Now, after many early attempts, finally addressable TV is reaching scale.
But just how advanced is the infrastructure behind “advanced TV”?
In a Beet Retreat panel, Addressable Tech: Next-Gen Solutions: Fixing the Plumbing, three industry executives were asked that question.
All agreed that addressable TV capability and viewer scale has grown leaps and bounds since the earliest attempts a decade ago. But the panel also raised concerns that the infrastructure is not nearly as mature as it should be.
Telaria’s Adam Lowy said lining up ads to support personalized play-out is not as frictionless as believed.
“In television, you have to send the (ad) spot to the box over the bird, has to sit in the box,” he said. “It takes about three or four days, maybe a week, to acquire (the ad), and then you go ahead and serve it.
“You can call that ‘mature’, I call that ‘we’ve got to move on from that at some point’.”
Telaria’s Adam Lowy said, right now, selling addressable ads to buyers is too complex.
“When you’re out there selling addressable (ads), it gets into the weeds so fast (that) you’ve essentially lost the sell, you’ve lost the mojo,” he said. “Because you get so into how it works and all the tech about it.
“I think we have to simplify the process and really state what addressable (advertising) is when you’re out there. And I think that is one of the things we need to fix.”
Google’s Chris Curley explained that, relative to digital media, addressable TV still needs to focus on open ecosystems.
“If you want to continue down a path where ads become more meaningful to the user and you can protect the privacy of the user and their wishes, as well as create meaningful measurement across all of these screens so that all of this works well at scale, we have a very long way to go,” he said.
“We need to focus on interoperability. We need to make sure that we’re working together and we’re using open standards in a way that works for everyone.”
Project OAR is beginning to issue over-the-top firmware updates to 10 million connected TV sets, to better deliver ads from FreeWheel, Google and Xandr, said the outfit’s Jodie McAfee.
OAR is a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising,
“We’ve also hit our milestones, one of which was to have a live demo at CES, which we did.We actually ran six different demos with members, two of which were live feeds broadcast into the Vizio space at CES.
“We (also) distributed the measurement spec. We will start pushing the solution to Vizio TVs in a firmware update next week. We’re on track to have 10 million TVs live by the upfront.” The discussion took place on February 5.
The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.
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.
]]>The process is part of Project OAR, a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.
Its Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs. The Open Addressable Ready consortium was announced in March.
At CES in January, the group announced it had begun technical integrations with major ad delivery and enablement engines FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager, Xandr and INVIDI.
In this new video interview with Beet.TV, Inscape’s Jodie McAfee says: “That will start next week roughly, so mid-February. That will be sort of a continuous roll because you don’t push firmware to the entire footprint of TVs at the same time because that means you might blow things up.
“So that rollout will happen over the course of mid-February through April with a target of having roughly 10 million TVs by the upfront (TV ad sales season).”
Inscape uses automated content recognition (ACR) in internet-connected Vizio TVs to understand what viewers are watching.
At CES, Project OAR showed demos of “creative versioning” – its ability to swap out ads being played out in live broadcast TV feeds.
“That was a big deal,” McAfee recalls. “I think it caused everybody to go, okay this is for real.”
He says it led to ad agencies getting in touch with interest from their brand clients. In addition, OAR’s range of broadcast partners will also bring their existing brand advertisers to a beta test.
McAfee was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk 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.
]]>That is why we have begun to see a range of collaborations, consortia and industry associations all come together, in pursuit of scale. It is the ultimate test of the “all boats will rise” idea.
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat In The City, two such executives discussed how they are embarking on just such initiatives:
They were interviewed by Janus Insights & Strategy president Howard Shimmel…
Led by Inscape, which uses automated content recognition (ACR) in internet-connected Vizio TVs to understand what viewers are watching, Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.
The founding members include Disney Media Networks (which includes ABC, ESPN and Freeform), Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBCUniversal, Discovery, CBS, AT&T’s Xandr and WarnerMedia’s Turner, Hearst Television and AMC Networks.
“The media landscape is littered with the dead carcasses of consortiums that have failed,” McAfee told Shimmel for Beet.TV. “We had seen previous attempts at trying to get to scale that really were, in our mind, rigid in that it was trying to force an entire industry into a single solution.
“The way to scale is flexibility and interoperability and the idea of building sort of a core building block.”
“Every one (of our members), over the course of the last … year and a half, has leaned in very hard. We get at least 25 to 30 participants in all of our meetings,” McAfee said.
“There are four big OEMs, we’re one, there are three others that shall remain nameless. We will probably be rolling out some trials at the first of the year. We think the next tipping point in terms of getting the other OEMs to join is when it’s real and so we’re sort of sitting back and not really pushing very hard on them.
“We will have a workable, a working product by the first of the year and when our members start pushing inventory through that product, the proof will be in that pudding.”
back when Canoe 1.0 launched, there wasn’t the existential threat of Facebook and Amazon and Netflix and Google. And so I think our members know that they have to work together in order to combat that.
Such joined-up thinking is music to the ears of David Levy. The former Fox executive is now CEO of OpenAP, the two-year-old consortium involving Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision which harmonizes how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.
Speaking on the panel, he recanted tales where going it alone didn’t pan out.
“Whether it was true[X] or Fox, every new thing that we did, regardless if it worked, if we were trying to just go up that hill on our own, it was difficult for agencies to invest a big amount to do something new, with just one of us,” he said.
“We’re now all compromising, small compromises, that basically mean we’re all pushing the same ball up the hill, we’re going to have success.
After its first phase of two years, now OpenAP recently launched its own marketplace from which to buy ads across the TV providers.
“A buyer can come define an audience once and actually get back a optimized plan across close to 20 networks, across linear and digital, all in one place,” Levy said.
Next up, Levy aims to get close to agency buyers.
“What we’re planning on rolling out this year is an agency council,” he said. “So we want to get a lot more feedback. A lot of the stuff we’re going to be focusing on is more on the measurement side of this year. So as we start to develop more standards, we’re going to really lean into our agency relationships.”
“The bigger threat by far is the fact that you are going to have three new direct to consumer offerings, all ad free, coming into the market, all competing for consumers’ time and attention and for the ad supported television industry,” OpenAP’s Levy said.
“We better be ready to have a better consumer experience that will make sure we actually retain users.
“We’re all now investing in new ways to transact better, ways to reduce waste so we can get more relevant advertising in front of people. But that has to also result in a better consumer experience and likely reducing ads.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>The Open Addressable Ready consortium announced in March is the result of Vizio having watched a number of companies try to bring more scale to addressable TV, McAfee says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“There are a lot of technical challenges with someone being in the middle of that conversation and then there are also a lot of business challenges. As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work.”
OAR membership includes both inventory owners and platforms, ranging from CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal to AT&T’s Xandr and Comcast’s FreeWheel.
By seeking an open standard, Vizio decided against “trying to force the entire market to jump into a single stack and adopt a single solution,” McAfee says. Given that “NBC’s going to want to use FreeWheel, WarnerMedia’s going to want to use Xandr, Disney has their deal with Google,” allowing flexibility “is the only way you’re going to get to scale.”
Vizio sees itself as stewards and OAR members as owners. “They’re the ones making the decisions and we’re just building everything to their requirements.”
McAfee notes that most addressable TV execution to date has been through MVPD’s. “We think there’s a complementary ability to generate more scale on live linear,” McAfee says, hence the inclusion of companies like Comcast and Xandr. “We bring incremental reach to all of those players and scale is absolutely critical to addressable. There needs to be more and there also needs to be more premium linear inventory in that bucket for addressable.”
McAfee says he’s old enough “to have watched multiple consortiums in our business not go very well. I think as a group we’re beneficiaries of good timing in that I think the television stakeholders in our business understand that they need to work together to succeed.
“And so far our meetings have been very collaborative, everybody’s leaned in pretty hard on the subject matter and everybody’s cooperating. So I’m really encouraged by that.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>A consensus also emerged during the session that ultimately, one or more companies will figure out how to compensate consumers for their data beyond simply dispensing coupons and swag, perhaps one of the major credit card providers.
The panel was moderated by consultant Howard Shimmel, most recently of Turner Broadcasting, who at the outset mentioned the Starwood data breach because it was in the headlines that very morning. He asked whether despite the availability of great content and technology, “immense demand and an appetite to scale,” there will be enough data available given new legislation like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California.
Jodie McAfee of Inscape, a subsidiary of smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO, related the “classic case of no good deed goes unpunished” that occurred in 2015. VIZIO had just pushed to TV owners notification of how it collects household viewing data and where the data ends up. One of those owners was a reporter for Pro Publica who wrote a mostly “inaccurate” story about how TV’s can spy on them, according to McAfee.
“Two class action lawyers saw the article, found two plaintiffs and sued us and the rest was a complete mess,” said McAfee.
Among the more interesting learnings from the whole episode, the Federal Trade Commission thought that the language explaining what VIZIO does with owners’ viewing data was too buried. It should be “separate and prominent” from the TV setup process, which is what VIZIO ended up doing.
“Unless and until the consumer clicks ‘I accept,’ data collection is default off on our TV’s, so it is a full, true opt-in regime,” said McAfee.
Another relevant learning was the FTC’s view of the so-called value exchange that most advertising and media companies believe underpins the collection of consumer data. The government said “everybody needs to stop promising this idea that when the consumer opts in they’re going to get these bells and whistles around greater search and recommendation or whatever. Just knock it off. That’s not necessary and it’s kind of bullshit. Just tell them what you’re doing,” McAfee said.
The architects of GDPR hold the same view, according to McAfee. “It’s in GDPR. Don’t promise anything special. Just be clear about what you’re doing. That’s all anybody cares about.”
With an opt-in rate of 90% in the United States, “What we’ve learned is if you’re front and center with it and you are completely transparent about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, pretty much everybody, at least in the United States, they’ll opt in and they’re fine with it,” McAfee added.
Robert Bareuther of analytics and measurement firm iSpot.tv said the company gets “a tremendous amount of raw data from our valued partner VIZIO and we take that raw data and we decipher it into how households view content” and then measure business outcomes for advertisers. “We never see any private data, but it’s very important to us that rules are followed and you don’t breach anything. I think VIZIO’s done a spectacular job of making sure that everything’s on the up and up,” said Bareuther.
Nielsen Catalina’s Matt O’Grady said his company doesn’t touch any personally identifiable information about consumers, “but our applications for measurement and targeting are highly dependent upon PII. I’m dependent upon everybody in the ecosystem not violation or for lack of a better expression not screwing up.”
As for the impact of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica misadventure, “that made our liability statements and our onboarding much more difficult than it had ever been before,” said O’Grady.
Asked by Shimmel whether CPPA in California will end up looking like GDPR, O’Grady said the initiative is “a very healthy democracy in the sense that the pendulum can swing and people can really get a chance to voice their concerns. But I think a good substantial part of that opt-in is going to be re-written” before the law takes effect in January of 2020.
So will marketers ever end up having to actually pay consumers directly for their data, along with letting them control their data? “If I was involved in that, I don’t want a coupon,” said O’Grady. “I want true compensation for that. Somebody’s going to come along and figure out how to crack this nut. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or twenty years from now, but I really do believe that we’re heading in that direction and there’s an enormous opportunity for somebody to come up with the vault concept.”
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.
]]>Along with Vizio and its data unit Inscape, the consortium’s members are AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, FreeWheel, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co. and Xandr, as Reuters reports.
In announcing the consortium, Vizio said that TV manufacturers use different technology and standards to enable addressable advertising. “It creates a level of complication for (TV networks), and scale is critical,” Reuters quotes Inscape SVP Jodie McAfee as saying.
While Vizio will create the new technology, it will be an open “industry standard” that competing TV makers can integrate into their products.
Last December, Beet.TV interviewed McAfee at Beet Retreat 2018 about Inscape’s experience in dealing with the Federal Trade Commission on issues involving consumer privacy and viewing data collection. In light of the news regarding Project OAR, Beet.TV is republishing that interview.
Being a pioneer has always carried risks and rewards. Smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO’s Inscape data unit found this out when the Federal Trade Commission a couple of years ago first started looking into what happens to viewer data collected with automatic content recognition, says Inscape SVP of Sales & Marketing Jodie McAfee.
Interacting with the FTC “was a little bit of a bad news, good news situation for us,” McAfee says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, where one panel discussion was devoted to data and privacy.
“The bad news was we were the first smart TV manufacturer to actually have such a discussion with the FTC. The FTC had never really taken a look at smart TV data collection and privacy regimes around it.”
The good news was “the fact that it put us in a position to actually sit down with the FTC and say, ‘okay, what do you want to see? What do you think a privacy regime should look like on a smart TV? So it became more of a collaboration as opposed to the FTC simply throwing down some ground rules and walking away.”
Nonetheless, the FTC fined Inscape for inappropriately collecting viewing data from 11 million TV sets.
“That back and forth generated really almost what our industry views as the VIZIO standard for smart TV data collection,” McAfee says. “And it also prepared us in advance for a little bit of what’s going on with GDPR because there were certain things around what the notification needs to look like, how it needs to read, that are now part of GDPR that we had already done coming out of that FTC negotiation.”
The FTC believed that many people are so intent on getting through the initial setup of a smart TV, they just scrolled through the terms of service so they could start watching something quickly, according to McAfee. “So they said what we’d like to see is a data collection notification that is separate and prominent from the rest of the terms of service.”
Thus was born VIZIO’s “completely separate screen” during the setup process titled “TV viewing data. And it walks through here’s how we do it, here’s what we’re doing, here’s who we give it to and here’s what they do with it.” People can either agree or decline, meaning data collection is off by default.
“So it is a true opt-in regime. We pushed that new regime to our entire footprint of TV’s in February of 2017 so we’ve been fully FTC compliant ever since,” says McAfee.
Changing its policy and communicating the new one to existing owners via a firmware update cost the company 2 million TV’s from its overall footprint because older ones “didn’t have enough processing power to actually support the user journey when we decided to make the opt out process easier.”
Have all other TV manufacturers taken note and now follow the FTC mandate? Not from what Inscape sees when the company checks them out, according to McAfee, most likely because they’re not in the data business like Inscape.
“The process for pushing a firmware update to a TV, it’s a pretty meaningful exercise. So I’m sure other manufacturers just did the math. Is it worth it or not. And I think some of them went, ‘not really.’”
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.
]]>“We detect at the glass” attributes of content playing on-screen, says Inscape’s SVP of Marketing & Business Development Jodie McAfee.
Those attributes are considered a “video fingerprint” for detecting everything from movies to TV shows to games.
Inscape’s technology actually detects pieces of a screen and then reassembles them on an external server to identify a particular piece of content. The company licenses data, along with IP addresses.
There’s a reason Inscape detects at the glass. “A fairly solid percentage of the behavior on our footprint is non set-top box behavior,” McAfee says. “We see all of that behavior.”
Inscape’s reach is just over 7 million TV sets across the U.S. in what amounts to “fairly close to census-level” reporting. It ingests feeds from roughly 150 national broadcast and cable networks and about 150 local feeds from DMA’s; it’s aiming for all 210 DMA’s by mid-2018.
“We maintain a standing map report against Experian demographics that we run on a pretty regular basis so that we can give people a sense of what the footprint of Vizio owners looks like,” he adds.
Data are licensed on a use-case basis and reported every hour, although there is a three-hour gap between when something aired and when the resulting data are available. Applications range from analytics to retargeting and measurement for the buy-side and sell-side of the media business.
While there’s “no such thing as the perfect data set” because ACR technology can’t tell exactly who’s watching something within a household, “it’s household-level data at scale,” says McAfee.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
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