As powerful as CTV can be, a common complaint is that it remains too complex.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Al Lustgarten, Senior Vice President, Technology & Information Services, Hearst Television, explains how Hearst tackles the issue.
“We know our sales are becoming more complex,” he says. The tasks include a strategy that now offers OTT platforms, converged selling methods and advanced ad targeting.
Lustgarten says Hearst is currently figuring accommodating everything. Next up, it wants to develop one platform to embrace it all, “over the next few months”.
For now, though, challenges are sufficient. “We’re experiencing very large growth in our digital business while maintaining our legacy linear broadcast business, and figuring out the path forward to have a unified workflow to accommodate both those lines of business is something that we’re spending a lot of time on currently,” Lustgarten says.
“We’re dealing with disparate platforms. Some of those platforms are legacy, so we’re dealing with platforms that are not necessarily accustomed to doing integrations or developing APIs. We’re working with the vendors to put those in place. Then we have the industry-old issue of dealing with disparate platforms on the buy side of our business and on the sell side of the business.”
Lustgarten says Hearst is trying a few technology approaches to make it all work:
“That’s given us a competitive advantage to get all that data and not only use it for decision support, but use it to work with our individual third-party vendors for other services that are wrapping around the tech stack,” Lustgarten adds.
But the different approaches have one thing in common – Hearst doesn’t want to build the software for itself.
“We’ve taken a position at Hearst Television that we would prefer not to build, so we prefer to buy or lease technology,” Lustgarten adds. “So we also have targeted trying to find best of breed technology.
“We’re working with our existing vendors and we accumulated a variety of what we consider best in industry technology. The challenge is trying to get them to all work together.
“Companies like Matrix are very easy to integrate in and out of. Other vendors are not as easy to accomplish that with, but it’s a challenge that we’ve tried to take.”
]]>So says the president of Hearst’s television operation in this video interview with Beet.TV.
The industry is embarking on a shift, from the historic method of measuring and selling TV eyeballs using rough “gross rating points” (GRPs) to selling on real viewership, by digital-style impression.
Whilst that may seem like a challenge, given local TV’s patchwork nature, Jordan Wertlieb isn’t daunted.
“I don’t see many obstacles,” he tells interviewer Howard Shimmel of Janus Insights & Strategy. “One thing we have to remember is that impressions have always existed – we’re not introducing a new measurement, we’re just introducing a way to transact.
“So I think what’s most important is television ratings were established to measure a percentage of audience in a television ecosystem. Because our audiences are now being reached on multiple platforms, that rating method is just too narrow.
“We’ve got to talk about total audience reached impressions across all these devices and add them up. I think it’s actually a more fair representation of the reach of the broadcast.”
Wertlieb says live linear still has an ability to capture audiences’ imagination whilst consumers also have a “voracious appetite for local news”.
The interview took place at the at the TVB Forward conference in New York.
]]>Hearst’s TV footprint spans 39 states where the company is now selling connected TV in conjunction with the same linear audiences for local TV, the Co-Founder, President and CEO of dataxu explains in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018.
“So it’s quite an innovative offering and because it’s Hearst, of course it features premium content on connected TV. And all that’s being powered by dataxu’s technology,” Baker says. “We’ve been really struck by how quickly it’s growing. Bear in mind, these are local, traditional, tier three advertisers” like movie theatres and car dealerships, the “bread and butter of local TV advertising. It’s been tremendous to see the interest in connected TV and these digital audiences, I think for good reason.”
Bringing together local linear and digital via TotalTV makes it possible to re-aggregate hard-to-reach viewers like young males who are “very hard to reach at all or with frequency on linear TV,” Baker adds.
Local TV represents roughly $25 billion of the $70 billion TV advertising industry, according to Baker, “and it has a completely different market structure. There’s targeting of course in the DMA’s and even below the DMA level, which is more possible with some of the new digital technologies like connected TV.
“So the opportunity is really to take local, geographic targeting combined with some of the more traditional ratings demography and put them together in an automated, high-efficiency, easy to operate sales machine. Groups like Hearst have hundreds of TV sellers, so you have to forecast and deliver and account for and report across many thousands of campaigns,” says Baker.
]]>“I think YouTube is creating their own stratification of their content. Obviously, they took to heart a lot of the brand safety challenges of last year, became more the content cop,” Ratner observes in this interview with Beet.TV. at the Digital Content NewFronts 2018.
Using both technology and human intervention, YouTube has been “creating tiers of content and adding in that brand safety layer. I think it’s still sitting on their roots in their ability to create stars out of individual content publishers and each of those guys developing their own channels and their own brands.”
Whether monetization for content creators on YouTube is an opportunity as opposed to a right is a matter of much debate. Either way, YouTube’s changing policies “pushed a lot of these guys kind of out of the business and out of the space,” says Ratner. “So I think there has been a leveling up of this sponsorable content within YouTube.”
Nonetheless, Ratner, who is Chief Media Officer at the Hearst-owned marketing agency, wonders about the discoverability of content in a sea of choices for consumers.
“As you start looking at whether it is through OTT or these channels of layering more and more content, more and more channels into the ecosystem, how are consumers going to be able to find it?”
YouTube often has “a tunneling effect,” Ratner adds. “You start watching a video of a certain nature and a certain type and then all of a sudden, you’re just seeing hundreds of videos there. And you almost end up with your own blinders on in terms of the content that you might have watched once or twice or whatever.
“How are new types of content getting exposed to consumers and how they become part of an individual’s content consumption ecosystem?”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>It’s against this backdrop that Troy Young, Global President, Hearst Digital Media, views the ever-evolving role of the Interactive Advertising Bureau during a time of what he calls “incredible” change.
“I’m an advocate of the IAB because I think it plays an important role in the community, in education, our relationship with government,” Young says in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s Annual Leadership Meeting. Trying to figure out what comes next “is really complicated because marketing is so complicated right now.”
He refers to remarks by IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg about how “direct brands” have forged a new path, veering away from what Young describes as “industrialized communication through marketer to agency to publisher to consumer.” Now a new generation of companies is “empowered by the cloud and everything on demand to create direct relationships with consumers and sell products that people value,” he says.
“Everybody’s a content marketer right now and everybody needs close proximity to data. For a company like ours, how does that change us?”
Not that long ago, owning Hearst titles like Cosmopolitan, Country Living, ELLE and Esquire and housing them under the same roof as Rodale’s Bicycling, Men’s Health, Prevention, and Runner’s World would have meant more than adequate clout in the market. Now it’s more about speed, ease of use for advertisers and being as powerful as logging into the Facebook interface to buy ads.
“We have to react to that reality as a publisher. We define trends and understand consumers and create audiences. But we have to refactor our ad offering, essentially our market offering, to deal with the new realities,” Young says.
Hearst continues to enhance its programmatic capabilities while mapping user buyer behaviors and help brands produce content, which takes time and investment.
“We really have to listen to our customers and figure out how we can make selling a complex product much easier, because if you’re buying on Instagram it’s really easy today and I think that’s the reality we have to compete with.”
Buyers “still love our brands,” Young adds. “The buy-side loves our sophistication in creating content. “What we’re really focused on is how do we help marketers around the idea of actions. There’s no doubt that the entire market is becoming more performance oriented.”
It helps to “eat our own dog food” by creating content that “sells product and we make money doing that. We’re keenly aware of what leads to a transaction and it’s that insight that we create by doing it ourselves that we sell to marketers.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>Few publishers are experiencing the change more than Hearst. With brands like food’s Delish, what once was a magazine publisher has rapidly upped its game to produce more and more digital video – not just for its own websites, but for a new multitude of new consumer touchpoints.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Hearst Digital Media digital global president Troy Young explains the company’s embrace.
“Web pages were never particularly good as a distribution point for video,” says Young, speaking at the NewFronts, where Hearst pitched its video roster to advertisers. “What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is the slow maturation of new distribution points for great brands and publishers like Hearst.”
Hearst is taking video seriously. In two years, the company reportedly put $300 million in to video platforms, including investments in BuzzFeed, Roky, AwesomenessTV and Vice Media.
At the recent Social Media Week, Hearst editors told how they are reinventing traditional practices to tell stories in video.
“The distribution’s becoming more predictable and the ad models are coming in to focus,” Young adds. “Unlike the cable ecosystem, there was never any systematic monetisation opportunities. So the answer was always to do it in partnership with a brand, and create a native product with it.
“But those environments are maturing, appetites for different types of shows are maturing and we’re moving along with that.”
Two decades after publishers embarked on their digital journey, they are finally emerging from replicating their text products, in to a more moving medium.
Says Young: “We’ll sit here in a couple of years and half of it will be video.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
]]>Using digital pipes instead of coaxial wiring, Awesomeness picked up early funding and set out to capture Gen Z—youths 12 to 24. Just as cable TV networks “erupted out of the new operators that created cable systems, digital was allowing us to do the same,” says AwesomenessTV President Brett Bouttier.
“We starting investing in shows and talent and building a brand for this demographic,” Bouttier explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “Because we listened to them a lot and we communicate with them, the brand really took off and it’s become a massive success.”
The company started with funding from YouTube and venture capitalists and progressed to a who’s who of investors, including DreamWorks Animation. It’s now owned by Comcast, Hearst Corp. and Verizon “who are themselves figuring out what the future of media distribution and programming looks like. We’re a great fit.”
DreamWorks “really encouraged us and gave us rocket fuel to continue to be entrepreneurial and innovative,” says Bouttier.
During the 2017 NewFronts, Awesomeness announced it is getting into the news business, catering to the way its audience responds to news events. “They’re responding by wanting to get actively involved,” says Bouttier. “What they can do now. How they can make a difference.”
What used to be called digital or TV or film, it’s now just about making good programming. “Our job is to build audience” with a demographic that, according to Bouttier, influences some $200 billion in annual household spending.
“And they literally will be the largest generation ever,” he says of GenZ.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
]]>That’s according to a media executive who has seen the evolution of the relationship over the broad sweep of time.
“A number of companies … have adapted to a very new important reality of distributed media creation,” says Hearst Digital Media digital president Troy Young, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“How is that creating tension between distribution and content, around how the spoils are divided? This is not a new conversation – it’s as old as media.”
Young was delivering a presentation at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting and an interview with Digiday on the same topic. He says Michael Eisner’s threat, to undermine Time Warner by buying customers satellite dishes to carry his programming direct, showed the crucial relationship between content and distribution had frequently been as tense as it was important, even in the analog age.
Whilst the tension may have been around for a long time, for Young, it has been inverted. “The platform was delivering value to content, now content is delivering value to the platform,” he says.
Publishers and producers are now living in a Catch-22 where they see value in owning audience data, but social funnels are perhaps their best chance at snagging audience in the first place.
Young thinks the equation has been weighted too strongly in platforms’ favor – but things are getting better.
“We’ve maybe taken content for granted a bit,” he says. “We’ve not worked hard enough at creating a mechanism to divide finances equitably.
“We’re seeing that now. Facebook has talked about monetization for publishers, disruptors like Snapchat are putting pressure on how curated environments work. It’s very welcome.
“I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing from Facebook, but I want more.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>Back then, the company had just one title. Now focused on magazines, websites and video, the publisher is more interest in applying a diverse range of mechanisms to its ad sales operation.
Hearst ad platforms SVP Mike Smith tells Beet.TV the company uses five methods of selling digital ads:
“The mix is a healthy mix,” Smith says. “The part that’s growing is the programmatic direct, or what the IAB calls an automated guarantee. It’s buyers that traditionally have bought direct – we essentially automate their buying process and make it more efficient to buy our media that way.”
These days, there is a glut of ad-tech vendors all competing for the attention of publishers like Hearst, promising to make their sales more efficient and profitable. Whilst some customers like to cut down on the number of extra parties with hands on their money, Hearst prefers to work with many.
“We like to work with a lot of companies,” Smith adds. “Different companies specialise in mobile versus video, even display on desktop, different creative formats.”
He counts Google, AppNexus, Rubicon, OpenX and CPX Interactive amongst the key partners for Hearst.
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>But the other side is now getting conned, too, as “sub-syndication networks” duplicate and misrepresent buyer inventory, selling it on for immoral profit, says magazine and web publisher Hearst.
“We’ve seen some very clever executions where someone buys the banner ad, then manages to inject a video player through some code hijacking and then run a pre-roll video and content clips,” Hearst digital revenue and analytics VP Susan Parker tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
She says the crooks are hard to spot as they are successfully obfuscating their true identity – but a typical crime involves a network buying up a banner ad which was never intended to show video, and selling it as higher-priced video inventory nevertheless.
“They’re selling multiple video impressions off one banner ad they might have paid $0.80 for and they’re reselling these as high-value pre-roll to legitimate advertisers who don’t know the difference,” Parker adds.
The problem was also written about recently in AdExchanger by mobile ad targeting platform Ubimo, which complained that DSPs are duplicating and recategorising publisher inventory against publishers’ wishes.
Hearst’s Parker sees three problems:
She is calling on the industry to “do more to stop it” by having “fewer connections between buyer and seller”. “The thing that is missing is identification – websites have certificates to verify the identity is accurate; (ad) impressions don’t have anything like that,” she says.
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>But that doesn’t mean the publisher thinks the new programmatic world is perfect.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” says Hearst’s Michael Smith in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The innovation that is real-time bidding paradigm-shifting for marketing. It empowers an advertiser to identify the audience that they specifically want to target and to construct a price that there are willing to pay in the moment. Smith holds has the title of SVP, Revenue Platform, Hearst Magazines Digital Media & SVP, Ad Platforms, Core Audience,
“That’s a brilliant innovation that still needs a lot of work to realise its full potential. It is less efficient than its inventors imagined it would be when they designed it. There is a lot of dysfunction, even, in how programmatic deals are executed today that over time will be worked on by smart people – the effectiveness and efficiency gains that were imagined will be realised.”
This video is part of series: Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented bySpotX. You find additional videos from the series here.
]]>Swartz began his career in 1984 as a reporter with The Wall Street Journal after graduating from Harvard. Then he served as an editor on the Journal’s Page One staff from 1989 to 1991.
“Like a lot of folks of my generation, I went in through journalism,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I was influenced by my fascination with the Watergate case. It led me to think that being a journalist is something that has great social responsibility.”
But Swartz’ executive career got started when, in 1995, he was named president and CEO of SmartMoney, a magazine venture Hearst and the Journal launched four years earlier with Swartz as founding editor.
He went on to be EVP and then president of Hearst Newspapers, before being named president and CEO of Hearst in its entirety in June 2013. That puts Swartz in charge of a multi-media empire. But his position is one he credits with following his early passion.
“Doing things you’re passionate about really works,” he says. “I got my start as a newspaper reporter – it’s because that’s what I was most interested in. That led to so many other things.
“How does one lead to another? When I was getting out of college, being a reporter was what I was most excited about. I did it, I loved it and it’s worked out.”
For a time, it didn’t look like it would. Swartz ran Hearst Newspapers during the economic turmoil of 2008 to 2010, when papers suffered a battering as advertisers pulled back on funding. In 2009, Hearst turned its Seattle Post-Intelligencer web-only.
But Swartz says it was a challenge the company rode out.
“We did a lot of intelligent cost-cutting that did not involve taking journalists off or cutting the quality of the newsprint,” he recalls. “We focused on our culture and people, making sure we supported each other through difficult times.”
Now those changes have been made, the overall industry has stabilized to flat fortunes or more muted declines, with Swartz says Hearst’s papers have shown profit for four straight years.
As the media landscape swirls around us, Hearst is making bets on a digital future not just by reinventing its own properties but also by investing in targets like Vice Media, BuzzFeed and AwesomenessTV. Latest rumors are that the company is working on a special ecommerce project with Snapchat.
Swartz was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, chairman of Xaxis and president of WPP Digital. The taping took place in New York. This is part of Beet.TV series title the Media Revolutionaries. The series is sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft.
]]>While the platform is presently free of advertising, the publisher will evaluate a range of “native” and brand integration partners.
Grosso explains that the Hearst has created a proprietary online video platform for the new subscription service. He says that the platform will be available to other publishers.
The new channel was announced earlier this month.
]]>But there may be a third way. “At Heart, we’ve merged the functions – programmatic, sales and ad ops are now one,” Hearst’s revenue platforms and operations VP Michael Smith told Beet.TV’s programmatic video leadership summit, presented by SpotXchange and hosted by The Hearst Corporation.
The New York Times is another example of a top publisher now embarking on programmatic selling in a way that is integrated with, not separated from, conventional ad sales, as its programmatic director also told Beet.TV’s summit.
Said Hearst’s Smith: “As I’ve observed it at other publishers, the unification of ad ops and programmatic selling is either pending or well along.”
]]>