“The upfront this year in some respects will be similar to years past, but in a handful respects is going to be pretty different,” Dan Aversano, senior vice president of data, analytics and advanced advertising at Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Use of data, technology and analytics, and how we’re structuring yields is changing the way that we all do business.”
Data and analytics will underpin deal making, as advertisers seek to reach target audiences more effectively, improve media attribution and optimize their spending.
” Every single market is under pressure to make the best use of their marketing dollars,” Aversano said. “Now, you have more and more marketers moving toward zero-based budgeting where they really need to justify their spend and how they’re putting those marketing dollars to work. Optimization is one of the most powerful tools to ensure that.”
Instead of looking in the rearview mirror, optimization gives advertisers the tools to look forward, and make better predictions about outcomes — whether the goal is to raise awareness, drive foot traffic or boost sales.
“One of the most interesting pieces around optimization is multigoal optimization. It’s rare that you have a campaign that’s trying to just do one thing,” Aversano said.
Audience-based buying has become a bigger area of focus for Univision among multiple platforms beyond linear TV and traditional radio. As more Hispanic consumers watch video on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones, Univision is now rolling out Prende TV as its ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service. The broadcaster last month bought Spanish-language streaming service VIX to round out its digital offering.
Aversano sees a need for improvements in data about the growing Hispanic consumer market, which has been underrepresented in media plans.
“A lot of the third-party data that’s out in market does not do an adequate job representing our audience of U.S. Hispanics. We at Univision want to help solve that issue,” he said. “We’re investing a lot in our own data as well as working with lots of third parties to ensure their data does a better job of representing what we think is the most underserved audiences in the U.S. today.”
Univision also is investing in data analytics to provide a more unified view of consumers among a variety of platforms, including national, local, AVOD, digital audio and radio.
“We want to be able to aggregate all of that supply and that audience, dress it with a common set of data so that now when somebody tells us there’s a particular segment that they’re interested in, we can effectively put them at the right message on the right screen at the right time, and optimize across all those touchpoints,” he said.
You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Case in point – to find viewers who would otherwise have watched sports events that have been cancelled, some brands are turning to audience targeting, which helps them find the same audiences though they may now be watching other content.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, WarnerMedia SVP of ad innovation and programmatic solutions, Dan Aversano, says explains what is happening.
“We represent a lot of sports properties and we’re not running any of those sports right now,” he says.
“We had a lot of marketing partners who were banking on being able to connect with those fans in those highly engaging environments. So we’ve pivoted and started to leverage a lot of our advanced solutions… whether it was things like audience targeting… so that we could help people find those highly, highly engaged sports fans, but in other forums, in other venues.
“(That is) so we can build segments based on previous viewership of things like the NCAA tournament or NBA games, and now find those consumers for our marketing partners in other areas and in other content or context.”
In other words, WarnerMedia is finding the needle even though there is no haystack.
Key takeaways today from our first ever Xandr-hosted webinar in the US include the importance of building trust by staying relevant with brands/customers now more than ever, to take an Audience-first mindset and approach today, and that day parts are being rewritten. pic.twitter.com/2heRR8d0iG
— Xandr (@xandr) April 28, 2020
Sports is one area of content that looks challenged for the foreseeable future, as many competitions wrestle with competing imperatives – the need to resume play, and the likelihood that spectators will either be forbidden from attending or will be reluctant to.
For Aversano, COVID-19 has made clear the need to quickly adapt the changing circumstances.
“This industry is learning a lesson right now about speed and agility that’s really important,” he says.
“The legacy media business has historically not been known for being a massive embracer of change, not been known for being extremely dynamic in how we adapt. I think what you’re seeing right now is a lot of pain in organisations that have not been able to adapt quickly.
“And my hope is that you’re going to see companies who embrace the need for agility and the need to be adaptable in times.”
Over the last year, as new privacy regulation and the looming death of cookies have put the brakes on the high points of advanced audience targeting, we have seen the re-emergence of contextual ad targeting, which seeks to buy ads against particular kinds of topics or emotional responses.
The two – audience and context – are thus being seen by many as operating at two distinct ends of the marketing spectrum.
Indeed, WarnerMedia is showing how brands can substitute the context of sports for the precision of audience targeting.
But Aversano doesn’t think one technique necessarily trumps the other.
“It really shouldn’t be a debate,” he says. “It’s really not ‘one or the other?’ You functionally need both.
“Who you talk to, what you say to them, your creative message, how many times you say it, the content or context with which you say it… these are all important levers that a marketer can pull.
“It’s not any one of them individually that works in isolation. They all actually have to work together.”
WarnerMedia’s COVID-19 response has also included CNN match-funding purpose-driven digital ad buys and committing further TV inventory to public health campaigns, a basketball Twitter talk show from Turner’s involvement in Sports and free content for HBO Go, HBO Now and international channels.
As part of its Tech for Good program, @xandr is partnering with organizations including the @CDCgov and @AdCouncil to educate the public about ways to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. Read more @iab members’ Good Works: https://t.co/WlIZZdKB0C pic.twitter.com/pFVdsm3ejc
— IAB (@iab) April 15, 2020
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>During “Data Activation, the New Tool for Programmers”, a panel convened at Beet Retreat In The City, executives held a refreshingly frank discussion on the true state of two of the most talked-about tech…
They were questioned by Howard Shimmel of Janus Strategy & Insights.
This year, executives like Levine have started describing the ability of advertisers to truly know who they are targeting with connected TV as “deterministic TV“, a proposed label that is in its infancy.
For Discovery’s Garfield: “I think about it as known versus inferred (audience profiles). As a national programmer at Discovery for 30 years, what we really knew about our audience was on an anonymized basis … age, gender…. inferred from a panel.
“Today, through our affiliate agreements, we actually have access to known (ad) exposures on set-top boxes where they know that person, they know what they’ve watched.”
WarnerMedia’s Aversano cautioned against expecting that the capabilities enabled by “deterministic” will grow to account for all TV targeting tactics.
“As an industry there’s been a ton of lip service given to this idea of a pure deterministic world,” he said. “It just will never happen. You’re never going to have perfect census-level measurement of everything. I don’t think you will. We need to accept the fact it will never be perfect – (instead), just make it a little bit better.”
Levine, deterministic’s champion, agreed. “Deterministic data today, unless you have a hundred percent of the U.S population, it’s not going to work, which is why you have to apply the projection methodologies,” he said. “But deterministic data activation allows us to do things on television that historically have been very hard to do.”
Which brought the panel to the second much-lauded technology – the new ability to attributed advertisers’ intended brand outcomes (be it a purchase or a click) directly back to a viewer’s exposure to a TV ad.
New services allow a line to be drawn between those things. But WarnerMedia’s Aversano says the cost of real attribution is prohibitive.
He explained: “The attribution marketplace today… you have a handful of vendors who I think have really good solutions, but they are cobbled together from lots of different third-party datasets that they have to pay for in licence that they in turn then charge advertisers, agencies and media companies for. A typical attribution study that we run for a specific campaign costs $30,000 to $120,000 for one campaign.
“That’s a million-dollar campaign and we have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to measure it. That will never scale.”
Aversano said the reality of this kind of attribution measurement is, it isn’t effective enough.
“The state of the industry today and this ecosystem of vendors is … none of it is at scale and none of it is always-on, (it) almost makes that impossible,” he said.
Discovery’s Garfield urged publishers not to dive farther in to offering guaranteed outcomes against ad purchases.
“We just don’t have enough of that understanding or benchmarks around what’s driving these numbers to really start guaranteeing on that,” he said. “And I think we all have to take a step back and understand one step deeper around what’s driving some of these outcomes.
“If the same audience is seeing the same creative across a bunch of networks, then what really is the differentiator in that outcome? And that’s what we’re trying to understand and we’re working with vendors and talking obviously to agencies about helping us together to understand that.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Now WarnerMedia is gearing up to make announcements on how it wants to unlock that opportunity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dan Aversano, WarnerMedia’s ad innovation and programmatic solutions SVP, explains the rationale.
“We operate eight fully distributed linear networks,” Aversano says. “They are national networks, but they’re not addressable. We put the ad in the spot, everybody in the country and our distribution footprint sees the same ad.
“AT&T owns one of the most integral pieces of technology in that space in a company called INVIDI, which is actually the ad serving technology that makes addressable possible in certain footprints – within DirecTV, within DISH, Altice, Frontier and a few others that they’re starting to work with.
“That’s really, really exciting. So we are pushing full-steam ahead around national addressability, we have a ton of work that we’re hopefully going to be announcing as we move into next year, but we think that’s one of the most exciting things that we can push from a technology standpoint by far.”
Addressable TV, which gives brands the ability to buy ads targeted at the household level, has made particular in-roads in certain local cable operators and in particular OTT services or TV devices.
But, whilst OTT devices now have considerable scale, there is also growing concern at the size of the footprint available to TV networks.
Back in the summer, Mike Bologna, president of addressable at Cadent told Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”: “National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because, for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
Aversano is clear why he wants to enable addressable. And it is not just about targeting.
“Addressable technology gives us a tonne of precision, so now we can put different ads in front of different people, at different times,” he says. “There’s a lot that we can do with that precision:
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But that’s what the modern AT&T – incorporating WarnerMedia’s Turner and CNN – now looks like.
For the corporation – like Verizon alongside it – it is part of an ambitious move to tie telco and content in to a broad offering that leverages data on subscribers and consumers across a range of devices and content types.
And, for advertisers, the gateway to the kingdom is Xandr, the platform which gains access to each platform.
Beet.TV’s Identity in Focus forum heard from two executives now at the cusp opportunities at the unified entity:
In conversation with former Turner revenue chief Howard Shimmel, the two Dans opined on the challenges and opportunities in delivering multi-screen ads.
“What’s incredible about the TV viewership data is you’ve got an almost infinite, library of signals in terms of content, behaviours, interests that are indicators simply from a proclivity to tune into certain types of content,” Rosenfeld said.
“And that can really tell us about the passions and the interests of consumers in and for an advertiser to align their brand with a specific passion or try to connect to a consumer through that insight is very powerful.”
Aversano agreed, adding that using data on telco subscribers available through AT&T is a particular added boost.
“Mobility data – things like geolocation, app usage, mobile web usage – is a vast treasure trove,” Aversano said.
It’s not just “mobile”, however. AT&T has made a big commitment to 5G roll-out. And, whilst its rebadging of some advanced existing 4G spectrum as “5ge” has ruffled feathers, the operator will soon operate 5G spectrum proper – leaving the two Dans licking their lips.
“5G is a game changer for many different reasons for AT&T but particularly in the data world, we see there being some great opportunities as that begins to roll out,” Aversano said.
“The ability to have zero-latency video streaming virtually on any device … cis a whole new ball game. And when you talk about it and things like an identity graph, there’s a lot of opportunity, we think.”
Rosenfeld agreed: “One beautiful opportunity with 5G is the idea that there’s one pipe controlling all of your video ad experiences.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Such guaranteed optimization could emerge by late this year or early 2020, Turner’s Dan Aversano explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.
By combining behavioral and viewing data from AT&T’s digital and television assets “we can now add in some fairly simply analytics to understand when and where people are exposed to ads and then use causal analytics to actually prove that they’re taking an action,” says the SVP of Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions.
An example in the auto industry could be “being able to prove the visitation that’s driven to a particular auto dealership because of the campaign they ran on TBS or a campaign they ran on CNN Go,” says Aversano. “That’s step one. Step two, where this data gets really interesting is how we start to make it actionable.”
Many advertisers are unsure exactly who they should be targeting or uncertain when it comes to building audience segments. Those in themselves have typically consumed many weeks of conversation.
“Now that we have these analytics that we’ve built and we’re automating them so they’re fast and fairly inexpensive for us to run, we can do that at scale.” Analyzing historical campaigns to understand who actually converted provides a “seed set” that can be modeled up. “Now I have an ROI-defined segment,” Aversano adds.
Moving even higher up the value chain is the ability to optimize media campaigns based on output. “This is where you forget about the who for a second.” Historical data from Turner media can show “when I put this brand’s ad here, how many people go to the dealership, two people for this unit, three people for this unit.
“So all of a sudden, now I’m building a media schedule not based on how many impressions or GRP’s it’s going to deliver against a demo or segment, but based on how many actual physical location visits you’re going to get. It’s optimizing for the actual outcome.”
If all goes by plan, Turner could end up providing outcome guarantees by the end of this year or early next year.
Asked by interviewer Howard Shimmel, President of Janus Strategy and Insights, how all the data can help to inform advertising from top to bottom of the purchase funnel, Aversano says “Putting that puzzle together is really, really tricky.” Backed by a lot of proprietary research into, among other things, consumer journey mapping, “We’re pushing hard on it.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We have a roadmap that takes us through essentially a 1.5 release and it’s going to go even beyond that,” Dan Aversano, SVP, Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions at Turner, says of OpenAP in this interview with Beet.TV. “We have some very big, progressive and we think exciting ideas that we look forward to telling the marketplace about as we move through 2018.”
OpenAP, whose founding partners are Turner, Fox and Viacom, was designed to bring consistency to audience targeting in terms of how segments are defined and the data being used. Right now, Nielsen and comScore data are the options.
“But in the future, we firmly see that expanding based on marketplace demand,” says Aversano.
OpenAP users can on-board first-party data, “Which is actually I would say the biggest trend we’re seeing. The most sophisticated advertisers and agencies are moving that way.”
One challenge in particular that OpenAP users face—the process of matching first-party data in the platform—is something that will improve with time, according to Aversano.
“We want to make that process easier, faster, more cost efficient. Right now matching first party data can take a little bit of time. It can also cost a little bit of money,” he says.
OpenAP is strictly for planning purposes, not for buying inventory. “That’s today. Who knows what tomorrow holds.”
Once OpenAP users create audience segments they wish to target, they can use the platform to share those segments with Fox, Turner or Viacom. Buying negotiations take place in the traditional fashion. Information about campaign impression delivery then shows up in the OpenAP platform.
Turner is working with beta products “a little bit outside OpenAP” to map audience segments across digital delivery venues, “an FEP, potentially OTT and potentially even VOD when and where we’re addressable,” says Aversano.
Noting that TV audience fragmentation is being driven by media sellers, he believes the onus is on them “to build an advertising ecosystem and advertising products that enable us to consistently re-aggregate that audience and use data to drive value.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
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