In recent weeks, we have heard from several executives who have suggested ad buyers are moving further down the marketing funnel, looking to improve the efficiency of their spend by finding more likely leads.
“With the quarantine that we’ve all experienced … you’re finding buyers becoming smarter about how they target folks,” says Darren Sherriff, VP of ad tech solutions at Fox Networks Group.
“The ‘spray-and-pray and hope you find your right customers’ methodology or mantra, I think, is going to the wayside. What we’re seeing is more and more advertisers want to find the exact household demographic that they’re looking for.
“They’re layering data, they’re bringing their own data, or they’re bringing third-party data of potential customers that they’re trying to target.”
Google’s net US digital ad revenues will drop 5.3% to $39.58 billion by the end of 2020: https://t.co/zAhJwzfuB2 pic.twitter.com/aF46JwNh2d
— eMarketer (@eMarketer) June 25, 2020
EMarketer has revised-down its 2020 US digital ad spending forecast from a 17% growth to just 1.7%, with TV ad spend declining at double-digit rates.
There are also forecasts of big job losses at ad agencies, as some brands pull some of their ad-buying duties in-house.
Across the industry, companies are looking to wring more effectiveness out of their activities.
In advertising, that may mean less emphasis on brand-building and more on data-driven targeting to reach in-market consumers.
“There’s been an increase in the amount of data trying to be used and that they’re bringing to deals,” Sherriff adds.
“Some of the advertiser budgets who have declined and have essentially got hit hard with the COVID crisis, travel, autos, things that essentially were big purchases and sometimes luxury purchases… those buyers are going to now strictly target the folks that they know that have the disposable income who are still looking to travel, are still looking to make those big purchases, rather than just essentially hit a broad demographic,” he says.
Efforts to help buyers buy the way they want to buy are crucial if the evolving TV industry is to arrest anticipated decline.
EMarketer expects 2020 first-half US TV ad spending will have declined by up to 29.3%. Before the pandemic, it had expected a 2% increase.
The growing amount of TV consumed via internet-connected devices gives broadcasters a shot at presenting advertisers with the precise audiences they are looking for.
Brands are also asking for new levels of measurement and analytics stats, in a bid to prove the effectiveness,” Sherriff says.
“We’ve seen more and more advertisers looking to measure in an aggregate fashion across their entire programmatic buy.
“We’re getting requests to support measurement studies. We’re getting requests to support sort of more robust delivery reporting, indicating where their campaigns ran, on what content, et cetera.”
Fox Networks Group is having to navigate CCPA and other regulations to figure out what audience data it can supply in response to the requests.
The Fox unit is selling digital linear TV ad inventory through a supply-side platform (SSP) marketplace, but is increasingly letting digital programmatic inventory compete with direct-sold ad space, because tools like programmatic-guaranteed afford greater control.
Sherriff says he started out by having many SSPs plugged into Fox’s inventory.
Over the last two years, however, he has consolidated around “a few key partners” whose technology has evolved to use OpenRTB, audience data and other features.
This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic. for more videos please visit this page.
]]>“I feel that more and more TV is getting baited into trying to become a performance outlet,” the President of Advertising Revenue says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.
“The biggest thing would be to make sure you’re not fighting a fight that you can’t win or being tricked into fighting the wrong fight.”
Marchese says he understands why “the ideal” would be to say “prove performance and then I can spend more money there. But the truth is, performance is that I get people to sit there and watch the ad. That’s what TV does.”
He notes that TV has always performed by helping to build brands over periods of time. But there’s more of a balancing act going on among networks to let consumers “dictate how many ads are tolerable. I’m looking for a better way to say it, but tolerable it is.
“People think if the ads are good enough, people will like them. No. Advertising is an interruption. It’s not what you came there for.”
Asked about household addressable TV ads, Marchese points to such shortcomings in the quest for performance as co-viewing, wherein it’s hard to determine what person among several who are watching a Sunday football game is actually being addressed, and going too far with person-specific targeting.
Brands are built not only on advertising but also on cultural, family and familial ties, among other things, according to Marchese. “Take it to the extreme. It feels odd to say, ‘Imagine a world where we can perfectly target only the people we think are going to buy the product.’ Then what would the brand mean anymore if no one else ever saw it? No one would know what that brand stands for, so what difference does it make if the person’s wearing it?”
As for the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, Marchese believes that traditional TV must “create a Netflix-competitive experience, or ad-supported TV, if you will. As far as the other three FANG members, “Their advertising is different. It’s not a TV ad that’s running there for the most part. It’s performance advertising.
“But I think you’ll see the marketers reclassifying more and more dollars towards performance advertising. Because you know, who doesn’t want performance?”
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.
]]>For advanced targeting of TV audiences, “Live linear programming is a big part of it. We are optimizing our television buys today for clients that have a desire to do so,” the network’s VP of Programmatic Sales says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference.
Meanwhile, on the digital side, whether it’s full-episode, OTT, connected-TV devices or set-top video-on-demand, “we are looking to bring this cross-screen, trying to find an auto intender regardless of the modality that they’re consuming our content and serving the person that is in market for that product that ad at the right time,” Callahan adds.
Finding the right ad length and load is easier with on-demand content like movies where it’s scripted and ad breaks are planned. “I think you can do things with the break. You can shorten the break, adjust the break.”
Callahan sees Hulu’s approach “with different flavors of subscriptions” as offering a tradeoff with viewers in terms of ad choices and data sharing, while the “holy grail of serving right ad to right person with right format creates a less clustered more meaningful ad experience.”
Linear commercial breaks remain “baked in, sports isn’t scripted, you don’t know when somebody’s going to score a touchdown or hit a home run. You don’t know when that commercial break is going to happen,” Callahan says.
“You can probably load some up to be a certain way, but I think more in the archived, on-demand digital video library today you can get creative do things unique and interesting and create more value for the interruptions in a shorter capacity in those environments.”
Like other networks, Fox is seeing continued growth in connected-TV viewing year over year. “The idea of cord nevers versus cord cutters, that pendulum swing has happened.”
He sees a call for greater transparency in reporting and proving out de-duplication of connected-TV viewing audiences. “How does CTV really operate as the standalone from a tracking, delivery, audience perspective” is one question. “As far as the CTV environment, there is a greater level of transparency on who’s watching it, what are they watching, when are they watching and certainly the ability to tie it back to greater outcome attributed data sets as well,” says Callahan.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>That doesn’t seem about to change anytime soon judging from a one-on-one interview with Marchese, who is President of Advertising Revenue at Fox Networks Group, and Dave Clark, GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel, at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television, the discussion did point to some amount of certainty.
For example, the futures market for national TV inventory known as the annual Upfronts isn’t going away anytime soon, for the simple reason that it protects buyers from price increases the way airlines hedge their bets with oil futures. The process is also something of a comfort to sellers, particularly those with the most coveted (and limited) ad avails.
The search for unification among TV sellers came about because of the digital age, according to Marchese.
“What we’ve never had to compete on before was what the currency metric was because we had Nielsen. People could complain all day about Nielsen, but at least it was consistent for everyone who was trading on it,” Marchese said.
Digital media introduced cost-per-view pricing, but when TV tries to create a new product, “everyone’s like, ‘cool, how does that fit in with what I paid you last year?’ There’s just no consistency.”
Fox has been pushing hard to establish new ad formats while reducing overall commercial load, “But if we do it alone, it won’t matter. You can’t create a market and you can’t understand what the market price of anything is if there’s only one person doing it,” said Marchese.
Given the difficulty in pricing new ad formats in something approaching a consistent manner, the lack of a common market will sow pricing disagreement. “Until then, opinions will differ. And then depending on the creative, one of us is right and one of us is wrong.”
Clark noted that the industry is will run by people who have been at it for two or three decades and asked Marchese what leadership traits and characteristics are most important.
“We need to understand that we’re just used to fighting over things because that’s just the way it was done. We’re used to negotiating with agencies over every penny because that’s just the way it was done.”
Now, in some ways, everyone’s on the same side of the table. “We have the same goal, that we would like to not kill long-form storytelling as an advertising vehicle,” Marchese said.
Responding to a question from the audience about the long-term viability of the TV Upfront, Marchese said he doesn’t think it will die. “I actually think we just get better at predicting where the inventory is going to be.”
Between now and then, he believes the “dumb definition” of a CPM—an impression is an impression—will yield to something akin to the real estate market.
“We analyze real estate not just for the square footage but for where it’s located, what are the amenities, who are the neighbors. There’s a bunch of things we do.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“Each source of viewing data has its own virtues and benefits. They have challenges as well,” says Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Levine puts those virtues and benefits into the context of the industry’s ongoing quest for more unified targeting and measurement.
Panels tend to be smaller than other options but can go deep in terms of being able to get a vast amount of information about the individual members of the panels. “Panels can typically go down in terms of Nielsen to the person level, and that is a powerful thing for the TV advertising ecosystem,” says Levine.
With cable set-top boxes, “what you’re doing to a certain extent is you’re moving away from person-level measurement to household level measurement.” This comes closest to census-level so that “you can get into the multiple tens of millions of households tracking what they’re viewing.”
The downsides to set-top boxes: they don’t capture over-the-air, over-the-top or connected-TV viewing behavior. “So that’s missing a lot of viewership potential,” says Levine.
Which leaves automatic content recognition, which provides second-by-second viewership information. “ACR by nature defaults to that very, very granular level.”
More granular than just having household mailing addresses, ACR provides “a different level of identity resolution and matching” owing to user registration information and home IP addresses.
“ACR not only allows viewership of what you’re watching through your cable operator it would potentially, provided your TV set’s connected to the Internet, allow you also capture over the air viewership,” Levine says. “But what’s even more interesting is combining that with connected TV viewership.”
Layered on top of panel, set-top box and ACR data are additional datasets for targeting purposes. “So it’s exciting, it’s diverse, it’s a little bit of a Wild West environment. It creates a lot of opportunity but it’s going to be a while for the industry to normalize and accept what is good and what is great,” he adds.
For now, a big focus is on figuring out how many impressions are available to sell and how many end up being delivered against precision targets, with unduplicated reach a key goal.
]]>Within OpenAP, Nielsen and comScore are “locked in,” Ruby says in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “We’ve got their MRI fusion datasets, Catalina datasets, the MBI datasets all coming through. With comScore, we’ve got all of their syndicated datasets. So we feel like we’ve kind of got the right breadth of what is an industry standard could be within OpenAP today.”
What gets “really exciting,” according to Ruby, is being able to move beyond the traditional measurement providers. Options include set-top VOD data, “into more of the MVPD data that we can actually be leveraging, more specifically the IP connected data” along with data from smart TV’s.
“Really what it comes down to is we want to enable as many of these datasets as we can so that we can bring them all to an open playing field and then let brands and agencies determine where they’re going to see the most value,” Ruby says.
And then there is the promise of linear addressable, a key piece of the cross-platform puzzle. “We’ve managed to be able to really corner it with Hulu, we’re looking at Comcast set-top box VOD and really making inroads there. But more importantly, we’re starting to think about what we can do in the live, linear space and how we can actually start looking at ad versioning and addressable copy splitting in live linear.”
IP-delivered streaming content poses the potential for one-to-one relationships between brands and viewers. But it gets pretty complex with broadcast TV and in a primetime broadcast environment, according to Ruby.
“And I don’t think that’s a future that we’re going to see immediately, but it is one that we’re starting to really understand how the technology comes together.”
Audience targeting tends to be “bespoke” on a vertical-by-vertical category basis, with automotive in particular having a longer “tail to purchase” than others. “People aren’t necessarily going to see a couple of ads for a new SUV on TV and then immediately go and buy one,” says Ruby. “They actually need to be identified as in market and not just in market but likely to convert in market and even within that, there’s a much longer tail that you want to look at for performance.”
Fox is working with auto brands to figure out how to construct campaigns over time while monitoring both the performance of an individual campaign for a awareness of a new sedan model “as well as any particular behaviors of driving greater traffic into dealerships, all the way through to eventually a new lease or a new purchase.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Advertisers are looking to solve two particular types of problems, Levine explains in this interview with Beet.TV. They are seeking more concentration of impressions against “whatever it is that they looking to target,” or “looking to get incremental reach beyond the audience that they’re currently able to be exposed to.”
He dubs “exciting” some synergies that exist between the way Fox offers its inventory and how agencies plan. The latter wants to optimize against a precision target across all the media sellers within the TV ecosystem. This is typically done by networks and dayparts.
“We can optimize down to the selling title level, we can optimize down to the quarter hour level, we can optimize down to the spot level,” says Levine. “That’s a really big part and then the other part is frequently what we do with this new type of conversation about buying against precision audiences is we help de-risk.”
This is done by offering guarantees against advertisers’ actual audiences “that the advertiser and the agency is investing a lot of time and energy and money and resources into planning against.”
Levine divides the video market into three segments: linear, addressable TV and digital.
Linear is extremely well-defined with a currency and rating system that, while still panel-based, provides “a concept of unduplicated reach” along with “an agreement for calculating impression delivery.”
Calling addressable TV “a younger market,” Levine notes that while early movers tended to be MVPD’s, Fox currently can offer advertisers access to between 10 and 12 million addressable households.
“What’s different between a lot of the programmers and MVPD’s is that we’re selling our national ad minutes,” Levine says. “We have a lot more frequency, depending upon if you have broadcast only or cable network only, or a mix of the two. It’s somewhere between five to eight times the amount of ad minutes that an MVPD has.” As for digital, the “vast majority” of Fox’s inventory “is actually viewed on the TV set.”
Digital TV impressions, he adds, are “actually the same type of impressions as addressable and, by the way, they’re not all that different from the impressions that are delivered in the linear world.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“And that’s a huge part of what we do,” Brace says of her position at Fox in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “I think the fact that so many people in the industry have lost sight of that and we’re seeing that course correction happen right now is a good thing.”
She says clients’ expectations are to give them reliable information about exactly where their ads are running. “That we’re doing our best to give them real human attention that can transfer their message. We couldn’t be more aligned with what brands are asking for.”
Brace also spent more than two years in a senior sales role at true[X], the interactive advertising specialist tech firm that Fox acquired three years ago this month in an effort to reinvent TV advertising by giving viewers more choice. Just before last year’s Upfront season—a mix of presentations and negotiations for TV ad inventory—Fox announced it had reduced the advertising load on all of its digital FX Networks programming by 75% in an effort to enhance the viewing experience.
“We kind of shocked the market,” Brace recalls. “That is absolutely about taking that model of reduced ad load and high consumer attention that pays off for brands.”
She notes that not only has Fox leveraged the true[X] model on platforms where there is interactivity, it’s taken the concept to video as well. Advertisers can own a full break or a full-series video without sharing consumers’ attention with other brands.
“And we’re seeing great success with that,” Brace says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear more news from us extending that sort of format to other platforms as well outside of digital. So it should be really interesting.”
Interactivity generates higher brand recall, according to Brace, because “the more someone spends time, the more they remember, the more vested they are and the more relevant it is.” Brands have caught on. “I always like to say once we kind of get a brand into the format they never leave because…what they can accomplish there and the stories they can tell,” she says.
It does create more work on the creative side, as Brace is quick to acknowledge, but there are benefits. “There’s always challenges with a customized solution because there’s a little more hand holding in terms of getting creative. I think the people who dive in and really leverage the most that it has to offer are the ones who do the best.”
Brace cites FX research showing that 90% of people prefer interactivity. “That tells me that we’re on to something and that we need to absolutely provide choice for people wherever we can. We’re not going to win by just jamming more commercials into the system to try to monetize.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>For companies more used to selling the context of their content to advertisers, the hot new possibility – in the over-the-top TV era – is to instead sell individual viewers, thanks to the myriad data points on offer.
But which are the most viable revenue opportunities, and which choices should distributors leave on the table?
In this panel debate convened at the Beet Retreat, executives from several publishers and distributors weighted up how they tackle the wealth of new options available.
NBCUniversal sales and strategy EVP Mike Rosen:
“I like the word ‘balance’. The culture of our company should be about content-plus-audience. We’re not abandoning content. We don’t want to go to our agencies, our advertisers, and make them choose between the two.
“We sort of see that balance, where, yes, you’re going to sponsor some shows, because your brand belongs there. But, at the same token, there may be other strategies that involve looking across our entire portfolio, and finding the audiences. The two, I think will coexist for a really long time.”
Fox Networks Group Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions Noah Levine:
“A year ago, I was very digitally focused. I’m very convergence focused right now. My team is probably spending about 70% of its time focused on linear. My team focuses on audience, and programmatic solutions across linear, addressable, set top box VOD, and digital.
“A lot of my time, and my leadership’s time, is spent socializing these concepts internally, getting buy-in, developing excitement around these initiatives, because part of our job is to be disruptors, to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been using age, gender as a way to guarantee for very long time’.”
Acxiom VP, Television Partner Development, Craig Berkley:
“I think most of the organizations in traditional TV are aware that this needs to happen, that we need to move towards addressable, and audience based buying, and incorporate all of these into our platforms. Different organizations are in different stages in accomplishing that internally.”
Oath Business Lead, Advanced TV, Brett Hurwitz:
“I kind of go through work each day, wondering ‘What are the obstacles’? There’s obstacles, I think, on the supply side. I think there’s obstacles on the demand side. I think we have to, as an industry, as leaders in the industry, really start breaking down those issues, and tackling them one by one, because I think the evolution is happening remarkably slowly.
“I think traditional linear television delivery has a certain amount of life ahead of it. It doesn’t make sense to me that money is still being spent the old way.”
A+E ad sales president Mel Berning:
“We have all sorts of balls up in the air right now. We would all prefer to get to a world where we’re talking about (advertising) outcomes.
“Until clients, agencies, and all of us are able to get into a real dialogue about what is the right metric to gage the effectiveness of the medium, I think we’re in a difficult spot.”
The panel was moderated by MediaLink A+E managing director Matt Spiegel.
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.
]]>MIAMI – There are only so many first responders in a particular city or an entire country to deal with natural disasters like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. This is where groups like Team Rubicon, an organization of military veterans, play a key role.
Brands that partner with Team Rubicon and other volunteer groups via sponsorships, donations or providing “boots on the ground” in disaster areas are “not just selling a product. You’re creating an aura about your brand and helping bring that to light in a very human way,” says Joe Rockhill, VP, Integrated Sales & Marketing, Fox Networks Group.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Rockhill explains how Fox wants to foster greater integrations between brand marketers and relief groups by creating a “groundbreaking docuseries” of original programming highlighting the activities of Team Rubicon. Following the interview with Rockhill, Team Rubicon Operations Section Leader Michael Lloyd provides a ground-level report on the group’s relief efforts to date in Isabella, a municipality in the northwest region of Puerto Rico.
Led by award-winning director Keif Davidson, Fox’s series about Team Rubicon will appear on Fox Broadcasting, FX, Fox Sports and National Geographic and will “live in culturally relevant programming and time periods,” such as The Long Road Home on National Geographic, Veteran’s Day initiatives and takeovers on FX, as well as programming like the Daytona 500, The World Series, Thanksgiving and Christmas on Fox Sports.
“Ultimately, the idea is that it would culminate in a 90-minute documentary that would live on our portfolio and air around Memorial Day of next year,” Rockhill says.
Fox is meeting with brands to see how they can “come on board and help tell the story of the men and women that are part of Team Rubicon, the heroes that are helping to rebuild these communities,” Rockhill says. “We want to understand what the initiatives are that our partners have and then find that alignment with what we’re doing with Team Rubicon so we can integrate them appropriately.”
Team Rubicon’s Lloyd relates how the organization has had a presence in Isabella for more than a month, providing medical care, clearing debris and helping to facilitate the availability of drinking water.
“Our medical teams have seen hundreds of patients,” Lloyd recounts. “In some cases just providing some mental health care as well.
“I think where our passion comes from is we’ve had a good opportunity to get to know the people and really experience what they’re going through on a personal level. The devastation on the island is complete. It’s an austere environment. It’s been one of the most gratifying Team Rubicon experiences that I’ve ever had.”
Stand With Puerto, The Industry Steps Up
This video reports on the pressing issues facing Puerto Rico and the organizations that are having an impact. It is part of a media industry initiative titled Stand With Puerto Rico. It is organized by Beet.TV and Omnicom Media Group along with founding partners AT&T AdWorks and Teads. Please find additional videos from the series here. The series was recorded in Miami at the Festival of Media/LATAM on October 30.
]]>That narrative is about “advancing the conversation away from adults 18 to 49 to what is your actual target, what is your actual goal” as an advertiser, Fox’s SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Fox unveiled the trial with Comcast during NYC TV Week. With on-demand programming and streaming, Fox’s addressable advertising can reach audiences that may not be watching linear, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
“We have the ability to sell and activate data in the same exact ways that MVPD’s are out there selling addressable today,” Levine explains.
The link with Hulu is to reach viewers who use connected-TV devices like Apple TV and Roku but it also applies to Hulu’s mobile and desktop viewing experiences, according to Levine.
On its cable network properties, MVPD’s get two minutes per hour of ad inventory to sell. Fox gets to monetize all of the remaining ad minutes.
“What we’re doing is packaging up that inventory to allow advertisers and agencies to take their first-party data, any combination of third-party data, and be able to match that against the MVPDs’ sense of identity through a safe haven,” says Levine.
Both Fox and Comcast use FreeWheel to handle ad insertions.
Fox has been offering addressable ads via its Fox AIM solution to reach its linear TV audiences. By adding in Comcast, “It’s now a cross-platform solution. We can provide the best worlds to an advertiser,” says Levine.
The Comcast and Hulu endeavors are the latest steps in Fox’s desire to “bring the future of TV advertising to market today.” It’s already rolled out six-second ads in linear-delivered programming and sponsored streams in VOD.
Reducing waste is one of the goals. “A lot of people argue that, ‘hey there really is no waste.’ There actually is waste and the waste is wasting the audience’s time,” Levine says.
“We as the media seller take on the responsibility to provide a better end user experience by having the option to cut down the ad load and be able to ensure that they’re the most relevant ads that are going to drive the highest ROI for the buyers.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>The answer rests on delivery systems, according to Joe Marchese, President, Advertising Revenue, Fox Networks Group.
“The idea is, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you know who’s watching and, secondarily, is a stream being delivered in a way in which you can either change the ads or not change the ads?” Marchese said during a panel discussion by Comcast at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. “Last portion is, is it being delivered on demand or live?”
Additionally, he suggested separating content from delivery vehicle. This yields a definition of TV as “long-form storytelling, sports, news and information.”
To panelist Eric Johnson, EVP, Global Advertising Revenue at ESPN, behavior is a key component. People watch on average 63 of live sports, whether on a TV set or mobile phone. “The behavior looks the same. If they’re watching SportsCenter they’re watching for 15 minutes on a television or a mobile phone.”
Beyond definitions, the only thing that marketers should care about is the likelihood that their message was delivered, according to Marchese. The problem is “pricing mechanisms and the currency we trade on. So we can innovate on the format all we want but if we don’t change the currency, if we don’t change what success is, none of it matters.”
ESPN is moving to a Nielsen Total Live Audience metric this year, Johnson said in response to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
“We’re seeing a 9 percent lift with young men in terms of streaming that’s not being counted by the current Nielsen measurement tool. I think it’s going to help immediately,” Johnson said.
Marchese would “love to have Nielsen measure 9 percent more audience” but wondered whether “I have to take the same ads that were in the linear TV environment and then put them into the place, that other 9 percent where I could do a digital ad where you could get a different ad from me? Is that the only way I’m going to get paid on that extra 9 percent?”
Johnson’s response: “We are passing through the commercials for the part that’s being measured by Nielsen and then we have another half that we’re dynamically ad serving, that we’re selling digitally, so to speak. So it’s a little bit of the best of both worlds.”
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It’s that “other” programming that concerns media sellers like ESPN and Fox, as evidenced by the discussion during a Comcast panel at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In fact, it keeps them up at night.
For ESPN, live is a North Star given its connection with fandom, according to Eric Johnson, EVP of Global Advertising Revenue.
“What has become live sport is expensive and at the same time we continue to just grow the way that consumption looks like,” said Johnson. “In live, real time. It’s complex, without a doubt. We try to make it as simple as possible for marketers.”
Fox Networks Group’s Joe Marchese is a big fan of live programming because it’s a choice of that or on-demand, where viewer attention isn’t a given. “Live doesn’t have that same problem. I will keep signing up for making money on live,” he said.
Asked by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink what keeps them up at night, both Johnson and Fox cited the options available to consumers who don’t want to see ads. Then there is a “virtual tonnage of garbage impressions out there that try to keep the price down. That keeps me up,” said Marchese.
Johnson believes the industry has lost sight that “ultimately good marketing is good marketing. We’ve overcomplicated the industry a little bit to get away from that.”
What keeps Johnson awake is that amid the demand branded, native and other forms of interruptive content, “we’re not thinking about advertising in the same way.”
He explained that most clients could buy a full season of football and run one just commercial with lots of frequency, but that wouldn’t be the optimal way of doing things. They need to be shown that varying creative iterations is desirable.
“That’s part of the process of how do we get to a place where we’re now creating a lot of creative for our customers, because we know what works but we have to help them get to that space of what works,” Johnson said.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That may be an intriguing possibility. Indeed, on many over-the-top devices, it may even be the norm.
But, for a television industry whose infrastructure has been built up around the concept of the household, that may be about as granular as advertisers can get, or should want to get.
That was a view expressed at a panel Beet.TV convened to discuss the new techniques.
“Television is bought and sold at the household level,” Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanton said. “You don’t necessarily know who in the household is consuming the content at that time. That is ‘solutions 2.0’ to figure out.”
And Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed that view, saying current currencies for measuring TV ads were built to fit a model based on households, not viewers.
“Nielsen has done a beautiful job in the linear television market,” Leine said. “It’s an extremely trusted currency. There is no equivalent outside of linear television.
“… It’s less important to have a very specific currency for very specific data segments, of which there could be thousands. But there must be an evolution so that we solve for unduplicated reach, cross-platform.”
Regardless of the level of targeting precision, there will be value simply in TV ad delivery over new connected devices, said Ooyala ad platforms GM Scott Braley.
“Television ads are not being viewed, they’re not being seen, they’re not impacting me at all,” he said. “So unskippable OTT inventory is actually pretty sizeable opportunity from a viewability and impact standpoint.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That was the verdict of several executives on a panel of industry folk assembled to discuss TV companies’ response to the burgeoning new multi-screen future.
The key question – how to approach ad sales when platforms are proliferating – leaves many with a sore head. But executives suggested one response: embrace chaos.
“We have to provide consumers with choice,” said video ad-tech firm Ooyala’s ad platforms GM Scott Braley.
“The broadcasters really need to be thinking about it holistically, and deploying analytics sitting across the licensing of content, subscription services, AVOD businesses and connect all of that together to produce a holistic content ROI across all of those models.”
Braley said his company is helping deliver that right now to clients in France, Germany and Sweden.
Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed the view.
“My crystal ball is foggy,” he conceded. “(But) the future is one where there can be multiple eventualities, multiple currencies, flexibility to support (many advertiser choices), different types of datasets and so forth.”
And Viacom data strategy SVP Gabe Bevilacqua said his firm thinks the future will look similar, but more so.
“We are investing in the belief that a transition is happening,” he said. “There is a rate of change that you can’t necessarily, granularly predict.
“But the way you want to address that transition is, ‘Ok, so what do marketers want to buy, how do agencies want to buy this?’ Where the audience is in 2019 versus 2021, I think there’s going to be a lot of similarities in the way a marketer wants to address them.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Enter the Moat Video Score, a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears.
“Interestingly, we’ve never really asked questions about what we call screen real estate,” Moat CEO and Co-Founder Jonah Goodhart says in an interview with Beet.TV at the the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “So for the first time we’re asking if you have an ad, is it on 10 percent of the screen or 100 percent or 50 percent.”
While it may or may not impact effectiveness, “we think it’s important to understand how much of the person’s attention did you potentially get and for how long,” says Goodhart.
One of the things that makes video “incredibly exciting” right now is that so many platforms are becoming video-first in their approach to content and advertising, according to Goodhart. “The question we ask is how do you effectively measure video. What are the right questions to ask when you’re measuring video?” he says.
The Moat Video Score, which is census-based and uses a scale of 0-100, has early supporters in brand marketers like Unilever and Bank of America, media agency GroupM, Condé Nast, Fox Networks Group, Hulu, NBCUniversal and Snap Inc.
The jury is still out on what video ad experience will rise to the top of consumer preference, according to Goodhart.
“What we know for sure is we’re changing the way we consume content and we know it’s increasingly mobile and increasing video,” Goodhart says. “How that plays out is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s going to be fun to watch.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
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