Now, after many early attempts, finally addressable TV is reaching scale.
But just how advanced is the infrastructure behind “advanced TV”?
In a Beet Retreat panel, Addressable Tech: Next-Gen Solutions: Fixing the Plumbing, three industry executives were asked that question.
All agreed that addressable TV capability and viewer scale has grown leaps and bounds since the earliest attempts a decade ago. But the panel also raised concerns that the infrastructure is not nearly as mature as it should be.
Telaria’s Adam Lowy said lining up ads to support personalized play-out is not as frictionless as believed.
“In television, you have to send the (ad) spot to the box over the bird, has to sit in the box,” he said. “It takes about three or four days, maybe a week, to acquire (the ad), and then you go ahead and serve it.
“You can call that ‘mature’, I call that ‘we’ve got to move on from that at some point’.”
Telaria’s Adam Lowy said, right now, selling addressable ads to buyers is too complex.
“When you’re out there selling addressable (ads), it gets into the weeds so fast (that) you’ve essentially lost the sell, you’ve lost the mojo,” he said. “Because you get so into how it works and all the tech about it.
“I think we have to simplify the process and really state what addressable (advertising) is when you’re out there. And I think that is one of the things we need to fix.”
Google’s Chris Curley explained that, relative to digital media, addressable TV still needs to focus on open ecosystems.
“If you want to continue down a path where ads become more meaningful to the user and you can protect the privacy of the user and their wishes, as well as create meaningful measurement across all of these screens so that all of this works well at scale, we have a very long way to go,” he said.
“We need to focus on interoperability. We need to make sure that we’re working together and we’re using open standards in a way that works for everyone.”
Project OAR is beginning to issue over-the-top firmware updates to 10 million connected TV sets, to better deliver ads from FreeWheel, Google and Xandr, said the outfit’s Jodie McAfee.
OAR is a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising,
“We’ve also hit our milestones, one of which was to have a live demo at CES, which we did.We actually ran six different demos with members, two of which were live feeds broadcast into the Vizio space at CES.
“We (also) distributed the measurement spec. We will start pushing the solution to Vizio TVs in a firmware update next week. We’re on track to have 10 million TVs live by the upfront.” The discussion took place on February 5.
The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.
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.
]]>And DeepMind has been busy answering that question, including by writing AlphaGo, an advanced AI program that has become skilled at playing the ancient board game Go.
AlphaGo is the first computer program to defeat a professional human Go player, the first to defeat a Go world champion, and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.
But what does any of this mean for marketers?
“There are a lot of analogies between how to predict the next best move in Go, when you have potentially billions of permutations of different moves that you can take, and what’s the next best move in marketing, whether to reengage somebody on email, what sort of offer to give them, whether to reengage them on display,” says Dan Stone, senior product manager at Google for Google Analytics.
“One of the ways that the DeepMind team solved this challenge was they simultaneously needed to come up with a way to figure out the next best move, but, before they could even do that, they had to figure out who’s actually winning at any point in time. So they built, as a starting point, a network to predict what is the score at any point in time.
“That’s where we are now in analytics, where we are starting to see more and more companies building these pieces to predict, at any given point in time, what is the user’s value, or where are we in the game so that we can ultimately predict based on where they are now, what is the next best move that we can take to optimise towards incremental predicted lifetime value.”
Stone says he hopes to see a continuation of a trend in which brands are defragmenting their internal corporate structures in order to pool data for their greater good.
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.
]]>“We’ve provided the opportunity for people to toe dip into connected TV. So we see that as really a big part of our future,” George says in this interview with Beet.TV at the LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference.
Referred to in some circles as “the trade desk for walled gardens,” Pixability’s foundation is in helping advertisers target audiences within YouTube and Facebook. “We are the only technology platform that has access to what is really the largest video inventory, and we get to leverage the unique capabilities for targeting and so forth on YouTube and Facebook,” George says.
In recent years Pixability has extended its footprint to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify. “Were uniquely positioned at the moment in really what’s a super exciting space.”
During most of his tenure at Facebook, George led the Mobile Publisher Solutions team, which drove rapid growth for Facebook’s Audience Network, according to a Pixability news release. His video software experience includes stints at Celtra, KickApps and Maven Networks, which was acquired by Yahoo.
“Think of us as a tech player that sits on top of the Google stack as well as Facebook.”
Asked about consumer data, George says, “We can leverage first-party data from clients, but it’s less of a challenge because we live within the walled gardens. All the data is available to us.”
As part of the YouTube Measurement Program, Pixability gets access to “a bunch of data that brands will use for insights about the audiences, and it obviously helps us with helping them find their audiences on these platforms.”
One of the company’s main focuses right now is around planning capabilities for targeting down to “micro audiences. That doesn’t exist in the market outside of Pixability.”
“They’ve been our trusted partner for many years and we’re one of their largest partners there,” he says of YouTube. “But now also having a cross-platform story that now will extend into connected TV.”
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.
]]>“The bulk of linear is still bought at a corporate level, so until those buying habits change we’re not going to see too much movement there,” Khan adds in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
WideOrbit has long provided the foundational piping for local TV broadcast transactions. After several acquisitions of digital assets, its programmatic solution now consists of four “flavors,” according to Khan. They are programmatic direct and private marketplace, which are “more akin to your traditional buying RFP’s” for guaranteed inventory that can be bought one year out.
“Then we have open marketplace and direct response, more akin to your open RTB protocol” in which spots can be purchased in real time anywhere from two to seven days out.
Meanwhile, on the demand side, WideOrbit engages with brands directly, “we do work with the DSPs, and we service our core SSP client needs in that we provide the channel for direct sold.”
Khan mentions WideOrbit’s 2017 partnership with Google, in which WideOrbit integrated with DoubleClick to allow ad buyers to buy broadcast TV spots from the same interface they use to secure digital display and video campaigns.
“We continue to see increased volume through that channel. We work with a number of DSP’s as well, and again we continue to see increased volumes coming through those demand channels,” says Khan.
To advance the convergence of digital and linear media, WideOrbit has developed different tool sets. “We are helping with the data and the targeting through our programmatic platforms. “Brands don’t necessarily always want to target a specific audience. They like the shotgun approach of linear. It helps with their brand building, and obviously it’s the safety that goes along with that as well.”
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.
]]>AT&T used a local meteorologist/social influencer to help inform and people prepare for the hurricane, while providing journalists with free WiFi data cards afterward and using satellite television programming time to inform children sidelined by school shutdowns. P&G provided free mobile laundry services so that people had clean clothes to wear. Telemundo took to using a live Facebook feed to communicate news developments while hosting gatherings of friends and competitors alike in the industry.
Beet.TV’s efforts to galvanize support for Puerto Rico relief efforts continue on February 5 at Xandr/AT&T in Manhattan. Accompanied by advertising and media executives, the program will explore fund-raising and other charitable initiatives to further support the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.
“The media landscape was basically starting over again,” Andres Claudio, MD of Hearts & Science/Omnicom, Puerto Rico, said during a Beet Retreat session titled Puerto Rico Media Transformed by Hurricane Maria and moderated by former GroupM executive Phil Cowdell. “Imagine in New York City if you have no power, no signals, no cell phones, nothing. At least you have another state around you.”
While brands have a responsibility to understand consumer needs, “we have a social responsibility” as well, said Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director, USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility. In the case of Maria, that responsibility started with the mobile service company helping people prepare for what lay ahead. AT&T leveraged the effort by using a local meteorologist who had a substantial social media following.
“What we did not expect, besides the fact of what happened after the hurricane, was that influencer became the top trending person within all possible influencers,” said Burgos.
“Basically we were in the dark ages” in terms of the ability to communicate through everyday media, with the exception of AM radio, said Freddie Hernandez, Site Leader, P&G Puerto Rico. When the company saw images of people washing their clothes in rivers and other waterways, P&G knew it had to do something.
“There’s a lot of health issues related to using non-purified water to clean your clothes,” said Hernandez. And while P&G had learned from such U.S. natural disasters as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, it had no logistical way to bring its Tide Loads of Hope community service from the mainland. “We decided to create our own asset” in the form of a Coach bus transformed into a laundromat with 12 combo units of washing and drying machines that assisted more than 2,000 families.
“It’s incredible the reaction of the people,” said Hernandez. “You take for granted what you have. People were just crying when they would see the bus getting to a town and people would be wearing clean clothes for the first time in about three weeks.”
Telemundo had been broadcasting “all the way up to the storm” but was forced to shut down early on the first morning that Maria made landfall, according to Jose Cancela, President of Telemundo/NBCU Puerto Rico. “When we cranked back up we were really broadcasting to the States because there was no power here. Whatever cell phone probably you had you probably used it up,” said Cancela. Reporting news live via Facebook was “for four days how we were broadcasting. Radio became the media of the day for a number of months.”
From the onset of Maria, advertising and media competitors pulled together, initially using Telemundo as a base for meetings. Meanwhile, Cancela credited Nielsen for doing “a great job in bringing their panel back on track. Without that measurement, our currency was zero and it wasn’t until May of this year that they were finally able to bring it on track. But during the whole process, they really kept the broadcast community and the agency community very much informed in getting their panel back up.”
One exception to media outages was satellite TV for those fortunate to have a source of electricity, said Burgos. Since all schools were either shut down, destroyed or being used for community services, “we had children at home doing nothing, so there was a need to educate or entertain those children.”
So AT&T organized a tour of education professionals under the auspices of DirecTV and used programming time to provide useful content to kids in 10 different towns. “They were dying for information,” Burgos said.
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.
]]>After all, “programmatic” advertising unleashed “real-time bidding” (RTB) on to the world several years ago now. Today, real-time auctions for display ads are commonplace and many hope for a similar arrival in TV and video.
But a panel discussion at Beet Retreat discussed ongoing inertia in a $70 billion US TV advertising business where the legacy medium is proving reluctant to change…
DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:
D’Antoni was asked if ad buyers’ requests for audience segments are still processed “mostly in Excel and (with) manual extracts of data from various systems, lots of macros”.
He responded: “Yes. There is still some friction.
“And that’s just dealing with one supplier – if you’re on the buy side, you’re going to have to deal with that three or four times. So there is a long way to go in terms of streamlining the process.”
Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:
Automation is what Videa is aiming to bring to the market. The company makes platforms that reduce friction in ad avails, makegoods and posting
“We have found, much to our chagrin, that (even) within the same broadcast group … multiple stations are not speaking the same language. There’s almost no standards at all when it comes to broadcast.
“We spent probably two years on something that we called traffic normalization, which was literally just getting our system to understand all the different names that exist for one program so that when someone wants to make a buy across multiple markets, the buy could happen and the system can understand (what) they mean.”
Google Head of Telco/Video Partnerships Peter Dolchin:
Asked for the most important priority, Dolchin said: “Interoperability.”
“We like challenges, but this is clearly complex and we have some really smart, talented people at the company who understand it. We’ve been recruiting people from the industry over the past decade. And so, we know it’s hard, but we are testing in a variety of different ways.
“So with this new linear addressable solution that we’ve launched, there is the ability to look at set-top box tuning data real time and bring that into the decision making when they’re selecting the ad. That is one of the ways in which we’re bringing real time to it.”
Experian director of TV solutions, Experian Marketing Services, Brad Danaher:
Danaher said his company had helped political advertisers target campaigns during the recent US mid-term elections.
“It was a big cycle for political. Even though it was big, we actually thought it would be a little bigger.
“When we work with folks like DISH, we have a platform called Audience Engine, which basically allows counts to be accessed within seconds if needed be. If (the audience target is, for example), environmentally-aware consumers … we can tell the MVPDs through that platform within 10 seconds and you can go on the platform and know it, and then launch that into their media plan, knowing the sizing right away. That’s an improvement.”
DISH Network director, ad sales, Dish Media, Jim D’Antoni:
D’Antoni was asked to describe the typical lead time to make an addressable TV campaign active.
“Typically three to five days,” he said. “And then that it served, it’s beamed up to the satellite. It’s (then stored) in the (set-top) box.”
Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz:
That prompted the panel moderator to make a “broad” statement on the relative slowness of what many think should, by dint of being digital, be a fast process.
“There is no real-time in TV,” she said. “Tthere’s really very little real time data, real time insights, real time decisioning, real time delivery, realtime ops.” Fellow panelists agreed, though Google’s Dolchin explained that Google has launched a linear addressable TV ad solution which supports examining set-top box tuning data in real-time.
Videa VP sales Archie Gianunzio:
Gianunzio said he thought a lot of the infrastructure inertia remains in place because few inside the legacy TV business perceive a threat driving need for change.
“Within TV, things have always been relatively rosy. There’s this feeling that, ‘No matter whatever came along, we were going to be able to deal with it’.” He cited DVRs, internet and Netflix as examples of purported TV-killers that have not turned out to be.
“Every article that you read is like ‘The audience is down and yet it’s more important than ever that you’re using television to get your message out there’ – Facebook and Uber are (doing just that).”
But Gianunzio sees a change may finally be coming.
“The people who thought ‘we’re just going to go passed this and we’re not going to have to actually deal with it’ … they’re either retired or they realize that they’re not going to get to retirement without dealing with it. I think that’s what’s going to push us there.”
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.
]]>Moderated by consultant Matt Prohaska, the discussion touched on the eternal reality of supply versus demand in making sales decisions, along with the prospects for the OpenAP audience targeting consortium.
“We still have bifurcation in linear programmatic and digital, so that’s always something that we have to navigate,” said FOX’s Noah Levine. “We’ve seen a maturity begin to develop in the linear programmatic TV space, which is quite nice.”
From the sell-side, programmatic is “primarily about automating the buy and being able to empower the agency, the buyer, to do more. That’s a good thing for us as sellers,” Levine added.
“The fact that we still need to look at linear programmatic as kind of a separate beast is something we should all start to want to reconcile and maybe have some degree of concern about,” said Brett Hurwitz of OATH, the Verizon unit. And if all TV inventory becomes available on an IP-based delivery platform, a major concern will be getting “enough of a premium on the highly desirable target folks to make up for the fact that some of your other impressions are going to probably be going at a much lower price.”
The issue of brand safety still holds sway and stands in the way of 100% data-driven decisions, according to Mike Law of Dentsu Aegis Network. “We need to find the right balance of that, because some brands hold that way too close to them and some buyers hold that way too close to them,” said Law. “They fear that if I don’t say something then this computer will do my job for me or somebody will do it for me.”
Sellers have obvious concerns about total automation when optimizing their inventory across the multitude of buyers. “In linear, there’s a lot of pressure on the inventory. There’s a huge amount of demand,” said Levine.
“It’s true, the private marketplaces are really the path forward for the most part when it comes to especially linear television inventory,” said Hurwitz.
Given some marketers’ desire to cherry pick ad units versus having the ability to transact via automation, “There’s a very healthy tension between those two models that we’re seeing in the marketplace,” Levine noted. And while being able to leverage programmatic technology to access inventory and re-optimize plans “is a very desirable state for us to reach in the future,” it’s tough to do for sellers that don’t have lots of unsold inventory. “That’s one of the challenges.”
Asked by Prohaska about the prospects of the OpenAP targeting consortium launched by FOX, Viacom and Turner, Law said its premise “remains really strong and positive.” The missing piece to him is being able to transact collectively across all members.
And OpenAP is in a crowded space.
“There’s OpenAP and then I’ve got actually all the partners included in OpenAP trying to sell me their own platform, plus fifteen other networks trying to sell me their platform as well,” said Law. “And then I’ve got Simulmedia calling me, I’ve got Adobe calling me, I’ve got Videology calling me.”
OATH experienced its own version of too many choices upon the merger of AOL and Yahoo, Hurwitz recalled, given the existence of “I’m going to say eight DSP’s between the two companies” plus a number of DSP’s. OATH decided to sunset its linear TV programmatic platform, which Hurwitz called “a fantastic product,” because “we felt was going to serve the industry for some period of time and then perhaps not be the tool the industry needed.”
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.
]]>The Upfront is the only marketplace where you can “figure out your whole year. There’s a whole bunch of efficiencies attached to that,” says the SVP of Client Strategy. “Getting the right kind of pricing, cementing a partnership, so there’s always going to be a role for that.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Effik also talks about the expectations of so-called direct-to-consumer advertisers and his team’s job of sifting through the “treasure chest of riches” that is the NBCU content portfolio.
At NBCU, the “whole idea of doing mass media now sits very comfortably with us bringing more targeted media, data-driven media, into the Upfront as well. So we’re managing to marry both of these worlds within the existing upfront,” says Effik.
His reference to a treasure chest of assets reflects, among other things, NBCU’s motion picture studios, theme parks, digital assets and set-top boxes. “My team’s job is to look at where the value is in that and then connect the dots for our clients.”
When talking about direct-to-consumer brands, Effik says that while NBCU wants to be “where any industry is being reinvented,” it’s also an opportunity change the way people see his company as just an upper-funnel player. “We think there’s been a misperception in the industry around what NBCU represents.”
For companies that grew up on Facebook and or Google, “we’re showing them that they can actually get just as good if not more superior returns by working with NBC at the lower end of the funnel.” For new but more established brands, “We’re now showing them that they can be mature brands by using the full scope of our portfolio.”
A common characteristic of direct-to-consumer brands is that “they’re CPA obsessed,” meaning cost per acquisition, according to Effik. “They want to get a low cost of acquisition, but they want to do it at scale. We know what things in our portfolio drive that the best and we’re packaging that kind of stuff with them.”
Priorities do change from one company to another, including economically driving website visits and gaining more brand awareness. For example, “People on the coasts, in the hip neighborhoods of New York or L.A. know who we are. Now we want to go into Middle America. I want awareness.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“We kind of fill the gap that the education system leaves in Puerto Rico,” Ramos explained in a one-on-one discussion with Phil Cowdell, formerly Global President of Client Services at GroupM.
In Puerto Rico, nine out of 10 schools “are failing schools” based on standardized tests, according to Ramos. Add to this some “crazy stats” cited by Cowdell: Maria damaged 82% of the island’s homes, 42% of the population had daily food shortages and 44% of children have a registered mental health impact from the storm.
“That’s pretty cataclysmic and we’re talking about this is part of the United States of America,” said Cowdell.
The bottom line education-wise was that children in Puerto Rico missed a half a year of schooling in a system already burdened by systemic failure.
“In Puerto Rico, we tend to be short minded, so we forget really quick, and we will say that we reopened schools six months after and that we passed our students. We pass them,” said Ramos. “How do you insert those kids in the formal economy later on, ten years from now?”
In the aftermath of Maria, her organization reframed its services to include things like yoga and mindfulness “so we can try to help the country doing the job they should have done with the storm.”
Having been involved early on in emergency relief efforts, Cowdell recalled that just over a month after Maria, “the far end of the island hadn’t seen milk for six weeks.” At a Costco store, “there were people there buying flat screen TV’s because they live on Ashford Avenue in the downtown part of San Juan.”
His point was that when the storm first made land, “it was a very democratic storm, it impacted everybody. It became very economic the week, the month and then the period after it. And what we see now is an economic impact.”
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.
]]>“We view it as a deterministic match between two first-party data sets,” Arrix, who is SVP of DISH Media, said of the addressable designation.
“I think that is really important because there’s a lot of faux addressable out in the marketplace that is disguised as data-driven linear, and I think it’s really important for the marketplace to understand what is true addressable and what is not.”
For their part, DISH and sister entity Sling TV aren’t looking to “create automated tools or platforms per se” but rather see things from a predominantly supply side partner point of view, according to Arrix.
“One thing that we’re trying to do to make it easier for the market is combine our full addressable footprint of DISH with Sling,” Arrix said. “We’re not trying to break it apart and say this is linear addressable and this is OTT addressable.”
One year ago this month, DISH partnered with Comscore to launch a cross platform/screen solution encompassing inventory on both DISH and Sling.
Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now President of Janus Strategy and Insights, assumed that over time Sling will become more of the companies’ distribution footprint than DISH “due to natural things going on with consumers. Is that a good thing for your ad capabilities?”
Arrix drew distinction between DISH trying to maintain its pay-TV subscriber base and ongoing set-top box migration, since about 70% of DISH’s boxes are addressable. “While the overall DISH subscriber base, TBD what happens there, the addressable footprint of DISH will continue to grow,” said Arrix.
Asked about Comscore’s role, Arrix said the company provides third-party measurement of addressable impressions that are unified in a single report. “It’s not this set of impressions because they’re coming from a set-top box is measured this way and this set of impressions I measured this way. They’re connected in with the technology that’s actually driving addressable on our side, which is Invidi, and they’re able to deliver one pool of addressable impressions.”
As for third-party measurement in general, Arrix said, “We advocate for and partner with any third-party measurement company and we believe that it really is up to the demand side, marketers and agencies, to determine which measurement they want to go with.”
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.
]]>“To think that somehow everyone is okay with personalization, or to think that everyone hates personalization, is wrong,” O’Connell said at the outset of a fireside chat with GroupM’s Phil Cowdell at Beet Retreat 2018. “None of us feels the same as any other person.”
As an example, she cited two hypothetical 25-year-olds that might have totally opposing attitudes toward the use of their data to better target them with ads.
“So that really is the crux of this, is that we need to appreciate that humans are individuals and we’re not doing that very well right now,” said O’Connell.
“We have all this data and technology available to us. It’s how we sort of tune the machines. The industry is kind of in the crapper. Consumers feel about different ad channels and formats, it’s not an awesome story,” particularly in the digital space, O’Connell added.
Addressing frequency capping of ads, Cowdell, most recently of GroupM, asked “How do we do it? Is it real or is it BS?”
From an omni-channel perspective, “There’s a lot of stuff out there where we are serving ads and we are just not cognizant enough of how all of those ads are interacting,” O’Connell responded. “We’re doing a good job in little fiefdoms of making things better, and that’s great.”
She talked about working with clients in the retail sector, one of which asked her “what should we centralize versus allow the brands to own?” Her response was to inquire whether the marketer understood the overlap in its user base, which it did not. “That might be a good place to start. Maybe the first thing to start thinking about is unifying your data. You can start thinking about execution a little bit later.”
Cowdell then asked about the potential for marketers embracing a service offering as opposed to individual brand managers selling individual products. “For sure. It’s starting to happen in little levels inside of these giant multi-brand organizations,” said O’Connell.
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.
]]>The short summary of their back and forth would be that from a cross-platform perspective, TV is still “a mess” and that despite much talk about industry collaboration among competitors, reality is bound to intrude when companies like Comcast and Disney wage their inevitable marketplace battles.
Gerber has been on the sell- and buy-side and is currently President of Global Media Investment for GroupM’s Essence agency. Clark is EVP of Advanced Advertising at Comcast & GM of FreeWheel.
In trying “to make supply make sense,” Comcast has scooped up no fewer than five companies—from FreeWheel to STRATA, under the FreeWheel brand—with the overarching goal of unifying linear and digital by removing a lot of the fragmentation and friction among the tv infrastructure, working on addressable technology, decisioning, and making life easier for marketers at the end of the day. The competitive backdrop is the ease of use of such platforms as Amazon, Facebook and Google.
“Whether you’re a programmer or you’re a marketer, you cannot run one campaign across TV. You cannot have it optimized in real time, you cannot get a report. You have to go hire an army of people to do that,” Clark observed.
This is why “television is not a platform…it is hundreds of sales teams, different ways of selling depending whether you’re local or national, measurement’s all over the place.”
As for Amazon, Facebook and Google, “Yes they’re walled gardens but they are unified tech and data platforms and they can bring sort of a seamless solution to marketers there’s no question about that. TV is not that,” said Clark. “Programmers are unified in wanting one campaign across linear and digital environments, which FreeWheel serves against all–including STB VOD–so that programmers can have everything unified.”
Never one to beat around the bush, Gerber put aside digital/linear unity for the more timeless question of competitive media selling, particularly as it pertains to national TV avails. “The fact of the matter is, most inventory still trades in television in a traditional unit linear model and it’s controlled by independent sellers,” said Gerber. “I care about the national avails that the national networks control because that’s where the bulk of viewing occurs. I need that brought together with the local avails, with the digital avails, everything together on one platform like you said with Google and Facebook. I don’t see that happening.”
Clark recalled when TiVo launched in 1995 and some people predicted “this is the end of television, it’s all going to change.” From his vantage point close to technology, he likened the state of affairs as “driving towards a mountain on the horizon, it doesn’t look like you’re ever getting close to it and then one day it’s right in front of you. There are massive investments right now going into the technology needed to clean this up.”
Gerber: “Who’s your competitor? Are you guys all going to work together to help us figure this out? Are you all going to compete with each other?”
This is where reality intruded. Just one day before, it was announced that Disney had chosen Google over FreeWheel to handle its digital advertising, as Advertising Age reports.
“They make the decisions that are in their best interests of course,” said Clark. “It’s undeniable that Google now has a massive beachhead in the industry. There’s no question about it.”
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.
]]>“What’s different about them is they come to the TV investment process with data of their own” typically consisting of e-commerce conversion data, CEO Baker says of direct-to-consumer marketers. Dataxu’s OneView identity and data management platform can “turn that into a TV plan,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“That’s one of the big trends in advanced TV in 2019 and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen our revenue go up forty times year over year from connected TV.”
Already comfortable with a data-driven marketing process, newer users of the company’s TouchPoint demand-side platform seek to leverage all of their online and mobile data in new channels.
“Many of them have seen things like Facebook or Google search sort of saturate as a play for conversions, and so they’re very interested in not only the branding aspects of TV but also the ability to drive return on investment for new customer acquisition.”
Nine years ago, long before the concept of advanced TV, demand-side platform TouchPoint was dataxu’s starting point. Along the way the company found that most marketers had a problem with connecting the dots between targeting and measurement on PC’s and mobile phones. OneView, which solves for this and can now factor in streaming devices and connected TV, “has really been the center point of our growth in TV and addressable TV,” Baker says.
Consumer device identity is a problem shared by the sell-side, as evidenced by dataxu’s involvement with media sellers like Sky in the U.K. “So on the sell-side, we’re increasingly working with some of the big media companies to help them on attribution and media planning that merges digital and linear data.”
In addition to direct-to-consumer brands, agencies with billings between $50 million and $100 million that never developed big TV teams, are bringing some of their clients into advanced TV. Baker predicts that some of the biggest agencies will be joining in as well.
“What’s been holding them back has been a little bit of uncertainty around who owns converged TV” within those agencies, Baker says.
As for a misconception that advanced TV cannot be done at scale, he adds, “I think at CES we’ll be talking a lot about the fact that you can and a lot of people are doing it today.”
Update: NBCU’s Yaccarino Issues Call To Action On Advertising Standards
On Jan. 7, NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino cited “privacy issues, data misuse, measurement chaos and brand safety neglect” at “major digital advertising platforms” while seeking industry unity for high business standards.
“For decades, audiences have loved premium content, and advertisers have trusted networks’ multiscreen advertising ecosystems,” Yaccarino said in an article published on the NBCU website. “That’s why the premium media industry has refused to compromise its core values for how that content is created and distributed, even as we disrupt legacy mindsets and reinvent how we operate.”
Among other benefits, lowering barriers to entry for marketers to engage in TV advertising has attracted direct-to-consumer brands, Yaccarino noted.
“Already what had been an exclusive space for established companies is now welcoming a wave of entrepreneurs whose disruptive brands had long been at a disadvantage against larger incumbents. But here’s the best part: The marketplace is opening up without any compromises on consumers’ or brands’ safety.”
She called for all media publishers, agencies and platforms “to raise standards to let a safer, smarter, more accessible advertising ecosystem take flight.”
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.
]]>Experian helps advertisers determine the data segments that will perform best and use those segments more seamlessly. In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, Danaher talks about the company’s Audience Engine platform and heightened concerns about consumer data privacy.
The company launched Audience Platform in 2016 to facilitate cross-channel audience targeting and closed-loop analytics. Citing one function, Danaher says the platform takes in data from MVPD’s and “can quickly, within seconds, determine the size of the audience that the advertiser wants. That is something that is removing a pain point.
“It’s often been very cumbersome to create segments. And there’s still some difficulty there, but this platform helps to speed up the precise of sizing up the segments so that then the media plans can be put into place a little quicker,” he adds.
Both the buy- and sell-side have similar concerns with regard to advanced audience targeting.
“The buy-side is trying to solve their advertisers’ desire for an interesting segment, one that is effective for them,” he says. Experian provides its own data sets “and we also have a team that helps them craft it together. A bit of a service model.”
On the sell-side, “they also need help guiding their clients and just understanding data, and also quickly matching first-party data as well as using that third-party data.”
Consumer data privacy was one topic of discussion at Beet Retreat 2018. Danaher says the company understands the concern all too well.
“That is actually in line with what we’re all about at Experian. As a credit bureau, we have all the rights to use it as a credit bureau, but also in our marketing data that is all opt-in data. It is not behavioral data or taken from online sources inappropriately.”
Looking forward, Danaher says Experian is very focused on identity, linkage and advanced data and measurement. Using data that’s effective and then measuring that on the back end “will prove the value of the data and prove that you did it right. That’s the advantage of targeted TV is that you can see it turns out and very clearly the cause and effect.”
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.
]]>NinthDecimal specializes in “physical world data” that, among other things, help advertisers understand the impact “that television ads had on where you’re going, meaning did you shop more because you saw an ad” by tying mobile devices to households,” Kilmer says.
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Kilmer talks about the quest to properly attribute to advertising media like TV business results that are being credited to other media and how marketer KPI’s can change given campaign results.
NinthDecimal can tell whether someone visited a quick-serve restaurant after viewing ads not just on TV but in digital, mobile and out-of-home media.
One of “the more interesting tactics we’re working through in television” is helping to determine whether the premium cost of a commercial pod takeover drove enough business outcomes to justify the premium “or is it more effective to just buy thirty-second spots or fifteen-second spots,” Kilmer says.
For theatres, primetime TV spots on Thursday night are a mainstay of movie premieres. But does a film also need to be advertised on the weekend after the opening? “Or can they supplement that advertising with different forms of marketing to drive consumers into theatres?”
Apportioning the right level of credit for advertising “is a hot topic for me personally,” says Kilmer.
“We measured a campaign last year that reached ninety-five percent of U.S. households with their linear TV buy. And we were measuring their digital ad effectiveness as well. Which simply raised the question, is TV doing a lot of the work that digital media’s taking credit for?”
While marketing and media modeling techniques abound, Kilmer would like to see an analysis within a consistent environment “to be able to truly understand the impact that mass awareness and the upper-funnel activity does have on the digital-based media that we often drive life from that is getting a lot of value based on other advertising.”
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.
]]>Data Plus Math has also partnered with Inscape, IRI, LiveRamp, Verance and others in its quest to supplement expensive post-campaign analyses with in-flight learnings that can be used to optimize campaigns on the fly.
When the company was launched in 2016, with investors that include Comcast Ventures and Greycroft Partners, it saw an opportunity to bring attribution to TV.
“Our main idea was that TV advertising works and the data would tell a good story if someone would go in and actually analyze it ad show that television is driving real world outcomes for marketers,” CEO & Founder John Hoctor says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
Data Plus Math started by building a signal graph that uses advanced data science and automated machine learning techniques to map actual ad exposure data to consumer behaviors.
“There’s been lift reporting and consultants and expensive studies. These studies usually take weeks to do. You usually get them weeks after a campaign is over. We wanted to have fast, low-cost attribution,” Hoctor says.
Going beyond consumer panels, the company prefers to work with “more of a footprint” of TV viewing data from set-top boxes, smart TV’s and streaming. “We have our own impression tracker that gets trafficked along with the creatives and can bring back exposure data from OTT or full-episode players,” Hoctor adds.
“It really helps TV get the full credit. If an advertiser’s trying to drive a certain attitude toward their brand or show that their brand is a fun brand, for instance, Millward Brown’s panel is really good at doing that.”
Describing A&E Networks as “great, forward thinking partners,” Hoctor says Data Plus Math is helping A&E to use attribution “not just as a report card. Attribution sometimes can be seen as you run the campaign and attribution will tell you if it worked.
“What really gets me excited is closing that loop and being able to not just measure whether something worked after it’s over, but measuring it in flight and providing back levers to help optimize for it while the campaign is still in flight.”
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.
]]>In fact, it’s “nirvana in a sense,” O’Grady adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018. He was interviewed by TV research veteran Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV
“It’s where all marketers are heading. They want to know for every dollar they spent what’s the return on the investment.”
Not that it’s quick or easy, like perusing overnight television ratings. “So we’re lucky to be in that business, we’re lucky to have all these assets, but a lot of it is still manual. A lot of it is putting the pieces and parts together.”
Things are headed beyond just activation targeting and measurement. “It always has to start with planning. So we call that purchase-driven planning,” O’Grady adds.
Asked for his view of consumer data mishaps in general and the recent Marriott breach of its Starwood guest reservation database, which exposed the personal information of up to 500 million people, he points to Catalina’s “flawless track record” on the use and protection of such data.
“Data protection was always on our mind before privacy was branded on our forehead,” he says. “It’s actually the retailers that have the permission base to use the loyalty card data with the actual shopper. That is extended to Catalina.”
He doesn’t think the trend is toward an opt-in model, “but opt out is definitely an opportunity at all those retailers and so we’re going to have to watch that very closely.”
Because consumers really don’t fully understand how their loyalty data are being used, O’Grady believes it’s incumbent on the industry to educate them. The first step is making things clear. “They’re probably not going to resent it. They resent probably surprises.”
Step No. 2 is give people a chance to opt out of data-sharing, followed by making sure “your partners are being really, really clear and disciplined about how they protect the data. Because any of those three things could derail you very quickly.”
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.
]]>“We’re still the best way to get in front of an audience, but it’s changing how advertisers and agencies want to get in front of that audience,” Gianunzio says of broadcast TV in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018 in which he envisions a future where other local media can be sold alongside broadcast.
Videa partners with TV stations to deliver a live, supply-side marketplace for full-schedule, forward-reserve broadcast inventory that can be ordered weeks or quarters in advance. It’s a way of automating the buying process, with pricing approved by the individual stations and second-by-second campaign reporting.
It’s a process designed to “sand off the rough edges of how we buy and sell,” says Gianunzio. The fact that someone in a local broadcast buying department handles thousands of spots is “insane.”
He recalls his time as a sales rep for Cox as the digital age dawned and local broadcast revenues were declining. “And the revenue leaves not because there’s not a good return on investment by running your spots in broadcast. And it’s not because it’s not where advertisers want to be,” says Gianunzio, citing Google and Uber as examples. “The reason advertisers and agencies pull their money out of it is because it is so cumbersome.”
Videa has been building a “foundation” to unify station sales. “Within each station broadcast group we’ve got different ways of doing things. I’m just talking about getting everyone to think the same way” and hopefully agree on activities that should be automated. “Automation scares people because if I’ve been doing it manually, that’s what I’m getting paid for.”
He talks about the complexities brands face when entering a new market and wanting to surround prospective customers with ads across all the various media available and do it quickly. “You’d be discouraged from doing it,” says of the current environment of going seller to seller.
“And that’s when you can see real power in advertising, when you’re surrounding a consumer with each of the forms of media that you’re using so that it’s not a different message coming from each one.”
Videa’s future vision is to be able to unite more media sellers. “The idea is not for a platform like this just to exist for broadcast. It’s to exist for broadcast and everything that comes with it, OTT, VOD, then network and radio,” says Gianunzio.
“If we could build sort of a superhighway where media can exchange with data and exchange with revenue, we’re in a position where you can make a smart decision about opening up in a specific market, you can surround a market and have it all in one place.”
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.
]]>In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, Heftman elaborates on networks’ mediator-like role in trying to please both advertisers and agencies in an increasing complex, consumer-led TV universe.
Brands are talking about business results like topline growth, better metrics and greater ROI. “When we talk to agencies, obviously agencies are intimately involved in that but ultimately agencies are also judged on a cost efficiency basis,” Heftman says. “And so that necessarily creates a bit of friction in the conversations that we have between brands, agencies and ourselves.”
Increasingly, the seller’s role “is being a bit in the middle of that,” he adds. “Making sure that we are delivering the cost efficiency and proper business rationale to our agency business partners, while working with brands to try and convince them that television in particular is a driver of their business. We never really had to do that historically. The agencies took care of that for us.”
He isn’t suggesting that some agencies don’t tell that story to their clients. But given the roadblocks that exist to connecting television to business outcomes, “it’s not necessarily the best decision to let somebody else do that for us. We have to take some of the lead on that ourselves.”
Heftman sees more marketers than agencies leading the way on innovating new forms of ad products, one reason being it’s not a skill set that one necessarily finds within agencies. “Sometimes it is faster to go straight to the client and work with them on something that works for their business.” This is particularly true for newer, direct-to-consumer brands that might not have a legacy relationship with an agency. “They simply have different expectations from television, and part of working with them is that it has gotten us up to speed in talking more about outcomes and different types of creative and different types of executions that are going to get use there.”
He’d like to see two things going forward. First, realistic acknowledgement that big changes aren’t going to happen overnight, and second an understanding that TV serves certain purposes that can be “a little bit dual” in nature. “I would like to see clients and agencies spend more time thinking about their funnels and really being honest about the places where TV fits into the funnel and things that it has to do to succeed there,” Heftman says.
“I think the sooner we get to a place where we are honest about what each different format can do, that’s going to get us closer to where we’re headed.”
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.
]]>“Fortunately, thank god the stigma of programmatic TV and those two words being bridged together is not a bugaboo anymore or freaking people out,” the CEO of Prohaska Consulting says during a break at last month’s Beet Retreat.
People recognize now “through education and getting people off the ledge, sellers, buyers and anyone else in between,” what can actually be accomplished. Prohaska cites some of the benefits of programmatic in display, mobile app and premium, pre-roll video “without the real-time nature and it doesn’t have to be a copy paste the exact same way.”
As some of the conference speakers indicated, there’s more cross-pollination of talent in agency teams. “People are starting to bring different skill sets and points of view to the same type of advanced TV buying where context does matter,” Prohaska says. “People are realizing, fortunately, that the benefits of buying in-program and contextual placements do matter if you can bring some audience targeting to the party.”
Still “very much a work in progress” is frequency capping across screens, “obviously not there yet, I think we all experience it as consumers.” He sees “a concerted effort to be able to figure that out both probalistically for now and deterministically where that’s available.”
Transaction friction costs are “not as perfect as they will be,” whether it’s leveraging the OpenAP platform “or any other more direct connections.”
There are still too many touchpoints and a “little bit too much delay between being able to execute a deal and then actually launch it. And then being able to optimize either by message sequencing or just by media mix optimizing and being able to appreciate where the best placements are,” he says.
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.
]]>While FreeWheel’s focus has always been on premium video from a variety of publishers, “There’s now a very low threshold for launching a app that will get TV distribution, so there is a big part of the industry now that is long-tail digital video but actually on a TV,” says Smith, who is GM of FreeWheel Markets.
“We spend a lot of time and energy when we’re evaluating who we want to work with to make sure that publishers that we don’t know well go through a pretty exhaustive process,” he adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018. Interviewing Smith for Beet.TV is Matt Prohaska.
Among the items on the inspection checklist are validating traffic and the right to sell inventory to brand safety concerns. “We’ve created a quality threshold that we use for anything that we package up and bring to market. We spend a lot of time educating brands and agencies about that.”
While it’s nothing new to FreeWheel, it’s not a shared regimen.
“We are fortunately enough that we can be fully transparent with what runs in our ecosystem because we have such a focus on quality,” Smith says. “But not everyone in the ecosystem understands that, and if marketers are looking for scale, it’s sometimes easy to trade off scale for lesser quality-inventory.”
Asked whether it’s getting any easier to work with all of the various parties needed to plan and execute campaigns, he feels “we’re getting closer but it’s still very complex.”
Within the major holding companies “it varies pretty significantly. So we invest a lot of time in mapping out those organizations and understanding who the key people are, regardless of title because those titles also kind of vary wildly across holding companies.
“But also ultimately connecting to the teams that work with the brands. Brands are driving the decision-making and the holding companies are trying to serve their needs,” Smith says.
Then there are what he terms “mid-market” agencies that never scaled to the extent of the biggest industry players and whose teams are thus more unified. “The value proposition to those organizations and the level of friction is much lower sometimes than going into the major holding companies. So in some sense we’ve had a lot of success, and I feel like some of those agencies are taking advantage of that unification of linear and digital in a way that the bigger ones are not yet. But I fully believe we’ll get there very quickly.”
Third Quarter Video Stats
Subsequent to this interview, FreeWheel released its Q3 Video Monetization Report. Here are some key findings:
U.S.: Top line ad view growth of 26% year-over-year, fueled in part by 87% ad view growth on IP-enabled MVPD platforms.
U.S.: While the ratio of traditional MVPDs ad views to virtual MVPD ad views on IP-enabled platforms is 80:20, vMVPDs are growing almost twice as fast.
U.S.: OTT devices and smartphones combined now make up 60% of total ad views.
E.U.: There was top-line ad view growth of 16% despite U.S. publisher ad views in Europe declining 21% in light of a cautious approach to the GDPR.
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.
]]>“The theme for us continues to be to provide audience-driven solutions for marketers, where they can buy on an audience-basis inventory across linear TV, social video, over the top. Everything in one place,” says Chief Revenue Officer Anupam Gupta.
“One of the things that we hear from marketers again and again is the audience problems are getting solved,” he adds in this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018. “That’s pretty much in a good place now. But now they’re looking for more scale.”
4C’s most recent partnerships within linear TV are with a4, a unit of communications giant Altice, whose networks include A&E, CNN, The History Channel and Discovery, and AMC Networks’ MASS Exchange. 4C’s self-service platform facilitates live, real-time access to inventory avails in the scatter market and performance data, as well as audience-driven Upfront allocations.
“So that’s now integrated within 4C where you can start with an audience and you can add that to repertoire of NBCU inventory” that became available to 4C clients via a partnership crafted in 2017, Gupta says.
“Essentially what you’re seeing is more linear networks making their inventory available through the aggregator partnerships and platforms like that are integrating to provide more scale for marketers.”
On the TV-to-consumer side, 4C has new integrations with FreeWheel, SpotX and Telaria. “For us, it’s natural to add over-the-top inventory to our platform. I think the scale issue is being addressed through these collaborations and integrations.”
4C’s three priorities are giving marketers flexibility to use whatever data they wish, help them plan and buy across premium content and drive and measure business outcomes.
“Our goal is to stitch those three pieces together into one platform so that marketers can essentially make progress in the data driven world,” Gupta says.
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.
]]>Last month, the two companies launched Direct to Scale, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, as Campaign reports.
In the Giant Spoon partnership “we are focused mainly on direct-to-consumer brands that they represent, but not only that, the opportunity is really for us to expand our roster of advertisers beyond the current more traditional legacy advertisers,” says Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal.
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Norris talks about transitioning from traditional media currencies and embracing more outcomes-focused metrics. He explains how NBCU’s in-house Future of Advertising Group is focused on “changing how we interact with marketers in terms of making sure that ultimately, we’re providing the most ROI for them long term sustainable growth.”
That process starts with providing the best content for consumers that, in turn, produces better results and better environments. “We’re looking at currencies that measure impact and outcomes as opposed to traditional currencies, which ultimately we’re not able tie business results to traditional measurement currencies,” Norris says.
Having started in TV at Lifetime Television in 2003 before moving on to Viacom and then DISH Media Sales and Sling TV, Norris has a broad perspective of marketers’ evolving expectations.
“I suspect that many advertisers will have different KPI’s and it’s upon us to be as nimble as possible to be able to achieve those results for them.”
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.
]]>This is why Prasad reflects on this year’s Retreat in this interview as “a small and purposely put together group like this where there’s a lot of people who are working together or thinking about working together and able to share ideas.” He says he prefers learning from “power panel sessions” than typical one-hour conference sessions “with everyone repeating themselves on a panel. It doesn’t happen here.”
Aside from Puerto Rico’s natural beauty, Prasad notes the Retreat location in the context of the devastation that Hurricane Maria caused in the fall of 2017 and the ongoing rebuilding. One element of the Retreat was dedicated to raising awareness of the short- and long-term impacts on residents and the marketing world.
“It definitely seemed like Andy and the team here really wanted to make sure that we understood that and there was a connection to it,” he says. “When you put that all together, I thought it was a really special few days.”
The time was shared with “so many partners across the ecosystem and clients that we’re working with. Maybe two years ago I would have looked across the room and said it would be great to be doing this with that company, trying to connect this supply source with this data so that this advertiser can execute. And now it’s actually kind of happening.”
Prasad describes “a really busy last two years” in which VideoAmp has been assembling its marketing investment platform, which encompasses data-driven, cross-screen planning and measurement, activation and programmatic. This year, the company acquired TV-data processing provider IronGrid Data Services, which when combined with a partnership with Inscape formed the basis for the new Data & Emerging Products Division, as Variety reports.
“So next is going to be taking all of these pieces of technology and solutions and making sure they’re optimizing to work together so that one piece of our system, like the measurement system, is actually informing how you should be planning,” says Prasad.
He clarifies that it’s not planning to determine a particular dollar spend for a particular medium “but actually event-level forecasting. Which means that we’re also going to be more tightly working with big media companies and suppliers and supply side technology to make that happen.”
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.
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