But, in the internet-connected TV (CTV) era, the old shapes are being rebooted.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dan Callahan, SVP of data strategy and sales innovation at Fox, describes how new technology is ushering in a wave of innovation that is re-thinking what TV advertising can be.
“The opportunity for it to be different is there,” Callahan says. “I think that’s a key piece here. We have moved linear-style breaks – four 30-seconds, or a couple of 15s and a couple of 30s – (into CTV) and really mirrored what was historically done in linear and supported that same strategy.
“The opportunities are really endless with, I think, the way you can re-imagine the pod, and that being from a structure standpoint but also from … ‘What does the break look like and how do I get to interact with it via my phone, via my connected device or my smart remote?’ It’s really exciting to see what is possible on the glass.”
Callahan’s Fox was relatively early on in the new-wave TV ads game. In 2014, it acquired TrueX, a tech vendor helping it reduce digital ad load to viewers who opt to engage with a TV ad. New Fox owner Disney has since sold TrueX.
Callahan says Fox and other networks are experimenting with what the ad break can do, including:
For him, technology is driving a change in the shape of TV advertising.
“I think we’re going to see people test and try different things with overlays and lower thirds, different prompts, things that really speak directly to you, whether that’s based on geography or based on audience,” Callahan says.
“It’s a really exciting time that you can reimagine these things. You can get creative, you can work strategically with clients to find out what they want the interruption to look like and what makes sense for really that great content to have an ad break that doesn’t feel like an ad break.
“I think it’s something we’ve talked about for years, but now we really have not only the screen and the content, but really the mechanics, and the technology behind it, to truly do things differently.”
But the technology to deliver those ads is still developing.
Callahan is enthusiastic about header bidding – the technology that allows publishers to entertain ad bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, thereby reaping higher yield – but that this is harder to implement in TV than it was in desktop display and mobile.
Furthermore, the CTV ecosystem is rather piecemeal.
Callahan hopes technology and specs can get more standardized in 2021, bringing the ability to switch out ad creative for different viewers much more easily.
“I hope that there’s better collaboration across the groups, and we can bring together a lot of the progress that’s made collectively,” he adds. “The rising tide will raise this opportunity.”
You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Callahan explains what opportunities Fox is tapping into heading into the New Year.
“For us, the New Year opportunity looks like linear creative ad-versioning with national scale,” says Callahan. “So taking a spot that’s across the Fox footprint nationally and divvying that up within specific households that we know more information about.”
Fox Networks are embracing addressability. According to Callahan, this allows the advertiser to create a more intimate message to a consumer that they know has a specific character trait. Within any national spot, they’re able to run an ACR technology the background, picking up SCTE markers and cue tones, along with on-the-glass watermarking that’s capturing what is taking place, and as this has all evolved, Fox has felt more comfortable taking a national spot and splitting it up eight to 10 different ways.
“Right now the way it’s worked for us, we can do this in two different 10-million household footprints today,” says Callahan. “My hope is that more Smart TV manufacturers and MVPDs adopt standardization and utilize similar tech.”
This changes the dynamic of the ad buy. It creates an enhancement and a different level of opportunity and Callahan is hopeful there is some added value tacked on because of the addressability. When there’s data available to specifically address a consumer, Fox is excited for what it can lead to.
Looking ahead, Callahan is also excited for live sports coverage on Fox. Not only did this perform well for the network last year, but this year, they’ll be the home of the Super Bowl among other major sporting events.
“Live sports is a great business to be in,” says Callahan. “The story with the Women’s World Cup and the World Series going seven games, NFL and college football this season have done huge numbers for us, so I think the position that Fox is in with live sports as our foundation is fantastic.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January. The series is presented by Samsung Ads. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“It’s designed to be watched live, it draws great audiences. It’s not designed to be viewed on demand,” says Dan Callahan, Fox’s vp of audience and automated sales, speaking to Beet.TV during an interview at Advertising Week. “Live only happens once and we’re excited about that.”
Live sports is only one piece of the puzzle, though, and Callahan says that like most other networks, Fox is figuring out its own direct-to-consumer play and subscription model (a betting component might be up next). The goal is “to be the best facilitator and partner for brands and agencies to come activate against,” says Callahan, and in service of that, Fox is working across a wide range of partnerships in order to light up the most inventory and match databases to Fox’s audience network. It’s currently splintered across linear TV’s MVPD, smart TV manufacturers and digital channels like Hulu, says Callahan.
One solution to that separation is OpenAP, which Fox is a founding participant in. OpenAP, which is an across-industry platform that consolidates premium TV programming and inventory into one place, was established in order to bring more transparency to ad inventory buying across new TV platforms. Callahan says OpenAP has gotten a new “shot at life” now that CEO David Levy is building a dedicated team for the initiative. “It’s been refreshing to have a group of thoughtful individuals focused wholeheartedly on the project,” says Callahan.
For Fox, the point of OpenAP is to standardize the process around audience definition, and make it easier for brands and agencies to work more holistically with the network.
“We’re trying to create a transactional workflow for a very manual process today, and if it can become an enter-exit point for planning and posting campaigns, we think we’ve got the ability to be successful and add value,” says Callahan.
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.
]]>What also came to the fore in this segment recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit and presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science was differences of opinion about the role of technology providers and the status of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium.
Asked by panel moderator Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, about Fox’s approach to advanced advertising, VP of Audience & Automated Sales Dan Callahan says the company is “piecing the bits together. There’s a million different places where our content is distributed and each has different rules and standards and tech specs, and that’s what makes it hard.”
He described a process wherein it’s “very much what can we deliver across these five platforms and what are their standards and methodologies. And then you have to have the conversation with the client and they’re like ‘we agree with these five but not these five’ and it’s a mess.”
So while everyone agrees on the need for convergence, “right now unfortunately it’s packaging smaller bits of our content and here’s what we can sell this way, here’s what we can sell this way, are you willing to accept it?”
Things are much different at Univision, as President, of Ad Sales & Marketing Steve Mandala explained.
“We have tried a lot of things, sought quick failure and fast learning on it too,” Mandala said. “One of the reasons that I’m glad to be able to be here because I don’t think we’ve figured out our solution yet. I think we’ve learned a lot of things along the way, typically much more of what we don’t want to do than what we do want to do. And are still searching for it.”
What Univision lacks in complexity can largely be attributed to the fact that 92% of its primetime programming is still watched live. “So we don’t have the issue of the time-shifted, alternative viewing sources that is so prevalent with all of our competitors, colleagues, peers. The issues regarding standards and unification of those standards are going to happen. It’s going to get fixed. It’s a rule of nature basically. It won’t happen as quickly as any of us want it to, but it’s going to happen because it’s the only way that the industry can come together.”
Mandala was not big on praise for tech providers, most of which he described as promising “silver bullets” that fail to solve what they purport to solve. “We’ve been completely dissatisfied in what we have found so far, other than Videology to be quite honest, is that there’s a flavor of the week all the time. It’s what is the next silver bullet that’s going to fix things. The truth is that very few of these things have yet panned out. The thing for us is to try to find those places where we believe that they’re really delivering simplified value.”
When the conversation shifted to OpenAP, Mandala noted that Univision was one of the first non-original partners to join the initiative “and I completely agree and endorse what OpenAP started with and still do.” However, Univision has had “an incredibly disappointing first year with OpenAP” and Mandala voiced doubts about so-called industry standards.
“There has to be a common vernacular. And the question is, is it going to be the seller or the buyer who develops that lexicon and that vernacular? What I worry about is that as we do this as sellers, we’re asking buyers to change their way of doing business to accommodate what we decide is the way that lexicon process should all be structured.
“Yet on the other side,” Mandala added, “I don’t think that the buyers can hardly agree what day of the week it is let alone a standard like that. Agency A will compete with Agency B in reviews based upon their view of how they deal with advanced advertising. So I don’t think it’s actually to the advantage of the agencies to have a standard in many ways so they can differentiate themselves.”
Callahan was more sanguine about OpenAP. “I feel like OpenAP is really putting their best foot forward to solve what they feel the programmers’ situation is, and then it really is the agencies and the brands and the others that can come to the table if they want to band together.”
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.
]]>“It does tie itself to emotional, meant to be viewed live events that create water cooler talk or social moments where people are interacting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,” adds Callahan, the VP of Audience & Automated Sales. “We feel like the new company is designed for that live happens now, it’s in the moment and it only happens once.”
Whether it’s live linear or live connected-TV, “we feel like that’s the most valuable viewing destination for our team to monetize.”
Fox News is the fuel for the new corporation, driving an estimated 70% of profit, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Heading into another contentious U.S. election cycle should help drive ads and viewing at the network.
Fox’s apps “continue to be extremely strong,” says Callahan. “People are finding Fox Sports Go through baseball season. Football season last year was gangbusters for us.”
Discussing distribution partners, he notes that programmers have typically retained 87% of advertising inventory while MVPD’s and other distribution endpoints get 13%. In its relationship with Hulu, “Fox has owned the ad insertion on ninety percent of the ad inventory within the Hulu footprint.” Even though Fox is no longer a co-owner of Hulu, the streaming service “still represents a great digital footprint for us with their growing number of subscribers.”
Asked about the local TV landscape, Callahan says companies like TEGNA Premion “are growing competitors. There’s a number of different local market makers that are growing into what is really a national footprint at this point. TEGNA Premion, any of those guys are a must watch, a must coordinate with, partner with where appropriate.”
Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcasting’s purchase of Fox’s 21 regional sports networks from Disney “shows how serious they’re taking regional businesses and building a national footprint on it.”
With regard to the UpFronts this month and the Cannes Lions event in June, Callahan says to expect from Fox “A nimble willingness to partner with brands and agencies in ways that we had not before. It’s a much leaner organization where we can quickly get things up to the top, approved.”
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.
]]>For advanced targeting of TV audiences, “Live linear programming is a big part of it. We are optimizing our television buys today for clients that have a desire to do so,” the network’s VP of Programmatic Sales says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference.
Meanwhile, on the digital side, whether it’s full-episode, OTT, connected-TV devices or set-top video-on-demand, “we are looking to bring this cross-screen, trying to find an auto intender regardless of the modality that they’re consuming our content and serving the person that is in market for that product that ad at the right time,” Callahan adds.
Finding the right ad length and load is easier with on-demand content like movies where it’s scripted and ad breaks are planned. “I think you can do things with the break. You can shorten the break, adjust the break.”
Callahan sees Hulu’s approach “with different flavors of subscriptions” as offering a tradeoff with viewers in terms of ad choices and data sharing, while the “holy grail of serving right ad to right person with right format creates a less clustered more meaningful ad experience.”
Linear commercial breaks remain “baked in, sports isn’t scripted, you don’t know when somebody’s going to score a touchdown or hit a home run. You don’t know when that commercial break is going to happen,” Callahan says.
“You can probably load some up to be a certain way, but I think more in the archived, on-demand digital video library today you can get creative do things unique and interesting and create more value for the interruptions in a shorter capacity in those environments.”
Like other networks, Fox is seeing continued growth in connected-TV viewing year over year. “The idea of cord nevers versus cord cutters, that pendulum swing has happened.”
He sees a call for greater transparency in reporting and proving out de-duplication of connected-TV viewing audiences. “How does CTV really operate as the standalone from a tracking, delivery, audience perspective” is one question. “As far as the CTV environment, there is a greater level of transparency on who’s watching it, what are they watching, when are they watching and certainly the ability to tie it back to greater outcome attributed data sets as well,” says Callahan.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
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