You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
A year ago, as the pandemic bedded in, ad buyers were holding on to their money, pushing it down the marketing funnel and calling for a delay to the upfronts, the traditional annual season in which TV and video networks pitch for advance ad spending commitments.
Fast-forward to May 2021 and, whilst pandemic economic effects have far from disappeared, a few circumstances are coalescing to make the Upfronts and IAB NewFronts a little different.
The new fronts
- Ad-supported VOD (AVOD) offerings have become bona fide operators.
- TV networks are cross-selling their traditional channels with their own-brand AVOD services.
- Live sports has returned.
- Production has resumed on many shows.
- The vaccination outlook is giving brands more economic optimism.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer for TV at ad-tech company LiveRamp explains why this time it is different.
CTV trends up
“Last year, you know, I don’t even think Peacock was launched yet, Discovery Plus wasn’t out yet, Paramount Plus in its combined form wasn’t out yet,” Prasad says.
“So this is now the first year with all these massively built-up platforms that are owned by the traditional TV media companies that are being combined with a return to normal in live linear with sports.”
Prasad thinks the emergence of the new, network-backed AVODs, plus increasing advertiser appetite for a new kind of media buy, will drive adoption of connected TV (CTV) advertising.
“I think this year’s upfronts are very much going to be focused on what the opportunities are for marketers to really embrace the platform,” he says. “Not just because it’s like digital – it’s because it has unique content experiences, viewing experiences, interactive and creative ad units that don’t exist in traditional TV.”
Over half (54%) of US digital media professionals naming it a leading priority for 2021, per an October 2020 survey by Integral Ad Science.
EMarketer estimates that US CTV ad spend will grow even faster this year than last, up 48.6% year over year (YoY) to $13.41 billion.
New tricks
For Prasad, it’s all about the new capabilities of connected TV.
“A lot of brands that are leaning in with cross screen measurement are able to understand who they’re actually reaching and how often on linear, and then being able to look at audiences and not just demographics,” he says.
“And then there is, of course, the ability to do a lot more audience related profiling targeting, and then measurement becomes something that is a lot more close to real time than we’ve had in the past with TV.
“A brand like Tubi, when it’s creating a customer accounts, it does have an idea of who’s watching. That’s the only way you can create customised playlist and surface recommend viewing and things of that nature.
“So that identity has to be able to work with a brand’s identity or a agency holding companies identity. And that’s the only way that you can get targeting and data to be able to move around.”
You are watching, “The Stream: New Audiences, New Opportunities,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Tubi. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But recent changes may suggest some of their prayers may get answered.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer, describes some of the findings of a new survey of brands and ad agencies that was commissioned by DISH Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, INVIDI Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia
Unification for the nation
The study, Era Of Addressable, carried out by Forrester found the buy side calling for change:
- Simplify buying and managing campaigns across suppliers (66%)
- Increase scale (65%) and national footprint (64%)
- Interoperability among MVPDs (74%); technology partners (93%)
- Single measurement standard from media companies (92%)
Addressable TV and emerging media channels are the #1 priority for brands and agency TV buyers in 2021. Read more in the new study, “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV”. https://t.co/6fEzcpenMD pic.twitter.com/AiGqjmQGnV
— DISH Media (@DISHMedia) March 24, 2021
“A unified and what they were calling a ‘single measurement standard for addressable’ was the second-highest question answered in terms of percentage,” Prasad says.
“Seventy-three percent said that that was something they were looking for. You can’t run addressable and then still measure things on an age-and-gender proxy in that commercial break, because that break will no longer function like a typical age-and-gender-measured commercial break, because now you’ve changed the targeting in a certain amount of households.”
Match segments
For Prasad, it is becoming important that addressable TV ad buyers can granularly identify their audiences, even on combined footprints of viewing services.
“LiveRamp maintains a subscriber file match process with MVPDs,” he says. “That match, it allows us to be able to look at the universe size of any MVPD against an audience. You can grab an audience from an advertiser through a first-party onboard, or grab a segment from the LiveRamp data store.
“We would basically allow for more instant counts, meaning if you grab this auto intender segment and you want to know how many households it can reach on DISH, we can give that calculation very quickly, and we can do the same thing across all the MVPDs.
If you’re an auto maker, (you can) look at, ‘Well, if I take my lease-ending segment of households that I know have a vehicle that’s expiring, and I want to add on this additional in-market auto segment from the data store, how much can I reach? How many households can I get to?”
EMarketer forecasts US connected TV ad spending will reach $18.29 billion by 2024, more than double the amount spent in 2020, driven especially by YouTube, Hulu, and Roku.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer for TV at LiveRamp, explains that, after fast growth, some development is still needed.
TV growth
According to eMarketer’s data, US CTV ad spend jumped 27.1% through 2020 – a year when viewing was swelled by staying at home and advertising was boosted by both US elections and a range of new AVOD entrants.
But Prasad says much of the buying in CTV has been traditional in form.
“It’s odd that, in the run-up to all of this growth in streaming, a lot of it’s been done with maybe just age and gender (targeting) capabilities.,” he says. “In part, (that is) because of the difficulty in being able to assess how much audience-based inventory exists in the marketplace.
“(Buyers) want to look at high quality data from reputable data firms, companies like Catalina and Polk and others who have high-quality data that’s been working in digital and then has been working in addressable linear.”
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer at LiveRamp TV says our collaboration with Kinetiq tackles antiquated measurement and attribution in TV head-on by streamlining measurement of all TV ad exposures across traditionally siloed channels. https://t.co/rTv3jtTvA8 #Martech #Technology pic.twitter.com/k2NgP3J5NF
— MarTech Series (@MarTechSeries) January 11, 2021
Custom audiences
Prasad says the ability to create “custom audiences” for targeting, a practice that has been enjoyed by other digital buyers for some time, is now emerging in connected TV.
“These custom audiences can be based on their own first-party data – things like purchase history – or the ability to look at prospects differently than existing customers,” he says.
Other new capabilities include using CTV to control the reach and frequency of ads, or to measure the outcome of ads.
How will programmatic buyers approach CTV inventory this year?
If you missed our blog about the buy side practice of supply path optimization (SPO), here is another chance to read how it can impact streaming AVOD publishers and some best practices: https://t.co/yg73gC4M5j
— Publica (@getpublica) January 14, 2021
Household intelligence
But having the custom audience capability isn’t enough, Prasad reckons.
“Once you have this custom audience, how do you make it work in CTV?,” he says. “That’s sort of that last-mile question that has been looking at the industry as a big opportunity.
“And we’re now looking at how we can make that happen between buyers and sellers and working with some key partners to do that.”
Prasad says the big opportunity is to generate intelligence at the level of individual ad impressions, which correlate to individual households – a step-change from the traditional TV panel measurement picture.
That means applying more data about the household in question, including the size of the household, and being able to de-duplicate that household from receiving too many ads – a problem Prasad’s LiveRamp is working on with Publica, a connected TV advertising platform.
You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But retails have plenty to gain from sharing their customer data with other organizations.
New software allowing that to happen in a way that respects both user privacy and client confidentiality now promises to unlock those benefits.
Brand benefits
In this interview with Beet.TV, Alice Stratton, LiveRamp’s global MD for Safe Haven, talks about the development.
Safe Haven is the suite LiveRamp launched in March to enable secure data sharing between brands and their partners.
Stratton says three use cases are typically on offer to brands:
- 360-degree insights view: For example, including campaign insights, recommendations, customer journeys, consumer insights and audience recommendations, online and offline trade, product and promotions, price performance.
- Media activation: Enabling audience refinement, using natural data sharing relationships to create new customer experiences, plus outcome-based optimization in campaign mid-flight.
- Measurement: Analyzing things like sales uplift, trade impact, touchpoint analysis.
Learn how @Danone now owns its #data architecture and #strategy with LiveRamp Safe Haven. https://t.co/PxgfHRhxgU #webinar
— LiveRamp (@LiveRamp) December 2, 2020
Safety in sharing
Ideas like Safe Haven have emerged in the last couple of years as privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA, as well as moves to reduce tracking by browser makers, have moved the advertiser focus from indiscriminate targeting toward real audience relationships.
“We’re really seeing LiveRamp customers lean into their own-first party data or assets, and also that of their trusted partners,” Stratton says, explaining the rationale behind Safe Haven.
“What we were kind of hearing from our customers there was that there was this need and desire to be able to collaborate and leverage each others first-party data assets to unlock new use cases, but there wasn’t a neutral and secure environment in which both parties could feel comfortable releasing their data assets to enable those use cases to be activated.
“The role that LiveRamp came to play in that engagement was to be that neutral intermediary, hence the name Safe Haven, that enables both parties to come together and ensure that both parties can feel comfortable and confident that LiveRamp is managing the permissions and the data access controls, so that their data is only available to the partners and for the use cases that they’re comfortable with.”
‘What’s your data strategy?’
Citing a 2017 Harvard Business Review article she says was influential, Stratton says brands need two kinds of data strategy:
- Offensive: “Making sure that you’re leveraging data to enable supporting business outcomes.”
- Defensive: “Minimising risk and making sure that, as the regulation landscape changes, you’re not only keeping up with best practises there, but also doing things from very customer-centric perspective
To remain competitive, companies must wisely manage quantities of data | What’s Your Data Strategy? https://t.co/3KrfarGet4 vía @HarvardBiz pic.twitter.com/wo9yFN5Doe
— Bellavista (@bellavistalegal) May 11, 2017
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
By laying a new infrastructure, says Travis Clinger.
Third-party cookies are being deprecated by browser makers and Apple is switching its Identifier For Advertisers (IDFA) system to opt-in by consumers – threatening traditional modes of targeting users.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Travis Clinger, SVP for addressability and Ecosystem at ad-tech company LiveRamp, says, amid this maelstrom, there is opportunity to build something better.
Beyond third-party
“In the past, what you would do is you would match that to a third-party cookie, and then we would have the DSP (demand-side platform) transact on their third-party cookie space,” Clinger says.
“But as we all know, the third-party cookies is already gone on 40% of inventory today, with Safari and Firefox, and is soon going to be gone on Chrome.
“We also know that the IDFA is going to be substantially reduced come early January of next year when Apple implements its change. And we also know that connected TV doesn’t have third party cookies.”
Post-cookies: How publishers are authenticating audiences. Fill out the form and download the report. Sponsored by LiveRamp. https://t.co/S6ypE0TiJD pic.twitter.com/pINUJrdF45
— Digiday (@Digiday) August 28, 2020
Real identity
Clinger thinks LiveRamp’s IdentityLink (IDL) solution can help. It is a deterministic, people-based ID that, many think, can improve on the often-inaccurate practice of cookie matching.
IdentityLink gets user information from a publisher and stores it as a hash-encrypted envelope inside a publishers’ first-party cookie.
Then the publisher’s supply-side platform (SSPs) opens the envelope and passes the information to the ad bid stream, so that demand-side buying platforms (DSPs) are bidding on real identity.
“This means they can frequency-cap (ads) at the person level instead of the device level – making sure that I see five ads instead of five ads on every device I own,” Clinger says.
Excited to announce that @IndexExchange is our first SSP to enable IdentityLink in the bidstream globally! Marketers and now buy and measure on IdentityLink around the world. Appreciate all of the partnership from @mikeosullivan and the IX team!https://t.co/ThyYpLk3fC
— Travis Clinger (@tclinger) July 20, 2020
Identity in the bid stream
He thinks the approach isn’t just a boon for advertisers, but for ad-buying platforms, too.
“This is a game-changer for DSPs,” Clinger says. “DSPs are competing, of course, (amongst) themselves but, more importantly, they’re competing with the large social platforms.
“If you’re a DSP, really your true competitor is Google, Facebook and Amazon. Those platforms transact on people-based identity, so now we are giving these DSPs and the open internet that same people-based identity.”
More than 40 DSPs are now plugged in to transact on IdentityLink – amongst them, MediaMath, which went live in July.
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But, whilst many in the industry are fearful of the impact of IDFA changes, a growing number are coming to believe they also represent an evolution toward a more-effective, more-robust and more-trustful relationship with audiences.
The tech company is due to change its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), which advertisers use to identify iOS devices so they can deliver customized advertising, to a default opt-in.
It had been due to make the change in this month’s iOS 14 release, but has delayed the change to early 2021 amid industry concern.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Travis Clinger, SVP of addressability and ecosystem at LiveRamp, says the changes will be profound – but the change they drive will be ultimately beneficial.
30% opt-in fear
“The iOS 14 changes are a big deal for the ecosystem,” Clinger says. “This is a major change.”
He thinks the experience from a similar, earlier change, in which iOS now routinely asks users for active permission to continue using location tracking, shows the impact will be significant.
“We suspect that many users may not consent,” Clinger says. “We’ve seen … 70% opt-out for Location Services.
“The general industry consensus is that we’ll have similar opt-out rates, 70%, potentially even higher.”
Leaning into first-party
A similar threat is seen in the ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies, with Google’s Chrome set to follow Safari and Firefox by 2022.
But what lies on the other side of these changes is not a barren wasteland of targeting opportunity but, rather, a chance to establish real, close audience relationships that use of traditional ad targeting methods had always seemed to keep at arms-reach, execs like Clinger are saying.
“Publishers need to lean on their first-party data,” he says. “IDFA is all around device data, but publishers have user-level relationships with their consumers, they have relationships that transcend devices.”
Clinger advises brands to begin asking for email addresses, and a lot sooner than they typically may be doing today.
Publishers, too, are currently deploying strategies to do just that. For each party, it is a case of providing adequate value exchange.
While others talk, @LiveRamp and its partners have been building. The results for customers are starting to show – check out real results from recent #cookieless campaigns: https://t.co/acIu13uD9j#IDFA #DigitalMarketing #advertising
— Dan Buckstaff (@Buckstaff) August 7, 2020
Cross-device identity
One of the beauties of consented relationships with users is that they can transcend devices.
No longer is the desktop PC king. Multi-device modalities are commonplace these days. To account for that, ad-tech has attempted to match up users’ different devices into single user profiles – often with sub-par results.
But, when a user is authenticated with a publisher or brand, and when that authentication is required on each device touchpoint – be it mobile app, desktop website or iPad – the advertiser or publisher are guaranteed to see the real user each and every time.
Clinger says LiveRamp is approaching the problem by offering a “consented IDFA graph” , plus its Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), which allows operators to leverage user accounts for mobile app, display and connected TV.
Going to the Source
The company also offers IdentityLink, its people-based, deterministic identity solution.
It gets user profiles from publishers and passes them to ad bid requests, effectively allowing advertisers to bid on real identities rather than cookies, enabling cross-device targeting, frequency-capping and private marketplace continuity.
This summer, MediaMath connected IdentityLink to its Source platform, allowing ad buyers to bid on user identities across display, mobile and connected TV.
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In his recent article published in AdExchanger, he advises: “To balance portfolios, ensure 15- 20% of budgets are allocated to cross-screen audiences and backed by outcome-based guarantees.”
]]>At the 2020 US presidential election, that is set to go in to overdrive.
And it’s not just web, app and online video publishers who are set to benefit.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, LiveRamp’s chief evangelist for advanced TV Gayatri Bhalla explains how candidates are already gearing up to use advanced TV targeting techniques.
“Advocacy groups and political campaigns are permitted use cases for the voter file,” she says. “So they get every person in the United States over the age of 18, with the permission to be able to use that data.”
Bhalla says that different candidates will end up running very different campaigns because different congressional districts supply different volumes of data.
She says that means the expertise of media buyers has never been more necessary.
And changes in the digital video space are driving further interest in TV targeting.
“The loss of YouTube for targeted inventory has driven a lot of the change in the market this cycle, because … it’s very easy on Google to be able to send in a custom audience and deploy a digital video campaign on YouTube,” Bhalla says.
“When that policy changed, it was announced in November – it took effect in January, on January 7th – it took away a lot of the targeted inventory for video for campaigns. That has increased the adoption we’re seeing for these other more sophisticated platforms for video.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>For LiveRamp, crafting this engagement means taking their marketer’s data and enabling them to use that data across many different channels. In an increasingly fragmented industry, this hasn’t been so easy, but Clinger believes that there are some benefits.
“One of the benefits that we’re going to see with the end of the third-party cookie is we’re going to go from having hundreds of different cookie IDs to having common, people-based IDs that are encrypted and securely moved through the ecosystem so that your have a secure, privacy-safe way to interact with the consumer to drive a meaningful consumer journey and do it much for efficiently,” Clinger says.
This ecosystem includes all of the companies in ad tech that you need to use to drive a campaign. In order to reach somebody with an ad, it doesn’t just happen through one platform.
“All of these have to interoperate,” Clinger says. “And that’s where we come together as the neutral identity provider, connecting them all together on people-based identity and making it easy to move data in a secure and efficient manner across those platforms.”
One of the challenges he identifies is privacy, which he calls an “industry problem”. Publishers, marketers, and ad tech platforms all must take responsibility and work to improve this.
“We need to talk about what the open internet is and how the open internet works,” Clinger says. “The open internet is built on the idea of a value exchange. I as a consumer can go to a website and I can access all of this amazing content for free… and I do that by sharing my identity and data. But we need to be clear to consumers about what’s happening, we need to explain the value exchange that’s happening, we need to make it easy for them to opt out.”
Though privacy may be an issue, Clinger sees the 2020’s as an era of tremendous opportunity. There’s opportunity to build a better ecosystem, to move from cookies to people-based identity, and to regain the trust of the consumer.
“It’s going to be an exciting few years,” Clinger says. “I think we have an opportunity to transform the ecosystem, and I’m really bullish on where the ad tech ecosystem is going.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>Google has declared it will phase out all third-party cookies – the tiny, user-side files that store information – from its Chrome browser by 2022.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, LiveRamp agency partnerships GM Daniella Harkins says the news is a blow – but there is silver lining.
“It’s almost earth shattering to our industry,” Harkins says. “(But) with change comes opportunity.”
Specifically, Harkins imagines two positive trends flowing from the news:
- “If we do this right and put the right type of players back in control, we have an opportunity to reduce waste, to reduce duplication, to reduce fraud, which is a really good thing.”
- “This can be a really pivotal moment in driving connected television. We’ve had a couple of years of starts-and-stops … it hasn’t really scaled across the broader ecosystem. This is a trigger point for us to now focus on that and make that happen as well.”
The writing was arguably put on the wall for cookies when GDPR was introduced a couple of years ago, placing tighter limits on what marketers and platforms could do with user data.
In Europe, explicit cookie consent directives had already begun to eat away at cookies’ effectiveness.
Subsequently, greater user control over third-party cookies in Safari and Chrome had further reduced the extent to which advertisers can depend on the technique.
It all helps add up to make a world in which marketers will have to benefit more from an opted-in relationship with a consenting user than from cookie-ing them around the web.
But Harkins is relaxed. “Now different partners are starting to think about inserting the individual into a bid stream so that we’re not necessarily losing how we can transact,” she says. “I think that fundamentally is really going to help drive the industry forward.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
It took place at RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco, presented by ZEFR.
For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>That is according to a tech exec who says “addressable” technology is coming on stream faster than ever.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer at LiveRamp’s TV division, says: “If a brand is used to using different audience segments already on their digital buys, then why not look at what that reach looks like on your linear (TV) buy?
“(They can) extend it seamlessly using that same segment or that same audience onto new platforms like CTV and streaming apps.
“That’s something that I think is going to be a continuing story this year, which is ‘What is your total reach against audiences?’, ‘What is your incremental reach?’, ‘What is your duplicated reach?’ And furthermore, this year we’re going to have a much more concentrated effort on making big streaming platforms addressable, just like an MVPD.”
Prasad is the former TubeMogul and VideoAmp executive with a long history in online video business.
LiveRamp is an ad-tech is an audience identity resolution provider, aiming to help ad buyers knit together fragments of consumers’ disparate digital breadcrumb trails.
It offers Identity Link – a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data.
LiveRamp recently published its guide to the upcoming 2020 upfronts ad sales season.
“I think there’s an opportunity now that you can create more addressable-scale television. Stop looking at television as ‘This is linear’, ‘This is addressable’, ‘This is CTV’, ‘This is digital’ – let’s just call it all television.
“Now that you can have more addressable scale there, this should be an opportunity to take some of the dollars from digital that were maybe in not so great pools of inventory just because they targeting people thought that it worked better. I think now you’re going to be able to see a better shift towards premium site-sound-emotion.”
Prasad was interviewed by Jon Watts 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.
]]>Upfronts season peaks in May, when video and TV content owners showcase their upcoming repertoire in a bid to secure advance ad buyers from brands and their media agencies.
In this Consumer Electronics Show (CES) video interview with Beet.TV, Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer at LiveRamp’s TV division, talks about what is different about 2020’s upfronts season and what the industry is still lacking.
“Coming out of CES, it’s already basically going to be upfront season,” says Prasad, whose appointment to LiveRamp was announced at CES. “The Beet Retreat (an executive event in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in February) is basically the last respite before the next crazy months of the upfront starts.”
LiveRamp Welcomes Industry Leader Jay Prasad to the LiveRamp TV Team
Prasad is the former TubeMogul and VideoAmp executive with a long history in online video business.
LiveRamp is an ad-tech is an audience identity resolution provider, aiming to help ad buyers knit together fragments of consumers’ disparate digital breadcrumb trails.
It offers Identity Link – a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data
“What’s missing in the marketplace is a scaled, neutral company who can actually make interoperability work amongst all of the big media companies via connective tissue to the brands and the agencies,” Prasad adds.
“That means you’re not buying or selling media, you’re not owned by a media company so, therefore, you can be a trusted steward of all of the data that is required to create this liquidity.”
LiveRamp recently published its guide to the upcoming 2020 upfronts.
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.
]]>LiveRamp acquired the company back in July. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Allison Metcalfe, the GM of LiveRamp’s TV offering, explains what new capabilities she has acquired.
“We’ve been working with those guys for six months now and we are aggressively expanding the scope of measurement to include not only outcome-based measurement but total cross-screen measurement in total,” Metcalfe says.”
“What’s unique about Data Plus Math is the outcome-based (aspect). Traditional measurement in TV has been much more about reach and frequency. We are actually now able to tie a business outcome – whether that be a store visit or a purchase or a website visit – to the impression of the TV advertisement.
“Marketers are truly able to understand the true business outcome of the investment that they’ve made in TV. That is something that the industry has embraced frankly with the advent of what Facebook and Google have been able to offer marketers and now it’s being demanded across all channels.”
At the Consumer Electronics Show, LiveRamp announced that former TubeMogul and VideoAmp exec Jay Prasad is joining as chief strategy officer for its TV division.
LiveRamp Welcomes Industry Leader Jay Prasad to the LiveRamp TV Team
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.
]]>“There’s a lot of brands that are still getting their feet under them in terms of audiences and digital,” says Christine Grammier, managing director of LiveRamp, during the panel at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Publicis Media.
Much of the challenge comes from gathering the proper data sets to be able to communicate trends to clients that reflect similar successes in traditional TV models.
“Trying to use the same data on the planning side and the measurement side is hard still,” says Brian Wallach, senior vice president and CRO of advanced TV at FreeWheel. “So even though we want to do this advanced targeting and we want to find the right people that are in the market for products and services, it’s still complicated, but we’re definitely making progress.”
While we may still be awaiting a full buy-in on advanced TV models across the industry, the reach of television continues to serve a crucial purpose for advertisers, which cannot be overlooked.
“We talk a lot about television and video and its ability now to be more targeted and more personalized,” says Neil Vendetti, president of investment at Zenith. “But I think if you take a step back, the vast majority of our clients still buy TV for largely the same reason they always have, which is maximizing reach. It’s still unparalleled in the marketplace in terms of its ability to do that.”
The reach itself, however, is a metric that needs to be reimagined in order to be fully maximized.
“If we’re going to transact on reach, it needs to be across any number of video touchpoints that a consumer would reasonably consider as television-esque,” says Vendetti. “It needs to be the same kind of an experience from an advertising and content standpoint so that we can reasonably expect the same level of effectiveness.”
All panelists are in agreement that now, more than ever, capitalizing on reach means first gaining a very specific and polished idea of what your target audience looks like.
“We really try to start the conversation with audience,” says Grammier. “And then your view on what does reaching them with a premium video impression really mean kind of pivots a little bit.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But buyers need to be walked through the transition, and an ultimate conversion to 100% addressable may not be the end outcome regardless.
In a panel at Beet Retreat In The City, “What Programmers & Brands Want from Advanced TV”, three industry executives were asked why around 10% of national TV ad spend goes toward advanced TV targeting, rather than around 50%:
- A+E Networks – SVP, precision, Ethan Heftman
- LiveRamp – John Hoctor
- NBCUniversal – Dominick Vangeli
They were questioned by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel..
Transition is hard
A+E’s Heftman said: “The reality is, doing business outside of Nielsen age, gender demos is time consuming.”
NBCU’s Vangeli agreed: “The process of onboarding a first party data set … think about how much more complicated that is than transacting on adults (aged) 25 to 54.
“There’s a legacy business with decades and decades of a specific way to transact, and then all of a sudden all the viewership behaviour started to change and fragment.”
No race to bottom-funnel
Although connected TV and advanced targeting capabilities hold the potential to use attribution methods in order to offer performance-driven TV ads, A+E’s Heftman thinks assuming that will be the norm is a misconception.
“Sophisticated marketers at brands and at agencies have always known the value of television for upper funnel, awareness and consideration metrics,” he said. “And now we’re finally able to put lower funnel, foot traffic sales, those types of metrics against it.
“I think the fear of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the idea that we’re all just going to focus on the lower funnel value of television at the expense of the upper funnel… that’s really overblown because we’re all pretty sophisticated.”
Learn to love incomplete
LiveRamp’s Hoctor warned advertisers not to over-estimate the powers of the new medium.
“You have to go into the problem realising you’re never going to have all the data,” he said. “You have to know that out of the gate. Because you’re never going to know if your neighbour recommended the car, or something like that. That’s just not something that’s publicly available, or even privately available for you to do analytics against.
“We have to really calculate a baseline and what would have happened in the absence of the media that we’re measuring”
Context optimizes inventory
NBCU’s Vangeli detailed how NBCU is offering advertisers the ability to buy inventory adjacent to particular show moments, based on machine learning analysis of scripts and closed captions, plugged in to ad sales platforms.
“Let’s pretend a movie is starting to segue into a commercial break, and there’s a great scene where James Bond is shaving in the mirror,” he said. “And this is exactly something that we saw and we tested internally.
“Well then right after that, why is there not a Gillette ad or Dollar Shave Club ad? And so there’s a way to bring context at greater scale on a lot of the programming.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Now the business of marrying different consumer data sets is a big deal, and identity solutions are the glue that helps advertisers smartly target consumers across different media channels.
But one of the technology vendors helping enable that opportunity is having to counsel TV broadcasters how to shed concerns and embrace the future of audience-based ad buying.
In this video interview for Beet.TV, LiveRamp Video GM Allison Metcalfe explains what her company is doing to help.
“You have data tied to CTV IDs, you have data tied to a Comcast ID or a different kind of PII,” Metcalfe says. “We need to break down the silos, enable those data sets to be joined together, commingled for every use case that is possible.
“We have built a product specifically to help the sell side push audiences to their platform.”
The system is two-fold:
- An offline database that is rooted in Acxiom AbiliTec, the tool owned by LiveRamp’s former parent company.
- A match network where it appends devices and mobile IDs and now CTV IDs to its graph.
Such a combination could help broadcasters sell actual audiences, not just rough demographics, to advertisers.
But, speaking with Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell during “The Scope of LiveRamp TV and the Promise of Convergence“, a chat at Beet Retreat In The City, Metcalfe said she has to encourage broadcasters to do so.
“The last great divide for us is working with the sell side to get them comfortable to enable us to give that information to the buy side,” she explains, saying many distributors grumble: ‘I don’t like the idea of people being able to, in essence, query my data’.
“I understand that,” Metcalfe says. “We actually have some headway. We’ve gotten a couple of agencies that are in a beta with our product working with certain publishers and MVPDs to give them access.”
Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year and kept the LiveRamp name for its remaining services.
The duo had already been helping companies meld audience data for digital ad buying strategies. Then it began looking at TV.
After Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But how that data comes in to execution varies.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, one vendor helping brands bring it to life for advanced TV ad buying explains the different levels of sophistication with which buyers are bringing audience data to bear.
LiveRamp TV managing director was speaking with Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail.
Brands
“The brands have the data or are close to acquiring the data. Collaboration across silos inside of the brands is really one thing we’re trying to help move more quickly. We’ve got six people on our team at LiveRamp that are really trying to make sure that the digital teams inside the brands are sitting with the TV teams inside the brands.”
Agencies
“The agencies, actually, are already moving more quickly in this way of trying to break down their silos. It’s an open door we’re pushing on – when we ask them to get in a room together, it’s usually not hard. So I really think we’re in that snow and that snowball is building. So we’re rolling downhill. It’s a really exciting time to just help nudge it along.”
Digital-style TV buying
Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year and kept the LiveRamp name for its remaining services.
The duo had already been helping companies meld audience data for digital ad buying strategies. Then it began looking at TV.
After Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships
“What we’re doing to bring all of these same opportunities in TV, not dissimilar to digital, to make sure that all of those TV IDs – whether it’s a Comcast ID or an Inscape ID or a DirecTV ID – bringing all of those IDs down to a common anonymous identifier,” says Grammier.
“(The aim is) to connect data sets together and help brands target their customers in a certain way on TV, help brands use third-party data in TV.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Myth 1: Advanced TV is addressable TV – if you don’t have a niche audience, it is not for you.
According to Metcalfe, this is false. “There’s an application of advanced TV for every brand out there,” she tells O’Connell. It starts with how companies define advanced TV: LiveRamp defines it as using data and automation to buy, sell, optimize or measure TV investment. Addressable TV is one component of that, but it’s not limited to addressable TV. New capabilities around data-driven linear TV have helped advertisers figure out how to address the right audiences in more traditional channels.
Myth 2: CTV is not resolvable to identity.
Connected TV is resolvable, says Metcalfe, and it’s an area where LiveRamp has been investing in the last two years. The company matches its network partners with connected TV IDs – essentially earmarking a household for audience targeting purposes – and is able to derive demographic data of consumers and the content they’re watching.
Myth 3: LiveRamp is only an identity graph.
This used to be true, but not anymore, says Metcalfe. While the identity graph is still LiveRamp’s core product, the company has evolved its offerings alongside the evolution of the industry. Today, it also offers a platform that matches the sell side to work with distribution clients directly, as well as a measurement platform and a platform for second-party data sharing and distribution.
Myth 4: Unduplicated reach and frequency is not possible.
This one’s complicated.
“Kinda true, kinda false,” says Metcalfe. “Technically, unduplicated reach is entirely possible. It’s more of an issue where the owners of the data are nervous and hesitant to give that type of information to the buy side.”
LiveRamp is working on a solution that involves building trust and collaboration between both sides of the fence that would encourage more data sharing, resulting in clearer reach measurement.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That is the growing consensus amongst a cluster of companies aiming to use so-called “identity graphs” to help publishers fight the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Google.
“People spend more time on the open internet than the walled gardens,” says Travis Clinger, VP of strategic partnerships at LiveRamp, the identity resolution service. “But then, when you look at their revenue, the majority of the revenue goes into the walled gardens versus the open internet.”
The trouble is, Facebook is every function end-to-end, Clinger says – the buy-side platform, the sell-side platform, and the publisher, all in one. By comparison, “the open internet’s much more complicated,” he says.
But Clinger is amongst the growing band of executives promising publishers a way to redress the balance.
It revolves around giving them a clearer understanding of their audiences, by combining their own first-party data with third-party data from other sources, creating beefed-up audience profiles and thereby making it easier for ad buyers to buy the right kind of inventory to match their desired audiences.
LiveRamp’s Identity Link – a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data – is plugged in to OpenX’s ad exchange.
“Imagine an open internet where you can onboard your audience first to third-party data,” Clinger says. “You can connect those directly to person-based identifiers. You can match that directly to publish your inventory via an exchange. Then you can buy that off of a demand-side platform, and then you can measure it transparently.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series “Unlocking People-Based Marketing on the Open Web presented by OpenX.” Please find more videos from the series on this page.
]]>Lately, however, legislation and tech vendors’ own policy changes mean this super-power is diminishing. Now, it is becoming more commonplace for brands to collect, store and use their own data about their own customers and prospects.
But could that customer data start seeping back and forth between brands again? Could customers’ identities become portable again?
One of the companies that has been at the forefront of customer identity targeting seems to think so.
“One of the trends we’re seeing … is around the emergence of companies who are partners exchanging data between one another,” says David Skinner, MD of channels and alliances at Acxiom, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“An example would be, if I’m Delta Airlines and I have lots of data about folks who are travelling, whether for business or personal use, my partner Marriott might find that data very useful in its digital advertising campaigns. If I’m Instacart, my partner Kroger would be very interested in the data that I have.
“Enabling safe, secure collaboration between business partners is an area we see this customer data trend … extending out over the next five years. Today, it’s really about managing your own customer data well, towards your advertising campaigns, and then we see it increasingly being about managing that data with your business partners.”
Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to Interpublic Group last year after Facebook cut ties with such data brokers. The new LiveRamp is reconstituted, however, following its acquisition of Data Plus Math.
As the privacy pendulum has swung way from data warehouses, toward marketer-owned first-party data, what could be the consumer reaction toward brands sharing that data with other companies?
In the next few years, according to Skinner’s forecast, we may be about to find out. “This trend exists, really, across the business landscape,” he says.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But, lately, legislation and tech vendors’ own policy changes mean this super-power is drying up.
Now, it is becoming more commonplace for brands to collect, store and use their own data about their own customers and prospects.
After Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year, the reconstituted LiveRamp, following its acquisition of Data Plus Math, now wants to help the industry in a different way.
“We live in a world of massive fragmentation and that fragmentation is only increasing over time,” says CEO Scott Howe. “Virtually every major advertiser has built their own CRM file and their own sense of identity with each of their consumers.
“Increasingly we’re seeing that on the major publisher side as well. They’re not relying on any intermediary to provide that identity rather they’re going out and they’re collecting first party permission. They’re doing a value exchange with their consumers.
“And so, in a world where there are thousands of different identities it’s so important for an agnostic, neutral, seamless provider to link those all together in a permission based way.”
LiveRamp recently acquired Boston-based Data Plus Math, whose technology helps match up audience profiles and map ad exposure to conversion activities.
Data Plus Math works when marketers add its “TV Pixel” to their websites or apps. The company links tracked in-app or on-web activity to ad exposure data from millions of US homes, effectively supporting attributing ad views to website or checkout conversions.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>This theoretical game isn’t going to be won by the emergence of one overriding supply side platform, Pangis predicted in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Moderator Tracey Sheppach asked what it is that buyers can ultimately expect to see. “Once we move through this innovation, do I have two logins to two different systems Xandr and NCC? Is that what it looks like?” said Scheppach, the CEO & Founder of Matter More Media.
“I think the future of collaboration in television is a much different discussion than what a lot of people are having, which is like ‘come on my platform and then you can use my demand-side’…that is not the way we’re going to get far fast,” responded Pangis. “It’s how do we connect with one another and sort of bring each of our super powers together, and the demand side is always going to want to do something a little different.”
Allison Metcalfe, GM of LiveRamp TV, explained that about two years ago, LiveRamp began to focus on automation to better serve the sell-side. Last fall, the company sold Axciom, the data provider that had itself acquired LiveRamp in 2014. “Life has changed pretty dramatically since then,” said Metcalfe.
Along the way, LiveRamp figured out that it needed to pay more attention to the buy-side. “The reality is that LiveRamp sits on the CRM’s of close to four hundred of the largest brands in the US and internationally. Those brands rely on us for people-based marketing strategies. It’s very natural that they would look to us to help them understand what’s possible in TV,” said Metcalfe.
Easier said than done, she went on to explain. Her team of four full-time people whose daily mission is to evangelize advanced TV to brands typically come away from meetings with “a list of twelve questions” regarding how to reach those brands’ audiences across platforms “and it takes us months to answer those questions.”
Even when such discussions lead to a purchase order, the entire process can take six months. “If we could get that to maybe two or three months, that would be a win for both Nicolle and I.”
One advantage of distancing itself from Axciom is that it dispels doubts about perceptions of LiveRamp’s neutrality, according to Metcalfe. “We are a technology platform with a data marketplace.”
Under the leadership of Grant Ries, LiveRamp is helping companies that have data assets but never considered themselves to be data suppliers. Metcalfe cited the example of travel data co-op Adara, which came to LiveRamp because it wanted to get into TV.
“So now we’re able to offer some really unique targeting capabilities to the travel industry, which historically wasn’t a really big buyer of advanced TV strategies,” Metcalf said. “We’re seeing a lot of trends like that.”
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.
]]>“A lot of viewers flocked to OTT very early on from the fact that it gave them a lot of choice,” the President of Enterprise Partnerships adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think beyond that it was probably a slower place for advertisers to start to market their products and services. And now that reach has hit critical mass, we see a lot of advertising in the space.”
With so many platforms to consider agnostically across linear TV and OTT, scale and reach are top priorities. “And by and large, we’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in that area. The plumbing and the framework behind it related to technology and data, a lot of that is being built in and it’s being built from a digital lens.”
As a means of preserving a value exchange with viewers, frequency capping is needed to prevent ad overload, according to Candela. “Moving towards an automated approach in buying OTT and connecting with consumers in that environment is going to be the way in which you solve for frequency. It’s an area that we believe has a tremendous impact on the consumer.”
As TV providers and advertisers gear up for the annual NewFronts and Upfront rituals, “I think from an innovation perspective we’re going to see a variety of advancements.” Examples on the OTT side include server-sider ad insertion driving improved viewing experiences by curtailing latency, along with emerging ad formats like pop-up ads when OTT viewing is paused.
“We’re seeing the ability to really integrate interactive, shoppable ad experiences into that environment,” says Candela.
Omnicom’s centralized people-based solution for all of its agencies is called Omni, fueled by data from Experian, LiveRamp, Neustar and others.
“There’s quite a bit out there for us to look at and I think we would be maybe a bit foolish to think we could do it with pen and paper.”
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, MODI Media’s Garrett Winkler talks about the growing practice of “layering on” viewing data and how cross-platform measurement needs to advance.
Like other business units, GroupM’s MODI Media is helping advertisers gain incremental reach and frequency against priority audiences by working with data companies like LiveRamp and Experian. Connected-TV viewing insights are being augmented with smart-TV ACR data “to get at those who are either underexposed or unexposed from a potentially linear television schedule,” says Winkler, who is Director, Connected Television Lead.
Where the industry is hoping to go is in unifying cross-platform measurement solutions.
“So we’re not just measuring linear TV and connected TV, or connected TV and a digital video buy. I think those things really need to come together and we need to do a better job of showing that to brands and expressing that.”
One of the more formidable hurdles is the fragmented marketplace, according to Winkler.
“We’ve seen a number of publishers wanting to sell directly, and then also at the same time sell programmatically and then also make their inventory available to aggregators or networks or even device partners,” Winkler explains.
“Where we want to work is using connected TV as a way to find that incrementality and drive incremental reach, or additional frequency where we know a brand’s customers are more likely to convert.”
He sees a future in which there will be more layering on of “personalization or dynamic creative.” This would give brands and agencies the ability “to go to the same publishers or content producers that they know and love as consumers and they’ll be buying broadly, but they’ll be able to deliver personalized messages to different groups of their customers.”
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.
]]>A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.
Slow addressable adoption?
The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:
“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.
Brands only dipping a toe
Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”
More supply needed
Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.
“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:
“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”
Don’t target, cap
The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):
“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”
Solve for cord-cutting
But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”
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.
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