So why are so many advertisers either spending so little or using addressable for a different purpose?
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat, a cast of “millennial”-aged companies assembled to discuss issues affecting the pace of roll-out of future TV advertising – and what advertisers really want it for…
The panel heard that what ad buyers really want is audience scale. This may seem to go against the inherent promise of addressable TV, which can make an audience far smaller but also far more relevant…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“There’s a lot of great data sets out in the marketplace. There’s 199 million homes. Get to half, you really have something. And then the strategy and the media planners will start funding that at a much, much higher rate than it does now.”
Today, connected TV even seems to mitigate against large-scale campaigns. One ad-tech exec said the promises aren’t quite living up to results achieved in limited trials – perhaps one reason so much advertiser spending in OTT is still considered “test-and-learn”…
Hardeep Bindra, Managing Director of Product, Sizmek:
“The general expectation from our digital-first customers is as we expand to CTV, OTT – and then adventuring to addressable and linear – is that we will continue that same (performance) approach in defining attribution. It works to a degree when it’s in a closed-loop testbed … But the minute you try and reach scale with it that’s when these systems start to either fall down or the delay in attribution breaks the existing models that we have in place.”
If connected TV advertising doesn’t yet have big scale, it may offer something else. Beet Retreat heard many executives talk about its ability to help cap the frequency with which viewers see a TV ad…
Frank Sinton, President & Founder, Beachfront Media:
“Connected TV but it hasn’t hit that 50% (penetration) mark yet. So we’re more like 10 or 15% penetration at this point. (In) connected TV, in particular, frequency (of ad exposure) is something that we’re looking really closely at.”
But the panel heard that using addressable TV to reach large audiences is possible. Two companies that have spent the last few years building out a patchwork of advertiser delivery opportunities, in very different ways, weighed in…
Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid:
Right now Innovid is 75 million households through nine different streaming devices across 1,000 different apps that are capable of delivering an interactive OTT ad. So the capacity is there. The systems and structure that we’ve talked about today is lagging that a bit. But we are continuing to focus on the largest potential audiences that can be lit up to be able to bring this reality to market.
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“One of the things that we’ve built over the last couple years is this local owned-and-operated station group opportunity which is, going back to we’re in 35 million homes, one out of every three TV homes, so we work with almost all the large station groups.”
Connected TV isn’t just about what happens on the TV. In a multi-touch consumer ecosystem, if you can track viewership and link it to outcomes like visitation and brand CRM data, you have the capacity to deploy sophisticated attribution that can prove the real value of connected TV exposure…
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:
“We’re literally enabling them to prove that their local TV ads are actually driving to the website or actually driving to the store. We’re able to do that because we are literally bringing live placeIQ data and matching it against our IP and IDs. So, ‘Wou’ve seen the ad for the F150, did you go to the dealership?’ ‘Did you see the ad for Taco Bell, did you go to Taco Bell or to the website for TD Ameritrade?’We literally get live information.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“The last few years have really seen the transformation in the digital living room, where the TV has gone from being a content generator or content distributor to now really just becoming a device in the living room,” Bindra says.
“For us, we look at the extension of video going onto the TV screen, the largest screen, as something that we have to deliver to our clients to give a more omni-channel output to their campaigns.”
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Bindra talks about the challenges of working within connected-TV and OTT environments and how the digital side needs to learn from past mistakes when branching out to TV.
“We’ve run into similar challenges as other DSP’s of how do we take our optimization and our reach capabilities that the marketplace really knows us for and recognizes us for and then expand that into this new arena,” Bindra says. “There’s a lot of work for us to do around this.”
Sizmek has been running test TV campaigns, some of which began on the digital side, that have for the most part generated responses he describes as “fantastic.” But outside of test environments, it’s the same story that many others are encountering.
“We’ve run into similar issues of scale, of data on a de-duplicated or a deterministic basis,” Bindra says. “So a lot of our technology, which is very much centered around being precise, now has to start to look at things in a less-than-perfect environment from a data perspective.”
Data access isn’t the problem, nor is figuring out who a particular viewer is since everything is at the household level, “but also how attribution works and the time delay in getting that information back while the campaign is running,” he adds. “Our focus has really been in how we can collapse that time gap and who we should partner with to get data back to us in a near real-time fashion.”
Asked to reflect on Beet Retreat 2018, he says it was “extremely helpful” being around knowledgeable practitioners who are open about discussing issues common to many participants. “Being relatively nascent in this space, this access was very valuable to us. There are things that you just don’t know where to start and who to talk to and how to evaluate things,” says Bindra.
Another common sentiment at the Retreat was a willingness to solve, according to Bindra. “In the digital side, we have made mistakes and we are now acknowledging those mistakes, we are trying to learn from those mistakes.”
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.
]]>