But, whilst CTV purports to enhance reach and control the frequency of ad exposure, what is the reality?

That is the question CTV ad software supplier Innovid set out to answer when it undertook research into the area, conducted with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

Research highlights

The resulting output, a report called Decoding CTV Measurement, tells the story.

Introducing "Decoding CTV Measurement" In partnership w/ @ANAmarketers, we conducted an unprecedented study across 20 leading advertisers to uncover the truth behind reach, frequency, and ROI. Here's what we found: https://t.co/ItOgGgVW9g pic.twitter.com/CWiAXY1K4J

— Innovid (@innovid) July 20, 2021

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin summarises the results from a study that heard from 20 brands with a total of $35 million in spending.

“We wanted to go out to the market and learn, what is the optimal reach and frequency?,” Chalozin says. “And even more than that is that, ‘when you buy media right now, what are you actually getting?’ ‘What’s the real duplication in the market right now?'”

According to the study:

• “Across our study, the average campaign reached only 13% of the available U.S. CTV households, indicating that we’re only scratching the surface of unique reach.”
• “Average frequency was just 4.6 across all campaigns. While high levels of frequency can exist in pockets, frequency is not universally high in CTV.”
• “The average eCPM of the campaigns in our study was $23, which sits between the average CPM for U.S. primetime TV ads for broadcast and cable ($36 and $19, respectively, according to eMarketer).”

Avoid overlap

Chalozin opened up on other findings.

“When you buy media from multiple media companies, we’ve seen that the average overlap between two media companies is 33%,” he says.

So, what’s the takeaway?

“Yes, people are tuning into streaming, cutting the cord, it’s definitely a tremendous transition,” Chalozin notes. “However, with the help of technology, you can do a much better job on making your money work harder.”

But what if those agencies wanted to buy or change their campaigns during the competition?

NBC has partnered with video ad-tech firm Innovid to ensure that ads delivered through NBC’s digital streaming platforms can be tweaked in real-time, rather than in weeks.

Enabling third-party ad serving

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin explains why this move represents a change for the way US Olympics TV rightsholder NBC has always done things.

“The advertiser needed to send a file via email and wait for confirmation in email and a lot of massively manual process, which created massive delays,” he says.

“Changing creatives in real-time, as the campaign goes, was close to impossible, let alone any advanced capabilities like rotation.

“From an ad-tech standpoint, there was no third-party ad serving into the Olympics.

“Now, for the first time ever … we will have actual third-party ad serving using an open standard like VAST available within the Olympics.”

In theory, that means advertisers could change the creative in their pre-purchased slots to reflect the performance of Team USA athletes, for example.

If you watch any streamed content during the #Olympics2021, the ads you see were served by @innovid across all digital/mobile/CTV platforms https://t.co/cK3xdQYiGk

— Rich Greenfield, LightShed (@RichLightShed) July 15, 2021

The everywhere Olympics

Chalozin says the tech hook-up is available across everywhere NBC is streaming Olympics, including NBC Sports, Peacock, syndication sources like Twitch.

Innovid customers get the NBC inventory out of the box, and there is a new self-service ad-buying portal ad OlympicsAdManager.com.

With this year’s Olympics held in Japan, for US viewers, many events will be happening in the early hours of the morning or otherwise the day-time.

Olympics’ CTV year

Since viewers mostly flock to live sport drama, that poses a challenge to NBC. Of course, it’s a challenge that the broadcaster – the IOC’s long-running US broadcaster – regularly has to contend with, as the Olympics routinely relocates to different continents.

But this year represents something different – a year when on-demand viewing via connected TV (CTV) services could help non-live viewership to swell.

In Olympic years gone by, on-demand viewing was largely confined to desktop and mobile services. But consumers’ CTV behavior has exploded in the years since the last games in Rio in 2016.

If NBC can attract viewers to its Olympics CTV content, it will also want to take advantage of the medium’s advertising advantages in order to realize the best commercial opportunity from it.

But the move also represents  big mindset shift for broadcasters, which have long treated such tentpole events as a big opportunity to secure ad commitments long in advance.

In a pre-Olympics pandemic year when advertisers’ business planning went haywire, there was value in becoming more responsive than that.

New global hire

"Dominic is a proven leader and his combination of strategic know-how and deep technical expertise of the advertising ecosystem makes him the ideal candidate to shepherd CTV growth across our markets." – @zvikanetter. Welcome to the team, Dominic! https://t.co/9uG5orDzXB pic.twitter.com/e1TgBr5WMc

— Innovid (@innovid) July 15, 2021

Innovid’s Olympics news also comes alongside another announcement – the appointment of Dominic Satur as VP of global brand partnerships.

Based in London, he will be responsible for expanding relationships with global brands and leading advertising transformation across channels.

Satur was previously with ad-tech company Flashtalking, which is due to be acquired by MediaOcean, for 10 years, most recently as VP of business development in Europe. He had helped that company build its European client base.

His role will involve counselling brands on how to take advantage of the new CTV opportunity.

That is what seems to be happening with internet-connected T right now – and that’s what is happening for Innovid, too.

The ad delivery and measurement platform for connected TV has been working in the area for 14 years. Now, with the CTV waves crashing ashore, it is going public to raise $403 million in a deal valuing the business at $1.3 billion.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder and CEO Zvika Netter says the company’s vision never swerved, and he wanted to quickly capitalize on CTV’s COVID-era growth curve.

Visible vision

“(We aim to) support the growth of the company, (so that) our clients and our partners could see that and not think, ‘These guys raised all this money and they’re going to sell it to some big tech firm and move to Bora Bora’,” Netter says.

“We’re here to work and really change the future of television for many years to come.

“Now I think everybody will understand that this is we’re here to stay for a very long time and why it’s the right route for us.”

Deal structure

Innovid’s software automatically uploads and encodes advertising creative to stream ads to any screen or device, manages the physical delivery of ads and measures performance across the MRC-accredited metrics, connecting together a host of demand- and supply-side platforms, publisher apps and CTV devices.

It claims 40% of the top 200 US TV advertisers as customers.

According to The Wall Street Journal: “Innovid is planning to raise $403 million through a roughly $150 million private investment in public equity, or PIPE, at $10 per share, and $253 million from a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called ION Acquisition Corp. 2.”

The company had taken a reported $95.1 million over eight funding rounds since 2008.

Going quickly public

After the earlier cooling-off in, ad-tech public listings are back in fashion after the pandemic revealed continued growth in key trends like online consumption and CTV ad capabilities.

PubMatic, Viant, AppLovin and DoubleVerify all recently went public, with Sprinklr and Integral Ad Science to follow.

“COVID was a delay – it’s a curse and a blessing in a way,” Innovid’s Netter says. “In Q2, we suffered like everybody else.

“But, very fast, we realised that the consumption of CTV, as everybody knows, is growing dramatically starting May and June of last year – and it’s never stopped.

“We waited for the presidential election to be over. We waited for the vaccines. We wanted to see that this is here to stay at scale. Once we saw it, we said, ‘Okay … we want to go and we want to go (public) very fast’.

“The SPAC allowed us speed. It was a way to lock this deal in a very high speed and be public, be out fast.”

CTV growth forecast

In May, eMarketer predicted 2021 US CTV ad spending would hit $13.4 billion.

The markets are realizing that linear TV consumption and classical pay-TV are unlikely to be resurrected, but that TV advertising generally remains effective.

So companies like Innovid are warming advertisers up to the idea they can deliver targeted, digital-style ads, with precision measurement, to TV-like devices. It’s a best-of-both-worlds strategy.

Innovid’s projections

Innovid wants a piece of an estimated $20 billion global CTV ad business, within a $200 billion global TV ad industry.

It projects its revenue growing from $69 million in 2020 to $177 million by 2023, 63% of it from CTV.

And Innovid boasts high customer retention, retaining 94% of core customers last year.

But it plans to double its operating expenses by 2023.

You are watching “Innovation, Leadership, and Value Creation: Strategies Explored,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Progress Partners. For more videos, please visit this page.

But, before it can get there, the technology will have to overcome in-built identity-tracking deficiencies at a time when some of the digital ad industry’s foremost identity technologies are disappearing.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jessica Hogue, Innovid GM for Measurement & Analytics, explains what will happen.

Cookie-less TV

Third-party tracking cookies are being deprecated whilst tech vendors are also tightening up on advertiser user of other device identifiers.

For Hogue, and the whole of connected TV, however, that is familiar territory, because many CTV devices don’t support system-level identifiers like cookies anyway.

“It’s cookie-less by nature,” she says. “Cookies don’t operate in the connected TV environment. So the future really looks to having much more of a modern approach that allows for those principles of privacy and interoperability.

“I think that that includes a mix of panels and different integration of different, whether it’s identity or first party data.”

Rip and replace?

That makes CTV the canary in the mineshaft for the big change that is happening in digital advertising – the move from tracking mechanisms like cookies toward more of an opted-in use of real audience data.

Across the industry, vendors are rushing to offer stand-in solutions in a world of disappearing cookies. But Hogue doesn’t think the idea of “repeal and replace” is the optimum one.

“When there’s a leak, you want to rush to fill it,” she accepts. “So that was perfectly understandable. But, I think as an industry, we’re not really serving the market at the end of the day by just slapping a Band-Aid on what is becoming really a broader issue.

“I don’t think that we’ll see the emergence of a new single standard that becomes the de facto, if you will. I think this has been a lesson that has some frailties. So what we see is more of a means to having a system of layers of identity that can be connected.”

Personalised TV ads

So Hogue, and others like her, believe that, instead, the industry will move to adapt all manner of practices and technologies that put independence, privacy compliance, privacy respect and interoperability at the heart of audience identification.

For Innovid’s part, it offers a household-level ID built on its ad-serving platform, recording viewing behavior of individual services at the device level and then clustering them into that household identifier.

It’s the sort of practice Hogue thinks will ultimately enable personalized advertising, and has already allowed marketers to be more responsive during the pandemic, on a location-by-location basis.

“Think of automotive dealers who had certain lots open in some DMAs (designated market areas) and perhaps not in others, or grocery retailers that maybe had kerbside delivery in certain markets but online delivery in others,” Hogue explains.

“The need to have that relevant message can be achieved through things like geographic location, small amounts of data that can allow that personalization to take place.

“The evidence shows that it works. When we look at campaigns that have those kind of KPIs and that relevance built in, oftentimes we’ll see upwards of 40% engagement, whether that’s measured through click-through activity, more time spent, completion, all those different variables.”

You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.

That’s a problem for several reasons – but a new one has just come to light.

After speaking with NBCU, AdExchanger reported: “When Peacock first launched, it was forced to reject about 40% of the creative it got from advertisers because so many of the tags were faulty.”

That’s bad news for a new, ad-supported platform trying to monetize itself. So NBCU has called on video ad-tech vendor Innovid to improve the situation.

Overcoming rejection

Innovid is working to install software checks that put a stronger workflow around connected TV ad ingestion – forcing marketers and agencies to use the correct file types and other criteria.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid, explains the problem. He says reasons ads are rejected include:

• Files are of insufficient quality.
• Tracking pixels from vendors that are not allowed.
• Potential for user data leakage.
• The format of the ad is not the right format and it does not apply to every device.

“It creates a lot of delay and problems in the campaign,” Chalozin says. “We’re talking about eight out of every 20 ads … being rejected.

“Together with NBC and the Peacock team, we want to lift this number all the way to one out of 20.

“The creative agency will see all the different elements that NBC asked for all the way in (at) the second that they upload the creative – we’re essentially limiting the rejects that are down the line.”

NBCU And Innovid Collaborate On Ad Quality Controls For Peacock

Improving CTV quality

As quality is a crucial element of connected TV because viewers and advertisers demand a TV-like experience.

That is despite some of the creative served being the same that is sent to digital video channels.

“There is a big demand for higher quality because people see when the content is pixelated,” Chalozin says.

“We want every viewer that watch streaming to have the same feeling of beautiful television as it is on the traditional side.

“People expect that the television is a product that just works, it doesn’t buffer, there’s no black screen, the volume doesn’t fluctuate.”

Toward 2021

Chalozin says his company wants to invest in personalization and identity technology for connected TV.

CTV suffers from lack of good identifiers, despite its digital chops, meaning the promise of super-targeted delivery sometimes falls short.

Chalozin knows that “one-to-one tracking isn’t going to fly. And he wants to move to a world of lower-frequency advertising, interactivity and shoppable TV ads.

“When you have better, more pixels and a bigger canvas and a more beautiful screen to introduce more creative, then you can do things that get better results,” he adds.

“Networking is hard for everyone,” especially for black woman who feel out place.  Even though it can be uncomfortable, she urges her colleagues to make the commitment to expand their social networks, to “get out there.”  She also speaks to the importance of connecting with mentors at work.

Geno is SVP of marketing at Innovid.

This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here.

But, bit by bit, the connection of TV to the internet is upgrading the old box in the corner of the living room with new tricks.

The new ability of TV to not just deliver messages but to help track, measure and trace those messages’ consequential impact is helping TV become more of a performance or direct-response medium.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Stephanie Geno, marketing SVP at Innovid, a software vendor helping the transition, explains.

New tricks for the old dog

“What we’ve seen as of late is that that shift has accelerated even faster than we could have imagined,” Geno says. “With that shift, brands are trying to understand, ‘What can I do with TV now that I couldn’t before?’

“They’re starting to really embrace a lot of the functionality that has been typically reserved for digital – addressability, interactivity, dynamic content – and leveraging that to think about, ‘How do I leverage TV beyond just a big brand awareness spot?’

“We’re starting to see a lot of QR codes getting incorporated into ads where you can look at something and say, ‘That’s interesting, I want to learn more.’

Geno says more brands are also leveraging SMS codes in TV ads, prompting viewers to text in to receive discount coupons.

Such functionality all helps “close the loop” between the TV ad play-out and actions taken on brand websites or retail establishments.

Questions arise

These new super-powers could boost ads’ return on investment, Geno says.

But they also pose new questions, like:

• how can advertisers measure and understand the impact of TVs’ new direct engagement opportunities?
• what is the optimum ad presentation for generating that engagement?
• how can advertisers produce the creative that has to flex across channels and incorporate interactivity?

Geno says the emerging measurement challenge today demands “progress, not perfection”, while Innovid says it is trying to ensure creative agencies can use their existing tools, including those from Adobe, rather than to learn new software to make the best of interactive TV.

For optimized, personalized

An element which may hold the key to heightened engagement could be personalization.

Innovid in July released the findings of a report it commissioned to understand viewers’ sentiments on personalized advertising.

New Study: Consumers want to be seen, understood, and shown advertising that matches their mindset in the moment and beyond. View the full infographic: https://t.co/pSc8oOty0g #advertising #consumerstudy #personalization pic.twitter.com/uD7EGfVX5h

— Innovid (@innovid) July 15, 2020

Amongst the findings:

• 43% of respondents said it was important that the online ads they see are personalized, incorporating geography, interests and behaviors.
• Nearly 30% (29%) said they would be more likely to buy something if an ad was personalized.
• Personalization also influenced loyalty, with 31% saying they tend to be more loyal to brands that embrace personalized ads.

Viewers said they wanted ads that understand the context of a given moment, including for events, product offers or community information.

That is the conclusion of one video and connected TV advertising technology company leader whose platform claims to have sight of 35% of the US streaming video ad market.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin says some brands’ ad strategies are recalibrating – but others are proving resilient.

Flight to agile

“We’re getting into the upfront (TV ad sales) time and what we hear all across the board is that this year probably will be a softer upfront market, for obvious reasons,” Chalozin says. “But, even more than that, many marketers understand the need for agility.

“Agility means (buying in the) spot market or scattered marketing, in television terms. But, in digital terms, frankly, it means programmatic. We believe that programmatic as a share of connected television will increase significantly.”

In other words, more marketers, facing unprecedented pressure, are going to be opportunistic about their ad buys.

The upfront ad sales season is when programmers tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.

But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.

Performance stays solid

Love streaming?
Data obsessed?
Wonder about marketing under current climate?
Curious about the impact marketing?

Tune in tomorrow (Tue) at 11a ET
to @innovid 's live stream!

register here –> https://t.co/x5kE7AXpTh#streamingwars #CTV #futureoftv #Livestream pic.twitter.com/tLpuFeP8xn

— Tal Chalozin (@chalozin) April 7, 2020

But adaptability is not the whole story. Chalozin says another class of marketers is keeping money in the game.

“Marketers that have a strong KPI for their video campaign did not decrease their spend, which is a very fascinating thing,” he says. “Marketers that really focused on reach or focused on any upper funnel KPIs or maybe decided based on their balance sheet or consumer spending if they want to increase or not.

“But marketers that are heavy ‘cost-per’ advertisers – so, cost-per-app download, cost-per-delivery, cost-per-add-to-cart or things like that – looked at the situation right now in a much different way.”

Chalozin says, because consumption of digital video is rising, programmatic ad buyers have a voice of better ads available to them, effectively lowering their cost-per-action.

He says that experience will, in the future, cause more advertisers to move toward solid direct-response tactics.

End of the pause?

"We are largely on the other side of the ‘pause,’” IAB’s David Cohen [@mrdcohen] about ad spend trends during the pandemic via: @AdExchanger: https://t.co/3FbbdXEf2l Full report: https://t.co/5TGxrhqvZH

— IAB (@iab) April 30, 2020

In a follow-up survey of ad buyers, IAB observes a progressive easing of spending cutbacks from March to April amid the COVID-19 pandemic:

• More ad buyers are pausing ad spend.
• Digital media are seeing fewer buyers pausing or adjusting ad spend, yet still remain -29% off-plan.
• Traditional media including linear TV are seeing an acceleration in buyers adjusting their plans.
• Social media, paid search and digital audio are leading the “slight rebound” of digital channels, with digital video largely flat.
• 73% of buyers have either modified or developed new creative assets.

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

Tal Chalozin has data he says proves it. Innovid, the video ad-tech serving supplier Chalozin co-founded, just released a product that lifts the curtain on all the trends being seen this month…

Just launched! Innovid iQ: A weekly snapshot of global video impressions by vertical, device and publisher type to help marketers tackle the changing advertising climate due to COVID-19. Check out the latest insights: https://t.co/nUp4PiXFyk #Adapt2020 #InnovidiQ #CTV pic.twitter.com/UwdYyqaRv7

— Innovid (@innovid) April 22, 2020

According to the platform, Innovid iQ, trends include:

• Some sectors’ video ad impressions are returning to February or March levels.
• Retail advertisers put the brakes on advertising, but have lately seen a massive jump in global video impressions, rebounding by 145% week-over-week in mid-April.
• Connected TV has replaced a portion of mobile video ad impressions.
• Automotive ad impressions have crashed, and auto brands continue to accelerate out of digital channels.

Chalozin estimates Innovid’s data covers 35% of the US streaming video ad market, which he says is the largest share. Innovid iQ data is culled from every campaign run across Innovid each week.

The only way is up

It’s not that the pandemic hasn’t been damaging, of course. We have recently reported how ad rates in the TV industry have been slashed, whilst many advertisers are actually pulling out of digital channels.

“We have seen a tempering of several verticals,” Chalozin tells Beet.TV, in this video interview. “However, there’s quite a lot of verticals that actually increase their spend,” he adds, noting telecoms and ecommerce companies have been spending more.

“The first two weeks of April, were the lowest point in the dip that we believe that we will see.

“We believe that, from this moment, we will go up.”

TV takes the hit

eMarketer has now revised-down its forecast for 2020 first-half US TV ad spend, from a 2% increase to a drop of between 22.3% and 29.3%.

Much of the drop will come from ads lost around sports programming, which cannot happen during the pandemic lockdown.

At least the latter half of the year includes a US presidential election, though broadcasters and publishers will hope that a postponement does not occur.

“Aside from the lost sporting events, we expect TV advertisers to take a wait-and-see approach as the economy continues to stall,” said eMarketer principal analyst Nicole Perrin.

Connected TV is unique

Adomik data shows connected TV CPMs have cratered recently, but actual revenue from connected TV ads has grown – the only platform out of mobile, desktop, tablet and connected TV to show revenue growth.

For Innovid’s Chalozin, all these shifts have real consequences for measuring the effectiveness of advertising.

“What we’ve seen is the connected television became the largest device category that people watch digital video in the United States,” he tells Beet.TV.

“That means that you really need to think about what’s the KPI, how do you measure success? Because people cannot click.”

At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:

• Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
• Michael Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp
• Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee

Chicken or egg?

Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.

“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.

“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”

Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

Agencies not on the same page

As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.

“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.

“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.

“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”

Is measurement to blame?

VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.

“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.

“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

That is the view of one technology leader who thinks simplicity needs to be restored.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tal Chalozin, CTO and co-founder of Innovid, describes connected TV as at “the nexus of everything amazing with digital”.

“It’s accountable, it’s one-to-one targeting,” he says. “You can measure every single impression, you can make decisions in realtime, and everything amazing with television. It’s on a big screen, it’s non-skippable, there are multiple eyeballs in front of that. It’s as premium as it can get by virtue of the device and the placements, and Connected Television really combined the two of them.”

But Chalozin also sees problems.

“But there’s very, very little knowledge,” he worries. “When we go and talk to, all the way up to CMOs or agency executives or senior buyers, there is very little knowledge about how many households do they actually reach, what’s the duplication or the contribution of connected television on top of linear reach, what’s the extra reach, and if I have a big buy with 15 different apps or networks, what is the real duplication between them?

“For example, there’s many sellers into Hulu. Hulu sells it themselves. The different networks, NBC or Disney, can sell into Hulu. Some of the media is bought programmatically in a private marketplace, some of it is bought on an IO or an upfront, and the same goes for other different apps on those connected TV. You need a centralised system that is not owned by anyone of the buy side, or the sell side systems, or the sell side media companies, that will tell you the overview of what actually happened.”

In 2018, Innovid gained accreditation from the Media Ratings Council (MRC) for video ad measurement in a connected TV environment, which it says makes it the first vendor to have gained the designation. That means customers should be able to trust that the figures Innovid gives them on ad views should be reliable.

The company launched OTT Composer, a software suite that lets brands, agencies and publishers design creatives for connected TV on a self-serve basis.

Chalozin was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The new solution marries OTT and linear TV occurrence and identity data from Roku’s 30.5 million active accounts as of June 30, with Innovid’s OTT ad serving footprint across over 75 million households. Matched together, the unique datasets are expected to provide marketers with new insights to better allocate advertising inventory bought from Roku and from other publishers without additional tagging or integrations.

For an overview of the new alliance, we spoke with Tal Chalozin, co-founder and CTO of Innovid.

We interviewed him during Advertising Week.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

The company is buying Herolens, a Buenos Aires-based technology provider for dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the craft of assembling das for individual viewers using distinct micro-components of ad creative.

“We’re able to work with the brand advertiser, using their first party data, to be able to version the creative,” says Beth-Anne Eason, Innovid president, in this video interview with Beet.TV. DCO campaigns Innovid is able to deliver include:

• Swapping out background based on local weather conditions.
• Customized car offers based on nearby dealer stock.
• A P&G shampoo ad which was built in to more than 2,000 different versions, based on viewers’ whereabouts.

Innovid will use Herolens’ Buenos Aires HQ as the beachhead for its own Latin America business, but the 40-strong Herolens team will now join the Innovid team and the Herolens site has been taken offline.

Herolens’ software is used as “a central hub for digital asset management and dynamic creative customization, as well as display ad serving”, say the companies.

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. 

Having helped to create Innovid 11 years ago to transform video experiences on the advertising side, “It’s finally here if you look at connected television. We see dramatic changes in that environment,” CEO & Co-Founder Zvika Netter says in this interview with Beet.TV. Among other topics, he discusses Innovid’s participation in special sessions featuring a roster of industry leaders at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month.

Citing companies like Netflix, Roku and Amazon, Netter observes, “if you see what they’re doing, they’re basically working on the experience. It’s the selection, it’s the quality of the content, the personalization, how you navigate. Companies are trading in the billions just because they pay attention to the user and optimizing their experience.”

What Innovid is about is “exactly that for advertising,” Netter adds. “How do we create the technology and the process and structure to create a better balance between advertising and content?”

If done correctly, this balancing act produces winners in the form of viewers, publishers and advertisers. “We work with all three contingencies. We’re in a great spot in the middle and we’re growing very fast.”

Earlier this year, Innovid secured $30 million in funding from Goldman Sachs to help expand its global footprint, and the company recently hired 60 more people. “We built a three-year plan to keep expanding the company both from a product offering but also geographically,” including in Japan, Spain and soon Germany.

“Connected TV is everywhere physically in the world. There are similar needs on that front,” Netter says.

“It finally has enough scale for them to care about it to have a conversation and see what the industry really needs,” Netter says of connected-TV. “It’s not just about us pushing the great next feature to buy something from your TV to your phone. It’s actually listening to CMO’s and publishers and understand what do they need, what do they care about these days and addressing that.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Then… not much. The internet boomed and video eventually graced connected screens. But interactive TV was still largely an unrealized dream.

Until lately, that is. Because contemporary consumption of TV through connected devices isn’t just about on-demand selections, it is now becoming about realizing the earliest dreams of the format.

“The idea of interactive television has been around for a very long time,” says Tal Chalozin, Innovid CTO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But what’s happened in the last year or so is that people… they put their credit card in a Roku or an AppleTV or something else.

“They’re used to discovery with voice, like with Siri or Alexa or other stuff. The type of viewer for television is totally different viewer than what it used to be with an older Comcast or type of a box.”

Chalozin’s Innovid is one of the companies making it happen.

During this year’s Super Bowl, interactive ads for Kellogg’s Pringles, powered by Innovid’s  OTT Composer technology, enabled viewers of the CBS Sports app on Apple TV.

They let viewers skip to alternative versions of the ad and use a QR code through an iPhone to purchase the products.

“We created the first-ever large national scale interactive and shoppable television ad for the Super Bowl, the largest televised event.

“A lot of the idea that used to be under-categorized under innovation and the cool things are reaching maturity mostly because viewers expect and play along with them.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. “We’re getting TV’s largest advertisers,” says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% “and we’re super serving them with some new tools.”

Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they’re watching.

Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share—information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports.

“We can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data” resulting in a “census-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,” says Naylor.

Working with Telaria, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that “we can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.” It’s a closed market because “we’re very protective” to avoid “category collision with our advertisers” and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.

“Happily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn’t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they’re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is “conventional TV with conventional breaks,” it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine and Innovid.

The “latest kid on the block” that Hulu is beta testing is “a pause ad.” When viewers hit the pause button “we’re going to serve up a little image” but not a display or video ad. “Imagine a Coke can with language like ‘the pause that refreshes.’”

The goal is to exploit the opportunity of “knowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It’s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,” Naylor says.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

So why are so many advertisers either spending so little or using addressable for a different purpose?

In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat, a cast of “millennial”-aged companies assembled to discuss issues affecting the pace of roll-out of future TV advertising – and what advertisers really want it for…

Scale before sale?

The panel heard that what ad buyers really want is audience scale. This may seem to go against the inherent promise of addressable TV, which can make an audience far smaller but also far more relevant…

Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:

“There’s a lot of great data sets out in the marketplace. There’s 199 million homes. Get to half, you really have something. And then the strategy and the media planners will start funding that at a much, much higher rate than it does now.”

When scale fails

Today, connected TV even seems to mitigate against large-scale campaigns. One ad-tech exec said the promises aren’t quite living up to results achieved in limited trials – perhaps one reason so much advertiser spending in OTT is still considered “test-and-learn”…

Hardeep Bindra, Managing Director of Product, Sizmek:

“The general expectation from our digital-first customers is as we expand to CTV, OTT – and then adventuring to addressable and linear – is that we will continue that same (performance) approach in defining attribution. It works to a degree when it’s in a closed-loop testbed … But the minute you try and reach scale with it that’s when these systems start to either fall down or the delay in attribution breaks the existing models that we have in place.”

Connectivity to cap

If connected TV advertising doesn’t yet have big scale, it may offer something else. Beet Retreat heard many executives talk about its ability to help cap the frequency with which viewers see a TV ad…

Frank Sinton, President & Founder, Beachfront Media:

“Connected TV but it hasn’t hit that 50% (penetration) mark yet. So we’re more like 10 or 15% penetration at this point. (In) connected TV, in particular, frequency (of ad exposure) is something that we’re looking really closely at.”

Reach is within reach

But the panel heard that using addressable TV to reach large audiences is possible. Two companies that have spent the last few years building out a patchwork of advertiser delivery opportunities, in very different ways, weighed in…

Beth-Ann Eason, President, Innovid:

Right now Innovid is 75 million households through nine different streaming devices across 1,000 different apps that are capable of delivering an interactive OTT ad.  So the capacity is there. The systems and structure that we’ve talked about today is lagging that a bit. But we are continuing to focus on the largest potential audiences that can be lit up to be able to bring this reality to market.

Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:

“One of the things that we’ve built over the last couple years is this local owned-and-operated station group opportunity which is, going back to we’re in 35 million homes, one out of every three TV homes, so we work with almost all the large station groups.”

Beyond TV

Connected TV isn’t just about what happens on the TV. In a multi-touch consumer ecosystem, if you can track viewership and link it to outcomes like visitation and brand CRM data, you have the capacity to deploy sophisticated attribution that can prove the real value of connected TV exposure…

Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso:

“We’re literally enabling them to prove that their local TV ads are actually driving to the website or actually driving to the store.  We’re able to do that because we are literally bringing live placeIQ data and matching it against our IP and IDs. So, ‘Wou’ve seen the ad for the F150, did you go to the dealership?’ ‘Did you see the ad for Taco Bell, did you go to Taco Bell or to the website for TD Ameritrade?’We literally get live information.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.

The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

The new money comes from Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing, a new backer for the company. It is a Series E – the latest of nine rounds now totalling $95.1 million, according to Crunchbase.

Notably this time, Innovid’s press announcement refers to the investment as “pre-IPO” money. That status stands to reason, of course, but may also set tongues wagging about the likelihood of a market listing.

The purpose of the money is said to be “additional capital” and ” to expand its global footprint”.

Innovid’s technology helps brands or their agencies create and deliver video ads, often with interactivity and personalization, across a range of devices, notably the burgeoning range of new connected and over-the-top TV devices that are enabling new digital ad experiences on large-screen TV sets.

Whilst most such vendors in the space see this evolution, from current digital media experiences to the connected TV (CTV) screen, as a growth driver, Goldman Sachs in Innovid’s announcement points back to digital channels.

Hillel Moerman, head of Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing group, is quoted as saying: “Innovid has differentiated video advertising software and technology, and has the scale and the reach to succeed, with access to significant supply beyond CTV, including platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snap and others.

Co-founder Chalozin recently told Beet.TV: “The (TV) environment behaves very differently from desktop or web-based video.”

Last month, Innovid president Beth-Ann Eason told Beet.TV the company was trying to help publishers re-think their advertising experience because, with consumer behavior showing an up-tick for subscription VOD and a growing frustration toward classical advertising, a change is needed.

“With what’s happening right now with Netflix being an option, and consumers not having to necessarily see commercials, the expectation to be able to take care of her in that experience is much, much higher,” she said.

“(Viewers) who chose a more immersive experience are more likely to actually buy the product that they saw within that immersive experience.”

For Innovid, the money caps a year in which it launched a self-service product and gained a notable industry accreditation.

The company launched OTT Composer, a software suite that lets brands, agencies and publishers design creatives for connected TV on a self-serve basis.

And it recently gained accreditation from the Media Ratings Council (MRC) for video ad measurement in a connected TV environment, which it says makes it the first vendor to have gained the designation. That means customers should be able to trust that the figures Innovid gives them on ad views should be reliable.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, video ad-tech firm Innovid says it is working with publishers to explore exactly what the best ad experience really looks like.

“We’ve now moved into the publisher side on connected TV so that we can work with them to find much better solutions for consumers, and really reimagine what this entire ad system can be,” says Innovid president Beth-Ann Eason.

“With what’s happening right now with Netflix being an option, and consumers not having to necessarily see commercials, the expectation to be able to take care of her in that experience is much, much higher.

“We’ve partnered with brands from true[X], to Hulu, to Roku to really rethink what the entire consumer experience is. We’re doing a great deal of work in that area, and exploring what that future of television will be.”

Previously, analysis from nScreenMedia suggests US Netflix viewers, by substituting free viewing for SVOD, are missing 2bn ad views every day, totalling missing ad sales estimated at between $3bn and $6bn annually.

Suddenly, the boom in paid content coupled with diminishing patience for classical interruptive ad experiences is prompting a search for a better balance.

Fox-owned true[X]’s technology rewards viewers who elect to engage with an interactive ad with reduced ad load during a show.

And Innovid, whose technology allows for the creation of interactive ads, has been working with the company.

“Those (viewers) who chose a more immersive experience are more likely to actually buy the product that they saw within that immersive experience,” Eason says. “Another great example is to start to look at the number of ads and the interactivity in those environments.

“Brands who are embracing this type of format are looking to use first-party data or third party data, to make the ad much more interactive. Volvo, for example, might choose to be able to bring in content that they know about that consumer. But also to drive someone directly to a showroom, so that they can get an offer out to them.”

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 one stands head and shoulders above others, according to a boss from one tech company helping advertisers deliver in to the new channels.

“(There is) anything from smart TV, a Samsung or an LG smart TV with apps, or streaming devices like Apple TV or Roku or Amazon Fire or Chromecast,” says Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozing.

“What we see right now – just in terms of share, we see Roku as the largest device right now in terms of delivery of ads on a monthly basis.”

Park Associates’ sales data showed Roku was the leading installed OTT device in Q1 2017, though Amazon this January said its Fire TV Stick was beating Roku, without breaking out sales figures.

Earlier this year, Roku introduced Roku Ad Insights, a suite of four tools to measure the effectiveness of ads placed in its platform.

But Chalozin, whose company has been going a decade, says he can already see Roku doesn’t just have more users – it has the most engaged users.

“And also in terms of engagement, we see Roku is leading the charge in terms of catering to an audience that understands that this is not television in the way that television used to be, but television that you can create a two-way communication with,” he adds.

“People will pull in their Roku remote, understand that there is a call-to-action, interact, click on the remote, use left and right (buttons), even voice navigation in order to engage with a commercial.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.

Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.

“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”

These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.

Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.

“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”

TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.

“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”

This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”

Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.

“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, one of the leading platforms helping brands deliver ads to over-the-top TV platforms says the potential is huge – but OTT ads are a different beast.

Innovid CTO Tal Chalozin broke out three main factors that are different:

1. “Right now OTT is a very premium type of a market. There’s no fraud, there’s no viability. It’s 100% brand safe. You can’t really multitask, you’re on the big screen.”
2. “A lot of success-based KPI, like click-through rate or completion rate does not really apply. You can’t really click on your connected TV. The completion rate is so high that it’s not the right way.”
3. “Some marketers the last couple of years spent a lot of money in building a DMP, and attribution capabilities and different ways that the marketing organizations or agencies can be smarter. A lot of those things does not really translate in an easy way into the TV world. The TV world is very much of a household delivery vehicle and not an individual messaging vehicle, which means that a lot of technologies that are based on login or based on cookies or device ID do not really translate well into the OTT space.”

OTT is rising. At Innovid specifically, the company has seen the proportion of ads it delivers to OTT grow from 5% of the total to 20% of the total.

And the outfit has teamed up with Fox Networks-owned TrueX, the company which helps channels reduce ad load when viewers engage in an ad-based value exchange.

“We’ve been exploring that in the last couple of months, and we just announced it out of beta about a month ago,” Chalozin confirmed. “We’ve tested it with a lot of different marketers in many verticals across many different shows, and we’ve seen amazing results.

When you give people the opportunity to step up and use their remote to actually choose, they choose – they engage, they spend the time, and we’ve seen amazing results and repeated marketers into that environment.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

But the new broadcast contenders should not just assume they will become all powerful.

One executive brokering the future of connected TV advertising thinks quality of experience must be the watchword.

“Television is at the mid-stage of migrating in to the digital world,”Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Beyond Sling, Sony Vue and DirectTV Now, YouTube is coming along, Hulu is delivering their live television service, maybe Apple will deliver their service.

“More and more people will stop paying or not even start their cable bill and immediately pay Google or Hulu and that will be their television service.

“Companies have a responsibility to create television quality equal to television now. Which means television should never buffer, should be high quality, volume should be correlated. All those things which seem very simple are actually hard to do.”

Chalozin’s Innovid, which helps advertisers personalise their video messages for viewers, claims to be processing a third of all video ads in the US.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Nine years ago, Innovid chose the latter path, providing an open platform approach to personalizing video targeting and integrating it with customer data and insights from other channels. Now, about one-third of all video served on the Internet is done so by Innovid.

It’s not been the easiest of paths, according to CTO and Co-Founder Tal Chalozin. “Clearly, it’s been an uphill battle fighting existing ways of doing businesses, existing processes and existing players,” Chalozin says in this interview conducted during the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview.”

Chalozin puts early innovators in two buckets. First are those that can prove success in the easiest way, including online sellers and data-centric players like Netflix. “It’s way easier for them to dabble into better creative, personalized storytelling, one-to-one messaging. That’s the easiest ones,” he explains in response to a question from Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.

In the other bucket are innovators who seek to “cater to the vast side of the market,” for example packaged-goods companies that haven’t traditionally tried to figure out specific creative to promote a household product based on gender, geography, different times of day and so on. Helping these marketers through a maze of sources and suppliers “is a hard business to be in,” Chalozin says.

Having planted its flag early in the video space, Innovid believes it has succeeded in moving the industry forward by focusing on technology and solving complicated problems. “Someone needs to be the operating system that makes this all work,” he adds.

Chalozin has two messages for marketers: the investment in personalized targeting “is not that hard” and not all outcomes need to be measured by sales lift because “in many cases it’s close to impossible.”

Besides, “There are many other ways today to find your metrics of success”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.

You also get to experience a sense of shared success—whether the topic is television audience guarantees, addressable advertising, or new offerings from the likes of Hulu, Innovid and Spotify, according to Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. and the self-described Dean of the Faculty of the annual Beet.TV Executive Retreat, which was sponsored by Videology with 605.

In keeping with longstanding tradition, in this video Swartz gives a brief recap of two days of industry give and take in a venue that eschews divisiveness for camaraderie and shared success.

This year’s Retreat was truly a global affair, with the presence of experts from Liberty Global, Sky TV and others. But for Swartz, there was something more basic at play.

“How blessed I am to have such amazing colleagues,” she says.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques.  The event and series is presented by Videology and 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.