But now, new techniques offered by connected TV platforms promise a lot more.

In Elevated Video, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by TripleLift, eight executives explored what that opportunity looks like.

1. Content ad insertions lighten the load

At TripleLift, the native ad company that has launched a connected TV offering in beta, advanced advertising GM Michael Shields says formats like ad insertions into TV shows, split-screen ads and other overlays “allows publishers to lower ad loads”.

“Unscripted, lighthearted comedies… you’ve probably seen our units in a lot of cooking shows – we think that that’s going to be the future ad model for a certain kind of programming.”

Native Advertising Has Key Role in Future of Ad-Supported TV: TripleLift’s Michael Shields

2. Post-cookie, context soars on data

At Havas’ Media Group’s health practice, managing partner Peter Sedlarcik welcomes the greater finesse available in contextual ad data.

“Contextual has really had a renaissance. We’re using more contextual data streams in order to inform strategy. There’s more of a balance now between purchased based data sets that have been kind of pre-eminent in a lot of the planning that we’ve been doing as an agency.”

Havas’ Sedlarcik Goes Long On Short-Form Ads

3. Dentsu’s quest to demystify media

Dentsu Media U.S. media partnerships EVP Sarah Stringer says buying connected TV is still “very convoluted”.

“A lot of different people sell a lot of the same channels, which means that we’re not getting that single point of view. You’re not getting the efficiencies that you want. How do we demystify the marketplace?”

Immersive Ad Experiences Promise Optimized Results: Dentsu’s Sarah Stringer

4. Tastemade’s Imberman likes CTV’s flavors

At cooking video producer Tastemade, Jeff Imberman, head of sales and brand partnerships, says connected TV manages to combine the best qualities of TV and digital.

“It’s traditional yet progressive all at the same time. You’re still able to serve 15 and 30-second ads the way a linear network can – but what makes it really compelling is it’s delivered in a digital format across digital pipes, so it allows for very unique targeting, contextual especially.”

Tastemade’s Imberman Feasts On A Full Menu Of Ad Options

5. Brand insertions bring viewers organic delight

For Team Whistle, a digital sports content producer, Anthony Susi, vice president of over-the-top sales, says audiences give positive feedback to brand partnerships in its content.

“Picture Bear Grylls wading through the water with a Powerade ad behind it, things like that. We do it in an organic way and not really force down your throat.”

Branded Content Helps to Engage Younger Audiences: Team Whistle’s Anthony Susi

6. Brands pick from new-wave measurement menu

MediaScience CEO Duane Varan says the advertising world is no longer about everyone using a “one-size-fits-all” paradigm of buying 30-second ads using traditional currencies.

“That model is flawed in a lot of ways. All brands are not the same. All categories are not the same. Our objectives are not the same. Every brand needs to discover the best in class measures delivering against those specific communication objectives.”

‘There’s a New Paradigm for Brand Integrations on TV’: MediaScience’s Duane Varan

7. Native can solve ad load aversion

Srinivasan KA of Amagi, a company that helps enable linear ad-supported streaming channels, says changing consumption patterns mean media must change.

“Nobody just has the patience for sitting through 10 minutes of advertising on a per hour basis. You’re going to have much more integrated ad formats. Native advertising on connected TV would kind of blend both content and advertising in a seamless fashion.”

FAST Must Fight Ad Fatigue: Amagi’s Srinivasan KA

8. CTV can kick-start the sequence

Liza Davidian, EVP of investment and activation at GroupM, says connected TV can be the start of a sequenced conversation with consumers.

“If it speaks to me again on a more personalised device like your Instagram or any type of social media on my phone, I applaud an advertiser who further digs deeper into the funnel and makes their message a little bit more customised.”

Customized Ads at Scale Are Key to Optimized Video Campaigns: GroupM’s Liza Davidian

But what if it could also move the needle on social responsibility?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM VP, Managing Partner, Global Head of Programmatic, explains how SPO is changing.

Socially-responsible SPO

SPO has risen as more ad buyers have wanted a better handle on the kinds of inventory they are really buying, and how.

But now it’s more than that.

“The idea of inclusion in social responsibility, understanding what properties our clients and GroupM is really supporting, is really at the forefront of our minds and has been for a bit,” Jaffe says.

He says the first step is to focus around  understanding all of the players within the path, their alignment and focus with buyer aims.

Multi-pronged effort

GroupM works with SSPs from the likes of Index Exchange, SpotX and PubMatic.

But SPO is evolving now to focus on more than just SSPs, Jaffe says, pointing to the importance of all three parties:

• DSP – “We kind of knew early on that the DSP always plays a critical role, but it’s just as important to kind of engage with everyone along that supply chain.”
• SSP – “Understanding what SSPs can bring to the table for buyers.”
• Publishers – “We have been exploring what we can do to kind of build closer relationships with our publishers”.

“Profound change,” according to GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, McDonald interviews MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki on how the entire advertising industry can reboot itself for a new era.

From ‘hack’ to patchwork

Both McDonald and Zawadzki agreed cookies, the third-party usage of which is being deprecated, are a “20-year-old hack” on top of rudimentary browser technology, and are ill-suited to modern demands.

“If you thought that either last click or post-click post view was the right basis by which to manage a $500 billion industry on our way to a trillion dollars… is it going to work by asking people to touch their TV?,” Zawadzki said. “Highly unlikely.”

"The advertising ecosystem is begging for a redesign and it’s our job to give it one." Read more from our CPO, Anudit Vikram, on the urgent need for programmatic redesign, live now on @TheDrum: https://t.co/1g4eO3nZfO

— MediaMath (@mediamath) June 29, 2021

“We’re in a situation where we want to recreate addressability as defined by the humans behind the screens and speakers, which is good. But the way that we’re going to have to do it – we’ll have to become enterprise-open. It’ll have to be a portfolio of solutions.

“Those things will need to be selected, stitched in scale – it’s going to be deterministic solutions, probabilistic solutions, open solutions, proprietary solutions. You’re going to have to put these things together in a way that allows for orchestration across set screens and speakers.”

‘Go far, together’

Zawadzki said the new-look industry organization demands a more consensual, all-hands approach to redefinition. Previously, he suggested, self-interest ruled.

“People (have been) operating in silos in isolation… optimising for publisher yields, optimising for advertiser performance, optimising for intermediary profit growth,” he said.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

“You can’t solve the industry challenges in a silo.”

‘Look in the mirror’

Global Forum on Responsible Media – Watch the Program on Demand

Ultimately, the significant disruption happening in the ad industry can be beneficial, the MediaMath CEO said.

“It is a requirement that the industry reorganise itself around a new set of principles and work backwards from what it should look like and what it needs to look like.”

And GroupM CEO McDonald agreed. “Profound times require profound change,” he said.

“Profound change does have us have to sort of look in the mirror.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.

So why leave it to machines to find a solution?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, two executives discuss how artificial intelligence can come to the rescue of troubles in media and marketing:

• Randi Stipes, Chief Marketing Officer of IBM Watson Media and Weather
• Kieley Taylor, Global Head of Partnerships, Managing Partner, GroupM

AI = Added Inclusion

GroupM’s Taylor says she is using the tools to interrogate her agencies’ creative for inclusivity.

“There’s a tonne of opportunity … using AI to curb things like hate speech, to make sure that there is more inclusivity in the platform discourse,” she says.

“Personalization at scale sometimes was not as meaningful as it could be to people who are perhaps underrepresented.

“So we’re really looking holistically across both creative and media to make sure that there’s meaning on behalf of advertisers when they’re talking to diverse audiences in a more equitable and inclusive way.”

Boosting identification

IBM’s Stipes, who leads marketing for IBM Watson Advertising, says the industry has “only scratched the surface in terms of showcasing what AI can do”.

Clorox last year used AI and chatbots for customer service inquiries during the pandemic.

Stipes says AI can be useful in a world watching the looming deprecation of third-party cookie matching.

“AI can rapidly and continuously make sense of the privacy-friendly data inputs and then use that data to recognise patterns to make predictions without relying on cookies or other identifiers,” she says.

“DCO (dynamic creative optimization) has traditionally been all about preset, programmed rules, decision trees. With AI, though, what we’re really talking about is real-time continuous learning that allows brands to predict the creative that will actually drive consumer action.”

Influencer intel

IBM’s Stipes also says AI can help agencies and brands pick through the growing number of influencers open to marketer partnerships.

“You’ve got to pick the right spokesperson and that’s a pretty arduous task to go back and look at a potential influencer’s content maybe from a decade ago,” she says.

“So using AI actually can enable brands to do this in a way that’s scalable and make better decisions.”

Responsible data

As agencies lean into advanced data usage technologies, GroupM’s Taylor says it’s important to do so responsible.

“We agree with the industry consensus that fingerprinting’s creepy,” Taylor says.

“We got to this place and this lack of trust, not the consumers, (they) were right in feeling wary of that thing that they already bought following them around the internet.

“So things like the data ethics compass help us to make sure that we are being really thoughtful about what the data is. Just because we can (do things), doesn’t mean we should.”

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s.  This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page. 

Companies are compelled to take a positive stance on a range of outward issues – but often find that benefits nevertheless flow back in.

As part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, advertising agency executives discussed what they are doing on that front:

• GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald
• 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz
• Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart

From singular safety to multi-responsibility

“When we used to think about things like responsible media, we used to go straight to brand safety,” said Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart.

“But, more and more, the definition and the view of responsible media and the obligation that we have to consumers in the world is becoming much more progressive and much more encompassing.”

He said he is most excited about the “depth” represented by a responsible stance. Gerhart cites data ethics and privacy, media plan practices, carbon neutrality, journalism and minority communities.

“(We can make) carbon-neutral media plans that encourage media partners and owners to offset their own activities,” Gerhart said. “We are now creating things like a series of inclusion PMPs (private marketplaces) which is directly aimed at putting money back into the hands of underrepresented voices. It started with LGBTQ community, has moved into black communities, and now we’re doing the same from a responsible journalism perspective.”

Having a point of view

For 4As president and CEO Marla Kaplowitz, responsible media is “not something anyone should take lightly”.

“We actually launched media responsibility principles last September, building on the work of our advertiser protection bureau focused on brand safety and brand suitability,” she said. “It was about taking action to really put a point of view out there and say what does this mean in terms of promoting respect, making sure that we’re addressing hate speech?” The principles cover 10 areas.

“Words only go so far. Actions go the distance,” Kaplowitz adds. “We’ve seen some brands, some agencies, do that, but now I’m really seeing a collective focus on this. We still have a lot of work to do with misinformation and disinformation.”

Lead by following

GroupM North America CEO Kirk McDonald says brands and agencies should respond to what consumers are saying. His responsibility commitment covers five areas.

The first is authenticity, something McDonald says the pandemic has shown the importance of. “Your brand had better be authentic and it better be able to live in the moment and react and move in the moment,” he said.

Other commitments for GroupM include a “data ethics complex“, sustainability, brand safety and diversity and inclusion.

“In dynamic, profound, changing times, the partners that truly are living evolve or die realise that if you don’t dynamically change, you won’t keep up,” McDonald added. “The bold are going to actually have this proportionate outsized wins as a result of actually living their promises to their clients, their guests, their consumers.”

We spoke with Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM NA about the event and his hope that the dialogue coming out it will lead to a more fair, sustainable media landscape.

Earlier, GroupM announced that some 20 leading brands are making substantial commitments to investment in Black-owned media companies. Speaking to Variety about the initiative, McDonald stated:

GroupM’s programs “are not just about what we need to do to support today’s owners, but how do we make sure that diverse ownership grows in the future? We are talking about both of those legs.”

The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 4 pm EDT on 6/23.  The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic.  To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia.  Please find more information and register here.

She is a pioneer in the programmatic space, starting her career on the sell side with stints at AOL, CNET and at Sky where she headed the satellite company’s trading desk.

She joined the buy side in the early days of Dentsu’s Amnet and remained with the company at its Amplifi and Carat units. The British born executive moved from London  to New York five years ago.

Last just July, she was tapped to head the Americas region for GroupM’s Wavemaker.

In our conversation, she speaks about her career and her perspective racial bias  in the United States as a British Asian. Speaks of her hopes that her work will lead society to a better place.

And she speaks about the evolving role of the media agency and the direction of Wavemaker with a range of brands including several, new disrupter companies.

Great conversation.  Thanks Louisa.

Thanks to the BeetCast sponsor Mediaocean.

And thank you for listening.  I hope you enjoy the episode.

But Choreograph is a little different. Launched at a time when brands around the world are trying to activate their own first-party data as a response to challenges facing digital ad identifiers, the new unit will focus on this new and emerging need.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kirk McDonald, North America CEO of GroupM, which will house Choreograph, explains the rationale.

Dancing with three legs

McDonald says Choreograph has “three legs”:

1. “We help our clients earn and manage the data that they have, and the access to that. We then help them turn that into ID, into a clear resolved identity.”
2. “We enrich it and expand it for them. Layers of intelligence and insights are included in that.”
3. “We actually help them activate that, where they want to activate it against media, through our operating systems and platforms.”

The company has more than 700 staff available to it, including data scientists, technologists, product developers and customer success representatives.

Our products enable marketers to create better experiences, stronger brands and trusted customer relationships. pic.twitter.com/gxcaKRIeJC

— Choreograph (@ChoreographData) May 13, 2021

First-party journey

Choreograph, which was announced in late April, will combine resources from GroupM and Wunderman Thompson, said by WPP CEO Mark Read to be “another important step in our simplification strategy”.

McDonald will oversee Choreograph.

He explains: “All our clients are on different parts of that journey of figuring out how to harness their first-party data, and activate it and turn that data into a resolved identity in a way that they can use it.

(Choreograph) really captures some of the history and the heritage of our Wunderman Thompson data business, 40+ years of experience in that team of data scientists, engineers, and experts around data management, robust data management suites, particularly around identity resolution and enrichment.”

Choreograph will use data and technology platform WPP Open.

But the conversation around the pace of creativity and innovation and change remains constant, if not accelerated.

Marking the two years since Cannes, we are doing a very exciting program with GroupM and the 4A’s.  We are convening a global forum on Responsible Media on June 23.

The virtual event will explore the future of media as being responsible and sustainable with some 30 speakers from the WPP/GroupM agencies, media, brands and technology companies.

The program takes its lead from the Responsible Media investment initiative from GroupM.   The initiative was announced last month by Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM NA.

Kirk is today’s guest on the BeetCast.  He explains the imperative for the responsible media program and other projects aimed to boost under represented voices.

We also go deep on WPP’s new agency called Choreograph and plans to drive unified user identity across its global network.

In our chat, he shares his hopes for the conversations during  the June 23 Responsible Media Forum.

The Global Forum is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen, PubMatic,

The event will be streamed live on LinkedIn Live, Twitter and YouTube.  It will be free and will not require a registration.   You can find more details in the days ahead on Beet.TV and via the hash tag #ResponsibleMedia or sign up for event updates here.

Thanks Kirk for joining us today and for all your years of  leadership and for your support and friendship.  Very much appreciated.

Thanks to the podcast sponsor, Mediaocean.

And thank you for joining us.  I hope you enjoy this episode.

That is now changing, with more of them apparently seeing reason to flip their ad strategy on its head.

In this video interview with Beet.TV senior adviser Jon Watts, GroupM’s Executive Director, Specialty Channels, Jen Soch says there is more appetite to let advanced TV dominate media plans.

Foot-forward on addressable

“In the upfront, I heard an auto client speak to the fact that they really are looking at connected TV and household addressability as their main foot forward, and then they sprinkle in linear on the side,” Soch says.

“That got me giddy with excitement of what the possibilities are here. I definitely see some of our clients looking at that idea in the future. If you know your audience and if you know where you want to be, why not consider things a different way?

“Why not look at household addressability as a main foot forward? And when you combine our capabilities on what we can do on the set-top boxes and the MVPD players with what we can do in the overall connected TV landscape, I think we have a really good story as we move into 2021 and 2022.

“Now, you’ve just described a really interesting patchwork quilt of platforms and devices, each with their own slightly different capabilities and peculiarities. What are the big pain points that you and other agencies are grappling with at the moment?”

Music to advanced ears

The strategies Soch is hearing, as well as those she is contemplating for GroupM’s clients, bode well for a technology that promises capabilities like TV targeting, frequency-capping and performance attribution.

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

That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.

Sticking points

But the truth is that, for all its super-powers, buying addressable ad campaigns and truly benefitting from those capabilities, remains difficult for many buyers.

Buyer surveys and thought leadership research exercises tend to wind up reporting ad buyers as bemoaning the steps required to buy and measure across a proliferating range of services and screens.

“Measurement has always been our pain point,” GroupM’s Soch acknowledges. “We still haven’t quite gotten to that place where we can measure things as successfully as we’ve always wanted to measure them.

“We have had some success in some areas, but being able to truly layer in these individuals, be able to look at the overall reach, be able to account for frequency among these different platforms, that’s still going to be a pain point as we move into this upfront season.”

Personal feel

Soch also says historic discussion about creative versioning – the compulsion to assemble a custom ad for every viewer – hasn’t come to pass.

Instead, the agency has consolidated around a few key creative executions, and Soch says she is able to find deeper personalization in complementary podcast advertising.

She says: “We are having a lot of clients where we look at some great video plans and household addressability, and then we’re bringing in audio on the side with podcasts and other areas to supplement and even layer on an interesting platform on top of just the video for more of an addressable and personalised, customizable, creative look.”

You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.

She was appointed to the head the agency one year ago, coming from GroupM’s Essence where she was Head of Media Activation for North America.

In 2013, Gila  joined the growing Google account at Essence and built a team to run Google’s SEM and biddable media efforts.  Gila also helped Google codify its global Adwords and DoubleClick best practices.

She grew Essence’s social practice by 50x between 2013 and 2016.

In this interview, she talks about her path to leadership and the efforts to bring diversity, equality and inclusion to Xaxis.  She speaks about the focus of outcomes at Xaxis as a core value of the programmatic unit of GroupM.  She covers AI and the future of of a more efficient programmatic ecosystem.

This year marks the agency’s 10th  year anniversary.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

Now technology has helped iron out kinks in where ads get placed – but the man leading the charge says “brand safety” concerns are still around, they have just morphed.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, GroupM’s EVP and advisor on brand safety, discusses how brand safety is changing into something else.

From ‘safety’ to ‘suitability’

Montgomery says brand safety is no longer just about protecting the image of a brand – now it also contributes to the effectiveness of an ad.

Montgomery says the “safety” concerns are being “elevated” to dwell on “suitability” – more broadly examining the rights and wrongs of a particular piece of inventory for an advertiser.

“Your brand may run in a safe environment but, if it’s not contextually suitable, it’s not going to work nearly as hard,” Montgomery says.

“So the 4A’s, GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) and other groups are  hard at work with identifying suitability categories and standards that everybody will agree to and build into their technology to allow us to run in suitable areas – not just safe areas, but suitable areas as well,” he explains.

Stepping up

It’s a step onward from the 2017 outcry about YouTube placements, when many brands became upset at lack of control over placements bought in automated systems.

“I think the platforms have stepped up with technology and AI to make it much safer for brands,” Montgomery says.

“The chances of a brand being positioned adjacent to harmful content are now much diminished, compared to four years ago.”

GroupM and Montgomery even developed their own in-agency tool, Brand Safety Risk Assessment, to help clients determine the brand safety of inventory.

Risk analysis helps guide clients in the brand safety process https://t.co/Lmxum3jSpb#loopme #brandsafety

— John Montgomery (@taxidodger) December 14, 2020

Four new considerations

Montgomery says brand suitability concerns are taking on four new shapes.

1. Applying a brand suitability model to align messaging with the most appropriate brand-safe environments.
2. Advertisers balancing audience delivery and performance against creating health in the wider ecosystem by denying fraudsters, pirates and purveyors of misinformation.
3. Brands are asking themselves: “Is avoiding direct adjacency to distasteful or negative news enough to satisfy my communication needs whilst preserving brand values?”
4. Brands having to consider safety of audiences.

On that last point, Montgomery says they are asking themselves: “Do I want to use my media schedule to send a signal to potential partners that protecting brands is not enough… ?

“… that consumer safety is paramount and that bias against protected groups, digital privacy, graphically obscene content and irresponsible treatment of debated social issues must be elevated to the status of priority, beyond revenue generation?”

Closing the loop

That set of concerns is far wider than that which first reared its head around 2017, when outcries by brands over widely-reported placement next to controversial content prompted a wave of demand for greater control.

In an automated ad world, advertisers want to be sure they can guard against mess-ups.

Montgomery is also working outside of GroupM to implement such solutions. In December, he joined the data advisory board of LoopMe, a company whose software closes the loop from ad exposure to outcome attribution.

LoopMe Welcomes MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard and GroupM’s John Montgomery to Data Advisory Board

“Companies like LoopMe are putting a huge effort into brand suitability and a targeting engine to help clients put their advertising in front of the right people, in the right context, at the right time,” Montgomery says.

“What LoopMe’s in-flight optimization does to help this is to measure and adjust the flight whilst the campaign is running, versus waiting until the end of the flight, to know if your campaign moved the needle.

“This not only saves large chunks of revenue that would have been wasted on non-optimal impressions, but it makes the advertised brand more agile and more responsive.”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page. 

But, despite the digital-style tactics, many in the industry are craving TV-style familiarity.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jessica Brown GroupM, Director, Digital Investment, GroupM, says she wants consistent data about her ad buys.

TV parity

“We need the same thing that we get in TV when we place a linear buy,” Brown says.

“When you do a TV buy, you know the pod position you’re in, you know the time your commercial ran, you know the show, you know the content of the show, which episode number it is. We need that same level of detail that we’re accustomed to.

“From some partners, we don’t know where we’re running – maybe we get a sample list before the campaign starts. Some partners are a little bit better – they’re giving us maybe a post-delivery report and maybe 50 to 70% of where your impressions ran on some of the content. On the other side, some of the content owners, maybe they’ll give us the top 20 shows.

“But, in each case, there’s still something missing and none of them are giving it to us – giving us that information in a consistent way. And none of it’s really from a trusted third party verification partner, which is really what we need. We need it in a consistent way from a third-party verification partner, someone like DoubleVerify.”

Connected growth

Over-the-top streaming services accounted for 25% of all US TV-viewing minutes during Q2 2020, according to Nielsen Streaming Meter.

EMarketer estimates CTV ad spending will reach $10.81 billion in the US in 2021 – up 56% from two years earlier, and representing around 15% of total US TV ad spending.

But GroupM’s Brown is worried that growth also means the emergence of nefarious fake CTV publishers, which could end up taking her spend if controls are not in place.

“We know where the money is, there will be fraud there,” she says. “We’ve seen cases where some of our ads, not necessarily our clients, but we’ve seen other ads they’re running on pirated content, or maybe a mobile phone, when they should be running on a CTV.

“We need that reporting, that measurement, that transparency that we’re used to getting in other digital channels to be applied to CTV so that we can even maybe block the content that we don’t want to be running on and make sure that we’re getting the quality that we need.”

TV Viewability Is Not Guaranteed: DoubleVerify CEO Zagorski

Fraud rising

DoubleVerify’s (DV) Global Insights Report 2020 lifts the lid:

• Q1 2020 CTV fraud was 161% up on the prior year.
• Since March 2019, DV has identified 1,300 fraudulent CTV apps — 60% of which were identified in 2020.

The report amplifies a datapoint given to Beet.TV in June, when it said CTV ad fraud is occurring in three ways – fraudulent apps containing bots, cloud server farms and ad spoofing.

You are watching “CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective,” a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos, please click here.

But GroupM is still kicking the tyres of a burgeoning range of suppliers.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer for GroupM US, describes spending trends and his wishlist for platforms.

Growing spend

“We’re increasingly spending and investing more and more dollars against advance TV, and this year’s upfront,” Sweeney says.

“We probably grew another 25% on top of 25% the year before. So they’re meaningful numbers there now.”

GroupM operates Finecast, its own unit dedicated to buying ads in connected TV, which has become a major source of big-brands CTV ads.

But Sweeney says the agency is having to navigate through an array of new options.

Partnership criteria

He says he is trying out supply-side ad platforms (SSPs) – software through which publishers make ads available to buyers – like that from Xandr, for these criteria:

• “Unique and advantages data – there really are only a few that have unique and advantaged data in the marketplace.”
• “Access to that data.”
• “Supply that’s fraud-free and brand-safe and available at scale.”
• “A technology partner that allows us to eventually leverage that on the platforms, with our own traders, and bringing our own data science and our machine learning to help find audiences at scale for our clients.”

Test and learn

Sweeney says GroupM is having to pick through a proliferating array of options.

“There has been a proliferation of new streaming services,” he says. “There are just so many different options right now.

“What we’re deciding to do is to test all, or as many as make sense for our clients, and then sort of double down and invest with the folks who are delivering the best either extension or the best experience for consumers.

“We’re looking at a combination of those factors, as we figure out who the proprietary or preferred partners are in this space.”

Drop ad prices for test

And, though connected TV ads command a premium for their ability to target viewers and support tactics like frequency capping and attribution, he is urging publishers to drop their prices.

“I’ve encouraged the partners in this space to put some skin in the game and not look for some of the high premiums that they’ve traditionally been charging as a way to sort of incent and compel clients to test it out,” Sweeney says.

“Even with some of the challenges around ratings degradation and prices, the inflation that’s been paid, (TV is)s still a pretty efficient medium to trade.

“If you want to break into that and have some of those dollars migrate over to either a new platform or a new data set, you’re going to have to cede the water a bit and incent some of those tests.”

You are watching Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, a Beet.TV series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page. 

“We would like to have cross-channel attribution, reach and frequency, and control,” Deborah King, vice president of media activation paid social for the EMEA region at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM media-buying firm, said. “Due to that not being available, it really opened up a lot of creative and innovative ways for me and my team to plan paid social campaigns.”

In this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean, King described how marketers need to approach their paid social campaigns.

“Social is one of the biggest ecosystems where you have to be a bit of a strategist at heart,” she said. “You always have to remember who is your audience. You have to remember the mindset, the context and the environment.”

Each social media platform has its own style of user experience, ad formats and ways for brands to engage with audiences. Understanding those differences is crucial in running campaigns and interacting with consumers.

“It’s an exciting time to be a digital marketeer with the paid social landscape,” King said. “There’s an element of creativity that we have to deploy and think about in terms of executing our campaigns.”

Marketers need to respect consumer privacy, not only to build trust with customers, but also to comply with stricter data-privacy rules in regions as varied as the European Union and the state of California.

“Privacy has become an increasingly more important, and having a privacy-first approach that we all need to follow through on,” King said.

She also sees more opportunities in livestreaming, which became more popular as people huddled indoors during the pandemic. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch all support live video in some form.

“During lockdowns, live has had a place in social,” King said. “A lot of marketeers are going to start to incorporate that into their strategy.”

You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.

But, for over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV), lockdown looks like being a catalyst.

Not only have OTT services seen a big uptick in consumption during the period, but the whole ecosystem appears to have come together to improve the tools available for advertising placement and monetization.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Esra Bacher, Managing Partner and Programmatic Investment Lead at GroupM, the world’s biggest media-buying agency, says the group has lobbied ad-tech platforms for technology improvements – and has emerged with a richer toolset.

Growth during pandemic

“CTV has been going through a very interesting time especially during the current events caused by COVID-19,” she says.

“I believe that the current conditions are going to be quite favourable in shaping the future of TV.

“We have been very vocal about our needs and challenges when it comes to programmatic CTV activation.

“During this time, we have seen some great enhancements that are being offered by both the SSPs, DSPs and the publishers. They have listened to our concerns and have built some tools, some products that are facilitating the programmatic activation of CTV media.”

New tricks

Bacher says recent platform improvements include:

• reach and frequency reporting
• audience-based inventory
• enriched data partnerships with deeper audience insights
• automatic content recognition (ACR) integrations for true understanding of viewer behaviour

Still, Bacher says an “ideal” is for them to ingest TV schedules so that ad buyers like GroupM can have a true insight into audiences’ real behavior.

Publishers ’embrace’ programmatic TV

EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion. That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.

GroupM’s Bacher says the tech improvements from SSPs and DSPs are encouraging media owners to make more inventory available to buy through programmatic mechanisms, increasing the scale available to buyers.

Together with the recent explosion in actual OTT TV consumption during the pandemic, it all appears to add up to a vastly increased opportunity.

But Bacher says she wants to be able to deduplicate – or distinguish between – TV viewing carried out through OTT and that carried out through linear, in order to better understand cause and effect.

The fragmentation of viewing options and diversity of ad placement requirements will continue to pose a problem, Bacher says. Next up, she would like to see “standardization” in the market.

The GroupM agency recently landed the Novo Nordisk Danish pharmaceutical giant with a reported annual media spend of $400 million.

Richman talks about managing the agency virtually and how this has lead to increased productivity.   “Remote work is bringing us closer,” she says.

Initially putting investment on hold during the initial days, advertisers are finding that news is increasingly providing “positive associations” says Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety, US at GroupM in this interview Beet.TV

CTV Lacks Transparency 

Barone sees the CTV ecosystem as troubled by a lack of transparency, multiple technology platforms along wiht fraud and piracy.   He says the industry needs to run exclusion and exclusion lists.  “We  need know where we are running,” he demands.  He calls for the industry adoption of bundle ID’s.

This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.

Last week, Comscore said 22% to 30% of all ad impressions were appearing in coronavirus-related content. Such content is now being widely blacklisted by ad buyers, whose brand safety tools allow them to use keywords to avoid their ads appearing against particular kinds of content. BuzzFeed also reported the scale of the problem.

Even as Comscore offered advertisers a new “epidemic brand safety filter” last week, the IAB and Digital Content Next called on advertisers to cease the practice.

Early in March, a GroupM executive told Digiday: “Less than one third of GroupM’s clients are blocking coronavirus terms, and those that aren’t either don’t advertise against news at all or don’t do a lot of keyword blocking in general”

Bad news is good news

In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, EVP of global brand safety for GroupM, says: “Newspapers are a brand-safe environment in the main, they have high viewability, they have low ad fraud …

“Marketers are so worried about their ads being seen adjacent to the news of the virus. But research shows that people are not turned off brands if they see as adjacent to COVID-19 news.

“Integral Ad Science did some research recently that showed that 78% of people are fine with it. There are some exceptions for food and travel and that makes sense.

“Other research shows that the harder the news, the better. So, research does not support the current marketer concerns.”

Death of newspapers

Advertisers behavior runs contrary to the audience pattern. News site traffic is spiking up for many publishers.

Even so, the crisis is pushing some newspapers, many of which have been teetering on the brink for years, to the brink of extinction, challenged by inability to print and deliver and by consumers’ inability to get out and buy. Several newspapers and alt-weeklies have announced pay cuts and layoffs, with some shutting down operations altogether, The Hill reports.

Montgomery is worried. “Whilst big media are suffering, it’s a crisis for local news,” he says. “Many of them are not going to get through this.

“This news needs ad revenue. It’s vital at this time to include newspapers and especially local papers on media schedules. Without it, I think we’re in grave danger. This isn’t just about keeping newspapers alive, it’s about free speech and democracy that literally depends on it.”

Closing newspapers won’t just be democracy’s loss, it will be the advertisers’, Montgomery says.

“The fact is that news is a very effective advertising vehicle,” he adds. “Readers are engaged with the articles that they choose to read. They spend longer reading them. There’s more dwell time and that means a better opportunity for your ads to be seen. But readers also trust their favourite local newspaper and that trust rubs off on advertising.”

Facebook has pledged $100 million in grant money and ad spending to help struggling news outlets, WSJ reports.

Be smart about blocking

GroupM’s global business of business intelligence Brian Wieser recently told Beet.TV brands should aim to be useful during the pandemic.

Montgomery is urging advertisers to think differently.

“If you need to use keyword blocking, don’t use it as a blunt tool,” Montgomery says. “Don’t use exact-match (for) ‘COVID-19’ or ‘coronavirus’ exclusions. Because this is automatically going to demonetize all content that contains these words.

“Instead, use something like exclusions (features) which will reduce the possibility of over-blocking things like ‘COVID-19 death’ or ‘COVID-19 death counts’ or ‘coronavirus death toll’ or ‘COVID-19 miracle cure’ or a combination of those words.

“You can work with your agency or verification provider if you need help with a strategy.

“I would say to the verification providers, although they are following the instructions from agencies and marketers have given those agencies guidance about limiting risk in the news environment, make sure that you educate your clients on how to use keywords as a strategic tool rather than a blunt tool.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of brand safety and the use of keyword blocking during the COVID-19 pandemic.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Norman, senior advisor to GroupM, the world’s largest media agency, says the coronavirus pandemic will allow us to assess brands against their stated goals.

“We’ve had any number of enterprises in the package goods business, and beyond in financial services, telling us that they are purpose-driven and that their brands and their business must have a wider purpose than simply profit in order to justify their existence,” Norman says in this interview recorded remotely due to the crisis.

“Now, these are all very easy things to say at times of great prosperity, when the only way is up.”

So Norman says organizations need to assess whether they are making good on three typical pledges many have made:

• “Our people are our most important asset.”
• “We serve all constituents, not just shareholders.”
• “We are a purpose driven business.”

The coronavirus pandemic threatens millions of lives globally, with many health systems expected to be over-whelmed, if they aren’t already.

In business, the virus is already threatening a catastrophic effect. The closure of theaters and cinemas will cause large revenue dents. Share prices are plummetting.

But Norman thinks companies should be concerned with more than finances.

“If we fight to only minimise their losses, the consequential loss in other parts of their business, and eventually to the underlying the asset they hold, will be catastrophic,” he says, urging businesses to “think about … the less-served in our communities”.

“This really should be the communications business’ golden moment,” Norman adds.

Norman was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam powered by Zoom.

Until the virus spreads more widely in the west and until more media organizations start reporting results, the full impact is hard to forecast – but brands have an opportunity to change their approach, says GroupM’s global president of business intelligence Brian Wieser.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Wieser says how GroupM is adapting.

“A lot of it right now is just providing information, frankly, to our clients, making sure that they’re keeping the brand safe, that they’re ideally finding ways to add value to consumers, and maybe different ways than they did before,” Wieser says.

“One of the better examples I’m aware of in China was that one athletic apparel brand that encouraged consumers to exercise at home, and an emphasised, ‘Here’s how you can do it, don’t let this stop you from doing what you need to do’.

“I think different categories of marketers can find different ways to be useful. Some of it just requires some creativity, as to what the brand is able to do.”

Group M subsidiary MediaCom’s UK division asked all staff to work from home on Friday, March 13 – a test for its systems to deliver continuity in the event of wider looming restrictions.

The impact of COVID-19 is already wide-ranging, including:

• Ad agency holding groups’ share prices have fallen.
• Several tech and media conferences have cancelled, with some exploring alternative virtual conferences.
• Closure of movie theaters will hit box office takings, forcing several titles to be postponed.
• Italian broadcast group Mediaset reported upward ad revenue declined in March due to COVID-19, whilst several TV productions are being affected.
• Sporting tournaments are being postponed, threatening broadcast exposure, with big question marks over the upcoming Olympics and Euro 2020.

Wieser says some Chinese media owners reported a “curtailment of spending” after the first virus-linked deaths in January.

He suggests postponement of events may have a lesser impact on ad revenue than cancellation, but he worries that particular impact in China will hit global supply chains that begin in Asia.

Still, Wieser – who was “the most-quoted man in advertising” as a Pivotal Research analyst before joining GroupM a year ago – thinks the virus crisis will make clear the value of ad agencies like his new employer.

“Any time there’s significant uncertainty, I think the value, at least, of expert advice only goes up,” he says.

“As we’ve seen, in other periods of crisis, that, certainly, in the last 20 years, that media indices were only more and more important.”

Wieser was interviewed remotely by Beet.TV from his office in Portland, Oregon.

Advertisers want to be able to reach viewers across the plethora of video screens and services – but their agencies are hard-pressed to measure their impact.

That goes doubly so when new services keep popping up which don’t necessarily subscribe to industry-agreed measurement methods.

All of which poses a challenge to Simon Thomas, global director for audiences research at the world’s biggest media-buying agency, WPP’s GroupM.

In this video interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV, he explains how a series of joint industry committees (JIC) around the world has agreed on measurement standards for particular media forms – but that this is coming under pressure.

“There’s a lot of frustrations in terms of the actual way we can practise our audience measurement and use that measurement to actually advise the advertiser on the effectiveness of the investment,” Thomas says. “Europe is a very fragmented marketplace.

“GRPs (TV gross rating points) are different between countries. A GRP is different in the UK to Germany, to France, and certainly to the US. Standardisation just in the TV market, has been an incredibly difficult task to achieve.”

In the old world, measuring media audiences was more straightforward – if not relatively accurate. Panels like that from BARB in the UK would report TV viewing habits, extrapolated to national level.

But what’s “TV” anymore”? GroupM’s Thomas favors a definition of “Total Video”. That’s something measurement agencies are striving toward, but initiatives like BARB’s Project Dovetail, accounting for new types of TV viewing, have been slow to progress.

In that space, Thomas is seeing the rise of new players that don’t necessarily subscribe to the JIC system.

He says new advertiser-supported VOD, broadcaster VOD, subscription VOD and new-wave pay-TV providers often all have their own take on measuring consumption on advertisers’ behalf.

“(They) all have their own return path data … as parts of that whole measurement picture,” Thomas says.

“Who is going to lead that charge? Who should be driving it is a really difficult question. But I would say the primacy has to be with the advertiser, it also has to be with the broadcaster / publisher on the non-broadcast side, as those who are using it to monetize their advertising inventory.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

TV stands to be the biggest beneficiary, Wieser tells Furious Corp. CEO Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV at the Future of TV Ads global forum. The bump will be spread across national and local distributors as well as other forms of media.

Political advertising gains are specific to US growth. Wieser has said that the category distorts global forecast figures. In GroupM’s global media forecast for 2020, published on December 9, the firm predicts an overall deceleration of global advertising.

“A lot of economic forces that are impacting the global economy are impacting advertising as well,” says Wieser, adding that most countries around the world are seeing meaningful deceleration and while the US and UK have held up, about a dozen markets are expected to decline. “Global trade wars, the deficit in the US, capital expenditures and weakening production – there are a lot of negative factors going on right now.”

It may be some consolation to the ad industry, then, that deceleration of growth is due to macroeconomics and not industry-specific factors. Wieser points to GDPR as an example of an industry-specific disruption that had “almost no effect on spending.”

Instead, advertising firms should look at their national economic landscapes to predict whether or not they’ll see growth in the next year.

“To the extent that the advertising economy in general is correlated in any given country with economic factors, we see slowing economic conditions in those countries,” says Wieser. “People around the world are making forecasts for their country, we see this in the advertising forecast as well.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Norman, senior advisor at GroupM, tells Beet.TV that seed data serves as the platform for building out audience “cohorts,” which Norman says can serve stronger results than one-to-one marketing. One-to-one marketing has been held up as a golden industry standard that advertisers continue to strive to reach, in contrast to the broader reach one-to-many strategy. Addressable and targeted advertising is lauded for its efficiency and personalization, but Norman argues that in some cases, a cohort approach is more effective: It provides reach while still targeting the right consumer, and doesn’t belabor the point around needing hyper-specific audience data for every campaign. He gives the example that one brand marketing shampoo for all hair types should take a much different approach than a brand marketing shampoo for curly hair, or shampoo for curly haired people experiencing hair loss.

A focus on data is set to be at the center of CES 2020. In the lead up to the show, Norman says that he expects to see an emphasis on intelligent information and inclusive technology that extends beyond the world’s more affluent customers dominate next year’s show. While last year’s focus was on assistance in technology – the Alexas and Hey Googles – this year’s will be on connectivity.

“The world generally, and I hate to use the word at my age, is rather more woke than it has been in previous years,” says Norman. “People are right to expect that there are holistic implications of the use and progress of technology above and beyond smarter, faster services and products for what is effectively a luxury goods audience of the richest billion people on the planet.”

Norman believes that the work at the show will revolve around bringing down digital divides instead of increasingly raising them. People want to see how technology can improve the world, not separate it, and the role of technology will shift in that direction. Additionally, Norman says that he expects to see intelligence applied to information and “imagination in ways people have set about solving problems and being smarter and more aware of what’s going on.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 202, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January.  The series is presented by Samsung Ads.  For more videos please visit this page. 

A board member from one of the world’s leading news organizations thinks such organizations need to do better at cutting through the fog with facts.

“We in the communications world … have really not done the populace a great service in terms of helping people understand what’s true and what isn’t,” says Rob Norman, the former GroupM chief digital officer who also now sits on the board of BBC Global News, Knotch, comScore and Simpli.fi.

“It’s got worse and not better in the three years since 2016

The trust problem is borne out by research. According Pew Center: “Just 26% of U.S. adults correctly classified five factual statements as factual, whilst just 35% correctly identified five opinion statements as opinion.”

61% say the news media intentionally ignores stories that are important to the public.

Norman recently left GroupM, the world’s largest media-buying agency, after several years.

“The news media has got to keep its metal,” he counsels. “It has to be incredibly self-aware and … think very, very, very critically about what they choose to write, what positions they choose to take. (If) people can demonstrate that they are severely partisan … I think they create an internal vulnerability which undermines the rest of their mission.”

It is rare for advertising industry personnel to take an interest in the societal health of the news business.

But, earlier this year, responding to business challenges, we also saw the launch of United For News, a coalition comprising advertisers’ agencies, tech platforms and journalism non-profits that is working to restore the strength of local news media around the world.

“It’s tremendously difficult to completely separate opinion and news … their audience won’t know the difference,” Norman warns.

His solution? Fight the fire with facts.

“News organizations … are going to have to do it with enormous discipline, and with enormously well-researched and detailed support for what they do, and maybe reign in some of their opinion,” Norman says.

“Less is more. We need more precision and create less opportunities for that precision to be de-positioned by other people.”