You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
A year ago, as the pandemic bedded in, ad buyers were holding on to their money, pushing it down the marketing funnel and calling for a delay to the upfronts, the traditional annual season in which TV and video networks pitch for advance ad spending commitments.
Fast-forward to May 2021 and, whilst pandemic economic effects have far from disappeared, a few circumstances are coalescing to make the Upfronts and IAB NewFronts a little different.
The new fronts
- Ad-supported VOD (AVOD) offerings have become bona fide operators.
- TV networks are cross-selling their traditional channels with their own-brand AVOD services.
- Live sports has returned.
- Production has resumed on many shows.
- The vaccination outlook is giving brands more economic optimism.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer for TV at ad-tech company LiveRamp explains why this time it is different.
CTV trends up
“Last year, you know, I don’t even think Peacock was launched yet, Discovery Plus wasn’t out yet, Paramount Plus in its combined form wasn’t out yet,” Prasad says.
“So this is now the first year with all these massively built-up platforms that are owned by the traditional TV media companies that are being combined with a return to normal in live linear with sports.”
Prasad thinks the emergence of the new, network-backed AVODs, plus increasing advertiser appetite for a new kind of media buy, will drive adoption of connected TV (CTV) advertising.
“I think this year’s upfronts are very much going to be focused on what the opportunities are for marketers to really embrace the platform,” he says. “Not just because it’s like digital – it’s because it has unique content experiences, viewing experiences, interactive and creative ad units that don’t exist in traditional TV.”
Over half (54%) of US digital media professionals naming it a leading priority for 2021, per an October 2020 survey by Integral Ad Science.
EMarketer estimates that US CTV ad spend will grow even faster this year than last, up 48.6% year over year (YoY) to $13.41 billion.
New tricks
For Prasad, it’s all about the new capabilities of connected TV.
“A lot of brands that are leaning in with cross screen measurement are able to understand who they’re actually reaching and how often on linear, and then being able to look at audiences and not just demographics,” he says.
“And then there is, of course, the ability to do a lot more audience related profiling targeting, and then measurement becomes something that is a lot more close to real time than we’ve had in the past with TV.
“A brand like Tubi, when it’s creating a customer accounts, it does have an idea of who’s watching. That’s the only way you can create customised playlist and surface recommend viewing and things of that nature.
“So that identity has to be able to work with a brand’s identity or a agency holding companies identity. And that’s the only way that you can get targeting and data to be able to move around.”
You are watching, “The Stream: New Audiences, New Opportunities,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Tubi. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But recent changes may suggest some of their prayers may get answered.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer, describes some of the findings of a new survey of brands and ad agencies that was commissioned by DISH Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, INVIDI Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia
Unification for the nation
The study, Era Of Addressable, carried out by Forrester found the buy side calling for change:
- Simplify buying and managing campaigns across suppliers (66%)
- Increase scale (65%) and national footprint (64%)
- Interoperability among MVPDs (74%); technology partners (93%)
- Single measurement standard from media companies (92%)
Addressable TV and emerging media channels are the #1 priority for brands and agency TV buyers in 2021. Read more in the new study, “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV”. https://t.co/6fEzcpenMD pic.twitter.com/AiGqjmQGnV
— DISH Media (@DISHMedia) March 24, 2021
“A unified and what they were calling a ‘single measurement standard for addressable’ was the second-highest question answered in terms of percentage,” Prasad says.
“Seventy-three percent said that that was something they were looking for. You can’t run addressable and then still measure things on an age-and-gender proxy in that commercial break, because that break will no longer function like a typical age-and-gender-measured commercial break, because now you’ve changed the targeting in a certain amount of households.”
Match segments
For Prasad, it is becoming important that addressable TV ad buyers can granularly identify their audiences, even on combined footprints of viewing services.
“LiveRamp maintains a subscriber file match process with MVPDs,” he says. “That match, it allows us to be able to look at the universe size of any MVPD against an audience. You can grab an audience from an advertiser through a first-party onboard, or grab a segment from the LiveRamp data store.
“We would basically allow for more instant counts, meaning if you grab this auto intender segment and you want to know how many households it can reach on DISH, we can give that calculation very quickly, and we can do the same thing across all the MVPDs.
If you’re an auto maker, (you can) look at, ‘Well, if I take my lease-ending segment of households that I know have a vehicle that’s expiring, and I want to add on this additional in-market auto segment from the data store, how much can I reach? How many households can I get to?”
EMarketer forecasts US connected TV ad spending will reach $18.29 billion by 2024, more than double the amount spent in 2020, driven especially by YouTube, Hulu, and Roku.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer for TV at LiveRamp, explains that, after fast growth, some development is still needed.
TV growth
According to eMarketer’s data, US CTV ad spend jumped 27.1% through 2020 – a year when viewing was swelled by staying at home and advertising was boosted by both US elections and a range of new AVOD entrants.
But Prasad says much of the buying in CTV has been traditional in form.
“It’s odd that, in the run-up to all of this growth in streaming, a lot of it’s been done with maybe just age and gender (targeting) capabilities.,” he says. “In part, (that is) because of the difficulty in being able to assess how much audience-based inventory exists in the marketplace.
“(Buyers) want to look at high quality data from reputable data firms, companies like Catalina and Polk and others who have high-quality data that’s been working in digital and then has been working in addressable linear.”
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer at LiveRamp TV says our collaboration with Kinetiq tackles antiquated measurement and attribution in TV head-on by streamlining measurement of all TV ad exposures across traditionally siloed channels. https://t.co/rTv3jtTvA8 #Martech #Technology pic.twitter.com/k2NgP3J5NF
— MarTech Series (@MarTechSeries) January 11, 2021
Custom audiences
Prasad says the ability to create “custom audiences” for targeting, a practice that has been enjoyed by other digital buyers for some time, is now emerging in connected TV.
“These custom audiences can be based on their own first-party data – things like purchase history – or the ability to look at prospects differently than existing customers,” he says.
Other new capabilities include using CTV to control the reach and frequency of ads, or to measure the outcome of ads.
How will programmatic buyers approach CTV inventory this year?
If you missed our blog about the buy side practice of supply path optimization (SPO), here is another chance to read how it can impact streaming AVOD publishers and some best practices: https://t.co/yg73gC4M5j
— Publica (@getpublica) January 14, 2021
Household intelligence
But having the custom audience capability isn’t enough, Prasad reckons.
“Once you have this custom audience, how do you make it work in CTV?,” he says. “That’s sort of that last-mile question that has been looking at the industry as a big opportunity.
“And we’re now looking at how we can make that happen between buyers and sellers and working with some key partners to do that.”
Prasad says the big opportunity is to generate intelligence at the level of individual ad impressions, which correlate to individual households – a step-change from the traditional TV panel measurement picture.
That means applying more data about the household in question, including the size of the household, and being able to de-duplicate that household from receiving too many ads – a problem Prasad’s LiveRamp is working on with Publica, a connected TV advertising platform.
You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In his recent article published in AdExchanger, he advises: “To balance portfolios, ensure 15- 20% of budgets are allocated to cross-screen audiences and backed by outcome-based guarantees.”
]]>That is according to a tech exec who says “addressable” technology is coming on stream faster than ever.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer at LiveRamp’s TV division, says: “If a brand is used to using different audience segments already on their digital buys, then why not look at what that reach looks like on your linear (TV) buy?
“(They can) extend it seamlessly using that same segment or that same audience onto new platforms like CTV and streaming apps.
“That’s something that I think is going to be a continuing story this year, which is ‘What is your total reach against audiences?’, ‘What is your incremental reach?’, ‘What is your duplicated reach?’ And furthermore, this year we’re going to have a much more concentrated effort on making big streaming platforms addressable, just like an MVPD.”
Prasad is the former TubeMogul and VideoAmp executive with a long history in online video business.
LiveRamp is an ad-tech is an audience identity resolution provider, aiming to help ad buyers knit together fragments of consumers’ disparate digital breadcrumb trails.
It offers Identity Link – a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data.
LiveRamp recently published its guide to the upcoming 2020 upfronts ad sales season.
“I think there’s an opportunity now that you can create more addressable-scale television. Stop looking at television as ‘This is linear’, ‘This is addressable’, ‘This is CTV’, ‘This is digital’ – let’s just call it all television.
“Now that you can have more addressable scale there, this should be an opportunity to take some of the dollars from digital that were maybe in not so great pools of inventory just because they targeting people thought that it worked better. I think now you’re going to be able to see a better shift towards premium site-sound-emotion.”
Prasad was interviewed by Jon Watts at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>Upfronts season peaks in May, when video and TV content owners showcase their upcoming repertoire in a bid to secure advance ad buyers from brands and their media agencies.
In this Consumer Electronics Show (CES) video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer at LiveRamp’s TV division, talks about what is different about 2020’s upfronts season and what the industry is still lacking.
“Coming out of CES, it’s already basically going to be upfront season,” says Prasad, whose appointment to LiveRamp was announced at CES. “The Beet Retreat (an executive event in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in February) is basically the last respite before the next crazy months of the upfront starts.”
LiveRamp Welcomes Industry Leader Jay Prasad to the LiveRamp TV Team
Prasad is the former TubeMogul and VideoAmp executive with a long history in online video business.
LiveRamp is an ad-tech is an audience identity resolution provider, aiming to help ad buyers knit together fragments of consumers’ disparate digital breadcrumb trails.
It offers Identity Link – a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data
“What’s missing in the marketplace is a scaled, neutral company who can actually make interoperability work amongst all of the big media companies via connective tissue to the brands and the agencies,” Prasad adds.
“That means you’re not buying or selling media, you’re not owned by a media company so, therefore, you can be a trusted steward of all of the data that is required to create this liquidity.”
LiveRamp recently published its guide to the upcoming 2020 upfronts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Brands would buy ads and, with little insight in to who really watched what, would need to unleash a slew of media mix modelling tools to understand what exposures may have led to which purchases.
That imprecision has led the industry to focus on the half-full glass – TV is an amazing medium for building mass initial awareness, if not for closing a deal with a customer.
Now that over-the-top TV services and addressable TV advertising technologies, which allow for precision targeting, are coming on stream, the industry is contemplating changing the way it trades ads, like offering guarantees on business outcomes, measurable with digital attribution.
For an industry that is worth north of $70 billion in the US alone, the change could be profound. But how quick is it happening? What will the real nature of ROI look like? And who stands to gain?
At Beet Retreat, a panel representing all sides of the value chain – brand, agency, programmer, and technology supplier – was convened to thrash out the issues, concluding three days of debate in Puerto Rico. Here is what they said…
TV is not direct mail
The panel was cautioned against comparing the emerging technology of addressable TV to forebear marketing channels, just because it exhibits similar one-to-one qualities…
Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover
“There’s going to be this inherent reaction to treat addressable TV like it’s direct marketing or direct mail. But, if you benchmark the performance of, let’s say, addressable TV from an ROI perspective, from an effectiveness perspective, it’s never going to perform similarly to direct mail.”
Top of funnel still matters
Addressable and OTT TV ads can laser-guide creative to individual households or even individual viewers, just like digital – very different from conventional mass broadcast. But reaching that mass is still important…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Awareness matters. The high-funnel stuff, brand-level marketing, actually really matters. In a rush to try to make everything accountable in a direct markety, outcome-based way, you end up minimizing the value of all that high-funnel stuff. We’ve done that largely because we never thought of making TV accountable at all. ”
ROI is a team sport
With so many technological possibilities at play, and the emerging possibility of selling ads only when an attribution can prove they have led to a purchase or other action, the whole notion of return on investment (ROI) is up in the air. But all sides of the value chain are playing the game…
John Hoctor, CEO & C0-Founder, Data Plus Math:
“Agencies, marketers, media folks (are now) partnering on (defining) ROI, which is kind of interesting. We’ll go on a lot of sales calls as the tech provider, as the glue that’s kind of holding it all together, to talk about what sort of outcomes can we measure for this particular advertiser. There’s some advertisers where the outcome is pretty clear, and you can measure it. There’s real budgets going against it. But it has not displaced the GRPs that are out there. But everyone is leaning into it. We’re in tons of these meetings with all of these folks. It’s a super hot topic.”
Turning around the TV ship
New technologies offer advertisers the ability to buy ads on TV in a manner consistent with digital – transacting not just for precise targeting but also buying specific business outcomes. But that is going to need the TV industry to change decades of habit…
Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal:
“TV has been transacted in a very similar way for the last 50 years or more. We’ve been really vocal about transitioning away from legacy measurement. Marketers by the way, are interested in that, and they’re leaned into it … (moving) into some sort of impact-, outcome-based measurement.”
Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp:
“But, still, 90% of your business is transacted against the Nielsen guarantee. $10 billion top line … moved against a currency that you and Linda (Yaccarino, Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships at NBCUniversal) and everybody openly express you feel needs to be refreshed. I guess maybe it’s also. ‘Guys, when is it worth the effort?'”
Jump right in
Beet Retreat heard frustration from attendees that many parts of the media-buying landscape still treat addressable TV advertising as a test-and-learn opportunity, with many holding back from significant investment. When could that change… ?
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer, VideoAmp:
“In 2018, a lot of it was research, so that you can prepare for how you want to start transacting moving forward. So by 2020, I’m hoping a lot of that volume, which is already pretty significant, is now moving into actual delivery, with measurement that is making buyers and sellers, both more effective in what they’re trying to do.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>This is why Prasad reflects on this year’s Retreat in this interview as “a small and purposely put together group like this where there’s a lot of people who are working together or thinking about working together and able to share ideas.” He says he prefers learning from “power panel sessions” than typical one-hour conference sessions “with everyone repeating themselves on a panel. It doesn’t happen here.”
Aside from Puerto Rico’s natural beauty, Prasad notes the Retreat location in the context of the devastation that Hurricane Maria caused in the fall of 2017 and the ongoing rebuilding. One element of the Retreat was dedicated to raising awareness of the short- and long-term impacts on residents and the marketing world.
“It definitely seemed like Andy and the team here really wanted to make sure that we understood that and there was a connection to it,” he says. “When you put that all together, I thought it was a really special few days.”
The time was shared with “so many partners across the ecosystem and clients that we’re working with. Maybe two years ago I would have looked across the room and said it would be great to be doing this with that company, trying to connect this supply source with this data so that this advertiser can execute. And now it’s actually kind of happening.”
Prasad describes “a really busy last two years” in which VideoAmp has been assembling its marketing investment platform, which encompasses data-driven, cross-screen planning and measurement, activation and programmatic. This year, the company acquired TV-data processing provider IronGrid Data Services, which when combined with a partnership with Inscape formed the basis for the new Data & Emerging Products Division, as Variety reports.
“So next is going to be taking all of these pieces of technology and solutions and making sure they’re optimizing to work together so that one piece of our system, like the measurement system, is actually informing how you should be planning,” says Prasad.
He clarifies that it’s not planning to determine a particular dollar spend for a particular medium “but actually event-level forecasting. Which means that we’re also going to be more tightly working with big media companies and suppliers and supply side technology to make that happen.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>But could the same happen on the sell side, and why?
VideoAmp chief strategy officer Jay Prasad thinks it could, prompted by the looming demands of new privacy legislation.
“We’re seeing media companies want to have a lot more ownership of how that content is accessed, and what kind of targeting and contextual capabilities they enable around that content,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Being GDPR compliant and soon ePrivacy compliant is pretty obviously more than important. It’s a requirement.
“And one of the only ways that they’re going to be able to really execute at scale with both those regulatory frameworks in mind, as well as to create this premium TV environment, means that they have to bring some of these platforms in-house and run them as an agency might do so.”
GDPR came in to force in May, bringing new requirements on how companies should collect and process European consumers’ personal data. The ePrivacy Directive will come with additional compliances.
Prasad thinks that will change things for broadcasters.
“They will still do commercial deals and trade with the agencies,” he says. “They may give agencies self service access to these platforms, but it’s becoming a part of a media company’s operation, and that’s a pretty new phenomenon.”
Founded four years ago, Prasad’s VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.
Earlier this year, the output has acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data for eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data, to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes.
It is creating a custom buying platform for RTL in the Netherlands so it can start to create its own packaging of very premium, on demand content.
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Now it is taking a step up by acquiring one company and partnering with another.
The outfit has acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data fr eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data – as AdExchanger puts it, “to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes”.
At the same time, VideoAmp is partnering with InScape, the unit of TV maker Vizio that deals with automated content recognition (ACR).
That will give it access to anonymized viewing data from nine million TV sets in the US.
VideoAmp has witnessed the evolution of early notions of “programmatic TV” – from packaging up remnant inventory at a mark-up, to something with far more potential.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp chief strategy officer Jay Prasad says more is coming.
“Our DSP platform, we still have some business that we run on behalf of clients,” he says. There is some very kind of, tricky KPIs sometimes, when it comes to hitting video metrics. It’s just different then other programmatic.
“So, our platform is used when we offer that white glove service to clients. And then, we are working with one of our investors RTL, in a version of the DSP that will be specifically designed for GDPR compliancy. And will be used in Europe by RTL themselves.”
]]>