Kevin Lemberg, head of partnerships for advertising solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions
“There has to be some sort of unification and some sort of common language and goals between the partners within a solution or technology that we’re offering out to the industry,” he said. “Partnerships are going to be very important to round out the technology offering and the solutions for the industry in order for us to move forward.”
Jen Soch, executive director of specialty channels at WPP’s GroupM
“We’re really seeing an idea where we can be with addressable and CTV part of the main video recommendation that goes into what we’re doing with a client, and look at it more holistically.” she said. “I do see a lot more interest in bringing it [addressable and CTV] very much to the forefront and being a bigger part of their overall play.”
Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal
“Interoperability across linear and digital without losing the value of premium content along the way is going to be so critical,” she said. “If we lose and swing the pendulum too far to ‘audiences only,’ imagine content being cheapened over the coming years and basically creating a society that the value is placed on audiences alone….I look forward to working with the industry on how, as we try to equivalize and become more interoperable, we don’t lose the value of premium content.”
Kristine Bayles, vice president of advanced advertising sales at AMC Networks
Addressable TV “enables us to get the insights into communication and driving deeper understanding in the industry,” she said. “We all know TV is important, but CTV and VOD is just as important…Viewership is truly fragmented now, and it’s not that less people are consuming, they’re just consuming differently. We need to understand this, and move forward with converged impressions.”
Mark Marshall, president of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal
“Our goal on that [automated workflows] is to work with our partners on the agency side be able to get rid of about 30% of the manual work that we do,” he said. “How do we find different APIs [application programming interfaces] and different ways to interact, and take out some of the manual elements to allow us to move faster and hopefully improve margins for clients.”
Nicole Whitesel, executive vice president of advanced TV and client success at Publicis Media
“We need systems that collaborate — tools that talk to each other, data that can break down those walls, IDs that can understand each other,” she said. “Better sharing of that data enables us to have conversations with our clients about outcomes, and outcomes that deliver change to their business, and outcomes that change the way they decide media mix.”
Vicky Fox, chief planning officer at OMD UK
“We’ve moved from a place where people were quite wedded to a linear schedule,” she said. “Self-scheduling is going to be the norm for everybody. Anybody who switches on the TV and either looks at their connected TV menu or their EPG [electronic programming guide] can see how much has changed, because some of the linear schedules may take second place.”
Richard Nunn, vice president and general manager of advertiser solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions
“Through automation and understanding what has worked and what hasn’t in more real time across channel – that in principle, should mean a greater ROI across what is a fragmented channel base,” he said. “They’ll drive that solution a lot more efficiently because of technology.”
You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.
Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Jon Watts who collaborated and reported for this series.
]]>“There’s so many challenges as we look across the industry that we need to continue to collaborate and work together to solve,” Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Interoperability across linear and digital without losing the value of premium content along the way is going to be so critical.”
She said measurement needs to be more flexible to anticipate evolving business models as consumer habits change. Modernizing media metrics, monetizing audiences based on other criteria aside from age and gender and moving beyond the panel-centric approach are three key priorities.
“As we think about all the ways that distribution is changing things for measurement as well as the consumer experience, the ability to bring forward better measurement is here at our doorsteps,” Abcarian said.
The goal is to make connected TV (CTV) as predictable as linear TV in delivering outcomes. Interoperability of those different channels should reflect the value of premium programming, such as NBC’s hit shows like “This Is Us,” compared with YouTube personalities who have a massive following.
“As we move ahead, the value of content that drives great content development, and enables consumers to be connected in meaningful ways to brands, is going to be critically important…as we bring linear and digital and the walled gardens together for measurement,” Abcarian said. “If we lose and swing the pendulum too far to ‘audiences only,’ imagine content being cheapened over the coming years and basically creating a society that the value is placed on audiences alone.”
NBCUniversal in 2018 joined the OpenAP consortium, which consists of media companies that seek to advance TV ad targeting.
“Partnerships like OpenAP amongst others that NBC is involved in are going to be critically important as we look to modernize the measurement yardstick in the years ahead,” she said. “At NBCU, we have multiple irons in the fire right now in which to push measurement forward at an accelerated pace.”
OpenAP in April introduced OpenID, a unique identifier that enables measurement of linear viewership and digital audiences within a common identity framework.
“My hope for the industry is that we hold ourselves all accountable at the highest levels of trust and transparency, and that we preserve the value of content so that we shape a society that we all want to be a part of,” Abcarian said. “That will have a multiplier effect both for marketers and consumers alike. When we get that right, everybody wins.”
You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.
]]>Nielsen recently began working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year.
A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January. And now Univision is in on the act.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s Kelly Abcarian says: “Total TV time spent … (has) grown by 3.4% in the month of March, and that equates to 37.6 billion hours.
“If we want to unlock addressable in linear across those 37 billion hours of television, it’s important that an advertiser gets an accurate understanding of the linear reach of that ad … have confidence in the data they’re using to transact.”
Nielsen announced its beta test at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It will run in three phases – understanding broadcast companies’ workflow and commercial models, a “light” technology installation in order for broadcasters to identify which ads they want to replace, and selling actual ads that are shown in consumers’ homes.
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Univision Joins @nielsen For First Linear Addressable TV Platform Beta Program https://t.co/DHjJnPexK6
— Univision Public Relations (@UnivisionPRTeam) May 7, 2020
Abcarian thinks the current global pandemic has put a new spin on targeted TV ad capabilities.
“Pre-COVID, you saw about 17% of total TV time usage,” she says. “Now, the week of April 13, we have seen that that has grown to 83% from prior year. So that’s tremendous growth, and it’s eight hours per week.
“We know that the consumer is changing. And therefore, helping a marketer and a programmer understand how to package inventory, price it, as well as optimise against that experience is going to be critically important. We’re very, very focused on delivering on that total audience, reach and frequency, duplicated metric for the industry.
She credits companies like Clypd, Xandr, OpenAP, Mobi, TransUnion and LiveRamp with helping connect up platforms to deliver addressable TV ad scale.
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But that is all set to change. US addressable TV is going national.
In a session dubbed Addressable for National & Linear: Solving the Problems, panelists at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 discussed that prospect:
It was kicked off by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media and a veteran of early addressable TV infrastructure initiatives.
“I literally have goosebumps at this idea,” she said. “Sixty million households have addressable capabilities, some through DirecTV and DISH and Comcast and so on.
“But it still only amounts to 3% of the inventory because it’s sitting on the two minutes (per hour of ad inventory that TV networks allow cable and satellite operators to sell in their live feeds).
“So, one of the things that we’re going to see in 2020 … is lighting up the smart TVs, which could take us from 3% to my estimation of 21%.”
The expansion, she said, is being driven by initiatives like Inscape’s Project OAR and Nielsen’s acquisition of Sorenson Media, plus the application of software from vendors like INVIDI and FreeWheel to a wider, national set of inventory – something which could make as much as 35% of inventory addressable, she said.
WarnerMedia’s David Porter said he won’t be putting WarnerMedia’s best content in to addressable bucket just yet, and not in the upcoming 2020 upfront ad sales season.
“While the technology … is getting better, it’s still not perfect and we want to make sure it is perfect,” he said.
“When we begin our technology pilots this summer, it will not be on a primetime inventory, it will not be on our sports inventory.
“We are going to find some lower-viewed inventory. We’re going to take one unit and we’re going to convert it on one network, and we’re going to test that.
“And then we’re going to test it on another network and another network, and then we’re going to start converting multiple networks per day and then multiple units per day, multiple units per hour. So we’re going to grow it very, very slowly.
Nielsen’s Abcarian said future TV measurement will need to combine specific data straight from connected devices with audience panels.
Scheppach said “measurement” would come to include attributes about a person and a home, augmented with automatic content recognition (ACR) like that from Nielsen’s Gracenote, which can identify real viewing behavior from digital fingerprints. Abcarian replied: “And set-top box data.”
Abcarian agreed that panels and big data would go hand-in-hand.
Nielsen is working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year, following its acquisitions of Sorenson Media and Gracenote, and spent “gruelling 11 months of integrating different companies, different cultures, different technology”, according to Abcarian.
But, the pathway for scale is being laid, panelists didn’t believe it would be in place during 2020.
“It’s progression (this year), because I don’t think we’re going to reach critical mass,” said WarnerMedia’s Porter. “I don’t see critical mass in 2020. I see it in 2021.
“But I want to get to 50 million, and I believe that we can aggregate all of these different distribution endpoints to get to 50 to 60 million by 2021.
“I do think we’re going to have some buyer education. We’re going to have to talk to a lot of agencies to understand how they want to leverage it.”
The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.
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.
]]>A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January.
“The point of the beta is to start to integrate their linear workflow in a true addressable world and allow them to understand the commercial and business models that they want to execute and go to commercial launch in the second half of the year,” says Nielsen’s general manager of advanced video advertising, Kelly Abcarian.
“The programmers will work in our beta environment to really understand how to execute linear addressable, really testing their end-to-end workflows that are very unique in a linear television environment… things like setting up inventory roles like brand separation, or rules they want to apply around when they want to have ads replace, like do not replace any ads during prime time.”
Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.
Other industry initiatives include Project OAR, a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.
“We published an addressable measurement framework a couple of weeks back that we’ve made available to everyone in the industry,” Abcarian adds. “It’s really an instruction booklet around helping to understand what we’re doing to clean up and calibrate the data sources, the methodology we’re applying to combine the panel and the big data together, so that we can accurately understand the true linear audience and the addressable audience.”
Abcarian was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
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.
]]>Nielsen announced the beta on Monday. It will run through the first half of 2020 ahead of a planned full commercial launch later in the year.
Speaking with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Nielsen’s general manager of advanced video advertising, Kelly Abcarian, said: “We’re … unlocking true live linear. It’s really any kind of telecast, whether that’s sports or drama or comedy; we’re enabling any programmer to basically execute ad replacement in real-time as that telecast is being watched and viewed in real-time in a consumer’s home.”
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables teal-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Abcarian says the beta will take three phases:
“I think what they’re hoping to learn out of the beta is to understand how their workflow needs to evolve and change,” Abcarian says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.
What is it going to take for the addressable opportunity to be realized at greater scale, across the country?
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a panel of executives was asked by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel how to make national addressable sing…
“There is not a scale problem with addressability,” Bologna said. “There are 60 plus, 70 million households where you can dynamically insert an ad to a household. It is with the local two minutes per hour. It is system by system. That’s not a longterm scalable model in order for it to really scale.
“National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
“We are working with one of the largest chip set manufacturers globally, media tech and which to embed our technology directly into smart TV chip sets,” Abcarian said. “We are working alongside directly the OEMs in which to better our tech directly into their software layer.
“All of this enables you to unlock all 16 minutes in real-time.”
“We believe has been holding back linear addressable … is a lack of technology and tool sets that really fit within the seller’s workflow,”said Amobee’s Daft.
“It’s not enough to just have a linear addressable insertion technology or have data technology. It has to be linked together with the sales process, which has to do with making them confident to be able to sell that inventory.”
“If they all work in a different way, if 50 different networks are treating at addressable or a dynamic ad insertion differently, then it’s just going to be the same mess we have right now with seven different MVPDs – just four times worse,” said one2one’s Bologna. “And that’s not going to make it any easier for buyers and agencies and advertisers.”
Bologna said addressable ads could end up commanding much greater returns overall.
“In an addressable world, you could take that unit and you could sell 20, 30, 40% of that unit at three or four times that CPM to multiple different advertisers,” he said.
“Then, of, course you have what’s left over that you would then ultimately sell at perhaps a 10, 15, 20% discount. The net-net in a perfect world would turn into a 10, 15, 20 perhaps 50, 60% increase in the overall value of the unit. So. instead of the network collecting $2,000 for the unit, they end up collecting $3,200 for a unit.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>eMarketer puts that figure at 5% of the total in 2019.
That opens up a disconnect with the proportion of TV viewing that is itself getting delivered through internet channels.
In this discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, Kelly Abcarian, GM of video advanced advertising at Nielsen, says US smart TV adoption has exploded from 16% four years ago, to almost half today, approaching 250 million TV sets; source unclear.
The gap between adoption and ad spend is reminiscent of the early days of mobile advertising, when consumer media time on mobile far out-flanked the proportion of ad spend brands were putting to the same channel.
But Nielsen’s Abcarian says publishers are nevertheless intensely interested.
“Programmers are looking at ways in which they can drive better yield for themselves, but even more importantly yield for their advertisers,” she says, speaking with Howard Shimmel, president of his own Janus Strategy & Insights.
“They see real value of being able to take a first-party or third-party (audience data) segment and really activate that on behalf of their advertiser. And so I think they’re really leaning in.
“You’re seeing a lot of that and kind of the audience-based buying, being able to … reach an ad schedule against a consumer segment defined very uniquely by that unique advertiser. And then as we do one-to-one addressable, really being able to kind of fine-hone on how you get that right message at the right time in front of that right consumer.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>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.
]]>One of Nielsen’s most recent acquisitions was of Sorenson Media. The company now has technical underpinnings of a platform for targeted TV ads that encompasses delivery, data-driven targeting, unified campaign management, and measurement, as Variety reports.
“All media is going to go addressable,” Kelly Abcarian, the GM of Nielsen’s new Advanced Video Advertising unit, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
She says some $4.7 billion worth of addressable ads will be bought next year. “That’s made up of OTT, advanced linear-driven audiences, as well as the cable two minutes of addressability that they’ve built a sizeable business against as well.”
In addition to Sorenson, Nielsen acquired Qterics, a smart-TV software and privacy management vendor, and Gracenote, which does automatic content recognition.
“First and foremost, measurement is the bedrock of what Nielsen provides to the marketplace and what we’ll continue to do,” Abcarian says. “We’re really trying to focus on how we unlock addressable in a way that brings standardization across all those impressions.”
She envisions an open platform. “As we look to do ad replacement on a television screen, we’re also creating unique capabilities in the ad decisioning space to enable buyers and sellers to execute against that efficiency alongside of other ad decisioning engines and algorithms and capabilities in the marketplace.”
Going beyond the traditional two minutes per hour of addressable TV ad inventory that goes to distributors, “We’re really unlocking the full sixteen minutes of inventory so that programmers, both broadcasters cable networks, can truly execute in a one to one addressable way.
“It’s a matter of setting up campaigns and getting those instructions across the buyers and sellers around what ads are eligible across linear television for replacement. We’re really sitting in the middle providing the measurement and the simplicity around understanding what was reached, how often were they reached across what platforms. Then providing mechanics to actually do the true ad replacement on the glass screen itself.”
In addition to Sorenson’s smart-TV data from Samsung, Nielsen is working with LG and chip maker MediaTek, according to Abcarian.
]]>The SVP of Product Leadership for the information and measurement provider spoke with Beet.TV after appearing on a panel discussion titled Building the Frictionless TV Media Buying Experience at Advertising Week 2018.
“It’s all in the name of bringing comparability and consistency to buying and planning and execution,” says Abcarian.
Nielsen earlier this year launched its Advanced Audience Forecasting tool, which enables buyers and sellers of linear TV inventory to accurately and more directly forecast inventory for a precise target across all nationally measured television networks. Inputs include people-level attributes like in-store and online credit/debit transactions and psychographics (e.g., pet owners).
Common forecasts will facilitate an understanding of segment sizes for transactional purposes. “Not to replace the secret sauce, but really to augment and help buyers and sellers speak more consistently and to understand the sizing that’s available in this linear data driven world,” Abcarian explains.
The forecasting tool was built through a collaboration with clypd, the provider of audience-based sales solutions, which has released what Abcarian describes 1.0 standards. “That was a consensus building across buyers and sellers so that they could start to understand how to think about benchmarks and norms around these segments and how do you measure campaigns,” she explains.
While it might seem relatively straightforward to describe pet owners, it can be complicated. “When you look at pet owners and you have new pet owners coming into a segment during that campaign measurement period and, unfortunately, existing pet owners retracting from that segment. How do you think about the fluidity of audience based buying to insure that there’s a common, consistent definition across buyers and sellers?”
Taking in the proceedings at Advertising Week, Abcarian believes TV doesn’t get enough credit for its accountability and 100% make-good environment. “That doesn’t really exist across the other mediums. And I think they’ve made real advancements and I think they’re realizing they’ve got to continue to run fast at that to simplify the advertiser’s world.”
]]>Advertisers’ own primary data, off-the-shelf datasets and more… a new world of viewer information has opened up to make TV ad targeting to over-the-top devices more powerful than ever before.
In many ways, this is a game that is just getting started. So what do the next five years hold for the application of data in TV ad buying? A recorded panel convened at the Beet Retreat discussed that topic. Here are some snapshots of what they said…
Turner ad innovation SVP Daniel Aversano:
“Using more and different data sets is important. That’s a little scary. When we talk to advertisers and agencies, and we use lots of different datasets in our targeting products today, no-one ever asks, “Is the data right? Is it representative?’ So, I do think that there’s going to be somewhat of a Renaissance period, where we come back to some of the core tenants of data quality.”
Nielsen SVP Kelly Abcarian:
“If you don’t validate it, you don’t ask the right questions about it, you don’t understand what it does and doesn’t represent, because there’s no such thing as true census. I think, digital kind of went down this really fast path of driving the Ferrari straight down the autobahn before they even drove it down the New York streets. And now they’re … figuring out, how do we build that confidence back?”
Sinclair Digital Group COO Robert Weisbord:
“We just hired our first data scientist, so I won that battle. The next will be a behavior scientist, but when you are dealing with linear people as the majority, you got to push a thousand pound barrel up the hill. We’re trying to blend this so called digital thought processing to the linear world, and I think it’s important that it’s not one or the other but amalgamates in to the new world.”
Cross MediaWorks CEO Nick Troiano:
“My belief is, in three or four or five years, devices won’t matter. Content will matter, data and audience will matter. If I’m a TV person from a company that is running a TV company, I’m basically saying that my business has to transform in the next three to five years. (We are) expanding and automating adjustable television. It’s shifting like 200 advertisers, that I currently do today on ad vision GRPs, to addressable.”
The interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>The deal involves Comcast agreeing to give its set-top data to Nielsen’s local TV measurement service.
“The need for accurate audience data is greater than ever before,” explains Nielsen’s Kelly Abcarian, SVP of the firm’s global watch product architecture, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It will give us access to anonymized viewing from millions of set top box homes. They are now the fourth provider that is providing set top box data into our platform for local television measurement, which means that we’re going to have access to over 25 million households returning data, to combine that with our high quality panels across all these providers, to really transform the local television measurement space.
“We’re really excited by the opportunities this brings because we believe that we’ve unlocked the value of set top box data, due to unique assets that Nielsen has around our panels to truly understand how to bring, and harness the power of these data sets.
“We do that through matching up our panel, and being able to understand the accuracy of the household characteristics, to the tuning behaviors, all the way to who actually is in front of that screen.”
Nielsen’s suite of measurement services also includes the Nielsen Catalina Solution, bringing over 90 million loyalty card households together, and Nielsen Buyer Insights, bringing over two trillion dollars of credit card and debit cards spend.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Nielsen just switched on measurement for 13,000 streaming Netflix shows using TV-style ratings based on age and gender – the same thing advertisers have used to buy linear TV ads for decades.
Nielsen actually began measuring streaming content in 2014 via an opt-in service. But, until now, clients needed to submit their own audio signatures for the shows they wanted to measure. Now Nielsen has enhanced the system with signatures for all those Netflix shows as a syndicated service inside its SVOD Content Ratings.
“We are starting with Netflix, but the goal is to extend this out to the SVOD landscape as a whole,” says Nielsen’s product management SVP Kelly Abcarian in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It really is enabling them to understand that total audience consumption at an age/gender break and a true comparable rating to linear television.”
Today, it seems like Nielsen’s best customer base for the product will be TV show makers themselves, as they try to better understand their work’s consumption and gain leverage for carriage negotiation.
“For the first time, we are bringing transparency across to non-linear viewing of audiences, to services such as Netflix,” Abcarian says.
“That transparency is very critical for our media owners and studio houses who are working and want to understand the audience sizes to this content, so that, when they go to the negotiation table, they have data that enables them to empower their decision-making process.”
Nielsen says eight major television networks and production studios, including A&E Networks, Disney-ABC, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Warner Brothers and others, have already signed on to subscribe to the service.
But, if Netflix ever did switch on advertising, it seems like a solution would be in place to help the trading of ads there, too.
Ampere Analysis analyst Richard Broughton has previously told Beet.TV that Netflix could make up to $8bn from a full switch to advertising.
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>Time Warner’s CNN and Turner Sports this week signed on for Nielsen’s OOH measurement service, which uses a panel of 77,000 people across the top 44 DMA’s to capture viewing that has typically gone uncounted.
“This really enables the industry as a whole to assign value to the audiences that are being captured and not currently tracked in the traditional ratings up to this point,” Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Product Leadership, Nielsen says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Under terms of the agreement with Nielsen, the Turner units will get viewership credit for both program and commercial ratings for up to seven days of viewing of various pieces of content, as Variety reports. CNN is the first news network to make use of the Nielsen technology. Disney’s ESPN and 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports already subscribe to the service.
For cable sports or cable news, Nielsen has seen lifts on a total day of 8 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, according to Abcarian.
The OOH metrics are a separate number that do not contribute directly to C3 or C7 ratings. “But it is a Nielsen metric that then gets made available to the buying platforms as well to allow buyers and sellers to transact on those audiences,” Abcarian adds.
As Nielsen adds more networks on a national level to its OOH offering, it’s also making it available to local stations and cable networks.
“We really see this as a broad coverage play to ensure that these audiences are being counted across our national ratings and our local ratings alike.”
The 77,000-person panel, when projected out, represents about 65% of U.S. TV households, according to Abcarian.
]]>Others may observe how TV networks themselves are now launching head-long in to offering audience-based ad-buying solutions.
But Nielsen says it has been doing that for years.
“We’re very supportive of OpenAP and all these initiatives that are rolling across the networks,” says Nielsen Media Research product management SVP Kelly Abcarian, referring to the partnership between Fox, Turner and Viacom to offer targeted ad buying for linear, as well as similar plans from NBC Universal and A+E Networks. “We’ve been doing this for decades.”
Referring to Nielsen Catalina and Buyer Reports data services the firm launched back in 2014, Abcarian adds that Nielsen can help TV networks offer buyers the granular and individual viewer data they want.
“We have historical benchmarks and data that allow the industry to rapidly move against this new television season, to transition from age/sex buying to true audience segmentation buying,” she says.
Nielsen’s new method for measuring cross-platform viewing of TV and digital content using a single metric, Total Content Ratings, was delayed again after key client NBC Universal dubbed it “bad, inaccurate and misleading”.
But the firm isn’t done trying to enhance its TV measurement products. “We’re going to be enhancing the size of our panels dramatically, 2x across the top 44 DMAs, as well as bringing set-top data that enriches our in-market panels … to truly reflect that consumer,” Abcarian concludes.
“That will be rolling out … over the back half of this year… we’ll look to take that out to currency in 2018.”
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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