Addressable Ads Growing on Linear TV

Chris Maccaro, chief executive of Beachfront Media

“We’re most excited about accelerating addressability across traditional linear, and that’s where we see an enormous amount of growth, both this year and into the future,” Maccaro said. “Our focus has really been on enablement, building the infrastructure to enable that addressability to happen, and then bringing the ability to access that supply through automated channels,” Maccaro adds.

Addressable TV Is Bridge Between Linear, Streaming

Adam Gaynor, vice president of network partnerships at Vizio

“Addressable TV today acts as the bridge between linear and streaming,” Gaynor said. “When I think about it from the buy-side, when I think about it from the brand side, we now have a real opportunity to help brands as they find their audiences in both the connected TV world and the linear world, to connect them by using addressable TV.”

Media Measurement Underpins Convergence

Beth Weeks, vice president and group director at Digitas

“Measurement becomes critically important as we’re losing reach on linear, but gaining in digital video,” Weeks said. “How are we validating the effectiveness of that holistic reach as we think about bridging those platforms, and being able to validate and verify that we’re achieving those critical KPIs and those business outcomes that our clients are expecting.”

Unification Means Greater ROI

Huda Kazi, vice president of ad technology and operations at Discovery

“Unification is key. We’re hyper-focused on creating a large deduplicated supply pool for our advertisers,” Kazi said. “This allows us to provide greater ROI for the advertisers while maintaining the value of our own content.”

Video-on-Demand Offers Brand Safety

Chris Pizzurro, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Canoe

“We have a very well lit, brand-safe VOD environment today with the Canoe footprint,” Pizzurro said. “We absolutely need to maintain that quality, but we know we need to open up the pipes to programmatic so our programmers can sell 100% of their inventory…We’re up-and-running, and we look to turn up the heat this year.”

Brand, Consumer Experiences Are Key

Rob Christensen, vice president of advanced TV sales and distribution at Vevo

“As we’re running ad pods in multiple minutes per hour, it’s important for us to make sure that it’s a great experience for brands, it’s a great experience for users and of course, maximizing the monetization opportunities,” Christensen said.

Don’t Forget Frequency Capping

JoAnna Foyle, senior vice president of inventory partnerships at The Trade Desk

“[Ad] frequency is a big challenge, that if you’re not using the right platform and the right tools – we see this as consumers while we’re watching content on mobile devices, on streaming services…the odds are frequency isn’t being managed very well,” Foyle said. “One of the things we talk to our buyers a lot about is making sure that they’re using the tools available to them.”

CTV, OTT See Data-Driven Innovations

John Vilade, head of ad sales at Premion

“We’re out right now doing a lot of education with marketers. Marketers are seeing rapid changes in the marketplace. There’s a lot of complexity and fragmentation. There’s a lot of nuance in terms of what you can do inside the connected TV space,” Vilade said. “I’m most excited about now is the data-driven innovations that we’re seeing inside of connected TV and OTT.”

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

With that challenge, it may seem like the ongoing limits being placed on digital user identifiers would hamper the process.

But, piece by piece, companies are giving publishers, broadcast owners and buyers new tools that, in many ways, are better than traditional targeting tech.

Better than cookies?

The Trade Desk kickstarted Unified ID 2.0, a post-cookie solution for making identity buyable by using hashed and encrypted email addresses.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, JoAnna Foyle, SVP for inventory partnerships at one such firm, The Trade Desk, says the mission is to build an effective, consumer-safe identity system.

“We think, frankly, it provides advertisers and publishers with a better option than cookies ever offered,” Foyle says.

“It really is an opportunity to rise all boats for the open internet.”

Paprtnership approach

Elaborating on that idea, Foyle says: “For those of us companies who philosophically believe in an open internet, this is a way for us to band together and continue to offer targeting for publishers and for advertisers at scale in a world where cookies are no longer the option.

“What we talk to our buyers and our publishers about a ton is the notion of interoperability. We don’t all have to use the exact same solution, but our solutions have to talk to each other because that’s the only way we come up with a solution for cookies, at scale, across the open internet.”

To that end, recent months have seen the announcements that UID 2.0 will be integrated by the likes of Epsilon’s CORE ID, OpenAP and Blockgraph.

And UID 2.0 just began its first ever deployment in Asia-Pacific, in Taiwan.

Cap the frequency

For The Trade Desk’s Foyle, it’s all about balancing advertiser and publisher interests plus a good consumer experience.

She says, too often, the inability of different channel screens to stitch together a single customer identity leads to excessive frequency of ad exposure, and she urges companies to use new tools available to overcome the problem.

Meanwhile, UK TV media sales house Sky Media in May announced it would tap The Trade Desk to make its VOD ad inventory available to buy programmatically.

That inventory exists in the VOD services not only of Comcast-owned Sky, Europe’s large satellite TV provider, but also of the broadcasters whose ads it represents, including Channel 4.

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.

OpenSlate, of which Foyle is chief operating officer, had already rolled out a service helping bring brand safety to YouTube and Facebook.

Earlier this month, it also struck a partnership with TikTok to provide a brand safety verification and filter tool that weeds out inappropriate content and categories for advertisers.

In this video interview, Foyle explains how the brand safety game is all about responsiveness.

Fast-changing content

“The minute you come up with what you think are a standard set of categories or models that you’re trying to manage for brand safety or brand suitability, the world of content changes,” Foyle explains.

“Think about what news today looks like versus five years ago. Think about what politics looks today versus five years ago. Sensitive social issues are more sensitive than they’ve ever been.”

OpenSlate launched a decade ago to measure content as people began watching more than just linear TV. Two years later, it built out brand safety tools for YouTube. Last year, it added them for Facebook.

The goal is to ensure brand ad dollars are supporting good actors, rather than shady content.

The new bad actors

But, though “brand safety” first arose on platforms like YouTube a couple of years ago, the 2020 problem poses particular challenges, Foyle says.

“Conspiracy theories and misinformation are now very publicly running rampant on our systems,” she says. “So we just released recently a conspiracy model that’s going to help control for some of those kinds of conversations that are happening on these social platforms that our clients are concerned about.”

Foyle says content advertisers don’t want to be exposed to includes “aliens and Flat Earthers and things that are more controversial like anti-vaxxers and some of the QAnon type publications that are going on now”.

She says the industry has done well at improving brand safety until now. “But those standards can’t stay flat,” she says. “They’ve got to continue to evolve as the content for which they’re meant evolves as well.”

Scaling up

TikTok has become a digital media behemoth. Comscore says US unique users grew by nearly 50% between January and March.

EMarketer believes TikTok’s UK user base will grow by 75% this year to 12.7% of the UK population.

OpenSlate offers brand safety solutions in 13 languages with more to come. It is investing in Asia-Pacific.

Last year, Nielsen invested to acquire a minority stake in OpenSlate. The deal puts the valuation of OpenSlate at $100 million, the Wall Street Journal reported based on its sources.

At the end of last year, Nielsen took a minority investment in OpenSlate to combine its audience measurement and scoring expertise with OpenSlate’s similar approach to measuring quality of content.

“What Nielsen is to audience, we aspire to be to content,” says JoAnna Foyle, chief operating officer at OpenSlate, in an interview with Beet.TV. “To a marketer, those things get really interesting.”

Combined, Foyle says, Nielsen and OpenSlate can work with marketers and advertisers to inform them on contribution strategies for audiences as it relates to outcomes.

The combination of that insight, according to Foyle, is the strength of OpenSlate and its tie up with Nielsen. “Nielsen can tell how an audience impacted performance, and we can talk about impact of content,” she says. “We had one client call it ‘utopia.’ We’re not at utopia yet but we’ve got some nearer term opportunities.”

On the roadmap, OpenSlate’s expansion opportunities include extending its content rating abilities to additional social platforms beyond YouTube and Facebook. Publishers are also coming to OpenSlate, looking for it to rate its content in order to be able to provide consistent metrics to advertisers and brands who use OpenSlate to track content performance elsewhere.

“The industry is preparing for a world less dependent on audience and cookies,” says Foyle. “OpenSlate plays a critical and unique role given that our entire business is about content analytics and using content as a way to figure out how to reach audiences and how to place brands in the right environments.”

But don’t publishers also have a duty to better indicate the kinds of ad spots advertisers can buy?

Joanna Foyle thinks so. And, from her vantage point as COO of OpenSlate, a company whose technology produces safety data on ad-supported YouTube videos, more publishers are beginning to agree.

“We’re actually starting to get pulled in a publisher direction,” Foyle says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We’re talking to some of the larger publishers who are aggregating content, not just in their owned-and-operated properties, but from other publishers. (That is) hundreds of publishers in some cases, and they don’t necessarily always have visibility into the nature or the quality of that content.”

Foyle says publishers are stepping up because agencies and advertisers are asking them to get some kind of independent third-party mark for the suitability of their content, or because they just want to better understand it, so that they can better package it themselves.

OpenSlate last year was taken on by media investment agency GroupM to ascertain the safety of its YouTube media buys, then extended the partnership this year to include brand “suitability“.

Foyle says OpenSlate is “pushing” publishers to understand brand safety issues a lot better.

“Some of those suitability challenges across content, like gaming and news, can be better understood and more transparent for the brands and advertisers to make transacting more fluid,” she adds.

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.

Among other things, the company knew “there would come a time in an industry that got hyper focused on audience and eyeballs and finding the right human that context would matter again someday,” says JoAnna Foyle, COO of the company now known as OpenSlate.

Given the recent and widespread advertiser backlash against their ads appearing alongside objectionable video content on places like YouTube, context has indeed arrived front and center.

“Our whole mission in life became how do we create an analytics system leveraging all of the ingested meta data from every scrap of videos that have ad opportunities on them,” Foyle recalls in this interview with Beet.TV.

This no small task considering there are 300 million videos on YouTube with ad opportunities. OpenSlate’s platform analyzes and scores YouTube content on quality, brand safety, subject matter expertise and audience.

In essence, OpenSlate helps brands create “a safe version of YouTube,” one that is tailored to their audience targets and objectives, according to Foyle.

The company scored a major coup in March of this year as brands began to flee some video platforms by partnering with WPP’s media investment management unit GroupM. As the companies announced at the time, their effort was aimed at providing GroupM clients “additional controls and content safeguards” to support their YouTube buys.

“We’re talking to a number of the other holding companies,” says Foyle.

YouTube seems to be keeping a low profile with regard to the safe content theme, telling Digiday that it’s focused on reviewing its policies and giving brands more control over ads.

OpenSlate covers both reservation media, including Google Preferred, and auction-based inventory bought through AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager. Its compensation is in the form of a CPM upcharge or percentage of media spend.

The premise of OpenSlate is “making sure that the video you your brand is appearing against is one where your brand would choose to appear,” Foyle adds.

One example might be a cosmetics brand aligned with appropriate female content as opposed to “stuff that’s completely irrelevant, like Minecraft videos.”

We interviewed Foyle earlier this week at the VideoNuze advertising summit.