This episode of the BeetCast is hosted by Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp and a longtime Beet.TV contributor.

Linear TV provides the reach and value that advertisers want.   Furthermore steaming is not for everyone as a third of the country doesn’t have fixed broadband, Morgan notes.

While overall viewership for linear TV will continue to decline, CPM’s will rise and the overall marketing spend on TV will remain relatively stable, he predicts.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.

The #BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.

The macro change that will take place in the TV industry will be massive dislocations and reallocations of billions of dollars worth of media advertising spend over the course of the next number of months. This doesn’t mean that digital companies will be the winners and everyone else will lose. Rather, the steps that people and companies take right now will be a determining factor of their ability to stay afloat.

“Historically, we find that the companies that become the most myopic, that focus on how to just get through today, how to just get through this week, will find themselves running out of steam in a couple months as fatigue sets in,” Morgan says.

Those companies that are able to take a longer and more measured view will likely be successful. There could be unique business opportunities to come from the pandemic, too. Morgan said that Simulmedia has never been as busy as they have been the past two weeks. This is because there has been a general growth around advanced advertising and there have been significant cancellations in live sports, so billions of advertising dollars that were allocated for sporting events now cannot run.

“That advertising needs to happen,” Morgan said. “They need to create that awareness among those consumers to be able to meet their business goals.”

Simulmedia has spent much of their time the past few weeks redeploying money that was targeted to sports viewers so that advertisers could still hit those audiences. Morgan believes that this industry disruption is due to the advertising schedule being traditionally built off of tentpole events like March Madness and other large live events.

“We’re not going to be able to find audiences based on old truisms of types of content and types of programming,” Morgan says. “We’re going to have to rely on data, we’re going to have to rely on analytics, we’re going to have to rely on automation, we’re going to have to show advertisers real transparency. This is going to ultimately fracture infrastructure processes that were sort of baked in concrete over decades.”

Morgan believes it’s important to calm his employees in the short term, but more crucial to look ahead and explore what they will be doing in the third and fourth quarter of 2021 and 2022 and get prepared for the long haul.

“How the media industry responds, how we are able to deliver news, information, how we’re able to deliver entertainment programming to help people through this is going to be important, and that’s going to be paid for with advertising. We’re going to have to find ways to make this work,” Morgan says.

This video was recorded remotely using the #BeetCam 

NBCU’s aim with CFlight was to give advertisers a sense of how their marketing campaigns are being seen, regardless of time or location.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan, whose company helps brands use data and targeting to buy ads in linear TV, says: “It’s the most progressive thing we’ve seen in TV advertising measurement in ten years. since we had the C3.”

C3 was launched to include DVR viewing in TV measurement. But today’s viewing options are far wider than DVRs. And TV networks are struggling to retain advertisers because single-channel measurement shows declining linear viewership.

That is why the industry has been scrambling to piece together viewing across all devices.

“CFlight it lets you count apples as apples,” Morgan says. “(It answers questions like) ‘What is linear viewing?’, ‘What is C3 viewing?’ … whether it was delayed viewing or exact linear.

“The easier it is for more people to buy on the same thing, the more the marketplace will grow, the more it will accelerate, easier it is for spend to happen.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.

TV operators are familiar with setting the terms of the deals through which marketers get to buy air-time – even the very process which leads to deals getting done at all.

But, in an age where digital media have ripped up rules of other advertiser funded channels, TV must also learn to let advertisers have more control.

That is the view of Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, a company whose platform helps marketers better target TV viewers.

“The future of all marketing and all advertising is building products and building processes that are centered on the advertiser,” says Morgan in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“They must exert more control, we need to let them determine the actual inventory they take on a spot-by-spot basis much more. We need to let them make decisions.”

Morgan is talking about a TV ad buying system that operators themselves have historically controlled – the annual “upfronts”, in which channel owners present their upcoming content roster for ad buyers to bid against ahead of broadcast.

Now TV is learning a thing or two from the web and online video, which have dispensed with these manual modes of selling inventory and instead sell through programmatic platforms, automatically.

Morgan says the lesson from search and social is that, when a publisher enables that for a buyer, it can say: “We think we’re both going to win.”

He acknowledges automation raises fears, but thinks it can grow the market.

“Particularly the smaller emerging marketers who would love to exploit TV, they don’t want to work the old fashioned way with hand-sold ads,” Morgan adds. “They want a high degree of automation.

“The pressures that the TV companies are under in the U.S. from Wall Street will drive them more towards putting automation in the places they need, so that they can invest in things like content development.”

This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom.   EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“There’s a really big mission. Whether AT&T itself is going to be able to do it or not we’ll see,” Morgan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses his Simulmedia advanced TV solutions company having achieved profitability and its new Transparent TV offering.

Although AT&T has the means to distribute its own content, it will need to work with multiple MVPD’s to scale household addressable advertising. Simulmedia collaborates with about a dozen of the top US television companies to aggregate and scale audience targeting, so Morgan understands what’s at play.

“It’s certainly trying to bring together the whole ecosystem,” he says of Xandr. “I think it realizes that it’s going to require a lot of partners to get there.”

Asked whether the combined assets under Xandr—which include AppNexus—will constitute another walled garden, Morgan says that’s an overused term. It’s not a “binary issue” of whether a business is either a walled garden or not, he says.

“I think companies that use data have to maintain certain protections around that data for proprietary reasons, for privacy reasons. I think clearly AT&T is going to be able to leverage a massive amount of consumer data and consumer media data and communications data for advertising that will certainly be able to drive more relevance, the title of this conference,” Morgan says.

He expresses praise for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s presentations at the conference, noting that Stephenson was “pretty clear” that he’ll be making more acquisitions. “He talked about why they did the deal, and he talked a lot of specifics about the advertising business and what they need to do.”

Morgan mentions in passing that Simulmedia has achieved profitability and explains the unveiling of Transparent TV in June of 2018. “We’ve unbundled our audience network offering so that we’re providing more direct automation to marketers,” he says.

With Transparent TV, advertisers can directly manage their campaigns against strategic audiences with total transparency on media outputs, marketing outcomes, competitive insights and pricing, according to a news release. This includes spots, networks, dayparts, GRPs and CPMs, and such marketing outcomes as reach maximization, conversions, and sales attribution and ROI.

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.

“Unless the TV companies are selling it, no one can buy it,” Morgan says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018. “Having their recognition that this is a way to deliver better value for the marketers and make more money themselves has been a really big step.”

In the “old days” of TV, a $3 million, three-week linear TV ad campaign might have involved buys on 10 networks and 110 spots. “But now that everything is fragmented, you really need to do it more precisely. So for us, that same campaign might be 70 networks and 3,000 spots.”

Post-campaign analysis used to take a month following the campaign’s end. Now it can be delivered in one day, showing not just gross rating points and demographics but how much of the advertiser’s target audience was reached. Simulmedia matches those data to the advertisers’ first-party purchase data at the household level. Therein lies the challenge of the future for traditional advertising and media agencies.

“The agencies just are not structured or staffed to be able to execute campaigns at that level,” says Morgan. “You need a lot of software automation, which we have, you need a lot of predicative analytics, which we’ve built” to traffic the creative and provide daily reporting.

Simulmedia counts among its clients Choice Hotels, Clorox, Expedia and Home Depot.

The company is still “very, very focused” on linear TV and the biggest reason is “that’s where the money is. Number two, that’s where the under-optimized opportunity is.”

Morgan sees the need for more collaboration among industry players given the growing importance of cross-screen TV viewing. He cites the example of Simulmedia’s partnership with Facebook.

“If you’re running a retargeting, campaign it’s natural for you to want to understand what people are likely to get a TV ad in the same day or two. So that you can make sure that you can maximize the proximity and time and to person in the delivery of those two messages.”

While the definition of TV is bound to keep changing, Morgan believes one thing that’s certain is the importance of viewing on large screens. “Maybe it’s not going to be the same hardware device but the large-screen format is going to continue to be really powerful,” says Morgan.

This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018.   Please visit this page for more coverage. 

BACK TO VEGAS: CES 2018

Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan tells Beet.TV his current company, which helps advertisers and agencies link consumer purchase behaviour to set-top box data, will switch on a software-as-a-service model in the next couple of months.

Until now, Simulmedia was working manually with its customers to tackle the emerging opportunities in advanced TV ad-buying.

“We built a lot of our tech platform anticipating that, at some point, it would be made available as software,” Morgan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“My previous two businesses both had standalone software offerings. We started last year to start unbundle that so we could disconnect the activation of the media service from the predictive analytic part of our platform and our user identity graph.

“We’re going to be launching our first beta customers over the next  month, two months, and we’re going to have this in full production by the end of this year.”

In the last few months, we have covered moves by Time Inc’s Viant and AOL’s ONE to acquire and launch online software platforms as services that let ad buyers control more of the process.

Morgan says TV advertising has traditionally stood apart from – and, arguably, behind -other media channels, which have come up to speed with data-driven targeting techniques.

He says TV advertising should no longer be an “opaque silo”, with proliferating, fragmenting viewing across new channels meaning measurement is now full of holes – gaps that a a range of vendors like Simulmedia are trying to fill in.

We interviewed Morgan last week at the LUMA Partners Digital Media Summit.

The rule would compel cable companies to offer their programming not just over their own boxes but through those of third-party vendors, too.

One ad industry veteran things that is going to shake things up – and quickly. “This is going to have enormous implications for all advanced TV advertising,” according to Simlumedia CEO Dave Morgan, pointing to three big changes:

1. “We’re going to have a lot more devices out there that have data and that you can address at.”
2. “A lot of pressure’s going to be put on television networks to change the revenue mix. They’re going to have to rely on TV advertising much more.”
3. “It’s going to put a lot of pressure on brands and buying agencies who are going to have to embrace this new way of buying very quickly. This order is going to go through in two years.”

Morgan’s Simulmedia helps advertisers place ads through new TV platforms, paying on guaranteed business outcomes.

“They’re world is going to change on them whether they want it or not,” Morgan adds. “If they don’t start availing themselves of data-driven TV advertising today, they’re going to be caught flat-footed.”

This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis.  Please visit this page for more videos from Seville. 

Increasingly emboldened by the guarantees that are offered by online advertising, some TV ad buyers are calling for an improvement. And that is what former Tacoda head honcho Dave Morgan‘s current business, Simulmedia, is enabling.

“We decided to put our money where our mouth is,” Morgan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We’re going to guarantee the actual performance of a branded TV ad against a measured biz outcome – typically, that’s purchase or sales, it could be website visits or a media mixed attribution model that the client does.”

Morgan says pricing TV ads based on their actual business effect “de-risks” the buy for advertisers: “Television advertisers has never had the closed loop capabilities that online have. Brand advertisers want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to make sure they have significant reach but also that it’s accountable.”

Morgan was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.

Look for a convergence of digital trends, he predicts. “The big trends are: all media is going digital, all media is going on demand, all media is becoming personal and all media is becoming accountable. Those are certainties. There are questions about how it unfolds, but in next three to four years it will really hit,” he says, adding that the root of these changes began decades ago.

Morgan has helmed several leading firms in the industry, including founding and running Tacoda, the shop that launched behavioral marketing as well as the ad serving network Real Media. Now he leads Simulmedia, an audience-based TV advertising technology company that is focusing on marrying audience buying with TV, especially in the currently upfront. “I’ve been on a twenty- to twenty-five year path toward this digital change in media and advertising, and I didn’t want to miss the critical moments or innings in the game when we saw things that would take decades to develop finally happen,” he says in explaining why he’s stayed in the business for so long, and steered so many companies.

His tenure had led to being known as a “change agent,” and some of that comes from being in the right place at the right time, he says. “The number one thing to being a good change agent is to go someplace changing. Then pick the things you can actually affect. Big markets won’t be changed by one person or one company, but if you can read the trends right you can get in them.”

Morgan was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.  This is part of the Media Revolutionaries series presented by Microsoft and Xaxis.   Please visit this page to view more from the series.

But now some marketers are beginning to demand publishers and networks charge them only when ads have generated an actual sale.

“The kind of accountability that the advertisers are getting used to is now infecting the TV marketplace,” according to Simulmedia CEO and digital ad veteran Dave Morgan, whose company is helping ad buyers plan TV campaigns with digital efficiency. “We’re going to see a shift from selling just on media outputs like gross rating points and demographics to business outcomes – by sales…

(This will be accomplished) not by a media mix model on what happens a year ago or a campaign you did nine months ago … but tying off on sales data with retailers, packaged goods companies and loyalty cards – connecting every singe TV impression to its individual impact at the household or personal level on sales.”

He was interviewed at the TV Of Tomorrow show in New York by Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV.

In this AdAge article, Morgan concludes channel fragmentation, a desire for accountability and digital envy are finally moving TV folks to invest in addressable advertising, programmatic technology and better targeting.

“In total, there are probably 10-12 million U.S. homes enabled for addressable TV ads today, with that number expected to grow to 20 million in 2015 and possibly 40 million in 2016,” he writes.

But Morgan issues the same cautious prognosis delivered during Beet.TV’s Cannes sessions: “Change won’t happen overnight. But, as marketers demand to learn exactly how each and every ad spot is performing for them … they will start pushing for that change to happen faster.”

Disclosure: Simulmedia was a sponsor of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions which includes the video on this page.  We have republished this video today.

“There’s been a sea-change in the attitudes but, more importantly, the confidence of the broadcast and major cable network groups,” according to Nielsen global product leadership president Steve Hasker.

“They’ve realized consumers are consuming more video. Consumers prefer professionally-produced content. Professionally-produced content is hard to make. The TV networks are good at it. They’re in a good position if they play their cards right. The quality of television programming is unprecedented. That augurs well.”

• Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan said: “The television industry is a highly competitive oligopoly. They know they need to move. Most TV companies would like to hold on to things as it is and slowly add pieces.”
• Media agency Carat’s global president Doug Ray said his firm is exploring new ways to evaluate campaigns for clients: “We’re looking at things like agency-based model and attribution modelling to get to the sale-based understanding.”
• Campbell Soup Co. integrated marketing VP Yin Woon Rani said the distinction between generalists and specialists in this fast-moving industry can make life challenging: “If you look away for  second, you’ve missed something.”

They were speaking with Luma CEO Terence Kawaja in a panel during Beet.TV’ssummit on the future of television advertising at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

“A lot of the (advertising) approaches that worked in the digital world over the last 20 years are finally ready for application to TV,” Morgan tells Beet.TV.

“(Back then), we had this idea that this information superhighway was going to plug in to the back of the TV set. Then the web came along and brought the PC-based online world. That, to me, was a distraction.

“The most impactful, largest-reaching advertising medium by far is linear television.”

Morgan, whose Simulmedia helps TV advertisers buy targeted audiences even in linear channels, was speaking with Luma CEO Terence Kawaja during Beet.TV’s summit on the future of television advertising during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.

Disclaimer:  Beet’s coverage of Cannes is sponsored by Simulmedia.

At Cannes, MediaLink created a a number of high-profile seminars for its clients along visibility for itself with banners and signage on Le Croisette and hosting the most talked about party of the Festival at the nearby Hotel du Cap Eden Roc.  The party featured a performance by Mariah Carey.

We we spoke with her on Tuesday, on a yacht cruising near Cannes.    Handling the interview is Dave Morgan, longtime associate of Millard.

Disclaimer:  Dave Morgan is CEO of Simulmedia, which is the sponsor of Beet.TV coverage of the Cannes Festival.

“There is some automation that can come in from the digital world,” says Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan. “But the idea of changing the ads at the individual set-top box or changing at the network at the last seconds or hours or days is beyond the capacity of TV and is probably setting the wrong expectations.”

Simulmedia ingests data on how 15 million Americans watch TV, second-by-second, and the performance of more than 700,000 US TV ads to help advertisers gauge their effectiveness, says Morgan.

“For decades, the only data that mattered in television advertising, was the Nielsen rating, the number of gross rating points and sex-age demographics,” he adds. “With 15 years of digital marketing and advertising under our belts, now people want more from the TV world, too.”

“It’s been something we’ve watched from the sidelines as a spectator,” Morgan tells Beet.TV. “For the first time, we have positions on both the sell side and the buy side.”

Simulmedia brings an avalanche of data to bear on TV ad buying, including using a “super-panel” comprising Nielsen, Kantar, MRI, TRA, NBI and purchase data. It is looking for specific content for specific brands in the upfronts, which Morgan says account for about $20bn (30%) of the $75bn US TV advertising business.

Despite the increasing closeness of online video and TV advertising, Morgan is cautious about prospects for dynamic, addressable ad insertion on TV, saying the platforms typically don’t support such a prospect but that savvy targeting can customise ad targeting a few weeks in advance. “For TV, that’s close to real-time,” Morgan quips.

We spoke with Morgan last week about Cannes as part of our preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”

Beet Partners with Simulmedia for Cannes Coverage

We are very pleased that Simulmedia is the presenting sponsor of Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2014.   As part of this association, we will be producing a summit with Simulmedia and Videology on the future of television advertising on Tuesday, June 17 at the Videology Cabana on Le Croisette.    Here is a list of the panelists and moderator.

*Marco Bertozzi, President, Audience on Demand, EMEA & N.A., VivaKi

*Tom Bowman, SVP Sales Operations and Commercial Production, BBC Worldwide

*Scott Ferber, Chairman & CEO, Videology

*Steve Hasker, President, Nielsen Global Product Leadership

*Terence Kawaja, CEO Luma Partners (moderator)

*Dave Morgan, CEO & Founder, Simulmedia

*Yin Woon Rani, VP of Integrated Marketing, Campbell Soup Company

Morgan’s company provides digital data to help TV buyers with ad decisioning.

More on the hype surrounding the NewFronts in this USA Today column by Michael Wolff.

As the use of data becomes more prevalent, brands will also increasingly look to hire data scientists to help understand how to best use data. “Data is changing what you can outsource and can’t and we are needing to hire more data scientiests. They will play a more important role in the enterprise.”

Also, data will spawn more addressable advertising. “Data-driven audience-based advertising will be the precursor to addressable,” he says, adding that addressable advertising can improve the relevance overall for ads. The most likely next step in addressable ads will be in testing different creative for various products rather than changing the ad for each person, he says.

The addressable TV universe stretches across about 12 million homes and that number should hit 20 million in the next year, he adds. For more insight into addressable TV and data-driven ads, check out this video interview.

Disclaimer:  Simulmedia sponsored Beet.TV coverage of the 4A’s.

“We can deliver, in one campaign in a day, on TV with normal linear 30-second spots, more targeted reach than YouTube can deliver all day,” Morgan tells Beet.TV

Simulmedia sets out to bring an avalanche of data to bear on TV ad buying. “We have viewing data on about 60m Americans – and we have purchase data on about 8m of them,” Morgan says.

“The standard measurements used in the industry today – the 50,000-person Nielsen sample – cannot see at that level of granularity across those spots. We’re finding the needles in the haystack of thousands and thousands of spots, aggregating them by the ton and delivering them to the advertiser.”

“We can’t have real-time ad deliveries in linear TV – the infrastructure doesn’t support it – that’s many, many years away,” says Simulmedia CEO and founder Dave Morgan.

“TV ads have to be scheduled – in most cases, that’s weeks in advance; in least cases, that’s days in advance. A lot of folks that talk about programmatic may find themselves disappointed in waiting.”

But Tacoda founder Morgan, whose current company brings an avalanche of data to bear on TV ad buying, says “proto-programmatic” could gain traction in TV by bringing some aspects of online and TV buying together.

Work carried out by Nielsen and Simulmedia shows the two media are colliding but TV stays in pole position.

The Tacoda founder now helms Simulmedia, a company bringing an avalanche of data to bear on TV ad buying – a process Morgan says deserves to be made more like internet ad buying.

“TV just rotates 2/two thirds of its spots according to sex, age and gender – not even picking a show-specific (spot),” Morgan tells Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show. “Just using data to better allocate selection and placing of TV increases yield in campaigns by several hundreds percent.”

Simulmedia doesn’t yet want to revolutionize TV with advanced addressability. Morgan says the company’s data, including from 50 million set-top boxes and numerous measurement agencies, can improve matters today.

“TV has a chance for at least $20 or 30 billion of optimization within its exiting targeting infrastructure, just using data better in enhancing content-based buying with audience buying,” he says.

We spoke with him on Monday evening at opening night MediaLink party.