Beachfront recently completed a pilot program to deliver addressable TV ads among local and national media in a collaboration with Vizio. The test included single advertiser slot optimization (SASO) that lets an advertiser target a specific demographic group or designated market area (DMA) with different versions of ads, also known as “creative versioning.”
“We place an OAR watermark on the programming feed, which is distributed to stations in 125 broadcast DMAs across the country,” Frank Sinton, president and founder of video ad management platform Beachfront, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The program ran across 3 million Vizio TVs equipped with the OAR spec.”
Beachfront now has the opportunity to work more closely with OAR steering committee members including Disney’s Media Networks, Warner Media, Comcast NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Hearst Television, AMC Networks, Fox Corporation, Scripps, Vizio and Univision — along with agency advisory committee members including Publicis Media, Omnicom Media Group, GroupM, IPG/Magna, Dentsu Aegis Network, Havas, Horizon Media and RPA.
The goal of Project OAR is to transform non-addressable TV into an addressable platform, applying consumer data to target more specific audience segments. That evolution includes the development of multiple advertisers slot optimization (MASO) that replaces a national spot with a commercial from a different advertiser.
“MASO is a reality today. It’s just a matter of getting the programmers to now use the platform, and start experimenting,” Sinton said. “We’ve already proven out the SASO model, and it’s going toward more of a MASO model.”
Beachfront’s unified decisioning engine handles different kinds of media buys including direct-sold, programmatic-sold or private marketplaces (PMPs), with real-time ad insertion for video on demand (VOD) and connected TV (CTV).
“Beachfront is one of the last pure-play, CTV- and TV-focused sell-side platforms,” Sinton said. “We’re the only player that covers all TV screens, whether it be linear, set-top box VOD or CTV.”
Looking ahead, Sinton sees greater convergence among linear TV and digital video platforms, giving advertisers more flexibility with their audience-based media buys. Advertisers also can implement rules for frequency capping and separating their commercials from those of competitors.
“Converting legacy TV to programmatic is going to be really key. There’s been a big transition to connected television over the last couple of years. This year is really the year for addressable TV, and we’re seeing that today,” he said. “Making CTV more like TV, and TV more like CTV is really the future of where things are going, and where Beachfront is focused.”
]]>Most of the industry has now settled on the view that third-party data, that held in data warehouses and made available for purchase by advertisers, is less useful than first-party data, that collected by brands themselves.
So publishers need to let advertisers buy ads using their own data, says a technology executive in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“As we transition away from a world where everything’s third party data (for ad targeting), that should just be like a layer, going forward,” says Frank Sinton of Beachfront Media, an independent video supply-side platform.
“It should be more about first party data, enabling publishers to directly transact with the brands on the data that they have.”
Beachfront – based in New York, Florida and Pasadena – offers technology to publishers:
Sinton says his company is one of those which has had to respond to publishers’ growing demand for more information about the ad trades happening on such platforms.
“The biggest thing that’s changed over the last year is there’s been a real focus on transparency in the supply chain,” he says.
“So folks like us have responded with that being a lot more transparent on things like take rates and what is actually being transacted, what’s actually going to the publisher.”
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
]]>So why are so many advertisers either spending so little or using addressable for a different purpose?
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat, a cast of “millennial”-aged companies assembled to discuss issues affecting the pace of roll-out of future TV advertising – and what advertisers really want it for…
The panel heard that what ad buyers really want is audience scale. This may seem to go against the inherent promise of addressable TV, which can make an audience far smaller but also far more relevant…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“There’s a lot of great data sets out in the marketplace. There’s 199 million homes. Get to half, you really have something. And then the strategy and the media planners will start funding that at a much, much higher rate than it does now.”
Today, connected TV even seems to mitigate against large-scale campaigns. One ad-tech exec said the promises aren’t quite living up to results achieved in limited trials – perhaps one reason so much advertiser spending in OTT is still considered “test-and-learn”…
Hardeep Bindra, Managing Director of Product, Sizmek:
“The general expectation from our digital-first customers is as we expand to CTV, OTT – and then adventuring to addressable and linear – is that we will continue that same (performance) approach in defining attribution. It works to a degree when it’s in a closed-loop testbed … But the minute you try and reach scale with it that’s when these systems start to either fall down or the delay in attribution breaks the existing models that we have in place.”
If connected TV advertising doesn’t yet have big scale, it may offer something else. Beet Retreat heard many executives talk about its ability to help cap the frequency with which viewers see a TV ad…
Frank Sinton, President & Founder, Beachfront Media:
“Connected TV but it hasn’t hit that 50% (penetration) mark yet. So we’re more like 10 or 15% penetration at this point. (In) connected TV, in particular, frequency (of ad exposure) is something that we’re looking really closely at.”
But the panel heard that using addressable TV to reach large audiences is possible. Two companies that have spent the last few years building out a patchwork of advertiser delivery opportunities, in very different ways, weighed in…
Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid:
Right now Innovid is 75 million households through nine different streaming devices across 1,000 different apps that are capable of delivering an interactive OTT ad. So the capacity is there. The systems and structure that we’ve talked about today is lagging that a bit. But we are continuing to focus on the largest potential audiences that can be lit up to be able to bring this reality to market.
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“One of the things that we’ve built over the last couple years is this local owned-and-operated station group opportunity which is, going back to we’re in 35 million homes, one out of every three TV homes, so we work with almost all the large station groups.”
Connected TV isn’t just about what happens on the TV. In a multi-touch consumer ecosystem, if you can track viewership and link it to outcomes like visitation and brand CRM data, you have the capacity to deploy sophisticated attribution that can prove the real value of connected TV exposure…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“We’re literally enabling them to prove that their local TV ads are actually driving to the website or actually driving to the store. We’re able to do that because we are literally bringing live placeIQ data and matching it against our IP and IDs. So, ‘Wou’ve seen the ad for the F150, did you go to the dealership?’ ‘Did you see the ad for Taco Bell, did you go to Taco Bell or to the website for TD Ameritrade?’We literally get live information.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Beachfront tries to get “as close as possible” to audience and content on behalf of its publisher clients, he adds in this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018.
“Everything around our SSP is working on behalf of the publisher and how close we work with the publisher to expose some of that data around the actual video content and what’s happening with the audience to the advertiser to make it relevant,” Sinton adds. “Not just audience relevance but contextual relevance and making sure the content is brand safe and things of that nature.”
On the television side, Beachfront is working with a variety of connected-TV partners at various tiers of the food chain, along with desktop and mobile. “Someone could be watching a piece of content on a connected TV and finish it on a tablet. We want to be able to connect those dots for the advertiser,” Sinton says.
“Right now of course, the big thing everyone is going towards is how do we create more addressable TV. When I say addressable TV I really mean how to create TV that basically has all the things in digital around targeting and be able to deliver on a big screen.”
With regard to video and video content, “We want to make it programmatic and as real time as possible.”
Given that it can take three to five days to traffic a campaign to linear TV, Beachfront would like to reduce that to three to five minutes. Its goal is to “create a much more real-time, biddable environment for this super premium TV audience. That’s the next big phase I think we’re going through over the next three to five years,” says Sinton.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>Designed as a mobile-first social video platform, the technology aims to connect consumers with content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and ecommerce apps in an interactive experience. Beachfront customers include Maker Studios, Big Frame Networks and Fremantle Media. Many customers use the platform to enhance their existing YouTube channels and audiences, he says. “How can I further engage my audience that I’ve already aggregated on YouTube? That’s what the platform does,” he explains.
The platform is free and Beachfront makes money via a revenue share from ads. “If you make more money on the ads, we make more money,” Sinton says.
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