In June, DISH Media told Beet.TV it was selling 60% of ads programmatically.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kevin Arrix, Senior Vice President, DISH Media, says players in an increasingly splintered industry need to come together in pursuit of openness and a common goal.
Catalyzing collaboration
Arrix sees strong momentum around the advancement of advertising technology, with plenty of healthy competition amongst distributors and programmers, tech companies and measurement providers.
DISH’s goals are two-fold, Arrix says:
- To be a catalyst to companies marching in the same direction.
- To partner with a strong collection of advertisers, peers and competitors to hash out evolving approaches.
“Our goal is to bring clarity to the forefront around what the biggest priorities are not only for DISH,” he says, “but everybody in the addressable space, so that we can lock arms as we hit 2021 and keep bringing what the industry does want and keep evolving to a world of better data-driven advertising.”
Arrix continues: “We’re big proponents of open. Open from our point of view is going to be key to success in this fragmented media market going forward. There isn’t going to be one central technology that everyone is going to use. You have to be interoperable, and you have to plug in as a supply side, and as a publisher side. It’s our obligation to plug into tech and platform that our clients select, so interoperability is really important.”
National addressable
DISH Media has been expanding its addressable capabilities for a few years now. Twelve months ago, it launched Reach Booster, a tool that can extend the national reach of brands’ ad campaigns.
It also launched a creative versioning tool for campaigns. But Arrix says most momentum is happening on national minute enablement.
“For us, addressable has been incredibly successful. It’s been a very strong growing line of business. That has primarily focused on the two minutes of addressable (per hour) that distributors have. And now we’re at the dawn of enabling the national minutes for programmers.
“So from our point of view, what we want to know is, what are the biggest priorities and hurdles that we need to get over and solve for? And it really spans across the industry, from tech players to programmers, distributors and measurement companies.
“We all should have the same north stars. At the end of this project, if we can have two, three, four north stars that we’re collectively marching towards, I think that’s going to make a big, big difference.”
Glass half-full
Arrix acknowledges 2020 has been challenging. But he sees a way forward for the business.
“The most important thing to do is dig in and keep working hard, stay connected with your clients and understand what’s happening from their side,” he says.
DISH is very fortunate to have a balanced portfolio with DISH linear and SLING OTT.
“From a media point of view, the negatives of COVID outlined in anybody’s business what their true weaknesses are. And we took that as a glass half-full, and looked at those weaknesses and addressed them.”
Opening new doors
For Arrix, the positive way ahead leads back to openness, transparency and accountability.
“I haven’t met a marketer or agency lead in the last six to nine months that doesn’t have accountability at the top of their priority list – ‘I need to know what the impact is of the dollar that I just spent’,” he says.
“Accountability is really important going forward, it’s one of the core pillars of our open approach and I think that has fuelled the fire for data-driven addressable advertising, and that is a positive that has come out of the COVID situation.“
You are watching “An Open Ecosystem is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by DISH Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The deal gives advertisers using Verizon Media’s demand-side platform (DSP) automated access to Dish’s household addressable ad inventory. Those media placements can reach households that either watch linear TV or have connected their TVs directly to the internet to see programming on over-the-top services like Dish’s Sling TV.
“Sling does over 60% of its revenue programmatically, and has relied on the DSP ecosystem for several years now,” Kevin Arrix, senior vice president of Dish Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s proven to be a great investment and bet for us.”
The partnership not only adds 7 million Dish house households to Verizon’s addressable TV ad footprint, it also lets advertisers buy addressable ads programmatically among 11 million households. Dish’s inventory will be available by early next quarter.
“Omni-video is critical going forward,” Arrix said. “The buy side doesn’t care if someone is watching linear television versus digital television versus video on demand (VOD). They care about reaching someone wherever they’re watching television.”
Consumers in the past year have increased the amount of time they watch TV by 9.3% to an average of 229 minutes a day, according to researcher eMarketer. Many people have been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, freeing up time to watch TV instead of commuting to the office.
The crisis has led advertisers reset their media spending priorities, and demand greater accountability than ever before, Arrix said.
“The need for advertisers to know exactly the impact of any given dollar spent … tends to push you toward a data-driven advertising scenario,” he said. “They’re going to prioritize data-driven more so than ever before.”
]]>But, in 2020, the promise is much greater than that. Now broadcast platforms are discovering they can offer advertisers a more diverse set of use cases than just targeting alone.
In this one-on-one interview at Beet Retreat, Kevin Arrix, SVP of DISH Media, responsible for ad sales at DISH and Sling, explains.
“Addressable has largely, if not entirely, been used for targeted advertising,” he says. “We’re entering a phase now, where we’re (seeing) a redefinition of addressable. It’s taken on a different meaning for us.
“Addressable, for us, is effectively technology that allows us to deliver, or take a specific action, to a specific household, or a specific subscriber.
“That technology has largely been used for targeted advertising in the past. Now we’re starting to apply it to new use cases, which is really exciting. We now are using that addressable technology to deliver, or work on reach and frequency, from a national linear campaign point of view.”
Speaking with Beet.TV previously, Arrix outlined three use cases for addressable technology:
- Targeted advertising: the classical use case for addressable TV.
- National minute enablement: wherein a pice of inventory is either retained as a linear spot in which different creative versions are inserted, or is broken up in to individual impressions by a programmer.
- National reach extension: when a national ad campaign hits a plateau, addressable technology can extend the audience reach in new footprints.
In December, DISH launched Reach Booster, a tool that can extend the national reach of brands’ ad campaigns.
At Beet Retreat, Arrix continued: “If you use linear television to the point where that reach curve starts to flatten, then you work with DISH or any other MVPD on using their addressable technology to then serve that ad to the homes that have not seen it, or to the ads that have not seen it frequently enough.”
Arrix was interviewed by Matter More Media CEO and co-founder Tracey Scheppach at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he 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.
]]>But, in 2020, the promise is a lot more than that. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kevin Arrix, SVP of DISH Media – responsible for ad sales at DISH and Sling – describes two more emerging use cases…
- Targeted advertising: the classical use case for addressable TV.
- National minute enablement: wherein a pice of inventory is either retained as a linear spot in which different creative versions are inserted, or is broken up in to individual impressions by a programmer.
- National reach extension: when a national ad campaign hits a plateau, addressable technology can extend the audience reach in new footprints.
In December, DISH launched Reach Booster, a tool that can extend the national reach of brands’ ad campaigns.
“We were in the press before the holidays around the creative versioning solution and we’re working hard on the true addressable solution as well,” he says
“In 2020, you will have live POCs (proofs-of-concept) for each of these national enablement solutions.”
Arrix will be speaking at the upcoming The Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, three days of high-level panels, group conversations, one-on-one video interviews and networking events.
“Talk about an intimate setting where you really can have meaningful conversations and build meaningful relationships,” he says. “That is a great place to do that”
]]>One of Sling’s key selling points is enabling live television to be delivered by IP. “Being able to bring live television to a programmatic environment and bring it to buyers who can transact in real time is really unique and really exciting,” Arrix says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan.
“And I think that’s a beacon of what’s to come down the road for anybody in the live TV OTT space as well as CTV.”
At Sling, programmatic is “a significant portion of our overall revenue. It’s a really unique way for buyers to come in and get live television advertising in real time,” Arrix adds.
What powers the combination of programmatic with real time transactions is the ability to leverage Sling’s viewer data. “By leveraging our data, you can deliver very unique targeting and probably more importantly, you can deliver reporting on the back end that ties into ROI and ties in to attribution and takes measurement to the next level.”
Asked about how Sling works with MediaMath and other DSP’s, Arrix says there’s a lesson to be learned in terms of “what the DSP’s have built” and that their utility is dictated solely by the demand side.
“The demand side is saying ‘I like this company, I like MediaMath I like their UI, I like their platform and I am going to run my marketing dollars through to this platform.’ Supply siders that want to be a part of that “need to get connected and get integrated.”
Noting that Sling has full integration across the spectrum of DSP’s, Arrix says he thinks Mediamath “has done a great job in terms of drumming up added demand around CTV and OTT.”
As for the continued emergence of new, streaming-video competitors, Arrix says, “The advanced advertising or data-driven video space is exploding and there are developments left right and center. We love were we stand right now.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“We view it as a deterministic match between two first-party data sets,” Arrix, who is SVP of DISH Media, said of the addressable designation.
“I think that is really important because there’s a lot of faux addressable out in the marketplace that is disguised as data-driven linear, and I think it’s really important for the marketplace to understand what is true addressable and what is not.”
For their part, DISH and sister entity Sling TV aren’t looking to “create automated tools or platforms per se” but rather see things from a predominantly supply side partner point of view, according to Arrix.
“One thing that we’re trying to do to make it easier for the market is combine our full addressable footprint of DISH with Sling,” Arrix said. “We’re not trying to break it apart and say this is linear addressable and this is OTT addressable.”
One year ago this month, DISH partnered with Comscore to launch a cross platform/screen solution encompassing inventory on both DISH and Sling.
Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now President of Janus Strategy and Insights, assumed that over time Sling will become more of the companies’ distribution footprint than DISH “due to natural things going on with consumers. Is that a good thing for your ad capabilities?”
Arrix drew distinction between DISH trying to maintain its pay-TV subscriber base and ongoing set-top box migration, since about 70% of DISH’s boxes are addressable. “While the overall DISH subscriber base, TBD what happens there, the addressable footprint of DISH will continue to grow,” said Arrix.
Asked about Comscore’s role, Arrix said the company provides third-party measurement of addressable impressions that are unified in a single report. “It’s not this set of impressions because they’re coming from a set-top box is measured this way and this set of impressions I measured this way. They’re connected in with the technology that’s actually driving addressable on our side, which is Invidi, and they’re able to deliver one pool of addressable impressions.”
As for third-party measurement in general, Arrix said, “We advocate for and partner with any third-party measurement company and we believe that it really is up to the demand side, marketers and agencies, to determine which measurement they want to go with.”
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 interview at Beet Retreat 2018, Arrix talks about the partnership between Sling TV and audience measurement provider Comscore and the need for a fuller understanding of addressable TV advertising within the industry. He was interviewed by senior television industry research executive Howard Shimmel.
In January of 2019, Sling partnered with Comscore to offer cross-platform addressable advertising measurement for campaigns across the live OTT service’s impressions and DISH set-top box impressions. Campaign performance is validated with addressable advertising metrics across platforms, using consistent third-party measurement.
“Instead of having measurement from a linear addressable source and an OTT addressable source, the Comscore product allows the buyer to look at it in one holistic way,” says Arrix, who is SVP of DISH Media. “To facilitate that on the sales side is just much easier.”
With Sling, addressable campaigns can be run programmatically. “It’s base-level audiences, but that’s really impressive and takes a lot of pain out of the process, both on the front end and the back end,” Arrix adds.
Noting the various MVPD sources of addressable inventory, he believes that the industry needs some level of automation on the planning side. “The industry needs a way to roll up all addressable sources for measurement and attribution and they need to be able to make the actual buy, the actual execution fairly simple.”
While addressable currently constitutes about 2% of overall TV spending, that amount will increase “because you can deterministically reach a consumer base. If you’re a marketer and you’re going to spend money on linear television and data-driven linear, I think it’s only going to continue to grow if they can definitely reach the target audience that they want to reach,” says Arrix.
As with any relatively new opportunity, there is an education process and learning curve that need to take place, according to Arrix.
“I think a decent portion of the marketplace is informed, but there are lots of people that still need to fully understand what’s happening with addressable and what it means. I think that’s a key part of it is defining it, make sure that everybody knows exactly what it is and what role it should play vis-a-vis linear television, data-driven linear, addressable connected TV.”
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 fact, programmatic methods of buying – that is, using data and targeting capabilities to buy individual audiences, not groups of viewers against whole shows – could help turn around linear TV ad spend that is itself now declining.
So what place does over-the-top (OTT) have in this emerging landscape?
“It’s the marriage of two big pieces of the advertising ecosystem,” says Senior Vice President of DISH Media Kevin Arrix in this video interview with Beet.TV. He was interviewed during NYC Advertising Week.
“On one side, you have digital capabilities. You have targeting, measurement, execution. And then on the other side, you have top of the pyramid video supply.
“So OTT brings with you the quality supply that the market needs where there isn’t enough supply to be quite honest in that lane, and it also allows you to put very detailed target against it, buy it programmatically or buy it managed services. It’s really the connection point to legacy linear television.”
DISH has put programmatic and addressable together for buying contextually or addressably. In May, DISH announced that it had partnered with SpotX to create addressable data segments representing anonymous viewers of Sling TV.
The segments involved included would-be-vacationers, auto intenders and back to school shoppers.
“We are seeing incredible demand for programmatic execution,” Arrix adds. “And so for us, our goal was to make sure that we had that connectivity and the execution is very seamless.”
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