Many in the industry with the scars from trying to make it happen would tell you a different story.
That is why, in the last two years, we have seen a series of initiatives and consortia aiming at harmonizing the spaghetti-like system of understanding and buying across a growing plethora of platforms.
Now another initiative, the TV Data Initiative, is launching, to tackle what it says is a “mess”.
In this discussion recorded for Beet.TV, the two people behind TV Data Initiative discuss what is happening:
In essence, the initiative is a thought leadership exercise that aims to help light the path to a more joined-up future.
Members include DISH Media, Blockgraph, TransUnion with TruOptik, MadHive, TVSquared, Eyeota and VideoAmp.
“Our plan is really to engage pretty wide in deeply with the industry over the months ahead and put together a really thoughtful diagnostic of the market,” says Watts.
“It’s going to be a big all-inclusive project, lots of engagement with the industry, lots of thoughtful research events and seminars.”
So, why are the two Jons getting involved?
“Our research early on when we were piecing this together, suggested that it’s not working as well as it could do, and there’s huge opportunity to improve,” Watts says.
Steuer goes farther. “This is a mess,” he says.
The pair aim to help by conducting research, holding talks, seminars and workshops, Watts says:
“Hopefully by the summer, we’ll have a really useful thoughtful piece of work that can really help industry to move forward.”
]]>The session is guest hosted by industry consultant and advisor Jon Watts.
O’Connell points to important innovations including Hulu’s pause ads and TripleLift’s dynamic ad placement.
She and Watts talk about the state of measurement and the needs for a common currency to plan and manage advertising.
Thank you Jon and Joanna for this wonderful session and all you participation in Beet.TV events and videos over many years. Great to have you together for the #BeetCast
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.
]]>Snare recently moved from Facebook where she lead their Global Business Marketing division for EMEA, overseeing large teams across all markets in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The TradeDesk is providing no fee access to its learning and certification portal call the Edge Academy through the end of this year.
Commenting about media spend during the time of COVID, she suggests that brands invest with the appropriate message to win marketshare in the longterm.
]]>“We’re a provider of data. What we see is an interesting confusion in the market around what attribution means. People think it means something different for them – conflating the notion of ROI and incrementality with attribution,” he says.
What Brothers advises is that advertisers map out everything that happened along the way to conversion or a sale, but keep in mind that it’s all correlative. The tendency is to isolate measurements and measure by independent variables, but focusing on causality is key to understanding what to do next time and what to optimize.
“Digital has been there for a long time, and TV is starting to get there,” Brother says. “That’s the set up for the notion of the confusion.”
In discussion with advertisers, Brothers says that there’s a common theme of wanting to shift away from demographic-based, mass reach ad buying toward finding the right audience. “The right audience is an option to attack. The right buyer is worth the added price as part of the CPM,” he says. The two best indicators that a buy is right is targeting previous customers and people who fall into the same category as previous buyers.
“Getting away from mass reach to the right buyer to drive success in causality is where things are tending to move,” Brothers says.
With more ways to reach people, Brothers says that the common goal will be figuring out what creative and what platform prompted the sale – that’s attribution.
“That’s going to be very, very important,” he says.
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.
]]>Google has declared it will phase out all third-party cookies – the tiny, user-side files that store information – from its Chrome browser by 2022.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Xandr corporate strategy director Allison Paley describes the consequences.
“Top of mind is data and measurement,” she says. “Data, obviously with CCPA over here and GDPR in Europe. It’s hard and it’s a really meaty problem that everybody needs to come together to solve within the industry.
“And understanding how we do that and how we share data and create a universal ID with the cookie crumbling, it’s a big question that we need to answer.”
Ad-tech vendors have been racing to tout alternative technologies that rely on consumer opt-ins but which also allow parties to share and pool consumer data.
Whilst that may seem against the spirit of the new privacy regulations, they argue that such uses are permitted.
This month, Xandr announced that AMC Networks, WarnerMedia and Walt Disney would use its Xandr Invest buying platform, which allows advertisers to define audience segments to be reached through their TV programming.
Variety reports that those three networks joining Xandr’s Invest “sets up a battle of sorts”, with NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Forx Corp and Univision part of the OpenAP consortium for audience buying.
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>In the ‘50s, the industry was trying to prove that TV worked through things like econometric modeling. By the ‘90s, there was a growing over-excitement at the thought that everything could be measured, yet there’s still no full picture.
“There are two reasons why TV attribution is important,” Giacosa said. “One is that we do need to redress that balance, but two, we need to make sure that we don’t do it in a silo.”
Giacosa explained that it’s important to look at the consumer experience as a holistic mix. Attribution must be done but within the context of everything else that the industry does and every experience that the consumer has.
This has become easier in some sense, because there’s no lack of data, but also a bit harder for two reasons. The first is the communal industry lexicon that is used, and the second is the currency.
“We’ve been trading off GRPs and old lexicon for quite some time and we’re quite happy with that,” Giacosa said. “But we need to redress that balance and think about how to take that to not even the future—it’s still years ago at this point that we have to catch ourselves up to get to a place where we have all of that set top box data, all of that connected TV data in one place because at the end of the day TV attribution is not just TV, it’s every video platform.”
There’s a lot of fragmentation across the industry, and in order to help solve it, there has to be a shift in focus on data costs that come with outcomes.
“For me, it’s more about how we connect the dots,” Giacosa said. “How we collaborate as an industry, and make the data more accessible and more palatable for clients and corporates to get to understand that business, because I think it’s all there, it’s just a case of how we break down the walls, how we bring all that together and bring it across different platforms.”
Stitching together a common methodology, lexicon, and currency will be the first step needed to make this happen, and Giacosa said that the industry collectively has the people and resources to make that happen.
A lot of performance advertisers work in small increments, day to day or hour to hour. Brand equity has a huge impact on how fast that works. She cited the success of Peloton in the past several months as an example.
“The impact that social media can have on brand equity and how fast it moves really changes how we think about TV attribution because how the brand is performing has an impact also on how it’s going to perform in terms of the TV attribution and the effect that it’s having on your business,” Giacosa said.
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.
]]>“We believe powerful content creates the best environment for advertising and efficacy. It’s an attention economy where consumer choice reigns,” Ashley Luongo, the vp of Adsmart advanced advertising sales, told Jon Watts during a town hall at the Beet Retreat in San Juan. “That clutter makes it hard for marketing to break through.”
At the core of Adsmart’s approach is a dedication to the consumer experience. Ad avoidance is something that the ad industry is dealing with, and creating a positive experience, Luongo says, is something “we lost the plot on. So we’re pulling it back to put customers at the center, so ad assets don’t create the avoidance.”
Data strategies help inform better messaging that then helps advertisers stand out, doing more for buyers at the same time as it’s improving the customer experience. The cross-portfolio approach changes how buyers work with NBCU, says Luongo. Where a potential buyer might enter the company through a division, like sports or entertainment, the Adsmart approach breaks down barriers to transact on the basis of “audience and automation.”
With the advancement of initiatives like Adsmart and One Platform, Luongo says that NBCU is on its way to opening the door to global transactions that are easier and forward-looking for the industry.
“We’re at this point where we’ve done enough test and learn, it’s time to do,” says Luongo. “Locking arms with the industry we can do better together. If you wanna go fast go alone and if you wanna go far go together. It allows the market to transact with publishers in an audience based way.”
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.
]]>“As a brand, I’m trying to achieve my goals of getting my message out there, finding things that resonate with my customer,” says Hovorka. “The thing I think we can bring is that brand perspective, connecting brands to their goals.”
Roundel, Hovorka says, is a good partner for brands because it can connect brands with the right customers, with linear and digital ad exposure connected to actual sales. While he’s aware that brands also need creativity to reach customers, Roundel’s connection to sales adds something extra.
“Here’s a new Lego piece, I’m excited to bring that and help them recognize that value,” he says.
That said, to be better brand partners, Hovorka says that tech companies should have humility. Not every solution is right for every brand, and there needs to be a clear value exchange for the added cost of taking on new tech partners. “Fat” in the tech stack isn’t a good solution for anyone, Hovorka says.
“If you truly had to be efficient and could see the crystal ball, there are things you could remove. That might mean you don’t get to play in this place or the brand doesn’t need it. Finding an appropriate tech stack means you can believe in the message,” he says.
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.
]]>“In session after session, I think we’ve seen a TV industry coming to terms with the fact that the 2020s are going to be both exciting and profoundly challenging,” says Watts in an interview with Beet.TV.
What makes it exciting is that the industry is going through a transition towards a market that’s more addressable, connected and more competitive than ever before. What makes it challenging is that TV is no longer operating in a purely TV industry. Rather, there’s a convergence of TV and online. While linear TV is still a major part of the current industry, according to Watts, nobody believes that linear will be as big a part of the market in 2030 as it is today.
“There’s work to be done on things like measurement, pricing, continuing to demonstrate the relative effectiveness of linear vs non-linear,” says Wtts. “All of these things are coming together slowly, but I think most people in the industry would argue not fast enough.”
The biggest roadblock is the current state of addressability. Whereas addressability used to mean delivering a unique ad into an individual household that will look different than in any other household, now, the growth of data-driven linear allows advertisers to target against a wider range of attributes. The industry has also experienced a boom in individual addressability and household-level addressability.
“A lot of what will happen over the next five years will be about knitting these things together much more seamlessly,” says Watts.
He adds that this is further complicated in the European market, which has been defined by fragmentation as of recent. Different streaming services lead the way in different European countries, and as a result, stitching together an addressable campaign across Europe remains very challenging.
“There’s not much evidence that pan-European addressability is a problem that’s being solved for the present,” says Watts. “But I think we’ve heard a lot over the past couple of days encouraging how it’s a problem that we will get to, my guess is around the middle of the next decade once we’ve sorted out the situation in individual markets.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>During a fireside chat with Jon Watts, co-founder and managing partner at MTM London at the Beet Retreat, hosted by Publicis Media, Whitesel explained why clients are “terrified” of current measurement strategies across linear TV, data-driven linear TV and advanced TV, mainly because multiple partners and approaches are required to get a clear picture of what’s driving results.
“We are in the Wild West. There are clients depending on the metrics and business goals. We could spend a day on TV measurement,” says Whitesel. “There’s a huge issue when it comes to TV measurement with a digital mindset, where people are like ‘Just give me exposure data and I’ll make decisions based on that.’ Thats a huge issue. If you do that you can run yourself right out of TV.”
Whitesel’s concern is that a singular view of data will mislead advertisers into ignoring some channels and spending more on others because of a lack of transparency across mediums. As advanced TV rises and linear TV changes, Whitesel is observing big shifts in the industry. Here are her biggest takeaways.
For advertisers, TV is a spectrum.
Whitesel says there’s still a misunderstanding about what advanced TV actually is – the conclusion is that it’s all OTT, CTV and one-to-one addressable TV. But there are more opportunities that get overlooked that fall between linear and hyper-targeted addressable TV, including data-driven linear, which helps brands make the most of big TV moments with the most reach, like the Super Bowl, while still collecting information on audience and lift.
“We have to understand that not all [channels] are equal across and they all contribute in different ways to different outcomes for brands and clients, and that’s the gap.”
Frequency remains the biggest issue for advanced TV.
Because transparency remains an issue for the advanced TV market, there’s a responsibility for agencies to improve the ability for clients to understand what they’re paying for and where it’s going, and tying that directly to business outcomes, whatever those may be. Those are going to be different for different companies, which is where multiple measurement partners come in.
“TV measurement is the great democratization we need to understand how each [of the channels] is tied to a business outcome at the client or brand level. Whether it’s retail store visits, website metrics, sales in aggregate – we need to get better about tying those things together, so we can deliver the right amount by channel for clients to deliver the best outcomes.”
Walled gardens come with both benefits and challenges.
Moving toward network and platform walled gardens, which Whitesel says some currently are but wouldn’t name names, would give advertisers more data and more transparency, because the data providers own the data. But that data comes at a cost.
“The cost is there of not seeing the rest of the universe, and there’s learnings where you’re not going to listen because you don’t have enough trust in the evaluation of the rest of the landscape,” says Whitesel. “What learnings can you get from the walled gardens without the cost of everything else?”
The next five years will be about content.
Whitesel’s prediction for the next five years in TV and advanced TV is that there will be a shift to control over content.
“There’s been a lot of disparate sources where you can buy audiences, through premium, TV-like content,” says Whitesel. “Now you’re starting to see the TV giants put their arms around that content, seeing how valuable it is and [wanting] better control of it regardless of where it’s being viewed. Owning that content and getting the exposure data is allowing for more insight.”
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, MTM co-founder and partner Jon Watts says the new-wave US TV market is leading the way in new capabilities – but, often, companies are racing ahead on their own, making it more difficult for ad buyers to easily place their money.
“In Europe… they’re all grappling with the challenge of scale, or rather the lack of it and there’s a real thrust in the market at the moment towards collaboration, partnership, joint ventures,” says Watts, whose London-based MTM is a research and strategy consultancy for the TV business.
“(In the US), you have a lot of very large businesses doing exciting things, but in many cases they’re doing very different things. The buy side, when I spend time engaging with it, will talk endlessly about the friction of dealing with multiple MVPD footprints, scale platforms like Roku and Samsung – all of them are doing exciting things individually, but they’re not all doing the same thing.”
Watts’ comment echoes those from executives who say giving advertisers a way to enjoy new techniques like TV targeting and advanced ad frequency capping at scale is a key imperative.
FreeWheel’s Joy Baer recently told Beet.TV: “We’re not always playing on the same team or paddling in the same direction.”
For his part, Watts can see where joint working has to happen.
“Trying to plan and execute a campaign nationally at scale, if you want to focus in on addressable, involves dealing with a lot of intermediaries and parties, and trying to attribute value to that campaign in a joined-up consistent way remains profoundly challenging,” he says. And that’s before we start thinking about linear multi-platform or TV Everywhere and digital video.
“I sometimes think that Europe is like Switzerland; its very collaborative. America, I think, has lots of buckets of collaboration, but sometimes the industry is at risk of losing sight of the big picture.
“(Its about) ‘what should we be doing collectively as an industry?’ as opposed to in groups or consortia or small sort of pockets that are working very well, doing great stuff, but they’re doing different stuff.”
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.
]]>That is a key question being asked of the emerging technology of “addressable TV”, which supports such targeting.
eMarketer has revised down its 2019 forecast for US addressable TV ad spending, from the earlier $2.54bn to $2bn, attributed to connected TV platforms gaining a faster share of spend that traditional MVPD platforms will.
Another inertia effect appears to be that national advertisers, who have historically used TV to make a big awareness splash at the top of the marketing funnel, are not necessarily motivated to slice their audience in to ever-smaller pieces.
“Where the industry hasn’t yet reached a consensus is in determining what proportion of the TV ad market will be delivered addressably 10 years from now,” says Jon Watts, co-founder of the MTM London-based consultancy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Part of the problem is use cases. Lots of advertisers who choose to run national campaigns in the US market really want national reach. They’re trying to reach a broad cross section of the industry.
“If you think about, for example, many FMCG advertisers or someone selling automotive insurance, these are companies that are really keen to hit that mass market.”
That is why so much attention of “addressable TV” and “programmatic TV” vendors is now turning to the local TV market.
Local cable inventory may not be as sexy as nationwide campaigns, but cable operators are making more inventory addressable to advertisers – not just the two minutes per hour historically given over, but all of the available time.
Coupled with the ability to deliver directly to devices, rather than through the cable operators, and advertisers who may go on booking big national campaigns now have the ability to reach specific localities additionally.
Coming at it from the other end, it is now recognized that addressable TV also offers local advertisers the ability to buy campaigns in a way they could not have before, priced out by the need to go large.
]]>“We have to go to market with a very different approach. This is to moment for us to really transform,” VP of Marketing Allyson Witherspoon says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
After long relying on buying TV audiences by demographic, Nissan has been able to shift to its own audience segments “but it’s a manual process. With connected TV, all of that’s kind of integrated. It’s a seamless approach to it.
“For us it’s can we make sure that through video content and through connected TV how can we reach the right type of consumer in the right type of vehicle segments that we have for Nissan at the right time in the vehicle shopping process,” Witherspoon says.”
Asked by interviewer Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, how Nissan has been using either specialist agencies and/or internal data scientists, Witherspoon says “kind of all of the above. From an agency standpoint, we’ve eliminated the silos that have been traditional over the last several years. Basically, we have all of the subject matter experts all on one team.”
Everyone on the team gets the same brief to create a go-to-market plan for both creative and media. “So we’ve completely collapsed our agency silos into one team.”
On the publisher side, Witherspoon notes that Nissan recently attended the annual UpFronts and observes that “I think the UpFronts even are taking a much different approach that is going to be much more about connected TV.”
Nissan “thinks about TV differently now” and also how it approaches content creation.
“You can’t get away with one size fits all when it comes to a TV ad. Now we have to have custom content based on the audiences that we’re trying to reach.”
Her expectation for media partners is “understanding the business challenges that we have, having open conversations about how we need to be reaching the right type of consumers. And then as much as possible, how can we show how our marketing investment is connecting to transactions.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
]]>What also came to the fore in this segment recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit and presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science was differences of opinion about the role of technology providers and the status of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium.
Asked by panel moderator Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, about Fox’s approach to advanced advertising, VP of Audience & Automated Sales Dan Callahan says the company is “piecing the bits together. There’s a million different places where our content is distributed and each has different rules and standards and tech specs, and that’s what makes it hard.”
He described a process wherein it’s “very much what can we deliver across these five platforms and what are their standards and methodologies. And then you have to have the conversation with the client and they’re like ‘we agree with these five but not these five’ and it’s a mess.”
So while everyone agrees on the need for convergence, “right now unfortunately it’s packaging smaller bits of our content and here’s what we can sell this way, here’s what we can sell this way, are you willing to accept it?”
Things are much different at Univision, as President, of Ad Sales & Marketing Steve Mandala explained.
“We have tried a lot of things, sought quick failure and fast learning on it too,” Mandala said. “One of the reasons that I’m glad to be able to be here because I don’t think we’ve figured out our solution yet. I think we’ve learned a lot of things along the way, typically much more of what we don’t want to do than what we do want to do. And are still searching for it.”
What Univision lacks in complexity can largely be attributed to the fact that 92% of its primetime programming is still watched live. “So we don’t have the issue of the time-shifted, alternative viewing sources that is so prevalent with all of our competitors, colleagues, peers. The issues regarding standards and unification of those standards are going to happen. It’s going to get fixed. It’s a rule of nature basically. It won’t happen as quickly as any of us want it to, but it’s going to happen because it’s the only way that the industry can come together.”
Mandala was not big on praise for tech providers, most of which he described as promising “silver bullets” that fail to solve what they purport to solve. “We’ve been completely dissatisfied in what we have found so far, other than Videology to be quite honest, is that there’s a flavor of the week all the time. It’s what is the next silver bullet that’s going to fix things. The truth is that very few of these things have yet panned out. The thing for us is to try to find those places where we believe that they’re really delivering simplified value.”
When the conversation shifted to OpenAP, Mandala noted that Univision was one of the first non-original partners to join the initiative “and I completely agree and endorse what OpenAP started with and still do.” However, Univision has had “an incredibly disappointing first year with OpenAP” and Mandala voiced doubts about so-called industry standards.
“There has to be a common vernacular. And the question is, is it going to be the seller or the buyer who develops that lexicon and that vernacular? What I worry about is that as we do this as sellers, we’re asking buyers to change their way of doing business to accommodate what we decide is the way that lexicon process should all be structured.
“Yet on the other side,” Mandala added, “I don’t think that the buyers can hardly agree what day of the week it is let alone a standard like that. Agency A will compete with Agency B in reviews based upon their view of how they deal with advanced advertising. So I don’t think it’s actually to the advantage of the agencies to have a standard in many ways so they can differentiate themselves.”
Callahan was more sanguine about OpenAP. “I feel like OpenAP is really putting their best foot forward to solve what they feel the programmers’ situation is, and then it really is the agencies and the brands and the others that can come to the table if they want to band together.”
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.
]]>There was no doubt that consumers had completely changed their viewing television venues, but that was just one component of the larger picture, Smolin related in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science.
“You have to have the broadcasters and programmers that are in a position where they really want to lean in for what is bringing data into advanced television,” Smolin said in response to a question from Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM.
“But you also have to have on the buy side, you have to have the agency ecosystem be in a position where it’s really ready to start using that and converging maybe the TV investment team versus what had been the digital trading desk.”
Amobee made its wager after assessing a variety of technology providers and determining that Videology was unique compared to companies that had fashioned themselves to fit into the programmatic space “for a world that came out of remnant display advertising and frames every problem like that,” Smolin explained.
Given the difference between display and long-form, premium video, “Videology to their credit had designed from the ground up to solve the problems of how TV works. That was uniquely powerful, and we thought it was the right technology at the right time and it’s had a huge impact on our business.”
Now, with Videology’s assets and Amobee’s partnership with Nielsen “we are able to bring converged measurement to linear plus digital activation. When we use the term advanced TV, it’s very much about being able to take that digital-first audience, first-party data, and to use that within what is video, what is OTT, what is connected TV but also to linear.”
Noting that eMarketer predicts linear will be 50% or more of all TV budgets by 2022, Smolin said it’s important for many brands to think holistically and for Amobee to provide “true, converged media solutions.” Another thing Videology had in its favor was its sell-side presence, “and that’s also critical because if they’re not positioned with the right tools to be able to sell the way that the advertisers want to buy, then it doesn’t work on either side.”
He echoed the concerns of many in the industry that agency structure remains an impediment, as some still have siloed TV investment and digital trading teams. “They don’t have to be the same people, but getting them to look at the same measurement data and turning that same measurement data into integrated planning” needs to happen.
Asked how TV can win back ad dollars that have flowed to Facebook and Google, Smolin cites data, targetability, measurement and scale. Where TV has an edge is that premium, long-form content “is not the strength for Facebook and YouTube. If the broadcasters, the programmers, are now bringing the data that gives you the audience and the measurement at the scale they already have, they’re now in a position to compete very effectively with much higher value ad units than what Google and Facebook have been doing.”
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.
]]>“But are they given opportunities, are they given strong client challenges, are they given chances to be promoted in the right way?” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“The big fight right now is keeping people in the business. In order for us to grow, we have to invest in that middle group of individuals now who are excited and want to work in our business. If we loose that excitement, if we loose them, we’re really going to be setting ourselves up for failure in the future.”
Warren has more than two decades of agency experience along with a stint at the 4A’s managing its diversity programs. In 2005 she founded the non-profit organization ADCOLOR to help drive diversity and inclusiveness in the creative and technology industries.
Not long ago, the only conversations about diversity and inclusion that Warren had at Cannes were informal ones on the beach. Now they have spread to Inkwell Beach on the Croisette. “In the past, diversity was simply an appearance by Kanye. I think we’ve moved past that,” Warren observes.
In addition to Omnicom employees, she was joined at the festival by like-minded clients. “I’m here with Microsoft and P&G and iHeartMedia. These organizations that take diversity and inclusion really seriously approached ADCOLOR and myself to partner with them so that they could have an authentic representation here on the Croisette.”
Asked by interviewer Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM, what the future holds, Warren says diversity and inclusion are always evolving. As a high-ranking executive of color she feels it’s “incumbent upon me not just to figure out how to make people rise up, but also in my spare time and also through work reach back and bring others along.”
She doesn’t consider herself a role model but “a real model. I’m transparent, I’m vulnerable, I’ve failed forward, I’ve failed hard, I’ve picked myself back up. This is who I am.”
Partnerships with organizations like the 4A’s and the American Advertising Federation are mutually reinforcing. “It’s so refreshing to be able to rely on partners who know us well and know where our heart really stands,” Warren says.
Building authentic relationships with employees is particularly important when dealing with younger generations because they represent “the future of our business. What I’m hearing is that they want authentic relationships with organizations.” It goes beyond just having a job to “where their values match the organization’s.”
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>That is the view of one consultant helping broadcasters navigate a path through international waters.
“Each individual geography is moving at its own speed,” says MTM London co-founder Jon Watts in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“In the UK, we’re moving to a new measurement panel system, which will do a much better job at taking account multi-platform viewing. In the US, you have two big measurement providers both adapting to do multi-screen.
“In other markets, it’s more uneven. In central and eastern Europe, the panels are much smaller, the broadcasters fund them much less well, the underlying infrastructure is pretty poor quality, it’s much harder to do (these) kind of things.”
That, Watts says, poses a challenge to big global channel operators that just want to template their operations from country to country.
“If you’re, say, Viacom … it means you don’t really have an option to do a one-size-fits-all solution,” he adds. “You’re going to have to do it different in every market.”
Watts’ MTM put together a just-out research paper from Videology, which examines the state of addressable TV across European markets.
It puts the UK at the most advanced with Spain lagging behind at the bottom. The report says effective measurement is not an essential pre-requisite for the development of addressable TV advertising, but can help to unlock significant extra value when the right kinds of investments are made.
Watts adds: “You would like to be able to unlock pan-regional campaigns more easily. We’re seeing a lot of fragmentation. Fragmentation is increasing, not decreasing.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
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