“The Hispanic market should be a foundation in your marketing plan. It is a business imperative,” Donna Speciale, president of sales and marketing at Univision, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “You’re only going to be able to grow your business if you include it.”
Speciale is a seasoned veteran of the media and marketing industries, having led advertising sales at WarnerMedia and overseen investment, activation and agency operations at MediaVest Worldwide. She joined Univision in January amid the American Spanish-language broadcaster’s expansion into streaming media.
“Since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing some due diligence and looking a lot at the advertiser base,” she said. She found that more than 1,900 brands run ads in English, while only 400 do so in Spanish — and segments like pharmaceuticals were underrepresented.
“That was shocking to me, given the inequities in what is happening with our healthcare,” Speciale said. “I’m working really hard to get to those clients, pharma specifically, and trying to educate them on why our Hispanic audience is so important, because we’re 60 million people and growing.”
As big as the Hispanic market is, marketers shouldn’t look at it as a uniform group of consumers, Speciale said. She sees opportunities for more granular audience segmentation based on other attributes including behavior.
“We have a really big segment of Afro-Latinos, we have LGBTQ — then you dive into behaviorals with auto intenders and stuff like that,” she said. “You can dissect the Hispanic audience just like you do segments within English-language. Audience targeting levels the playing field.”
As more Hispanic consumers watch video on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones, Univision is now rolling out Prende TV as its ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service. The broadcaster last month bought Spanish-language streaming service VIX to round out its digital offering.
“We will be the only destination for streaming for Spanish-language in the country,” Speciale said. “That is a powerful statement to say.”
As one of the architects of OpenAP, a collaboration among major media companies to define audience categories in a more uniform way for audience-based ad buys, Speciale is well familiar with advanced TV.
“We will be building our audience capabilities. They will be ready for this upfront to be diving into, and cross-platform will be part of that initiative,” she said.
]]>WarnerMedia planned to show how its union with AT&T’s Xandr helped to a produce a first-quarter, double-digit lift in in-store visits for McDonald’s and a 6.5% increase in dealership visits for Volkswagen during the same period.
Besides the retirement of the Turner name, “We have not changed anything for the past four or five years, but now with AT&T powering us we’re going to be that much smarter, that much stronger,” Speciale said. In the walkup to its UpFront presentation, WarnerMedia has been “talking to individual holding companies and their clients who want to partner with both of us with their addressable product.”
While AT&T offers addressable advertising, WarnerMedia has been building out its audience-targeting solutions. Underlying both is AT&T data insights from its 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships. “Now buyers are going to get much more broader reach and expanded reach with both of our products,” Speciale adds.
Xandr, which is AT&T’s advanced advertising and analytics company, used the occasion of the UpFront period to announce the formation of Community. It’s described in a news release as “a curated marketplace of publishers that enables advertisers to reach their audiences at scale in a brand-safe, privacy-protected, premium video environment.” Xandr describes the Community marketplace as “the first-step towards the future convergence of linear TV and digital.”
Discussing WarnerMedia’s plans for a direct-to-consumer streaming offering, Speciale said the new SVOD service would be in beta test at the end of 2019, with a full product set to debut in 2020.
“There is a goal a year from now that there will be an AVOD service. I am working very closely with the team in LA to talk about what that AVOD service looks like,” she said.
Right now, the AVOD offering is “a clean slate” as WarnerMedia continues to research the desires of consumers and advertisers. Possible ad loads are completely open to consideration. “It’s not a one size fits all. I don’t want it to be pre-dispositioned.”
According to Speciale, advertisers have been waiting for linear TV to be more accountable for business outcomes along the lines of digital media, but lack of data has been a problem.
“Now with AT&T data, we can make that happen. We’re optimizing a lot quicker. We’re going to be guaranteeing on business outcomes. That’s what you’re going to see at this UpFront. We’re going to have proof points that television actually now works and can drive business outcomes.”
]]>“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”
At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.
“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.
Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.
“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.
“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”
To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”
At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I’m thrilled to be attending the conference in the next week or two,” she says. “I want to hear Brian’s vision from him and his team,” she adds in a reference to Brian Lesser, who is CEO of the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics unit. “I think it’s going to be so exciting.”
Speciale, who is President of Advertising Sales at Turner, is already in sync with Lesser and his people, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
“We’ve been working together for the past few weeks collaborating with both our teams,” she says. “And what’s so exciting is that both his side and our side, our visions have been so much aligned. So I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say and what our clients have to say.”
Like many others, Speciale is keen on knowing how AT&T plans to use customer data for better targeting of ads across media. “At Turner, we’ve always put the consumer at the center. We have been doing that for years.”
She talks about the company’s efforts to reduce commercial load “because the experience is so important to us of how our viewer really feels, making content more relevant, targeting obviously is definitely something that we have been focusing on over these years.”
With advanced targeting data, “I think addressability is what’s really going to be popping. That’s really where our vision has been for the past few years.
“It has to start with audience, that’s what we’ve been focusing on, now getting the data from AT&T is going to make that even more rich and viable and the next portion of that is going to be addressability.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’ve seen ratings lifts in both areas,” Speciale says of the truTV and TNT ad reduction efforts, along with “increased brand affinity to the messages that have been within those pods.” Specifically, she says C3 ratings—which track average commercial minutes in live programming plus total playback by digital video recorder out to three days after—was “probably anywhere from five to seven to ten percent lift,” depending on the programming.
“It’s going to be continuing. truTV might be adding some more of their programming with LCI and there are going to be more originals on TNT in 2018 where you’re going to be seeing reduced commercial load,” says Speciale.
On the native ad front, Turner has been asking clients to take some of the one- to two-minute messaging they’ve done in the digital space and bring it to TV. In addition, its content studio has been marrying Turner’s talent ranks with ad messaging and environments. “And that’s going to have a huge pop and resonate really well with the consumer right now.”
Turner uses its targeting capabilities to find the right placement for native content across its entire portfolio, as Advertising Age reports.
According to Speciale, OpenAP was a direct response to clients “asking us to get together.” Even though the individual member networks had focused on their own audience targeting capabilities, “Some of the comments have been ‘it’s great but it’s a little complicated, it’s not scalable. Would you guys consider coming together?’”
She believes the consortium will be a “catalyst” to spur more advertiser interest in audience targeting using their own data sets during this year’s TV Upfront.
“We have been getting a lot of response from other media companies and we are hoping shortly that we’ll be able to announce other people joining the consortium,” Speciale says.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“That was the first thing we have ever done where we started with the mobile concept and then a lot of the ideas from that app then branched itself out into the linear space and branded content and other areas,” Donna Speciale explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s not a one-size-fits all, because every client is going to be using mobile and it’s created very differently,” Turner’s President of Ad Sales explains during a break at the Mobile World Congress 2017.
The data-centric CNN Politics app was designed by CA Technologies to track the latest polling, delegate, voting and fundraising data behind the 2016 presidential race. With personalized alerts and notifications, the app provided users with comprehensive election results, breaking news, enterprise and video reporting.
CA Technologies was a technology sponsor of the 2016 America’s Choice Election on CNN. On digital, CA was the exclusive sponsor of the CNN Politics app, as well as the hub on CNNPolitics.com that housed the app’s content and included CA branding.
Asked about Turner’s view of the upcoming TV Upfront negotiating season, Speciale talks about the shift from Nielsen age-sex demographics to audience targeting specific to clients’ needs and objectives.
“We are now able to hone in a lot more on who our fan is,” Speciale says of Turner’s audience targeting capabilities. “We’re now getting a lot more into who our fan base is and the behaviors of our fans and how we can marry that to our brands and their objectives coming together in the right environment.”
Speciale attends MWC for a glimpse of the future, given that the U.S. isn’t always ahead of trend curves like, say, China or Europe. It boils down to figuring out “How do I have to alter the organization or our thinking with clients, knowing in the next two or three years the next iteration of innovation is what? I think you can find that here,” she says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>One year on, how is the initiative faring? Donna Speciale, Turner Ad Sales’ president, tells Beet.TV the early results are exploratory but promising, and lead her toward wanting fewer, longer ads that give brands a bigger canvas and exclusive air time.
Shaking up the way commercials are structured in US TV programming is such a significant move, Speciale is treading cautiously, searching for evidence.
Next up, she will be testing reduced ad loads on archive shows, too, to establish whether old and first-run shows perform differently with the new setup.
The advertising and publishing worlds have been rocked by the reality of ad blocking online. Steadily, the TV world is starting to get spooked that it, too, may secretly be suffering from latent consumer resentment.
“The industry needs to focus on the consumer experience int he television landscape,” Speciale adds. “It’s not just us doing it. NBCU announced limited commercials with SNL, Fox is reducing NatGeo and did some stuff with Empire. It can’t just be a Turner initiative.”
So what is the optimum ad format, and how will it be used? Again, Speciale is as yet non-committal while tests are ongoing – but first tests are leading Turner toward a conclusion.
“We’re testing, should there be five breaks that are shorter, or three breaks that are longer?,” Speciale says. “Our initial inclination is five breaks in an hour but two minutes in each.
“The next iteration is to trying take those two-minute pods and get out of the traditional 30-second commercial. We want to make that environment better storytelling with client messaging.”
Those longer slots would allow advertisers to have ownership of a given ad break, a space in which to run longer creatives.
“There’s a lot of content right now in the digital landscape with one- or two-minute messaging but they’re not taking that messaging and translating it in to linear – because of cost, but also we’re not set up that way.
“By making the pods shorter, we can enable them to take storytelling that they’re already doing or we will create and start marrying the right messaging to the content.”
Such a switch would make this a rare occasion on which the US TV advertising infrastructure is re-shaped by online advertising and not the other way around.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>Turner’s solution – fewer, longer, better ads. That’s why, in October, it said it will halve the number of prime-time ads on its truTV real-life crime channel, a reduction of up to nine minutes each hour. But now the same idea is also being applied to original series on the TNT channel, which will also halve ad load.
“Our vision starts with having the consumer at the center,” Turner ad sales president Donna Speciale explains in this video interview with Beet.TV. That’s why we started thinking about the ad loads.
“The experience right now on television is not ideal. With all the choices that a consumer with Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or cable or TV or mobile, the experience is now crucial.
We needed to take a step.”
Although these steps have so far been taken in earnest on two of Turner’s channels, don’t bet against seeing ads reduced across the board. Adult Swim on TBS already comes with fewer ads in tow.
Fewer ads in a slot gives Turner the opportunity to sell longer ads to brands at a higher premium, in what is a less cluttered airing, and lends itself better to the kind of extended videos brands are now making as native marketing content. The only question is finding the right balance. That’s why Speciale is running tests.
“We’ve been doing a lot of research on the backend and testing what breaks we should be doing – three breaks with more ads in those breaks, or should we keep it at five breaks with less commercial loads in those,” she says.
“We’re testing on three to five. Our gut is saying five breaks are probably the best, with a two-minute to two-and-a-half-minute load between them.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
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