Interoperability Is Great Unifier

Kevin Lemberg, head of partnerships for advertising solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions

“There has to be some sort of unification and some sort of common language and goals between the partners within a solution or technology that we’re offering out to the industry,” he said. “Partnerships are going to be very important to round out the technology offering and the solutions for the industry in order for us to move forward.”

Holistic View of TV Landscape

Jen Soch, executive director of specialty channels at WPP’s GroupM

“We’re really seeing an idea where we can be with addressable and CTV part of the main video recommendation that goes into what we’re doing with a client, and look at it more holistically.” she said. “I do see a lot more interest in bringing it [addressable and CTV] very much to the forefront and being a bigger part of their overall play.”

Don’t Devalue Premium Content

Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal

“Interoperability across linear and digital without losing the value of premium content along the way is going to be so critical,” she said. “If we lose and swing the pendulum too far to ‘audiences only,’ imagine content being cheapened over the coming years and basically creating a society that the value is placed on audiences alone….I look forward to working with the industry on how, as we try to equivalize and become more interoperable, we don’t lose the value of premium content.”

Addressable TV Unlocks Insights

Kristine Bayles, vice president of advanced advertising sales at AMC Networks

Addressable TV “enables us to get the insights into communication and driving deeper understanding in the industry,” she said. “We all know TV is important, but CTV and VOD is just as important…Viewership is truly fragmented now, and it’s not that less people are consuming, they’re just consuming differently. We need to understand this, and move forward with converged impressions.”

Automate Workflows for Savings

Mark Marshall, president of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal

“Our goal on that [automated workflows] is to work with our partners on the agency side be able to get rid of about 30% of the manual work that we do,” he said. “How do we find different APIs [application programming interfaces] and different ways to interact, and take out some of the manual elements to allow us to move faster and hopefully improve margins for clients.”

Outcomes Need Collaboration

Nicole Whitesel, executive vice president of advanced TV and client success at Publicis Media

“We need systems that collaborate — tools that talk to each other, data that can break down those walls, IDs that can understand each other,” she said. “Better sharing of that data enables us to have conversations with our clients about outcomes, and outcomes that deliver change to their business, and outcomes that change the way they decide media mix.”

Self-Scheduling Becoming the Norm

Vicky Fox, chief planning officer at OMD UK

“We’ve moved from a place where people were quite wedded to a linear schedule,” she said. “Self-scheduling is going to be the norm for everybody. Anybody who switches on the TV and either looks at their connected TV menu or their EPG [electronic programming guide] can see how much has changed, because some of the linear schedules may take second place.”

Technology ‘Lifts All Ships’

Richard Nunn, vice president and general manager of advertiser solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions

“Through automation and understanding what has worked and what hasn’t in more real time across channel – that in principle, should mean a greater ROI across what is a fragmented channel base,” he said. “They’ll drive that solution a lot more efficiently because of technology.”

You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.

Editor’s Note:  Special thanks to Jon Watts who collaborated and reported for this series.

That is now changing, with more of them apparently seeing reason to flip their ad strategy on its head.

In this video interview with Beet.TV senior adviser Jon Watts, GroupM’s Executive Director, Specialty Channels, Jen Soch says there is more appetite to let advanced TV dominate media plans.

Foot-forward on addressable

“In the upfront, I heard an auto client speak to the fact that they really are looking at connected TV and household addressability as their main foot forward, and then they sprinkle in linear on the side,” Soch says.

“That got me giddy with excitement of what the possibilities are here. I definitely see some of our clients looking at that idea in the future. If you know your audience and if you know where you want to be, why not consider things a different way?

“Why not look at household addressability as a main foot forward? And when you combine our capabilities on what we can do on the set-top boxes and the MVPD players with what we can do in the overall connected TV landscape, I think we have a really good story as we move into 2021 and 2022.

“Now, you’ve just described a really interesting patchwork quilt of platforms and devices, each with their own slightly different capabilities and peculiarities. What are the big pain points that you and other agencies are grappling with at the moment?”

Music to advanced ears

The strategies Soch is hearing, as well as those she is contemplating for GroupM’s clients, bode well for a technology that promises capabilities like TV targeting, frequency-capping and performance attribution.

EMarketer previously estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.

That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.

Sticking points

But the truth is that, for all its super-powers, buying addressable ad campaigns and truly benefitting from those capabilities, remains difficult for many buyers.

Buyer surveys and thought leadership research exercises tend to wind up reporting ad buyers as bemoaning the steps required to buy and measure across a proliferating range of services and screens.

“Measurement has always been our pain point,” GroupM’s Soch acknowledges. “We still haven’t quite gotten to that place where we can measure things as successfully as we’ve always wanted to measure them.

“We have had some success in some areas, but being able to truly layer in these individuals, be able to look at the overall reach, be able to account for frequency among these different platforms, that’s still going to be a pain point as we move into this upfront season.”

Personal feel

Soch also says historic discussion about creative versioning – the compulsion to assemble a custom ad for every viewer – hasn’t come to pass.

Instead, the agency has consolidated around a few key creative executions, and Soch says she is able to find deeper personalization in complementary podcast advertising.

She says: “We are having a lot of clients where we look at some great video plans and household addressability, and then we’re bringing in audio on the side with podcasts and other areas to supplement and even layer on an interesting platform on top of just the video for more of an addressable and personalised, customizable, creative look.”

You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.