“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.
]]>“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.
]]>NCC Media is owned by Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications.
“Really what we’re talking about is all of MVPD inventory in the live linear environment, the on-demand environment as well as the digital environment,” Ward adds in an interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event.
“That’s really one of the primary drivers behind the creation of the enterprise. How do we begin to federate those solutions” in a horizontal manner.
Comcast Media 360, Comcast Spotlight’s former national advertising sales team, will form the foundation of the new unit together with resources from NCC Media, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, NCC media said in a news release.
The second goal—data consistency—will address such advertiser concerns as audience segment definitions, which can vary from one media company to the next. Ward also wants to extend that consistency to analytic and data partnerships to bring uniformity to “what is currently an irrational marketplace.”
Simplification will require structuring “an end-to-end solution” to ensure that transacting national addressable TV campaigns is profitable for advertisers.
“Nobody doubts the sound strategy of using richer data to more precisely deliver audiences and measurement those audiences in more robust ways,” says Ward. “But we’ve got to encase that transaction in elegant architecture from pitch to pay, such that the process is simplified.”
The new unit within NCC Media will use viewers privacy compliant, non-personally identifiable data. This is not an issue because the companies involved are subject to 1980’s rules that Ward characterizes as “probably the strongest consumer protection language in the marketplace.”
All of the aforementioned goals have one common thread: To move national TV targeting, measurement and attribution into the future.
“We don’t fundamentally believe that the future of television planning, buying and measurement will sit on top of an age/gender definition and on top of a panel-based survey methodology,” Ward says.
He takes a broad view of the term “addressable” and points to other forms of audience targeting, including by geography. “Our addressable strategy is part of an overarching targeting approach that also takes into consideration various lenses. Context, device, geo and ultimately household,” Ward says.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“We’re 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.
]]>Jenckes, who is President, Advertising, Comcast Cable believes now is the time to be very optimistic about what premium video can be.
“It is the best way for marketers to reach their audiences. We’re coming off of the greatest Upfront in history. There’s a lot of successes that we can look at,” Jenckes says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Comcast/FreeWheel Client Summit.
Add to those factors “this incredibly, from my perspective, optimistic collaboration between all the players in the ecosystem.” Whether it’s networks or distributors, “We know the power of what we have and if we work together we can create value for everybody,” Jenckes says.
Now for the challenges. Alongside audience and data fragmentation, they include new digital competition and the need to rationalize different sources of demand.
While the golden age of TV is upon us, more platforms and viewing choices are making it difficult to pull together audiences for advertising purposes. And fragmentation isn’t a problem solely limited to audiences.
“Everybody has their own different data pools. People are struggling for how do you create joint identity across platform, or how do you find that segments you’re looking for across multiple pools of data.”
Among the many tools that Comcast’s Advanced Advertising Group has developed is its new Blockchain Insights Program, which combines the capabilities of FreeWheel, Strata and Visible World. The initiative expands upon the advertising relationship between Comcast and NBCUniversal as well as new collaborations with Disney, Altice USA, Channel 4 (UK), Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and TF1 Group (France).
The companies will work together on a new and improved advertising approach to facilitate the secure exchange of non-personal, audience insights for addressable advertising.
“For us, making sure that the tools exist for that to happen as efficiently and effectively as possible is critical.”
This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.
]]>Powered by planning, buying and reporting optimization platform AudienceXpess, the new system will help Magna Global agency clients advertise on Cox Media cable inventory by first running audience segment targeting using first- and third-party data sets, and by using geographic, network and daypart attributes.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, AudienceXpress president Walt Horstman explains: “In early 2015, we’ve been creating a version of the AudienceXpress platform which will allow Magna Global and Cox to work together through a private marketplace.”