We’ve covered Kevin’s over the past 10 years in his leadership roles at Bloomberg and CNBC.We’ve spoken many times about the changes in TV news from linear to IP delivered.   It’s been a fascinating sector to cover, and Kevin has always been way in front of it.  He shares his views  on the sector on this episode of the #BeetCast, among a number of topics.

Since 2105, he has headed EDO, a TV data firm that provides programmers and advertisers the tools to determine the outcome of TV ads by understanding Web search.  The company works with many leading programmers.  Recently, it  announced its newest partnership with Univision.

Choose Creativity 

Separately, Kevin and his wife Marina founded  a non-profit organization called Choose Creativity.  It is an educational initiative that empowers children and adults to build resilience, creative confidence, and social-emotional skills through engagement.  It is being widely adopted.  And is particularly valued during the pandemic.

As Kevin explains in this interview, the organization was founded in the wake of the terrible loss of his two children.  It’s an amazing, inspiring story.   I hope you will visit ChooseCreativity.org  to learn more, and will join me in making a contribution.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

Grunther says that EDO is focused on how to capture the moment of impact for an ad, and specifically how to capture impact at the middle of the funnel.

“Everyone was at the top and hopped right to the bottom and attribution is terrific,” Grunther says. “But there is the ability in the middle of that funnel to capture impact when viewers are engaged and want to take an action. How do you capture that?”

The way he thinks of impact right now is the moment in which the viewer moves from passive to active. There’s exposure, attention, engagement and outcome, all of which are important and all are different measures of impact, but ignoring the middle-funnel metrics would mean losing out on a lot of key insights.

Part of finding a measurement that could be currency-grade requires thinking about scale. For the TV industry, this means being able to measure a small program on a cable network the same way that we measure a huge tentpole event like the Super Bowl.

“It’s basically being able to apply measurements and metrics to the entirety of programming regardless of how large or small the audience is,” Grunther says.

Reaching scale may be a huge step, but Grunther doesn’t necessarily believe that it will make the transacting process seamless. The buy side will look for accountability and proof of performance. Sellers, on the other hand, don’t want to guarantee anything that they don’t have to.

“In there lies this sort of conundrum and that is if you’re guaranteeing on outcomes or impact or other forms of effectiveness, it’s going to come down to what’s in it for both sides that is valuable for both,” Grunther says. “So I think we can get there, but ultimately the sellers are going to have to feel enough pressure from the buyers to basically adjust the way that they guarantee deals or conduct business.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But, whilst not every brand is a Casper, Allbirds or Soylent, many other traditional companies which are reliant on marketing partners could be doing more to look like D2C.

That is according to one ad-tech exec whose company aims to capture data which infers the intent of consumers – and then execute on that in TV environments.

Former CNBC SVP and general manager Kevin Krim is CEO of EDO (Entertainment Data Oracle), a data science company that uses machine learning to crunch data sets like consumer search and browsing behaviour, turning it in to marketing data.

“What we saw in our research is that, this trend around direct-to-consumer brands that are doing such smart and interesting things with TV advertising… that’s not a phenomenon that’s unique in the consumers mind to direct-to-consumer brands,” says Krim in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“They don’t sit there and think, ‘Oh, well Dollar Shave Club is a direct-to-consumer therefore I will respond instantaneously to their ads on TV, and buy what they’re selling, but, oh, Toyota is a different kind of brand, so therefore I won’t do something when I see an ad for Toyota’.

“The reality is, consumers react in the exact same way to these ads. They grab whatever connected device they have near them if they’re stimulated … they’re going to go search for it.”

That is why search is one of the key signals that EDO uses in its machine learning analysis for customers.

Those customers are marketers, TV networks and movie studios.

For them, EDO has a database of real-time ad airings and measurement for how well national TV airings drive consumers in to purchase funnels.

Backers include the venture capitalist Jim Breyer, the co-founders of Moat and the actor/filmmaker Edward Norton.