That is according to an ad-tech boss whose platform is facilitating some of the deals.
John Hoctor is president of Data + Math, a company that maps consumer behavior like purchases, store visits and app downloads to TV ads. It is now fully owned by LiveRamp.
“Going into this upfront season, we’re very, very busy,” Hoctor says. “There’s forward-thinking marketers working with us in partnership with some of the biggest cable and broadcast networks to set benchmarks and baselines so that they can actually transact.
“They’re partnering. They’re working together. They’re setting benchmarks. It’s like a cooperation. People talk about ‘currency’ – if both sides are using the same dataset and they both understand the models, they can create a currency between them for that particular buy.”
Hoctor means that the price of ads is being set upfront because advertisers now are armed with evidence of ads’ effectiveness.
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.
]]>But buyers need to be walked through the transition, and an ultimate conversion to 100% addressable may not be the end outcome regardless.
In a panel at Beet Retreat In The City, “What Programmers & Brands Want from Advanced TV”, three industry executives were asked why around 10% of national TV ad spend goes toward advanced TV targeting, rather than around 50%:
They were questioned by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel..
A+E’s Heftman said: “The reality is, doing business outside of Nielsen age, gender demos is time consuming.”
NBCU’s Vangeli agreed: “The process of onboarding a first party data set … think about how much more complicated that is than transacting on adults (aged) 25 to 54.
“There’s a legacy business with decades and decades of a specific way to transact, and then all of a sudden all the viewership behaviour started to change and fragment.”
Although connected TV and advanced targeting capabilities hold the potential to use attribution methods in order to offer performance-driven TV ads, A+E’s Heftman thinks assuming that will be the norm is a misconception.
“Sophisticated marketers at brands and at agencies have always known the value of television for upper funnel, awareness and consideration metrics,” he said. “And now we’re finally able to put lower funnel, foot traffic sales, those types of metrics against it.
“I think the fear of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the idea that we’re all just going to focus on the lower funnel value of television at the expense of the upper funnel… that’s really overblown because we’re all pretty sophisticated.”
LiveRamp’s Hoctor warned advertisers not to over-estimate the powers of the new medium.
“You have to go into the problem realising you’re never going to have all the data,” he said. “You have to know that out of the gate. Because you’re never going to know if your neighbour recommended the car, or something like that. That’s just not something that’s publicly available, or even privately available for you to do analytics against.
“We have to really calculate a baseline and what would have happened in the absence of the media that we’re measuring”
NBCU’s Vangeli detailed how NBCU is offering advertisers the ability to buy inventory adjacent to particular show moments, based on machine learning analysis of scripts and closed captions, plugged in to ad sales platforms.
“Let’s pretend a movie is starting to segue into a commercial break, and there’s a great scene where James Bond is shaving in the mirror,” he said. “And this is exactly something that we saw and we tested internally.
“Well then right after that, why is there not a Gillette ad or Dollar Shave Club ad? And so there’s a way to bring context at greater scale on a lot of the programming.”
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.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CEO and co-founder of the TV advertising attribution vendor says, before its sale to LiveRamp earlier this year, the company was actually attempting a fundraising.
So, whilst LiveRamp is a friend with benefits for Data + Math, Hoctor views being part of the LiveRamp family as having funding for growth. Over the next year, he is planning two such growth points – first, becoming an automated currency for outcome-based ad guarantees and, second, international expansion.
“We really want to be viewed as a cross-screen currency that they can use to sell,” Hoctor tells Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel for this Beet.TV interview. “The networks are doing more and more of this business, outcome-based guarantees. But, if you think about it, that’s more work than selling a Nielsen rating point. So the more we can automate it, make it easier, the more volume that they’ll drive.
“And then we’re definitely looking international to see where we could take Data + Math and launch it in other markets because the technology really can be applied to these other markets.”
Data + Math works when marketers add its “TV Pixel” to their websites or apps. The company links tracked in-app or on-web activity to ad exposure data from millions of US homes, effectively supporting attributing ad views to website or checkout conversion.
Wall Street Journal speculated that such marketing capabilities could be used in the 2020 US election cycle.
LiveRamp acquired Boston-based Data + Math, whose technology helps match up audience profiles and map ad exposure to conversion activities, after selling its former Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) division to IPG for $2.3 billion.
Hoctor says Data + Math now benefits from LiveRam’s “identity” technology, which gains an understanding of consumer profiles in a fragmented world.
For Hoctor, it’s all about helping TV prove its worth.
“I started Data + Math with my co-founder, Matt, with the thesis that TV was under-credited and, (therefore), undervalued,” he says.
“TV drives outcomes, but the fact that it’s separated from the purchase or that last click (means) credit is being gobbled up by the walled gardens and taken away from TV. I think a lot of advertisers would think of television as, ‘Oh, I do that for branding and then I do the other digital media for the outcomes, the final click’.
“The reality is, when you look at the data, you can see that TV will precede those clicks. If you see an ad six times on TV and then you do a Google search, shouldn’t TV be getting some credit?”
Hoctor lays out two examples of brands that can benefit from TV advertising that can demonstrate real outcomes:
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.
]]>Now named LiveRamp after its key remaining asset, the company says it plans to acquire Boston-based Data Plus Math, whose technology helps match up audience profiles and map ad exposure to conversion activities.
“Our main idea was that TV advertising works and the data would tell a good story if someone would go in and actually analyze it and show that television is driving real world outcomes for marketers,” Data Plus Math CEO & Founder John Hoctor said in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
LiveRamp had sold its former Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) division to IPG for $2.3 billion. It is buying Data + Math for $150 million, WSJ reports.
The deal is another illustration of the confluence of key advertising mega trends:
Data Plus Math works when marketers add its “TV Pixel” to their websites or apps. The company links tracked in-app or on-web activity to ad exposure data from millions of US homes, effectively supporting attributing ad views to website or checkout conversion.
“What really gets me excited is closing that loop and being able to not just measure whether something worked after it’s over, but measuring it in flight and providing back levers to help optimize for it while the campaign is still in flight”, CEO Hoctor had told Beet.TV.
In their announcement press release, LiveRamp and Data Plus Math presented a procession of executives from across the industry to support the deal, which is seen as another step to reducing friction in the trading of data-backed TV ads.
Wall Street Journal speculates that such marketing capabilities could be used in the 2020 US election cycle.
]]>What Data Plus Math brings to Comcast’s FreeWheel is “a fast, automated and low-cost attribution provider,” Hoctor adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.
Data Plus Math helps ad buyers and sellers tie ad exposures to business outcomes by matching anonymized viewing data with external data. By connecting the two, advertisers can look across platforms, networks, programs, creative iterations, audiences to determine “how much credit they should get in driving those business outcomes.”
Business outcomes, or KPI’s, typical consist of offline and online commercial traffic and website visits.
“We help them understand at a macro level, is this media working. But then more granular, what parts of it are working hardest? Where should I be investing more money in order to generate these outcomes?” says Hoctor.
According to a FreeWheel news release, Data Plus Math can deliver attribution measurement within days to weeks from the start of a campaign depending on its scope and then provide continuous updates through the remainder of the campaign schedule.
Hoctor attributes the rise of attribution in no small way to “some of the digital giants” that are helping drive advertiser demand. “Television is a huge part of their budget, and wouldn’t it be great to understand what parts of TV are working harder?”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage 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…
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.”
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. ”
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.”
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?'”
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.
]]>Data Plus Math has also partnered with Inscape, IRI, LiveRamp, Verance and others in its quest to supplement expensive post-campaign analyses with in-flight learnings that can be used to optimize campaigns on the fly.
When the company was launched in 2016, with investors that include Comcast Ventures and Greycroft Partners, it saw an opportunity to bring attribution to TV.
“Our main idea was that TV advertising works and the data would tell a good story if someone would go in and actually analyze it ad show that television is driving real world outcomes for marketers,” CEO & Founder John Hoctor says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
Data Plus Math started by building a signal graph that uses advanced data science and automated machine learning techniques to map actual ad exposure data to consumer behaviors.
“There’s been lift reporting and consultants and expensive studies. These studies usually take weeks to do. You usually get them weeks after a campaign is over. We wanted to have fast, low-cost attribution,” Hoctor says.
Going beyond consumer panels, the company prefers to work with “more of a footprint” of TV viewing data from set-top boxes, smart TV’s and streaming. “We have our own impression tracker that gets trafficked along with the creatives and can bring back exposure data from OTT or full-episode players,” Hoctor adds.
“It really helps TV get the full credit. If an advertiser’s trying to drive a certain attitude toward their brand or show that their brand is a fun brand, for instance, Millward Brown’s panel is really good at doing that.”
Describing A&E Networks as “great, forward thinking partners,” Hoctor says Data Plus Math is helping A&E to use attribution “not just as a report card. Attribution sometimes can be seen as you run the campaign and attribution will tell you if it worked.
“What really gets me excited is closing that loop and being able to not just measure whether something worked after it’s over, but measuring it in flight and providing back levers to help optimize for it while the campaign is still in flight.”
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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