That is according to one ad executive who says companies need to be able to find their own audience amongst the newly-inflated base of stay-at-home media consumers.
“The need for personalization on direct-to-consumer relationships from brands will just heighten,” says Jason Brown, chief revenue officer of AT&T’s Xandr advertising company.
“The capabilities that come out of products like addressability and the ability to precision-target and frequency-manage will become more relevant for clients as they try to personalize the messages to their current customers and also their prospects.
“In this environment, with COVID, I believe we’ll start to use those production capabilities for brands just to message directly to consumers.”
Brown cites the example of one Xandr client, a financial services institution that is using first-party data on its own customers together with viewership insights from AT&T to connect with its customers, making clear how its online banking products allow them to go on banking without visiting a branch.
The consulting firm Prophet says brands can thrive out of COVID-19 by being customer-obsessed, ruthlessly pragmatic, distinctively inspired and pervasively innovative.
According to an Unruly survey, consumers say they want brands to continue advertising, but to be more informative.
Its data showed some brands had seen an uplift in shareability and some brands had helped consumers feel more informed.
The pandemic is putting brands’ commitment to purpose to the test. GroupM representatives have encouraged brands to be useful at this moment in time.
Brown says one consequence of a burgeoning growth in at-home media consumption is the risk a brand’s ad may get shown too many times to viewers – a reason frequency management capabilities may be necessary.
But he says commercials aren’t the only tool in the chest. Brown sees brand content messages as being deliverable on a personalized basis to specific audiences, too.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“From a TV perspective, younger audiences have left. The deeper ratings decline is within kind of the younger set and they’re just watching digital video, they’re watching CTV. There’s a need in the marketplace to find them,” says Xandr SVP Jason Brown.
AT&T has 130 million mobile customers plus 25 million on pay TV and 14 million on broadband. “We have this great opportunity where we’ve matched our device graph to our addressable TV footprint and we’re now able to advertise the same unified target that you would do with addressable TV across all the devices,” the Head of Ad Sales Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“When a marketer comes to us, we take the unified target and we run it in TV, we run it to the devices associated to those television households and then we show most importantly the impact of TV alone, mobile alone and the incrementality of using TV and mobile together,” Brown adds.
Brown says that Xandr is constantly doing testing controls. “With each campaign we’re sending the ad to 90 percent of the target and holding out 10 percent. That’s true in TV and that’s true in mobile.”
Brands that cater to younger consumers know their audiences are literally on the go. “What we frequently see is in terms of exposure against these particular cohorts, a lot of them are mobile only viewers or watch very little TV,” Brown says. “What we’re seeing is there is an incremental impact the majority of the time on whatever the KPI is” when measuring the combination of both TV and digital.
Where advertisers want to get to is sequential messaging, according to Brown. Given AT&T’s cross section of users, “the data that comes from it allows advertisers to see how their cohorts are reacting by device type and frequency across those device types.”
Last week, AT&T’s newly formed WarnerMedia pulled out of OpenAP, the consortium of television competitors formed to provide advertisers with unified audience targets. “As our company has transformed, our advanced advertising strategy has evolved. As a result, we are withdrawing from OpenAP,” WarnerMedia said in a news release reported by Broadcasting & Cable. “We appreciate what OpenAP has supported to this point in widening the adoption of audience-based buying on television.”
In a separate statement, OpenAP said, “Fox, NBCUniversal and Viacom remain committed to working together in pursuit of a premium, open, independently verified marketplace that will continue to transform the industry. Over the next few months, we will be growing and expanding the OpenAP platform to simplify audience buying at scale, and you’ll hear more from us on these exciting developments in the coming days.”
]]>“There is a need to upgrade the advertising experience,” says Jason Brown, SVP, Head of Ad Sales Partnerships at Xandr Media. He cites such shortcomings as too many irrelevant ads, too much frequency and commercial overload.
At the Xandr Front, “you’re going to hear how we’re using the technology of addressable at scale to solve these issues to create a better advertising experience, to create a better customer experience,” Brown adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s not a complete reinvention of TV advertising but it’s a big upgrade. This year especially brands are going to want to hear about it.”
The traditional concept of addressability—targeting devices and households and tracking ad outcomes—is getting a “new flavor that’s trending right now, and it’s frankly just the ability to use the technology to frequency cap and manufacture reach and create a better user experience.”
According to Brown, 50% of all national brands use some form of addressable advertising. Typically, they had been brands selling goods or services to less than 35% of the population, but now consumer packaged-goods and other categories have turned to addressable, too.
“They’re typically using the product for reach extension and frequency controlling,” Brown says. Regional brands, particularly “super regionals” like supermarket chains, are also testing addressable.
Automotive and financial services advertisers are “well beyond testing” and the “middle phase” with addressable, wherein a couple of campaigns a year had been the norm.
“Many of them are always on. They’ve realized the light bulb has gone off. They realize the benefits. They’re seeing the ROI around always being in front of their most valuable customers and the ROI it’s delivering for them,” says Brown.
Mass marketers faced with declining linear-TV ratings and “pricing well beyond inflation” are experiencing over-saturation of heavy TV viewers, because 80% of a schedule can reaches only 30% of households “at a very high level of frequency.” Addressable can add a frequency cap.
“When you do that you reach you reach the heavy TV viewer in a couple of days. The ad comes off the system and then it just extends across every decile. You have this kind of even distribution of deciles.”
Given AT&T’s own assets and its deals with Altice USA and Frontier Communications on the local level, “We now represent forty percent of all sellable impressions in the marketplace,” Brown says.
]]>Advertisers will be able to bring their own data to a self-service, “private marketplace.” They will be able to see results in a fully transparent manner, explains Jason Brown, VP for National Advertising Sales at AT&T AdWorks.
The new programmatic marketplace is powered by Videology. Details of the AT&T plan was discussed on Thursday at an industry event on advanced TV presented by Videology in Manhattan. We interviewed Brown there.
News of the plans at AT&T was reported earlier today by the Wall Street Journal.
We interviewed him at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York. Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here.
]]>Once advertisers know enough about viewers to precisely target ads, will they also deconstruct their 30-second spots in to a million different permutations, for the many different consumers out there? Today, that’s not happening at significant scale. But a Beet Retreat panel discussed the prospect…
But “we will”, says SMG precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach. “The reason we don’t see more activity around versioning is because there’s significant amount of waste. We are in the process of wringing out the value that is created by better targeting. Once you get through that value, the client will want to continue to wring out value. You’re going to see creative come to play.”
An ad group veteran is excited about the prospect. “What’s the point of being able to slice and dice your audience if everybody’s going to see the same message?,” according to GroupM global chairman Irwin Gotlieb. “The new holy grail is likely to be relevance to a specific need state that the segmentation takes you to.”
Before we get there, how does the industry want to measure the effect of these new-wave ads?
“We measure success on whatever the results were that the client wanted,” saysDish media sales VP Adam Gaynor. “We’ve seen sales lift of 2%, 3%, I’ve seen sales lift in a category of 160%.”
But others caution against expecting significant uplift at the start.
“If you don’t see lift, that’s okay, too,” according to AT&T AdWorks national sales VP Jason Brown. “The product works. Clients sometimes don’t have their target right.”
Magna Global advanced TV VP Matt Bayner agrees: “Don’t expect a sales lift at first. We’ll be able to get some good insights to do it better next time. I can’t promise lift the first time. But we do promise a journey to get there.”
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.
]]>That’s according to AT&T AdWorks ad sales VP Jason Brown, who tells Beet.TV, in this video interview, the choice is not “either-or”.
“It’s both,” he says. “Brands still love to rub up against high-marquee live sports. There’s a ton of value to building awareness in association with quality content.
“On the flipside, there’s a ton of value in audience-based buying. Cord cutting has made everybody in the ecosystem a lot smart – everyone is optimising, whether it’s set-top box data, or you’re doing addressable advertising at the household level.”
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.
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