Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor
Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.
Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence
YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.
David George, CEO of Pixability
The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.
Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony
Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.
Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’
“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”
Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability
While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.
Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability
“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”
You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“The shift from linear to digital is happening, and that just continues to happen at a rapid pace,” David George, CEO of video ad-tech startup Pixability, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Last year really accelerated that shift. CTV has picked up as the dominant way for folks to consume content, which makes it attractive to brands.”
Media buyers use his company’s PixabilityONE platform to improve the targeting of their ads on YouTube, the Google-owned video site whose ad revenue surged 31% to $19.8 billion last year. However, the company is expanding to CTV services including Amazon Fire and Roku as their viewership grows.
“YouTube on TV has been a dominant platform for advertisers to reach their audiences,” George said. “We were the first company to actually execute YouTube on TV campaigns as a third party with YouTube.”
Pixability’s platform is integrated with YouTube, giving it access to application program interface (API) data as part of the YouTube Measurement Program. Pixability provides data analysis tools to help brands and their agencies with targeting, both as a self-service platform and with managed services — or a hybrid of the two.
“Some of the largest clients on YouTube actually leverage us as their YouTube partner,” George said. “Our clients are getting more sophisticated around video advertising, which is fantastic. There’s a keen interest around connected TV, which we’re at the forefront with our clients as well.”
With many people spending more time at home during the pandemic, YouTube’s usage and adoption grew — especially on CTV devices like smart TVs. YouTube is the dominant ad-based video on demand (AVOD) service for 18- to 54-year-olds, George said.
“Brands, as they’ve learned more about its reach into the living room are looking at it much more as a strategic, if not the most strategic platform to reach their audiences,” he said. “In the coming 12 to 18 months, you’re going to see a lot of innovation around that. For Pixability in particular, you will some new product innovations coming out over the coming year. In addition to that, some relevant partnerships that will help accelerate the whole industry and be extremely valuable for our customers.”
You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We’ve provided the opportunity for people to toe dip into connected TV. So we see that as really a big part of our future,” George says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.
Referred to in some circles as “the trade desk for walled gardens,” Pixability’s foundation is in helping advertisers target audiences within YouTube and Facebook. “We are the only technology platform that has access to what is really the largest video inventory, and we get to leverage the unique capabilities for targeting and so forth on YouTube and Facebook,” George says.
In recent years Pixability has extended its footprint to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify. “Were uniquely positioned at the moment in really what’s a super exciting space.”
During most of his tenure at Facebook, George led the Mobile Publisher Solutions team, which drove rapid growth for Facebook’s Audience Network, according to a Pixability news release. His video software experience includes stints at Celtra, KickApps and Maven Networks, which was acquired by Yahoo.
“Think of us as a tech player that sits on top of the Google stack as well as Facebook.”
Asked about consumer data, George says, “We can leverage first-party data from clients, but it’s less of a challenge because we live within the walled gardens. All the data is available to us.”
As part of the YouTube Measurement Program, Pixability gets access to “a bunch of data that brands will use for insights about the audiences, and it obviously helps us with helping them find their audiences on these platforms.”
One of the company’s main focuses right now is around planning capabilities for targeting down to “micro audiences. That doesn’t exist in the market outside of Pixability.”
“They’ve been our trusted partner for many years and we’re one of their largest partners there,” he says of YouTube. “But now also having a cross-platform story that now will extend into connected TV.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>“A lot of folks refer to us as the trade desk for walled gardens,” says Pixability CEO David George. “The next evolution for us is into OTT or CTV.”
Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well, George explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
The big six “tend to look at YouTube and Facebook in different groups where the independents and brands they really get value around our ability to do cross platform. We provide a lot of efficiencies and scale in that environment because we can move ads and budgets around to different platforms.”
Earlier this month, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs, as MediaPost reports.
Part of the reason for Pixability’s presence at DMEXCO is its expansion to international markets. In addition to Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the company has an office in London.
While video consumption and advertising “is growing exponentially,” says George, what’s really exciting is what’s going on in OTT. I myself recently cut the cord. It’s a liberating experience.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
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