The end goal is “how you can get a holistic view from television viewing across the same audiences across different platforms into one place so you can offer video viewing to the buyers in a more holistic fashion,” Clarken adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Nielsen has been working the industry on cross-platform measurement “and it’s been complicated.” Signs of encouragement, according to Clarken, include the “fantastic job” that Linda Yaccarino and her team have created in the form of CFlight.

Within CFlight, Nielsen provides foundational data from its traditional television ratings plus Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings “as the underlying data, and then they put those things together inside of this platform. It’s great. It’s a place where it’s a starting point,” says Clarken.

“I think it’s great for the industry. It shows movement across a problem that’s been there for some time where there hasn’t been movement. We’d love to continue to work with them and see how this can be adopted more broadly.”

She considers calculating cross-platform reach and frequency as “the first place to start. How many people saw it, how often did they see it, how long did they see it for. And that provides an underlying platform for everything else.

“And what’s really important is that when you measure reach and frequency across platforms you’re doing it in a comparable way. Buyers want holistic view. They don’t want to try to cobble together their TV data with the data from mobile, with the data from PC, with data from multiple providers to try to get some sense of their ad spend on video themselves.”

As more advertisers extend their audience targeting beyond age and gender into different demographics and biographics, the next step is to show actual business outcomes.

“You have to start with the base before you can get to the sales targets, but ultimately the holy grail is to put the base in place and then start to building the pieces on top of that to the ultimate outcome. Which is did I actually sell something on the back of my advertising,” says Clarken.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“We feel great. It’s really a time of technology sophistication where it’s intersecting with creativity,” says the Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships at NBCUniversal—the “largest legacy content company.”

Whereas TV used to be the sole province of big brands behind a “velvet rope,” the evolution of the medium is ushering in a new wave of entrepreneurs seeking the advantages of co-mingling with premium content, Yaccarino explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

“No one ever argues that’s the best performing opportunity, but now as TV’s gotten smarter we’ve invited in a whole new crop of brands that are able to expand into a space they once thought unattainable.”

Newer brands bring with them an expectation to break out “beyond the limitations that they’re experiencing from solely being a performance based marketer” but without some of the strictures that have long governed TV advertising, according to Yaccarino.

“You can only survive in point-and-click or performance-based marketing platforms and grow to a certain point. Then you start to hit a ceiling.”

What these brands do expect is business performance without any legacy hesitation. “We’re on a playing field that’s not officiated by an obsolete success metric, whether it is a currency of a rating or the legacy that’s held our industry back or the inertia that’s held us back from past business practices,” says Yaccarino.

Asked to comment about controversies that continue to bedevil some of the biggest digital media platforms, she demurs while calling NBCU a worry free zone.

“But I have to say that the transition that once was taking your media mix to the shiny new toys of the new social platforms, or that were new back then, and the promise of media effectiveness and efficiency and the disappointment that then followed, that pendulum has swung back.”

Noting that the live linear TV experience is “very imperfect,” reducing commercial load has brought improvements for viewers and advertisers. “The brand metrics consistently across the board have exceeded our expectations.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Core pillars of that cadence are measurement, commercial innovation and technology, The Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.

The goal behind NBCU’s State of the Industry Forum could be boiled down to one element, according to Yaccarino. “Our behavior, processes, do not reflect consumer behavior as they exist today.”

She uses the word “fatigued” to describe the sentiment that existed within NBCU because the company was certain that “advertising is likely to change more in the next five years than it’s changed in the last fifty. We needed a reset.”

On the measurement side, Yaccarino says nothing has changed in more than a decade. “Think about consumer behavior and we could use measurement just as one example. The iPad didn’t even exist.”

Last April, NBCU developed the all-screen measurement currency called CFlight because “we couldn’t wait any more so we decided we’ve got to do it ourselves.” CFlight measures all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every platform, as Advertising Age reports.

“The good news is, other companies are starting to adopt that CFlight measurement,” Yaccarino adds.

NBCU has been promoting its contextual intelligence platform, which matches specific ads to specific programming, another step toward commercial innovation. “We’re able to marry the content that is contextually connected to our advertisers’ commercials. It’s the first scaled tool that we’re able to offer the advertisers.”

Asked about her expectations for CES 2019, Yaccarino says her activity will include giving clients “a performance report” that encompasses things like CFlight and PRIME PODs, which reduced clutter by 20%. “Show them that our hunch was right and it’s working, and it’s working really well.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

Tremor Video DSP’s three-point plan to address concerns in the market around transparency overall and around quality of inventory encompasses policy, fraud and brand safety, Wiener explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Video Symposium.

Tremor Video DSP also enforces the IAB’s ads.txt compliance on its end and that of all its suppliers. “We’re only going to work with supply that’s been validated and we’re encouraging everyone else in the ecosystem to do the same thing.”

To curtail fraud, the company works with “all the leading players, whether it’s DoubleVerify, IAS, to make sure that our pre-bid inventory is screened for fraud and we’re using whatever vendor our clients want.”

On the brand safety side, Tremor Video DSP recently announced it’s working with Grapeshot, whose solutions provide advertisers with contextual intelligence. Grapeshot’s pre-bid, custom brand-safety capabilities are now available for Tremor Video DSP’s advertisers across all supply.

“Brand safety is really the most subjective of the three criteria and so we want to really understand what each marketer cares about and what context they are comfortable having their ad in,” Wiener says.

Two of her main takeaways from the IAB confab are the continued rise of storytelling via premium video and brand safety. With regard to the latter, she takes issue with some of the comments by NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino at the event regarding where advertisers should be directing their video dollars.

“Linda Yaccarino’s message about premium and premium quality is an important message,” says Wiener. “But I also think that marketers need to understand that their consumers are watching video in so many different places that if you only pick the names that you knew from 1950, you’re going to miss a lot of how the audience is consuming video today.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Video Symposium 2018 presented by Tremor Video DSP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

NBCU is making reductions in more than 50 primetime, original shows across its entire portfolio.

“Sometimes, a little bit less means a whole lot more,” said Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising and Client Partnerships. “The industry knows that television is already the most effective advertising medium there is, but we need to make the experience better for viewers.”

NBCU says it will unveil a suite of innovative new ad products including Interactive Picture in Picture and Social Commercials and Social First Pods. The new PRIME POD “combines the power of fewer, better, and more contextually relevant ads, and gives clients a unique opportunity to connect with audiences in the most effective, exciting, and efficient way,” the company announced.

Noting that contextually targeted ads fuel greater consumer conversion, the company will use a new artificial intelligence-based contextual content targeting product that “combs through scripts and data sources to make every ad that much more contextually relevant to its audience.”

The company has produced a video explaining its rationale. It’s titled We’re Creating More Prime Time Primetime.

Earlier this month, Krishan Bhatia, NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, explained to Beet.TV that improving the user experience is an “huge focus.” In light of today’s announcement about cutting commercial loads, we are republishing that interview.

NBCUniversal’s Total Audience Delivery is a first for its coverage of Winter Olympics and a model for what the company believes will be more acceptance of the way it is helping marketers re-aggregate fragmenting audiences. So far, one of the biggest takeaways from the PyeongChang Winter Games for Krishan Bhatia has been the acceleration of over-the-top and connected TV viewing.

“I think for the past few years we have continued to underestimate that potential,” says NBCU’s EVP, Business Operations & Strategy, who Beet.TV interviewed at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau several days after the opening ceremonies. “Once again, we believe that it’s going to blow through all of the estimates.”

As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCU figures showed that 28.3 million viewers watched the opening ceremonies, 27.8 million of them on television. Audience numbers for out-of-home viewing weren’t yet available. As of Feb. 13, half of U.S. television homes and more than one-third of the country’s population had watched the Olympics on the networks of NBCUniversal, according to fast cume data provided by Nielsen. Six days into the events, NBC Sports Digital’s presentation had been accessed by 6.6 million unique devices–higher than the 2016 Rio Olympics (6.0 million through the comparable date) and more than tripling the 2014 Sochi Olympics (1.8 million to date).

Bhatia says the company’s total audience measurement and delivery approach should apply to any content and consumer segment that is proliferating and fragmenting across multiple platforms along with time-shifting consumption. Given this backdrop, brands want to work with fewer, bigger partners to re-aggregate eyeballs.

“I think we will find marketers and agencies leaning more into this than they ever had,” Bhatia says of Total Audience Delivery.

Commercial ad load and viewer experience remain “another area of huge focus for us,” he adds. Having reduced ad loads on OTT and on-demand platforms by about 30%, NBCU continues to test new formats and develop new products as well as improving its contextual targeting solutions.

“We’re in a two to three week process of researching ad pod length and formats right now to really come up with what is the optimal solution both for the consumer experience and for how that drives marketer metrics,” says Bhatia.

As the company approaches its third year of enhanced audience buying, it doesn’t plan to “reinvent the wheel” but scale the business “and quite frankly making it more efficient for marketers and agencies to engage with us.”

As examples he points to NBCU’s work on facilitating better data interoperability for audience targeting and its automation capabilities. In the latter category is its API through which buyers can access TV inventory on the 4C Insights Platform, which is the subject of this interview.

“We think that’s a giant step towards making the buying and transacting of television significantly more efficient,” Bhatia says.

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

Therein lies a paradox of sorts, given NBCU’s public bashing of some of the new generation of content providers. So it’s noteworthy to hear the company’s sales chief, Linda Yaccarino, discuss issues like brand safety, premium video and “shiny new toys” in this interview conducted by OMD’s investment chief Ben Winkler at the FreeWheel/Beet.TV New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum, which took place at the Comcast beach cabana.

Winkler set the stage by asking Yaccarino to square her comments about advertisers over-allocating spending to digital platforms with a wave of negative comments about brand safety on some of those platforms. Were the two connected?

Yaccarino responded by citing a “dangerous soup of an environment that we live in today. I don’t think anyone has the answer yet of what’s the right magical number of the mix, of premium content to digital.”

At the next Cannes festival, the subject may very well be moot, as far as Yaccarino is concerned. “Next year, I hope we stop talking about digital versus linear. In a year or two it’s all going to be the same thing,” she said. “But the turf war isn’t about digital versus linear. It’s how can we come together and help our clients sell more product.”

Winkler asked why NBCU disparaged “shiny new toys” in the digital space but proceeded to invest in and partner with some of them. That all depends on how one defines shiny objects, Yaccarino said.

Citing Apple News, BuzzFeed, Snapchat and Vox, she said, “It’s all populated by one thing and that’s premium content.”

Consumers have already dispelled any semantical differences between traditional TV content and video, according to Yaccarino. “The consumer is already there. They see no difference between accessing content via the big screen on the wall in their home or the screen in their lap or the screen in their hand.”

However, barriers still remain in the “ease of transaction for our customers,” she noted, “and the ability to offer them unified measurement or, God forbid, a currency in which to transact.”

NBCU’s Symphony initiative is credited with, among other things, raising NBC from “worst to first” in ratings by pooling the resources of all company units—from linear digital to theme parks. Among the beneficiaries has been the program “This Is Us,” as The Los Angeles Times reports.

“The difference this year is that we’re able to spread that messaging through the partners that we’ve been talking about, Snapchat, Buzzfeed, Apple News so it’s very exciting,” said Yaccarino.

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Winkler mentions a conversation he had onstage with NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino during the the FreeWheel/Beet.TV forum hosted by Comcast. He says her call for an agnostic approach to media selection strikes a chord of harmony.

“It’s great to talk to Linda. What’s especially heartening is I think that she and the industry as a whole lower your temperature a little bit around the us versus them, traditional versus digital,” Winkler says in this interview with Beet.TV.

From the beginning of the digital era, people like Winkler found it challenging when broadcast networks “would come out and say digital has garbage content,” Winkler recalls. Paradoxically, some of the same networks would then implore buyers to patronize digital companies in which the networks had invested.

“The reality is any advertiser to succeed needs a nice mix of different types of media,” says Winkler. “You simply cannot deliver on your business objectives if you just pick a single medium.”

He adds that it’s “nice to see that Linda is embracing that idea of a portfolio approach, NBCU being a big part of that. Certainly they deliver fantastic content.”

OMD’s clients “have an insatiable appetite” for video content, according to Winkler. “When I say video content, I don’t mean tiny videos with no sound that are watched for 1.8 seconds. We’re talking about the full commercial experience.”

Beyond traditional TV, there are few places where brands can indulge in “the full commercial experience,” he adds. “Strangely enough, Snapchat is one of those places and it’s good to see that Linda and NBC have invested in that as well.”

Outside of “the video paradigm,” brands also need platforms like Facebook to reach audiences at scale. “You get great data, remarkable targeting with very little waste,” Winkler says.

As with any medium there are challenges. “But at the risk of saying something obvious, you have to spread the wealth when it comes to media planning because it’s the only way to deliver your business objectives.”

This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“I think the creative agencies are wrestling with two things,” the media company’s Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV in advance of the 2017 Cannes Lions festival.

One is the power of a 15- or a 30-second ad. “Because In the right context, there really is unparalleled impact so that’s still going to be part of a media plan,” Yaccarino says.

She also believes that agencies are going to experience “a time of incredible opportunity as they figure out how to create content for the different platforms.”

NBCU’s mantra is screen agnostic, platform specific, according to Yaccarino.

“Creative, whether it’s the content itself or the advertising that goes along with it, really needs to be specific to that platform experience,” she adds.

This is because a user on Snapchat has different expectations and can consume and ingest content in very different ways than it does on Facebook or YouTube or when they’re watching This Is Us on NBC.

“So I think that’s a great opportunity for creative development,” Yaccarino says.

She wants to “shine a light on the need for the industry to reach out beyond legacy metrics so we can promise our clients, the national marketers, an improvement to their business.”

This was a big theme in NBC’s TV Upfront last week.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Digital Media Summit of LUMA Partners, Yaccarino talks about what advertisers have been waiting for, the value of parent Comcast’s set-top box data and the company’s newly expanded relationship with Snapchat in the form of a daily news show on the social platform.

While no one argues the value of premium content and its impact on an advertising campaign, “How great would it be for us to be able to transact on a currency that reflects their outcomes to improve their business,” says Yaccarino, who is Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships for NBCU.

She dismisses traditional ratings like C3 and C7 as “an approximate number of who may or may not have watched out show that we have to wait three weeks to get.” Lacking better metrics, marketers have lacked “the data they craved or were promised form the digital platforms combined with the scale of premium content.”

She cites NBCU’s audience tools and studio, largely powered by data from parent Comcast’s set-top boxes, as providing insights that can be married together with consumer data “to have a good prediction” of advertisers’ business outcomes.

As ADWEEK reports, NBCU just announced that NBC News will produce Snapchat’s first daily news show. Yaccarino says what started out as a “very modest relationship” with the social platform for the Rio Olympics “changes every single day.”

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

David Sable is quick to point out that algorithms for TV buying are nothing new, as spot TV was traditionally purchased based on CPM’s—the algorithm of the day. In this interview with Beet.TV, the Global CEO of Y&R discusses the seeming dichotomy that is TV everywhere and the growing urge to micro target audiences.

“It’s complex because the promise of so much data and so much targeting makes one think that that’s what they have to do. That you have to be super targeted,” Sable says.

He references Facebook, Mars and Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard as advocating a wider approach to reaching audiences. “We’ve always looked for better ways to target,” Sable says. “I think the problem is we’re in a world of because we can we do, as opposed to people taking a step back and thinking about it and saying ‘what am I actually targeting.’”

He was experimenting with what is now known as addressable TV advertising roughly 15 years ago at direct-marketing agency Wunderman. And while he believes addressable is “going to be important,” he fears that “hyper micro targeting is creating an echo chamber” that keeps getting smaller.

“Do I really only want to talk to people who are going to buy a car in the next six months, who have a propensity to buy a Ford or a Mercedes and only talk to them? If that’s what you do, you’re going down the wrong path,” he says.

In a parallel vein, he points to analyst prognostications a decade ago about the bleak future for TV programming because it would all go the way of CGI.

“There’s more stuff on location than ever before. Less stuff in studio. Less CGI,” Sable notes. “On the content side, we in the golden age here.”

He agrees with NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino on the need for ad-supported programming that fuels the content of popular platforms like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, as The New York Times reports.

“They’re selling the stuff that advertising has allowed to be created,” Sable says. “They’re just reaping the benefit.”

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.