In Europe, the leading pay-TV provider Sky has long been forging a collaborative path with its pioneering AdSmart addressable TV product.
As he prepares to leave the company after 11 years during which he led AdSmart’s roll-out, Sky’s advanced advertising group director Jamie West sat down with Beet.TV to reflect on “the end of a chapter” – and to foretell what comes next.
In May, Sky already announced it would begin using NBCUniversal’s CFlight unified advertising metric across all content and platforms in the UK from autumn and in its other European territories next year, to capture all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every viewing platform. But West reveals Sky will help CFlight fly higher.
“We will take what the NBCU team have achieved, but take it a stage further with true de-duplicated reach and frequency reports for all advertisers in an automated fashion,” he says.
“That will also entail us moving all of our first party data processing, the viewing from our set-top boxes, out of house – so we’re not measuring our own viewing. (We will be) moving all of the methodology into an independent source, and then publishing that so that we can be fully transparent.
“(We will go) further than that in sharing it with our competitors in every territory we operate in. It’s on-record that we’re prepared to share this, the methodology, the processing and the infrastructure with our competitors in the UK, with ITV and Channel 4.”
It has been quite a decade for AdSmart, during which it has become known as the one of the world’s most pioneering addressable TV platforms.
Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.
In 2017, rival Virgin Media, a cable TV operator, took on Sky’s AdSmart to power its own addressable TV ad capabilities.
Recently, public service broadcaster Channel 4 said it would use AdSmart to deliver targeted linear TV ads.
“And we hope, in the not too distant future, that we’ll be able to extend that capability to our partners at ITV,” West said.
After Comcast acquired Sky, AdSmart is shaping up as a key element in the wider group’s targeted TV ads odyssey. Earlier this year, Comcast said it would merge NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart.
Last year, independent UK TV measurement agency BARB launched its own industry-wide system to count viewing across TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones, Project Dovetail, giving it sight of views through broadcasters’ catch-up platforms.
But Project Dovetail launched only in its first phase, offering average audience counts. Launches are pending for stage two (multi-screen reach and time spent) and stage three (multi-screen ad campaign performance). Amid the protracted delay, West’s decision to put AdSmart viewing data in to a neutral industry space seems like a shrewd move.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.
Following the acquisition, Comcast in March announced it would merge NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, whilst the pair said Sky’s Sky Media ad sales house, which sells inventory for both Sky’s owned-and-operated channels and others’, will adopt NBCUniversal’s CFlight metric across all content and platforms in the UK from autumn and in its other European territories next year.
This panel discussion at Cannes Lions saw executives who have driven the companies’ advanced TV initiatives talk about going even larger…
The pair revealed to their host, MTM co-founder Jon Watts:
“We’re all now gunning for the same end game, which is consistency for an appetiser across global markets,” West said.
“We’ve enabled more and more channels and hopefully there’ll be more announcements about that in the coming weeks, rapidly scaling and the conversations with Denise and the team mean that we can go beyond little old Europe into the US and ultimately South America.”
In its home UK, AdSmart benefitted early by being deployed on the largest pay-TV platform, Sky’s own. It will soon be lit up also on rival Virgin Media’s cable network, taking penetration to 40%.
NBCU’s Colella explains the logic in using tis approach around the world.
“I think the benefit really comes down to our advertisers and their agencies,” she said. “They all are thinking of how do they take these audiences and leverage them in a global way that they’ve never done before.
“It really comes down to planning globally, but then activating locally … CFlight was an actual evolution of that because it gave us the ability to measure across channels.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>The other appeared in 2016, tying together four suites for buying ads across devices.
Now Comcast is merging NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, after the owner acquired the European pay-TV company last year.
In this interview recorded in London in December, Sky advanced advertising group director Jamie West explains AdSmart’s journey – and future.
What is AdSmart?
Sky launched AdSmart in 2013, storing ads on satellite subscribers’ set-top boxes for subsequent targeted playback. It has since spearheaded the UK’s addressable TV revolution, which, despite the existence of several broadcasting networks, is still largely confined to Sky’s AdSmart, and is a European leader in addressable technology.
Sky has served billions of impressions this way using 1,200 customer categories (many of them for newcomers to TV advertising), and later added a cross-platform ad sequencing platform called Sky AdVance and an analytics offering, too.
What is Audience Studio?
NBCU launched Audience Studio as a data management platform under Denise Colella three years ago, tying together its Audience Targeting Platform (for targeting linear TV viewers), NBCUx (for digital media targeting), NBCU+ (for using Comcast set-top box data) and Social Synch (for extending out through social networks).
What is happening?
Comcast will now badge both offerings as “AdSmart” – specifically, “AdSmart from NBCUniversal” and “AdSmart from Sky”.
That is the starting point. Over time, the pair will aim to learn from each other’s capabilities (Sky’s talent in advanced addressable, NBCU’s in linear optimization), applying them in their respective territories.
An NBC spokesperson tells Beet.TV: “Sky and NBCU’s teams will both gain insight into each other’s advanced advertising capabilities. The long-term goal is that over time, each team will look at how to apply the learnings and solutions from the other to their own markets.”
It’s not yet clear how fully that means a merger for the products.
What is the impact?
Such synergies were always likely as a key component of Comcast’s much-heralded Sky acquisition.
Comcast hopes the closer alignment will help large global brands more easily target and optimize ad campaigns on a more worldwide basis.
“The world is getting smaller, and the opportunity for international marketers to make an impact with consumers is getting bigger,” says NBCU’s advertising chairman Linda Yaccarino in a statement.
All told, the combined product feature set includes:
Six years after launch and having just been acquired by Comcast, Sky suggests this new method of selling TV ads is now commonplace across the company.
It was back in 2013 that the UK satellite and telco company launched AdSmart, its method of more finely targeting and custom-delivering different ad spots through its connected satellite set-top boxes.
In that time, Sky has served billions of impressions this way using 1,200 customer categories (many of them for newcomers to TV advertising), launched a cross-platform ad sequencing platform called Sky AdVance and an analytics offering, too.
But, for Jamie West, the executive who has steered much of the progress, those individual products no longer matter much.
“Those capabilities will not disappear and go away but, actually, our conversation now with advertisers will be about business outcomes, their marketing challenge,” Sky advanced advertising group director Jamie West in this video interview with Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV.
“And how can we help them solve the issues that are important to them. Because they quite frankly don’t care about my products, they care about what’s important to them.”
In other words, Sky’s addressable TV ad journey seems to have reached a point of maturity.
West says data capability has now been threaded throughout his organization, while many clients now want an account lead, often embedded in their company, to use as a point person for the new technique.
All of this happens a couple of months after the eventual sale of Sky to NBCUniversal owner Comcast finally closed, one piece in an evolving jigsaw of media and telecoms consolidation.
It’s clear which of the companies operates in the biggest market – but Sky’s addressable TV heritage would seem to be something NBCU can learn from the European company.
“I think the most exciting thing about the acquisition is that our strategic goals are a hundred percent aligned,” West says. “Whether it be talking to (NBCU advertising chairman) Linda Yaccarino or Dave Clark at Comcast advertising services.
“The ambition is shared not now just across two entities – Comcast and NBCU – but across three. 2019 and beyond, I think is one of the most exciting years that you’ll see at Sky.”
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.
]]>Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sky’s advanced advertising director Jamie West says the foundation is built, now the company is blowing it out.
“We’ve just signed a partnership with (rival) Virgin Media, part of the Liberty Global group, which is going to take us from something like 30% household penetration to in excess of 40%,” he says.
West is also rolling out AdSmart in some of the other European territories in which Sky operates.
So what is the AdSmart benefit? Granular audience targeting has opened the door to new kinds advertisers, from the small to the not-so-small.
“It is making TV more relevant to more brands,” West adds, “whether that be markets like the luxury car market … the likes of Porsche, Maserati, McLaren, all using TV for the first time … all the way down to the other end of the scale … down to the very local brand whether it be builders, merchants, taxi firms, florist, all using TV as well”.
Some of those local advertisers are buying in a new way, too. For instance, many local brands are able to target ads at viewers living within a 15-minute commute of their store.
For Sky and for West, it’s all about giving TV “the flexibility to compete with direct mail, with digital, with press”.
The UK government has now cleared 21st Century Fox to buy the 61% of Sky it does not already own, as well as a rival bid from NBC owner Comcast. Sky shareholders will now decide.
]]>This summer, Sky, the UK’s leading pay-TV company and combined telco and channel provider, announced it will launch in Spain.
But, unlike its core offering back home in the UK, Sky’s Spanish launch won’t transmits primarily over satellite. Instead, Sky is launching its own over-the-top (OTT) box to receive shows from 12 entertainment channels for €10 per month, and no ongoing contractual commitment.
If that sounds a lot like Now TV, Sky’s existing OTT off-shoot in the UK, that’s is because it is. Running on Roku-powered boxes and other digital devices, Now TV provides satellite-free access to entertainment or sports channels from Sky and others over the internet for a flexible monthly fee.
First announced in November 2012, Now TV is essentially Sky’s strategy to control the cutting of its own cord, now that the outlook for traditional pay-TV has turned down. It was available in UK 1.2 million homes, according to measurement firm BARB’s Q2 2017 data.
But, whilst Sky’s Spain launch sticks closely to the Now TV template, the company is launching it under the core “Sky” brand name – and the company’s advanced advertising director tells Beet.TV the company is not stopping with Spain.
“We announced a few weeks ago that we were about to launch our OTT service in Spain. I think we’re working on other territories as we speak,” he says in this video interview.
Sky already operates core satellite TV services in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria. The idea of using OTT as a beachhead to additional territories is new.
The company recently told investors it would use profits from its Sky Bet gambling service to finance a strategy to “create future value by expanding the footprint of our OTT services, leveraging the success of our existing multi-territory streaming platform and our capability in creating original content”. So where will the company go?
“It’s really dependent on the broadband penetration and the capability of the market to support OTT streaming at scale,” says West, speaking at the DMEXCO ad and media gathering in Germany where the topic of advanced TV advertising was high on the agenda.
“We’ve chosen in Spain to go with an OTT proposition because we think that is the most relevant for the Spanish market. As we review each market, that will be a decision point on whether we go with a satellite service with full infrastructure or whether we go with an OTT service. The OTT service, of course, allows us to very quickly and efficiently replicate our models in UK, Italy, or Germany into that other territory.”
Sky needs to find growth. Whilst its 2016/17 annual revenue grew 10%, it is facing a profit decline thanks partly to the growing cost of live premium sports, audiences for which are nevertheless now declining.
21st Century Fox, which owns 39% of the company, has tabled an £11.7bn acquisition of the remaining portion to wholly own Sky, an offer that has prompted some concerns over media concentration. UK government culture and media secretary Karen Bradley has thus referred the matter to the Competition & Markets Authority, due to advise Bradley within six months on whether the merger should proceed.
The next few months will see a scramble to argue the merits or otherwise of the proposal. But, meanwhile, the potential for international growth through OTT roll-out remains undimmed.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>To Jamie West, Group Director of Advanced Advertising at Sky, programmatic transactions in the broadcast world are about automation. The notion of biddable inventory is not “particularly relevant for a broadcast world,” West says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.
Like other traditional broadcasters, Sky has made a big push to enable advertisers to do business with its various platforms via whichever means they desire. Hence the continued evolution of its AdSmart addressable platform, Sky Advance cross-screen offering and Sky Analytics media planning and transaction tools.
With AdSmart, current efforts involve building out the reach and targeting capability and easing the friction in the transaction funnel. “The feedback from the market has been ‘you’ve got to make it easy and transparent for the market to use.’ That’s one of the things that we’ve been focusing on for the last few months,” says West.
In the cross-screen realm, Sky Advance is designed to bring down “the barriers between TV and digital so that we can serve sequential campaigns across TV and digital.”
The next big phase at Sky is around analytics tools, including launching the ability for advertisers and agencies to plan addressable TV campaigns on a portal so they can then “push a button and get that integrated into our booking systems.”
Sky believes that TV campaigns “will still be traded in a truly linear way, much in the same way as they are today through direct buys.” Nonetheless, “It’s important to enable brands and agencies to transact however they so wish with Sky, and that’s what our partnerships with the likes of Videology and Comcast are all about.”
Like their U.S. broadcast counterparts, Sky is trying to determine the appropriate commercial load and lengths for TV and digital viewing. In linear TV, the U.K. tends to have about nine minutes of commercial time per programming hour, “which is substantially less than the U.S. model,” says West.
In digital, “We tend to have a relatively clean environment,” with perhaps two or three pre-roll ads and two or three mid-roll positions.
Asked if Sky would offer six-second ads as do some U.S. broadcasters, West said that while “we tend to operate on metric lengths” of possibly five, 10, 15 or 20 seconds, if the market wants six-second spots Sky will oblige.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Sky (satellite) and Virgin Media (cable) may be fierce rivals, but this week they announced a “strategic partnership” to scale advanced TV ad targeting opportunities, against the common enemy of online platforms.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sky’s advanced TV advertising director Jamie West singles out two online behemoths, not Virgin, as competition.
“We’re trying to build a common currency and platform for advertisers to transact addressable TV,” he says.
“Our universe potential will grow to some 30 million individuals in the UK. That puts us on a level playing field with the big tech giants, whether that be Facebook or Google, in terms of reach.”
So, what is the partnership all about?
Sky’s AdSmart has been in market now for three years, and works by storing TV ads on satellite set-top boxes for playback in commercial breaks, targeted based on Sky’s deep customer data. It is arguably the world’s leading advanced TV ad targeting deployment, and is due for expansion to Sky’s Ireland, Italy and Germany operations.
Virgin will now begin using AdSmart for its own addressable offering.
Specifically, Virgin Media will enable AdSmart data targeting for customised ad delivery through its platform, for channels owned by Sky or its channel partners NBCU, Fox, A+E and Viacom/Channel 5.
West is realistic about addressable’s roll-out pace. “We haven’t got every single agency using addressable week-in, week-out or month-in, month-out,” he acknowledges, but says the benefits are significant. “Addressable brings optionality and choice – it means TV is more flexible for a brand.”
]]>The pair have announced Virgin will use data from Sky’s existing AdSmart addressable TV system, as well as tech from its parent company Liberty Global, to underpin its offering.
The key to the deal is billed as providing a consistent currency, targeting characteristics and capabilities for ad buyers, the pair say. We have recently seen similar moves in the US, with operators teaming to harmonize their customer datasets.
But what the pairing says about the relevant positions of these UK companies is fascinating…
Sky’s AdSmart has been in market now for three years, and works by storing TV ads on satellite set-top boxes for playback in commercial breaks, targeted based on Sky’s deep customer data. It is arguably the world’s leading advanced TV ad targeting deployment, has opened up TV ads to smaller and more local companies, and is currently being rolled out across Sky’s European footprint.
Virgin Media, which is the smaller company, uses a box running TiVo software and is seen as lagging behind. It has long had the capability to dynamically insert ads in to catch-up TV, but has only made its biggest push now that its ownership by Liberty Global, which acquired it in 2013, has bedded in.
Whilst this announcement is of a “partnership”, it does not state that Sky will be receiving any assets from Virgin Media.
Both Sky and Virgin Media both have their own media sales houses to sell ads against their own channels, but last year, John Paul, advanced advertising and data VP of LibertyGlobal, told Beet.TV that Virgin Media would primarily act as the platform for other channel operators to sell inserted ads in to their own content aired over Virgin.
It is telling that the companies’ announcement singles out online platforms as rivals: “Advertisers will be able to target a potential audience over time of more than 30 million viewers; putting it on par with leading social networks.”
Editor’s Note: This video with Jamie West was produced by Beet.TV in London. It has been previously been published. Whilst it gives a thorough overview of AdSmart, it was recorded in 2014 and the platform has been expanded significantly since.
]]>Speaking at the Beet Retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the middle of March, the satellite platform’s advanced TV director Jamie West said: “Sky AdSmart launched in Italy six weeks ago, it launches in Ireland on April 7 and then in Germany in 18 months’ time.
“It’s important than all advertisers can expect the same quality of service and execution across the different territories.”
AdSmart was launched four years ago, and allows advertisers to pre-fill subscribers’ set-top boxes with ads for custom-targeted play-out during linear TV commercial breaks. It is helping smaller and local businesses buy ads in TV for the first time.
Sky has since launched AdVance to help ad buyers understand frequency of play-out to deduplicated consumers across Sky’s advertising offering, which includes online sales, as well as an analytics tool.
As he aims to deliver an advertiser offering that can match those of Google and Facebook, West says the changes are prompting a reboot of how Sky wants to price its advertising, having introduced a commitment, four years ago, that it would only charge for ad views that were 75% completed.
“TV has the best opportunity now to really differentiate itself,” West said. “TV as a business should have standardised currencies, measurements and metrics. We need to start thinking about the differential between a view on a three-inch screen versus a 52-inch screen.
“We will be transitioning all of our currencies – whether it be long-form video – to be all 75% view-through rate – in a high-engaging, lean-forward environment, where brand messages excel and excite on he big screen.”
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.
]]>One key competitive advantage is that it only charges advertisers for impressions that garner a 75% view-through rate, its Group Director of Advanced Advertising, Jamie West, says in this interview with Beet.TV. West was one of some four dozen advertising and media leaders who gathered for the Beet Executive Retreat 2017 titled Video Everywhere: The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
Sky is Europe’s largest entertainment company, serving the UK, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Italy, West explains in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., the inventory and supply chain management company serving premium publishers.
“When you think about Sky from an advertising perspective, we’re most known for our advanced advertising products and scale,” says West.
As The Drum reports, Sky takes an agnostic approach to competing for advertising budgets not only with the likes of ITV and Channel 4 with with digital giants. “We as a broadcaster and an innovator have to compete head-to-head and toe-to-toe with the likes of Facebook and Google to truly compete in the digital age,” he told The Drum.
Asked by Swartz about the biggest change to Sky’s business over the last three to four years, West cites data enablement. It’s been a driving force behind not only Sky AdSmart but also Sky AdVance, which West describes as the ability to serve ads in a digital environment “as the result of some kind of consumption, whether viewing to apps or programs.”
The third pillar of the company’s operations is its analytics capabilities, including its viewing panels that now reach some 3- 3.5-million households and provide insights into second-by-second viewing. “With that appended to device ID’s and IP addresses means that we can serve ads across the whole digital estate as a result of that viewing consumption,” says West.
With Sky AdSmart, advertisers are charged only for impressions that have a 75% view-through rate. “On a 30-second commercial, that will be something like 20 seconds of incremental value versus some of the digital players that charge on one or three seconds,” West 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.
]]>That diversity gives it breadth that extends beyond its own platform, and beyond its own content.
Case in point – Sky AdSmart, Sky’s solution for delivering customised TV ads to viewers’ set-top boxes, no longer just functions whilst viewers are watching Sky’s owned and operated channels.
“Sky Media, the advertising sales division of Sky, sells on behalf of all of Sky’s wholly owned channels, but also the likes of NBCU, Discovery, Viacom, Channel 5, those sorts of brands,” Sky Media’s deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“So, whereas in the US, the platform operators tend to offer addressability and targeted advertising only in those cable opt-out minutes, we, as a vertically integrated platform, offer addressability and targeted advertising across the full spectrum of advertising minutes across the day and across channels.
“We’ve launched Sky AdSmart, our addressable TV product, with NBCU, with Fox, with A+E Networks, and with more channels – Viacom, digital channels – and then Channel 5 goes live, I think it’s in and around Q1 2017.”
Channel 5 is the lifestyle channel, the fifth and final channel to be awarded a digital terrestrial license in the 1990s, that was acquired by Viacom in 2014.
This interview was conducted at the 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.
]]>The company, which is the UK’s leading pay-TV provider, has satellite addressable TV system AdSmart and cross-platform ad sequencing system AdVance under its belt.
“We go live in Italy in September for Sky AdSmart and then in Ireland in January,” Sky Media’s advanced advertising director Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “In the fullness of time, we’ll expand AdSmart in to the German market. We’ll then move AdVance across.”
With Sky AdVance, ads can be served across TV and digital media in a single campaign – in other words, multi-platform sequential targeting in which ad impressions are frequency-capped on every screen, not just the internet ones.
So what’s the big idea for Sky, which has long invested in or acquired from a pool of technology and ad-tech companies it hopes can help improve its offerings for consumers and brands alike?
West is thinking big, about “super-serving” advertisers in a larger geographical footprint and across a broader range of services.
“It’s no longer acceptable to only think about the execution or targeting of an advert or campaign,” he says. “We’re thinking about how we can amplify the full campaign lifecycle – plan, execute, evaluate and re-plan an advertiser’s campaign.
“The execution part is only a very small part. That will mean we can have that preferred partner status with brands and marketing directors.”
Over the last few years, Sky has acquired:
It has invested in:
We spoke with West this week at the FreeWheel European television summit in Cologne presented along with StickyAds.tv. Please visit this page for additional videos from Beet’s coverage..
]]>So, with live sports the jewel in the crown of TV content today, are the digital networks really challenging traditional TV operators for the rights? Will traditional TV really lose its hold over top competitions?
Not so fast – each of the deals above was really about marketing, building the brand of at least one of the partners involved: the NFL outside the US, BT Sport to potential subscribers, and women’s soccer to the uncoverted.
Sports TV rights remain hugely lucrative – money the online upstarts may not stump up. But that doesn’t mean they have to stay locked to TV, and it doesn’t mean the online platforms won’t still have content to gain.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, UK pay-TV platform leader Sky, which paid a record £4.18 billion to retain three years of English Premier League soccer, reveals it hopes to distribute videos from its coveted locker through the big online platforms.
“We’ve got really strong partnerships with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – they are a very key part of our marketing plan for our content rights,” says deputy MD of the company’s Sky Media ad sales division, Jamie West.
“In the next Premier League season coming up in August, we’re already exploring with all of those platforms how we might share our Premier League clip rights across those platforms, within the rights restrictions that we have – time-bound, day of match and that sort of thing.”
For Sky, this is not altruistic. Nor does it represent a tipping point in which the networks gain full-match, live or substantial programming rights. Sky is not about to give away the content it has spent heavily for. But it does want to use soccer clips as a shop window for its full package of Sky Sports subscription channels.
“For us, it’s about driving consideration back to the Sky Sports app, the Sky Sports platform,” West adds.
“Some of our relationships are very deep-rooted relationships – whether it’s F1, Premier League in the UK or Bundesliga in Gemany. We look to build really strong relationships with those rightsholders that really amplify their content across multiple platforms.
“So for us in that social world it’s about bringing that consumer back to the (pay-TV) platform.”
Such a distribution arrangement would be interesting. In addition to owning live, multi-platform broadcast rights, Sky also has a separate package of rights governing online clips. Whilst these are also made available through Sky Sports’ own apps, the company also struck an exclusive sub-licensed distribution deal with its sibling company News UK, the newspaper publisher, to run the clips across The Sunday Times, The Times and The Sun newspapers’ digital properties.
The Premier League has tended to use coercion and legal action to remove illegal use of its rightsholders’ content from social and other online platforms, its latest concern being Vine clips and live rebroadcasts through Periscope and Meerkat. Sky Sports’ own football channel on YouTube stops short of including match clips.
Partnering with the online platforms to gain visibility for its premium content is nothing new. In a recent fire-side chat with me at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit, Sky’s UK CEO and Facebook’s EMEA VP explained how the pay-TV company runs events to trail things like Game Of Thrones and Sky News stories on Facebook, all building awareness of Sky’s own core pay platforms – but never giving away too much.
This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Investments have included $5m in to native ad tech company Sharethrough in 2014, and, recently, a $10 million round in to DataXu. Now the company is seeing some of the first synergies from its Sharethrough commitment.
“Sharethrough will have been integrated, by the end of this month (May), across all of our app estates, so we’ve got really sympathetic and empathetic ad experiences across our Sky News app, Sky Sports all, all of those sorts of things,” Jamie West, the deputy MD of Sky’s Sky Media ad sales division, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Sharethrough’s technology helps advertisers present messages in mobile apps that resemble the content users are already browsing.
That leaves DataXu, the Boston-headquartered, data-driven marketing analytics company. How will Sky harness the outfit run by CEO Mike Baker?
“DatXu is really about being a key enabler for our product Sky AdVance (which) takes our unique understanding of TV consumption and applies that in to the digital estate, allowing us to serve sequential and frequency-capped campaigns across multiple platforms,” West adds. “DataXu’s part in that is to act as our demand-side platform to enable us to buy inventory off Sky’s platform.”
West says Sky realized a few years ago it couldn’t build everything itself, so set up a San Francisco outpost to spot opportunities to work with startups. Now West says the company is looking globally for best-in-class vendors in which to take strategic stakes, to go on giving it an ad advantage.
This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi. Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.
]]>Now Jamie West, deputy MD of the company’s Sky Media ad sales division, says he also wants to bolster technology through more deals with outside digital vendors.
“We’ve come to the realization at Sky … that we can’t build everything ourselves,” he said at this Beet.TV recorded panel interview. “We are constantly looking for new partners that we think can add value to our ad-tech stack.
“We’ve announced partnerships with DataXu and Videology, we’ve got a long-standing and deep relationship with FreeWheel. We are trying to find products or solutions or technologies that can enhance the product suite.”
Over the last few years, Sky has acquired Pace (set-top box maker), The Cloud (WiFi operator), O2 broadband (telco), Sky Deutschland & Italia (siblings). It has invested in Roku (OTT box), Jaunt (VR), 1Mainstream (OTT video), Whistle Sports (sports network), Pluto TV (online video aggregator), Sharethrough (native ads), Fubo (OTT sports), InCrowd Sports (sports marketing) and, most recently, DataXu (ad-tech).
For West, the bigger picture is a four-pillar attack on addressable TV, cross-device ad sequencing, programmatic ad-tech and analytics.
“We’re no longer thinking about that as a UK-only proposition,” he says. “The Sky footprint now is across UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria. Jeremy Darroch (CEO) has … said we have ambitions to grow beyond those territories.”
He was interviewed by MTM London founding director Jon Watts.
This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi. Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.
]]>European satellite operator, channel owner and telco Sky is fighting against that tide when it comes to next-generation advertising, launching an analytics suite for its its AdSmart addressable TV service.
“I think there’s a big challenge in the broadcaster market,” Sky Media’s deputy MD Jamie West acknowledges. “If they don’t add value to that full campaign lifecycle, you end up having a relationship that is very much about being a supplier or transactional, and the power shifts away either to the ad tech company or the media agencies/trading desk.
“We’re building up all of our analytics tools to prove our return on investment. But those same tools can enable agencies and advertisers to plan their campaigns and execute their campaigns and optimize their campaigns for the whole campaign lifecycle if you like.
“So it means that the dynamic and the relationship that Sky has is that very much of a tripartite relationship. We’re evenly balanced between advertiser, media owner, Sky, and the media agency, and that’s a much healthier environment and ecosystem to operate in.”
AdSmart Analytics is a managed service allied to AdSmart, the technology Sky uses to enable millions of satellite set-top boxes for household-targeted linear TV ads.
As part of its expansion, Sky Media just invested $10mn in Boston-based programmatic ad tech vendor DataXu.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>Then, in October, the company bowed AdVance, a suite knitting together data from across its many screens to better target consumers. So what is AdVance all about?
“If AdSmart is all about taking the very best and only the very best of digital targeting and bringing it to TV, what Sky AdVance does is take how really unique TV consumption understanding and brings it into digital,” according to Sky Media’s deputy MD Jamie West.
“Knowing which sites subscribers are browsing and which channels they are watching lets Sky Media serve ads back through internet or TV, respectively, that learn from consumers’ holistic behavior.
“We enable our three million-home viewing panel,” West says. “When you think about all those multiple touch-points that we have with our customers … you have a really rich understanding of customer journeys across those multiple platforms. That will enable us both to serve ads both on the Sky platform or via our DSP partners.
“Once you’ve seen the ad four times on TV, we can now frequency cap … Or we can use that platform to tell … different stories … in the app environment, the mobile environment, or the browser environment.”
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>Deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV the service, which allows advertisers to target individual household set-top boxes using more than 532 attributes held by Sky about its customers, has clocked up 700 advertisers, 4,000 campaigns and billions of impressions.
“More than 70% of the advertisers active on the platform are new to TV or new to Sky, and they’re coming from a real diverse mix of market categories,” West adds, “from … garden centers or car dealerships, to … high-end finance, software-as-a-service.”
Now Sky wants AdSmart to go large. The company is already planning to roll it out across its enlarged European footprint, after the UK company merged with its German and Italian siblings.
And West reveals: “We turn over about £1.2 billion a year. Of that, at the moment it’s about 13% of our revenue is non-core, non-linear TV. We have ambitions to make that much closer to 70-30 within a couple of years.”
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>He noted the new architecture assures that video serving happens within the “compliance” parameters.
West runs the company’s AdSmart unit which serves addressable, or specific ads via IP and on linear television to specific households. He says that a recent study reflects consumer enthusiasm for addressable ads. He says that channels switching during addressable ads is down 32 percent versus watching generally served ads.
The collaboration between Sky and Videology was announced last month.
We spoke with West earlier this week in London at the Future of TV Advertising Forum where he was a speaker. For more videos leading up the Forum and subsequent coverage, please visit this page. Our coverage of the Forum was sponsored by Xaxis.
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AdVance is the name given to a new suite from the company’s Sky Media ad sales division, threading together data from TV and internet to give advertisers new possibilities.
“We are trying to break down the barriers between TV and digital to enable linear TV viewing data to power digital ad serving,” Sky Media deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Sky’s in a position to do that because we have … a three-million-household, second-by-second viewing panel.
“When you overlay that with IP address, device ID or cookie ID, you have an opportunity to serve sequential stories across platforms.”
For Sky Media, which has long sold ads on the web as well as on TV, it is part of a multi-platform initiative.
“The next challenge for Sky is to think about how we can evolve in other media – not just thinking about addressable TV,” West says.
“Advertisers are asking us to work much more closely with them across all media, not just TV. A campaign is planned holistically across all media – but, when it comes to execution, that campaign is served in silos – TV is bought separately to press and radio.”
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.
]]>“TV advertising will not fundamentally change in the short term,” Jamie West, deputy director of UK satellite and telco operator BSkyB’s ad sales division Sky Media, which this January launched Sky AdSmart, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Big brands are going to continue to want to use TV exactly as they do today. TV is the number one brand-building medium.”
AdSmart uses Sky customer data to analyze viewers, sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes. West expects addressability to let advertisers “top up” TV campaigns with online-style targeting.
“We will be joining up all of the platforms that we operate on,” he adds, “- whether it be display, video or on TV – to offer a holistic campaign to advertisers to be able to sequentially target across those platforms… serving three ads in-home, followed by a VOD execution on Sky Go and a call to action on your phone when you’re near that store.”
This interview is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series. This session was recorded in London.
]]>Launched in January after lengthy gestation, AdSmart sees different ads served to different viewers by storing alternate ads on their respective Sky+ connected set-top boxes, triggered by refined customer profiling techniques.
“Sky AdSmart is the culmination of five years … and about £100 million ($162 million),” Sky Media deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It’s the single biggest project that I think Sky has ever undertaken. Over the coming months, we’ll be announcing more channels … and, hopefully within time, we’d like to be able to announce some third-party channels as well.”
On linear TV, AdSmart is currently enabled on Sky’s owned-and-operated channels plus Fox Channels and A+E Networks. Audi has used the technology to show ads for its high-end cars only to affluent consumers, as determined by known characteristics that are more detailed than conventional demographics.
At IBC recently, West announced 224 brands have run 640 individual campaigns using Sky AdSmart, yielding, 577 million views in Sky homes. BSkyB is also mulling taking AdSmart to Germany and Italy if it gains regulatory approval for acquiring its sister companies there.
This is part of the State of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. The video was recorded in London. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series.
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