns that Comcast Spotlight ran in 2018:

1. Sustained exposure:

“A flight of about five to seven weeks really drove conversion rates and ensured that the reach and frequency was was high,” Rothwell tells Beet.TV in this video interview. This particularly benefits episodic content.

2. Multi-platform approach:

“Using both linear and VOD … in concert … enabled viewers to … see the ads multiple times, which again drew more conversion lift.” A campaign spanning 3+ platforms drives significantly higher results than campaigns running on just one or two platforms, according to the research.

3. Mix and match platforms

The combination of those platforms is a significant weighting factor – and choosing distinct platforms can reduce overlap. Comcast recommends choosing one broad-reach platform, one narrow. It has seen that, “by combining linear and VOD, only 29% of reached households were exposed to both platforms, demonstrating the value of multi-platform incremental reach”.

4. Smarter audience segments:

“Ensure that your audience segments are constructed in the right way. In the past, we’ve seen media and entertainment clients just going after the clients that are already loyal. (But) (they) need to find new viewers. (They should) feed the top of the funnel (and) push those new potential viewers down the funnel to convert and tune into the new content.”

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 chief revenue officer at Comcast Spotlight, Comcast Cable’s ad sales unit, says he can help bring ad spend back to local cable – by proving to advertisers the effectiveness of their spending.

Spotlight just launched Instant Impact, an analytics software platform that shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.

And it seems to be working. “We’ve seen sizeable double digit growth in spend, as well as in renewal rates,” Condon tells Maryann Halford, senior advisor at MTM Consulting in this video interview for Beet.TV

So, why has Comcast launched Instant Impact, which is powered by TVSquared? Chiefly, because marketers – especially auto dealers – have been turning away from linear local TV, finding they can get results and proven effectiveness in digital channels.

“In order to stem some of that share shifting and also to grow with the spend for these automotive marketers, we needed to ensure that we could show, when they advertise on television, that it actually works, that we can attribute the traffic to their dealerships or respectively to their websites,” Condon says.

Comcast initially launched a proof-of-concept in three to five markets, followed with a pilot involving 25 advertisers and the full roll-out announced this week.

Whilst it initially focuses on auto dealers, the company wants to make the software available to all advertisers across its 67 markets, and plans to target financial services, quick service restaurants, insurance and travel categories.

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 group’s Instant Impact is an analytics platform that shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.

Initially, Comcast Spotlight rolled it out to car sales advertisers. But now Instant Impact is about to gain wider impact.

“We started with the automotive space, with dealers who were very interested in looking at the traffic that dealers are seeing,” says Comcast Spotlight chief revenue officer Brendan Condon, the former AOL and Time Warner ad exec.

“When you advertise with us in Comcast, you can see a direct correlation to web traffic increasing based on those advertisements.

“Instant Impact afforded us to do that and say, ‘Wait a minute, we can do this for local markets in respect to auto dealers, we can also now do it for national, regional, and local’. Of course, any market. And so we’re rolling out this Instant Impact enterprise wide this quarter.”

Condon was speaking ahead of speaking at the upcoming event Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.

And he touched on findings from Comcast Spotlight’s new TV Viewership Report. According to the Q1 edition:

• TV viewership is at a two-year high, reversing the trend of decline that Comcast Spotlight has seen since it began tracking this data in 2017
• People spent an average of six hours and 25 minutes watching TV each day.
• Viewing rose six percent (21 minutes) over Q1 2018.
• VOD viewing has increased by 36% year on year and doubled across total Comcast households since 2016.
• More than half of all viewing (68%) occurred outside of television’s traditional primetime.

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 and TVSquared.   Please visit this page for additional segments. 

“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.  

The Open Addressable Ready consortium announced in March is the result of Vizio having watched a number of companies try to bring more scale to addressable TV, McAfee says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“There are a lot of technical challenges with someone being in the middle of that conversation and then there are also a lot of business challenges. As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work.”

OAR membership includes both inventory owners and platforms, ranging from CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal to AT&T’s Xandr and Comcast’s FreeWheel.

By seeking an open standard, Vizio decided against “trying to force the entire market to jump into a single stack and adopt a single solution,” McAfee says. Given that “NBC’s going to want to use FreeWheel, WarnerMedia’s going to want to use Xandr, Disney has their deal with Google,” allowing flexibility “is the only way you’re going to get to scale.”

Vizio sees itself as stewards and OAR members as owners. “They’re the ones making the decisions and we’re just building everything to their requirements.”

McAfee notes that most addressable TV execution to date has been through MVPD’s. “We think there’s a complementary ability to generate more scale on live linear,” McAfee says, hence the inclusion of companies like Comcast and Xandr. “We bring incremental reach to all of those players and scale is absolutely critical to addressable. There needs to be more and there also needs to be more premium linear inventory in that bucket for addressable.”

McAfee says he’s old enough “to have watched multiple consortiums in our business not go very well. I think as a group we’re beneficiaries of good timing in that I think the television stakeholders in our business understand that they need to work together to succeed.

“And so far our meetings have been very collaborative, everybody’s leaned in pretty hard on the subject matter and everybody’s cooperating. So I’m really encouraged by that.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee.  For more videos from the series, visit this page.  To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

“From a measurement perspective and understanding viewership and consumption, we are partnering with Inscape to complement our Comcast set-top box footprint,” FreeWheel’s Brian Wallach says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We will be the largest footprint where you can actually get an understanding of deterministic viewership and consumption of digital video content across every screen.”

The SVP and CRO of Advanced TV says FreeWheel is “leaning into being able to show incremental reach” to advertisers using a national campaign or a targeted one on linear TV “and also the complementary digital delivery that’s happening in our footprint and across the Inscape footprint as well.”

The goal is to be able to determine whether someone watched a program on TV or digital and did an advertiser reach them in one or both environments because “there’s light TV viewers, heavy TV viewers, all types of consumption that’s happening across screen,” Wallach says.

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, every advertiser is different. Some are as simple as brand metrics measured with the help of research studies while others are looking for down-funnel conversion.

“As a marketer defines what their KPI’s are, we help them with different providers to match up whether or not the media that was shown to those consumers actually drove that behavior. That’s a growing trend.”

According to Wallach, some marketers could look to seek different audience guarantees from publishers that are based on campaign outcomes, as “guaranteeing delivery of impressions is somewhat not enough these days. Obviously, this is important for our publishing partners as well.”

He describes TVSquared as “a very valuable attribution partner for us. They really help us understand how to optimize a campaign and try to drive impressions against inventory that is yielding good results.”

While campaign performance beyond mere impression delivery has traditionally taken “months and months,” TVSquared provides “a rolling report on information that’s happening with those interactions, where we can actually optimize a campaign, maybe move inventory from one publisher to another based on performance” and do creative optimization.

Better analytics at the local level means that search no longer gets 100% local attribution, according to Wallach.

“We have data that can show exposures across TV, exposures across digital and then the corresponding interactions with search where they’re getting a location or address for a particular store and then visiting it,” says Wallach.

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.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.

NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.

“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”

Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.

In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”

Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.

Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”

NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”

Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.

“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”

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.

He sees tremendous opportunity in the power of television advertising to target local audiences. “We’re looking to aggressively tackle the opportunity that we see in the local market to bring to bear more audience-driven selling for our advertisers,” says Greenwald.

Then he refers to a white paper titled The New TV issued in March by Comcast Spotlight that examined the range of TV options—from linear to OTT and several other advanced iterations. For example, primetime viewing.

“Today there’s a point of view that so much viewing is captured just in primetime. But really that’s only about a third of viewing and you can still capture a large portion of the audience where two thirds of viewing is happening outside of primetime,” says Greenwald.

He points out that about 87% of total TV viewing happens live and that Comcast can “help you find them on a linear schedule” so that “you can reach as much of them as possible in a premium, brand-safe environment.”

Comcast Spotlight has a “huge local business” wherein advertisers can target audiences in specific zones. In a DMA like Philadelphia, “we can carve that up into a number of smaller zones and let an advertiser that might be a smaller business that only operates in a portion of the Philadelphia market just reach the potential customer base that they have in that zone.”

Also at the LUMA Digital Media Summit, the head of NCC Media, Nicolle Pangis, talks about “chapter two” at NCC, which is the national cable sales group owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. Referring to NCC, Greenwald says, “We see a real opportunity in conjunction with our partners to bring a lot of new offerings to market that we think are going to be very valuable to advertisers.”

Asked about Comcast’s FreeWheel, he cites publisher-side projects coming to market for Comcast’s programming and MVPD partners. In particular, he mentions pilot tests with NBC focusing on unification, bringing digital and linear together in a single execution. “These pilots enable us to remove the linear schedules from their traffic system and optimize within FreeWheel’s ad server/decisioning system before flowing back into the linear traffic system for execution.

“We’ve seen that yield meaningful results for NBC and we believe that’s a real proof point in the market for us as we work to unify audiences across all screens,” Greenwald adds. “And that is a real core competency for FreeWheel and something we’re laser focused on.

“We believe it brings a lot of value to the marketplace for our immediate customers but also for marketers. It enables them to buy an audience across all screens with one single order as opposed to a siloed execution.”

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.

“One of the newer and exciting announcements for us is Sky with AdSmart,” says Mike Reidy, SVP, Digital Ad Sales, NBCUniversal. Sky being this amazing international leader but also in the OTT space as well.”

In this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan, Reidy also talks about the migration of video viewing to big screens and evangelizing the opportunities of connected-TV and programmatic advertising transactions.

“I think it’s interesting because when digital video viewership first began, it was seen as taking viewers from the big screen to the small screen” amid concerns like viewability of content and ads. “But now with the advent of connected TV, OTT you’re seeing those viewers migrate back to the big TV screen,” Reidy says.

It’s one thing to have “the largest canvas for a brand to communicate via sight, sound and motion” and another to have advanced TV sitting on a digital platform. “So that lends itself to all the capabilities of dynamic ad serving, new interactive ad units as well as data.”

Last month, Comcast united NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting solutions with Sky’s addressable advertising tools. Operating under the AdSmart name, it’s designed to enable global brands to reach customers in international markets and measure results across NBCU and Sky’s TV portfolio, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

Asked about AdSmart’s plans for the United States, Reidy says, “That’s what we’re working through right now, identifying what are the strong points from each of us respectively. But ideally, the long term is that if we have a client that’s looking at things from a global landscape through a global lens, we now have this incredible domestic and international reach to have a much more strategic conversation with them.”

As for working with DSP’s, Reidy says NBCU is “really excited about what MediaMath is doing. They’re leaning really heavily into the connected TV space and this programmatic landscape. We look at them as people we can partner with, collaborate with, to evangelize what the capabilities are here.”

This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.

What Data Plus Math brings to Comcast’s FreeWheel is “a fast, automated and low-cost attribution provider,” Hoctor adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.

Data Plus Math helps ad buyers and sellers tie ad exposures to business outcomes by matching anonymized viewing data with external data. By connecting the two, advertisers can look across platforms, networks, programs, creative iterations, audiences to determine “how much credit they should get in driving those business outcomes.”

Business outcomes, or KPI’s, typical consist of offline and online commercial traffic and website visits.

“We help them understand at a macro level, is this media working. But then more granular, what parts of it are working hardest? Where should I be investing more money in order to generate these outcomes?” says Hoctor.

According to a FreeWheel news release, Data Plus Math can deliver attribution measurement within days to weeks from the start of a campaign depending on its scope and then provide continuous updates through the remainder of the campaign schedule.

Hoctor attributes the rise of attribution in no small way to “some of the digital giants” that are helping drive advertiser demand. “Television is a huge part of their budget, and wouldn’t it be great to understand what parts of TV are working harder?”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

For nearly 10 years the industry has been aware of the challenge of “needing to do something different and better,” Rockwood explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. “I think in the last two we’ve probably made a lot of progress. I think before then there wasn’t enough of a business need but now there certainly is and I think there has been a lot better progress.”

The SVP of Ad Sales Portfolio Research says of Comscore and Nielsen, “I think that they both have started to do more that’s actually helping us” while echoing the concerns of many CIMM participants about the need to make it easier to conduct business in cross-platform premium video.

“It’s just too hard. As this measurement improves it will become easier to transact.”

She describes the fragmentation of viewing options as “so extreme that it may not be the best thing for the consumer. So I do believe that they’re going to start looking for simpler solutions that provide more value” And while the marketplace is fragmented is now, it’s “going to coalesce around some solutions that actually have more consumer value.”

Asked whether there are too many measurement options for the sell-side, Rockwood doesn’t think so. “I think you have to have competition in this marketplace and you have two major companies that are trying to solve for this,” both of which are “getting traction.”

Beyond that competition is the disparity in data sets, whether they derive from an MVPD or in Turner’s case DirecTV and NBCU with Comcast that “can all be used in different ways and I think we’re finding our way through that now. I don’t think that the complexity is getting in the way of us doing business.”

On the subject of identity graphs, Rockwood stresses their importance in how video advertising and viewing related to individual households and individuals.

“Having high-quality information around what devices belong to which households and then which people are using those devices is I think really important,” Rockwood says. “I think that the Xander data will certainly give us a leg up in that race.”

The short summary of their back and forth would be that from a cross-platform perspective, TV is still “a mess” and that despite much talk about industry collaboration among competitors, reality is bound to intrude when companies like Comcast and Disney wage their inevitable marketplace battles.

Gerber has been on the sell- and buy-side and is currently President of Global Media Investment for GroupM’s Essence agency. Clark is EVP of Advanced Advertising at Comcast & GM of FreeWheel.

In trying “to make supply make sense,” Comcast has scooped up no fewer than five companies—from FreeWheel to STRATA, under the FreeWheel brand—with the overarching goal of unifying linear and digital by removing a lot of the fragmentation and friction among the tv infrastructure, working on addressable technology, decisioning, and making life easier for marketers at the end of the day. The competitive backdrop is the ease of use of such platforms as Amazon, Facebook and Google.

“Whether you’re a programmer or you’re a marketer, you cannot run one campaign across TV. You cannot have it optimized in real time, you cannot get a report. You have to go hire an army of people to do that,” Clark observed.

This is why “television is not a platform…it is hundreds of sales teams, different ways of selling depending whether you’re local or national, measurement’s all over the place.”

As for Amazon, Facebook and Google, “Yes they’re walled gardens but they are unified tech and data platforms and they can bring sort of a seamless solution to marketers there’s no question about that. TV is not that,” said Clark. “Programmers are unified in wanting one campaign across linear and digital environments, which FreeWheel serves against all–including STB VOD–so that programmers can have everything unified.”

Never one to beat around the bush, Gerber put aside digital/linear unity for the more timeless question of competitive media selling, particularly as it pertains to national TV avails. “The fact of the matter is, most inventory still trades in television in a traditional unit linear model and it’s controlled by independent sellers,” said Gerber. “I care about the national avails that the national networks control because that’s where the bulk of viewing occurs. I need that brought together with the local avails, with the digital avails, everything together on one platform like you said with Google and Facebook. I don’t see that happening.”

Clark recalled when TiVo launched in 1995 and some people predicted “this is the end of television, it’s all going to change.” From his vantage point close to technology, he likened the state of affairs as “driving towards a mountain on the horizon, it doesn’t look like you’re ever getting close to it and then one day it’s right in front of you. There are massive investments right now going into the technology needed to clean this up.”

Gerber: “Who’s your competitor? Are you guys all going to work together to help us figure this out? Are you all going to compete with each other?”

This is where reality intruded. Just one day before, it was announced that Disney had chosen Google over FreeWheel to handle its digital advertising, as Advertising Age reports.

“They make the decisions that are in their best interests of course,” said Clark. “It’s undeniable that Google now has a massive beachhead in the industry. There’s no question about it.”

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.

Whilst many broadcasters are now keen to copy Netflix’s subscription model, what could be the impact on ad sales?

“There’s maybe less premium content available for the ad sales team to monetize,” says Comcast international GM, advanced advertising, Thomas Bremond in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“So, why don’t we look at it with data and make the right content exposition or content monetization choices in a way that maximizes profit for the organization as a whole?”

That’s what Bremond’s Comcast has been called on to do by Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial broadcaster.

Back in July, Mediaset rebooted its former Mediaset On Demand service as Mediaset Play, adding new viewing options.

Now Comcast is announcing that is technology, together with that of its FreeWheel subsidiary, will power certain functions for the broadcaster.

Media set will use Comcast technology to manage backend distribution, transactions and subscriptions, and Comcast’s FreeWheel technology to manage advertising systems.

“They’re just in the beginning of their digital transformation story,” Bremond says.

“How do we help Mediaset make as much revenue or profit from its content that it acquires?

“In the past, we would look at it from just an advertising standpoint or we would look at it from just a subscription perspective. Guess what? We should really be putting those two together in order to maximize our yield as a company.”

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.

In this interview at Beet Retreat 2018, the EVP of Advanced Advertising at Comcast & GM of FreeWheel talks about the value to be unlocked from “very low” household TV CPM’s and the distribution efficiencies enjoyed by cable and broadcast but not necessarily IP-dependent providers.

Asked why TV can’t behave more like the big digital platforms when it comes to booking and evaluating campaigns, Clark points to the traditionally siloed world of linear TV.

“It can’t happen today because the audiences in the inventory and the data associated with those audiences, to the extent that it even exists, are locked away in literally hundreds, maybe more, different pools,” Clark says. “And if you want to build a campaign across those pools, you’ve got to contact each one of them and negotiate a deal and then cobble it together.”

Given the “supply constrained world” that has long characterized network TV, with direct sales teams best positioned to negotiate deals, “they’ve kind of represented the networks in a way that got the best price for that inventory, historically.”

According to Clark, looking at the TV market as a whole shows the average CPM on a household basis to be a “very low” $2 to $3. “We think there’s a lot of value to be unlocked there,” says, adding that he doesn’t believe all sales teams will disappear. “All companies will make their own decisions based on their market positions.”

Among the biggest players, he thinks NBCUniversal under the leadership of Linda Yaccarino has exhibited “a lot of innovation there and the rest of the industry might be able to benefit from that going forward.”

And while business models and value will change, the alternative “is the industry really getting commoditized and the value getting sucked out of the ecosystem,” says Clark.

In his view, the TV bundle delivers lots of value for consumers, but those will change as well going forward.

“I also think that the cable plant is a really efficient way to distribute mass content, as is broadcast obviously. What people don’t always understand is that when I serve content across cable whether one person is watching it or fifty million people are watching it, the price is the same. It’s fixed. “That means it’s better business and more can go into the production of content.”

The same can’t be said for platforms dependent on IP delivery. “Not only do your costs go up the more customers you acquire but the cost per customer goes up as they consume more content,” Clark says. “So your costs move up with your revenue. That’s some of the challenges of the SVOD model that we’re seeing out there.”

While he’s mostly optimistic amid all the change, what does worry Clark is that some TV industry players, like some media platforms that have failed, will make decisions without fully understanding “the opportunity that we have or like the underlying economics that we really should sort of understand in making these decisions.”

So far, the industry has kindled a spirit of “yes we all should come together and work as a platform, as long as it’s my stuff. And I’m hoping the next stage is let’s get together and figure out who’s best in class at different things and really truly work together and understand where the threat really is. And what could throw that upside down is short-term thinking.”

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.

“We’re trying to put this all together, create scale and apply data and measurement so it’s a really transparent, easy to execute environment for buyers,” says Brian Wallach, SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, FreeWheel Markets.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference, Wallach explains how partnering with Nielsen also benefits digital media buyers and talks about the big rise in live digital TV viewing and the challenges ahead for reaching those audiences.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth in live TV consumption on apps and connected TV devices. That’s a huge opportunity. That’s probably one of the biggest areas that we see growing quickly,” he says.

Unlike some people, Wallach doesn’t believe that the trend of viewers migrating from linear TV is a catastrophe. “I think there’s still plenty of scale in linear TV. We’re just all trying to focus on the new living room and the TV being a device rather than it being the distribution means,” he says.

“It’s really exciting to us because linear TV buyers are asking how to do their linear campaigns with age and gender and GRPs and also tap into this new supply in OTT,” Wallach adds. “And we’re the only people in town really that have this kind of scale on full-episode inventory across the TV programmer universe versus a whole bunch of clips or long-tail websites that are trying to mimic that experience.”

Nielsen’s DAR provides a comprehensive view of digital audiences in a way comparable to linear TV. Using FreeWheel’s proprietary methodology, DRIVE enables marketers to assess total TV reach across linear and digital viewing, control reach and frequency, and ultimately, tie outcomes to anonymized, household-level data, according to a FreeWheel news release. Wallach says the need for DRIVE’s capabilities spans both linear TV and digital media buyers.

“As you start to explore different measurement types and all the different data partners that we’ll work with out there, making scale against this inventory isn’t just a TV buyers need. Digital buyers are looking for this type of need as well and they have all sorts of psychographic data that they want to target against and we’ll be able to unlock that on this inventory at scale within the next couple of months.”

Looking ahead, Wallach summarizes the challenges related to the rise in viewing of live programming via non-linear means, namely the way it’s delivered. With a traditional digital video ad campaign, there’s a start date and an end date, with everything in between evenly paced over the course of the flight.

“Live happens when live happens. So it’s going to take some time to create a difference in planning and execution and people acknowledging that it’s still great quality inventory and it’s actually really good scale in digital as a complement to TV.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

“Historically, we were seen as just an ad rep organization and what we’re trying to do is build adtech underneath it that supports it and drive operational efficiencies into that space,” says NCC Media Chief Data Officer Bob Ivins. In this interview with Beet.TV, he discusses how NCC hopes to unify audience targeting transactions across TV distributors and shares his thoughts on viewer data and privacy.

“I think that the cable operators have all operated in their own swim lanes,” Ivins says. “They’ve taken their subscriber files, they’ve appended variables to it or attributes to it, they’ve used that within their infrastructure to do zone-based addressability, but they’ve all been kind of one-off.”

Some operators are versed in video on demand and digital but there’s no uniformity.

“You end up with this bingo board of distributor and capabilities and there’s no one line or one row that matches for everybody. What NCC is trying to do is we’re trying to harmonize, standardize and federate those capabilities so that you can actually do one buy, one place and have national capabilities within an infrastructure.”

Consumer TV and digital data from NCC owners Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications forms the basis of a converged data set that NCC says will represent “the largest data set in television,” as CEO Nicolle Pangis explains in this video interview.

Ivins joined NCC in July 2018, having played a pioneering role in the development of the data-driven advertising ecosystem for three decades. He held executive roles at comScore, Mindshare, Comcast, Yahoo and Nielsen.

Noting that “we rationalized the irrational going back in time,” Ivins refers to a period when executing a local spot cable buy in a market like Philadelphia required transacting with anywhere from four to six operators.

“It was really hard to do an operation like that. NCC stepped in, they harmonized the process so you had one order, they distributed the execution, you had one set of affidavits that went back to the client,” Ivins says. “We’re kind of doing the exact same thing, but now instead of in that environment we’re doing it a new environment and hopefully we’ll extend it to cross-platform.”

Asked about data and privacy, Ivins believes the industry recognizes its responsibility in ingesting and understanding behavioral data. Given the head start that digital media companies have in advanced consumer targeting, “I think it’s now time for the TV industry to really take advantage of that.”

Consumers should have an “active opportunity” to understand what companies like NCC intend to do with their data, according to Ivins. “And I think that notice and choice needs to get really solidified in the industry and if it does, I think we should have the rights to do it. As long as the consumer knows what we’re doing with it.”