David Levy, CEO of audience targeting platform OpenAP, has been working toward that goal of providing advertisers with a way to reach consumers based on more granular data rather than broader demographic characteristics like age and gender.

“We’ve been very focused on how we break the silos for audience-based buying,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We can now confidently say that that reality is here. We can make it just as easy for you to buy on your sophisticated audience segment as it is to buy on a broad demo.”

The company a year go launched the OpenAP Market, an open marketplace to guarantee audience delivery among premium TV programming on linear and digital platforms. Founded in 2017 by a consortium of television publishers, OpenAP’s members include AMC Networks, Fox, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Univision and The Weather Channel.

To provide guaranteed reach on linear and digital, OpenAP in the past six months has been working with measurement companies to provide richer datasets that support audience-based targeting.

“We all have to work together to really get to an outcome where you can actually measure who you’re reaching across different platforms and how you actually optimize your campaigns across platforms,” Levy said.

Commingling Data

Viewership data can come from a variety of sources, including automatic content recognition (ACR) information from media devices, set-top boxes and consumer panels. Combining the three sources provides a more robust view of audience viewing habits.

“We believe strongly that companies need to be using all three of them — and have good mechanisms to commingle those datasets and normalize that data,” Levy said.

Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau

The information helps to determine reach and frequency across screens, and supports deterministic media buys that are more focused than probabilistic efforts. With 70% of media buyers saying their budgets are in flux for 2021 because of the pandemic, according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the data can help to make better decisions.

Levy foresees growing collaboration in the media and marketing industries to create a common currency.

“We’re engaging with multiple currency providers at the moment, and are really pressing them to work with us on solutions,” Levy said, adding that publishers also are doing their part to reach common goals. “It’s incumbent upon us to actually come with resources, too. We’re not going to solve everything immediately, but if we can start making these small steps toward meaningful change across screen, we should be successful.”

This video is part of Advancing Toward a Common TV Measurement Currency, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comscore. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

In this environment, audience targeting platform OpenAP today announced a collaboration with measurement company iSpot.tv to give advertisers and media agencies greater insights into how their campaigns drive web conversion, retail visits, box office sales and programming tune-in — while measuring and analyzing over-the-top (OTT) campaigns alongside linear TV buys.

“iSpot is providing us a great opportunity to look at the attribution on these campaigns,” David Levy, CEO of OpenAP, said in this Beet.TV segment that covers a range of topics, including the partnership with iSpot. “The ultimate goal is to show what we’d been able to do on a campaign-by-campaign basis, but not really cross-publisher before.”

The collaboration lets advertisers activate attribution and OTT measurement on any campaign in the OpenAP Market, an open marketplace that guarantees audience delivery among premium TV programming on linear and digital platforms. OpenAP is a consortium whose members include AMC Networks, Fox, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Univision and The Weather Channel.

Activating Cross-Channel Campaigns

Levy sees opportunities for advertisers to be more efficient with viewer’s time and attention, along with the ability to measure how cross-channel campaigns affect behaviors deeper into the sales funnel.

“We have a lot more capability to actually see how campaigns are performing, what the attribution looks like on those campaigns and how to optimize them,” he said.

The collaboration with iSpot comes as advertisers are looking for more sophisticated audience segmentation that goes beyond standard demographics and helps to find consumers whose purchase decisions are more meaningful to TV advertises.

“The challenge historically was that you’d build your audience dataset, but then you had to go every individual publisher to onboard that data against a viewership dataset like Nielsen, Comscore, Comcast,” Levy said. “We’re now enabling the ability to standardize that process. You only need to onboard the audience once, and we can syndicate that audience seamlessly across planning, execution and measurement.”

But, in 2019, David Levy found the door relatively easy to push on.

The CEO of OpenAP, a consortium through which several broadcast companies are teaming to make it easier for advertisers to buy across their channels, was speaking with Beet.TV about a new initiative to enable direct campaign buying.

Under its first iteration, the two-year-old consortium is the means through which Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision have harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.

Recently, OpenAP made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.

Speaking with Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM, for Beet.TV, Levy describes the challenge of unifying the partners.

“It was a lot easier than most people think,” he says. “I think there is a common need now with Facebook and Google out there – I think most people feel like that is the real competitor.

“There’s actually been an incredible amount of collaboration, camaraderie amongst the table, so that actually has not been as bad as most people think.”

Earlier in October, OpenAP unveiled its marketplace plan, after two years in which its primary focus was creating a common taxonomy of characteristics used to buy advanced TV ads across the different partners’ properties.

“You can come in and say, ‘I want auto intenders and I have a million dollar budget, and here’s the campaign flights that I want’,” Levy adds. “And you can actually get one plan back across close to 50% of all the TV inventory, across linear and digital, in one plan.

“All you’re doing is going in and setting your audience and you’re getting back one campaign, instead of having to work with multiple networks. Instead of having to define your audience and onboard it across multiple networks, you just go into OpenAP, define it once and you can get your plan back.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is why we have begun to see a range of collaborations, consortia and industry associations all come together, in pursuit of scale. It is the ultimate test of the “all boats will rise” idea.

In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat In The City, two such executives discussed how they are embarking on just such initiatives:

• OpenAP CEO David Levy – the Fox/Viacom/NBC Universal/Univision addressable ad data consortium has now launched a marketplace.
• Inscape sales and marketing SVP Jodie McAfee – the ad targeting unit of TV maker Vizio has launched a technology consortium, Project OAR.

They were interviewed by Janus Insights & Strategy president Howard Shimmel…

Project OAR starts paddling

Led by Inscape, which uses automated content recognition (ACR) in internet-connected Vizio TVs to understand what viewers are watching, Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.

The founding members include Disney Media Networks (which includes ABC, ESPN and Freeform), Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBCUniversal, Discovery, CBS, AT&T’s Xandr and WarnerMedia’s Turner, Hearst Television and AMC Networks.

“The media landscape is littered with the dead carcasses of consortiums that have failed,” McAfee told Shimmel for Beet.TV. “We had seen previous attempts at trying to get to scale that really were, in our mind, rigid in that it was trying to force an entire industry into a single solution.

“The way to scale is flexibility and interoperability and the idea of building sort of a core building block.”

OAR trials early 2020

“Every one (of our members), over the course of the last … year and a half, has leaned in very hard. We get at least 25 to 30 participants in all of our meetings,” McAfee said.

“There are four big OEMs, we’re one, there are three others that shall remain nameless. We will probably be rolling out some trials at the first of the year. We think the next tipping point in terms of getting the other OEMs to join is when it’s real and so we’re sort of sitting back and not really pushing very hard on them.

“We will have a workable, a working product by the first of the year and when our members start pushing inventory through that product, the proof will be in that pudding.”

back when Canoe 1.0 launched, there wasn’t the existential threat of Facebook and Amazon and Netflix and Google. And so I think our members know that they have to work together in order to combat that.

Don’t go it alone

Such joined-up thinking is music to the ears of David Levy. The former Fox executive is now CEO of OpenAP, the two-year-old consortium involving Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision which harmonizes how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.

Speaking on the panel, he recanted tales where going it alone didn’t pan out.

“Whether it was true[X] or Fox, every new thing that we did, regardless if it worked, if we were trying to just go up that hill on our own, it was difficult for agencies to invest a big amount to do something new, with just one of us,” he said.

“We’re now all compromising, small compromises, that basically mean we’re all pushing the same ball up the hill, we’re going to have success.

OpenAP befriends agencies

After its first phase of two years, now OpenAP recently launched its own marketplace from which to buy ads across the TV providers.

“A buyer can come define an audience once and actually get back a optimized plan across close to 20 networks, across linear and digital, all in one place,” Levy said.

Next up, Levy aims to get close to agency buyers.

“What we’re planning on rolling out this year is an agency council,” he said. “So we want to get a lot more feedback. A lot of the stuff we’re going to be focusing on is more on the measurement side of this year. So as we start to develop more standards, we’re going to really lean into our agency relationships.”

Respond to SVOD threat

“The bigger threat by far is the fact that you are going to have three new direct to consumer offerings, all ad free, coming into the market, all competing for consumers’ time and attention and for the ad supported television industry,” OpenAP’s Levy said.

“We better be ready to have a better consumer experience that will make sure we actually retain users.

“We’re all now investing in new ways to transact better, ways to reduce waste so we can get more relevant advertising in front of people. But that has to also result in a better consumer experience and likely reducing ads.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Under its first iteration, the two-year-old consortium is the means through which Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision have harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets. Now OpenAP is making a step forward.

“The first step was just standardising how we talk about audiences and how we define those,” says OpenAP CEO David Levy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“But, to really bring skills to the marketplace, we needed to actually build a marketplace.”

Levy was speaking as the organization launched just that – a new way for buying TV ads using data across the organizations.

“An advertiser can come define any audience segment that they want, build their own campaign across linear and digital and get one consolidated proposal back where they can actually see unduplicated reach for that target segment across all the publishers in our marketplace. Which is close to 50% of the overall TV marketplace. So really excited about that.”

Buyers can either buy direct from OpenAP or go through dedicating buying platforms via integrations with the new marketplace.

The new marketplace does not undo the significant direct buying efforts the individual TV groups already have. Advertisers can still buy from individual operators.

OpenAP’s launch announcement claims the tag team can reach “more than
90% of all U.S. television audiences through its combined member footprint of 20 cable networks, three broadcast networks and a vast array of digital video”.

It’s all about using audience segments that can find people across broadcaster properties, in pursuit of a single advertiser goal, and with cross-network forecast insights.

Levy became full-time CEO of the group in May after a stint at Fox after consortium members decided it should be a dedicated effort.

“Previously, all of us were spending about 25% of our time trying to push things forward,” Levy says. “If we could create a marketplace, that could truly bring scale to the advanced ad formats. But to do that we needed a company and we needed actually dedicated team who has focused a 100% of their time on building this vision”

Levy also gave a recent interview to Variety on the evolution of OpenAP.

As he looks ahead to CES 2019, he talks about “redefining” television, outdated audience metrics and the need to preserve the traditional cable/satellite/telco distribution business as viewing fragments across devices.

“Television has to be redefined and has to be redefined in a few different places,” prominent among them the big screen that hangs on a wall, Levy says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Television programing is still a very, very popular thing that people watch.”

Also in need of reordering is Nielsen’s “outdated metric system that we’ve been using really since the 1960’s. Television isn’t about primetime only. It’s about all dayparts. “We need to think about not selling this in dayparts but selling it in audience segments.”

He expects that among the topics of conversation at CES will be addressable targeting and attribution of campaigns to business outcomes.

Asked about the effect of AT&T’s bringing Warner Media into its arsenal of advertising and media assets, Levy points to premium content. “On the AT&T side, they were looking for that quality, premium programming and I think that’s one of the reasons why they purchased us.”

For Turner, “why I think it’s so attractive from an AT&T perspective is the data they’re going to provide,” encompassing 170 million consumer touchpoints. “That data, coupled with our first-party data and mapping it together, is going to allow us to have better information around a few things.”

With viewers as the top priority, the data will help to inform program production, provide a better understanding of viewers and facilitate better targeting for clients. But there are more fundamental issues as well.

“First and foremost, we need to keep the ecosystem that we live in today very healthy,” Levy says. “We have a great relationship with our cable operators, with our satellite providers and with our telco companies and now the virtual MVPD’s. That is a very healthy business and is going to continue to be a very healthy business at our company.”

But as a modern media company, on top of that ecosystem “we also need to have a one-on-one relationship with the consumer. Personalize content for them if need be.”

He notes that truTV has reduced almost 50% of all the primetime inventory to half of what it was three years ago, while all of TNT programming originals are now produced with about 50% fewer ads. “We’re trying to give the consumer a better experience, which is very, very important.”

Using data to generate more contextually relevant advertising amid less commercial load “is going to be a better consumer experience also.”

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. 

“true[X] is still an independent organization – we still service ABC, CBS, Viacom,” says true[X] COO and C0founder David Levy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

The company’s acquisition was the latest by a TV studio of a video ad tech platform, as big media companies show increasing interest in the software that can better manage their ad sales processes. Previously, RTL invested for a big stake in SpotX.

“We service the whole industry, not just Fox,” Levy adds. “But Fox is helping us invest in growing our technology and product teams, to get more access across different platforms.”

The company has brought one a new ad format that gets digital viewers off the hook of watching ads through their favorite shows if they actually interact with one upfront initial ad.

“You can choose to interact with an ad for 30 seconds,” Levy says.” If you do that, you get better attention for the advertiser but the reset of the show is commercial-free.”

We interviewed him at Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association in association with Beet.TV  Please find more event videos here.

“We have incredible budgets for television commercials. What we haven’t really seen is incredible production budgets for digital advertising,” according to true[X] co-founder and COO David Levy. “The reason is because no-one pays attention to it today.

true[X] rewards viewers for interacting with ads, in between TV shows viewed online, by showing them fewer ads overall. Late last year, the company sold to 21st Century Fox for $200 million.

“Instead of just automatically rolling to those five or six spots, we prompt the user with a choice in their ad experience – either to engage with a brand (click to initiate a rich-media experience), or you can just watch your normal five to six 30-second spots,” Levy adds.

He is talking about attentional shift, in which so-called “endogenous” attention is shifted voluntarily toward a given stimulus whereas “exogenous” attention merely passively engages with oncoming stimuli.

“When we create that choice, it’s one of the most important factors in creating quality attention,” Levy says. “It’s an attention transfer … something you choose to do. If you choose … your cognition for a message goes way through the roof.”

We interviewed Levy on the true[X] yacht.  This video is part of a series of Cannes interviews sponsored by true[X].  Please find additional videos from the series here.