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.”
]]>There are two forces that got the industry to where it is today. One is the promise of digital and how the way that digital optimization has worked has led us down a dangerous path where optimization is about short-term campaigns simply proving that something worked. In turn, the data that is yielded has shown short-term gains and ignored the big picture.
“The data that we buy and use has been focused more on showing short-term gains because they’re easy to show than thinking about how data fits into a broader audience strategy that looks holistically at the whole marketing funnel, the consumer journey, the true inventory optimization,” Steuer said.
The industry is also still operating in a world of measurement that was designed for a TV ecosystem in which there were three TV networks and where rating numbers felt like an accurate representation. Now, this ecosystem has evolved.
Accuracy now comes from counting each atomic exposure, including delivery and and outcomes.
“If you skip that counting step and go directly to the, ‘we’re going to do it on an outcome’, you necessarily sort of collapse the entire conversation into, ‘This campaign did awesome because more people bought beds or beer or subscribed to a newspaper,’” Steuer said.
In order to make this more accessible and more realistic, Steuer explained that it’s about simplification and standardization. The industry has been so fragmented that there is no standard interface or data set or way of looking at outcomes.
“You need a standard underlying data set that everyone can trade on so that instead of worrying about the information gradients around who has what data and who can do what better than the other folks, you can at least look at reach and frequency across everybody,” Steuer 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.
]]>One of the exciting parts of the here and now is that supply enablement is finally moving forward. The sheer amount of inventory sources still presents a challenge, but more and more inventory is becoming technically addressable.
Two situations in which brands are leaning into addressable are either when there’s a tightly defined target or when companies have CRM data.
“They’re able to think about using TV like the way they use other digital sources,” says Steuer. “That would be the DTCs, or even we work with McDonald’s. They’ve got an app and loyalty data and they’re trying to use that to shape their addressable strategies.”
According to Steuer, five or 10 years from now, all TV advertising will be technically addressable, meaning it will be able to have some sort of dynamic ad insertion for some kind of a target audience.
“On some level it doesn’t matter whether that’s happening on the glass of the TV set through a smart TV, or through a set top box or through a streaming app,” says Steuer. “I think then the conversation we need to have is how you balance marketers needs for broad reach mass campaigns that are still absolutely relevant in the marketplace and useful at brand-building versus the much more precisely targeted, hard, conversion-driven one-to-one world that we come from in digital.”
The challenge for addressable today has two sides. The first is that there’s not true census data for linear TV so there’s no record of who has seen a campaign and who has not. There’s also a data transparency issue on the digital side because it’s simply not being shared.
“I think both of those point to a world where for us to build a more efficient advertising ecosystem we need collaboration around data sharing to enable both planning and measurement against a unified data environment.” Says Steuer.
He points to some additional warnings for the future of measurement. First is the need to get away from the raw, volume-metric past that the industry is accustomed to in order to make way for fewer and more valuable impressions. The second is that the buy, sell, and delivery sides of the industry need to unify and establish some standard methods for aggregating and story delivery data
“That’s the only way we get from ‘measurement’,” says Steuer. “Which is what we had before because we couldn’t actually count what was going on, to a world where everyone can count based on the same underlying data and use that to understand what people saw, when they saw it, and what they did afterwards.”
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 a sit-down discussion at Cannes Lions, Tracey Scheppach – who encountered that challenge over years spent specialising in smart TV at Publicis and Starcom, and who now runs her own Matter More Media – led a discussion on the conundrum with two execs focused on improving measurement…
Abcarian began by excitedly illustrating the growth the industry is seeing in smart TV adoption, something which is lighting up the opportunity for broadcasters and marketers alike.
“When you look at the growth of smart TVs, it’s been incredible,” Abcarian said. “Almost half of the homes have at least one enabled smart TV, 47%. We look four years back, that was at 16% so it just shows you the hugest acceleration.”
But that growth is driven by proliferation. There are many smart TV viewing systems, many ad delivery mechanisms and many ways to measure the ultimate consumption of smart TV ads and content.
“The thing that concerns me … is, we need all of the smart TVs to be available under the same umbrella … both from a data-for-targeting-and-measurement purposes, and from an addressable-inventory point of view,” said Steuer, who also spent years in the trenches on the same issues at TiVo.
To that end, both Abcarian and Steuer both recently helped drive a new “measurement taskforce” in June, focused on improving data readiness, transparency and reconciling smart TV consumption to Nielsen C3 and C7 ratings.
That, says Abcarian, is the “number one thing I tell everyone that is the core focus for me and my team to solve this year”, because she believes that has been holding back the industry’s ability to realize full advanced TV ad benefits.
“Our target is June of next year,” she said. “We’re working alongside the committee and based on kind of progress and feedback and the bringing that transparency and ensuring the methodologies right is critically important.
“With C3 (and) C7 we’re under penning $70 billion, so there’s real money at stake here, so we have to get this right and we’re very committed to doing so.”
Omnicom’s Steuer said his agency holding group, like the others, wants to achieve a person-based view of consumers, usable across all media platforms, built out in to a unified measurement framework.
Hard problems don’t have easy solutions. But, if the growing raft of initiatives and working partnerships is anything to go, the “umbrella” may become a lot more effective soon.
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.
]]>At the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan, Steuer, who is Chief Research Officer, welcomed the “consistent effort across almost all of the networks and network groups to try to make advanced TV solutions work,” he explains in this Beet.TV interview.
This is in contrast to just a few years ago, when individual TV networks began to roll out their own advanced-targeting arrangements.
“Then we had OpenAP, which does not appear to be a force in the marketplace for this year’s UpFront,” Steuer says. “But every conversation we’re having with network groups involves some notion of trying to move or investment toward more advanced TV and other kinds of targeting and measurement, and we think that’s great.”
Omnicom has been using data from Vizio-owned Inscape “pretty deeply” for the past nine months and is currently working with VideoAmp to conjoin set-top box and ACR data. “I was pleased to see this morning that FreeWheel announced they’re doing the same thing with Comcast and Vizio Inscape ACR data.”
This is because set-top box and ACR data do different things very well, according to Steuer.
“ACR lets us get some read of both content and commercial exposure across sources so we can see both OTT and linear delivery in that data set. Set-top box data gets you every TV in the household, typically when people are pay-TV subscribers, but only gets you pay-TV subscribers.”
What still needs to happen is for MVPD’s and ACR providers to make their data available in a more “democratized” fashion. “But at least now we see steps in that direction, which is great,” Steuer adds.
Asked about a unified data platform that would serve much if not all of the TV industry, Steuer cites a “trust problem” with having any single vendor be the data aggregator.
“So what I think is going to have to happen is each of the data aggregators to find a way to make their data available in a linkable but segregated format.”
The end goal is the formation of a common set of data formats, pre-processing rules and linkage mechanisms.
“That’s the only way to evolve the TV business to compete in the world of walled gardens,” Steuer says.
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.
]]>A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.
The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:
“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.
Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”
Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.
“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:
“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”
The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):
“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”
But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”
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.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Omnicom Media Group chief research officer Jonathan Steuer opens up on the dilemmas presented by the emergence of connected TV platforms.
Interviewing Steuer for Beet.TV is veteran TV research executive Howard Shimmel.
“Traditional television measurement, in the Nielsen world, is based on impressions against a demo(graphic),” Steuer explains. “That comes from people pushing buttons on people meters, and so all of our advertisers actually believe, for better or worse, that what they’re getting is actual people.
“One of the challenges in advanced television and addressable and IPTV especially … is what we’re measuring are deliveries.”
Many in the advertising world are getting excited about the potential to deliver individualized ad creative to households or individual viewers, and to be able to measure exact numbers that watched.
In addition, new technology enables marketers to track the viewer of an ad all the way through to a store, demonstrating real effectiveness.
But Steuer observes an “interesting problem”.
“We’re measuring the server side,” he says. “‘This ad got sent to this device at this point in time’, and we can do demographic matching via Experian, or whoever, to figure out whose in the household.
“But, getting to that last mile of attributing which humans in that household where actually in front of the set when the ad aired, is still an unknown process. The models that comScore and Nielsen have built to deal with that, typically aren’t based on single-source measurement of what’s actually happening.”
Steuer says he is having to convince brands to pay up to 40% more for ad placements on connected TV platforms where he can prove humans were actually watching.
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.
]]>Now that connected TV has the ability to reach individual consumers based on refined targeting criteria, some in the industry want it to become a one-to-one medium.
But there is a third way.
For Jonathan Steuer, Omnicom’s chief research officer, the two tactics can co-exist in a media plan.
“I absolutely feel like it’s a chocolate and peanut butter, you know,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Targeting and reach are great tastes that taste great together.
“I think the normal human tendency is to want to swing the pendulum all the way one way and then swing it back the other way. What we’re seeing is that desire to try to make TV as much as possible like Google and Facebook and it doesn’t fit and it doesn’t wanna be that. But we need to make it more like that and that’s the tension we’re living in right now.”
Steuer was talking after a Beet Retreat in the City panel during which he heard industry executives espouse opinions at both ends of that spectrum.
“The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere in between,” he says.
The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City at the post event reception by Matt Prohaska, CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That same kind of infrastructure is getting people in several industries excited. In particular, blockchains’ ability to store an immutable, public ledger of every system activity.
In the advertising world, that capability has some people wondering if such a ledger could be the perfect way to record how every cent of media spend is allocated and how every consumer action correlates.
For Jonathan Steuer, Omnicom Media Group’s, chief research officer, the benefits are coming in to focus.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, he says: “The two things that keep coming up over and over again are:
“The two, I think, potentially get solved together in a … blockchainy-like solution… some sort of tokenized identity.”
Whilst the detail is yet to be fleshed out, in theory, Steuer imagines a system driven by how audience members themselves control the data they provide to advertisers.
“On one hand, you empower consumers to control the data about them that gets collected and, on the other hand, you have standard ways of connecting that and rolling that up that extend across all the various different platforms,” Steuer adds.
Today, blockchain is the zeitgeist technology searching for application beyond cryptocurrency. Could it really cure advertising’s ills? Many a vendor is currently launching blockchain solutions purporting to enhance advertising capabilities. But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
“I think that’s where we eventually get to,” Steuer says of his own idea. “The question is, how long does that take and what are the stops along the road to get there?”
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Meanwhile, during this year’s TV Upfront season, “There’s going to be a much bigger focus on delivery across all platforms,” Steuer adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
He likens the networks’ embracing audience-buying, platform-based tools to a continuation of the evolution of better TV targeting from the likes of Simulmedia and unwired networks and “picking up where the TRA platform left off,” a reference to the technology purchased by TiVo before its acquisition by Rovi.
A big challenge to the buy-side, according to Steuer, is stitching together the various network offerings.
“In a world where the lines between linear TV and other digitally oriented methods for delivering television programming, whether that’s streaming services or video downloads or on demand from the cable operators, all of that is making it extremely complex to measure audience delivery across multiple providers,” Steuer says.
Gone are the days of a single TV currency based on Nielsen panel data, which are too small to measure more granular audiences.
“The more severe problem is finding those granular audiences across a variety of different platforms and delivery mechanisms,” Steuer adds.
On-boarding clients’ first-party data has led to many opportunities, but there are limitations to such datasets because they don’t provide a view of the entire marketplace.
“It gives you who your current customers are. That first party data is a great suppression mechanism if what you’re trying to do is go fined people who aren’t already your customers.”
On the plus side, first-party data can easily connect exposure with outcome “because you already know on a person level exactly who the people are.”
This Upfront will be Steuer’s second representing the buy-side, so he offers his thoughts with “a grain of salt required here.” He’s optimistic because given linear ratings erosion, networks aren’t to maintain the status quo while offering patchwork solutions “around the edges” to make up for ratings shortfalls.
“I think it’s going to be a different dialogue than we’ve had in previous years and one that has much more of a data informed story throughout, because the old way of saying ‘we’re really strong in 18-34’ doesn’t ring the clients’ cash registers anymore,” says Steuer.
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>That is according to one ad agency man who represents brand clients.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Omnicom Media Group chief research officer Jonathan Steuer complains about Nielsen’s Total Audience Report solution. It was due to begin reporting cross-platform viewing of TV and digital content using a single metric from March 1, but it has been delayed again after key client NBC Universal dubbed it “bad, inaccurate and misleading”.
“We’re very frustrated by the fact that access to Total Audience is going to be gated by whether the networks and folks actually being measured like the data that they’re seeing,” Steuer says.
“I understand a sea change is tough for their business. But I can only assume, from the rapid response on the networks’ part and the fact that we’ve now delayed this, that there must be something there that the networks didn’t want to see – which just makes our buy-side clients that much more worried about whether what they’re getting is accurate.
“The fact that buyers won’t get to see it before the upfronts this year puts us a bit more on edge, wanting to find other solutions to fill in the gaps in the meantime. That’s hard to do – but we need an answer.”
If Steuer’s views represent those of other agencies and their clients, the industry has a problem. They are eager to know whether TV companies really are seeing as big a drop-off in viewing as available linear-only numbers suggest – or whether some of those audiences are being retained by networks’ digital offshoots. Steuer fears NBC Universal’s intervention suggests they have something to hide.
But the concerns run deeper than what is just the latest delay to the latest iteration of US TV measurement methodology. For Steuer, it is just a symptom of the way US TV measurement has been structured for years. He prefers the approach in other countries, like Canada.
“We have a competitive environment for measurement and there they have a planed joint industry committee,” he tells Beet.TV.
“They’re approaching that integration (of set-top box and return-path data is) in a coordinated way. Though it’s taken longer to get to market there, they will end up with perhaps a more comprehensive solution than we’re on trajectory to have here in the US, because all the providers have an incentive to participate and everyone’s on an equal footing.
“In the US, every video provider has different rules about what data they’re willing to provide, who they’re willing to provide it to and at what level of granularity.”
Kantar Media CEO has also told Beet.TV that the joint-committee structures of TV audience measurement in other countries around the world, as well as the relatively smaller size of the TV ad markets there, mean some other markets are successfully deploying cross-screen measuremernt more quickly and effectively than America.
Omnicom’s Steuer tells Beet.TV: “From the advertisers’ side, I certainly would like it better if everybody was on the same footing. I hope that happens here in the States eventually.”
]]>
The narrow range of options was the focus of a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 conducted at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. It brought together representatives of 605, NBCUniversal, Omnicom Media Group and Turner Broadcasting.
Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink started the dialogue by stating “We don’t seem to making a lot of progress” in using data to deliver specific creative iterations to specific consumers.
“Some of that comes from the fact that measurement is still inherently broken,” said 605 CEO Kristin Dolan. She added that even measured at the segment level, a panel is not going to tell you whether your creative is good. “It will tell you that the one person who represents all the other people that are supposed to look like that person thought the creative was good or wasn’t good,” said Dolan.
Spiegel opined that dynamic ad targeting is “a soap box we should all be championing. You’re filming all this great video content. It seems way too hard to create five versions and be able to run them.”
Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, suggested reversing the cart and horse lineup. It would involve finding a way to identify an audience or segment and deriving insights based on certain things that are attracting that segment. This would both inform the creative brief and how the creative should be delivered.
“As opposed to we have the creative and which one should we allocate it to. I don’t know how that gets done,” Strober said.
“It’s about starting from the beginning of the process, which is the creative brief, and thinking about the audience targets and thinking about them together,” said Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. This would yield “the ability to incrementally check your work along the way.”
There is much inertia supporting the current status quo of television ad buying, said Strober, wherein much inventory is purchased in advance every year during the Upfronts.
“We have to move to a more campaign-based approach where we’re constantly measuring and optimizing and iterating,” said Strober. “That’s just not there yet because of the measurement and the ROI metrics.”
To Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU, it’s about taking baby steps toward a common goal. “We have to crawl before we run,” she said, adding that getting her clients to work with her to understand which format they want to use with which targeting capability “I think would be a tremendous improvement.”
Dolan related how a couple of years ago, her Cablevision Systems Corp. was assisting Madison Square Garden promote a boxing match featuring a Russian boxer. No one had considered running a Hispanic version of a TV spot until Dolan pointed out that “Hispanics buy tickets to boxing and watch it on TV.”
The eventual Hispanic version of the ad created “a lift because we took a product that we knew appealed to a particular segment,” said Dolan. “Just even getting people to consider doing something different from the way they’ve always done it isn’t that much more expensive and can result in some learning.”
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Cable programmers have always gone narrow in the sense that their individual networks tended to be much more niche content designed around specific audiences,” notes Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer for Omnicom Media Group.
Over time, the individual networks got rolled up into giant network groups, Steuer explains in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.
“The giant network groups tried to sell everything bundled together. That meant that it wasn’t as easy to target the single audiences anymore,” says Steuer.
Now companies like NBCUniversal, Turner, Viacom and others are combing their ad inventory pools to help identify audiences of interest to brands.
“We’re thrilled whenever it’s easier to buy targeted advertising because it’s more efficient for our clients,” Steuer says. “The challenge is that if each of the network groups does it independently we’ll end up with a hodge-podge of different ways to buy similar audiences.”
Because media agencies want to reach their target TV audiences wherever they happen to be, programmers want to make them easier to buy.
“We’re early days,” says Steuer. “We think everyone will do it and what we need to figure out how to do on the buy is how to plan and buy across all those different audience-based strategies.”
Asked about the state of audience measurement across various forms of TV delivery like over the top, on demand and linear, Steuer concedes that its “really challenging” to combine viewership across different channels. “I think we’re evolving toward better solutions. I know Nielsen is trying with Total Content Ratings.”
Steuer hopes to see greater ability to target on-demand ad inventory, along with “more impression-based measurement based on real delivery.”
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This was the consensus of media sellers and audience targeting specialists who participated in a Beet.TV panel discussion about commercial loads during CES 2017 held at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink began by asking panelists what the TV world might look like five years from now, given the low tolerance many people have for watching commercials in the digital realm and their ability to avoid them via subscription services.
Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which provides data-driven, census-based audience measurement solutions, commended Turner Broadcasting’s drive to reduce commercial load. “I think it puts the customer first to say were not going to jam however many minutes in an hour,” said Dolan. Observing that “advertising is part of our existence, it’s not going anywhere,” Dolan said she doesn’t perceive outright antipathy toward advertising. “The more relevant the advertising is the more it actually could have a positive impact on the brand that’s surrounding the ad that’s being presented,” she said.
“We take a long-term view,” said Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, before citing audience demographics showing how much people ages 18 to 24 watch on-demand programming as opposed to live TV. “What’s going to happen five to ten years from now when they are largely the key audience that most of our clients want to reach? If they go to linear TV and it still looks like it does today, we’re going to lose them.”
The key is to start to figure out now how to show fewer commercials “but each exposure or opportunity is incredibly impactful to the marketer and ultimately to the consumer,” Strober said.
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, noted that the main objection to digital ads is their intrusiveness. It’s not that consumers don’t understand the value exchange at play when watching ad-supported content, according to Steuer.
“I think part of it is just about having a reasonable conversation with consumers at scale and looking at the data about what’s working and what’s not working and adjusting the mix accordingly,” said Steuer.
Asked by Spiegel to imagine a TV world in which ad delivery and performance is based on impressions as opposed to units, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCUniversal, said “It’s just a matter of time. In a couple more years the television on the wall will be able to deliver advertising in the same way that you get it on your phone or that you’re getting it on your tablet or on your laptop.”
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Joining Dolan on the dais were Denise Colella from NBCUniversal, Turner’s Michael Strober, Jonathan Steuer from Omnicom Media Network and moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Asked to trace the Dolan family’s pioneering involvement with addressable linear TV, she explained how for 27 years she helped run Cablevision—from its trucks to its call center—and oversaw the in-house marketing department. Cablevision started aggregating set-top box data with an initial sample size of 1% and around 2007 began dabbling with addressability. Located in the number one market, it would become the first 100% addressable U.S. cable system.
“We had lot of time and the benefit of some runway to really learn about addressability,” said Dolan. “Our sales teams used data from the set-top boxes to sell advertising on an impression basis. They could sell long-tail content because we could apply actual viewership information against those long-tail networks.”
Being a subscription-based business, Cablevision “utilized our own avails a lot” to target viewers to upsell services and for tune-in initiatives. “We could do frequency capping and media optimization within the marketplace, and integrate both the opportunity to have set-top box data and 100% addressability within our own company,” said Dolan.
After completing the sale of the company, the Dolans formed Dolan Family Ventures then acquired Analytics Media Group and formed 605, whose segmentation and targeting services started in political advertising and have expanded to serve companies like Walmart.
Given all of the “noise and the discussion about the marketplace right now” about marketers leveraging more precise audience data, Spiegel asked Dolan why 605 is starting out with a focus on the sell side.
She used the words “passion” and “passionate” to describe her affinity for using data to provide better audience targeting, noting that 40 million homes are reachable via addressable linear TV.
“Because our primary experience is coming from cable television and a lot of our relationships in the past have been with the programmers that’s the area we want to focus on first,” said Dolan.
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That transition is “about three or five or seven percent of the way there,” the Chief Research Officer of Omnicom Media Group opines during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016.
Steuer recalls that when he started in the media business, data availability was a major obstacle. “And in particular, the combination of what I would call small data, the data that lets us understand how individuals are using a bunch of different media devices across the day, with what’s now big data,” Steuer explains.
He defines big data as “the device-level data that’s giving us very precise mounds of data that’s hard to connect together because you can’t connect it across the different platforms.”
Even though the industry is on the path to rationalizing the data piece, “The supply side plumbing is what’s missing to get us all the way to the IP-based, highly targetable, very audience-based future of television,” Steuer says.
Then he shifts to a food metaphor to address the combination of highly targetable and broad reach options available today.
“The problem of today is figuring out what’s the food pyramid of TV circa 2016, 2017 where I can have a balanced diet of my addressable as a sometimes food and still deal with the broad reach,” says Steuer.
He notes that clients like McDonald’s want to say something to everybody, but “what they say to different groups is something advanced television can help them to get to in a more and more focused way.”
Panel moderator Tim Hanlon, Founder & CEO of The Vertere Group, asks Steuer whether traditional media agencies, with their broad-based approach to marketing and media, are up to the task of becoming more data driven.
By way of response, Steuer says client wins of AT&T and Procter & Gamble by Omnicom’s Hearts & Science agency were rooted in the belief that “data is a key ingredient of the full stack, all the way from how do you inform building the right creative plan and the right messages all the way through to how do you target and measure it.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>The buy side needs to understand that “questions and strategy” have to have top priority, “then you look for the appropriate research tools to answer those questions,” Steuer says in an interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s how the strategy side of agency life appears to work, but it’s certainly not how the buy side has worked because the data there has always been Nielsen,” Steuer says in response to a question from interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group. “And since that’s the currency, people have said we’re not going to worry about anything else.”
Steuer’s views are shaped by a five-year stint at TiVo and a long career in research. “When I started in research and data in the media world, the great limiting step was availability of data. Now there’s plenty of data available. The question is how does the buy side use it,” he says.
Asked whether the continuing evolution of Nielsen’s measurement solutions will satisfy the industry’s needs, Steuer responds that those are the answers to the wrong test.
“They’re still solving the local ratings problem and the world is moving on to trying to think about impression based television,” says Steuer. “I don’t think their evolutionary path ever gets us to the new world.”
While Nielsen panels are useful calibrations for understanding individuals’ media usage across devices, other inputs are needed. Steuer mentions TVision, “which basically does attribution of who’s in front of the TV set using a camera,” and RealityMine, which did comprehensive measurement of cross-device viewing of the 2016 Summer Olympics.
“If what you’re trying to do is understand that cross-device usage, that super deep data set from a sample is awesome,” Steuer says. “But what you then need to do is take that small data world…and marry that to big data datasets that measure actual delivery of impressions.”
Omnicom’s clients are indicating they’re ready to take the plunge into impression delivery, according to Steuer. “They’re not going to do it with every dollar they spend, but they’re certainly willing to experiment,” he says. “And step off the single currency train and try something else because I think they realize they’re not being well served by the existing measurement tools.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
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