Now we are living in a world which is swimming – or, perhaps, drowning – in the sticky, digital substance.
For many in broadcasting, data is proving to be transformational to the way they sell advertising, reinventing a discipline that has long relied on manual operations and sketchy viewer targeting.
In this Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV, executives discussed the application of data to their businesses.
Panel leader Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by positing that “data is a product”…
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“100% data is a product. We just announced the fact that we’re launching our own Warner Media D2C (direct-to-consumer) product itself, which will be driven by deep insights on consumption, on behavioral insights, personalization, recommendation engines, dynamic ad insertion built into the overall interface, as well as dynamic content insertion, and dynamic framework of how the actual product itself gets built out. That’s all data driven.”
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“Typically. what we see is in a programmatic delivery or even in a direct sold model, we see anywhere from 15% to 20% lift on the value of media when that kind of data is applied to it.”
But speakers also said that data alone won’t be a game-changer…
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“I would say it’s not just the value of the data. It’s the value of the addressability itself. You’re also enabling this household-level dynamic insertion ability. It’s the combination of those two plus the media I think that gets you to that.”
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“They have to work together.”
Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:
“Where I see the convergence of these two is traditional linear and then you have this audience data. The challenge is, what is the value of that? Is it about outcomes? Is it about time spent? Is it about consumer lifetime value?
“I think we’re not getting to that. We’re not starting to understand the value of combining data and linear television in a way for brands and buyers to truly value it in a sophisticated way.”
Turner’s Redniss argued that this value actually is becoming clear. But Swartz asked panelists whether it can really be quantified…
Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:
“There is not a significant interest in proving the value from a buying standpoint at the moment, because they’re not incentivized to do so. They’re incentivized to efficiencies and reach.”
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“I think we have the talent. I just think the costs of trying to understand the end ROI is still so high, and every marketer has their own metrics for success. It’s just hard to make it a universal standard.”
Swartz said she feared different companies, all hoping to burst the bubble of traditional TV measurement currencies, would simply pick their own solutions, leading to silos…
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“We as an industry need to come together to identify some key data points that we can all trade on. That’s it. If we can all baseline around that – and it’s not just one currency, it’s probably going to be five or six – that’s when it really starts to come together.
“We all need to do a better job of educating … the end consumer. Right now we’re giving them a shit ton of opportunities and a shit ton of choice. How do we help teach them and educate them on what those things mean?”
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.
]]>That was one of the many tricky balances debated in a fireside discussion at Beet Retreat between Turner EVP of data strategy and product innovation Jesse Redniss and Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
Swartz set up the distinction as a juxtaposition of “EQ” (emotional intelligence) and “IQ” (intelligence quotient), noting that the ongoing human characteristic of TV involves a heavy dose of the former.
Agreeing, Redniss said: “If you don’t have a great consumer experience, you’re never going to capture data.
“TV traditional business was never based on PII (personally-identifiable information), it was based on panels that Nielsen drove for a long time. Then along came all mobile platforms, web-based platforms, which are capturing IP, device IDs, you’re capturing a lot of behavioral insights.
“Now a lot of companies are blending emotional responses that can be gleaned from everything from biometric measurement to social conversation. All that (is) flowing into now how you’re actually really truly trying to understand consumers.”
After watching the digital display ad business convert largely to programmatic modes of ad trading, the broadcast business has spend the last couple of years looking for similar ways to inject data and automation in to TV and video advertising.
But, so far, a fraction of the US TV ad business has converted, and the evolution is now happening amidst a new global concern over practices which use consumer data in ad targeting.
Is the pendulum suddenly swinging back toward the human touch?
“I think right now, we need to put a pause, quite frankly, into the free fire hose of how data is accessed and utilized to strategically align use cases of how data can be leveraged,” Redniss added.
“Facebook is now in a position where they took too much liberty in how they’re leveraging data and who could actually access it.
“That’s the balance that every single company and every publisher is trying to solve right now – how do you scale content creation, how do you scale direct-to-consumer relationships in a way that respects that balance?
“When you look at what’s going on with GDPR and soon to be CCPA, which we believe and I believe should be an overall regulation that the US has to stand by. We’re going to have to do it.”
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.
]]>“As a fan experience company, it’s really coming to its own now the EVP of Data Strategy & Product Innovation says in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
So how does a company with such vast resources seamlessly connect platforms and experiences? “That’s basically the crux of my job is to figure out across all the different divisions how are we gathering all the insights and all the data points,” says Redniss. “How do you set a standard across every app that we have at Turner, and there’s a lot of them.”
Much hinges on instrumentation of different tracking methodologies. “If CNN sets up their data instrumentation one way to measure video or measure a touch or a click and TBS or sports does it a completely different way, you can’t bring those two things together and reconcile.”
Turner’s salespeople, researchers and product teams can mine the Turner Data Cloud for core insights. “We’re getting to a point where we’re going to start using all those insights to create dynamic content experiences where what my actual experience is on CNN’s home page could be completely different then another’s. Not just from the content you’re seeing but also it could be the framework in which the actual platform or CNN site is then kind of materialized for the consumer,” Redniss says.
Given complications like the GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, dealing with different data sets is “really challenging and interesting.” It pays to take a pro-consumer approach, according to Redniss.
“The way we think about it is when you are building a world based on consumers at the center and it’s all about fandom, you absolutely have to respect that relationship with the fans and the consumers at the center.”
Thanks to digital technology, more consumer engagement means more data to seed more product offerings.
“That to me is really exciting because that means you’re actually winning at the game of trying to scale something. Data is a massive asset for us now. When you can actually get positive consent to build something off of or provide something to consumers using what they’re provided to us, that’s a win-win for everybody,” Redniss says.
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.
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