That is the message from the connected TV division of the world’s biggest media buying agency.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen says it is safer and more responsible to swerve open CTV marketplaces.
“Linear TV will stop to exist, but it’s not happening tomorrow – it will take 10 years,” says Nielsen.
Finecast is GroupM’s specialist advanced TV buying unit. In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardized measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in a total of 11 countries.
Finecast aggregates video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
For Nielsen, those direct relationships are the key.
Leveraging GroupM’s decades of experience, Finecast works directly with CTV-operating broadcasters, rather than buying through SSPs or exchanges.
“You know that (there is) no fraud with that, you know that is responsible media,” Nielsen says.
He estimates open-marketplace CTV ad sales will total almost $10 billion this year – and thinks that’s a problem.
“Most of the fraud in connected TV to date has happened in the open programmatic exchange and marketplace environment,” Nielsen observes.
CTV ad fraud is on the rise. DoubleVerify, which makes and sells anti-fraud digital ad software, says CTV ad fraud rose 161% year-on-year in Q1 2020.
For Finecast’s Nielsen, verification tech is only part of the solution.
“You can have stricter control,” he says. “When you work directly with a broadcaster, there isn’t fraud because you buy it directly.”
And that is one dimension of a new imperative GroupM is calling “responsible media”.
“It’s how you, as a company, behave; how they treat people, how they give everyone an equal opportunity, how they don’t look at the skin color, they don’t look at how tall you are,” Nielsen explains.
“It’s part of our responsibility to make sure that we predominantly work with companies that have a very, very declared strategy and behave according to that strategy in the market.
“We need to educate all of our clients that they need to spend their money with companies that we can rely on.”
]]>But Jakob Nielsen is having the time of his life.
In 2017, WPP’s GroupM launched Finecast, aiming to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”, beginning in the UK and since launching in Australia.
Now Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen says the outfit will launch in another country this coming September.
Having launched in the UK, the unit is up to 51 people and has also set up in Australia.
“We are starting to really scale,” says Nielsen – of both Finecast and the addressable ecosystem in general. “Now it feels like there’s a shift this year.”
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data.
It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
What are the right ingredients for the addressable TV facilities recipe? “You need to have a lot of data people, a lot of technology people, lots of TV people,” Nielsen says, speaking with MTM co-founder Jon Watts for this interview.
“They find better solutions for our clients and that’s what we think our job is.”
Not just people, but also technology. Finecast has built some of its own, but is happy to use software from the likes of FreeWheel, AT&T, Amobee and others, what Nielsen calls the “plumbing” for TV 2.0.
But getting there isn’t easy. Though advanced TV advertising may be hitting a kind of scale, it is relative to the dominance of the overall linear market – and it is a slog.
“(It is) enormously complicated, very fragmented, no measurements, many, many systems to connect to,” Nielsen acknowledges. “And that will slow down the adoption of addressable TV. That’s why we are where we are now and we won’t grow as much as most people want to grow because it’s complex. It’s difficult to understand.”
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page
]]>And that is crossing off its ecommerce platform and on to online TV, too.
In a recent terms of service update for Fire TV ad sales, Amazon says
“Fire TV Ad-Enabled Apps must provide 30% of total advertising impressions in the app to Amazon, which 30% will be representative of all of the app’s advertising impressions and not exclude or limit Amazon’s access to times, programs or categories. Apps will not receive payment for the 30% of impressions provided to Amazon.”
That sets reports flying, like this from AdAge: “Until last month, Amazon let the publishers sell their own ads and take all the money.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the boss of one ad agency’s connected TV play gives his view on how Amazon’s position is shaping up.
“You can say, ‘Well what’s different about that? Apple is charging 30 percent if you have an app there they will take 30 percent or 40 percent cut of that app’,” says Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen.
“Well the difference is, Amazon is not saying that. They’re not saying they’ll take a cut of their revenue – they’re saying they want to sell the inventory. So for Amazon to do that, they’re building a big infrastructure, sales force of going directly after TV money. So they’re definitely going to be a gigantic player in there.”
Last year, GroupM launched Finecast, spanning multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms, set-top boxes, video-on-demand services, over-the-top providers and game consoles.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
Finecast recently told Beet.TV the unit has effectively been soft-launched and plans to deliver a self-serve tool to both agencies and brands later.
In the big picture, Nielsen doesn’t think connected TV will be left all to Amazon.
“I think all the current broadcasters can be big players, but they have to invest,” he says. “They have to invest in technology, they have to bring data into it.
And I think they’re all doing that, depending on what market you’re in. But I think the future of TV is enormously exciting, and that’s why we’re here.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
]]>Sky is the UK’s leading pay-TV provider, whose AdSmart was one of the world’s first and biggest addressable TV services. Finecast is GroupM’s agency aiming to be a single point of access to buy inventory across multiple UK TV platforms and operators, including Sky.
In this Beet.TV discussion panel, Sky advanced advertising group director Jamie West and Finecast CEO Jakob Nielsen say addressable TV won’t kill linear – but could soon gobble the majority of TV ad spending.
EY global advisory leader for media and entertainment Janet Balis led the discussion…
West and Nielsen said they have numbers to prove how addressable TV advertising works.
Sky’s West: “In ad breaks where there is an addressed client, channel switching … reduces by more than a third. that means more relevance or engaged audiences, and that’s a win for the advertiser; that’s a win for the consumer.”
Finecast’s Nielsen: “Advertisers today are starting to struggle just to get their reach across in the linear environment. Wherever you are in the world, linear is declining. Ten years ago the way we watched TV was in front of a box. We didn’t have distractions as we have today. If you are an advertiser and there are too many distractions for you that’s not going to work.”
The future will not be wholly on-demand. Whilst addressable can drive brands’ business, there will still be a role for traditional TV, the pair said…
Sky’s West: “I don’t think that linear TV is dead. What a marketeer is trying to do when they use TV is build brand fame. You will still do that using TV, whether it be on-demand or through linear. Addressable makes TV more relevant; it allows you to customize the message; it allows you to understand, household-to-household, the efficacy of your campaign, which means that you can optimize, prioritize and sequence campaigns through that process.
Finecast’s Nielsen: “We don’t think addressable TV will be 100% (of TV ad spend). We think traditional, live, linear TV is very, very important. You still have an tremendous amount of clients that needs to keep investing in their brands and do the reach. The small companies can disrupt your business very, very much if you forget to invest in your brand.”
Sky’s West: “I have a very clear line of sight to getting to 65, 70 percent household penetration for addressable by 2020. That is sort of market-leading or world-leading in terms of household penetration.”
West and Nielsen said it is challenging to drive adoption when brands are thinking short-term. West said the benefits are clear to brand sat the start, it’s just institutional adoption that needs education…
Finecast’s Nielsen: “Today companies are unfortunately becoming more and more short-sighted; there’s more and more pressure on P&Ls; there’s a tremendous amount of disruption in the market, whatever industry you are in, (your value) could replicated if you don’t have a powerful band. Clients are more and more focused on the short-term. I think that’s a really, really dangerous trend. I think we are doing what we can to kind of keep educating.”
Sky’s West: “What we’ll see is that the market will coalesce around a common standard and common goals, and that’s when you’ll really see addressable go from being whatever percent it is of the market today to being the numbers that Jacob talks about. Forty or 50% (of TV ad spend) is eminently achievable, in my mind.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.
The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.
Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.
“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.
Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:
“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”
Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”
Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.
Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”
Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”
Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:
“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.
“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”
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, the CEO of a company GroupM has established to work on addressable TV advertising in the UK has an observation that may be surprising to some.
“It’s not as progressed as here in the US,” says Jakob Nielsen of Finecast. “(The) US is not as progressed as in China. I’ve spent quite a bit in time in China seeing that.”
Spend on OTT TV and movies in China will total $12.22bn by 2022, the massive majority of Asia-Pacific spending, according to a Broadband TV News forecast.
A host of new streaming boxes and services has emerged there in the last couple of years.
Nielsen says Finecast will have to take a different approach in every market in which it launches.
So far, the company has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters…
…in most of its main set-top and over-the-top devices…
But Nielsen wants Finecast to become an “ecosystem” that operates across national borders.
He explains, the opportunity lets smaller and more local companies advertise on TV with cost efficiency they could not previously achieve.
“The predominant group of advertisers are around automobiles and financial clients because the notion of being able to do household targeting fits these clients very well,” he says.
“Imagine you are a BMW dealership, which is one of our clients, and you have all these different dealerships all over the world. The dealership in Manchester could never do TV because TV in the UK is six regions at the most detailed level, otherwise it’s national.
“If you’re a dealership in Manchester, you will waste an awful lot of money if you do national TV when you’re trying to sell a BMW in Manchester. Now, if they have a special offer, let’s say they want to sell X BMW X5s and they gift 15% discount that’s only relevant for the Manchester area and now they can start doing TV advertising. It changes everything.”
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, in the smaller UK market, Finecast has quickly gained real traction – and now its boss wants to give it to the world, too.
The agency’s business unit aims to “help advertisers address hard-to-reach TV viewers through a single access point with standardised measurement”.
That is long-hand for saying Finecast has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters…
…in most of its main set-top and over-the-top devices…
In this video interview with Beet.TV, CEO Jakob Nielsen says Finecast is a different kind of entity for a different kind of market.
“Finecast is a product company,” Nielsen says. “It’s not really an agency. It develops audience products that take inventory, mix that with data, and it gives that to our clients, and we make it a very easy for all our agencies to do this with our clients.
“We have the 26 million households in the UK. We have a reach of about 15 million, we think.
“We don’t have the two-minute principle you have here,” Nielsen says, referring to the limited two minutes per hour of ad time which US pay-TV providers sell in local programming. “There are certain things that are more and more easy in the UK market.”
If the roll-out has been “easy”, the future may be more of a challenge. Because Nielsen has big ambitions for Finecast, which is part-powered by Videology.
The outfit has already said it will roll out to “top markets” over the next few months. So, will smashing those two minutes in the US be difficult?
“You need to make benefits for everyone else, and participate in that ecosystem,” Nielsen adds. “If you develop an ecosystem where it’s a marketplace where people have opportunities to fit within that business models, all of a sudden, you can create something pretty unique.
“We’ll take one thing at a time. It’s not a two-year project. It’s a 10-year project.
So much consensus will Finecast need to achieve in order to meet its ambitions, Nielsen even suggests it could share equity with other players in future.
“Today, Finecast is 100% owned by WPP and GroupM. We don’t think that we’ll have it look like that in the future.”
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
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.
]]>Jakob Nielsen, Managing Director at GroupM Digital in the U.K., has been named Chief Executive Officer of Finecast. The company is headquartered in London with Rich Astley as Chief Product Officer supported by Kelly Clark, Global CEO of GroupM, and Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM.
“The time is right for traditional TV and over-the-top providers to scale their new classes of addressable inventory to the benefit of our advertisers and to meet demand for targeted TV advertising,” Nielsen said in a news release. “With the rapid growth of digital advertising, TV budgets may be at risk from new competitors, particularly as digital video improves in quality and ease of access.”
Nielsen will be one of the featured speakers at the 2017 Beet Retreat in Miami, where the theme will be The Future Of Advanced TV.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
Beet.TV interviewed Nielsen last year at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London where he discussed the potential of addressable TV ads in the coming years. We are republishing the interview in light of today’s news about the rollout of Finecast.
About 42% of US homes are now able to receive so-called “addressable advertising” – TV ads custom-targeted at individual homes thanks to one of a variety of return-path TV systems. But how much of the multi-billion-dollar TV advertising industry could be funneled through that channel in the years ahead.
It’s early days, but ad agency GroupM’s UK MD Jakob Nielsen says his group is taking a guess.
“You are changing how you are thinking from the past – therefore, it will take some time,” he cautions, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But, if you look across all our clients, we think 30% to 50% of all TV could eventually – not tomorrow – be addressable TV. You will have some clients having 60% of their total mix, in five or 10 years, being addressable, other clients being 20%.”
Nielsen says Europe is farther behind on roll-out, but dominant UK pay-TV provider Sky is already an early leader with its so-called AdSmart technology, pushing multiple alternative ads to consumers’ set-top boxes for subsequent decisioning and play-out during standard ad moments.
The beauty of the idea is two-fold. First, it is opening TV advertising to smaller new advertisers. Second, it means those advertisers can target people close to the point of purchase, not just spend money on raising initial awareness.
“You have the top of the funnel, but all of a sudden TV can start going in to the mid and lower parts of the funnel, that they weren’t part of in the past,” Nielsen adds. “AdSmart, in the beginning, 70 to 80% of their advertisers came from non-traditional TV advertisers.
“They were able to reach a BMW dealership who wanted to sell a BMW in Edinburgh. That puts a completely new perspective on what you can do with TV.”
]]>But how much of the multi-billion-dollar TV advertising industry could be funnelled through that channel in the years ahead.
It’s early days, but ad agency GroupM’s UK MD Jakob Nielsen says his group is taking a guess.
“You are changing how you are thinking from the past – therefore, it will take some time,” he cautions, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But, if you look across all our clients, we think 30% to 50% of all TV could eventually – not tomorrow – be addressable TV.
“You will have some clients having 60% of their total mix, in five or 10 years, being addressable, other clients being 20%.”
Nielsen says Europe is farther behind on roll-out, but dominant UK pay-TV provider Sky is already an early leader with its so-called AdSmart technology, pushing multiple alternative ads to consumers’ set-top boxes for subsequent decisioning and play-out during standard ad moments.
The beauty of the idea is two-fold. First, it is opening TV advertising to smaller new advertisers. Second, it means those advertisers can target people close to the point of purchase, not just spend money on raising initial awareness.
“You have the top of the funnel, but all of a sudden TV can start going in to the mid and lower parts of the funnel, that they weren’t part of in the past,” Nielsen adds.
“AdSmart, in the beginning, 70 to 80% of their advertisers came from non-traditional TV advertisers.
“They were able to reach a BMW dealership who wanted to sell a BMW in Edinburgh. That puts a completely new perspective on what you can do with TV.”
This interview was conducted at Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“(In the) UK … TV buyers are constantly looking to new audiences,” Nielsen tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “With video… in the diminishing-return space, all of a sudden we can find a new audience.
“Broadcasters in the UK, I feel, are very progressive at participating in this space. If you follow Channel 4… they are having a programmatic strategy – they now sell some of their core audiences programmatically as a broadcaster – that’s quite progressive.
“Videology … is a great technology that will enable us to … create similar audiences to TV audiences… ABCS1s etc… (we have) started shifting TV spend in to video spend.”
He was interviewed for Beet.TV by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all the coverage here.
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