“It’s a hope,” he says. “I’ve always been surprised that the advertisers have not forced Facebook to be more collaborative. It’s really different to play in a planning space versus retain the necessary data to drive yield on an individual deal.
“I think it’s really important that every publisher realise you’ve got to play for planning, but … it’s not going to diminish your ability to actually use data to drive yield.”
Previously chief research officer at Turner, Shimmel left in 2018 to form his own consultancy.
He has previously published work showing how consumers are willing to give up more of their data than is commonly assumed.
But now Shimmel sees a problem.
“We, (in the industry), have is a big willingness to pay for currency transaction data, but no willingness to pay for great planning data sets,” he says. “If we’re ever going to get convergence right, there’s going to be this massive data set that is used just for planning.
“It links into Hulu’s inventory, it links into Roku’s inventory, it’s able to see what Ampersand has from cable addressable, and then it has linear on top of it, so it could actually then be used to plan effectively.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>The ability of marketers to target individual viewing households with specific messaging seems revolutionary. But, though it has existed for several years now and though consumer technology deployment is wider than ever, discussions from successive Beet Retreats suggest some advertisers are still getting up to speed, and are still yet to be convinced.
eMarketer recently revised down its 2019 forecast for US addressable TV ad spending, from the earlier $2.54bn to $2bn. The earlier forecast had pegged addressable spending at just 3.7% of total US TV ad spend in 2019.
As connected TV ad spending continues to grow — addressable TV ad spending is slowing down. Check out eMarketer's revised forecast. #DigitalMarketing #ProgrammaticMarketing pic.twitter.com/ZJwfn7rd1V
— IXS Performs (@ixsperforms) June 28, 2019
Whilst that was attributed to connected TV platforms gaining a faster share of spend than traditional MVPD platforms will, we continue to hear brand views at both ends of the spectrum… from skepticism that addressable presents any brand benefits, to brands needlessly hoping to fine-target audiences.
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, an executive from a company which has been a canary in the mineshaft for addressable TV said he sees varied willingness on the part of brands.
Marc Cestaro, MODI Media addressable lead, was interviewed by Howard Shimmel, president of Janus Strategy & Insights.
“Whether clients are willing to abandon or learn something new is kind of where (growth) lies.
“I think it’s just (about needing) a unified march to understand and push and accept that it is fragmented, but it’s really not that hard.”
“People tried this (technique) three or four years ago and say it didn’t work or it was too complicated, (but) it’s totally different now. We’re not reinventing the wheel, but it’s just, with repetition, comes ease.”
“Another misconception is, (when marketers say), ‘My brand is not fit for addressable because my target is very broad’. And, I’m not going to say that’s not true, but it’s all about how you look at it…
“If I own a tissue company … would it make sense to target that (precision) way? (No), everybody’s using tissues. But, within that, you can have a subset:
“I think we’ve kind of moved beyond the challenges that were just six months away.”
Asked to rate advertisers’ acceptance of the tactic, Cestaro rated it four out of five on average.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is the view of a company that has long offered the infrastructure for local TV networks’ ad management around the US. But now WideOrbit wants to service ad buyers, too.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Zinsmeister, WideOrbit chief revenue officer, says the “spot” TV ad market in the US is “haemorrhaging” money, down from $18 billion to $16 billion [source unknown], “because it’s not super-accessible”.
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
Now WideOrbit is bringing workflow automation to spot TV advertising. It wants to speed up the old manual system in which an ad buyer passes campaign requirements to a buying representative, on to stations and back to the buyer.
WideOrbit’s Zinsmeister spoke with Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
“If you really kind of look beneath the covers, when (ad buyers) say, ‘I don’t buy local (TV ads)’, it’s because it wasn’t accessible. Now I think we’re going to change that.
“We’ve spent 20 years putting everybody on a similar platform, now we’re really doing cool stuff to be able to leverage that. We’re working directly with Hudson MX and Mediaocean, the big buying systems that the buyers are utilizing.”
“The problem with local, at least in spot (ads) and to some degree local cable as well, is an agency is working at a 2% or less profit margin. It works really well, the brands want it. It’s a fantastic medium, but it costs so much to transact it.
“Data providers, buy-side systems, sell-side systems, we’re now working together to communicate information that reduces discrepancies, and more importantly, the time that it takes to transact. ”
“They don’t see the performance until way after the campaign, so you don’t get that level of attribution.
“By putting everybody on a similar footprint, by now working with the buy-side systems instead of competing with them, we’re providing really fast access, both for traditional buyers and also for folks like Google.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.
What is it going to take for the addressable opportunity to be realized at greater scale, across the country?
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a panel of executives was asked by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel how to make national addressable sing…
“There is not a scale problem with addressability,” Bologna said. “There are 60 plus, 70 million households where you can dynamically insert an ad to a household. It is with the local two minutes per hour. It is system by system. That’s not a longterm scalable model in order for it to really scale.
“National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
“We are working with one of the largest chip set manufacturers globally, media tech and which to embed our technology directly into smart TV chip sets,” Abcarian said. “We are working alongside directly the OEMs in which to better our tech directly into their software layer.
“All of this enables you to unlock all 16 minutes in real-time.”
“We believe has been holding back linear addressable … is a lack of technology and tool sets that really fit within the seller’s workflow,”said Amobee’s Daft.
“It’s not enough to just have a linear addressable insertion technology or have data technology. It has to be linked together with the sales process, which has to do with making them confident to be able to sell that inventory.”
“If they all work in a different way, if 50 different networks are treating at addressable or a dynamic ad insertion differently, then it’s just going to be the same mess we have right now with seven different MVPDs – just four times worse,” said one2one’s Bologna. “And that’s not going to make it any easier for buyers and agencies and advertisers.”
Bologna said addressable ads could end up commanding much greater returns overall.
“In an addressable world, you could take that unit and you could sell 20, 30, 40% of that unit at three or four times that CPM to multiple different advertisers,” he said.
“Then, of, course you have what’s left over that you would then ultimately sell at perhaps a 10, 15, 20% discount. The net-net in a perfect world would turn into a 10, 15, 20 perhaps 50, 60% increase in the overall value of the unit. So. instead of the network collecting $2,000 for the unit, they end up collecting $3,200 for a unit.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>As US TV viewership declines, more companies are coming to think of the new capability of advanced viewer targeting as a way to ratchet up advertiser value from those viewers who remain.
“Generating incremental ratings is very hard because of the hyper-competitive environment with SVOD and other other forms,” says Howard Shimmel of Janus Strategy & Insights in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“What addressability allows a media company to do is potentially drive some new top line revenue, even if their ratings may be going down. So, now is a time the market needs to move fast.”
Shimmel is an ad veteran of AOL, Nielsen and Turner who has now formed his own consultancy.
He says three trends have recently commingled to light up a new opportunity for television – traditionally, a top-of-funnel, brand-building marketing channel – as a performance ad medium, one which can generate and measure real brand outcomes…
Shimmel was speaking ahead of Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, an event at which he will be a moderator.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight and TVSquared. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But that’s what the modern AT&T – incorporating WarnerMedia’s Turner and CNN – now looks like.
For the corporation – like Verizon alongside it – it is part of an ambitious move to tie telco and content in to a broad offering that leverages data on subscribers and consumers across a range of devices and content types.
And, for advertisers, the gateway to the kingdom is Xandr, the platform which gains access to each platform.
Beet.TV’s Identity in Focus forum heard from two executives now at the cusp opportunities at the unified entity:
In conversation with former Turner revenue chief Howard Shimmel, the two Dans opined on the challenges and opportunities in delivering multi-screen ads.
“What’s incredible about the TV viewership data is you’ve got an almost infinite, library of signals in terms of content, behaviours, interests that are indicators simply from a proclivity to tune into certain types of content,” Rosenfeld said.
“And that can really tell us about the passions and the interests of consumers in and for an advertiser to align their brand with a specific passion or try to connect to a consumer through that insight is very powerful.”
Aversano agreed, adding that using data on telco subscribers available through AT&T is a particular added boost.
“Mobility data – things like geolocation, app usage, mobile web usage – is a vast treasure trove,” Aversano said.
It’s not just “mobile”, however. AT&T has made a big commitment to 5G roll-out. And, whilst its rebadging of some advanced existing 4G spectrum as “5ge” has ruffled feathers, the operator will soon operate 5G spectrum proper – leaving the two Dans licking their lips.
“5G is a game changer for many different reasons for AT&T but particularly in the data world, we see there being some great opportunities as that begins to roll out,” Aversano said.
“The ability to have zero-latency video streaming virtually on any device … cis a whole new ball game. And when you talk about it and things like an identity graph, there’s a lot of opportunity, we think.”
Rosenfeld agreed: “One beautiful opportunity with 5G is the idea that there’s one pipe controlling all of your video ad experiences.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>A consensus also emerged during the session that ultimately, one or more companies will figure out how to compensate consumers for their data beyond simply dispensing coupons and swag, perhaps one of the major credit card providers.
The panel was moderated by consultant Howard Shimmel, most recently of Turner Broadcasting, who at the outset mentioned the Starwood data breach because it was in the headlines that very morning. He asked whether despite the availability of great content and technology, “immense demand and an appetite to scale,” there will be enough data available given new legislation like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California.
Jodie McAfee of Inscape, a subsidiary of smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO, related the “classic case of no good deed goes unpunished” that occurred in 2015. VIZIO had just pushed to TV owners notification of how it collects household viewing data and where the data ends up. One of those owners was a reporter for Pro Publica who wrote a mostly “inaccurate” story about how TV’s can spy on them, according to McAfee.
“Two class action lawyers saw the article, found two plaintiffs and sued us and the rest was a complete mess,” said McAfee.
Among the more interesting learnings from the whole episode, the Federal Trade Commission thought that the language explaining what VIZIO does with owners’ viewing data was too buried. It should be “separate and prominent” from the TV setup process, which is what VIZIO ended up doing.
“Unless and until the consumer clicks ‘I accept,’ data collection is default off on our TV’s, so it is a full, true opt-in regime,” said McAfee.
Another relevant learning was the FTC’s view of the so-called value exchange that most advertising and media companies believe underpins the collection of consumer data. The government said “everybody needs to stop promising this idea that when the consumer opts in they’re going to get these bells and whistles around greater search and recommendation or whatever. Just knock it off. That’s not necessary and it’s kind of bullshit. Just tell them what you’re doing,” McAfee said.
The architects of GDPR hold the same view, according to McAfee. “It’s in GDPR. Don’t promise anything special. Just be clear about what you’re doing. That’s all anybody cares about.”
With an opt-in rate of 90% in the United States, “What we’ve learned is if you’re front and center with it and you are completely transparent about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, pretty much everybody, at least in the United States, they’ll opt in and they’re fine with it,” McAfee added.
Robert Bareuther of analytics and measurement firm iSpot.tv said the company gets “a tremendous amount of raw data from our valued partner VIZIO and we take that raw data and we decipher it into how households view content” and then measure business outcomes for advertisers. “We never see any private data, but it’s very important to us that rules are followed and you don’t breach anything. I think VIZIO’s done a spectacular job of making sure that everything’s on the up and up,” said Bareuther.
Nielsen Catalina’s Matt O’Grady said his company doesn’t touch any personally identifiable information about consumers, “but our applications for measurement and targeting are highly dependent upon PII. I’m dependent upon everybody in the ecosystem not violation or for lack of a better expression not screwing up.”
As for the impact of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica misadventure, “that made our liability statements and our onboarding much more difficult than it had ever been before,” said O’Grady.
Asked by Shimmel whether CPPA in California will end up looking like GDPR, O’Grady said the initiative is “a very healthy democracy in the sense that the pendulum can swing and people can really get a chance to voice their concerns. But I think a good substantial part of that opt-in is going to be re-written” before the law takes effect in January of 2020.
So will marketers ever end up having to actually pay consumers directly for their data, along with letting them control their data? “If I was involved in that, I don’t want a coupon,” said O’Grady. “I want true compensation for that. Somebody’s going to come along and figure out how to crack this nut. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or twenty years from now, but I really do believe that we’re heading in that direction and there’s an enormous opportunity for somebody to come up with the vault concept.”
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.
]]>A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.
The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:
“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.
Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”
Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.
“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:
“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”
The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):
“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”
But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”
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.
]]>For Disney, the acquisition a year ago added to an already-broad portfolio of assets, and came right as the company was figuring out a direct-to-consumer SVOD strategy and learning to get to grips with a whole new world of advertising capabilities.
In this Beet Retreat interview with Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV, Disney’s SVP, Audience Solutions at Disney Advertising Sales, Laura Nelson, opens up on a big year for the Mouse.
“Disney, as a whole, is going through a huge transformation right now,” she said. “We have a ton of operational challenges because we are effectively still in the middle of reorganizing our whole company.
“We have multiple systems and multiple process, and we potentially may be inheriting new ones. So just trying to streamline and create a technology stack and a data stack that is unified across our company is going to take us some time. We’re behind some of the other larger publishers … who have already gone through that.”
Those changes are coming about including through combining ESPN and ABC ad sales efforts in a single division, led by Disney’s chairman of direct-to-consumer and international efforts Kevin Mayer. Nelson said: “We’ve actually changed the way the whole company is set up now so that there will be one group and on infrastructure that’s going to do that across sales and marketing.”
Nelson said a big part of the transformation involves growing a desire to be more transactional and automated in a data-driven way. She wants to eliminate friction in the ad sales process and believes automation can bring benefits for both buyer and seller.
But, despite fragmentation in how the industry is approaching that opportunity, Nelson is sceptical that a single industry platform can be achievable.
Nelson concedes Disney is arriving late to the idea of selling ads based on advanced audience data segments across different TV networks, in a way that makes it seamless for buyers.
For instance, Disney’s ABC is not a member of OpenAP, the joint Turner/Fox/ Viacom initiative to normalize consumer identity attribute descriptions, which was also joined by NBCU, though of course 21st Century Fox’s Fox Networks Group is plugged in.
But she also questioned whether such an opportunity can work when who is paying for it isn’t necessarily clear.
Nelson says she aims to unify consumer data sets including ESPN sports affinities, Disney lookalike models, theme parks, Disney gamers and, later, digital viewing.
“A lot of different divisions – from the film studio to ABC Television – have been doing it their own way,” she says.
“I think really bringing all the processes together, being uniform, and not having people create their own ideas is going to be more beneficial.”
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.
]]>But what if the presuppositions they made with that data could be improved on in yet another step-change?
One leading TV company researcher thinks viewers may soon elect to give broadcasters and their advertisers far more specific information about their buying intents.
In this fireside discussion with Prohaska Consulting CEO Matt Prohaska for Beet.TV, Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel – previously chief research officer at Turner – opens up on how Turner’s research has convinced him the change is coming.
“We did some research at Turner that we call the Consumer Data Value Exchange,” says Shimmel. “We were trying to get an understanding of what consumers are willing to give up in terms of data to get a better ad experience so they’re not getting ads for categories they don’t care about.
“The reality was consumers said they’re willing to give up a lot more than we think they’ll give up. They just need control and they need to be paid for it.”
That realization could have profound consequences for marketers and the publishers or broadcasters they go through.
For one, it could mean a change in emphasis – from second-guessing consumers’ position in the purchase funnel for various products and services, to actually knowing.
“I think eventually we’re going to have to get to a world where there’s more consumer control and they’re giving us signals a little bit more directly than (simply) ‘I’m in the market for a car because I happen to go to a BMW site yesterday’,” adds Shimmel.
This kind of approach may see new power brokers emerge. Shimmel, who joined Janus last year, says comScore and Nielsen evolved to measure media consumption because buyers didn’t have access to first-party data with full accuracy. But now connected TV sets can give off exact data signals about who is watching.
That, he says, should prompt the measurement agencies to change the nature of their service, and – for anyone hoping for a career in media measurement – it will place a premium on getting skills in data science.
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.
]]>Now the President of consultancy Janus Strategies and Insights, which is named for a Greek god, Shimmel says we’re now in a world where getting the right amount of reach in-flight is much harder.
“Whether it’s average weekly reach for a CPG company, or it’s reach within the last two weeks for a movie studio opening,” he says in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018. “TV’s reach is compressing as ratings go down.”
What hasn’t evolved is a measurement ecosystem “that actually allows you to stitch together all things addressable with linear so that you’re doing is using addressable to get the reach points that you’re not going to get with your linear schedule,” Shimmel adds. “And you’re also using addressable to avoid wasting addressable impressions with people who you could pretty well surmise are going to get a boatload of TV impressions.”
His example is a regular MSNBC viewer who is getting 20 TV impressions, “what’s the point of giving me two more impressions on digital? It’s just a waste.”
Asked whether that’s always the case, he says an exception could be advertisers using sequential creative messaging across platforms.
“One of the things as an industry we’ve made a mistake at is we’ve never invested the right amount of money in planning tools,” says Shimmel. “Used to be you would develop some reach and frequency curve off of Nielsen TV data and you’d use them for five years. Because the world really didn’t change.”
Today, an advertiser using 2016 data to plan for “some first quarter 2019 scatter, you’re probably twenty points off of the market in terms of average rating, so it means that reach and frequency curves have to change.”
Planning tools need to be more future-oriented, and planning and activation need to be closely meshed together. “So that you’re able to say here’s my TV base, I’m going to score an addressable population based on expected levels of frequency, and then I’m going to activate digitally to complement that in whatever an advertiser wants.”
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.
]]>But it’s also nice to stay ahead of the audience targeting curve by using data science to analyze viewing behavior and enable more targeted advertising buys, Shimmel, who is Chief Research Officer, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
For the most part, professional sports still lives on broadcast and cable. “It seems to have been more resilient in terms of ratings over the last couple of years than other genres have been,” Shimmel says. “We’re really happy with the way that post-season baseball is performing for us, both on linear and we’re seeing amazing growth on digital.”
Earlier this year, Fox, Turner and Viacom announced they would collaborate on a linear TV audience targeting solution called OpenAP. It launched the first week in October and Shimmel says acceptance in the advertiser and agency community has been “great.”
He references a paper that was just released of an analysis of a $1 million TV spend and the resulting ROI depending on whether age-sex demos or audience optimization was the basis for the buy. “It turns out that the ROI for audience is about 30% more than buying age-sex” at the same budget, Shimmel explains.
Simply stated, the goal of OpenAP is “to facilitate that.”
As for the future roadmap of OpenAP, Shimmel lays out the vision thusly: “ Obviously we want to migrate beyond linear TV. We want it to buy cross-platform. We also want it to include cable set-top box inventory.”
Shimmel references an exercise that Turner did within the past couple of years when it first started measuring homes that had streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services. Data showed that those homes watched about one-third less traditional TV, so the exercise involved creating a group of non-SVOD homes with similar demographics to SVOD homes.
“Of the 33 percent difference, about two thirds of it was explained by demographics. Only a third of it was due to the fact that the technology, SVOD, was in the home,” Shimmel says.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Shimmel provides a look under the hood of OpenAP and the mechanics of trying to standardize audience targeting beyond age/sex demographics across several publishers.
“There is an immense appetite among agencies and advertisers to do audience deals, but nothing has made the infrastructure easy for them to do it cross publishers,” Shimmel says.
The problem has been that different publishers have used different data sets for audience targeting and schedule management has been disparate as well. “The whole idea behind OpenAP is to standardize that,” he adds.
Buyers use the OpenAP interface to identify their audience targets and will be able to see the size of those targets, according to Shimmel. The targets are then published so that all partners are aware of the deal.
“We then go through the normal process of optimization and managing the schedules,” says Shimmel, while on the back end buyers come back to OpenAP “and they will get a verified, third-party post in terms of delivery against the audience.”
Each publisher manages its own inventory in OpenAP, with Turner using its proprietary methodology, according to Shimmel. He notes that Turner tries to find the most appropriate inventory given the advertiser and its goals as opposed to “carving out” inventory specifically for OpenAP.
He hopes that more publishers join OpenAP so that it will incent advertisers and agencies to get involved.
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
]]>But the growing popularity of a subscription-driven, ad-free service that keeps its viewing data under lock and key is also bad news for advertisers.
Turner chief research officer Howard Shimmel wants to understand the Netflix audience a whole lot better than he does today, because he sees a problem.
“They’re in 45m homes roughly in the United States,” Shimmel tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The average user uses them for two hours a day. That would mean they are taking a pretty significant chunk of minutes out of the market.
“We may not have long sight to 10% to 15% of viewing that goes on every night. You don’t want to have that much blindspot. We need to know how they’re doing.”
Netflix, famously, keeps that viewing data to itself, and skillfully uses it to customise its commissioning and procurement patterns for more new shows.
Right now, Shimmel may simply want to understand what his audience is doing when its not watching his TV networks like CNN. After all, Netflix doesn’t compete for advertising.
But TV analysis firm Ampere’s Richard Broughton, a year ago, told Beet.TV that Netflix could make $270mn per quarter from selling pre-roll ads or $2bn a quarter from a broadcast-style model – both of which would nevertheless lead to varying degrees of churn from upset customers.
And the issue doesn’t just apply to Netflix. “It extends down to platforms like YouTube,” Shimmel adds.
]]>