But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?
Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.
But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?
A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…
Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:
“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.
“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”
Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.
Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”
From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.
“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”
The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:
“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.
“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.
“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”
But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:
“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”
Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:
“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.
“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”
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.
]]>Hulu harvests a plethora of insights from its first-party data, traits that don’t emerge from traditional metrics. “For a researcher and someone who loves television, it’s like a treasure trove of goodies of really interesting types of behavior that emerge when people have complete choice and control over their TV viewing,” DeTraglia adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
With addressable TV limited to correlation with households or devices, profile addressability remains a longer-term goal, according to DeTraglia.
“For as long as television has existed, it’s been a collective medium where families and friends get together and watch something together. No amount of first-party data is going to measure those viewers in the room at that same time.”
Hulu’s approach is probabilistic, but it’s based on household-level composition data, census-level data from the ads that are being served and meta data associated with viewing.
“So all of that comes together to come up with what we call a viewer assignment model” that shows given a situation, campaign, program genre, time of day, device and household, “this is the most likely scenario of who is sitting in front of that ad at that time.”
In one camp of Hulu clients are traditional advertisers trying to offset the impact of linear TV ratings contraction on their reach and frequency goals by looking to OTT. “And increasingly, even those more traditional advertisers are also experimenting with adding more data to those audience segments or addressability and all that stuff that’s happening now,” DeTraglia says.
In another, more digitally steeped camp are newer brand marketers who have chosen the direct-to-consumer approach. “They start in a digital-specific world where they are buying Facebook and Instagram, display and they’re able to measure that very quickly and with some one-to-one accuracy because it’s also cookie-based environments where they see this person saw the ad, we had whatever conversion.”
That’s a little harder to execute in an OTT environment, “but we’re doing it and we enable those advertisers to take their traditional digital, sort of nascent marketing into more of a storytelling environment,” DeTraglia says.
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.
]]>As the Wall Street Journal reports, comScore launched Xmedia a few years ago to measure and de-duplicate viewers across screens, but that product didn’t specify how many people saw the actual ads. Campaign Ratings will launch in beta this September, with support from nearly all media companies and existing customers, including ABC, CBS, Fox, Viacom, Hulu and others.
In this interview with Beet.TV, DeTraglia recalls a time when TV viewing consisted of just one screen “and there was a system that worked” for measuring audiences. “And then everything fragmented very, very quickly.”
While companies were figuring out how to quantify audiences on desktop computers and then mobile devices, “What happened in between there was that living room connected devices really leapfrogged, at least in terms of television content and other video as well, as being a first choice for watching digitally,” explains DeTraglia, who is VP and Head of Research.
As has been the case with linear TV, connected-TV viewing is a shared experience, which has measurement drawbacks.
“None of the data that had existed or the measurement that had existed took that into account. So we were never really able to get a very accurate understanding of the reach of Hulu.”
Thus the company has worked with various companies, including comScore and Nielsen.
“We have this benefit of having first party subscriber level data that we can leverage in a variety of ways, and one of them is working with these third-party companies to use it as a baseline for measuring audience,” DeTraglia says.
Hulu has worked with Nielsen on DAR side for OTT and with comScore on its vCE offering.
To achieve accurate, consistent cross-screen measurement requires “full industry participation, and some are more interested in doing that than others,” she says. “It just takes a very long time. It’s not an easy thing to implement or execute. We believe it’s important to live in a third-party verified world and we know that it’s important to our advertisers.”
This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.
]]>Hulu sees it as the logical extension of what consumers have grown accustomed to on various digital devices like desktop computers and phones—being able to discover product attributes via interactivity, for which it partners with Brightline.
“That’s a little bit more nascent in the living room, but I think it’s just as interesting to consumers to be able to see something and rather than have to go to some other device and find it they can get more information about it right through the living room screen,” DeTraglia says in this interview with Beet.TV. “So far we’ve found the marketplace is really I think sort of excited by it because it offers them the opportunity to utilize it in a variety of ways.”
Interactivity is not just about being able to buy tickets but also about “being able to offer other information about the product right within the ad unit, and we find that people stay in the ad unit longer because there’s other stuff for them to do.”
Hulu considers consumer choice to be “purposeful viewing,” which “tends to have a halo effect on the overall experience.” Advertisers benefit as well, according to DeTraglia.
“When you ad choice and interactivity to all of that, what you get is lifts across all key branding metrics” compared to linear TV, she says.
Not being locked into specific timing of ad pods allows Hulu to accommodate “whatever it is the advertiser wants to put in front of us. And we can sequence them in various ways.”
DeTraglia cites experiments with storytelling within ads, which “tends to work very well because it keeps users engaged with that messaging in the advertising as they’re engaged in the storyline of the program that they’re watching.”
Like other premium video providers, Hulu can match first- and third-party marketer data to its subscriber base. “Obviously we have a really deep understanding of viewing behaviors, so that allows us to target by daypart, by geo, by genre.”
This segment is from a Beet.TV series series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.
]]>“Our biggest priority right now is measuring audiences, because we know that there’s a tremendous amount of co-viewing that happens on a television set,” DeTraglia says in an interview with Beet.TV. “You’re less likely to have a family gathered around an iPad.”
At last year’s Upfront, Hulu revealed a new collaboration with Nielsen to enable digital ad measurement through Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings to capture OTT viewing in the living room environment. Hulu said it would have the capability to deliver the accurate measurement of viewership beyond the PC for advertisers on a campaign-level basis.
At the recent 6th Annual Cross-Platform Media Measurement & Data Summit of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, DeTraglia offered an in-depth profile of Hulu viewers as they continue to flock to connected devices in the living room setting. Hulu has 33 million “young and affluent” viewers of its ad-supported offering, according to DeTraglia’s presentation.
As recently as 2014, 54% of Hulu viewing was in the living room, compared with 75% currently. PC viewing declined to 9% from 28%, while mobile slipped slightly, to 16% from 18%.
Drilling deeper into device preferences, Hulu finds that its 5% of tablet viewing over-indexes for older audiences, while its Latino content is more likely to be viewed on a mobile device. Programming about news and information over indexes on PC’s, as do short-form video clips.
Asked about the Digital Ad Ratings initiative, DeTraglia says, “We have made a lot of progress and you’ll probably see more from us on that in the coming weeks. I think this audience measurement will have an impact because it’s a different way than we’ve sold before,” DeTraglia adds. Having third-party audience verification will be “a lot of what we’ll talk about at the Upfront.”
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