That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:
They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…
Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.
“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”
But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.
“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.
“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”
Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.
Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.
“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.
“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”
FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.
“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.
“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.
“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.
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.
]]>Case in point – the emerging world of connected TV offers huge potential for precision targeting, even marrying up that process with traditional linear TV buying.
One of the leading technology suppliers helping deliver that future acknowledges that there are too many vendors all trying to do the same – and that reaching the kind of scale to which traditional TV is accustomed will remain a challenge as long as self-interest stands in the way. She is urging them to start teaming up, so that advertisers can realize the kind of results they are looking for.
After more than 25 years in enterprise software and management consulting, Joy Baer, GM for FreeWheel Advertisers at Comcast-owned FreeWheel, says the new-wave TV ecosystem needs to come together.
“We’re not always playing on the same team or paddling in the same direction,” she says.
“What happens is an agency, or advertiser, or a broadcast company comes up with solutions that they initially want to determine … it’s their secret sauce. They want to think about how to best position that so it’s in their best interest first, and then the industry second.
“We have to find a way to meet in the middle on behalf of all of us.”
What’s the problem created by this fragmented approach? More fragmentation.
“I think that the single largest challenge is scale,” says Baer, in this video interview with Beet.TV, referring to the potential advanced TV audience that could be reached if the separate islands of platforms were wired up to support straightforward converged TV ad buying, buying across a range of TV platforms.
“We need the broadcasters, for example, and cable operators and MVPDs to step in and make sure that their data and their inventory is consistent, and measurable, and we have a currency, and that they have systems that allow us to transact across screens, and that they’re investing in those things as well as the buy side so that the two can meet in the middle.
“It’s (about) making it possible to do it at scale, which television is the king of. That’s what we want to return to, and we’re bumping up against what I see as scale challenges. The reality is we’re not there yet.”
FreeWheel Advertisers is the product formerly badged “Strata“, a media-buying platform through which customers can see automated optimized TV schedules based on their audience goals, machine learning-driven ratings estimates and two-way price negotiation communication.
Prior to joining Strata, Baer was CEO of SpotBuySpot, purchased by Strata in 2007.
Baer is the latest to urge more interconnectedness for connected TV. Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel recently urged the industry to be more collaborative. Forrester analyst Joanna O’Connell expressed concern over whether Roku’s acquisition of dataxu would lead to “higher walls” limiting converged buying. SpotX’s Sean Buckley and MTM’s Jon Watts have said that the US TV ecosystem, in particular, is too fragmented.
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.
]]>“Emotions are running high. The good news is spend is running very high as well,” already surpassing spending in the 2016 election cycle two weeks before the mid-terms, Baer explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference. “So it’s a very exciting space.”
Behind the dollar figures are trends showing that data “is playing a really key role in enabling the right type of targeting.” Local cable’s share of political advertising budgets is at 33%, “which is an all-time high for cable advertising. We’re also seeing that their ability to go deeper into the networks that they’re selling and the candidates are buying is greater because of this data,” Baer says.
Previously, a Republican candidate might have advertised on just one TV network but now “can advertise on four or five different networks to get greater efficiency and effectiveness in reaching their audience.” The effect on Democratic candidates is even greater, with some using more than a dozen networks “because of this rich data that’s informing the buy.”
Because of the compressed time frame of political campaigns, they have been leaders in the use of data targeting, particularly with the rise of digital media. But political spending is still focused primarily on TV.
“TV is still king in many ways,” says Baer. “In large part because political spend happens between Labor Day and November. So it’s a very condensed window of time, and in order to be effective in spending what turns out to be billions of dollars in aggregate, we need to do it in an efficient medium. And television is that medium.”
Nonetheless, digital spending by political campaigns also is up to the tune of triple digits, according to Baer, citing data from Comcast Spotlight, which marries its own data insights with voter data to help better target cable advertising at the local market level.
“So there’s a greater amount of digital inventory, and actually that’s driven a lot by set-top box VOD inventory. So what we’re seeing is the trend toward accessing cross-screen and following viewership to their other devices and modeling after their viewing habits, not just live television.”
Political advertisers also are harnessing household addressable advertising for more precise targeting of voters, according to Baer, who is President of FreeWheel Advertisers (formerly STRATA).
All in all, she believes that the two-month campaign window represents an “accelerated view” of what’s happening in television.
“While TV marketing is undergoing tremendous change overall, in the context of political everything is accelerated. One trend that we’re seeing is that data-driven television is the future. I would say one of the main takeaways from the political spending season right now is that using intelligent data capabilities married with the right television inventory is going to skyrocket effectiveness for all advertisers.”
This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.
]]>“It’s still very cumbersome and difficult for advertisers to buy TV across screen and we all on the inside know the labor and intricacies of those challenges,” says Joy Baer, President, FreeWheel Advertisers, FreeWheel, which is a Comcast company.
FreeWheel Advertisers processes roughly one-quarter of total U.S. ad spend annually, servicing 7,500 media buyers at 1,200 media buying agencies and in-house advertisers in the U.S. and Europe. In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Baer explains the ramifications of cross-screen buying challenges for her clients.
“They in turn create real significant margin problems for the agencies because they’re under such pressure to begin with. Their only solution to really solve for TV meaningfully is to throw additional investment and throw additional bodies at the problem.”
FreeWheel Advertisers is bringing to bear measurement and technical capabilities “so that TV can be as easy to buy as a spot was fifteen, twenty years ago,” says Baer, who started at Strata in 2007.
Many agencies maintain a completely separate digital department while using a whole host of tools to buy digital media, and there’s a crossover. “The digital platforms that they use in the space are DSP’s and DMP’s to help them target and make sense of different audiences and make sense of the data that’s available out there to target television today.”
Nonetheless, it’s not enough to reach “the real living room, to actually get to where television has its largest impact,” Baer adds. “We have to get to a cross-screen solution and combine the capabilities of these DSP’s with our platforms that work so well in linear. And that’s exactly what FreeWheel and FreeWheel Advertisers endeavors to do.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
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