That is the message from the connected TV division of the world’s biggest media buying agency.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen says it is safer and more responsible to swerve open CTV marketplaces.
“Linear TV will stop to exist, but it’s not happening tomorrow – it will take 10 years,” says Nielsen.
Finecast is GroupM’s specialist advanced TV buying unit. In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardized measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in a total of 11 countries.
Finecast aggregates video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
For Nielsen, those direct relationships are the key.
Leveraging GroupM’s decades of experience, Finecast works directly with CTV-operating broadcasters, rather than buying through SSPs or exchanges.
“You know that (there is) no fraud with that, you know that is responsible media,” Nielsen says.
He estimates open-marketplace CTV ad sales will total almost $10 billion this year – and thinks that’s a problem.
“Most of the fraud in connected TV to date has happened in the open programmatic exchange and marketplace environment,” Nielsen observes.
CTV ad fraud is on the rise. DoubleVerify, which makes and sells anti-fraud digital ad software, says CTV ad fraud rose 161% year-on-year in Q1 2020.
For Finecast’s Nielsen, verification tech is only part of the solution.
“You can have stricter control,” he says. “When you work directly with a broadcaster, there isn’t fraud because you buy it directly.”
And that is one dimension of a new imperative GroupM is calling “responsible media”.
“It’s how you, as a company, behave; how they treat people, how they give everyone an equal opportunity, how they don’t look at the skin color, they don’t look at how tall you are,” Nielsen explains.
“It’s part of our responsibility to make sure that we predominantly work with companies that have a very, very declared strategy and behave according to that strategy in the market.
“We need to educate all of our clients that they need to spend their money with companies that we can rely on.”
]]>Addressability allows ad buyers to target ads at particular groups of viewers – sometimes even individual households – thanks to viewing platforms’ audience identifiers.
But Harry Harcus, the managing director of GroupM’s specialist advanced TV buying unit Finecast, says the many connected viewing devices and programming providers nevertheless makes for complexity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts, Harcus says: “The barrier to entry (to TV) is just lower than it used to be.
“In a year of the pandemic, we’ve seen small – often, direct-to-consumer brands – coming through with much lower budgets, still able to produce fantastic TV creative, but able to target an audience that’s very specific to them, whether that is demographically, geographically or around very specific behaviors and sections of the audience.”
Our Head of Engagement, @ClaxtonKristian spoke alongside @DLGroupMedia's Sam Taylor @Campaignmag #Media360 earlier this month demonstrating why addressable is the future of TV advertising. Here are 6 reasons https://t.co/2HQflo3N2a
— Finecast (@Finecast) October 8, 2020
“To reach them at the moment, the problem is it’s become a very fragmented ecosystem. You’d have to go to each (UK) broadcaster in turn to reach their on-demand audience and, by the way, not able to reach their linear audiences on an addressable basis yet.”
In Harcus’ native UK, Sky’s AdSmart technology powers addressable linear TV ads across its own distribution platform and has inked a deal with rival Virgin Media, while ITV and Channel 4 now sell targeted on-demand ads in their cross-platform viewing apps.
“You’ve got the new CTV suppliers coming in as well,” Harcus adds. “So in terms of where the audience are and the content that they’re viewing, they’re pretty scattered.”
New-look TV’s ability to serve a new generation of brands has been documented, for example, in research by VAB.
Finecast’s Harcus says such digital brands have, online, enjoyed the ability to do fine-grained audience targeting and measurement, but have not been called to TV due to the absence of such attributes.
Connected TV changes that, however, and is now beckoning a new generation of brands that want to build their names using digital-style targeting on the main screen in the house.
“TV is probably the most loved advertising medium and one that most people can relate most easily to,” Harcus says.
Finecast is a major buyer of connected TV advertising. That also makes it a major partner for brands attempting to pick their way through both the fragmentation and the opportunity in front of them.
Finecast has recently learned a lot more about both thanks to research carried out by Dipsticks Research Group (DRG) and University College London (UCL).
Harcus says the research has an important takeaway – there is a difference between relevant targeted TV ads and personalized ones.
“The good news is that what the research did show – through surveys, through ethnography studies and through neuroscience – is the relevance of advertising messages does make a difference,” he explains. “It leads to higher engagement and ultimately greater effectiveness of advertising.”
]]>We launched the results from our #ThinkingInsidetheBox research last week with DRG and @ucl.
Take a look at how TV advertising has changed and how new mechanisms could help brands to advertise on TV effectively https://t.co/a41Pt2uKu1#addressabletv #BVOD #AVOD #SVOD #lineartv pic.twitter.com/LCLoAsB8Uc
— Finecast (@Finecast) October 5, 2020
That is the observation from one group providing a helping hand to agencies under the banner of the world’s largest agency holding group.
Finecast claims to offer addressable ads in programming from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, distributed over platforms from YouVie, Sky and Virgin Media, using data partners like Acxiom, CACI, Experian and Mastercard.
“What’s been really interesting is looking at how our agency partners have tried to restructure themselves around it,” says Kristian Claxton, head of engagement at Finecast, the advanced TV unit in WPP’s Group M.
“This is the first business I’ve worked in where the ingredients to a really successful adjustable TV campaign require all four corners of an organisation to lean in. In one (campaign) instance, we’ll have:
In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in Australia.
Finecast aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
Finecast claims to offer addressable ads in programming from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, distributed over platforms from YouVie, Sky and Virgin Media, using data partners like Acxiom, CACI, Experian and Mastercard.
Claxton, speaking with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz, says, at this stage, his main job is educating brands that often are still fixed on buying mass reach using television.
By contrast, advanced TV targeting can help them reach much smaller, but perhaps more relevant, cohorts.
They have a goal to capture declining reach that exists within linear TV through new platforms and devices, Claxton says.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But true use of the opportunity is running wider than that.
This is according to one man whose addressable TV company is celebrating having achieved a depth of real use cases.
In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in Australia.
Finecast aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Finecast UK MD Harry Harcus explains: “We were kind of a startup 18 months ago, but we’ve worked with 250 brands this year. We’ve run 2,500 campaigns. We’ve delivered almost three billion addressable TV impressions.
“As a result of all of that, we’ve learned a huge amount. We’ve learned … the diversity of use cases that brands are coming to us for – we’ve seen the full spectrum.”
Harcus says that spectrum includes:
Finecast claims to offer addressable ads in programming from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, distributed over platforms from YouVie, Sky and Virgin Media, using data partners like Acxiom, CACI, Experian and Mastercard.
Harcus was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But Jakob Nielsen is having the time of his life.
In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in Australia.
Now Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen says the outfit will launch in another country this coming September.
Having launched in the UK, the unit is up to 51 people and has also set up in Australia.
“We are starting to really scale,” says Nielsen – of both Finecast and the addressable ecosystem in general. “Now it feels like there’s a shift this year.”
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data.
It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
What are the right ingredients for the addressable TV facilities recipe? “You need to have a lot of data people, a lot of technology people, lots of TV people,” Nielsen says, speaking with MTM co-founder Jon Watts for this interview.
“They find better solutions for our clients and that’s what we think our job is.”
Not just people, but also technology. Finecast has built some of its own, but is happy to use software from the likes of FreeWheel, AT&T, Amobee and others, what Nielsen calls the “plumbing” for TV 2.0.
But getting there isn’t easy. Though advanced TV advertising may be hitting a kind of scale, it is relative to the dominance of the overall linear market – and it is a slog.
“(It is) enormously complicated, very fragmented, no measurements, many, many systems to connect to,” Nielsen acknowledges. “And that will slow down the adoption of addressable TV. That’s why we are where we are now and we won’t grow as much as most people want to grow because it’s complex. It’s difficult to understand.”
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page
]]>TV isn’t without its challenges, of course. But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Finecast chief product officer Rich Astley, whose company helps brands buy ads for targeted audiences through connected TV platforms, paints a more nuanced view of the shifting dynamics.
“The challenge with linear TV is obvious the ratings are going down in most TV markets,’ he says. “But revenue is kind of holding up.
“That means that inflation has been a challenge in most TV markets and big TV advertisers are looking at where they can spend in audio-visual advertising.
“So, naturally, that starts to lend itself to other platforms, potentially other formats that are TV-like still and offer that trusted, quality environment, but allow us to extend our reach into other areas of television.”
Astley’s Finecast is a new unit established by GroupM to smoothe the path to buying addressable campaigns by aggregating inventory.
The company aims to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”. It has launched first in the UK but has previously said it wants to roll out to global markets.
It also plans to deliver a self-serve tool to both agencies and brands.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
]]>And that is crossing off its ecommerce platform and on to online TV, too.
In a recent terms of service update for Fire TV ad sales, Amazon says
“Fire TV Ad-Enabled Apps must provide 30% of total advertising impressions in the app to Amazon, which 30% will be representative of all of the app’s advertising impressions and not exclude or limit Amazon’s access to times, programs or categories. Apps will not receive payment for the 30% of impressions provided to Amazon.”
That sets reports flying, like this from AdAge: “Until last month, Amazon let the publishers sell their own ads and take all the money.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the boss of one ad agency’s connected TV play gives his view on how Amazon’s position is shaping up.
“You can say, ‘Well what’s different about that? Apple is charging 30 percent if you have an app there they will take 30 percent or 40 percent cut of that app’,” says Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen.
“Well the difference is, Amazon is not saying that. They’re not saying they’ll take a cut of their revenue – they’re saying they want to sell the inventory. So for Amazon to do that, they’re building a big infrastructure, sales force of going directly after TV money. So they’re definitely going to be a gigantic player in there.”
Last year, GroupM launched Finecast, spanning multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms, set-top boxes, video-on-demand services, over-the-top providers and game consoles.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
Finecast recently told Beet.TV the unit has effectively been soft-launched and plans to deliver a self-serve tool to both agencies and brands later.
In the big picture, Nielsen doesn’t think connected TV will be left all to Amazon.
“I think all the current broadcasters can be big players, but they have to invest,” he says. “They have to invest in technology, they have to bring data into it.
And I think they’re all doing that, depending on what market you’re in. But I think the future of TV is enormously exciting, and that’s why we’re here.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
]]>What comes next? Maybe getting it in to the hands of media agencies, says the man who runs the product.
“We’re looking to bring that out into markets, so the agencies can use that themselves,” says Finecast head of product, data and analytics Clive Page in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Last year, the agency launched Finecast, spanning multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms, set-top boxes, video-on-demand services, over-the-top providers and game consoles.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
But Finecast is not yet in primetime.
“Ultimately, it’s a sort of soft launch in a way,” Page adds. “We have it internally, we’re stress-testing it, if you like, it’s sort of beta tested. We’ve held its feet to the fire somewhat more recently – we’ve actually demonstrated to our clients.”
“The first step will be to the agency operatives so they will be able to use it, understand where their audience is being seen, understand where they’re getting the best reach and optimize their campaigns using our technology.
“Then ultimately, I don’t see why that shouldn’t go to clients as well to give them insight.”
Finecast has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, like Channel 4, Channel 5, STV, Discovery and Disney, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
“We take the disparate supply sources of media that is addressable, and we corral that all into one place and then we add layers of insight and technology to that to bring value to our proposition,” Page adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
]]>Powered by consumer segmentation data, set-top box data and TV-specific data, the self-serve platform for live avails is in the beta stage, Marcus says in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum.
“There were a couple of pain points from a TV buying perspective that we wanted to address. There’s a lag in posting that media buyers just aren’t used to in the digital world. There’s an ease of use with other products and so we wanted to address some of those things,” Marcus says.
Among other changes, transactions are in net dollars as opposed to traditional gross dollars. “We think that lines us up nicely for a multi-platform use in the future.”
Early feedback has been positive. “The market has basically come down on what we thought they would. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s a little bit more powerful than they’ve had in the past and they like the timely, useful information.”
Looking forward, Marcus hopes the rest of the industry embraces such platforms and common audience segmentations. “The days of heavy competition between broadcasters has diminished and we need to think of ourselves as a platform to compete against other platforms,” he says.
Marcus cites three hurdles to scaling addressable TV advertising, the first being regulations requiring such ads on specialty stations must be for national advertisers and national campaigns. “Very hard to break up a spot in addressable,” he explains.
The second hurdle is that cable companies in Canada are investing heavily in the next generation of set-top boxes, something that will make addressable easier, but “no one’s investing a lot of money in the current set-top boxes and so we sort of have to wait until that scales until we start making addressable easy.”
Lastly, growth of addressable TV in the U.S. market has been driven by the two minutes per hour of local time that cable providers have been able to use to monetize their investments in technology like new set-top boxes. This is not the case in Canada, so there’s “no direct way to monetize addressable inventory.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Not that the advertising industry knew this instinctively. In fact, it’s been looking in the wrong direction for awhile, according to Christian Kurz, SVP, Global Consumer Insights, Viacom. Kurz believes the future will bring more live programming and events to get people to watch programming at a specific time.
“As a media industry, as media executives, we have a very warped view of the world, particularly when it comes to media consumption. We are just not normal,” Kurz says in this interview conducted by Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum. “And we completely misrepresent what the rest of the population does,” Kurz adds.
“We overestimate their use of mobile their use of online for big TV viewing, we completely underestimate the importance of TV sets. We are more urban, we are more male, we are younger. So there’s a really big discrepancy.”
Those are among the reasons why organizations like thinkTV set out to ask viewers what they really think, beginning with their definition of television. It is anything that is professionally produced video content between seven and 90 minutes—which leaves out short-form video and movies.
“That really means that when they talk about television, they have a slightly different conversation than we have in the industry ourselves. So we kind of need to recalibrate with that,” says Kurz.
In recent thinkTV research, survey respondents in Canada had to give up watching television for 10 days. “People completely underestimated how television brings people together” both in the home and “also in the wider world, the cultural connection,” he says.
Some survey respondents indicated they had given up social media “because they didn’t want to spoil the stuff they’re not watching on TV. So then the connection to the outside world is completely gone.”
Among linear TV’s attributes are flexibility and versatility because it “can be active and lean-forward when you really want it to, but it also is the easiest thing when you come back from school or work or whatever and just press a button.”
“Would you call it escapist?” Swartz asks.
“It’s incredibly escapist. That’s essentially what it is. It’s escaping reality,” with the exception of news programming.
Asked to speculate on the state of television three years hence, Kurz demurs but offers some predictions:
• There will be much more on-demand consumption, but “I don’t necessarily believe that dumping all of a series at one point is going to be the norm because people actually like the idea of watching something occasionally. It gives you something to talk about.”
• More linear TV programming will become dependent on “live-ness,” and not just traditional awards, news and sports. It could be “cameras following police cars around the world.”
• The “event-ization” of everything. “The shiny floor entertainment shows, they’ve been big, they’re going to continue to be big, because there’s a reason for you to watch it at the time. You can vote, you can participate.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>“So what we need to look at here in Canada is are these platforms going to be North American? If they are, we need to find a way to carve Canada into that,” says Colette Watson, SVP, Television & Broadcast Operations, Rogers Media. Watson has held a variety of ascending roles since starting at Rogers in 1990.
“In terms of program acquisition and program commissioning, we’re now looking at how do we participate in a North American market as opposed to a Canadian market,” Watson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum.
As recently as a couple of years ago, Rogers would compete against Netflix and Amazon for a program hour and come up empty, Watson explains in response to a question from interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp.
“But today I find that’s not the case. Studios are now holding their programming back from big global suppliers, not all of it obviously, but they’re looking to create their own over the top products” like CBS All Access.
In addition to the second season of Bad Blood on Oct. 1, Rogers has a variety of its own shows in development, but they’re not 100% exclusive. “Right now, the way the Canadian market works is we create and commission for Canada but we partner on Bad Blood, for example, there’s an international distribution sale with Netflix,” Watson says.
Asked by Swartz whether Rogers approaches original programming first from a linear TV mindset and if it considers going digital-first, linear is still the first step by a margin of roughly 80% to 20%.
“Mostly because producers who come to us still get most of their funding through linear applications. As regulations and legislative frameworks evolve, that will change. It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in terms of how financing works in Canada.”
There is a mix of ad-supported and subscription models, the former represented by two new products from Rogers in October: Citytv NOW and FX NOW.
“As revenue streams change and evolve, you need to add more and more revenue streams,” says Watson. “Creating a good viewer experience, primary. But also creating a good advertiser experience is paramount. And so that’s how we’re looking at our development.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>This “interesting construct of a market” with huge geography and “not a lot of people” still has more than 75% of households using cable TV subscriptions. “And it’s not eroding at the same rate we are seeing in the U.S.,” Swartz explains in this conference recap interview for Beet.TV.
A frequent Beet.TV contributor, Swartz is CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization and has clients in Canada. She says that research shows similarities in Canada to audience behaviors in the United States and Western Europe, “Which means there’s a huge opportunity for brands here to take lessons they’ve learned in other markets that may have more data, may be more mature, be introducing audience-based products sooner and bring that to Canada and execute with great precision sooner.”
She cites as examples a real-time buying platform by Corus Entertainment that encompasses 25 of its specialty TV networks and the introduction of the data-enabled RED solution from Rogers Media.
“Both of them are innovating and bringing new products to market that are elevating the value and ROI of television,” Swartz says. “Stepping on the traditional business models of an Upfront-driven marketplace and taking risks in order to innovate and deliver more ROI.”
Although she hears complaints about the amount of friction required in buying TV and media overall, Swartz believes the sentiment exists in Canada to collaborate, plus a “hunger to innovate and a desire to continue to grow this market.”
She doesn’t see the kind of industry protectionism that exists in the United States, where “fear and uncertainty” still prevail.
There is much to be learned from the growth of advanced TV in other markets as Canadian broadcasters pave their future, according to Swartz.
“I think that creates a Petri dish of opportunity for brands and marketers for their agencies to begin to start to spend dollars in different places or allocate net new money in different ways as these sellers are coming to market with new opportunities and new innovations.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Just over a year ago, Sky and Virgin disclosed their intent to team up on addressable TV ads by adding Virgin Media’s customer base to Sky’s addressable TV offering, Sky AdSmart, as The Drum reports. In this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp. Founder & CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Future of TV Advertising Forum, Ranger provides an update on the alliance.
It’s been a few years since Cadent began working with Virgin to deploy VOD dynamic ad insertion on its Qam system. Cadent has also enabled VOD on Virgin’s IP system in the UK and Ireland “and now we’re looking at linear as well,” says Ranger.
“What’s been less talked about is the fact that it’s Cadent technology providing the system which is going to allow them to do that,” he adds of the Sky/Virgin initiative.
To be GDPR compliant, Cadent is “effectively creating a walled garden, which means Sky are abstracted away from all of the Virgin subscriber information and keeping it GDPR compliant from that perspective.
“We’re managing the exchange of the campaign data from Sky, because obviously Sky are very sensitive about handing over campaign information as well. We’re acting as the mediator between the Sky media campaign information and the Virgin subscriber data,” says Ranger.
In Canada thus far, Cadent has worked “specifically” with Rogers Cable, enabling VOD dynamic ad insertion for its 1.6 million subscriber households to pay-TV, along with Corus Entertainment and Bell Globemedia.
Ranger sees the role of Cadent as two-fold: being pioneers and educators in the interested of advanced television advertising.
“And we’re looking at it from a technology perspective as well,” he says. “One of the things that we don’t want to create is a whole load of siloed systems that make it very expensive to operationalize these new kinds of advertising.”
Priorities include normalizing data, making ad ops as efficient as possible and creating “a common technology product across multiple BDU’s that the major programmers can tap into and use to drive new revenue streams,” he says, referencing Broadcast Distribution Undertakings—satellite TV operators, as they are known in Canada.
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Canada is a “fascinating market and for many reasons,” Astley says in this Beet.TV interview conducted by Furious Corp.’s Ashley J. Swartz at last week’s Future of TV Advertising Forum in Toronto. Foremost among those reasons is that Canada has one of the world’s highest rates of pay-TV subscriptions, at some 85% to 90%.
“So that means obviously you’ve got boxes in living rooms, in pretty much every living room in Canada. Which is a pretty good base to start for an addressable TV business,” Astley explains.
The challenge is that many set-top boxes are older-generation devices not equipped with modern ad-serving capabilities. Currently, Ericsson and Comcast are rolling out new boxes with all of the latest technology.
“That’s going to change a lot because it’s going to create a new universe of addressable boxes in Canadian homes and we hope that will scale pretty quickly,” Astley says. “Where there’s been a lot of VOD inventory available in Canada historically but with no real ad insertion capabilities, suddenly that will unlock over the next year or so.”
Until quite recently, Canadian broadcasters have not really been under “a huge amount of threat from international distribution businesses,” he adds, but this year and going into next year “the threat is very real.”
Netflix adoption in Canada is “incredibly high. We’ve seen OTT start to grow massively.”
Launched a year ago in the U.K. to serve as a single access point to inventory across different broadcasters and operators, Finecast sees three pillars to the success of addressable, with an ecosystem being the foundation. Those are advertiser demand, content distribution and content.
“We think collaboration across those three areas is really important because what a marketer really wants is scale against unique addressable segments,” Astley says. “To achieve that scale you’ve got to collaborate on data and you’ve got to collaborate on a multi-broadcaster basis to really achieve that scale.”
While the transformation in Canada won’t happen overnight, “the change is there and I think over the next six to twelve months, we’ll start to see some pretty interesting developments.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, 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.
]]>Last year, the agency launched Finecast, spanning multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms, set-top boxes, video-on-demand services, over-the-top providers and game consoles.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, chief product officer Rich Astley says: “We’re looking at some other markets. We’re going to hopefully launch later this year.”
Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen first trailed the planned expansion to Beet.TV back in November.
But new territories are not the only item on Finecast’s agenda. Astley is also trying to embed addressable TV, as a new option and a new way of thinking, with the agencies he hopes will crete and buy ads through the medium.
“We are looking at how we integrate addressable into the communications planning cycle, so making sure that we understand the role that addressable can play in the comms mix,” he says. “(It’s about) building it into the agency planning process, but also educating both the agencies and our clients around technology.
“One of the things we’ve done is create virtual living rooms, where we’ve brought clients in to actually see the technology in action and all the different ways you can access and consume TV.”
This video is from Beet.TV Global Addressable TV Forum at Cannes Lions presented with Wavemaker. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.
The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.
Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.
“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.
Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:
“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”
Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”
Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.
Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”
Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”
Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:
“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.
“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CEO of a company GroupM has established to work on addressable TV advertising in the UK has an observation that may be surprising to some.
“It’s not as progressed as here in the US,” says Jakob Nielsen of Finecast. “(The) US is not as progressed as in China. I’ve spent quite a bit in time in China seeing that.”
Spend on OTT TV and movies in China will total $12.22bn by 2022, the massive majority of Asia-Pacific spending, according to a Broadband TV News forecast.
A host of new streaming boxes and services has emerged there in the last couple of years.
Nielsen says Finecast will have to take a different approach in every market in which it launches.
So far, the company has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters…
…in most of its main set-top and over-the-top devices…
But Nielsen wants Finecast to become an “ecosystem” that operates across national borders.
He explains, the opportunity lets smaller and more local companies advertise on TV with cost efficiency they could not previously achieve.
“The predominant group of advertisers are around automobiles and financial clients because the notion of being able to do household targeting fits these clients very well,” he says.
“Imagine you are a BMW dealership, which is one of our clients, and you have all these different dealerships all over the world. The dealership in Manchester could never do TV because TV in the UK is six regions at the most detailed level, otherwise it’s national.
“If you’re a dealership in Manchester, you will waste an awful lot of money if you do national TV when you’re trying to sell a BMW in Manchester. Now, if they have a special offer, let’s say they want to sell X BMW X5s and they gift 15% discount that’s only relevant for the Manchester area and now they can start doing TV advertising. It changes everything.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But, in the smaller UK market, Finecast has quickly gained real traction – and now its boss wants to give it to the world, too.
The agency’s business unit aims to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”.
That is long-hand for saying Finecast has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters…
…in most of its main set-top and over-the-top devices…
In this video interview with Beet.TV, CEO Jakob Nielsen says Finecast is a different kind of entity for a different kind of market.
“Finecast is a product company,” Nielsen says. “It’s not really an agency. It develops audience products that take inventory, mix that with data, and it gives that to our clients, and we make it a very easy for all our agencies to do this with our clients.
“We have the 26 million households in the UK. We have a reach of about 15 million, we think.
“We don’t have the two-minute principle you have here,” Nielsen says, referring to the limited two minutes per hour of ad time which US pay-TV providers sell in local programming. “There are certain things that are more and more easy in the UK market.”
If the roll-out has been “easy”, the future may be more of a challenge. Because Nielsen has big ambitions for Finecast, which is part-powered by Videology.
The outfit has already said it will roll out to “top markets” over the next few months. So, will smashing those two minutes in the US be difficult?
“You need to make benefits for everyone else, and participate in that ecosystem,” Nielsen adds. “If you develop an ecosystem where it’s a marketplace where people have opportunities to fit within that business models, all of a sudden, you can create something pretty unique.
“We’ll take one thing at a time. It’s not a two-year project. It’s a 10-year project.
So much consensus will Finecast need to achieve in order to meet its ambitions, Nielsen even suggests it could share equity with other players in future.
“Today, Finecast is 100% owned by WPP and GroupM. We don’t think that we’ll have it look like that in the future.”
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Jakob Nielsen, Managing Director at GroupM Digital in the U.K., has been named Chief Executive Officer of Finecast. The company is headquartered in London with Rich Astley as Chief Product Officer supported by Kelly Clark, Global CEO of GroupM, and Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM.
“The time is right for traditional TV and over-the-top providers to scale their new classes of addressable inventory to the benefit of our advertisers and to meet demand for targeted TV advertising,” Nielsen said in a news release. “With the rapid growth of digital advertising, TV budgets may be at risk from new competitors, particularly as digital video improves in quality and ease of access.”
Nielsen will be one of the featured speakers at the 2017 Beet Retreat in Miami, where the theme will be The Future Of Advanced TV.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
Beet.TV interviewed Nielsen last year at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London where he discussed the potential of addressable TV ads in the coming years. We are republishing the interview in light of today’s news about the rollout of Finecast.
About 42% of US homes are now able to receive so-called “addressable advertising” – TV ads custom-targeted at individual homes thanks to one of a variety of return-path TV systems. But how much of the multi-billion-dollar TV advertising industry could be funneled through that channel in the years ahead.
It’s early days, but ad agency GroupM’s UK MD Jakob Nielsen says his group is taking a guess.
“You are changing how you are thinking from the past – therefore, it will take some time,” he cautions, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But, if you look across all our clients, we think 30% to 50% of all TV could eventually – not tomorrow – be addressable TV. You will have some clients having 60% of their total mix, in five or 10 years, being addressable, other clients being 20%.”
Nielsen says Europe is farther behind on roll-out, but dominant UK pay-TV provider Sky is already an early leader with its so-called AdSmart technology, pushing multiple alternative ads to consumers’ set-top boxes for subsequent decisioning and play-out during standard ad moments.
The beauty of the idea is two-fold. First, it is opening TV advertising to smaller new advertisers. Second, it means those advertisers can target people close to the point of purchase, not just spend money on raising initial awareness.
“You have the top of the funnel, but all of a sudden TV can start going in to the mid and lower parts of the funnel, that they weren’t part of in the past,” Nielsen adds. “AdSmart, in the beginning, 70 to 80% of their advertisers came from non-traditional TV advertisers.
“They were able to reach a BMW dealership who wanted to sell a BMW in Edinburgh. That puts a completely new perspective on what you can do with TV.”
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