“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 in this video discussion on Beet.TV. “It’s still one of the few places where you can create such excitement and buzz.”

Speaking to James Rothwell, vice president of global agency, brand and industry relations at Comcast Advertising, Law said younger viewers are looking for sports content that’s easier to consume in shorter segments throughout the day.

“It puts a lot of emphasis on highlights. These audiences are not used to watching a three- our four-hour game at once,” Law said. “They’re going to consume 10 games within that window” by watching highlights and analysis. With the expansion of legalized sports betting, that analysis adds value to the viewing experience, too.

Audience-Based Targeting Is Key

Audience-based targeting is crucial in reaching fans as they consume sports content among different devices and media platforms, including social media and video on demand.

“It’s the ability to follow that audience, to talk about audiences versus broad demographics,” Law said. “There’s only upside to it from an advertiser standpoint. It’s the addressability, it’s getting that passionate fan where they want to be.”

Amid the limitations on fan attendance, sports leagues, broadcasters and marketers adapted their strategies to engage viewers. They experimented with everything from new kinds of signage that was visible on-camera to video mosaic walls that showed fans cheering for their favorite teams while livestreaming games at home.

Law said he expects a return of fans in stands to make the viewing experience more exciting, especially for college basketball games that feed off the energy of the surrounding crowds.

“College basketball just isn’t the same without fans,” he said.

Bidding for Sports Programming Heats Up

Broadcasters traditionally have made lives sports programming a central part of their schedules, but they may face growing competition from digital platforms that bid for streaming rights. Video-on-demand services have become more popular as households connect their TVs directly to the internet, and they need fresh programming to help differentiate their brands.

“This next round of negotiations is going to be interesting and really expensive,” Law said. “The digital players have a lot of cash that they can bring to the table.”

He cited the example of Amazon, which for the past four years has livestreamed “Thursday Night Football” alongside Fox and the NFL Network. Amazon has showcased its technological prowess, letting viewers see on-demand replays and data about players, and pick from a menu of multiple announcer feeds.

Amid the higher prices for broadcasting rights, advertisers will demand that media owners provide sponsorship opportunities that aren’t limited to a 30-second spot in a sports broadcast, Law said.

“What I’m not excited for is the price tag. That price tag is going to be high, and ultimately, that’s passed along to consumers, passed along to advertisers,” Law said. “We’re going to have to think about how we’re going to offset that and be more creative, and get the equal value.”

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.

But TV is now a medium that can drive results even for upstarts, according to a new piece of research.

The Halo Effect, a report from VAB and Comcast Advertising’s Effectv, examined direct-to-consumer (D2C) and 50 other brands to discover the effectiveness of launching a TV ad campaign.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, James Rothwell, Comcast Advertising’s  VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations, explains the findings.

RELEASED TODAY Our new report in collaboration with @effectv, "TV as a Growth Engine," and the latest in #TheHaloEffect series, provides a rich analysis of the impact that TV has on a brand’s digital storefront and platform. https://t.co/3OLobcyBZY pic.twitter.com/GZeFcec6Ww

— VAB (@VABintel) November 17, 2020

Traffic driver

“On the month of that TV launch, all brands, no matter what their age, saw double digit growth,” Rothwell says.

• “The younger brands saw the largest jump of around 23% increase in their total unique website visitors.”
• “When they weren’t on air there was a halo effect of TV’s impact with younger brands, they were able to sustain some growth through those channels, reinforcing the TV messaging.”
• “Those that were able to stay on air they had the resources to do so with an ongoing TV campaign were able to see 80% growth in digital engagement while on television.”

“The real takeaway for us was – it doesn’t matter how old the brand is; if you have the opportunity to invest in television early, you can exponentially grow your business very, very quickly.”

For example, eco-friendly cleaning products company Blueland saw a 65% jump in website traffic after launching a TV ad campaign, the report found.

Future of D2C

EMarketer analysis suggests D2C ecommerce sales would hit $17.75 billion in the US in 2020, up from $14.28 billion in 2019 – 2.6% of total ecommerce.

But eMarketer thinks growth rate will tail off in the emerging economy as many items are non-essential and customer acquisition costs are rising.

To gain cut-through, many D2C brands are turning to TV. That is different for a category that has traditionally built its name in online, social media. Indeed, the “D” in “D2C” may as well stand for digital.

Why wait?

But many D2C brands that turn to TV are finding the reach and impact, indeed, provides the platform they need.

“Typically, (it is) around eight years before a DTC brand invests in television,” Rothwell adds.

“But, more and more, we’re seeing brands are accelerating that up in their timeline and accelerating their TV investment strategies because they’ve seen what it’s been able to do. (It can) catapult them to that next level of growth much quicker than maybe if they’d waited.”

Rothwell cites targeting as one capability that addressable TV can bring, helping new, digital-side marketers see a pathway to TV. He says “it’s a great time to do test and learn”, starting with basic messaging and working toward real-time optimization.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, James Rothwell, VP of global agency, brand and industry relations at Comcast Advertising, says the industry needs a universal ad ID to make ad transaction workflows more efficient, deduplicate ad creative storage, address ad quality issues and improve campaign delivery.

“Fragmentation has created huge obstacles and workflow challenges because now we have to serve these ads into 200 different endpoints,” Rothwell says.

“There’s a huge opportunity for the industry to align their incentives and get behind this initiative to use a persistent identifier throughout the entire value chain to manage creatives in this world of fragmentation.

“Ad-ID … enables a brand or an agency to be able to manage that campaign through all of those different endpoints.”

The Ad-ID system, begun in 2003, is jointly owned by the ANA and the 4As.

Rothwell, who also leads the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video at Comcast-owned ad-tech platform FreeWheel, says the technology can benefit two sides:

• Brands – “they’re able to understand the way in which their creatives are performing through all those different endpoints and can optimise their campaigns.”
• Publishers – “they can actually manage restrictions and collisions around industry categories and competitive advertisers, which creates obviously a much better advertising experience.”

Rothwell is concerned that Ad-ID has had too little traction. His Council conducted a survey of 250 brands and agencies which found only 16% using some form of universal Ad-ID.

“The good news is 3,000 brands already signed up with Ad-ID,” he says. “The other great news is VAST 4.2, which is the latest version of IAB (video ad-serving) standards, incorporates Ad-ID into it. Ad-ID will just become part and parcel of the workflow.

“We know there’s massive amounts of opportunity. We believe there’s maybe just a lack of awareness,” Rothwell adds.

Over a sustained period, across platforms and using a targeted approach, according to James Rothwell, Comcast VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations for Comcast Spotlight, which is Comcast Cable’s ad sales unit.

His recommendation is based off a just-released analysis of 36 media and entertainment campaigns that Comcast Spotlight ran in 2018:

1. Sustained exposure:

“A flight of about five to seven weeks really drove conversion rates and ensured that the reach and frequency was was high,” Rothwell tells Beet.TV in this video interview. This particularly benefits episodic content.

2. Multi-platform approach:

“Using both linear and VOD … in concert … enabled viewers to … see the ads multiple times, which again drew more conversion lift.” A campaign spanning 3+ platforms drives significantly higher results than campaigns running on just one or two platforms, according to the research.

3. Mix and match platforms

The combination of those platforms is a significant weighting factor – and choosing distinct platforms can reduce overlap. Comcast recommends choosing one broad-reach platform, one narrow. It has seen that, “by combining linear and VOD, only 29% of reached households were exposed to both platforms, demonstrating the value of multi-platform incremental reach”.

4. Smarter audience segments:

“Ensure that your audience segments are constructed in the right way. In the past, we’ve seen media and entertainment clients just going after the clients that are already loyal. (But) (they) need to find new viewers. (They should) feed the top of the funnel (and) push those new potential viewers down the funnel to convert and tune into the new content.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Now, digital TV and identity resolution technologies are building a bridge, however.

In its latest report entitled Assigning TV Credit: A Practical Guide to Attribution, FreeWheel Council for Premium Video (FWC), the education body established by Comcast-owned video ad-tech company FreeWheel, shares examples and best practices for brands who want to spend in one medium to achieve results in another.

“TV has always been a brand builder,” says FWC’s James Rothwell in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s always been about awareness and reach. But, with the precision that you’re able to now get through advanced TV, you’re able to now push that consumer down through the consider, intent, and sales process as parts of the funnel.”

FWC’s attribution report includes parts on:

• Demystifying First/Last Touch Attribution
• Household Level Ad Exposure Impact
• The Purchase Funnel & Advanced TV’s Multifaceted Role

And it features 10 case studies, including one on a regional automotive dealer that drove incremental reach to its website through multi-screen extension via premium digital TV.

“Some of the key takeaways for us was really around showing how those different ways in which TV companies, media companies are able to now push their consumer down through the funnel through those different techniques, and through the different ways in which they can target and get to those precise audiences,” Rothwell added.

“One of the other takeaways is that TV can now operate on the same plane as digital. Digital has always had its advantage of being a closed loop channel for marketers, and TV has always suffered as a result by the fact that they couldn’t do that.”

In summation, FWC’s report includes five pieces of key best practice marketers can follow:

1. Use granular levels of data to optimize your campaign mid-flight
2. Establish an appropriate timeline to measure against the campaign objectives
3. Use a statistically-significant model to infer causality for your media plan
4. Incorporate a control group for your measurement
5. Make sure the data is representative of the target population being measured

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.

“I think we’re at an inflection point,” Rothwell says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference. “Scale has been lacking in certain areas, which made it tough I think as an investment prioritization for some brands and agencies,” Rothwell adds. “But now we see a lot more scale coming through those OTT, set-top box VOD and, increasingly, addressable linear opportunities.”

Calling advanced TV “the umbrella term for all of those opportunities or anything outside of the linear stream,” Rothwell says he’s “getting the sense that people are really leaning into it now. ”

In a Beet.TV interview with Brian Wallach, who is SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, FreeWheel Markets, Wallach explains how FreeWheel’s new DRIVE platform is designed to unify advanced TV offerings with unified audience measurement.

To align with a more scaled, dynamic TV offering, Rothwell discussed the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video’s latest output: A Buyer’s Guide to the New Living Room.” This reference guide provides media planners and buyers with tactics and workarounds to take advantage of what the new living room can do for advertisers.

Every quarter, increasing volumes of digital and dynamically delivered video advertising are accessed via set-top boxes and (OTT) devices on the big screen. This now accounts for 57 percent of all non-linear impressions, according to the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report (VMR) Q2 2018.

“Combine the reach of broadcast television with the dynamic insertion and dynamic advertising opportunities through these new devices and you can combine that reach now with precision. TV being that full-funnel opportunity for advertisers,” says Rothwell.

This is not to suggest these still-growing channels are not without their challenges. “Currently, there’s a lot of constraints getting in the way, whether that be measurement, technology and partners.”

Hence the following guideposts for buyers from the FreeWheel Council’s “A Buyer’s Guide to the New Living Room”:

• Become a subject matter expert in the new living room to gain advantage for your clients while these channels are still nascent and growing

• Create a plan using complementary channels to balance reach and precision, leveraging the common and unique attributes of each

• Work through measurement hurdles and leverage the tools and KPIs that are available to access these engaged yet underserved audiences

• Personalize messaging and manage frequency through addressable options with creative diversity on all campaigns delivered to the new living room

• Optimize for scale by adjusting your KPIs for platforms as necessary such as viewability targets in channels that aren’t able to be measured

“We are as an industry starting to understand what we need to do to make it a more viable opportunity for brands,” says Rothwell, who is VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations. “Really get that first and third party data to light up and create additional value, create additional precision for those advertising campaigns.”

He sees a “wide appreciation” for the reach of TV programming, regardless of how it is accessed, to help build the purchase funnel and using addressable advertising options to help push consumers to the transaction phase.

“Consistency and standards obviously come next, and we’re starting to see some of that already as well,” Rothwell says.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

Suddenly, all bets are off – and answers to those questions are becoming necessary.

That’s why the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video, the ad-tech company’s advocacy group comprising 45 members, commissioned research to understand the impact of varying ad length.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, FreeWheel global agency, brand and industry relations VP James Rothwell details two key findings from Realeyes’ nearly-5,000-participant survey…

Six after 30: “Six second ads worked incredibly well across certain metrics like engagement, brand recall, purchase intent when placed after a 30 second ad from the same campaign. It’s a smart use of, effectively, frequency and reinforcement that helps to drive better metrics and better results for advertisers.”

Fifteen is the sweet spot: “15 second ads were found to be almost twice as effective as 6 second ads and 30 second ads when used exclusively in short-form content. 15 second ads seem to be the right balance of being able to tell a story, but not be too intrusive to the user.”

What’s the takeaway from all this? Context is key, and variance is crucial.

“Understanding how to apply … a lighter ad load in certain environments, I think, is very important,” Rothwell adds.

Next up for FreeWheel’s council? A growing membership base, and a research roster that will extend to the topic of attribution, as FreeWheel aims to examine “how TV can reinforce and ultimately push people down the funnel towards action and outcomes for advertisers”.

Initial FWCE members include Canal+, Channel 4, Discovery International, Medialaan, MTG, Nelonen, Proximus, RTE, SBS, SFR, Sky Germany, Sky UK and TF1. In conjunction with the launch, the FWCE published its first position paper, titled Why Premium Video Matters for Advertisers: a European Perspective. The document provides a definition of premium video, an overview of how premium content differentiates itself from the digital fray and what the industry in Europe needs to do to effectively evaluate and leverage its engaging, brand-safe environments.

“We’re really excited to replicate the success we’ve had in the U.S.” with the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video, James Rothwell, FreeWheel’s VP, Global Agency, Brand & Relations, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

The FWCE held its first board meeting with its members at Cannes, after which it curated the panel session Television Evolved: The Rise of the Dynamic Living Room, in conjunction with The Drum.

Publishers share many of the same interests and needs across the Atlantic, according to Rothwell. “U.S. TV programmers and operators look very similar in many ways to their European counterparts,” he says.

Nonetheless, there are differences from market to market. “So understanding those differences and obviously creating a unified voice and a unified perspective on how we move the industry forward across the region while thinking about the nuances for each different country is very important,” Rothwell adds.

Here are three takeaways from the initial FWCE position paper.

1) What sets premium video apart is its capacity to elicit engagement with both publisher content and the advertising that appears alongside it.

2) All too often the industry is trying to measure premium video by the standards of other formats, pinning its worth on metrics like viewability alone, without recognizing its potential to engage the consumer.

3) In TV-like environments, brand-safety is assured and fraud is virtually non-existent and advertisers can reach real humans, engaged with the content they have chosen to watch.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Given the 2017 the Upfronts and the attendant conversations about audience buying and cross-screen executions, “One of the most important topics that’s underpinning all of that is ensuring that we’re delivering a really good ad experience to the consumer,” says James Rothwell, VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations at FreeWheel.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, where the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video released its survey results, Rothwell explains that the video ad experience was cited above measurement, “which I think gets most of the airtime as the number one challenge.” In all, 59% of respondents indicated that improving consumers’ video ad experience is very important in helping to achieve campaign goals.

Among other survey findings: 46% of respondents cited a lack of creative diversity as one of the leading reasons for a poor ad experience, and there are typically 3.3 ads per screen produced per campaign today. Those surveyed believe that an average of 4.7 ads should be created, while more than one in three said the video ad experience has a direct impact on advertiser ROI.

Despite talk at the Transformation confab of ever-emerging creative formats, Rothwell believes that “it’s more about how do we execute the basics. Making sure we have the right amount of creative to be delivered per screen is really, really important.”

To achieve this, it’s crucial that creative and media teams work closely together “to ensure that process is end to end and is being synchronized in some fashion,” he says.

With 30 members, all on the selling side, the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video operates as an educational and organizing resource to assist marketers reach desired audiences in premium video environments.

Among the survey’s calls to action are industry collaboration to refine the frequency of exposure across channels and ensuring that creative diversity and quality “maps to the context and audience.”

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

In this interview, our panelists discuss lingering fraud issues, vendor challenges and the multi-dimensional value of video…

Cross-platform brand safety 

Brand safety on web may have been improved by software, but is still a problem on mobile and new platforms like connected TV, according to Integral Ad Science general manager Kevin Lenane.

“We can now measure viewability in in-app and mobile,” he said. “But there’s probably I would say generally less being done about brand safety on mobile and other things, you know, there’s fraud models on mobile now, too, but it’s definitely newer than web, and then if you look at connected TV, it’s wow, we have even less there.”

Vendor value

Many ad-tech vendors are taking too much and not providing enough value, according to FreeWheel’s agency VP James Rothwell.

“I think there’s a lot of extraction of value without actually the creation of value there,” he said. “So we need to find ways—better ways—of bringing the buyer and seller together to ensure that they are using partners all the way through that value chain.”

Video’s broad context

Video advertising can be valuable in its own right but can also provide a boost to other aspects of a marketing campaign, according to Mediaocean’s product VP Cordie DePascale.

“I’d look at TV, I’d look at video, I’d look at display, and I’d find ways to show that when I package it all up together in a certain way, they lift each other up,” he said. “We kind of have to get people comfortable with that idea and bring the comfort across from what they do in TV today.”

This panel was chaired by Furious Corp founder Ashley J. Swartz.

This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

But one word is inarguable – “complex”. That’s why the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video, a collection of video providers advocating alongside the video ad-tech vendor, is aiming to stitch back together a fragmented landscape.

The outfit just put together the first of three position pieces examining how to achieve a unified approach.

“We need to first establish what is the language we’re going to be using to describe this challenge,” FreeWheel agency and brand relations VP James Rothwell tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “‘Multi-platform’, ‘convergence’, ‘fluidity’ – there are hundreds of terms and it depends on who you are.

“Let’s align on what we mean when we say these things. Let’s think about different measurement and targeting techniques, currency windows, associated with the linear and digital sides of the house, and figure out how we then unify measurement to tie it all back together again.”

Dynamics are already shifting fast within this multi-dimensional landscape. According to its latest Video Monetization Report, desktop ad view growth has now flattened out, with most growth coming from mobile and over-the-top video devices.

The latter are now making up almost a quarter of ad views on FreeWheel’s publisher network, which Rothwell says accounts for the majority of the premium video ecosystem.

This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

“It’s really important for us to ensure that the ad experience and all of the workflow that goes into making sure that ads appear in the right way is done well,” James Rothwell, VP of Agency & Brand Relations at premium video company FreeWheel, says in an interview with Beet.TV.

The Council’s position derives from content consumption patterns showing how people interact with both content and ads. Says Rothwell, “Am I a sampler of content? do I come just to watch an individual show or am I a digital enthusiast basically watching all of my content through all this digital platforms?”

The first leg of the position is preventing ad fatigue from ads that are repeated too often. “It’s a challenge,” Rothwell notes. “The good news is the research we’ve done shows that most long-form and live content, those frequency caps are being adhered to.”

Between five and 11 percent of creative are being repeated over two times, “Which we think is an appropriate frequency per stream. But we know there’s still work to be done,” says Rothwell.

The second area of Council focus is customization of the ad experience based on content consumption. For example, how “snackers” differ from binge watchers.

“There are different ad experience models that our premium publishers are testing out right now to find the right balance between content and ads and ensure that they’re retaining and growing their audiences while meeting advertisers’ goals,” Rothwell says.

Finally, the Council wants to make sure that there is maximization of the diversity and quality of advertising creative. This includes making sure campaigns have “the right amount of creatives in every single format on a cross-screen execution, according to Rothwell. “We’re going to dive a little deeper into that in the future” via custom research, he says.

We interviewed him last month at the ANA Masters of Marketing summit.

That change is happening because, as TVs or TV boxes get connected to the internet and enabled with software services, the way content is consumed and ads traded is, many think, about to look a lot more like digital video.

“I think there are elements of linear that could be applied to digital – maybe finding ways to put a specific advertiser in a specific spot as opposed to the dynamic, continual dynamic allocation of those ads,” according to James Rothwell, the agency and brand relations VP for FreeWheel, a video ad tech vendor, in this Beet.TV video interview.

“But I think it’s more likely to be the other way around … I think linear is more likely to look like digital … where we’re taking the best of digital in terms of data, in terms of automation, in terms of dynamic insertion and applying those to the linear world.”

The industry is now replete with ad tech vendors trying to enable TV, a decades-old, one-way medium, with some of the qualities of online ad buying, like refined targeting and solid campaign measurement.

Whilst the change has started, many also concede they are in it for the long haul.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Rothwell acknowledges. “There’s still decades of practices and infrastructure. That means that we’re just not gong be applying the same digital practices across the board.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page. 

“Context still matters,” Rothwell tells Beet.TV. “Appointment, live viewing is very important. The first break of the firs quarter or a half-time show is still very important to a CMO.

“The inventory is not quite there yet from a programmatic point. We’ve got a long way to go before primetime and real-engagement viewing is being traded in a programmatic fashion.”

The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of  TV Advertising Forum in London  You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.