But is full attribution really available today – or is it just a mirage?
In a spicy panel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a trio of executives disagreed on whether the relative absence of such strategies in the TV industry today is the fault of lack of technology – or lack of willingness:
They were led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis.
Kinsella of TVSquared’s, whose platform helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites, took issue with sentiment expressed on an earlier panel – that measuring TV ads based on real outcomes, like sales, should not take precedence.
“That boggles my mind,” she said. “Why am I going to give you money if you can’t prove that it’s going to work? I’m not going to believe that bullshit. Currencies and GRPs? Just stop! We have the data, we have the technology – and people are getting in the way. It’s time to stop being scared. Use the data, use the tech, drive results. Simple.”
Bob Ivins of NCC Media – the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter – that is measuring set-top box viewing data – said measuring “outcomes” is not so simple.
“You’re measuring an outcome, one outcome – and there’s a bunch of different outcomes,” he explained. “An outcome could be to ‘go to a website’, an outcome could be ‘do a transaction’, an outcome could be ‘do a search’. There’s a bunch of different outcomes.
“Unless you have all those outcomes with the metric on them that you can monitor with real-time and at scale the way you are, then we’re just doing one at a time. And I think when you think attribution, it’s not one thing.”
Wallach of Comcast-owned FreeWheel said the new technology allows ad buyers to change how they buy inventory in the middle of a campaign – a vast change from previously.
“A year ago, it would be six months after a campaign was completed before you first look at a report,” he said. “(By then), everything has changed – consumer behaviour has changed, the product may have even changed or the sales channel, etc.”
Kinsella said being able to do that across TV devices required consolidating from multiple distinct software platforms to one that gives a holistic overview.
But NCC Media’s Ivins replied: “There’s a long journey though, until we can do that executionally in linear TV.
“I mean, there’s a long, long road ahead of us. It’s hard. I think it’s (because of) technology, I think it’s people, I think it’s just the cable plan itself is hard to work with. There is legacy infrastructure on the agency side and the brand side and the technology side.”
But TVSquared’s Kinsella disagreed with the “no”: “Just say ‘yes’. (People say) ‘there’s still so much’, ‘no, it’s hard’, ‘we can’t do that, the systems are old, what about Nielsen? I can’t fire that many people’.
“Just say ‘yes!’. Just say ‘yes’. We are doing it today. It’s happening. It’s real.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>GroupM’s North America CEO Tim Castree used Beet Retreat to call for the industry to develop common standards for measuring ads on an impression basis.
Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, in this video interview with Beet.TV, said agency in-fighting is stopping standardization.
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory. It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
Smolin spoke at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” with Janet Balis, EY Global Advisory Services Leader for Media & Entertainment.
Smolin said technology is not holding back standardization – “operational” disagreements, between agencies’ distinct traditional TV-buying and programmatic trading desk teams, are.
“There’s kind of a fight in a lot of agencies over who gets control over that, on who’s going to lead in that going forward,” Smolin said. “On the sell side, you have a similar challenge in that, up until very recently, most of the broadcasters, programmers and MVPDs have generally been leaning back in regards to programmatic, as opposed to leaning forward.”
Asked by Balis if technology was “out-innovating the market readiness”, Smolin said he saw a three-step process through which agencies can prepare themselves to buy in this converged fashion…
Smolin said advanced TV ad buyers that are profiting from the opportunity don’t want to be named, seeing the technique as a “competitive advantage”.
“We are seeing some organizations that are pretty evolved with their traditional TV investment teams, very data-driven. They are doing data-driven (TV) upfronts, and then they are taking those and using digital KPIs measured against the linear TV upfronts in order to do monthly and, for some of their brands, weekly planning updates.”
The company spent $101 million on the TV and video ad-tech supplier in 2018. But what was the rationale?
“Amobee’s heritage as a technology platform was in programmatic,” Smolin said. “Programmatic evolved out of remnant display advertising; it’s demand-constrained.
“But when you look at TV, it’s supply constrained. It introduces the dimension of time, upfronts, reservations.
“It’s very different algorithms in order to solve those problems effectively. We realized it would take us years to build (this new kind of software).”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Until now, it has been mostly the large national networks and OTT platforms benefitting from the new tools. But local players don’t have to be left out.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Janet Balis, EY global advisory leader for media and entertainment, says local cable operators can excel at the opportunity.
“We expect that national media entities bring a strong degree of sophistication to the advertising products that they have, which range from targeting to optimization to increasingly true addressability,” Balis explains.
“But I think what’s really exciting is to see that same sophistication start to be applied at scale by the local cable operators and the local media players and broadcasters.”
Balis was speaking ahead of Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, an event where she will be a moderator.
The opportunity is opening up because cable operators are making more inventory addressable to advertisers – not just the two minutes per hour historically given over, but all of the available time – and because more of that advertising can be delivered direct to devices, rather than through the cable operators.
Balis says local cable boasts two key features:
The impact could be profound.
“For marketers, the implication is that we can now really look at the dovetail between national, regional, and local media strategies,” Balis adds.
“We can now start to understand the interaction between building a national brand and then really driving it home in the markets that matter.
She says collaboration between cable platforms is critical to fully realize the market opportunity. So Balis wants to see interoperability of data across cable operators.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight and TVSquared. Please visit this page for additional segments.
Here is a list of the speakers and moderators for the #BeetRetreat in the City
Kelly Abcarian, GM, Video Advanced Advertising, Nielsen, @kellyabcarian
Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment, E&Y, @digitalstrategy
Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media, Cadent, @CadentTV
Tim Castree, CEO, GroupM North America, @castree
Marc Cestaro, Director, Addressable Lead, MODI Media, @ModiMedia
Brendon Condon, CRO, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight
Jennifer Donohue, VP, Local Advertising Sales, Hulu, @hulu
Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer, NCC Media, @bobivins
Ryan Jamboretz, Chief Development Officer, Amobee Broadcaster Solutions, @r_jamboretz
Jo Kinsella, CRO & EVP, TVSquared, @JoKinsellaTVS
Joe Marchese, Entrepreneur In Residence & Co-Founder, Human Ventures, @joemarchese
Brian Norris, SVP, Direct to Consumer, Ad Sales, NBCU, @thebriannorris1
Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, @BGCPR
Sean Robertson, General Manager, Partnerships, DISH Media, @DISHMedia
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy & Insights, @HowardShimmel
Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee, @philipsmolin
Ashley Swartz, CEO & Founder, Furious Corp., @RedFuryNYC
Brian Wallach, SVP, CRO, Advanced TV, Freewheel, @bw10
Andrea Zapata, VP, Research & Insights, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight
]]>“I think we’ve got a lot of bets in motion right now,” says Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader, Media & Entertainment, at professional services provider EY.
“Some bets are bringing things together and other bets are creating more walled gardens. Right now it remains to be seen how it all plays out, but I think we’re going through this open and closed ecosystem debate,” Balis adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
She lauds the efforts of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium as “a great step in that direction” of industry unification. Meanwhile, consumers are dabbling with a preponderance of OTT and streaming television choices while “the entire industry is playing catch-up mode” in figuring out how best to reach those viewers.
Referencing this year’s TV UpFront season, Balis sees a mix of legacy mindsets and behaviors and the reality of a shifting landscape. “I would imagine that next year’s UpFront will look quite different. I think right now it’s sort of got a foot in both worlds.”
Aside from media and technology companies, brand managers face major hurdles just trying to take advantage of audience segments in advanced TV. “Once we change all of those models, they have to change the entire infrastructure within their companies,” says Balis.
She sees a future in which marketing and customer experience, which today are often separate departments, will have to come together. “We have to build a smarter experience for consumers because that’s their human expectation of brands.”
Advertisers won’t be focusing just on the ROI of individual campaigns but “total lifetime value to get loyalty, retention and value from customers. Fundamentally, what that requires is embracing first-party data, enhancing it with second- and third-party data.”
Asked about her expectations for the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Balis recognizes an underlying “tension” but reminds that, “Ultimately, Cannes Lions celebrates creativity and we have to remember that. It’s about the art of the craft and really celebrating the stories that are told.”
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.
]]>The bottom line is that consumers need system interoperability, not “essentially closed loops” but one particular operation system across devices, Balis explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
And then there’s the television business. “I think television follows the same parallel here. In this case, it’s the advertiser that needs interoperability,” says Balis. “And they really need interoperability at scale. So the worst thing we can do is fragment all of these different sources of supply.”
Bringing things together and infusing it with data would produce standards so that people “can make intelligent decisions about what media they can or cannot find value in.”
Whether it’s open platforms or walled gardens, at the end of the day what facilitates fluidity in marketplaces is what wins, according to Balis. “I think we have to be able to connect supply and demand in a way that’s objective, that’s infused with data and ultimately that allows you to compare one piece of inventory with another. Fundamentally I think walled gardens make it harder to do that. It implies some layer of comparison that we’re going to have to make across walled gardens.”
EY fundamentally believes in building a better working world, with TV being no exception even if it means competitors working together. “Data and technology fundamentally connect everything. I think the big question is, if everyone’s innovating in a vacuum, we may not get to answers as an industry as quickly as if we come together.”
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.
]]>Sky is the UK’s leading pay-TV provider, whose AdSmart was one of the world’s first and biggest addressable TV services. Finecast is GroupM’s agency aiming to be a single point of access to buy inventory across multiple UK TV platforms and operators, including Sky.
In this Beet.TV discussion panel, Sky advanced advertising group director Jamie West and Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen say addressable TV won’t kill linear – but could soon gobble the majority of TV ad spending.
EY global advisory leader for media and entertainment Janet Balis led the discussion…
West and Nielsen said they have numbers to prove how addressable TV advertising works.
Sky’s West: “In ad breaks where there is an addressed client, channel switching … reduces by more than a third. that means more relevance or engaged audiences, and that’s a win for the advertiser; that’s a win for the consumer.”
Finecast’s Nielsen: “Advertisers today are starting to struggle just to get their reach across in the linear environment. Wherever you are in the world, linear is declining. Ten years ago the way we watched TV was in front of a box. We didn’t have distractions as we have today. If you are an advertiser and there are too many distractions for you that’s not going to work.”
The future will not be wholly on-demand. Whilst addressable can drive brands’ business, there will still be a role for traditional TV, the pair said…
Sky’s West: “I don’t think that linear TV is dead. What a marketeer is trying to do when they use TV is build brand fame. You will still do that using TV, whether it be on-demand or through linear. Addressable makes TV more relevant; it allows you to customize the message; it allows you to understand, household-to-household, the efficacy of your campaign, which means that you can optimize, prioritize and sequence campaigns through that process.
Finecast’s Nielsen: “We don’t think addressable TV will be 100% (of TV ad spend). We think traditional, live, linear TV is very, very important. You still have an tremendous amount of clients that needs to keep investing in their brands and do the reach. The small companies can disrupt your business very, very much if you forget to invest in your brand.”
Sky’s West: “I have a very clear line of sight to getting to 65, 70 percent household penetration for addressable by 2020. That is sort of market-leading or world-leading in terms of household penetration.”
West and Nielsen said it is challenging to drive adoption when brands are thinking short-term. West said the benefits are clear to brand sat the start, it’s just institutional adoption that needs education…
Finecast’s Nielsen: “Today companies are unfortunately becoming more and more short-sighted; there’s more and more pressure on P&Ls; there’s a tremendous amount of disruption in the market, whatever industry you are in, (your value) could replicated if you don’t have a powerful band. Clients are more and more focused on the short-term. I think that’s a really, really dangerous trend. I think we are doing what we can to kind of keep educating.”
Sky’s West: “What we’ll see is that the market will coalesce around a common standard and common goals, and that’s when you’ll really see addressable go from being whatever percent it is of the market today to being the numbers that Jacob talks about. Forty or 50% (of TV ad spend) is eminently achievable, in my mind.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>One more thing that’s in full-swing? The arrival of consulting firms to the advertising and marketing party. For months, ad land has been attuned to the appearance of big consultants aiming to capitalise on ad agencies’ troubles.
At the nexus of these two trends, Beet.TV asked one Big Four consultant to opine on the current state of media land.
“We’re seeing two different formulas happen,” says Janet Balis, global advisory leader for media and entertainment at EY (Ernst & Young).
“On the one hand, we’re seeing horizontal integrations, where people are leveraging scale across a broader portfolio of assets so they can gain scale with audience and offer scale to advertisers. On the other hand, I think we’re seeing vertical integration as a major theme.”
Balis was speaking at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where the festival chairman noted the pitch-up from advisories like EY.
Philip Thomas said they had not “taken over”, but were more visible.
For EY’s Balis, vertical integration – through which firms from previously-disparate disciplines are combined – is key.
“Three things need to come together – content, data and distribution,” she says.
“Ultimately the notion of that vertical integration will continue to be critically important because having data content and distribution not only allow you to build a direct to customer business, also to build an advertising business.”
Balis was the moderator of the Beet.TV Global Addressable TV Forum presented with Wavemaker. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Balis talks about why targeting is more of an immediate concern than achieving true one-to-one TV addressability at scale, and how EY counsels its publisher clients on the various ways they can better control and monetize their businesses.
“Television still very much matters,” is how Balis prefaces her comments about advanced targeting, before questioning its oft-malleable definition. “If we’re talking about truly addressable, having a full, two-way footprint, we’re a ways off from that being at scale. So I tend not to think as much about advanced advertising,” Balis says.
She’d rather concentrate on the confluence of digital advertising media and the growing number of TV delivery options, whether it’s video on demand or over-the-top streams. “There’s no question that we’re moving to more advanced television advertising. But the crux of what’s happening right now is much more about targeting,” particularly audience segmentation.
“And right now, what you see is essentially every network or network group has their own approach to how they bring more optimization into the mix.”
Today’s world is one in which an industry that for years was based on programs and ratings is colliding with one centered on viewable impressions “in a very different kind of content.” However, “there’s no comparability of the currency.”
This why media buyers and sellers, people “who would traditionally look at each other as competitors,” should come together around new standards and ways to transact. “Because but for an industry solution, it’s very hard to see how we will really get to scale.”
The beneficiaries will be marketers that want to be able to use the same audience segment “across different places, compete viably in the marketplace and really understand the value that they’re getting out of advertising. That’s the pressure around where television advertising is going today.”
For publishers working to monetize their content, Balis believes the biggest pressure is “first and foremost to market themselves differently” while taking control of how they acquire customers and achieve distribution.
Adopting a more direct-to-consumer approach is in contrast to publishers’ “dependencies on many of the largest players in that landscape.”
Balis describes digital display ads as being at “a very mature, plateauing perhaps declining, side of the marketplace” given alternative formats—video being at the top of the list.
“With that being the case, we really have to look at subscriptions, the value exchange that we have with consumers, how we look at compensating transparently for the use of data and what that value exchange that enables consumers to want to provide their data.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
]]>“Frankly, the reason why I think consulting is becoming so relevant at this particular moment is this is an industry undergoing tremendous change,” says Janet Balis, who is Global Advisory Lead, Media & Entertainment, at EY. “The consumers are leading and the business model is in catch-up mode in so many cases,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
EY is a case in point in the diversification of professional services firms. Until its official rebranding in 2013, it was known as Ernst & Young, with a pedigree that dates to the 1800’s. Now it competes with the likes of Accenture and a host of other big-name entities that have expanded their consulting offerings in step with the increasing complexity of the advertising and media world.
Balis has a deep background in media, having been Publisher at The Huffington Post, head of sales and marketing at AOL and EVP, Media Sales and Marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She also held positions at Time Inc. and Newsweek.
When she surveys the present terrain, Balis doesn’t focus on the friction that can exist between consultancies and advertising/media agencies, preferring instead to posit that everyone should be working together.
“I certainly recognize that some companies in the professional services space are absolutely and increasingly playing roles that we would consider to be the roles of agencies,” says Balis. “We have taken a distinct position, which is that we want the full ecosystem to thrive.”
Thus EY works with agencies “that we’re privileged to serve and that we believe in. We think that the right answer is not that this is a moment to compete, but this is a moment to collaborate.”
More specifically, the name of the game is to help marketers connect the dots. “The fact is that there are so many places that the dots don’t connect. There are silos in the organization, people working at odds with KPI’s, data sitting in particular silos. In order to connect the dots, that’s the perfect role for a consultant.”
Looking ahead to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Balis discusses EY’s sponsorship of a concept known as “better questions,” which rests on this philosophy: The better the question, the better the answer, the better the world.
“Because this is a moment frankly for intellectual humility. No one has all the answers.”
Given the dynamics of lower linear television viewing amid a sea of video alternatives, giving rise to a lessening of ad loads, “It places more pressure on the business model. It also places more pressure on the creative. It’s really about the stories we tell,” Balis adds. “So Cannes is the perfect place for us to have that dialogue.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview series of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by FreeWheel, a Comcast company. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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