In the new era of digital audio, advertisers are able to buy only those ads they know generate some kind of measured performance uplift.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lauren Russo, EVP, Managing Partner Audio Investment at the media agency Horizon Media, describes the trend.

Dial up results

“We have enhanced our performance audio capability,” Russo says. “We launched that last January. We’re going to clients with cost-per-acquisition deals, trying to frame deals around that.

“We’re building tools to measure that success and ultimately prove attribution related to that specific investment.”

Horizon Media is buying performance-based audio ads through Horizon Next, its division that is specific to performance buying across media types, and Big, its other agency devoted to buying outcome-based ads.

It is also using its Blue, an identity platform, to create audience identity segments.

“We only get paid based on performance – so we really see that as a big opportunity for the future,” Russo adds. “We think everything is moving in that direction and it’s all about attribution and results.”

Listen to this

Audio advertising is no longer just about radio. In-ear gadgets like AirPods, in-home smart speakers, in-car systems and a burgeoning podcasting ecosystem are driving up digital audio consumption.

According to latest The Infinite Dial report from Edison Research and Triton Digital in March:

• 37% of Americans age 12+ (104 million) listen monthly to podcasts, up from 32% in 2019.
• 62% of Americans use voice-operated assistants.
• 45% of Americans have listened to audio in a car through a cell phone.

According to The Smart Audio Report from Edison and NPR in April:

• 24% of American adults now have a smart speaker.
• 34% of non-owners said they were likely to buy a smart speaker within the next six months.
• 36% of smart speaker owners said they are using the device more for music and entertainment amid COVID-19, with 35% reporting the same for news and information.

The Infinite Dial 2020

Casting wide

Alongside the growth in listenership, audio publishers have been plugging in or building technology allowing them to recognize individual listener profiles and sell ads targeted to them – now even on a programmatic, automated basis.

Russo likes recent Apple Podcasts data quantifying global available podcast shows at around 900,000 – which, in theory, means a wider canvas against which to advertise – and she estimates that now having risen to 1.5 million.

But she says measuring podcast consumption remains challenging.

“The biggest challenge that I see exist in the podcasting space, there’s not a third party company that’s measuring audiences,” she says. “We’re using publishers first party data right now to get download information.

“We came up with an automated tool where we poll our publishers on a regular basis and we’re able to determine by vertical or genre what the best places to be are for our clients.”

Audio is hot

“We really view that as a complimentary experience, because the landscape is fragmented so much, it’s evolved so much,” Horizon’s Russo adds.

“And there’s just an opportunity for great reach and targetability when you blend those three platforms together.”

“Within broadcast, we do a lot of our transactions on iHeart Smart Audio platform for better targetability across various audience segments. And we also have that opportunity across all of our streaming partners as well.”

You are watching “Advertisers: Turn Up the Volume on Streaming Audio,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by TruOptik, a TransUnion company. For more videos, please visit this page.

But, as more opportunities are lit up to deliver targeted ads across the entire US, some are swallowing the challenges – whilst hoping for a more straightforward 2021.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Samantha Rose, Horizon Media SVP, Advanced TV & Video Solutions, says OTT has come a long way – and, yet, has a way to go.

National excitement

“I think OTT at this point is table stakes,” Rose says. “As consumption is shifting out of the linear space and into the non-linear space, OTT is where we know a lot of those eyeballs are headed. That was really incorporated into our media buys several years ago.”

Until now, it has mostly been offered by local cable operators, but growing capabilities from national operators are expanding the opportunity.

“National enablement really is going to increase the scale of the addressable marketplace very considerably,” Rose says. “It’s making the inventory on that other 14 minutes of inventory, of commercial inventory on national TV networks, addressably enabled.

“That’s going to make it a much larger landscape. It’s really exciting because it combines the scale and opportunity of national TV with the targetability that addressable has offered the past several years.”

Brands Coming Back To News: Horizon’s Koenigsberg

Fragmented landscape

That comes with its challenges, however. The more that agencies and brands lean into national-level addressable, as it rolls out, the more they have to struggle with a splintered market.

The problem, as Rose puts it, is having to buy in separate chunks – “a few million TV sets over here, a few million households over here”.

“Trying to bring that together and deliver back a media buy, a holistic media buy to a client, is much more challenging than when we were just buying linear across the total TV landscape,” she says.

Growth through simplicity

In November, eMarketer forecast connected TV ad spending will grow 40.1% in 2021, but less in later years, reaching $18.29 billion by 2021.

To boost growth, most people in the industry pine for simplification. So Rose is hoping for things to coalesce.

“It’s not completely standard yet,” she says. “It’s much more difficult and challenging to move forward from the advertiser’s perspective.

“There’s a lot of different vendors and a lot of different publishers in the mix. What we really need is standardisation, and really trying to wade through that and understand how to transact in that marketplace, it still remains to be seen.

“Standardisation is key. Collaboration is going to be what’s going to make it move forward.”

Closing the loop

As TV becomes connected, it becomes trackable, measurable in a way that traditional panels – premised on merely age and gender demographics – could not accommodate.

Closing the loop between TV ad exposure and viewers’ consequential actions could transform TV into a performance ad channel.

“Business outcome results and business outcome guarantees is something that’s absolutely a top of mind for us at Horizon,” Rose says. “We would love to be able to connect, not just guaranteeing that the audience are seeing our advertising, but that it’s actually delivering sales lift, location visits, brand health lifts, things like that.”

Addressable TV Can Overcome Challenges: Horizon Next’s Wallach-Baker

Rose says 2021 is likely to see a big solidification in such campaigns, after a 2020 when “outcomes” was high on the discussion agenda with clients.

“We had a lot of those business outcomes discussions in the works on behalf of our clients and with our partners, and unfortunately with everything else with 2020, that sort of paused because of everything that happened,” she says.

“2021 will be a good year to get back on track. For business outcome results, I could see that being huge.”

You are watching “An Open Ecosystem is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by DISH Media. For more videos, please visit this page.

Jo Ann Ross, president and chief advertising revenue officer at ViacomCBS domestic advertising sales, discusses how she and her teams have managed through the disruptions in this episode of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum.

Speaking to Bill Koenigsberg, the president, chief executive and founder of media services agency Horizon Media Inc., Ross talks about the uncertainties that started in mid-March when officials ordered many businesses to close down to suppress the spread of COVID-19. While many advertisers and media agencies have been working remotely for months, Ross has found a way maintain and even deepen connections with ViacomCBS’s clientele.

“We’ve all learned how important in this industry the value of these personal relationships that we’ve grown to nurture,” Ross, who last year became the first woman to lead an ad sales team at a broadcast network, said.  Supporting those relationships includes calling chief marketing officers at advertiser to reassure them that her company is there to help them.

“No one has been through a pandemic before,” Ross said. “I hope what we take away are the learnings that we listen more, we stay in touch more and that we really do work to help the clients solve the problems.”

You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB.  The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.

In March, many brands began using brand safety tools’ keyword blacklisting features to dodge ad inventory adjacent to coronavirus news, or simply pulled out of news altogether, fearing that association with downbeat stories would harm their brand.

But Bill Koenigsberg, CEO and Founder of Horizon Media, the largest independent media agency in the U.S., says things are improving.

“Early on in the first two weeks, when the predictions were out there with potentially a million people dying … marketers were very careful to stay out of that environment,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“The news is slowly getting better and a little bit more optimistic, you’re seeing more and more marketers gravitate back into the news environments.”

Returning to news

US virus deaths were 85,197 at time of writing, but the last few weeks have seen fewer daily deaths and a growing proportion of coronavirus patients recovering, according to statistics.

The whole episode has forced brands – and their agencies – to think on their feet.

“I think it took a couple of weeks for certain clients to realize they’ve got to change their messaging,” Koenigsberg says. “Now you have seen so much more supportive, caring, purposeful messaging out in the marketplace from a tonality standpoint.

“We have told our entire brand strategy teams and activation teams, ‘we’ve got to scrutinise every piece of creative that goes on the air to make sure that there cannot be any backlash from the tonality and the content within the messaging out there’.”

Koenigsberg says some marketers, early in the pandemic, got their creative messaging “tone-deaf”, but quickly improved to match the times.

Disconnected sentiment

Although Koenigsberg says marketers are coming back to news because the news is getting more positive, some studies show they need not have swerved news in the first place.

Results of a survey from March by Integral Ad Science (IAS) show:

• 58% of users were actively seeking out coronavirus news.
• 78% said their sentiment toward a brand placed in coronavirus news remained unchanged.
• But consumers believe the suitability of that placement depends on the brand.
• They have greater demand for messaging from health, pharmaceutical and government communicators.
• Travel and food-and-beverage ads are the biggest turn-offs for consumers.

In a follow-up study in April, IAS found:

• Aa 12% growth in consumers seeking out coronavirus content online
• 75% of consumers were actively seeking out news online, that’s 16% up from March, a huge jump.
• And there was a 27% growth in consumers actively seeking out news content
  due to coronavirus situation.
• 28% of consumers said they were unlikely to engage with an ad against coronavirus content.
• But a vast majority said that adjacency would not change their opinion of a brand.

Consumers’ views seem at odds with those of brands. In a March marketer survey from IAS:

• 61% of marketers said that the coronavirus situation is changing the types of content they are comfortable advertising alongside
• 49% of marketers said the they would be “concerned” if their ad appeared near coronavirus content online.

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.

Increasingly, a consensus for the way ahead looks like being “identity graphs”, software systems which offer up a PII-compliant way to use profiles on millions of consumers.

In the latest example, the media agency Horizon Media says it will use the identity graph products from TransUnion, the consumer identity data provider, to help deliver its clients’ ads at the person level.

Omni-channel

“The identity framework is really key to helping our brands build out their own internal CRM,” says Horizon’s chief data officer Laura McElhinney. “If they don’t have their own internal CRM, if they’re not data-rich, it gives them a baseline of data that is extremely rich … to formulate their target.

“It’s not just digital, it is truly omni-channel. It helps a full consumer journey, because it … it takes that ID… It carries it all the way through the consumer journey, all the way through to attribution.”

The largest privately-held agency, Horizon works with brands like Corona and Geico, managing over $8.7 billion in client investments.

The agency began working with TransUnion a year ago. It gets “deterministic” consumer profile data from TransUnion’s platform, which it augments with data from other sources to create enriched profiles on more than 280 million individuals.

Future of targeting

Identity graph technology has risen in the last five years as a means to tie together the multiple, dispersed facets of a consumer’s digital life in to a holistic database profile.

It works by forging connections between various authenticated user accounts, like credit card accounts or website accounts. Many believe that identity graphs go far beyond what cookies and single-device IDs offer as they are short-lived, don’t necessarily give a snapshot of an authenticated consumer and offer only a partial view.

“We knew two years ago that cookies were going to be going away and that we would need other ways to help enhance that consumer journey,” McElhinney adds.

“We’re able to take data, we’re able to come up with a better targeted segment, we’re able to help utilise that for content, to drive the content change that needs to happen in speed to market.”

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

Consulting is one of the many parts of Horizon’s business model, and it’s one where Williams sees a great opportunity. There are a lot of businesses whose core value propositions aren’t relevant or can’t exist right now because of COVID-19, so there’s a great need for realizing a marketing and communications strategy that helps to pivot their business in an effective way.

“For us, there are countless brands that have been sidelined because of this pandemic,” Williams says. “And instead of it being kind of a management of a portfolio of media investments, it becomes kind of a consultative approach to understanding the business viability and the opportunity to shift strategy from an operations standpoint.”

For many brands who have relied heavily on sporting events to stay relevant and convey value, Williams said that they have had to reimagine how to pivot these brands to get in front of the right audience and keep the scale and volume required to drive the same level of success.

“It’s been a lot of optimizing around consumer behavior – leaning into digital channels,” Williams says. “And then it’s been a lot of pivoting around messaging so that there’s something more relevant and potentially less opportunistic to share out during this sensitive period of time.”

One example that Williams gives is brands shifting the focus of TV ads from a promotional value proposition to providing more consumer options around things like payment flexibility or low-contact delivery.

Some brands, however, have been fully sidelined by COVID-19, and Williams says that this is a problem across the industry. Still, many of the responses from advertisers have been unsurprising.

“You’ve seen folks gravitate towards more measurable and accountable channels,” Williams says. “We’ve seen some drop off in traditional media; we’ve seen some recovery in what have historically been referred to as lower-funnel marketing activities including affiliate marketing and surge marketing and to a lesser extent social marketing as well. I think you’re going to see folks gravitate towards those types of performance-related channels because they’re flexible and they’re dynamic both on the messaging side of things and on the media side of things.”

These lower-risk advertisements give way to a great importance around measurement and data. Williams says that all of the data and performance-based parts of Horizon Media are high traffic right now because marketers are needing greater insight more than ever. While these insights won’t be fully clear until the third quarter, Williams has already picked up on some trends.

“I think you’re going to see people really lean into some of the behaviors we’re seeing including connected and OTT inventory really spiking,” Williams says. “Marketers are going to figure out how to use dynamic assets in those environments in a scalable way so that spend should pick up pretty quickly as well.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

“Vevo is reflective of a multicultural shift, when you look at their content and their users. We know that for Hispanics and African Americans, music is a huge passion point. To be able to engage them in that environment, that’s a factor,” Dobarro says in an interview with Beet.TV.

Music videos also represent the short-form content that Dobarro says is consumed by multicultural consumers, particularly on mobile, more so than other groups. Working with Vevo extends Horizon’s clients reach beyond linear and other traditional content outlets. Buying across linear, digital and OTT platforms is key, Dobarro says, to fully encompassing where audiences today are consuming content.

Having a presence on Vevo is just the start. Targeting the right audiences in accordance to who brands are trying to reach puts ad dollars to better use. On Vevo, Dobarro breaks down audience targeting capabilities in three ways.

• By genre: Brands can target ads by specific genre, including Latin music or Regional Mexican, according to Dobarro.
• By artist: Take the Super Bowl for example. A brand with an ad buy could also make a targeted playlist including halftime performers and Latina artists Shakira and Jennifer Lopez to augment linear spend.
• By context: Contextual targeting, specifically by language and culture, helps brands connect with customers in the right setting. “We know language is important to the multicultural consumer and the Hispanic consumer in particular, and for younger Hispanics they’re trying to retain and sustain their culture and language,” says Dobarro. “Music oftentimes is that gateway to be able to connect with that culture.”

Horizon Media’s approach is to define audience insights before designing a media plan, so that it’s better understand what group an ad or campaign is trying to reach. Then, with that background information, Vevo’s targeting capabilities can match Horizon’s audience to its own. Using this strategy to define and target multicultural groups, Dobarro says, is necessary.

“As the US becomes more diverse, we’re seeing marketers realizing they need to speak to these multicultural segments,” she says. “They are not only growing in size and economic power but also in influence. For a brand, if they’re looking to grow as a business, they need to be speaking to these segments.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s leadership series Vevo Everywhere: Evolving Content Distribution.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

Kim says that the availability of new data sets has helped their corner of the industry, especially as they’ve found their footing with tune-in marketing.

“Not only now can we actually get feedback on a more granular tactic-level basis,” says Kim. “But now we can actually action on those things.”

Kim points out that the availability of A+E Network’s data has been a huge advantage, saying “It’s pretty rare that a brand is sharing access with their agency partners, but that’s been a great opportunity for us.”

Taylor adds that the flexibility goes both ways, and Horizon’s ability to see what sticks keeps both parties moving forward.

“They’re not plug and play,” says Taylor. “They’re not continuing the same way we used to as things are changing, they’re really at the forefront of trying and learning new stuff.”

Kim says that this is all possible because of A+E Network’s patience, their efforts in providing as much data and transparency as possible, and their desire to continue building up their database in both digital and linear.

But this partnership doesn’t come without new challenges. While both Kim and Taylor are optimistic, Taylor explains that tune-in makes immediate decision-making more difficult.

“I think the biggest challenge about tune-in marketing is that the show has to premiere, and then it’s premiered, and then you have to get the data, and it either comes back the next week or it doesn’t.” Taylor says. “It is hard getting the data and turning it around fast enough to make actionable insights immediately.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

At the Beet Retreat in New York City in November, hosted by Horizon Media, Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz spoke to a panel of women currently navigating advertising’s continuing changes: Kim Norris, gvp of digital and advanced advertising sales at Spectrum Reach; Caroline Horner, svp of product management at 605; and Samantha Rose, svp of video at Horizon Media all discussed how data has changed the advertising industry, the challenges it’s raised, and what’s still to come.

“We’ll see evolution across all verticals”
Norris says that right now, “demand outstrips supply” when it comes to advanced advertising, but that the marketplace is catching up through experimentation and learning. As first-party data for tune-in viewership data has changed how tune-in marketing operates, “we’ll see evolution across all the verticals,” Norris says.

Horner, who saw through early digital advertising models during the dot com boom before moving on to positions on both sides of the market. Most significantly so far, Horner says, data and attribution marketing has changed the role of the marketer.

“It was incredible to see how fast real, deterministic data affected the marketer. We had to re-up relationships and sales processes because they saw real data,” says Horner. “That delight and experience – you know you’ve made a difference and that’s what data has done. We’ve been riding that over the last 15 years.”

Growing pains
While data has infiltrated advertising strategies, Horner’s observed that the sell side has been slower to adapt to new capabilities and approaches influenced by data. While marketers on the buy side quickly realized how data was making advertising work better for them – and how the money would follow – Horner says the sell side had to be “dragged into it,” but are now used to “heavier and heavier analytics.”

But when the agency’s jobs depend on convincing networks, platforms and marketers that the data will help, the stakes are high, says Rose. “What we don’t want to do is have something not work and then deter someone from moving forward. In this more addressable [market], whether it’s MVPD or digital, a wasted impression is wasted. In this area where we’re growing we want to get it right.”

Data-specializing partners, like Ampersand and 605, can help add a support network with the goal of getting advertising from operating like one-to-many fishnet to a one-to-one fishing line, says Swartz.

Where it’s headed
Rose adds that while one-to-one remains a goal to reach, addressable is still in its infancy, and some brands are looking for the mass reach that linear TV provides. “I hate to say it cause it’s a term we always use, but it’s not one size fits all,” she says.

As the space does mature, Horner notes that trust is going to be one of the most important factors when it comes to data sharing and making sure customers aren’t concerned about privacy. That will entail working with the right partners and legitimizing the industry and, as Norris adds, setting standards.

“We have to get standards,” she says. “We need to make sure we have clear definitions, that it’s as standard as possible.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

In a panel dubbed “Finding A Path to Deterministic TV” at Beet Retreat In The City, Laura McElhinney, Chief Data Officer, Horizon Media, explained how her agency is adapting.

McElhinney told Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz how Horizon is seeing challenges and opportunities thrown up by advanced TV advertising capabilities.

Challenge: Data view needed

Advanced TV demands a holistic sight of audience behavior data from across multiple channels. But McElhinney said Horizon doesn’t always get sufficient sight of data to construct the optimal campaign.

“We have to break down the silos,” she said. “The problem is, is that everyone’s working in their own silo and you’re not able, from an agency standpoint, to bring all that data together and to look at it.

“It really helps us really look at the measurement across the ecosystem instead of just looking at one channel or something that’s happening in one area.”

Opportunity: Incentivised

But McElhinney said Horizon is responding to the wish of some clients to change the pricing model for performance-driven advertising.

In other words, she is happy for Horizon to be part part of its fee based on the real, attributable outcomes it can provably generate for brand clients

“We’re driving a lot of our clients more towards that shared risk, shared reward, which is helping to change the KPIs and changing what we look at from a currency standpoint,” she said.

Asked by Swartz if that meant clients are incentivizing Horizon on performance, she said: “Of course. Yeah. We are (open to that). It’s not a one-size-fits-all. You have to play all sides of the coin.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

In conversation with Furious Corp. founder and CEO Ashley Swartz at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media, the agency’s evp and co-chief investment officer David Campanelli said that the top of the funnel still matters. Relying too much on data can leave a portion of potential customers off the table.

“As we get more specific and more addressable in media, do we lose that reach aspect, particularly in linear TV? What [linear TV] does well is reach massive amounts of people at one time with a 30-second ad,” Campanelli told Swartz. “Going too far down the addressable road, you’ll miss segments of the population that are potential consumers. There is still a role for that.”

The key, Campanelli says, is finding a way to make decisions using both traditional metrics, like Nielsen, and advanced TV metrics that paint more specific portraits of the customer. The more those two sides of the customer data coin – which incorporate top-to-bottom of the funnel reach – can merge, the more value that will be created, he argues.

And of course, as the top metric for Horizon Media is to drive business outcomes for clients, the value of the media buy has to match up for premium prices. As more agencies, including Horizon Media, build out their own data systems, the price of services increase. The investment has to be worth it, but Campanelli says the shift in emphasis from third- to first-party data is only going to continue.

“What we’re learning more and more is first-party data – good, valuable first-party data – is the holy grail, the way to go,” says Campanelli. “Third-party data is not as accurate as we had hoped. Leaning more into first-party matches and developing our own Horizon data practice and platform to match that and push that out to vendors is where we think it’s going in the future.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“There’s a new trade article every day about a new vendor or a new offering, especially with streaming wars and everything that’s happening there,” says Rose. “Our purpose is really trying to make it something that everybody can understand, and then [determining] how we activate in that space. Not just what it is, but how do we advertise in that area.”

While the instinct is to stay ahead of the curve and chase after advanced TV capabilities and streaming platforms, Rose stresses the importance of not undermining the power that linear TV still offers.

“We know ratings are diminishing, but we do also know that many times those audiences are moving towards the same premium long-form content, just within other platforms,” says Rose. “So we know that dollars and the health of the marketplace might be disparate and might revert off into OTT, but it will be a long time before linear TV goes away completely if ever.”

Rose explains that the sweet spot is finding the happy medium between more addressable models and the ways that long-form content plays out on streaming outlets.

“If you’re looking at OTT, especially with the release of Disney+ and Peacock, those are still largely kind of long-form TV platforms,” says Rose. “But TV now is really going to be addressable, so it’s OTT and addressable and bringing together new data and new platforms and it’s going to be a whole new world for us.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

But television may now be pulling back some of that ad spend, because the old dog is learning new tricks.

“Several years ago there was a big move towards the digital side of things and spending. I think that balanced back,” says David Campanelli.

He should know. As EVP and co-chief investment officer for the advertising agency Horizon Media, Campanelli is responsible for the ad spending decisions of account clients likeWeight Watchers Burger King, Corona, LG, Little Caesars and Capital One.

“Now it’s a little bit more about, ‘How can we use TV more intelligently to target our audiences?’,” he says. “I think that the budgets have found their levels across different media types. Really now it’s about trying to find smarter ways to use linear TV, smarter ways to use OTT, which is a relatively new platform, to deliver that audience.”

If Campanelli’s own spending patterns are playing out industry-wide, they are not yet visible in available data.

eMarketer projects 2020 US TV linear and broadcast ad spend will grow 1% – but thanks to it being both an election year and an Olympics year. Thereafter, the forecast is for a 1% decline in each of the three years to 2023 – the main rationale being the rate at which viewers are cutting the cord for subscription, ad-free video services.

Still, that migration could exist alongside the trend in which linear TV is gaining new super-powers – namely, the ability to

• target ads at individual households
• control the frequency with which they are seen
• plan campaigns seamlessly across platforms, including TV
• discover audience outcomes that occurred as a result of a TV ad

Horizon is pushing more clients’ ad spending in to this data-infused reincarnation of television because it offers such features.

The agency began its journey with the medium by leveraging third-party data sales houses to uncover the right audiences for its brands.

Then it graduated to building its own data platform, used to plan all its buying in the marketplace using digital identities

Even so, Campanelli can see the risk in excessive precision-targeting.

“With better targeting becomes more narrow audiences and more narrow reach of your buys,” he says. I think there’s a risk of going too narrow, too addressable, and not having that broad reach.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

And some agencies are stepping up to demand that proof as a baseline.

Case in point: Horizon Media, the large independent agency. In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Campanelli, Horizon Media EVP, says attribution technology is vital to demonstrating to brands the effectiveness of TV ad spend.

“TV (and) video needs to prove that they’re effective and … which elements of most of these networks’ portfolios are most effective to drive our business,” Campanelli says.

“So all the work being done on the attribution side is really exciting. It’s still very early stages and even the best out there still have a long way to go, but it’s certainly headed in the right direction.”

Attribution happens when systems which track audiences’ online interactions or even eventual purchases can draw a line back to the same people’s exposure to an advertisement.

It promises to answer John Wanamaker’s historic quandary: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Agencies like Horizon are now weighing up different technology providers’ strengths and weaknesses when it comes to attribution.

“Some of the TV and/or internet providers that have the either set-top box and/or IP-based information, and/or both, really can drive a lot of attribution,” Campanelli says.

“We can understand what people are watching through either smart TV or set-top box data and then understand their web behavior through an IP versus cookies, to show that someone saw a spot and they later took an action, and the action we wanted them to take.”

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

Many third-party ad vendors have been moving in the same direction, touting “outcome-based attribution.

“Now it’s time to start asking our immediate partners to … actually put the money where their mouth is, so to speak, and guarantee those results … and not just the eyeballs,” says Campanelli in this video interview with Beet.TV

Campanelli will be speaking on a panel at AT&T-owned Xandr’s Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara on September 17.

But outcome-based ad buying isn’t just for the future. Campanelli says this method was already “a big part of our conversations (with sellers) in this past up-front”, the season when publishers tout their upcoming content slate in order to secure forward-looking at deals.

“We have, with several major network groups, set up the framework for business outcome deals,” he says.

What’s an “outcome”? That varies by client. Some want to achieve a website visit, others want to generate an actual consumer transaction. Attribution technology, which can measure the ad exposures which led up to those actions and draw a line between the events, promises to be the glue which enables those KPIs.

But Campanelli acknowledges the industry won’t flip to outcome-based buying overnight. He sees a two-year lead-up that is in-play:

• Year one: “Monitoring, attribution, understanding how, when you pull different levers, you get different results or better results, hopefully.
• Year two: “Year two is a guarantee of that result or an improvement on that result. Networks’ vendors are guaranteeing those results.

“It’s really a fairly long road, intentionally, because it is not a quick-solution space,” he adds. “It’s something that takes a long time, and it is challenging to get up and running and get running properly, because we want to make sure we’re doing it right.”

Note:  Beet.TV will cover the conference as part of a sponsorship arrangement with Xandr. 

When it first reared its head, the automated ad trading model was more commonly thought of as a way to sell unsold inventory. Now that has changed, with new technologies offering ad buyers the ability to sell automatically from a smaller and more controlled group of publishers.

Still, at Horizon Media, the agency’s trading desk wants to combine “premium” with continuing to buy from open ad exchanges. So, how will Monica Capelan pull it off?

“Clients always want to be in the most premium areas that they can be against,” says the VP of Sales Planning for Horizon’s HX, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“So I think the more open conversations we have with SSPs and the more open conversations we have with optimizing those SSPs to make sure that we are in the best environment possible… I think that that’s really the next step for us when we’re working with these clients.”

When Capelan started four years ago, HX was just four people. Fast-forward, and the unit has now reached 45 – an indication, she says, of the growing zeal with which ad buyers want to conduct automatically.

And HX will continue automating through the typical systems with which programmatic has grown up.

“I would say 80% to 90% of our buys are open exchange,” Capelan adds. “We prefer to have the decisioning power in our hands. Certain channels like CTV (connected TV) where you can only engage in a PMP (private marketplace), that’s where we’ll have to beat PMP only.

“But, unless a client has a specific site or specific reason that they need to be executing on a specific site, we prefer open exchange buys.”

Capelan is encouraged to do so because verification partners and pre-bid solutions have made life easier.

Next up, she is hoping industry consolidation can reduce the number of supply-side platforms she has to work with.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic.   For more videos, please visit this page.

“We’ve entered into a new era where people are not buying platforms. It’s not just TV is the only game in town,” Daigle says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re really looking to buy outcomes. You want to make sure that your local grocery chain or furniture store is actually making money, their businesses are thriving.”

Noting that media agency Horizon Media recently indicated a preference for 50% of its TV buys to be based on business outcomes over the next several years, Daigle adds, “That’s a big challenge for the agencies and I think the media community at large. But it’s indicative of where our clients are expecting us to go and so where we’re focused on going.”

In April, TEGNA disclosed that it had chosen Alphonso’s data and analytics to show the effectiveness of linear TV and OTT, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. That followed months of pilot testing that have produced encouraging results, according to Daigle.

“It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” she says.

The three KPI’s that TEGNA can now track are reach extension, website traffic and retail visitation using information about viewer location.

Alphonso uses data from smart TV’s in more than 30 million households to give a second-by-second view of where national ads appear and alongside which programs, among other insights. In Houston, for example, Alphonso’s footprint is some 800,000 households while Nielsen measures 800, according to Daigle.

“The amount of data is just mind boggling, so that’s one of the reasons we’re partnering with them.”

A standard local TV buy might reach one million households on linear, 200,000 on OTT “and maybe low single digits, four percent of TV viewers also saw OTT.” This shows 160,000 incremental homes by adding OTT. “It’s a pretty compelling case for why you need both.”

At this point, there’s far more data to corral beyond the three main KPI’s than can be used easily and instantly.

“Our goal is to make this really simple,” Daigle explains. “I don’t want to get kicked out of a car dealership by making it too complicated. It’s not a one-stop-shop solution. We’re not going to run a campaign, get the results and then turn everything we’ve ever known around just based on these results.”

While digital media like social and search are constantly being optimized based on ad results, “if every month we’re able to make tweaks here or there and increase the yields of all of our clients’ campaigns, they’ve been pretty excited about that idea.”

This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion. Premion is a unit of TEGNA. 

Despite early skepticism about the potential for ad-supported OTT services, they continue to emerge and find consumer acceptance, the SVP of Video Investment & Horizon Advanced says in this interview with Beet.TV. But OTT is far from being fully penetrated.

“All of those things aggregated together are at scale, but many people only have one service or two services and we know many people don’t even have an OTT device in their home yet.”

So it’s still far easier to manage ad spending and frequency with traditional linear TV, according to Rose. “It’s much harder to do that in the OTT environment.”

Horizon looks at OTT in two ways, first being a traditional content play. “We need to buy This Is Us whenever somebody’s watching This Is Us. We want to capture the This Is Us consumer,” Rose says. Then there’s the ability to more precisely target certain viewing segments and buy through a “digital lens” and “managing those two buys together.

She cites data overload as a particularly high hurdle, even for something as seemingly simple as targeting audiences based on household income. “There’s many different ways that you can get at that, and which is the most valid way of doing that.”

With many tools for measuring front- and back-end campaign elements, Rose is eager to see the syndication this fall of Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings. “We think that’s going to help us wrap our arms a little bit better around the true potential reach of OTT, whereas before it’s kind of been a little bit of a black box.”

Asked about ad loads on OTT and linear, she anticipates an “evening out” for the viewing experiencer. “But we’re a long way from that.”

While interactive TV has been around for a long time from the likes of TiVo, improved technology and remote-control usage are making it more seamless to navigate, according to Rose.

She acknowledges that addressable TV has its advantages but many advertisers still want to reach mass audiences for broad reach and brand building. By focusing too narrowly on audience segments “you’re maybe missing out on your future customer.”

This videos is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform,   For more interviews, please visit this page.   This series is presented by Premion.

“Looking at a deterministic ID needs to be the way that we move,” McElhinney explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.

As part of that push, the media agency has been working on a new entity called Big, which Advertising Age reports will operate under a 100% performance-based model. It’s part of Horizon’s quest to have more than half of its ad deals to be guaranteed on business outcomes within the next three to five years.

“We want to make sure that we’re spending our money in the right way and that we’re reaching our audience effectively, that we’re not overdoing it, that we’re not saturating it so much that they’re leaving the brand, that we’re upsetting them,” says McElhinney.

Asked about the availability of targeting data, she says it’s still not easy enough to obtain.

“Not all of our vendors are going to give us back the data that we need, and not all of our clients will even give us first-party data to the point that it would be super helpful to us.”

With the 2019 television Upfront events already under way, McElhinney believes they are still an essential ritual. “The Upfronts aren’t going to go away. Relationships are very important, those conversations up front are very important. Reach frequency doesn’t go away, impressions and GRP’s don’t go away,” she says.

What has been changing “is that we have more data available to us that we can now marry that with that way of buying, that way of approaching the TV audience.” More data available will help to inform deterministic ID’s and “get more addressable, get more targeted to a tighter audience. As opposed to just throwing a big net over it.”

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

Combining Xandr’s content assets with tech and ad delivery “is an exciting way to build an offering that hits both sides. It’s not just data and tech and targeting and it’s not just the content side. It’s a good marriage of both,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.

Asked about the broader application of addressable TV advertising, Campanelli notes that Horizon isn’t in the camp of those who believe that all TV will be addressable in the future. He sees it more as a complement to TV’s broad reach.

“Addressable is incredibly important and it’s going to play a bigger role as time goes on and an increasingly important role,” he says.

But there is a caveat in the use of TV’s reach to influence people who may not be aware of particular brands. “The value is reaching consumers who are not in your target today but could be tomorrow. Or someone who is not in your target but could be a word of mouth to someone who’s in your target.

“So there’s a value in reaching people outside of your target and addressability is about just reaching that target effectively. They’ll to coexist together but we don’t see a world where it’s entirely addressable.”

How much of TV will be linear versus on demand is a different question to Campanelli, who nonetheless says the ability to reach mass audiences is crucial. “Addressable is a critical complement to that but it’s not the way that all of television should work.”

To fully understand the rapidly evolving TV space, Horizon formed a unit several years ago called Horizon Advance to explore addressable, third-party programmatic TV vendors like Simulmedia and new techniques like data matching.

“It’s a complicated space. We learned it and we had to immerse ourselves to learn it.”

As opposed to an activation team, Horizon Advance is more consultative for clients and other in-house teams. “It’s been a huge asset to Horizon and our clients,” says Campanelli.

This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.

Horizon’s client roster includes A&E Networks, Scripps and Turner, in whose category “in terms of driving viewership and tune-in to programs that we’ve seen a lot of success with addressable TV because you can really hone in a specific audience,” O’Connor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You can really identify who the target is, see how that target performed when you delivered the message and then also see how that target performed when you didn’t deliver the message. We’ve seen that there can be a lift of twenty, thirty percent in terms of tune-in, which is obviously a huge lift when you’re trying to drive next day ratings.”

For clients in other categories, addressable is not as easy a sell. It all begins by deciding on particular campaign results, according to O’Connor.

“We have to dig in and look at the target we’re trying to reach. Is it worth going the addressable route? Is there enough waste there? Is there a specific enough target that we can deliver a message to, or are we okay with kind of the spillover into a larger buy?”

Although advertising inventory of the various virtual MVPD’s is “still a pretty small portion of the overall universe,” it does have its values.

“We do have clients that are reaching out and buying those specifically, particularly a lot of our digital-first accounts, whether it’s ecommerce or brands like that. We use that to drive down costs to some degree,” says O’Connor.

He sees huge opportunity for the VMVPD’s “particularly when you think about something like a DISH and a Sling, is where you can supplement something like an addressable TV buy and you can use the Sling as a portion or complement to what you’re doing through the traditional or satellite set-top box.”

A constant thread regardless of the platform is more advanced audience targeting. “I don’t think that there are many advertisers out there saying ‘just give me adults eighteen to forty-nine,” says O’Connor.

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

His take on the media supply chain strikes a familiar and recurring refrain. “When you think about all the people that touch that food chain, we’ve got to get to a much better place in terms of performance metrics and transparency,” Koenigsberg says.

He defines transparency as “all sides sharing information. If we can get to the that place, I believe that the seller community, the publishers, the linear TV suppliers, the other platforms will end up all working toward business outcome solutions for clients.”

Koenigsberg differs from many in advertising and media who have been advocating for a uniform way to measure campaigns across media and platforms. He envisions a far more fluid landscape.

“You may end up having 100 different metrics, all these different KPI’s, but that’s fine. I think AI will help that. And if we can move in that direction, that’s where the world needs to go. That’s where the business needs to go.”

After building Horizon for the past 29 years based on an integrated business service model rather than the a la carte offerings of the biggest holding companies, Koeingsberg’s creation is now ranked #2 in the U.S. in terms of scale. However, with the rise of digital media, scale isn’t the be-all-end-all it was touted to be a decade or so ago.

“I’d rather be ranked in terms of being best in general as opposed to scale, because I don’t think scale says it all,” he says.

He ticks off a list of holding company legacy shortcomings and figures that the model he chose happens to be “the model of today.” But he’s not fully satisfied.

While being consistent has helped, “If anybody thinks that once they’ve reached that plateau they can rest on their laurels, that’s the time to change. We are relooking at our whole structure today.”

If he were to start from scratch, he’d want even more integration. “I believe that our teams should be led by business solution experts. I believe that the business solution expert should own everything. Content, data analytics, insights, tactical planning, data analysis with one cohesive integrated group.”

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.

“Talent today in my opinion is a culture game,” Koenigsberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, a conversation in which he also shares his views on the present market dominance of Facebook and Google and why he thinks Amazon is most worth watching.

As he discusses the evolution of advertising and media agency holding companies, Koenigsberg recalls a decentralized approach consisting of “a ton of companies, not integrated but selling all kinds of different services. And when you think about companies that are completely integrated and non-siloed, it’s the antithesis I think of a holding company.”

Of the genesis of Horizon, he adds, “We didn’t build the company by buying a whole bunch of different companies that have competing interests.”

The industry talent pool consists of “smart kids” with “lots of choices.” So getting the most qualified ones to join a media agency is easier said than done.

“But we’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle with the pocketbook of Google and Facebook and Amazon and some of the other tech companies,” says Koenigsberg. “I believe that our industry has to somehow figure out an enormous pivot if we are going to get the best and the brightest in our industry.”

In a week that saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining his company to Congress, Koenigsberg observes that nothing is static and that the business world constantly moves.

“There are some storm clouds over Facebook right now. How are they going to deal with their data play in the future. There are some big storm clouds with Google with regard to brand safety and their data play and where are they going to be in the future.”

Nonetheless, he doesn’t count out media companies with a presence in linear and digital as they consolidate, build out digital ecosystems and invest in subscription services and other forms of entertainment to drive scale.

“So I think that Facebook and Google will be chipped away at over the next five years. They’re not going to have the hold on the ecosystem that I think people think they will have,” Koenigsberg says.

He thinks Amazon in particular is one to watch because of its ability to continue to scale, the data and information it has on purchasing power and “the fact that they’re getting into every business under the sun, including the content business.”

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Announced today at the 4A’s Accelerate conference, the APB “came up as a very natural discussion around something that we call the code of decency,” Louis Jones, EVP, Media & Data at the 4A’s, says in this interview with Beet.TV. “There ought to be a base level for brand safety.”

Founding members of the APB include executives from Dentsu Aegis Network, GroupM, Havas Media, Horizon Media, IPG Mediabrands, MDC Partners, Omnicom Media Group and Publicis Media. Each holding company—as well as Horizon Media—has committed to dedicating a Brand Safety Leader within its network to serve on the bureau.

“We are creating a database where everybody can report in and say, ‘Hey, I’m the person from Dentsu Aegis and I just saw some of your Publicis brands in places where you don’t want them,” Jones says. “And then that information gets shared so that everyone can collectively act and keep every brand potentially, every major brand in the marketplace, safe.”

The formation of the APB is the first step in a list of actions that nearly 100 4A’s members and industry leaders “outlined and rallied around” at the Advertising Assurance Forum, a closed-door event hosted by the 4A’s on March 19, according to a 4A’s release.

Additional next steps outlined under the Advertising Assurance initiative include:

• Develop a risk management module. The APB will work with advertisers to 
develop categorizations of risk across a spectrum from most safe to least safe.

• Create a code of decency. Working with the Media Rating Council, Inc., APB agencies will help establish a set of ground rules that align baseline expectations for safety through a new set of standards within the MRC’s Brand Safety Guidelines, currently in initial draft. “Down the road, media agencies will also work with the MRC to identify efforts and methodologies to mitigate fake news,” states the 4A’s release.

• Educate the ecosystem. The APB will develop an industry playbook that will include new standards, metrics, methodologies and tools to combat unsafe environments for both brands and consumers.

Working with the MRC will help agencies understand “what are all the things we can do as an industry, from a perspective of how can technology be better, how can it be more specific, what is the role that human intervention plays in terms of understanding levels of risk and inappropriateness,” Jones says.

This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Horizon Media national TV SVP David Campanelli tells Beet.TV the company is using ad tech vendor Rovi’s Ad Optimizer tool together with ad spots on A+E Networks: “We’re going to take portions of our upfront spend on the books now, run that through the tool to optimizer against a higher index to reach our target customer for that particular advertiser.”

Campanelli likes the tool because “it’s built by people thinking from a TV standpoint, not from a digital standpoint and trying to translate that to TV”.

But Campanelli sees “programmatic TV” as meaning automation, data targeting and real-time optizisation of a schedule and dynamic ad insertion. But, on the latter, he says: “TV doesn’t work that way. We can’t have full programmatic until we have the ability to dynamically insert ads. That is a way off from a technology standpoint.”

Campanelli was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.