Pooja is a veteran of senior advanced TV roles at Viacom, Disney and as CEO of trueX until earlier this year.

For all of us, it’s been a challenging time during the pandemic: For Pooja it has been an especially  tumultuous year that included the sale of TrueX, a pregnancy, the birth of a second child, and joining Comcast in a senior role.

In this session, she speaks about her experiences as a woman of color. She shares her hopes for a more inclusive, bias-free workplace. She reflects on her own journey and tells what she is doing to help others.

Commenting on the current state of advanced TV, she talks about the importance of interoperability of viewer identity and the work that’s being done by Blockgraph and others.

And she shares her vision for FreeWheel and Effectv, both units of Comcast Advertising.

Thanks Pooja for a great conversation.  And congratulations on the new job!

Thanks to the BeetCast sponsor Mediaocean.

And thank you for listening.

Hope you enjoy the episode.

Thanks to a new technology that brings control to how commercial breaks are constructed, the answer could be either.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, FreeWheel’s Sara Wallace explains how her company’s new technology works.

Split avails

According to the company’s announcement: “(It) allows sellers to dynamically ‘split’ (ad) impressions from a single linear TV spot in real-time across multiple advertisers, improving efficiency and opening up scale for advertisers”.

That means “a single linear TV advertising avail can be utilized by different advertisers, a form of advertising known as audience addressable”, it says.

The technology works across traditional linear set-top boxes.

FreeWheel parent Comcast and Charter are the first inventory owners to offer this technology to their buyers, with plans to make it available to other MVPDs later this year.

Evolving media

“The industry has truly been on a journey to make cross-platform addressability a reality,” Wallace explains. “This is that next step of that – really unlocking centralised real-time decisioning across both linear and digital.

“It has been an evolution, but we’re really excited to be here from a cross-platform addressability standpoint and being able to do that across the MVPD footprint.

“We are piloting this with Comcast and charter and working closely with them as they work through their pilot success criteria and move into scale.

“We are also really excited about looking at this as a building block to offering this capability to other MVPs, as well as programmers and national inventory in the future.”

Across the funnel

For Wallace, the development means publishers can offer ad buyers capabilities that span different ad tactics – from brand exposure through to performance and attribution.

“When you think about addressability as part of a full marketing approach, you think of that full-funnel brand building through to engagement to sales activation, addressability plays a role in that full funnel activation,” she says.

“And what’s really exciting about today’s news is that that cross-platform capability really making sure that traditional linear endpoints are able to adhere to the needs of addressable campaigns and have the optimization and performance measurement that’s long been associated with digital and really be a full participant in that-full funnel advertising approach.”

We sat down with her  to talk about her vision o the industry and her decision to join Comcast.

She speaks about the unique position that Comcast’s FreeWheel and Effectv hold in the transformation of television.

Beeswax offers a “bidder-as-a-service“, a DSP-like ad-buying software that sits in buyers’ own clouds and uses a software-as-a-service pricing model.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, FreeWheel general manager Dave Clark explains the rationale behind the acquisition, and how he sees 2021 panning out.

Expanding demand

“Our publisher client base – publishers and distributors in Europe and in U.S. – have been looking to us increasingly for help sourcing demand,” Clark says.

“They themselves are often out buying inventory, co-mingling others’ inventory with their own, and wanting to manage frequency across all of it.

“So, given the appetite that exists from our existing client base, we’ve been investing in that area over the last couple of years. We’ve had a lot of success with it, but adding Beeswax is just a huge accelerant to it.”

Bidding service

The deal also means that Beeswax now gets to do more in a connected TV (CTV) space that is rapidly expanding.

AdExchanger writes that its technology approach, giving users more control, will appeal to CTV buyers, given the higher rates of CTV inventory compared with standard display.

“We love that kind of philosophy that they’ve brought that to market,” Clark adds.

“They’re not a DSP, they haven’t gone out to compete against DSPs, but they’ve created this sort of customizable bidder, largely with the more sophisticated kind of buyers and media in mind.”

Today we announced we've agreed to be acquired by Comcast's @FreeWheel. We couldn't be more excited for the journey ahead and to deliver even more for our customers and partners. Read more: https://t.co/StwlwcDoqB

— Beeswax (@BeeswaxIO) December 17, 2020

Market growth

The deal is expected to close in January 2021. That will be a year looked to closely as the world continues grappling with COVID-19 effects.

“We saw advertisers this year, as they started to reenter the market, really prioritise more efficient, more targetable methods of reaching audiences, which just accelerated existing trend,” Clark says.

Connected TV ad spending next year will jump 40% to $11.4 billion in the United States, and make up 4.2% of total media spending, researcher eMarketer estimated.

EMarketer last November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.

Advising Beeswax on the deal was LUMA Partners.

NBCUniversal, also owned by Comcast, and The Trade Desk, a large demand-side buying platform, have both signed up to use FreeWheel’s new unified decisioning.

In a statement from NBCUniversal: “We enable marketers to reach key audiences across all screens with one simple solution powered by our One Platform offering,” said Krishan Bhatia, Executive Vice President, Business Operations & Strategy, NBCUniversal Advertising & Partnerships. “By incorporating FreeWheel’s unified decisioning into One Platform, we’re now able to combine direct sold and programmatic capabilities into one, making it even easier for clients to access all of our premium video inventory in whatever way works best for their business while allowing us to continue to improve the consumer experience. Since first incorporating this FreeWheel capability into our platform, we’ve seen 170% growth in programmatic video revenue, and we believe there is significantly more growth to come.”

The solution has been in pilot since April 2019 with A+E.

For an overview of the product and its roadmap, we spoke with Geoff Wolinetz, Head of Sell-Side Revenue at FreeWheel.

That is the promise of Blockgraph, a division of Comcast’s FreeWheel that has been working on realizing the potential.

The initiative was launched in December 2018, counting Viacom and Charter’s Spectrum Reach as early partners. Now Blockgraph is getting ready to get bigger, with some big announcements in the works.

“Blockgraph has been building a platform that will enable both addressability through secure peer-to-peer audience matching, data-permissioned usage applications, and then ultimately provide a lot of utility to all of the industry for those inventory activations,” says Jason Manningham, GM of Blockgraph, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“To achieve that, we’ve been quietly amassing a group of distributors across a large footprint of TV viewing homes, as well as inventory partners. And there should be a really exciting announcement in the coming month that we’re really excited about.”

Blockgraph is video ad-tech firm FreeWheel’s new industry initiative focused on creating a more secure way to use data and share information.

By decentralizing information flow, the software aims to help:

• advertisers activate their data across screens.
• publishers to more effectively measure yield.
• data owners to monetize their information in a privacy-compliant manner.

“It is designed to become the “identity layer” for the TV industry, providing a platform on which media companies and publishers can offer marketers data capabilities without disclosing identifiable user data to third parties,” Manningham adds.

“Today, everyone who wants to match data is required to send that to the trusted third party. That can be very manual and it requires using these third parties who are putting an extra tax on the ecosystem. Blockgraph is a platform approach, so it allows near realtime matching off of data without exposing the underlying raw data sets. ”

Manningham was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

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

“There’s a lot of brands that are still getting their feet under them in terms of audiences and digital,” says Christine Grammier, managing director of LiveRamp, during the panel at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Publicis Media.

Much of the challenge comes from gathering the proper data sets to be able to communicate trends to clients that reflect similar successes in traditional TV models.

“Trying to use the same data on the planning side and the measurement side is hard still,” says Brian Wallach, senior vice president and CRO of advanced TV at FreeWheel. “So even though we want to do this advanced targeting and we want to find the right people that are in the market for products and services, it’s still complicated, but we’re definitely making progress.”

While we may still be awaiting a full buy-in on advanced TV models across the industry, the reach of television continues to serve a crucial purpose for advertisers, which cannot be overlooked.

“We talk a lot about television and video and its ability now to be more targeted and more personalized,” says Neil Vendetti, president of investment at Zenith. “But I think if you take a step back, the vast majority of our clients still buy TV for largely the same reason they always have, which is maximizing reach. It’s still unparalleled in the marketplace in terms of its ability to do that.”

The reach itself, however, is a metric that needs to be reimagined in order to be fully maximized.

“If we’re going to transact on reach, it needs to be across any number of video touchpoints that a consumer would reasonably consider as television-esque,” says Vendetti. “It needs to be the same kind of an experience from an advertising and content standpoint so that we can reasonably expect the same level of effectiveness.”

All panelists are in agreement that now, more than ever, capitalizing on reach means first gaining a very specific and polished idea of what your target audience looks like.

“We really try to start the conversation with audience,” says Grammier. “And then your view on what does reaching them with a premium video impression really mean kind of pivots a little bit.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is the growing refrain from advocates of advanced television advertising techniques like addressable targetability and frequency capping.

They are witnessing a burgeoning set of technical capabilities, and a growing footprint of audiences with the devices to take advantage of them.

But now the industry needs to come together to counter what is a proliferation of such initiatives.

In this video interview during our Beet Retreat In The City event, David Clark, GM & EVP at FreeWheel, tells MTM partner Jon Watts how FreeWheel is seeking partnerships to do that…

Blockgraph for identity

Part of the commonality and interconnectedness that is required concerns identity – or rather, gaining an understanding of consumers’ real identity in a cross-device, post-cookie world, in a way that can be leveraged for TV ad buys.

Recently, Comcast-owned FreeWheel introduced Blockgraph, a new industry initiative focused on creating a more secure way to use data and share information. It is designed to become the “identity layer” for the TV industry, providing a platform on which media companies and publishers can offer marketers data capabilities without disclosing identifiable user data to third parties.

“If you’re a first party data holder, you want the ability to query everybody else’s first party data without having to expose your data to the outside world,” says Clark.

“It’s not just a technological problem. You want to have trust. So we created a thing called blockgraph.

“We’ve incubated it, we spent a lot of money on it… and invite the industry to participate in it. It’s self-funded but not-for-profit entity.

“If you want to join, you run your own node to the graph and, when your data gets queried, you get paid and, when you query other people’s data, you get paid and the match rates are exceptionally high. Then we open it up for all members also to build applications on top of that.”

Addressable scale required

Clark was speaking after Freewheel parent Comcast, Cox and Charter this summer launched On Addressability, a joint initiative to offer advertising customers targeted ads across the outlets.

“We wanted to pull the industry, the major industry, particularly MVPDs to start, to get alignment around how should programmers be enabled, what are the economics behind it, how should it be presented to the marketplace, how should people transact on these things?,” Clark explains.

“(We will) just start a dialogue on that. Not everybody’s going to agree on everything. There’s a recognition in the industry that, until a marketer can run a campaign on some meaningful percentage of American homes in addressable fashion – call it, 70%, just guessing – that the addressable market is not going to emerge.”

Standardization needed

“This year, the big thing we’re hearing from clients in the industry is, ‘We need you to connect us to each other and we need you to play a role, but not alone, in helping with a lot of the operational standards’,” says Clark.

“If you were to list out all the technical problems, the solutions to them are all known. I can probably point to some player in the industry that has solved it.

“The challenge where we are now, and different players are different states … Charter’s doing amazing things, Comcast’s doing amazing things, Dish is doing amazing things, AT&T, programmers, so on and so forth. The next phase is standardising all that.

“It’s just got to fill in the gaps, get it to connect and put the business standards on top. The measurement, the transaction types, remove the friction.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:

• Amobee – Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer
• FreeWheel – Joy Baer, president, FreeWheel Advertisers
• ZenithOptimedia – Nick Hartofilis, EVP, national video activation

They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…

Zenith buyer bullish

Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.

“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”

Agencies stuck in Excel?

But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.

“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.

“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”

Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.

TV effectiveness diminishing

Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.

“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.

“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”

Play to medium’s strengths

FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.

“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.

“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.

“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, James Rothwell, VP of global agency, brand and industry relations at Comcast Advertising, says the industry needs a universal ad ID to make ad transaction workflows more efficient, deduplicate ad creative storage, address ad quality issues and improve campaign delivery.

“Fragmentation has created huge obstacles and workflow challenges because now we have to serve these ads into 200 different endpoints,” Rothwell says.

“There’s a huge opportunity for the industry to align their incentives and get behind this initiative to use a persistent identifier throughout the entire value chain to manage creatives in this world of fragmentation.

“Ad-ID … enables a brand or an agency to be able to manage that campaign through all of those different endpoints.”

The Ad-ID system, begun in 2003, is jointly owned by the ANA and the 4As.

Rothwell, who also leads the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video at Comcast-owned ad-tech platform FreeWheel, says the technology can benefit two sides:

• Brands – “they’re able to understand the way in which their creatives are performing through all those different endpoints and can optimise their campaigns.”
• Publishers – “they can actually manage restrictions and collisions around industry categories and competitive advertisers, which creates obviously a much better advertising experience.”

Rothwell is concerned that Ad-ID has had too little traction. His Council conducted a survey of 250 brands and agencies which found only 16% using some form of universal Ad-ID.

“The good news is 3,000 brands already signed up with Ad-ID,” he says. “The other great news is VAST 4.2, which is the latest version of IAB (video ad-serving) standards, incorporates Ad-ID into it. Ad-ID will just become part and parcel of the workflow.

“We know there’s massive amounts of opportunity. We believe there’s maybe just a lack of awareness,” Rothwell adds.

According to Brian Wallach, svp and CRO of advanced TV at FreeWheel, which is owned by Comcast, local TV used to be the black sheep of the industry. That’s changed, as a more fractured market has made marketers reconsider how they reach the audiences they’re targeting. FreeWheel is working with MVPDs to aggregate their local inventories, as the most advanced part of the business is household addressable, where premiums are up to 15x the rate, Wallach told Beet.TV in an interview with Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester, at the Beet Retreat hosted by Publicis Media in New York.

“People are jumping in to buy the same local inventory, proudly to declare they’re using household addressable, and that local inventory went from, ‘Ick, ew, I don’t want to be next to that,’ to ‘Wow, this is really powerful inventory when you can understand you’re reaching the consumer,” says Wallach.

While national television is regularly upheld for its reach, providing fast access to a mass audience, local TV is more aligned with personalized targeting that marketers are increasingly looking to supplement their video advertising strategies with.

“Most people make decisions locally,” says Wallach. “It’s really high quality, valuable inventory.”

FreeWheel’s core role is to help marketers find audiences at scale across the different platforms and programming where they’re consuming content. The company makes it more efficient to find the right places to advertise across different networks and streaming services by modeling desired audiences and offering next-day reporting.

It’s a work in progress, says Wallach, trying to make the process of buying ads and targeting more customers more efficient. According to Wallach, it will be an industry-wide effort to get it right.

“I’m really excited about partnering across the industry in terms of data. We work with Vizio, and Inscape, to try to expand what that offering is and find real scale for these audiences really easily, that’s critical,” he says. “When you have great data and insights, and great supply, you can connect the dots and make an impact.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted by Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Case in point – the emerging world of connected TV offers huge potential for precision targeting, even marrying up that process with traditional linear TV buying.

One of the leading technology suppliers helping deliver that future acknowledges that there are too many vendors all trying to do the same – and that reaching the kind of scale to which traditional TV is accustomed will remain a challenge as long as self-interest stands in the way. She is urging them to start teaming up, so that advertisers can realize the kind of results they are looking for.

Come together

After more than 25 years in enterprise software and management consulting, Joy Baer, GM for FreeWheel Advertisers at Comcast-owned FreeWheel, says the new-wave TV ecosystem needs to come together.

“We’re not always playing on the same team or paddling in the same direction,” she says.

“What happens is an agency, or advertiser, or a broadcast company comes up with solutions that they initially want to determine … it’s their secret sauce. They want to think about how to best position that so it’s in their best interest first, and then the industry second.

“We have to find a way to meet in the middle on behalf of all of us.”

The scale challenge

What’s the problem created by this fragmented approach? More fragmentation.

“I think that the single largest challenge is scale,” says Baer, in this video interview with Beet.TV, referring to the potential advanced TV audience that could be reached if the separate islands of platforms were wired up to support straightforward converged TV ad buying, buying across a range of TV platforms.

“We need the broadcasters, for example, and cable operators and MVPDs to step in and make sure that their data and their inventory is consistent, and measurable, and we have a currency, and that they have systems that allow us to transact across screens, and that they’re investing in those things as well as the buy side so that the two can meet in the middle.

“It’s (about) making it possible to do it at scale, which television is the king of. That’s what we want to return to, and we’re bumping up against what I see as scale challenges. The reality is we’re not there yet.”

The push for unity

FreeWheel Advertisers is the product formerly badged “Strata“, a media-buying platform through which customers can see automated optimized TV schedules based on their audience goals, machine learning-driven ratings estimates and two-way price negotiation communication.

Prior to joining Strata, Baer was CEO of SpotBuySpot, purchased by Strata in 2007.

Baer is the latest to urge more interconnectedness for connected TV. Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel recently urged the industry to be more collaborative. Forrester analyst Joanna O’Connell expressed concern over whether Roku’s acquisition of dataxu would lead to “higher walls” limiting converged buying. SpotX’s Sean Buckley and MTM’s Jon Watts have said that the US TV ecosystem, in particular, is too fragmented.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

In advance of the event, we interviewed one of the event’s keynote speakers, David Clark, GM & EVP at FreeWheel, a Comcast company.

“You’re starting to see technologies come online in that world that do look and behave more like digital,” says  Clark, in this video interview.

“Take just ad serving, for example. The concept of ad serving has never existed in linear television, that sophistication. It’s been more of a scheduling exercise.”

But companies like FreeWheel imbue their ad serving technology with awareness of TV schedules, allowing broadcasters to serve customized ads for play-out.

“That provides the publisher first with pretty meaningful improvements to their own yield, their own ability to use their inventory to drive more value for marketers.” Clark says.

This is the “first step” in connecting up linear and digital ad inventory, says Clark.

Household Addressability Is Happening

Clark says household-level addressability customized ads in linear schedules are finally real, after years of anticipation.

He was speaking after his Comcast, Cox and Charter this summer launched On Addressability, a joint initiative to offer advertising customers targeted ads across the outlets.

Speakers & Moderators on October 22, Hosted by Publicis Media:

To request an invitation, visit this page.

Presented by

In a deal announced today, Discovery Inc, which already was a FreeWheel customer, says it will now take on FreeWheel’s “unified decisioning platform to enable holistic advertising management for Discovery’s full roster of cable networks”.

Discovery wants advertisers to be able to reach viewers across:

• Discovery Go, its own-brand player.
• Discovery’s channels through cable or satellite providers’ own apps.
• Traditional linear broadcasts
• Other VOD.

“Measurement of addressable (TV) had been limited to the addressable campaigns (alone),” FreeWheel’s data platform GM Claudio Marcus, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“What’s new here is the ability to combine the addressable exposures with the linear exposures, perhaps with digital video exposures.

“Let’s say that we already knew that a household that was in our target had already been reached enough times with linear – well, then I wouldn’t necessarily want to target them with an addressable expression, because the CPM on an addressable impression is much higher.”

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

Attribution technology is rising in prominence, as programmers seek ways to show agencies the effectiveness of new-wave, data-fuelled advanced TV ads.

But an executive at the center of the emerging capability says a foundational element before attribution is ensuring that ad creative can be placed for the right viewers in the first place.

“Everyone always wants to look at sales,” says Brian Wallach, FreeWheel SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And if you’re a publicly traded company, you’re looking at sales quarterly, and some companies weekly and daily.

“From a business perspective, the media and advertising industry has really been about matching up audience with an advertiser’s message. And I still think, foundationally, the attribution plays a role in it, but our job in the ecosystem is to make it as easy as possible to find those audiences. Yes, using data, and then (to) deliver that message whatever screen the consumer’s watching on.

“I think if we do our job of matching up those audiences, the outcomes will be what the outcomes need to be, based on that creative, and that messaging, and that offer, and the value prop that the marketer is presenting to all of us as consumers.”

He was speaking with Janet Balis, global leader of EY’s media and entertainment practice.

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

The Open Addressable Ready consortium announced in March is the result of Vizio having watched a number of companies try to bring more scale to addressable TV, McAfee says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“There are a lot of technical challenges with someone being in the middle of that conversation and then there are also a lot of business challenges. As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work.”

OAR membership includes both inventory owners and platforms, ranging from CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal to AT&T’s Xandr and Comcast’s FreeWheel.

By seeking an open standard, Vizio decided against “trying to force the entire market to jump into a single stack and adopt a single solution,” McAfee says. Given that “NBC’s going to want to use FreeWheel, WarnerMedia’s going to want to use Xandr, Disney has their deal with Google,” allowing flexibility “is the only way you’re going to get to scale.”

Vizio sees itself as stewards and OAR members as owners. “They’re the ones making the decisions and we’re just building everything to their requirements.”

McAfee notes that most addressable TV execution to date has been through MVPD’s. “We think there’s a complementary ability to generate more scale on live linear,” McAfee says, hence the inclusion of companies like Comcast and Xandr. “We bring incremental reach to all of those players and scale is absolutely critical to addressable. There needs to be more and there also needs to be more premium linear inventory in that bucket for addressable.”

McAfee says he’s old enough “to have watched multiple consortiums in our business not go very well. I think as a group we’re beneficiaries of good timing in that I think the television stakeholders in our business understand that they need to work together to succeed.

“And so far our meetings have been very collaborative, everybody’s leaned in pretty hard on the subject matter and everybody’s cooperating. So I’m really encouraged by that.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee.  For more videos from the series, visit this page.  To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

That’s a person-level frontier that FreeWheel plans to tackle, according to Claudio Marcus, the GM of the company’s Data Platform. In this interview with Beet.TV, Marcus recaps FreeWheel’s progress on TV advertising planning and attribution, calling measurement “a huge challenge.”

On the attribution side, FreeWheel took on the role of TV advocate in 2016 when it conducted research “just to understand the impact that TV advertising has on different types of clients’ business.” There followed secondary research in which FreeWheel hired a firm to find any study that touted cross-channel or multi-touch attribution.

“The more interesting part was actually the secondary research,” Marcus notes. That’s because out of some 164 studies, “only twelve actually included TV. So here is TV, the biggest communication channel in the world and it basically wasn’t getting its due credit when it came to cross-channel attribution.”

Since then, FreeWheel has provided to “qualified attribution firms” household-level ad exposure data, free of charge, “so that they could include that in their cross-channel studies and their ability to measure television more effectively. That’s been a big success.”

FreeWheel has also been working with the programmer members of the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP to understand de-duplicated reach across those members. “Because as things get more and more fragmented, advertisers want to be in those new places where there are audiences, whether it’s different channels or different platforms. But they also want to make sure that they’re not hitting the same people that they were hitting by going in traditional linear TV.”

Earlier this year, FreeWheel licensed VIZIO smart-TV data from Inscape and built a nationally representative model “which is really a co-mingled data set between the Comcast set-top box data and the smart-TV data.” Among other things, the data helps programmers that sell on national basis. “They want something that’s more nationally representative. They want to be able to forecast national impressions. They want to be able to measure on a national basis,” Marcus says.

There are disparities in data gathered from boxes and smart TV’s. Within Comcast Cable’s footprint, there’s an average of about 2.6 cable boxes compared to about 1.1 devices in homes with smart TV’s. “What that means is that there’s some viewing that you’re missing.”

Meanwhile, smart TV’s have their advantages over boxes. “It has lower latency, it covers OTT as long as it’s content that has been previously fingerprinted on linear,” Marcus says.

As IP-delivered content proliferates, so do devices that receive the content. Problem is, not all of the devices that connect to WiFi “are associated with people in a specific home” because some belong to visitors.

“As we think about moving TV measurement from a household level to an individual level, it helps us to understand who’s home and who’s not. So that we can start to get better models when it comes to what’s called viewer attribution.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“From a measurement perspective and understanding viewership and consumption, we are partnering with Inscape to complement our Comcast set-top box footprint,” FreeWheel’s Brian Wallach says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We will be the largest footprint where you can actually get an understanding of deterministic viewership and consumption of digital video content across every screen.”

The SVP and CRO of Advanced TV says FreeWheel is “leaning into being able to show incremental reach” to advertisers using a national campaign or a targeted one on linear TV “and also the complementary digital delivery that’s happening in our footprint and across the Inscape footprint as well.”

The goal is to be able to determine whether someone watched a program on TV or digital and did an advertiser reach them in one or both environments because “there’s light TV viewers, heavy TV viewers, all types of consumption that’s happening across screen,” Wallach says.

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, every advertiser is different. Some are as simple as brand metrics measured with the help of research studies while others are looking for down-funnel conversion.

“As a marketer defines what their KPI’s are, we help them with different providers to match up whether or not the media that was shown to those consumers actually drove that behavior. That’s a growing trend.”

According to Wallach, some marketers could look to seek different audience guarantees from publishers that are based on campaign outcomes, as “guaranteeing delivery of impressions is somewhat not enough these days. Obviously, this is important for our publishing partners as well.”

He describes TVSquared as “a very valuable attribution partner for us. They really help us understand how to optimize a campaign and try to drive impressions against inventory that is yielding good results.”

While campaign performance beyond mere impression delivery has traditionally taken “months and months,” TVSquared provides “a rolling report on information that’s happening with those interactions, where we can actually optimize a campaign, maybe move inventory from one publisher to another based on performance” and do creative optimization.

Better analytics at the local level means that search no longer gets 100% local attribution, according to Wallach.

“We have data that can show exposures across TV, exposures across digital and then the corresponding interactions with search where they’re getting a location or address for a particular store and then visiting it,” says Wallach.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

In this interview with Beet.TV, McGurn explains the company’s new relationships with distributors and why the upcoming Cannes Lions event is “always a dealmaker’s paradise” for Vevo, which is owned by Universal Music and Sony Music and has global music video licensing rights with hundreds of other labels as well.

About this time last year, Vevo decided to phase out elements of its owned and operated platforms. With its business centered on YouTube distribution, it wasn’t cost effective to continue funding video distribution on its own.

The subsequent strategy was “finding endpoints of distribution in neighborhoods that users frequent where they might enjoy music videos again on television,” says McGurn. Vevo is about to divulge “a number of partnerships” and is offering “inventory anchored in connected television in the YouTube application on the TV’s and in living rooms to market in the UpFront.” McGurn quantifies the inventory at “about a nine-figure body.”

Vevo has typical inventory sharing relationships with MVPD’s in the 10% to 15% range “and they sell it on an audience basis, nothing specific to music or videos.”

The company handles sales for the rest of its inventory, including the use of various programmatic channels and working with SpotX. “We have the mass majority of inventory that’s there and we are a centralized point of buying for music television on all these distributors,” says McGurn.

“The demand is there. We have a larger supply than most people would even know about. The reaction so far from those buyers has been very positive and we think we’ll be able to sell it out in the UpFront.”

McGurn says Vevo’s “technology stack in the living room starts with FreeWheel. That’s our dynamic ad insertion vehicle.”

Vevo is counting on search, discovery and recommendation to ramp up ad sales, along with its understanding of the viewing behavior associated with music television that “far exceeds short-form behavior. We can see all the way up to sixty-five minutes of viewing behavior in a lean-back experience on TV’s if that search and discovery and recommendation is hit right.”

Looking ahead to next month in France, McGurn says, “Cannes for us is always a dealmaker’s paradise” as the company seeks domestic and global deals based on its extensive video licensing rights. “Audiences are aging in the living room and we represent a great counterbalance, to reaching almost twenty-five percent of every country’s population that we operate in.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

But do marketers have what they need to succeed in this new world?

“Identity is really at the center of data-driven TV,” says Jason Manningham, General Manager of FreeWheel’s Blockgraph, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“If you think about the ability for a marketer to reach an audience across different distribution points in an increasingly fragmented environment, identity and being able to understand that audience across those different devices and distributors is the foundation.”

Blockgraph is video ad-tech firm FreeWheel’s new industry initiative focused on creating a more secure way to use data and share information. It is designed to become the “identity layer” for the TV industry, providing a platform on which media companies and publishers can offer marketers data capabilities without disclosing identifiable user data to third parties.

For a new white paper on the topic, Blockgraph has uncovered emerging trends.

For instance, the survey found that marketers imagine a growing proportion of their TV spend will be data-enabled, but 36% of marketers feel that identity resolution is one of the top three barriers preventing them from using data to build TV advertising segments.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

He sees tremendous opportunity in the power of television advertising to target local audiences. “We’re looking to aggressively tackle the opportunity that we see in the local market to bring to bear more audience-driven selling for our advertisers,” says Greenwald.

Then he refers to a white paper titled The New TV issued in March by Comcast Spotlight that examined the range of TV options—from linear to OTT and several other advanced iterations. For example, primetime viewing.

“Today there’s a point of view that so much viewing is captured just in primetime. But really that’s only about a third of viewing and you can still capture a large portion of the audience where two thirds of viewing is happening outside of primetime,” says Greenwald.

He points out that about 87% of total TV viewing happens live and that Comcast can “help you find them on a linear schedule” so that “you can reach as much of them as possible in a premium, brand-safe environment.”

Comcast Spotlight has a “huge local business” wherein advertisers can target audiences in specific zones. In a DMA like Philadelphia, “we can carve that up into a number of smaller zones and let an advertiser that might be a smaller business that only operates in a portion of the Philadelphia market just reach the potential customer base that they have in that zone.”

Also at the LUMA Digital Media Summit, the head of NCC Media, Nicolle Pangis, talks about “chapter two” at NCC, which is the national cable sales group owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. Referring to NCC, Greenwald says, “We see a real opportunity in conjunction with our partners to bring a lot of new offerings to market that we think are going to be very valuable to advertisers.”

Asked about Comcast’s FreeWheel, he cites publisher-side projects coming to market for Comcast’s programming and MVPD partners. In particular, he mentions pilot tests with NBC focusing on unification, bringing digital and linear together in a single execution. “These pilots enable us to remove the linear schedules from their traffic system and optimize within FreeWheel’s ad server/decisioning system before flowing back into the linear traffic system for execution.

“We’ve seen that yield meaningful results for NBC and we believe that’s a real proof point in the market for us as we work to unify audiences across all screens,” Greenwald adds. “And that is a real core competency for FreeWheel and something we’re laser focused on.

“We believe it brings a lot of value to the marketplace for our immediate customers but also for marketers. It enables them to buy an audience across all screens with one single order as opposed to a siloed execution.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.

“They’ll be putting demand into our marketplace and doing audience extension to find their audiences on other premium content in service of their advertisers and their advertisers’ goals,” says Geoff Wolinetz, SVP Client Relationships, FreeWheel.

“This fits in very, very nicely with FreeWheel’s strategy of television as a platform,” Wolinetz adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

OTT represents the plurality of adds that FreeWheel serves at any given time. The impact for Hearst is a sign that it, too, is committed to TV as a platform, according to Wolinetz.

“They want to expand their reach in any way that they possibly can also while adjusting to where the users are actively consuming the content. What they get to through us is leverage our ad server and our ad decisioning technology to find the right audience, in the right supply, for their demand, at any given time.”

Hearst gains access to “the universe of FreeWheel programmers” that participate in its marketplace from the supply side. “Your premium broadcasters, cable companies, distributors, folks that have inventory and have premium audiences that Hearst can leverage on their end to use their demand to fill,” Wolinetz says.

According to a news release from FreeWheel and Hearst, the new integration enables “an improved connection to premium inventory from natural partners such as A+E Networks,” which is a joint venture of Disney-ABC Television Group and Hearst. In addition, it’s the first step designed to enhance the value of local broadcast inventory, with next stages focusing on “the co-development of initiatives to further the unification of digital video and linear TV inventory, an area of focus for both companies.”

From the Hearst perspective, “I think they’re realizing that they can find their audiences in a lot of different places. Not just on their live linear broadcasts but also on over the top devices,” says Wolinetz.

Now ad-tech firm FreeWheel is effectively uniting the “shampoo” and “conditioner” of TV ad sales – creating a unified product in which A+E Networks can manage two different kinds of ads.

Comcast-owned FreeWheel has worked with broadcast company A+E to give it a “unified ad decisioning engine”, uniting the previously separate tools which handled:

• management and scheduling of direct-sold ad inventory
• management of programmatic demand through a supply-side platform

FreeWheel says that historic separation has led to “pricing conflicts, TV-compliance issues and negative user experience impacts”. But the unified system “allows A+E Networks to holistically consider the full pool of demand, including direct sold buys, and optimize across all business rules and requirements”.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Geoff Wolinetz, FreeWheel SVP client relationships, says: “Effectively, we’re talking about changing the way that we decision advertising.

“When you have a bunch of different demand sources in play, typically what happens is there will be an SSP that does an auction, and then they will pass a winner along to an ad server who then does another set of decisioning to figure out which is the right ad to serve.

“In this case, what A+E is going to do is send us all of their demand. We’re going to put it into one big pool, and we’re going to arbitrate one auction that allows us to pick the most fit ad.

“Think of this as survival of the fittest for an advertisement that comes through.”

FreeWheel plans to offer the system to other companies beside A+E this year.

Here is the company press release.

At the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan, Steuer, who is Chief Research Officer, welcomed the “consistent effort across almost all of the networks and network groups to try to make advanced TV solutions work,” he explains in this Beet.TV interview.

This is in contrast to just a few years ago, when individual TV networks began to roll out their own advanced-targeting arrangements.

“Then we had OpenAP, which does not appear to be a force in the marketplace for this year’s UpFront,” Steuer says. “But every conversation we’re having with network groups involves some notion of trying to move or investment toward more advanced TV and other kinds of targeting and measurement, and we think that’s great.”

Omnicom has been using data from Vizio-owned Inscape “pretty deeply” for the past nine months and is currently working with VideoAmp to conjoin set-top box and ACR data. “I was pleased to see this morning that FreeWheel announced they’re doing the same thing with Comcast and Vizio Inscape ACR data.”

This is because set-top box and ACR data do different things very well, according to Steuer.

“ACR lets us get some read of both content and commercial exposure across sources so we can see both OTT and linear delivery in that data set. Set-top box data gets you every TV in the household, typically when people are pay-TV subscribers, but only gets you pay-TV subscribers.”

What still needs to happen is for MVPD’s and ACR providers to make their data available in a more “democratized” fashion. “But at least now we see steps in that direction, which is great,” Steuer adds.

Asked about a unified data platform that would serve much if not all of the TV industry, Steuer cites a “trust problem” with having any single vendor be the data aggregator.

“So what I think is going to have to happen is each of the data aggregators to find a way to make their data available in a linkable but segregated format.”

The end goal is the formation of a common set of data formats, pre-processing rules and linkage mechanisms.

“That’s the only way to evolve the TV business to compete in the world of walled gardens,” Steuer says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

What Data Plus Math brings to Comcast’s FreeWheel is “a fast, automated and low-cost attribution provider,” Hoctor adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.

Data Plus Math helps ad buyers and sellers tie ad exposures to business outcomes by matching anonymized viewing data with external data. By connecting the two, advertisers can look across platforms, networks, programs, creative iterations, audiences to determine “how much credit they should get in driving those business outcomes.”

Business outcomes, or KPI’s, typical consist of offline and online commercial traffic and website visits.

“We help them understand at a macro level, is this media working. But then more granular, what parts of it are working hardest? Where should I be investing more money in order to generate these outcomes?” says Hoctor.

According to a FreeWheel news release, Data Plus Math can deliver attribution measurement within days to weeks from the start of a campaign depending on its scope and then provide continuous updates through the remainder of the campaign schedule.

Hoctor attributes the rise of attribution in no small way to “some of the digital giants” that are helping drive advertiser demand. “Television is a huge part of their budget, and wouldn’t it be great to understand what parts of TV are working harder?”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.