This article and accompanying  video highlight interviews from this series

The series was produced by Beet.TV in partnership with the VAB and sponsored by Comcast’s Effectv.

Dan Lovinger, NBC Sports and NBCUniversal

NBC Sports was among the broadcasters that scrambled to reinvent its programming during the pandemic, recognizing the need for sports as people seek escapist entertainment during trying times.

“History proves that people need sports the most. There’s always this huge desire for sports coming from fans,” Dan Lovinger, executive vice president of advertising sales at NBC Sports Group, said.

He pointed to multiple occasions when sports viewership bounced back from interruptions ranging from player strikes to major disasters.

“What was different this time was that sports stopped for a long, long time — and that left the leagues, the fans, the owners in a much different position,” Lovinger said. “All those people did a terrific job in trying to wade through this no-sports environment.”

Jason Wiese, VAB

Sports have broad appeal, giving advertisers a way to reach a mass audience of consumers who are passionate about their favorite teams and players.

“When I think about the value of sports to marketers, I come back to scale, the audience composition and the incredible emotional engagement of sports,” Jason Wiese, senior vice president and director of strategic insights at VAB, said. “[Sports] is some of the most watched programming content across video platforms.”

Eighty percent of sports fans said that during the pandemic, TV was the centerpiece of the their households, VAB found in a study. Meanwhile, 63% of sports fans have bought a bigger TV screen to watch games, and many don’t mind viewing other events on a smartphone or tablet at the same time.

Melanie Hamilton, Effectv

Live sports have the power to reach a broad audience, making them a key part of the media strategies for mass marketers. When sports were suspended last year during the onset of the pandemic, marketers looked for other ways to reach those audiences.

“With everybody inside, viewership was on the rise and marketers needed to reach those sports fans,” Melanie Hamilton, head of enterprise sales at Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “That’s really where data as our backbone and our set-top boxes came into play, and we were able to deliver this in real time to the buy-side community.”

Tina Shah, Turner Sports

Bringing live sports back to television last year required a significant effort by broadcasters, sports leagues and advertisers to pivot quickly to engage with fans. Turner Sports, the division of AT&T’s WarnerMedia, worked with sponsors to develop innovative campaigns that could be activated within the confines of the arenas that were mostly empty.

Advertisers can find ways to parlay that engagement with the “opportunity for an ‘always-on’ investment, whether the games are on or not,” Tina Shah, executive vice president and general manager of Turner Sports, said. “We’ve historically had large-scale media partnerships that are multifaceted with advertisers that really let us establish a lot of trust with the advertiser, and get a deep understanding of their goals, and really tailor solutions that meet their needs.”

Jon Stainer, Nielsen Sports Americas

Because many sponsorship deals with sports leagues consist of multiyear contracts, the level of investment in sports wasn’t affected dramatically. Instead, part of the spending shifting to digital channels that become key touch points with fans.

“The big opportunity for brands is surviving and thriving in this hybrid world that we’re going to live in, where live events and attending live entertainment are going to be very important, but so is playing in virtual world,” Jon Stainer, managing director of Nielsen Sports Americas, said. “The big thing for the sports industry is how they best play in the virtual and digital environment, alongside the live environment where they’ve thrived for so many years.”

Danielle Brown, Disney Advertising Sales

The absence of live sports challenged sports leagues and broadcasters to provide programming that partly filled the void. For Disney’s ESPN, that meant getting creative with its approach to providing everything from documentaries like “The Last Dance” about NBA legend Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to reformatting events like the NFL Draft.

“Sports definitely has evolved a lot over the past few months,” Danielle Brown, vice president at Disney Advertising Sales, said. “It continues to be an effective reach vehicle across all platforms.”
ESPN’s internal research found that 90% of consumers describe themselves as sports fans, giving it a broad market to serve with programming.

Tom McGovern, Optimum Sports

Sports marketing traditionally has been experiential in its engagement with fans who attend games, but the disruptions of the pandemic led to more experimentation.

“We worked with a number of clients on: how do we get more innovative in how we engage consumers with brands?” Tom McGovern, president of Optimum Sports, the sports marketing agency of Omnicom Media Group, said. “How do we create and market outside of those 30-second pods, which is something we’ve always looked to do, anyway? But what other opportunities have come out of this to create some storytelling for the brand that is authentic?”

Adam Schwartz, Horizon Media

The immediacy of live sports is hard for other kinds of content to replace, with 97% of sports viewing happening in real time.

“Sports is a very important part of a number of my advertisers’ portfolios. The broad reach is certainly a big part of that, but also the passion of the people who watch and consume sports,” Adam Schwartz, senior vice president and director of sports media at Horizon Media, the world’s biggest independent media services company, said.

Seth Winter, Fox Sports

Live sports is one of the strongest genres on linear TV for advertisers seeking to reach a mass audience. While other genres of programming like drama and sitcoms face competition from streaming services, sports has endured in providing immediacy and excitement to fans.

“What I think that advertisers most sought in this Covid environment was the ability to deliver impressions,” Seth Winter, executive vice president of sports sales at Fox Sports, said. “With some of the challenges of not being able to execute on-site sponsorships in the manner in which we had originally negotiated, the advertisers very much worked with us.”

Gibbs Haljun, Mindshare

The pandemic’s disruptions pushed marketers and their agencies to come up other ways to engage consumers, and optimize their advertising efforts.

“The pandemic created the opportunity to pivot and actually compress the timelines to do things in a quicker, faster, more agile fashion, which really benefited all of our clients.” Gibbs Haljun, total investment lead of GroupM’s Mindshare, said. “That’s one of the great things that’s come out of this pandemic, that renewed sense of partnership. It’s not about saying, ‘no.’ It’s about saying, ‘yes, and…’ The reality is not every network, every client will be a great fit, but there are so many that are, that there’s always a solution.”

Mike Law, Amplifi USA

Sports fans will find a way to watch their favorite players and teams, giving advertisers a way to participate in programming among a wider variety of devices. Amid the fragmentation of the media market, audience-based targeting is central to reaching those fans, especially younger consumers.

“Whatever you’re a fan of today, you can find that sport. Younger audiences like that — because they want to control the experience,” Mike Law, president of Amplifi USA, the media buying agency owned by Dentsu, said. “It’s still one of the few places where you can create such excitement and buzz.”

James Rooke, Effectv

Sports programming is an important anchor for advertisers in reaching audiences, not only when fans watch their favorite teams, but also when they consume other kinds of content. Reaching them takes an audience-based approach — and that become much more apparent last year when the pandemic capsized the sports calendar.

“Sports remains such an important anchor for advertisers who either want to target specific sports content, or take a more audience-base approach,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “What our aggregate set-top box data from Comcast allows us to do is derive really important insights into viewing behaviors of those sports viewers.”

You are watching “Live Sports 2021: What’s Next on TV,” a Beet.TV + VAB leadership series presented by Effectv. For more videos, please visit this page.

“What we’ve found is that sports viewing hasn’t decreased. In fact, the opposite has been true,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “The sports audience didn’t go away when COVID hit and sports programming went away — it just shifted.”

Soon after the coronavirus was declared a pandemic in March, many professional and college sports leagues suspended operations and organizers of the Summer Olympics — typically a billion-dollar bonanza in televised sports marketing — announced the games would be delayed for a year. Soon after sports resumed in the summer, fans were overwhelmed with an abundance of competing games.

Speaking to Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of video advertising trade group VAB, Rooke said he had observed a variety of changes in viewing behaviors because of the pandemic, including a willingness of hardcore fans to be flexible, giving advertisers more ways to reach them.

“The sports ‘super fans’ tend to move and watch other sports when their core, No. 1 sport isn’t on TV,” Rooke said. “Fifty-five percent of really heavy sports viewers typically watch three or more sports on a consistent basis.”

Among the findings, fans of professional baseball tend to also enjoy watching hockey, golf and college basketball. First-party data about viewership, which Effectv gathers from set-top boxes, help to track those audiences across different sports programming.

“What’s really critical is being able to start with first-party, deterministic data to drive those types of insights out,” Rooke said. “Against the backdrop of shifting schedules in sports, advertisers can continue to follow their audience despite those changes.”

Audience-First Over Content-First

Sports programming is a major draw on linear TV, giving advertisers a broad platform for mass campaigns. However, the pandemic sped up a longer-term shift in viewing habits that have made audience-based targeting an even bigger priority than contextual, content-first strategies. Consumers are spending their time among a broader variety of media channels — a shift that won’t reverse.

“There’s no going back,” Rooke said. “We’ve seen such a major shift since COVID started toward audience-based buying.”

The change isn’t isolated to sports.

“What happened with sports in our country was really the catalyst more broadly for a shift in the media industry to more audience-based executions,” Rooke said. “That will get accelerated further as viewing continues to fragment against more distribution channels. An advertiser needs the ability to execute, not just across where viewing is taking place on linear television distribution channels, but also across streaming.”

Amid the fragmentation, omnichannel buying strategies deliver better performance for marketers, Effectv found in a study last year.

“We were able to demonstrate that on average campaigns that aired on more networks had double the reach compared to those that executed on less than 10 networks, regardless of spend level,” Rooke said.

The shift in viewing habits also has led the video advertising marketplace, which encompasses linear TV and newer streaming platforms as households connect TVs to the internet, to come to grips with growing competition from tech giants that have powerful targeting tools.

Media buying requires an audience-based and multiscreen approach as consumers watch video a broader variety of devices. However, the TV media marketplace is still divided between among more traditional approaches to measuring reach and newer audience-based strategies in advanced TV.

“Television overall has to simplify how it is bought if we’re going to move toward an audience-based execution. Then, segment definition becomes one of many execution priorities,” Rooke said.

You are watching “Live Sports 2021: What’s Next on TV,” a Beet.TV + VAB leadership video series presented by Effectv, a Comcast company. For more videos, please visit this page.

“We need to move away from transacting on GRPs, and we need to transact on an impression-based model,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, referring to “gross ratings points” that quantify impressions as a percentage of a target population. “It’s 2020, and the fact we’ve not grown a lot on this journey is problematic.”

In this second episode of series co-produced by Beet.TV and video advertising trade group VAB, Rooke shared his thoughts about recent trends with Sean Cunningham, the president and CEO of VAB.

Rooke sees a need for impression-based measurement amid the shift toward multi-screen video consumption. U.S. consumers are forecast to increase their time spent on mobile devices to more than three hours a day this year, up from about two and a half hours in 2018, according to researcher eMarketer. Smartphones give advertisers a way to reach younger consumers who watch their favorite programming throughout the day.

Advertisers and media channels recognize the need for impression-based advertising amid the shift toward a multi-screen, audience-based and addressable world, Rooke said.

“The question is: how do we use this moment now to accelerate it becoming the norm? We need to overcome a series of challenges, including legacy mindsets, incentive structures and system constraints, among others,” he said. “If we don’t do this, then innovation in the television industry is going to be held back — and the only one’s that’s going to gain from that are going to be the tech platforms.”

Lifting DTC Brands

Video channels need to highlight how commercials drive return on investment (ROI) and results at all stages of the purchase funnel, Rooke said. “Last-touch attribution” that gives greater weight to digital ads to convert viewers into buyers devalues the power of television to help drive business outcomes.

“The truth’s on our side here — we just haven’t done a good job as an industry proving it,” Rooke said. “We’re not where we need to be in terms of proof of performance just being de facto, and it should be. When that happens, we’re going to see a shift of dollars away from bottom-of-funnel players as the reality of top to mid-funnel comes to fruition.”

TV and digital are most effective when they work together, Rooke said. He cited internal research that found that when ads air on TV and digital channels, brand recall is twice as high than on digital alone and brand intent is 50% higher. Combining TV and digital are highly effective for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that don’t sell products through traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

“There comes a point where their social channels simply can’t provide the reach they need, and they run into issues with excess frequency,” Rooke said. “Multi-screen television has played an absolutely crucial role in helping them scale and go mass market.”

“Our roots are very much in local advertising,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “That said, we are not a local advertising sales business anymore. We are an audience delivery company.”

Rooke shared his thoughts in this first episode of two conversations with Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of video advertising trade group VAB. Beet.TV and VAB co-produced the video series.

‘Sports Audience Didn’t Go Anywhere’

The company has a vast trove of viewing data gleaned from set-top boxes that can be harnessed for audience-based targeting, instead of media buys based on TV networks and dayparts. The data have provided numerous insights, including how the temporary suspension of live sports during the coronavirus pandemic have triggered a shift in viewing habits.

“The sports audience didn’t go anywhere. They didn’t stop watching TV,” Rooke said. “Their viewership has moved elsewhere, in particular to places like news.”

That audience likely is to return as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League resume play — with TV offering the only venue to see games held in empty stadiums. The National Football League next month starts its regular season, which will be significant for linear TV viewership.

Strategies for Brands

With advertisers seeking ways to reach audiences more efficiently, audience-based targeting can help to expand the reach of campaigns and improve return on investment (ROI), Effectv’s Rooke said. The company recently analyzed more than 100,000 campaigns and 30 million commercial airings to find that campaigns airing on more networks had double the reach than on 10 or fewer networks, regardless of spending level.

The health crisis has had a significant short-term effect on media spending, including an expected 18% decline in U.S. TV advertising excluding political campaigns this year, as forecast by GroupM, the media-buying unit of WPP.  The firm expects a rebound of 5.9% in TV advertising next year as the economy continues to recover.

Comcast also has worked to develop content to connect advertisers with consumers at the local and national levels. As one example, the company developed a “Hometown Hub” on its Xfinity X1 platform to help viewers find local businesses, including ones that were opening as pandemic lockdowns were lifted.

At the national level, it created a virtual showroom for automotive brands seeking to reach homebound consumers, Rooke said.

He foresees the continuation of several shifts that will change how advertisers reach audiences on a broader variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets and TVs. Advertisers will measure reach based on impressions rather than gross ratings points, and will seek to measure how their campaigns affect business outcomes like sales.

“None of those things are groundbreaking insights, I know that,” Rooke said. “What I think is interesting is that the mindset shifts that have taken place in the last five months” of the pandemic.

That sort of integration requires extensive infrastructure development. But bigger things are coming, says James Rooke, FreeWheel GM, publishers, who explains the workings in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“The foundation is enabling the digital ad server, FreeWheel’s digital ad server, to be able to understand and receive linear television logs,” Rooke says. “And that really is building the connective tissue between the traditional NBC’s linear tracking system and FreeWheel’s digital ad server.

“Once you’ve built that connective tissue, then you can start to leverage FreeWheel’s digital ad server to use this intelligence to make decisions about how the linear log should be scheduled.”

As Digiday’s Tim Peterson reported: “FreeWheel is not pulling digital video ads and putting them on linear TV — for now. (But this) sets up for a day when its linear and digital inventory can be treated equally.”

Rooke says NBC has made the move because ad buyers are calling for a single unified way to buy moving-image ads, whether on “TV” or in “video”. “Executing on that is incredibly hard,” he concedes.

Rooke outlined a three-phase approach he will use to pull it off:

1. Phase one: This connecting of fundamental systems. Now complete.
2. Phase two: “Use FreeWheel’s digital ad server to be able to take a look at the linear schedule and say, ‘Hey, I think there’s a better way to organize that schedule that will enable better delivery on behalf of NBC and ultimately on behalf of the advertiser’. Rooke says FreeWheel will work on that integration through 2019, starting on a smaller NBC channel and rolling up to all of them within eight to 12 months.
3. Phase three: Supporting buying audiences, not just demographics. “Building the foundation of your single decision brain, the ad decision engine that is based on principles in digital, enables you to execute much more sophisticated use cases, audience based use cases, data-enabled use cases, on behalf of NBC that can work not just in digital environments but across linear environments as well.”

These are some of the views that emerge from the vantage point of James Rooke, GM, Publisher Platform at premium video provider FreeWheel, who has long had a close-up view of the digital video landscape.

Asked to identify a major change in the marketplace year over year, Rooke says “One is that the pendulum that’s been swinging back to premium video is accelerating in the direction that the premium video companies want. So that’s a good thing.”

Looking back a few years, he recalls the revelations of fraud within certain ad networks and a resulting pullback of advertising dollars and relocation to safer environments. More recently, some digital video ads have appeared alongside objectionable content, much of it user-generated.

“That has now evolved into a deeper understanding of the depth of challenge of ensuring brand safety,” along with a rise in the recognition of the positive impact for advertisers that premium video content has on viewer engagement with ad messages.

Asked gauge the ultimate impact of Nielsen’s Total Content Ratings, Rooke sees it not as a silver bullet but one step in a positive direction. That’s because going forward, more precise audience targeting will naturally result in a “mosaic” of audience measurement metrics.

Because audiences may be targeted using proprietary first party datasets of a brand marketer, “there isn’t necessarily the need in that instance to have different types of measurement,” Rooke says. He also points to the “leadership that the programmers have been taking” in advanced audience targeting, citing the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom.

“I think those are really important signals that the premium video ecosystem understands that it needs to move toward a model that gives greater options to the buy-side in terms of how that inventory is bought,” Rooke says.

He brings a similarly granular and realistic perspective to addressable advertising. “The reality as I think we all know is that it’s still a very nascent topic.”

FreeWheel’s clients need to unify their quality reach across not just digital video but set-top box, video-on-demand inventory and, ultimately, linear inventory. “What we’re being asked to solve for is ‘enable me to plan, forecast, ad decision, steward, optimize across a unified pool of inventory’ where the screen is simply an end point,” says Rooke.

The second “layer of the cake” in Rooke’s words is enabling the sell-side to be able to “execute on that unified pool of quality inventory against any dataset that they choose.” While it’s still in the early stages, “those are the proof points that need to get put on the board and I think that’s going to be beneficial obviously not just for the sell-side but for the buy-side.”

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“There was a clear understanding, based on the conversations that we had with brands and agencies, that solving for best-in-class ad experience isn’t the issue of the publisher alone,” says the GM, Publisher Platform, FreeWheel. “There is shared accountability on both sides.”

More than half (52%) of 250 agency and brand leaders surveyed by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video said that improving the video ad experience for consumers is the biggest challenge for the industry.

“One of the interesting findings was that the number one answer for ad experience issues actually came back as creative diversity, and that is something that the buy side has accountability for,” Rooke says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Other findings highlighted the need to ensure the right creative assets are made available for the right screens and that ad tags aren’t so heavy as to cause latency issues. “But there was a very balanced point of view that says that at the end of the day, we have to put the consumer at the center,” Rooke says.

He believes that if everyone does their part, everyone will win. Brands know that they’re getting the best return for their money if consumers are watching content in brand-safe and engaging environments, while MVPD’s and other premium video providers can continue to grow their share of ad dollars.

“That fuels the production of best-in-class content that we get to all enjoy, and that’s good for consumers. So I think there’s a nice virtuous cycle there,” Rooke says.

When it comes to fragmentation, FreeWheel has a bird’s-eye view of the complications, as it executes dynamic ad insertion to more than 200 different endpoints.

“Managing that ad experience is not just a technical issue but it is the combination of business policy, operational execution and technical execution. And those three things have to come together across all the different parties,” Rooke observes.

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But is programmatic automation really all it’s cracked up to be?

“When people talk about programmatic and they reference automation, the irony is it’s actually far more manual and far more inefficient, and, on a cost-per-dollar standpoint, more costly, than a traditional linear TV transaction,” says James Rooke, marketplaces GM of the programmatic video ad-tech platform FreeWheel.

But Rooke does see a glowing future in which advertisers can benefit from greater programmatic video efficiency, if they focus on their business models.

“There’s an opportunity to reduce the number of back-and-forth conversations that go on between the buy and the sell side, automate the RFP process … and, through API connections, be able to go from the pitch-to-paid process, with less hand-offs, less emails, less conversations,” Rooke says.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, FreeWheel marketplaces GM James Rooke channels marketers’ concern: “How am I going to unify my (advertising) inventory to get greater scale … regardless of screen?

“You may have different measurement providers for OTT versus for a set-top box environment – how do you stitch all that together? It’s very fragmented right now. (But) things are moving at light speed.”

For its part, FreeWheel recently tied up with Canoe Ventures, which helps pump ads in to US cable operators’ VOD platforms, to begin combining the buying process for ads across VOD, set-top box and internet video.

“It opens up a large amount of long-form premium video inventory for the programmers to be able to monetize,” Rooke says. “As buyer concern increases about inventory sets that may not be considered premium, set-top box is a fraud-fee, 100%-viewable in a leanback engaged environment… it’s the best stuff there is.”

FreeWheel is a wholly-owned unit of Comcast.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

That is according to video ad tech platform FreeWheel, which expects to observe growth in its upcoming Q4 video monetization report.

FreeWheel’s business solutions GM James Rooke expects “continued growth in viewing taking place behind the authentication wall”: “In our last report, it was over 450% growth year-over-year

“More and more of our publishers are putting their content behind that authentication wall. Consumers are starting to understand how to access that content. That’s a great thing for the industry.”

Rooke was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

“Consumers see TV as TV – an episode of Family Guy is an episode of Family Guy, regardless of where you watch it,” says video ad tech platform FreeWheel’s business solutions GM James Rooke.

“A lot of the growth in non-desktop viewing is actually coming on OTT. With a lot of the marquee sports events last year – whether it be the Olympics, World Cup or others –  last year, we saw over 200% growth in live viewing. Consumers are getting educated about the ability to watch across their devices.”

A year ago, FreeWheel was acquired by Comcast.

“Off-desktop (viewing) is around 27% (of digital viewing) in the US. The greatest growth is coming from OTT (over-the-top) devices. Mobile is over 100% growth year-on-year .”

Rooke was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat by Furious Corp founder and CEO Ashley J. Swartz.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

The partnership sees advertisers use their own audience data to buy video ads via TubeMogul, whilst TubeMogul lets publishers do deals using that data – but sensitivities are safeguarded, Rooke tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We need to ensure brand advertisers’ data is protected and the advertiser is never going to pass their data to the publisher,” he says. “On the flip side, our publishers don’t want to pass their inventory across to the buy side.

Rooke adds that FreeWheel has seen a 250 percent year-on-year growth in viewing coming via TV Everywhere services.

We spoke with him recently at the TubeMogul partner meeting.  For more videos from the event, please visit this page.