But new technology allowing TV to operate like digital channels means the medium can fulfil both awareness and “performance” goals, which aim to generate an actual, measurable business outcome.
That is what a growing number of industry insiders are saying. Amongst them is Sandro Catanzaro, founder of dataxu, an ad-tech company set up to facilitate connected TV ad placements.
“When we started working on TV, in many cases, what we saw is, actually advertisers wanted reach, initially,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “More recently, we have been a big more surprised to find that both, on the buy side and on the sell side, there’s starting to be a nascent and a strong interest in getting performance – the advertisers want to know whether that exposure created a conversion.”
How can TV become a “performance” medium? The growing number of devices and channels that mean TV is delivered over the internet make it possible. But that is just the start. Catanzaro:
And the connected TV boat is certainly rising. Catanzaro says his company alone serves more than nine billion impressions per month.
Knowing the identity of viewers unlocks heightened results. By knowing who is watching, Catanzaro says a typical ad load of 18 to 20 minutes per hour can, over connected TV, be reduced to just three to five minutes, such is the effectiveness bump/
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?
Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.
But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?
A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…
Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:
“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.
“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”
Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.
Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”
From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.
“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”
The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:
“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.
“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.
“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”
But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”
Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:
“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.
“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”
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.
]]>“What’s different about them is they come to the TV investment process with data of their own” typically consisting of e-commerce conversion data, CEO Baker says of direct-to-consumer marketers. Dataxu’s OneView identity and data management platform can “turn that into a TV plan,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“That’s one of the big trends in advanced TV in 2019 and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen our revenue go up forty times year over year from connected TV.”
Already comfortable with a data-driven marketing process, newer users of the company’s TouchPoint demand-side platform seek to leverage all of their online and mobile data in new channels.
“Many of them have seen things like Facebook or Google search sort of saturate as a play for conversions, and so they’re very interested in not only the branding aspects of TV but also the ability to drive return on investment for new customer acquisition.”
Nine years ago, long before the concept of advanced TV, demand-side platform TouchPoint was dataxu’s starting point. Along the way the company found that most marketers had a problem with connecting the dots between targeting and measurement on PC’s and mobile phones. OneView, which solves for this and can now factor in streaming devices and connected TV, “has really been the center point of our growth in TV and addressable TV,” Baker says.
Consumer device identity is a problem shared by the sell-side, as evidenced by dataxu’s involvement with media sellers like Sky in the U.K. “So on the sell-side, we’re increasingly working with some of the big media companies to help them on attribution and media planning that merges digital and linear data.”
In addition to direct-to-consumer brands, agencies with billings between $50 million and $100 million that never developed big TV teams, are bringing some of their clients into advanced TV. Baker predicts that some of the biggest agencies will be joining in as well.
“What’s been holding them back has been a little bit of uncertainty around who owns converged TV” within those agencies, Baker says.
As for a misconception that advanced TV cannot be done at scale, he adds, “I think at CES we’ll be talking a lot about the fact that you can and a lot of people are doing it today.”
Update: NBCU’s Yaccarino Issues Call To Action On Advertising Standards
On Jan. 7, NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino cited “privacy issues, data misuse, measurement chaos and brand safety neglect” at “major digital advertising platforms” while seeking industry unity for high business standards.
“For decades, audiences have loved premium content, and advertisers have trusted networks’ multiscreen advertising ecosystems,” Yaccarino said in an article published on the NBCU website. “That’s why the premium media industry has refused to compromise its core values for how that content is created and distributed, even as we disrupt legacy mindsets and reinvent how we operate.”
Among other benefits, lowering barriers to entry for marketers to engage in TV advertising has attracted direct-to-consumer brands, Yaccarino noted.
“Already what had been an exclusive space for established companies is now welcoming a wave of entrepreneurs whose disruptive brands had long been at a disadvantage against larger incumbents. But here’s the best part: The marketplace is opening up without any compromises on consumers’ or brands’ safety.”
She called for all media publishers, agencies and platforms “to raise standards to let a safer, smarter, more accessible advertising ecosystem take flight.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV roughly a month into her new role at the measurement company, Hofstetter talks about Comcore’s doubling down on offerings like its Comscore Campaign Ratings and what’s needed to move cross-platform unification ahead.
“The question that has been brewing has really been a big question on the buy side. There have been silos. There’s TV buying, there’s digital buying and then there’s that premium that sits in that purgatory in between,” says Hofstetter, who until September of 2018 was Chairwoman of marketing agency 360i.
“Consequently, media partners have tried to aligned themselves to the buyers. So we’ve had a little bit of a breakdown in the ecosystem and that has inhibited a lot of the movement towards looking at video more cross-platform.”
Measurement providers want to see things go cross-platform, “but the buy-side’s not always organized for that,” she adds.
“I think the more we can get better video, better targeting, better cross platform, better de-duplication, the more we’ll be able to proliferate and help advance that.”
In speaking with marketers, media partners and agencies, Hofstetter has found that “everybody has their own perception of what Comscore is and what they do. And if I just say we’re here to bring trust and transparency to media and marketing to use data to drive growth, that is true but it doesn’t explain the how.
“So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us, call it in the next six months, to better educate the marketplace on who we are, the benefits that we provide and then bring that to market and deliver on the promises.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“That’s because there’s not only the interest but the capability and also the audience. This will be the first time as we go into the video season that you have those things together,” Rozen says in this interview with Beet.TV.
He separates advanced TV into three buckets, beginning with its increasingly programmatic nature for automated buying.
“We’re really excited about the programmatic television, and that scale is growing ridiculously fast. We’re able to do more and more today to address more individuals than ever before,” says Rozen.
The world of smart TV sets occupies Rozen’s second bucket. He cites a “cacophony of partners and players” that are providing technologies and platforms that enable IP targeting, tracking co-viewing and listening and understanding what’s being displayed.
All of this information can be used to retarget viewers or for “individualized household delivery of nuanced creative because I know who you are versus somebody else,” Rozen says.
Third is OTT disruption of the traditional linear broadcast TV model and the advanced advertising opportunities created along the way.
Prior to joining 360i this summer, Rozen was at OMD, where he drove all digital and innovation activities, including Ignition Factory (trend spotting), Zero Code (gaming and virtual reality) and OMD’s mobile and social divisions. Now he’s helping to scale the media capabilities of the agency that has a deep heritage in search and now integrates creative and media capabilities.
Clients, says Rozen, are trying to understand the shift from such historical TV measures as reach and frequency with GRP’s in mind to being able to correlate ad impressions with sales. Historical comparisons of reach and frequency must yield to used advanced identity tools and media selection “and then be able to attribute that to a direct sale.”
While 360i’s roots are in performance, “We have been driving very quickly beyond that to be a full-service agency, which is refreshing, exciting and certainly I think ripe for where the market’s going as media and creative really need to be tied together more closely,” Rozen says.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”
In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.
Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.
To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”
It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.
He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.
“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”
Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.
“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.
Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.
“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”
She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.
The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.
“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“While you can’t do all that programmatically in terms of execution, what you can do is look at that analytically in terms of understanding reach and frequency of, like, a special precision audience across these different ways of watching TV,” Baker says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
A big plus has been the addition to the mix of quality data from automatic content recognition technology, which Baker calls “a game changer.” Adding that data to a device graph containing digital data enables advertisers and agencies “to start to look at households, and even people within the household, in a holistic, sort of normalized basis.”
The impetus for some agencies to de-silo their approach to media planning and execution has been their clients’ push to amass greater amounts of first-party customer data and invest in data-management platforms, according to Baker.
“Obviously, these companies have done a great job of selling the vision of the importance of first party data,” he says. “But then it’s sort of like, ‘Hey I need to use this in more places because it’s expensive to implement these programs and collect data.’ So one of the places would be media investment.”
One example could be “I have a pile of cookies and now I need to use this. Please use this identity information for TV planning, buying and even inflight optimization and measurement.”
This is one reason why agencies have become customers of dataxu’s OneView identity solution, “to help them solve the problem of how do you translate digital device data coming out of a DMP into a world where you’re buying and measuring TV,” says Baker.
Many direct-to-consumer brands that started life by specializing in analyzing the meaning of abandoned shopping carts and relying heavily on platforms like Facebook and Google now want to use their CRM files for TV. They want to execute on TV “in the same incrementality and return on ad spend against a very specific set of consumers. The problem is the same. How to translate digital logic and data into shared device or concept of TV household versus just a person.”
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.
]]>But, on the flip side of “reach”, technology can also help control the “frequency” with which an ad is shown, as long as it can have full sight of viewers’ consumption behavior.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, ad-tech firm dataXu‘s founder Sandro Catanzaro explains how frequency-capping works.
“We are trying to target the audience with as flat frequency as you can,” he says.
“You can create a plan, a schedule that tries to make it as flat as possible and, on the connected (TV) side, we totally can frequency-control across all the different inventory providers.”
In Catazaro’s case, dataXu’s OneView platform has integrations including with FreeWheel’s MRM ad server and with Sorensen Media, so his company can see and understand when which consumer actually saw which ad.
That data helps the platform act on ad buyers’ desire not to make duplicate ad spending decisions.
“We know how many times that user has been exposed, no matter where (or) which platform he has been exposed,” he says.
“As we get modern integrations, we can offer the deduplication of reach and deduplication of frequency across all these different devices.”
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.
]]>Hearst’s TV footprint spans 39 states where the company is now selling connected TV in conjunction with the same linear audiences for local TV, the Co-Founder, President and CEO of dataxu explains in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018.
“So it’s quite an innovative offering and because it’s Hearst, of course it features premium content on connected TV. And all that’s being powered by dataxu’s technology,” Baker says. “We’ve been really struck by how quickly it’s growing. Bear in mind, these are local, traditional, tier three advertisers” like movie theatres and car dealerships, the “bread and butter of local TV advertising. It’s been tremendous to see the interest in connected TV and these digital audiences, I think for good reason.”
Bringing together local linear and digital via TotalTV makes it possible to re-aggregate hard-to-reach viewers like young males who are “very hard to reach at all or with frequency on linear TV,” Baker adds.
Local TV represents roughly $25 billion of the $70 billion TV advertising industry, according to Baker, “and it has a completely different market structure. There’s targeting of course in the DMA’s and even below the DMA level, which is more possible with some of the new digital technologies like connected TV.
“So the opportunity is really to take local, geographic targeting combined with some of the more traditional ratings demography and put them together in an automated, high-efficiency, easy to operate sales machine. Groups like Hearst have hundreds of TV sellers, so you have to forecast and deliver and account for and report across many thousands of campaigns,” says Baker.
]]>What started with “very humble web ads” about a decade ago has progressed to the point where “where we can show ads on TV that are fully addressed, and one by one, and you can sequence the story,” Catanzaro says in this interview with Beet.TV. “And you can link those exposures to consumer conversions.
“Now you start get to fully leverage the power of that capability. If you think of the next step, now agencies can use this technology to follow the consumer as they journey and tailor their message to the different stage that the consumer goes.”
Although it may sound odd given his tech background at dataxu, Catanzaro talks about the prospect of technology becoming invisible.
“Technology, if anything, we hope will start disappearing. It will enable people who actually want to think about strategy to execute as they wish to actually execute. If technology disappears, your execution, your ability to touch consumers in different stages and different messages will become much more relevant and important.”
He also sees creative becoming more important and creative working with media planning and media strategy becoming central.
“It’s kind of back to the old days, but we couldn’t do it, there was no tools to do it. Now you can tailor ads and target specific populations and segments and you can have a much clearer separation of messaging.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It can typically take several weeks for addressable linear TV campaigns to be created and activated, Catanzaro notes in this interview with Beet.TV. “The integration enables us to do an immediate activation. You can be live in half an hour. That’s really amazing.”
It’s all about reducing the barriers to entry for addressable so that more advertisers take advantage of its targeting and attribution aspects.
“These addressable TV campaigns used to be very manual. You have to use a significant budget to actually justify the amount of work,” says Catanzaro. “These days you can create a campaign for as little as you want, the campaign will go live and there is basically no humans in the loop.”
Embedded in TV sets, Sorenson’s technology can detect whatever is happening on the screen via automatic content recognition. From an advertising standpoint, everything happens in real-time, meaning buyers can start, stop or pause campaigns, or change target audiences, in seconds, as Sorenson’s Stefan Maris explains in this Beet.TV interview.
As it rolls out the Sorenson integration with agency partners, “We think this is going to help them activate much faster and be much more flexible. It also brings them control” in that campaign reporting doesn’t have to wait until the campaign ends. “Now you can actually start working on pacing, you can change pacing on the platform. You can also control frequency.”
Using dataxu’s cross-device targeting solutions, advertisers can allocate frequency by device and now include TV sets that have Sorenson’s technology. The company’s OneView identity and data management platform links consumers across all the devices they own while linking them to households.
“You’re linking that exposure to a commercial that may happen on a desktop or on a mobile device. Or actually somebody may walk by a store and can also connect those. And that happens organically.”
As the Wall Street Journal reports, AMC Networks signed on with Sorenson for targeted ads. Discovery Networks has been in pilot mode as well.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Sling is a really great example of a premium partner that we work with to bring what people would consider to be real television to the connected TV and the programmatic buying space.”
Now dataxu is “seeing interest from all over the place,” LaHaise adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
One common question from buyers is “where’s this coming from, digital or TV,” because those can be very different teams at agencies. “We definitely see interest on both sides and it’s interesting to see the things that people on either side of that table are looking to achieve,” says LaHaise.
For example, some advertisers are looking to extend upon their digital reach. “They’re already running digital video campaigns and they want to get on the big screen.”
On the TV side, advertisers running large, linear campaigns are seeking to reach cord cutters that they can’t find through traditional means. “Connected TV is a great bridge between those two because it gives true television experience like you get through Sling through an execution that can actually take place in real time through private marketplaces that are buying against advanced audiences,” LaHaise says.
The bridge connects campaigns running on TV—lacking identifiers for digital targeting—with digital campaigns associated with cookies or mobile ID’s. “So if you want to extend the addressable capabilities that you find in digital, you have to be able to either have ID’s codified for those devices or a way to connect two different inventory and data sources that aren’t necessarily matched.”
Dataxu’s identity management platform enables advertisers to connect both those different entities at the household level.
“So you have your cookies and mobile ID’s that a campaign might be targeting, they’re going to be normalized to a specific household, and then the inventory that’s coming in from a television has information within it,” says LaHaise. “It’s not going to be cookies and mobile ID’s, but it’s enough that you can actually key off of it and identify a household as well. So even though this transaction is taking place in real time, in fractions of a second, you have a platform that’s linking two datasets that otherwise wouldn’t be the same.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>By most definitions, that is a recession.
But Mike Baker thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. The CEO of ad-tech firm dataxu thinks digital and linear TV can combine to make something greater than the sum of their parts.
“I was a little-bit surprised how people were a little bit off on linear TV,” Baker said, describing the chat at our recent Beet Retreat industry event. “There was a lot of consternation about the viewership, about the ad effectiveness and whatnot.
“We’re definitely feeling some of the frustration, I think, in the middle of the upfront, with some of the viewership and the ad fatigue, if you like, on linear TV.”
But linear TV doesn’t have to stay linear, and ad buys don’t have to be so one-dimensional. These days, partners like dataXu are helping broadcast operators offer advertisers the best of both worlds.
“We have a product called One View, which we’ve used for the connected TV to take digital audiences and translate them into TV,” Baker adds.
“Now what we’re doing is really looking analytically at the linear TV to explain to linear TV buyers how connected TV can increment the reach.”
This interview was conducted by Matt Prohaska.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Dentsu Aegis has gone full throttle on its custom platform, M1, the most recent data integration being with IRI. As announced early last month, M1 will now allow custom audience creation utilizing IRI Verified Audiences and/or IRI ProScores audiences linked to first- and/or third-party data.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Laurenzo explains why he is bullish on current and emerging data sources like automatic content recognition.
“Audience buying is definitely where we want to get to as an industry. Anybody you speak to on both sides of the desk would probably say our reliance on age and gender demographics for transactional purposes is really outdated,” Laurenzo says. “We have all this data that can tell us who’s watching what content, why can’t we transact on those more granular targets?”
Agencies are still “very much held accountable” to segments like adults 18-49 and the price at which they can transact for gross rating points. “It’s ‘as long as you get me this price on this demographic then you’re doing okay’ versus I want you to buy the audience that we need to hit and then if that audience then goes and makes some sort of action.”
Laurenzo says there’s no shortage of audience-based television advertising inventory in the marketplace. “Every network group has their own audience-based platforms that we can leverage and they’re making a lot of inventory available through those platforms.”
The question is what’s the right data to use and when would you use it, according to Laurenzo.
“There are a lot of partners now with ACR technology and I think that’s great,” he says, citing Vizio, Samsung, Samba and Alphonso. “It’s really changing the game in terms of measurement.”
He cautions that despite the plethora of data available, “It’s muddy. Not all the data’s perfect. You have to really go through the methodology of how they’re collecting everything. But I’m actually bullish on the data marketplace.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“There is a return to premium media from an advertiser perspective, an appreciation and a willingness to pay actually a premium price,” says Sandro Catanzaro, Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer of dataxu.
It’s not uncommon to see cost-per-thousand impressions ranging from $10 to $60. “And those are really healthy prices for quality programming,” Catanzaro says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“This is pretty much in contrast with the trends that used to happen like probably ten years ago when it was a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and not necessarily with the quality.”
The amount of TV inventory that can be targeted is growing exponentially. “In the last month, we have seen four-point-seven billion impressions on a TV set” measuring at least 40 inches. “This has been growing very, very significantly in the last three months.”
The last three years have seen dataxu receive an infusion of some $10 million from Sky Media, helping to fuel the company’s investment in software that facilitates people-centric messaging by connecting the dots of device ownership. If the target is potential luxury car buyers, “I can understand all the other devices they own and I can show them ads and target ads on all these other devices,” says Catanzaro.
On the analytics side, exposure can be linked to conversion, for example being exposed to an ad on connected-TV and then logging into a computer and taking an action prompted by the ad.
“So we can create a closed loop from that computer to the exposure on the TV and create attribution in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
Eroding linear TV ratings have made content owners “much more open to have conversations about technology,” Catanzaro says.
One end result for consumers from better targeting will be a reduction in ad loads in programming over the next several years, he adds.
“With the ability to target advanced audiences and only show ads to those individuals you as an advertiser care about, they’re going to pay a premium price but you don’t need to show that many ads to create the same revenue from the media seller side.”
Today’s ad load of 12 to 13 minutes per hour could “drop to probably half, maybe a quarter. While at the same time the cost per unit will rise and probably create incremental revenue for the media seller.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Last month, Dish for the first time quantified its Sling subscriber footprint at 2.21 million households, as The Hollywood Reporter noted.
“The live, streaming space as a whole is about 4.6 million households, so we have near a 50 percent market share of that universe,” Flatley says in this interview with Beet.TV. “The interesting thing with Sling is that each of our households, because of the way we deliver it through IP, is inherently addressable.”
Educating the industry “as to what’s possible” with advanced TV typically begins with an advertiser wanting to target viewers contextually. During March Madness, that could entail running ads in entertainment and sports networks, according to Flatley.
“And what that generally leads to as advertisers get more comfortable with the platform is the advanced TV capabilities that we offer, such as household addressable or overlaying specific demos right onto a buy,” he explains.
For example, an auto manufacturer “may come in and say we’re looking to reach SUV buyers who are in market for a new auto in the next 12 months.” Sling works with a data vendor like Polk to pull those segments, “apply it to the Sling file and serve only matches to that advertiser who are people are actually in market to buy a car.”
Eliminating waste by serve ads only to the most likely prospects is one part of the process of proving value to advertisers.
“So when we do an addressable deal, there will typically be attribution behind that. Using auto, we do sales match back data and tell the advertiser how many people were buying their cars who were exposed to the message,” Flatley says.
It doesn’t matter whether buyers prefer traditional insertion-order transactions or programmatic, he adds. If it’s the latter, “anything we can do directly we can execute programmatically and the pricing is going to be the same.”
In 2017, more than 1,000 new advertisers come onto the Sling platform, “and that really spans every vertical you can imagine. I think where we’ve seen huge uptick initially is with the autos and now the CPG’s coming through.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>To CEO Tim Cadogan, the industry as a whole can succeed as well by adopting recent policies to address widespread quality issues.
“We think that the challenge now has a clear answer. Which is adopt the existing quality standards and run with them,” Cadogan says in this interview with Beet.TV while attending RampUp 2018, the annual LiveRamp event.
He’s referring to the ads.txt initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and standards promulgated by the Trustworthy Accountability Group.
“If a buyer buys based on TAG, buys based on ads.txt as P&G is doing, they solve eighty to ninety percent of the quality problems and they can trust the supply through which they’re buying,” says Cadogan.
OpenX is a new entrant in the video space. “We’ve benefitted from the fact that probably eighty percent of our buyers are existing buyers,” some of which have significant quality video inventory. “In the first two quarters of us working in video, about half of our leading partners are running video inventory through us.”
While announcing its 2017 financial results this week, OpenX said it would spend around $25 million this year on quality initiatives, up from $16 million last year, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
OpenX is the #1 ranked independent exchange for ads.txt, meaning the top 1,000 publishers rank Google first and OpenX second, according to Cadogan. Meanwhile, it’s put some distance between itself and competitors in dealing with the new overseas GDPR privacy regulations, “which puts all of our publishers in compliance with GDPR four months before the deadline.”
Cadogan is on the board of Acxiom, which owns LiveRamp, so he wore two hats at RampUp 2018.
“From an OpenX point of view, we are interested in helping buyers identify the users that they want to go after.” Two areas in particular are mobile and location data, “which we still think is a little bit sub-optimal, could be improved, and we’re very interested in ways to continue to prove identification more generally in the app environment.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Somaya talks about linear optimization across the Walt Disney Co. portfolio and why advertisers are becoming more comfortable providing their first-party data for targeting linear audiences.
“We are now seeing it rapidly approaching us in the form of syndicated data notions within linear television and I think we’re seeing the beginnings of being actually able to use first and third-party data in a linear television framework,” Somaya says. “So true, addressable television if you will.”
Disney is taking those notions “and broadening them out beyond ESPN” through its other media groups.” So it’s not just about the power of ESPN’s first-party knowledge of sports fans “but more broadly, how do our guests at the Walt Disney Company become part of that audience selling notion,” Somaya adds.
ESPN is introducing linear optimization into its linear networks “and I think over the next I’ll call it 12 to 18 months we’ll really start seeing the insertion of first and third-party data into our linear networks in a very, very I think forward looking way.”
One sought-for result is being able to change how television is given attribution for the things that it does, “which today digital gets an outsized amount of attribution for.”
Things are still in the early stages for media buyers wanting to target specific audiences as opposed to demographics. So the next 12 months will constitute the experimental phase, according to Somaya.
“Once we get past that and the systems are able to do this at scale, that’s when the whole game changes.”
Somaya calls live sports “the last bastion of communal viewing” and cites the upcoming launch of streaming service ESPN Plus as “adding even more content that makes our sort of super sports fans get access to things they’ve never gotten before in an almost completely new way.”
He encourages cooperation around data “and understanding how data can become mobile as much as possible. I think the other piece of that coin is allowing consumers to have control over what piece of their data is shared and allowing for an open value exchange.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“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.
]]>The CEO of linear TV and video yield optimization provider Furious Corp. probed the panelists for their thoughts on how bring together all the players that are required to advance the TV and video ecosystem in a way that benefits brands and consumers.
What follows are some of the more salient dialogue and exchanges from Brian Katz, VP of Advanced TV Insights & Strategy at Eyeview; Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer at Alphonso; Tore Tellefsen, VP of TV Solutions at dataxu; and Neil Smith, SVP, Markets at FreeWheel.
On the need for speed of data delivery:
Alphonso has an always-on, real-time index of every program and ad airing across over 200 broadcast and cable networks and major OTT services, so buyers can see the number of units plus reach and frequency for their clients and competitors. “You don’t have to wait six months any more or six weeks anymore. You can get that in real time. And that’s something that TV buyers have never had before. In real time. Speed is key,” said Gall.
On the need for speed in personalized creative:
“We’ve made the process very simple for our clients,” said Katz. “We don’t show every single creative to the creative team. We storyboard the process with their ads, we show where we’re going to come into play with various creative and then we activate it.”
Asked by Swartz whether all clients are so trusting, Katz explained, “It’s not all marketers, all brands. And that is the challenge for us to educate and to develop that trust with clients and marketers.”
How does one get people who are very comfortable with traditional TV media to embrace more data-driven decisioning? “The short answer is patience and repetition,” said Tellefsen. “What we try to focus on or try to push and emphasize is get as many people to the table as possible and not focus on sort of specific point solutions or specific capabilities but spending a lot of time talking about the art of the possible. Here’s how other people are employing it.”
Said Smith: “We want to bridge that gap between marketers and consumers. We consciously work across the value chain. We do tons of education and advocacy to brands, agencies, agency trading desks, buy-side technology companies, data companies.”
Asked how much of an influence fear has on peoples’ ability to change, Katz responded, “I haven’t seen any fear out there. I think it’s just a lack of education and the unknown that people fear and maybe the way certain businesses are set up sort of the fear of losing certain budgets or influence over decision making.”
Will vertical tech stacks become horizontal ones in the desire for a more unified TV and video ecosystem?
“Right now in the TV to mobile targeting business or the attribution business it’s still probably in the innovation or early adoption phase of our industry and we have to really work together,” said Gall.
So is it the gradual consolidation of the largest media companies that will bring the tipping point to the industry or the power of advertisers to demand faster change? “What is going to have a greater influence on us thriving and not just surviving for scraps as an industry through the current storm that we’re in,” asked Swartz.
Katz: “I think it’s a combination of consolidation and collaboration.”
Tellefsen, speaking about the impact of companies like Amazon and Netflix, called those digital upstarts “tremendous competitors and tremendous forces in the industry. And it’s forcing everyone in this room to rethink how they do business, who they do business with and how they’re going to remain relevant to brands and advertisers for the future.”
Smith: “I think it’s the ability to put all the pieces together to deliver that that’s been the challenge that we’re working through. I think that gets a lot easier when you have consolidation and you have a critical mass to bring those solutions to market in ways that they can connect together and actually work.”
And on the need for greater collaboration: “I think the marketers are demanding it,” said Gall. “Within three years if you don’t deliver it, you’re dead. So I really think they’re pushing the piece.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>dataxu started down the road of expanding its OneView audience management platform some four years ago. Back then, the focus was to “solve the problem around mobile advertising” and being able to tie digital and cookies with mobile devices.
“What dataxu did at the time is they had designed the platform and the system with an eye toward TV in the future. So we built in the notion of household and individuals,” Tellefsen says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
With OneView, a variety of marketer’ data, when combined with mobile data about consumers, facilitates targeting people at the household level for connected-TV.
Another key piece of the solution pertained to inventory. This involved working with publishers and demand-side platforms “to bring to bear all of the best publishers and apps that are available across the connected TV universe and make it available on the platform for our clients to activate against,” Tellefsen says.
It represents a shift from contextual buying of connected-TV to deciding which audiences are most attractive and “do that across connected-TV and online video and mobile video.”
Tellefsen cites the example of a dataxu mobile streaming client that’s using its device ID’s and targeting those customers on connected-TV to do subscription upgrades. Other uses are taking first-party data—people who have visited a website or signed up for a subscription—translating that into digital audiences “and then reaching those same consumers with offers around their product and their service.”
Given the paradigm shift from context to audience targeting, educating advertisers and agencies requires “patience and repetition,” says Tellefsen.
“It’s not so much about describing the Swiss Army Knife and what it can do but how have other people employed these tools and these capabilities to solve business challenges.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“That is certainly one of the objectives for us as well as for a number of partners that we work with in the space, and it certainly seems like it’s going to require a number of stakeholders to get to where the industry wants us frankly to be,” says Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud.
With 97 of the top 100 US advertisers and slightly less of the top 100 globally, there’s very little in the way of data that Oracle hasn’t seen on the digital side. Now a core focus, according to Harrison, is to “deliver solutions to all flavors of TV, from national linear to addressable VOD, linear to connected and OTT.”
Oracle doesn’t lack for partnerships in the TV space, counting Hulu as an early collaborator and also The Trade Desk, DataXu and TubeMogul, all of which have been “investing quite a bit to solve for TV through their own initiatives so we are working to align closely with them,” Harrison says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
The first time that Oracle Data Cloud enabled its purchase-based audiences for linear national TV was through a linkup with Simulmedia, something company founder Dave Morgan called “a defining moment in the transformation of TV to a data-driven, audience-targeted business.”
Asked about the quest for unified, cross-platform measurement, Harrison says clients are indeed looking for a more holistic approach to planning and activating both digital and TV. That would mean no longer having to ““drop that digital audience that you’ve customized and invested a lot of time and effort into at the gate and then pick up a totally different audience derived very differently to solve for it in, let’s say, TV and other media.”
A second priority for Oracle’s clients is measurement, i.e. what’s really driving lift, and to bring its digital methodology to the TV space. “That’s where again you come up against the uniqueness of each of these different media types and the need to address them first in and of themselves and then in a more overarching way across media.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That used to be the view in TV land – “one day”. But one ad exec elbow-deep in the data says that day is already upon us.
“I spend a lot of time in the marketplace talking with partners, talking with agencies and brands who are exploring this space, and I really think it’s reached a tipping point,” according to dataxu’s Tore Tellefsen.
“A year ago, we were talking about exploratory or test budgets and … dipping your toes into the water to figure out what’s going to work and what’s not. But with the advent of the skinny (TV) bundles, the availability of live, linear, dynamically ad inserted ads to consumers is just incredibly exciting.”
Boston-based dataxu’s ad-tech makes billions of ad impressions daily available for buyers to buy, and it analyses the follow-on behaviour of users to better rate the same inventory on future opportunities. Sling TV inventory is available to buy through the platform.
According to eMarketer, US addressable TV ad expenditures will grow 65.8% to reach $1.26 billion in 2017.
Addressable TV spending will make up just 1.7% of total TV ad expenditures ($72.72 billion) in the country this year. By 2019, that proportion will grow to 4.0%.
“We see this (explosion) happening for real, every day, every month in just terms of the growth of inventory that’s available, the number of households that are consuming ad supported connected TV applications like Sling TV,” Tellefesen adds.
This video is part of series on developments with OTT. The series is presented by Sling TV and DISH Media Sales. Please find more videos from the series here. For the Sling/DISH report on OTT and the marketplace, download this report.
]]>This is not lost on marketing analytics provider DataXu, which has been in the programmatic space since 2009, fittingly using combinatorial algorithms originally developed by one of its co-founders for guiding NASA’s Mars missions. DataXu has a broad footprint in the demand-side platform side of the business and has set its sights on helping media companies so as to stay one step ahead of would-be competitors Amazon et al.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show, DataX CEO Mike Baker explains what the buy-side wants from programmatic TV and the race to beat digital giants to help the sell-side better cope with automated transactions and measurement.
A big focus of DataXu to date has been on connected OTT screens via its core DSP called TouchPoint. Via self-serve software buyers can track campaigns running across seven types of devices, providing the benefit of automation “unlike some of what’s plaguing some of the TV targeting with linear streams,” said Baker.
Along with automation, he identifies application of digital audience insights and campaign attribution as three main issues of interest among buyers. With insights, it can be as granular as using mobile audience data to target a live ad on ESPN.
“That’s really provocative and I think an industry first,” Baker observes. OTT inventory “is much more valuable when you’re able to buy these kinds of granular targets with your data.”
There’s a shift by some ad tech companies toward the digital TV landscape given the continued growth in viewing habits. That’s where are Amazon, Facebook and Google come in.
“I think everybody at this point sort of understands this is the next frontier for these companies and they come very well equipped indeed” with data, analytics and other resources. DataXu is busily developing its media company segment to help some of these very large incumbent TV players adapt and fit up to be competitive with these Internet giants as they “encroach inevitably on TV,” Baker says.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>