If you are Comscore, you take a strategic investment round.
That’s what the measurement giant just did, taking an investment from Charter Communications, Qurate Retail and Cerberus Capital Management, which will jointly take $204 million convertible preferred stock. That money will be used to repay a $204 million debt to Starboard.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Kline, the EVP of Charter Communications and president of its Spectrum Reach division, explains that the deal is about more than just money – it’s about the future of media measurement.
Comscore nears a deal with Charter, Qurate Retail and Cerberus https://t.co/VXFmcWx007 pic.twitter.com/qBmH1OCxob
— CMO Today (@wsjCMO) January 7, 2021
According to the announcement, Charter will provide Comscore with “enhanced access to deidentified and aggregated data sources and rights (to) richer and more granular consumer-level data sets”, whilst Comcast also just extended a deal in which it provides data to Comscore.
“What we were trying to do is to give Comscore the opportunity to really have census-based data in virtually all their markets,” Kline says.
“Between the rights deals that we have with our data and their extension with Comcast in the Comcast markets, Comscore now has probably the most exhaustive set of impressions to help advertisers find their audiences in a more granular way, and to help them do backend analytics on attribution to see who actually saw the ad and who acted on it.
“We’ve got millions of set top boxes and connected devices with our app on it collecting viewership data – whereas in, say, a market like Cleveland, maybe Nielsen has 1500, if that, local people meters.”
Comscore’s announcement describes the deal as “a watershed moment in our history,”, saying it will help it pursue:
In recent years, Comscore itself has been investing to bring forward its media measurement infrastructure for the age of cross-media consumption, including through a merger with TV’s Rentrak.
The additional new challenge is tackling cross-device in a way that also promotes user privacy.
Charter’s Kline thinks the Comscore deal does that in a way that enhances local media buying.
“When you have Charter and you have Comcast, and then you have other data sets that Comscore already had prior to us – I believe it’s Vizio and Dish and AT&T – it means you can be more precise,” he says.
“On a national basis, there’s still a lot of set tops and a lot of apps being aggregated. But the first place, I think, for aggregation is on local. And then they’ll take that local number and they’ll bump that up, meaning Comscore, to a national sample.”
]]>“My analogy always was what if Mars attacked?” Kline says. “There’s all of these country conflicts, but if our asses were all on the line, just like a good sci-fi movie, we’d have to pull together and make it through. Mars did attack, in the form of Facebook and Amazon and Google. They attacked a few years back, so we’re pulling together now to try and give scale to all this advanced advertising that the ad tech players have been able to do.”
While MVPDs and networks continue to battle each other at times over things like affiliation agreements, they recognize that they need each other for scale in advertising. The resulting data has been enormously helpful in leading smaller businesses to television. Kline cites success stories like Peloton and Wayfair, who have used TV as a leveraging point for growing their brands. Spectrum Reach’s partner strategy also helps bolster its data strategy: Spectrum Reach works with Ampersand to catch up on advertising data collection, while 605 worked with the company to build out an audience app that lets users customize their own schedules.
This has also led MVPDs to explore the use of new products and advanced advertising technology. The launch of an ad portal has been a gateway for businesses of all budgets to get a more advanced look at data and customize advertising that suits them. Kline also mentions an audience app that their partner 605 designed for them that sifts through set-box top data to optimize a schedule.
“That’s been a game changer for us,” Kline says. “That’s taken the conversation away from ‘Just give me ESPN and USA Network’ to 50 networks deep.”
The redefining role of MVPDs as linear and digital continue to evolve has led to more precise data as well as more advanced forms of advertising. Kline says that this creates an environment ripe for opportunity for all stakeholders involved.
“I think from the local perspective to the national perspective, we’re going to make the ecosystem work much better,” says Kline.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“I’ll tell you why,” Kline told Sean Cunningham, CEO of VAB, in conversation with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media in November. “We have census data, it’s pristine. We know it’s attached to a household. Everything we do is aggregated, anonymized and privacy compliant. It’s the best tool for an advertiser to use.”
Spectrum Reach’s data, aggregated with partners including Ampersand Media and Canoe, enables the company to make network inventory addressable. That means a cable company can go to a potential ad client, like BMW, and help them target specific audiences based on the data that Spectrum Reach sets the company up with. According to Kline, roughly $65-70 billion is spent in network advertising annually, so the goal isn’t to necessarily win over more ad dollars – even as performance marketing brands like DTC companies are exploring the arena to diversify from Facebook and Google. Kline wants to attract more dollars, but also make the existing dollars spent smarter.
“I wouldn’t say we’re breaking new ground with this, I’d say we’re catching up because the ad tech players have been able to do this,” says Kline. “But we are now in the position to compete heavily with them, with the best data and highest quality content.”
While Kline acknowledges Spectrum isn’t reinventing the industry, he says that it’s most critical asset is being able to make TV addressable at scale. As the definition of TV has changed, Kline says, marketers just want to be able to decipher who their audience is and how to reach them. Now, Spectrum can offer that – it’s no longer just talking about offering it.
“It’s a work in progress,” says Kline. “We didn’t do ourselves any good by talking about it too early, but now we’re there and we need to just shut up and make it happen.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“We are aggregating all our addressability, not just for the two minutes an hour we sell to our local national spot buyers but soon national networks like AMC or USA Network, or pick any network, will be able to come to NCC and be able to make their national time addressable on our platforms,” Kline says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.”
NCC is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Three months ago it expanded into digital ad buying so as to be able to deliver cross-screen campaigns across linear, VOD, addressable TV, digital video, display, social media, out-of-home and mobile, as Multichannel News reports.
“We’re going to make it very easy for networks to be able to make their inventory, the fourteen or twelve minutes an hour, addressable using our two-way interactive platform,” Kline says.
“Right now they can all do it on our digital feeds and on our set-top box dynamic ad insertion, our Spectrum TV app where they can do streaming on linear addressability or even VOD on our streaming apps addressably.”
With the bulk of ad impressions being on linear TV, “Coming soon you’ll be able to buy literally our full footprint, which could be up to fifty, sixty million households addressably on linear as well as on demand as well as on demand as well as on streaming.”
Kline says the local TV marketplace has changed dramatically in the last few years because of viewing data and infrastructure.
“Part of what we’re trying to do with the VAB is to take some of those wonderful things that we do locally and apply them nationally to our national network partners. And we’re working fast and furious on that. NCC is going to be the hub of that. More on that in the coming months.
“It’s really a great time to be in local advertising.”
This video is from a Beet.TV’s coverage of the VAB’s Direct to Success summit held on June 12 at Viacom in New York City. Please visit this page for more segments.
]]>“National advertisers don’t want 40 million. It’s a good start, but I think we’ve got some catch-up to play,” Kline says in this one-on-one discussion with Tatta at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.
Upon the sale of Cablevision to Altice, Tatta joined the startup 605, on whose board Kline now sits while also holding the roles of President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. Tatta is President of 605.
Asked by Tatta to define the state of addressable TV, Kline points to the traditional business model of the cable providers whose participation is needed to expand the national footprint by using their two minutes of local ad time.
“I think a big reason for that is many operators, many distributors are in the subsection television business. They’re not in per se the advertising business, and I think that perception is starting to change,” Kline says.
“They’re always going to be in the subscription business, selling video products and high-speed data and telephony and soon mobile phone service for some of us,” Kline adds. “Advertising has always sort of been, ‘hey we’ll take that money, it’s great high margin, but we’re not going to invest that much in it.’”
Having just launched linear addressable in Los Angeles, Charter’s “footprint in New York will be months away. I think it’s not moved fast. Maybe it’s moved fast in cable years, but it hasn’t moved fast in anything else,” Kline says.
On the way to additional scale, addressable is providing a foundation upon which TV networks can enhance the value of their national inventory, according to Kline.
“If they really want to make their network inventory more valuable, they need to get it better targeted. More relevant. And we have the platforms that can do that.”
In the meantime, he sees the model for networks as acquiring the widest possible amount of distribution and collecting license fees from distributors. “But I’m not naïve. We know that things will evolve and viewership will move to other places. But there is still a ton of viewership on what we would call traditional platforms, and I think that’s going to continue for quite some time,” Kline says.
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.
]]>In this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Kline talks about bringing scale to addressable linear television and testing a self-serve platform for small advertisers to complement direct-sales efforts at the local level.
Charter this month launched household addressable TV in the Los Angeles market, to be followed by New York “and then rolling out throughout the rest of the country in our footprint over the next, I would say, twelve to eighteen months,” Kline says.
He thinks cable companies are “really, really well positioned to help not only their customers, but I think that same infrastructure that we’re building we’re going to be able to help some of our network affiliates as well.”
Noting that that the traditional linear business “is still several billion dollars for us and we’ve got to make sure that we bring that in and secure that,” Kline discusses the quest for scalable addressability and automated reporting.
“Ultimately, what we want have happen for our customers is they go on a secured website and they can see television, they can see online, they can see on demand, they can see on our IP streaming services how many impressions they got on each platform.
“That sounds lovely and it sounds easy, but it takes an awful lot of the organization’s attention and time to start to start to build those systems,” Kline says in response to interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, who is a Beet.TV contributor and CEO of Furious Corp.
Asked by Swartz to look out a few years, Kline says “we’re going to be selling impressions, we’re going to be selling them highly targeted, highly data infused. I think you’ll see not only us but other MVPD’s doing similar things to make advertising much more front and center than it is today as a revenue stream for their companies.”
While agencies are big users of cable interconnects for their clients, many local businesses have direct client relationships with Charter, “which is still for many of us billions of dollars worth of revenue.”
He mentions a test being done in Raleigh, NC, involving a self-provisioning platform “for very small customers that can go on, pick the schedule they want, pick the creative that they want and put in their credit card and be right on our air.
“Five years ago I would have said never. But with Facebook and Google and all these other self-provisioning platforms, small advertisers are used to this. And we think we can quadruple the number of customers we have at any given time.”
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.
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