Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic has up-ended traditional business practices, a growing school of thought, amongst those that are successfully pivoting, posits that these changes were overdue and are, ultimately, beneficial.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy at NBCUniversal, says the group has made a series of rapid adjustments that will lead to a better TV ad experience.
‘Accelerated innovation’
“A very unfortunate situation has taught us new ways of working, increased productivity, how to deal with consumers in different ways,” Colella says.
“We’ve been able to create accelerated innovation with our data partners, our technology partners, agencies, and advertisers, and we’re so looking forward to seeing that continue.
“This accelerated innovation is really going to help with all of our efforts in data-informed advertising, programmatic, getting into new platforms and improve platforms like streaming and also linear
“We see the industry is never turning back. We hope to continue this accelerated innovation throughout.”
Changing times
Recent NBCUniversal innovations have included:
- ShppableTV, a system NBCUniversal launched last year to add ecommerce sponsors’ QR code links to programming, was used to raise $6 million in donations during a recent Parks And Recreation fundraiser for Feeding America.
- Through Stay-In-Theater, NBCUniversal has staged “family movie nights” across its networks, radically reducing ad time thanks to a content sponsorship from Target.
- The company has been more accurately targeting COVID-19 public service announcements at different demographics by leveraging One Platform, the combined tech line-up it is now offering with Comcast stablemate Sky.
- As TV show production and viewing habits have been shaken up, NBCU is using technology to find viewer groups – for example, “golf enthusiasts” – who may be watching entirely unrelated programming.
Granular targeting
“We were able … to reduce advertising load from over 30 minutes to just under two,” says Colella of Stay-In-Theater. “That is something that we’re incredibly proud of and we’re hoping to take reduction in ad time forward
“We’re seeing our technology and our data vendors cooperate and learn how to use data in conjunction with one another.
“Through the pandemic, we realized that not everybody requires the same message. Parents want to speak about the pandemic to their children different than millennials need to hear message, different from people who are high-risk.
“So we were able to segment the data alongside our vendors to make sure that we could get the correct creative to the correct people across all platforms, using One Platform. And that allowed us to contribute to society’s education about a very important topic.”
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>NBCUniversal, for the past four years, has been investing time and resources into its addressable advertising systems, work that has so far resulted in AdSmart, the company’s audience targeting platform. Now, Colella tells Beet.TV in an interview on site at CES in Las Vegas, NBCUniversal is ready to debut One Platform, an addressable advertising system that lets clients plan, schedule, optimize and measure across both digital and linear channels. Previously, separate systems oversaw digital and linear channels. The future of addressable for NBCUniversal is holistic.
One Platform, Colella says, is the result of work with partners like Project Oar, the industry consortium setting addressable advertising standards, and other industry leaders like Comcast. “We’ve been working tirelessly to test how we’re going to create linear, addressable opportunities for our clients who want them and ask for them, and we’re finally able to deliver.”
According to Colella, while the launch of One Platform is a milestone for the company, there’s still progress to be made, particularly in defining new modes of measurement. “We’re looking for a lot of players to get involved and understand how this is going to change measurement for the ads that it replaces, so I don’t want to say we’re exactly there yet,” says Colella.
What’s important, though, is that linear television is now on par with digital streaming services in terms of targeting and performance capability. That’s particularly crucial in a year that Colella says is set to see the launch of six new streaming services.
“It’s the year of the video platform,” says Colella. “But we can do a lot more for our advertisers and agencies than we ever have been able to do in the past. We’re making investments in content and bringing that together is a great user experience.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.
Following the acquisition, Comcast in March announced it would merge NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, whilst the pair said Sky’s Sky Media ad sales house, which sells inventory for both Sky’s owned-and-operated channels and others’, will adopt NBCUniversal’s CFlight metric across all content and platforms in the UK from autumn and in its other European territories next year.
This panel discussion at Cannes Lions saw executives who have driven the companies’ advanced TV initiatives talk about going even larger…
- Jamie West – Deputy Managing Director Sky Media UK & Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Sky
- Denise Colella – SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU
The pair revealed to their host, MTM co-founder Jon Watts:
- Sky’s AdSmart will be enabled across new TV channels in the next few weeks.
- AdSmart will reach 65% to 70% UK household penetration in the future across all platforms, based on West’s projections.
- The duo imagine bringing the functionality to South America.
- It’s all being driven by brands which have an increasingly global outlook.
“We’re all now gunning for the same end game, which is consistency for an appetiser across global markets,” West said.
“We’ve enabled more and more channels and hopefully there’ll be more announcements about that in the coming weeks, rapidly scaling and the conversations with Denise and the team mean that we can go beyond little old Europe into the US and ultimately South America.”
In its home UK, AdSmart benefitted early by being deployed on the largest pay-TV platform, Sky’s own. It will soon be lit up also on rival Virgin Media’s cable network, taking penetration to 40%.
NBCU’s Colella explains the logic in using tis approach around the world.
“I think the benefit really comes down to our advertisers and their agencies,” she said. “They all are thinking of how do they take these audiences and leverage them in a global way that they’ve never done before.
“It really comes down to planning globally, but then activating locally … CFlight was an actual evolution of that because it gave us the ability to measure across channels.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.
NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.
“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”
Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.
In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”
Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.
Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”
NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”
Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.
“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.
That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.
A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…
The big reduction that wasn’t
The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”
Peacock’s cut is coming
Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”
Linear is hard to change
Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…
Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:
“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.
Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:
“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”
Tech can solve for excess
If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”
Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:
“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”
Viewers are revolting
Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:
“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”
Re-think the ad unit
Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:
“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”
Proof of the pudding
Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…
Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:
“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”
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.
]]>The Contextual Intelligence Platform uses machine learning to further advance the art and science of TV audience optimization. Its launch comes about a month after NBCU brought its audience optimizer in house, Colella explains in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
“We wanted to have our own proprietary algorithm. Nobody knows our inventory like we do,” Colella says.
The company also wanted to be able to use its optimizer beyond what it’s been doing on the linear TV side for about three years. “We also realized there are other parts of the company that can benefit from it, like our promo department,” Colella adds.
Continuing in the nuptials vein, she says the Contextual Intelligence Platform seeks to marry both audience and contextual optimization. By crawling scripts from the closed captioning of shows and studying a brief and a video review of the content of the ad “we’re actually able to match both the sentiment and the content of the lead-in scene to the ad with the ad itself. So you’re able to make the television experience more continuous, because what the viewer is looking for is that you’re continuing the feeling from the previous scene, continuing the emotion.”
Focus groups for ads placed with the new platform have shown an average increase of 19% in brand memorability, 13% in likability and 64%, as ADWEEK reports.
So what could go wrong with a wedding scene?
“A wedding could go poorly,” says Colella. “The bride could run out, it could be the wrong person. You don’t want to have your ad appear after that, so we also make sure that the emotions are matching.”
Since bringing its optimizer in house in October, NBCU has added new features to make it easier for advertisers to switch focus from price to reach or concentration. “And also we’ve been able to create restrictions. For example, if you don’t want too much overnight or there’s specific channels that you’re not looking for you can actually role them out of your optimization so you come up with a better media plan.”
It all adds up to “taking the best of the digital targeting capabilities and getting rid of the worst of them.”
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.
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The annual gathering will unite dozens of executives in advertising and media, with this year’s theme being It’s Consumer First in TV Land. Among the participants will be representatives from GroupM, IPG MediaBrands, Target, Nissan, Discover, Comcast, NCC, Oath, Google, comScore, Nielsen, DISH, Amobee, FOX Networks, Turner Broadcasting and NBCUniversal.
“I really think we’re at a turning point,” says Colella. “Now we’re seeing giant publishers come together making the inventory available. We’re making standards like what we’re seeing happen in digital, that’s happening now for linear.
“We’ve always participated in the Beet Retreat so we’ve made a lot of great connections,” Colella adds. “But I also feel that the conversations that happen with the other providers really moves the industry forward.”
And while advertisers and agencies heretofore have “really struggled” with the difficulties involved in audience buying and advanced advertising, “we continue to make it easier and band together to really work on what’s going to bring the whole industry forward, not just ourselves,” Colella says.
Beet Retreat 2018 will involve three days of high-level panels, group conversations, one-on-one video interviews and extraordinary networking events and interactions.
In addition to covering the world of advanced TV, the Retreat will examine the changes and broader implications for the media industry from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017 led by executives from Procter & Gamble, Hearts & Science, Telemundo and GroupM
Confirmed speakers:
Kevin Arrix, SVP, DISH Media
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu
Robert Bareuther, SVP, Business development. iSpot.tv
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV | LiveRamp
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent
Joe Cashan, Chief Marketing Manager, Nissan
Tal Chalozin, CTO and Co-Founder, Innovid
Dave Clark, EVP, Advanced Advertising, Comcast & GM FreeWheel
Andres Claudio, Managing Director, Hearts & Science/Omnicom, Puerto Rico
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU
Jacqueline Corbelli, Founder, Chairman, CEO BrightLine Partners LLC
Jose Cancela, President, Telemundo/NBCU Puerto Rico
Brad Danaher, Television Partner Director, Experian
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu
Peter Dolchin, Head of Telco/Video Partnerships, Google
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM)
Anupam Gupta, Chief Revenue Officer, 4C Insights
Jason Harrison, President, Client Partners, Essence (GroupM)
Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks
Freddie Hernandez, Managing Director, P&G, Puerto Rico
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, comScore
David Hohman, EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen
Walt Horstman, SVP, Advanced Media,Tivo
Evan Hovorka, Director – Digital Media and Data Products, Target
Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, OATH/Verizon
Nick Jazarian, Media Director, Target
Marissa Jimenez, President, Modi Media (GroupM)
Brad Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal
Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover
Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising, Data and Technology, FOX TV Networks
Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales, DISH Media
Eric Matthewson, CEO, WideOrbit
Jodie McAfee, SVP, Sales Marketing, Inscape (VIZIO)
Matt O’Grady, CEO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy/Business Officer, VideoAmp
Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal
Nicolle Pangis, CEO, NCC Media (Comcast/Charter/Cox)
Jessie Reddis, Chief Innovation Officer, Turner Broadcasting
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik
Andrew Ward, President, NCC Media (Comcast/Charter/Cox)
Anthony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee
Moderating the discussions will be:
Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Matt Prohaska, CEO, Prohaska Consulting
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC
Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp Special
Guest Speaker: Olga Ramos, President, Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico
To attend the conference, contact info@beet.tv
The Beet Retreat is presented by
Title Sponsor
Presenting Sponsors
]]>“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”
NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.
“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”
In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.
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.
]]>Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.
Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.
‘Not waiting’
“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.
“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’
“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”
Brands ‘thirsty’ for more
That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.
“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”
Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.
“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”
Tech ‘not ready’
Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.
“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…
- Unification: “Premium television content now can touch consumers across many different points within a consumption journey, whether that is a traditional piece of glass on a wall, whether that’s a mobile phone, whether that’s a tablet. The ability to unify that around content, around this premium experience of television content, that’s sort of critical piece number one.”
- Cooperation: “OpenAP is sort of an incredible effort that has been bearing a ton of fruit over the past 12, 18 months. And over the next 12, 18 months I think it’s going to absolutely accelerate the ability for marketers to come in and buy television in a more comprehensive and cohesive way.”
- Bridging the activation gap: “I can go to Facebook, I can go to Google, I can go to Amazon, I can bring data, I can bring advanced targeting. We’ve been limited to Nielsen demography for the past 50 years in the TV ecosystem. But with OpenAP and with other efforts that are happening across the market, we are seeing that fundamentally change.”
Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.
Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”
She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.
Accept inconsistency
But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.
“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>“We understand that brands are going to demand their own special measurement. It’s not our place to determine exactly who they should use,” says Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, NBCU. “So we’re allowing them to use a suite of attribution partners that we partner with to make sure they can measure anything they do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Colella expresses enthusiasm for NBCU participating in the OpenAP audience targeting consortium and the need for added speed in moving the TV industry forward.
When NBCU looks at cross-platform viewing, it tries to deliver a “premium experience” regardless of where its content is being consumed by using a device graph that reflects that consumption, according to Colella.
“We’re able to use OpenAP to make sure that our planners can plan and the brands can plan across publishers” and then use a suite of offerings that are “great towards being able to measure these campaigns across platforms.”
Having recently joined OpenAP, “We’re very excited to work with Fox, Viacom, Turner to make sure that the industry is really moving ahead at the breakneck speed that we need to be going at. They’re our first partners that we’re so excited about.”
For attribution, NBCU is working with iSpot and is testing with Data + Math, among others. With iSpot, the company works with advertisers to define the outcome they want to measure and then tracks the success of the campaign, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Not every partner is going to be the best at every vertical, so we make sure we have a good host of those,” says Colella. “So we have an entire group that’s dedicated to just managing our data and partnerships.
“The overwhelming effect is that everybody wants the same thing. They all want to be across platforms, they all want to be able to plan that way and they all want to be able to measure that way.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>This comes three years after the media company began offering its Audience Targeting Platform during the Upfront negotiating period and after the second Upfront with its Audience Studio suite of data offerings.
“One of the things we found coming out of this year’s upfront is that clients are making audience buying a regular part of their planning process,” Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising & Product Strategy, NBCU says in an interview with Beet.TV at the DMEXCO advertising and trade show.
Things have gained traction on the audience-buying front after a few slow years following the Upfronts. In the early going, by the time agencies and clients ended their negotiations and then had to figure out who they wanted to target and what data to use, they just weren’t ready to make deals.
This year, NBCU’s audience-buying commitments have tripled in the third quarter because clients have their data and are ready to go.
“So the fact that they’re ready so soon after the Upfront shows us this has become mainstream and a regular part of their buying process,” Colella says.
Having decided to make all of its unsold inventory available through its data products, NBCU saw early uptake by such vertical categories as finance, insurance, automotive and travel.
“But over the past year or so, we’ve seen it expand into all verticals, everything from pharma, to CPG to studios. “At this point, I believe all verticals are looking at this as a viable and in some cases better way to buy.”
Advertisers are still mixing traditional demo buys with audience targeting. “More and more we’re seeing the audience budgets increase.”
While NBCU has been offering video-on-demand addressable ads, in the coming year it will test linear addressable with parent Comcast.
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.
]]>This is the assessment of Denise Colella, NBCU’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, who sees over-the-top TV as “one of the most underleveraged opportunities” in the ecosystem today.
Delivering an enhanced ad experience comes as “we’re starting to see the lines between linear and digital blurring, because you’re not necessarily watching TV in the same ways that you used to,” Colella says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Between digital capabilities like targeting and optimization, there’s a lot that can be learned “looking in the rear-view mirror about what we’ve done in digital for the past 10 years to make sure we don’t commit the same mistakes,” Colella says.
Missteps might include viewability, brand safety and the consumer experience. “We’re able to take all of those learnings from digital, apply the good ones and learn from the bad ones,” she says.
While a lack of data about OTT viewing is ultimately “fixable,” the broader issue is linking all data together for the benefit of the viewer. The goal is to make people feel as though “they’re having one experience with NBCUniversal and not many different experiences through the different platforms that they access our content,” Colella adds.
While ad loads have been reduced in some instances, there’s still room to grow the ad experience itself so that it becomes an integral part of what consumers enjoy. By way of comparison, Colella says, “Many people buy magazines because they like looking at all the fashion ads. When we can make sure they’re getting advertisements that are relevant to them, it changes the whole dynamic.”
Referencing this year’s Upfront market, Colella cites comments by NBCU CEO Steve Burke that “he believes it was our greatest Upfront ever.” As the Los Angeles Times reports, NBCUniversal struck deals for the upcoming television season worth nearly $6.5 billion, an increase of 8% over 2016.
“As we’ve seen in our recent Upfront, our industry partners are really leaning in what we’re doing with our data products and we’ve seen our data products at least triple,” says Colella. “For us it’s a big testament to the investment that we’ve made in our data and the Audience Studio and also it gives us all the confidence in the world to keep developing our road map and our data products moving forward.”
This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying the New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.
]]>Speaking on this Beet Retreat panel, representatives of the networks explained their strategy.
The recent announcements included:
- Fox, Viacom and Turner teamed to form OpenAP, a system in which they will allow ad buyers to define audience segments that are targetable across the networks, not just individually.
- NBC plans to sell $1bn of its upfront inventory through its own Audience Targeting Platform.
- A+E followed with a similar announcement.
NBCUniversal advanced advertising SVP Denise Colella:
“We’re going to avail up to $1bn in inventory to be traded on non-Nielsen guarantees, or audience guarantees.
“Our clients are investing a lot in data, they really want to put that to use. We’re willing to put our money where our mouth is. We’re not reserving inventory per se. We’re making all our inventory across all of our networks available for audience.”
Turner Broadcasting ad innovation and programatic VP David Porter:
“OpenAP does three things – helps define audience segment, allows an advertiser to choose wha publishers they want to share that segment with, and aggregates reports. That solves a lot.
“There will be no commingling of inventory in this platform, this is not a transaction platform. This is just a way to get a consistent definition. Then the advertiser can send that definition out to any publisher.”
Viacom audience science EVP Julian Zilberbrand:
“It is uber-complicated to have different methodologies when you have one data set you’re working off of.
“This is about enabling the advertiser to have an easier experience.”
ABC TV Group programmatic VP Michael Dean:
“We’re excited about it and we’re supportive. This is all the right things to do. Removing friction, removing cost, lowering complexity is absolutely where all of us want that market to go – as long as we can make differentiation, that’s the key.
“The devil is in the details. For Disney Company, it’s about ‘How do we bring our unique data assets – what we know about families, homes, from the parks, from our games network?’”
605 president Ben Tatta:
“It’s great news. We felt, for a while, that there will be a shift to more audience-based buying, selling and measurement – but that starts by moving off a panel, which is really just a large focus group. It drives demand for census-based data. The market is demanding that more granular attributes, other than age and gender, are available.”
Panelists also discussed the emergence of addressable TV advertising technologies and amateur versus premium video.
This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“That’s really exciting because we’ve been investing in our data capabilities and our audience platforms for a couple of years now and we’re ready to put our money where our mouth is,” Colella explains in an interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
In the past, NBCU’s Audience Targeting Platform was available only during the Upfront period, while its NBCUx programmatic linear product was limited to buys in the scatter market. “Now that we’re seeing the great results that we’re getting and we’ve invested in the ability to scale these, we’re turning all of our data products always on,” Colella says.
Part of the momentum comes from advertisers, which are increasingly investing in their own data infrastructures to enhance TV audience targeting. NBCU has a unique position in that advertisers can use their own data and demand-side platforms to buy programmatically on NBCU’s platform, according to Colella.
“At this point in time we know who is consuming the content,” she says. “The value proposition is really to speak to consumers individually and make sure we’re providing the best return on ad spend for our advertisers.”
Given its plethora of properties—ranging from entertainment to sports, news to Hispanic brands—NBCU has no shortage of insights into its more than 100 million unique visitors.
“We know a lot about our consumers, whether it’s what platform are they consuming our content, when are they booking golf games with our properties like Golf Now, what movies are they watching on Fandango and when are they going to the theatre,” Colella says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This is the main takeaway from a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 focusing on advanced television targeting. Held at held the OMD Oasis at The Venetian, the panel featured sell-side executives from NBCUniversal and Turner, TV data specialist Kristin Dolan and Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Research Officer, Jonathan Steuer.
Steuer started things off on a positive note by opining that the industry has made more progress in using set-top box data for audience targeting and performance measurement in the last 18 months than it had in the past eight years. The elephant in the room: How buyers can use the data at scale across multiple TV networks and inventory pools in the most efficient way.
“The at scale is the tricky part,” said Steuer, whose research background includes a long stint at TiVo.
The desire for data consolidation didn’t come as a surprise to Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU. “I think we hear that loud and clear from all the folks on the buy side,” said Colella. “People want to do more audience buying. It isn’t easy.”
She added that it’s “incumbent upon us as an industry to figure out how do we facilitate more buying of audience products.”
Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, agreed that the process must be made more user friendly, particularly in comparison with the current modus operandi of most TV ad buyers.
“Agencies are structured and can do an enormous amount of business buying on Nielsen demo guarantees and running schedules. It’s a machine,” said Strober. “You talk about audience targeting and it’s like you threw a wrench in the gears.”
Since MVPD’s “won’t share their data,” moderator Matt Spiegel from MediaLink asked how data consolidation could occur.
Acknowledging reality, Strober said, “Those guys aren’t going to send data to each other” and suggested they should “put it in some sort of common format in one or a few different common repositories that made it possible for folks on our side of the table to access it.”
Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which helps buyers and sellers analyze audience data, said consolidation would help everyone. “On the sell side the opportunity to have people really want your inventory because it’s going to reach the people they’re trying to reach is helpful. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?” said Dolan.
Asked by Spiegel what entity could do the consolidating, Steuer suggested it would have to be standalone companies “because the alternative is people grading their own homework.”
Dolan also cited the reluctance to share on the part of MVPD’s, but said their data could be anonymized so that it can’t be used improperly. “Everybody’s trying to solve the same problem of how do I contribute without it negatively impacting me,” said Dolan. “I want the benefit but I don’t want the negative.”
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The narrow range of options was the focus of a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 conducted at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. It brought together representatives of 605, NBCUniversal, Omnicom Media Group and Turner Broadcasting.
Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink started the dialogue by stating “We don’t seem to making a lot of progress” in using data to deliver specific creative iterations to specific consumers.
“Some of that comes from the fact that measurement is still inherently broken,” said 605 CEO Kristin Dolan. She added that even measured at the segment level, a panel is not going to tell you whether your creative is good. “It will tell you that the one person who represents all the other people that are supposed to look like that person thought the creative was good or wasn’t good,” said Dolan.
Spiegel opined that dynamic ad targeting is “a soap box we should all be championing. You’re filming all this great video content. It seems way too hard to create five versions and be able to run them.”
Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, suggested reversing the cart and horse lineup. It would involve finding a way to identify an audience or segment and deriving insights based on certain things that are attracting that segment. This would both inform the creative brief and how the creative should be delivered.
“As opposed to we have the creative and which one should we allocate it to. I don’t know how that gets done,” Strober said.
“It’s about starting from the beginning of the process, which is the creative brief, and thinking about the audience targets and thinking about them together,” said Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. This would yield “the ability to incrementally check your work along the way.”
There is much inertia supporting the current status quo of television ad buying, said Strober, wherein much inventory is purchased in advance every year during the Upfronts.
“We have to move to a more campaign-based approach where we’re constantly measuring and optimizing and iterating,” said Strober. “That’s just not there yet because of the measurement and the ROI metrics.”
To Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU, it’s about taking baby steps toward a common goal. “We have to crawl before we run,” she said, adding that getting her clients to work with her to understand which format they want to use with which targeting capability “I think would be a tremendous improvement.”
Dolan related how a couple of years ago, her Cablevision Systems Corp. was assisting Madison Square Garden promote a boxing match featuring a Russian boxer. No one had considered running a Hispanic version of a TV spot until Dolan pointed out that “Hispanics buy tickets to boxing and watch it on TV.”
The eventual Hispanic version of the ad created “a lift because we took a product that we knew appealed to a particular segment,” said Dolan. “Just even getting people to consider doing something different from the way they’ve always done it isn’t that much more expensive and can result in some learning.”
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This was the consensus of media sellers and audience targeting specialists who participated in a Beet.TV panel discussion about commercial loads during CES 2017 held at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink began by asking panelists what the TV world might look like five years from now, given the low tolerance many people have for watching commercials in the digital realm and their ability to avoid them via subscription services.
Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which provides data-driven, census-based audience measurement solutions, commended Turner Broadcasting’s drive to reduce commercial load. “I think it puts the customer first to say were not going to jam however many minutes in an hour,” said Dolan. Observing that “advertising is part of our existence, it’s not going anywhere,” Dolan said she doesn’t perceive outright antipathy toward advertising. “The more relevant the advertising is the more it actually could have a positive impact on the brand that’s surrounding the ad that’s being presented,” she said.
“We take a long-term view,” said Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, before citing audience demographics showing how much people ages 18 to 24 watch on-demand programming as opposed to live TV. “What’s going to happen five to ten years from now when they are largely the key audience that most of our clients want to reach? If they go to linear TV and it still looks like it does today, we’re going to lose them.”
The key is to start to figure out now how to show fewer commercials “but each exposure or opportunity is incredibly impactful to the marketer and ultimately to the consumer,” Strober said.
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, noted that the main objection to digital ads is their intrusiveness. It’s not that consumers don’t understand the value exchange at play when watching ad-supported content, according to Steuer.
“I think part of it is just about having a reasonable conversation with consumers at scale and looking at the data about what’s working and what’s not working and adjusting the mix accordingly,” said Steuer.
Asked by Spiegel to imagine a TV world in which ad delivery and performance is based on impressions as opposed to units, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCUniversal, said “It’s just a matter of time. In a couple more years the television on the wall will be able to deliver advertising in the same way that you get it on your phone or that you’re getting it on your tablet or on your laptop.”
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Joining Dolan on the dais were Denise Colella from NBCUniversal, Turner’s Michael Strober, Jonathan Steuer from Omnicom Media Network and moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Asked to trace the Dolan family’s pioneering involvement with addressable linear TV, she explained how for 27 years she helped run Cablevision—from its trucks to its call center—and oversaw the in-house marketing department. Cablevision started aggregating set-top box data with an initial sample size of 1% and around 2007 began dabbling with addressability. Located in the number one market, it would become the first 100% addressable U.S. cable system.
“We had lot of time and the benefit of some runway to really learn about addressability,” said Dolan. “Our sales teams used data from the set-top boxes to sell advertising on an impression basis. They could sell long-tail content because we could apply actual viewership information against those long-tail networks.”
Being a subscription-based business, Cablevision “utilized our own avails a lot” to target viewers to upsell services and for tune-in initiatives. “We could do frequency capping and media optimization within the marketplace, and integrate both the opportunity to have set-top box data and 100% addressability within our own company,” said Dolan.
After completing the sale of the company, the Dolans formed Dolan Family Ventures then acquired Analytics Media Group and formed 605, whose segmentation and targeting services started in political advertising and have expanded to serve companies like Walmart.
Given all of the “noise and the discussion about the marketplace right now” about marketers leveraging more precise audience data, Spiegel asked Dolan why 605 is starting out with a focus on the sell side.
She used the words “passion” and “passionate” to describe her affinity for using data to provide better audience targeting, noting that 40 million homes are reachable via addressable linear TV.
“Because our primary experience is coming from cable television and a lot of our relationships in the past have been with the programmers that’s the area we want to focus on first,” said Dolan.
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Having launched ATP in the 2014-2015 Upfront negotiating period, NBCU began by guaranteeing audience delivery against traditional Nielsen age and gender metrics. In the 2016-2017 Upfront, it switched to guaranteeing delivery of specific audiences as defined by advertisers, according to Denise Colella, SVP of Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy.
“We’ve seen the amount of budgets that are getting optimized double and we’ve seen a tremendous increase in clients,” Colella says in an interview with Beet.TV. “And we’ve also seen almost all of the clients we had in year one come back for more.”
As The Wall Street Journal reports, NBCU has offered make-goods for campaigns that did not initially reach specific audience targets, meaning additional ad inventory within its portfolio of programming.
“It’s been somewhat of a limited release up until now,” Colella says in response to a question from interviewer Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink. “We’re definitely seeing a lot of uptake.”
NBCU’s Audience Studio is composed of NBCUx and NBCUx for Linear TV, a programmatic offering across digital video, mobile and display platforms and linear television; NBCU+ Powered by Comcast, its addressable TV capability; and Social Synch, which helps extend advertisers’ and NBCUniversal’s social media content campaigns across major social platforms.
Segmenting audiences for individual advertisers has been a learning process, as it can be time consuming to help them define whom they want to target, according to Colella.
“Last year, we continued to guarantee against Nielsen because that’s what they were used to,” Colella says of NBCU’s advertiser clients. “Now that we’re seeing how this scales and the benefits that it’s providing to our advertisers, we’re standing behind the audiences that we’re promising and we know we can deliver them across our portfolio.”
Right now, Audience Studio products are “fairly siloed,” according to Colella, as they are limited to individual platforms.
“Over time, we’re building the connective fiber so that we can do that in a more seamless process,” she says. “That’s going to take some time.”
Meanwhile, buying practices also remain siloed to a certain extent. “The buying for addressable is typically in a separate group, a separate budget, than what we’re seeing for buying linear,” Colella says.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
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