In this video interview with Beet.TV, TransUnion’s EVP of marketing solutions and media vertical Matt Spiegel explains why his company is making the move for one of the major ad data providers.
November 2020:
Experian + Tapad: $280 millionSeptember 2021:
TransUnion + Neustar: $3.1 billionIdentity is becoming expensive.https://t.co/4VZjixO3s4
— Giulio S. (@astaniscia86) September 13, 2021
Why buy?
“We’ve seen a really good complimentary set of capabilities – at the core mission, they really fit nicely,” Spiegel says.
“They built up what they call their OneID technology platform, a great cloud-based, AI-integrated, well-connected technology platform for resolving identity in real-time.
“They’ve got a clearly market-leading suite of measurement solutions, very importantly, focused on marketing performance measurement versus other types of measurement.”
Spiegel says TransUnion, which has a $23 billion market cap, is buying Neustar’s risk, communications and marketing solutions offerings, but not its security business.
TransUnion's acquisition of Neustar is a game changer in the MarTech sector. @mspiegel and team have executed on a killer identity strategy! https://t.co/HjwV9vFJ6l pic.twitter.com/XUjYC3od3T
— Terence Kawaja (@tkawaja) September 13, 2021
From information to identity
To many, TransUnion may be best known as a provider of consumer credit information.
Under Spiegel, TransUnion has been making in-roads becoming an audience data provider.
Neustar would be its latest acquisition in that space after TruSignal (2019), Signal (2020) and TruOptik (2020).
$3.1 billion — that is what your data is worth https://t.co/TBMmAEj9SB
— Josh Sternberg (@joshsternberg) September 13, 2021
Making complex simple
“We feel strongly that the era of identity (will) underpin marketing ecosystem, one that’s focused on enabling personalised marketing in both the household and individual level,” Spiegel adds.
He says the death of the cookie, the lack of mobile IDs, the increasing of streaming and the digitization of the world has made the ecosystem increasingly complex.
“In a world of multiple digital identity signals, multiple different touch points of consumers and worlds, where there are “walled gardens”, there isn’t just open access to all data.
“To have the accurate underpinning of identity is a complex data science problem
“The more technology you put behind there, the more data sourcing rules and regulations you put behind there, the more data governance you put behind there … all those things really create the ecosystem that allows you to build from a strong foundation.”
]]>The company had acquired Tru Optik, Signal Digital and TruSignal, as it built out its own ambition to provide consumer and household data to power ad targeting. Now it is bundling them into a single suite, TruAudience.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, EVP Marketing Solutions, Head of Media Vertical at TransUnion, explains the rationale.
Triple whammy
TruAudience has three legs:
- TruAudience Identity: With data on individuals, devices and homes
- TruAudience Data Marketplace, formerly Tru Optik: Features audience segments from dozens of partners including Kantar, Comscore, IHS Market, Lotame, and NCSolutions.
- TruAudience Platform: Dubbed “a rapid audience creation and management system leveraging multikey matching and machine learning to onboard first-party data and model audiences”.
Post-cookie readiness
“Our focus has been on really making sure we’re ready for the next wave of personalization underpinned by an accurate view of identity that was fundamentally fundamentally built in a post cookie world,” Spiegel says.
“It’s not just about individuals. It’s not just about devices or just about households. It’s actually fundamentally about all three.”
On TruAudience Data Marketplace, specifically, Spiegel says: “Now, whether you want to use TransUnion data or comScore data or IHS data or Kantar data, it’s, it’s a marketplace available right now to connect you to get to 80 million connected homes.
“That’s a higher match rate, more accuracy than a lot of the other solutions available on market for all that money being spent in streaming media.”
Building up
Under Spiegel, TransUnion has been making in-roads becoming an audience data provider, not just a consumer credit information provider.
It recently began powering OpenAP’s identity solution and began injecting identity into Blockgraph, a TV industry initiative.
According to Spiegel in TransUnion’s product announcement: “The marketing and advertising sector is on the precipice of reinvention with the demise of third-party cookies, the rise of privacy-centric solutions and the overarching need for brands to break down silos and communicate to consumers across channels — from connected TV and audio, to direct mail and linear TV.”
]]>In the latest move, OpenID, the US TV network consortium, is launching its own such identity system.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, who runs the media division of TransUnion, explains how the identity system, powered by his company, will work.
Powering ID
“Each of these different players in the industry need to create an understanding of identity and be able to translate that across different platforms and have the right connect connection points,” Spiegel says. “They all have to be able to translate from one data set to another, from one identity to another.
“In order to do that behind the scenes, you’ve got to have the right different data matching mechanisms … called ‘crosswalks’ … to maintain a translation layer from one ID set to another. What we’re doing is giving … the OpenAP ID that ability.
“When they work with their network partners or their advertising partners, because it’s underpinned by TransUnion’s intelligence and we are connected to all these different ID sets, the ability is (for targeting) to … start anywhere. (For example), start with a client’s first-party data, start with the network’s first party data, start with a third-party available data.”
OpenAP’s progress
OpenAP is a way for ad buyers to buy across AMC Networks, Fox, NBC Universal, ViacomCBS, Univision and The Weather Channel properties.
Launched three years ago, OpenAP first aimed to harmonize the meta data descriptions used by a variety of TV broadcasters in order to make selling more scaleable.
Then it made a step-change by launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
And it launched a supply-side platform (SSP) in January.
Start anywhere
It announced its OpenID in April, calling it a “a consistent person-level audience definition that is unified across linear and digital video environments and enables efficient matching with viewership currencies for distribution to multiple television publishers, evolving advanced TV from age and gender demographics to ID-based targeting”.
According to the launch:
]]>“Advertisers will start every campaign by identifying an audience that will be resolved to a set of OpenIDs, which can be broad or narrow based on campaign objectives.
“Audiences are defined at the ID level then matched to viewership data and platform IDs for linear, digital and addressable activation to create a unified, cross-platform OpenID audience.
“OpenIDs are shared with TV publishers for use in linear and digital campaigns, with publishers using their internal tools to build targeted media plans.”
She explains the rising value of contextual marketing, the need for unified identity solutions, and “clean rooms.” Addressing the upside of the pandemic for Meredith, she says the publishers’ editorial focus on home and family has become more relevant during these times.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.
]]>Blockgraph – owned by Comcast NBCUniversal, Charter Communications, Inc. and ViacomCBS – is partnering with TransUnion, the consumer data company which has been making in-roads as an ad data provider.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, EVP Marketing Solutions and Head of Media at TransUnion, explains how the arrangement will work.
Privacy + identity
According to the pair’s announcement:
“Blockgraph will leverage TransUnion’s growing portfolio of identity and data-driven audience solutions, including privacy-focused identity, data modeling, audience creation and activation solutions.
“Blockgraph also will utilize data marketplace applications through TransUnion’s recent acquisition of Tru Optik.”
Spiegel says: “What Blockgraph has really been working on is the technology infrastructure for a safe set of environments – both privacy-safe and data security-safe environments – where specifically a lot of the cable operators, the MVPs and the networks, have a home to be able to place their customer data.
“Where TransUnion comes in is helping provide a lot of that identity, intelligence, and the tools to use the data within their environment.”
‘Transact at scale’
Blockgraph Spreads Its Wings: More Partners, Manningham Says
Spiegel continues: “We’re really working together to provide the best of that data security, privacy centred world that comes from Blockgraph’s platform and technology married to TransUnion’s identity intelligence and data creation tools so that it’s easier for both the buy side and the sell side to transact in more addressable means.
“Putting those things together actually makes it possible for the markets to transact with much more scale and much more ease.”
For several years now, tech vendors have searched for an application for blockchain technology in ad-tech. The technology, a variant of which powers cryptocurrencies, works by using a shared, “immutable” – or, untamperable – ledger of actions like ad transactions.
Blockgraph is using it to help publishers improve data privacy and movability in an industry that suffers greatly from lack of supply chain transparency, where intermediary vendors stand accused of obfuscating effectiveness and pocketing “ad tax”.
The company has been signing deals with more data partners lately.
Data marketplace
TransUnion to Acquire Tru Optik To Bolster Connected Identity Matching
But the TransUnion partnership could give Blockgraph customers a big new data set to play with.
“It’s not as simple as people often think to be able to translate a household ID into a specific target segment, into the ability to deliver that,” Spiegel adds.
“Whether you’re buying off of a given linear platform or a network, whether you’re buying through an MVPD or whether you’re buying through a streaming service, those things that are not inherently connected.”
The hook-up will be bolstered by TransUnion’s recent acquisition of Tru Optik, the data marketplace and management platform that includes the behavior of more than 80 million homes on connected TV, streaming audio and gaming.
]]>Creating a unified identity graph, and establishing “clean rooms” and interoperable marketplaces – all the while in a privacy compliant manner – are some of the industry topics discussed here.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.
]]>With the acquisition of 4C last year, Mediaocean has become a cross platform player, expanding beyond its roots to planning, optimization and measurement.
These are some of the conversations in this podcast with Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise and guest host Matt Spiegel, EVP of Transunion and head of its fast growing media vertical.
Bill and Matt take a deep dive around the challenges of interoperability among digital platforms and TV, measurement vs. currency, the needs for identity, and the right balance between efficiency versus price. Lots covered here.
Thanks Matt and Bill. Great conversation.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.
]]>Says Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Omnicom Media Group in this BeetCast podcast moderated by Matt Spiegel, EVP of Transunion.
Part of the problem is that sensational content optimizes algorithms that in turn pull advertising in. While the number of impressions might be high, associations with the content is not necessarily valued and potentially detrimental to the advertiser, Hagedorn warns.
In this wide-ranging conversation, topics include identity, privacy and the importance of the integration of the supply chain with media investment.
The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Opik, a Transunion company. Please visit this page to find more episodes of the BeetCast and to subscribe via your preferred podcast service.
]]>“We’ll look back two years from now, and consumers will say, ‘I wish we just had cookies again, because I can delete those — and I didn’t have to log in and hit ‘accept’ on every site I go to,'” Jay Friedman, president of data-driven advertising agency Goodway Group, said in this interview with Matt Spiegel, executive vice president of marketing solutions and head of media vertical at TransUnion.
Google this year announced it would end support for third-party cookies, which are data files that websites put on browsers to help track consumers’ online activities, in its Chrome browser by 2022. Because Chrome is a popular way for consumers to use the internet, Google has a significant effect on the digital advertising industry.
Source: eMarketer, Winterberry Group
If the loss of third-party cookies in Chrome weren’t enough of a challenge, Apple this year said an updated version of the software that runs its iPhone, iPad and Apple TV streaming devices will show an opt-in alert. The notification will tell Apple customers when apps want access to the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), a randomized number the company assigns to its devices that helps to track audiences and serve targeted ads in apps. Apple had planned to implement the change this year, but pushed back the date to early next year to help app developers prepare.
As these changes hinder audience tracking, consumers may become more frustrated with ads that aren’t targeted, but are still intrusive, Friedman said.
“If unaided, consumers would rather see ads that are relevant to them — because you’re going to see ads either way,” he said.
More First-Party Data
First-party data that consumers share directly with advertisers and publishers will become more valuable in marketing communications as the third-party cookie becomes diminished.
“It forces everyone to get their first-party data in order,” Friedman said. “When before, we really didn’t know the name of the person we were targeting very often. Now, we will.”
Measuring the effectiveness of campaigns will still be a priority, even it is more challenging without third-party cookies. Friedman said advertisers and their agencies will continue to use the tools they have, while developing new tools on a parallel track.
“Getting our first-party data in order as a marketer is a no-brainer, regardless of what happens,” Friedman said. “Getting comfortable with the idea of incrementality as a metric is a good idea, regardless of what happens.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by TransUnion. For more videos, please click here.
]]>Blockgraph is a JV of Comcast, ViacomCBS and Charter’s Spectrum Reach that uses the technology behind Bitcoin to enable privacy-compliant sharing of digital ad transaction and effectiveness data between partners.
Now it is broadening its partner base from broadcasters to the back-end.
Identity partners
In this video interview with TransUnion’s media EVP Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Blockgraph CEO Jason Manningham explains.
“It started with distribution – we focused a lot of our efforts, initially focusing on some of the largest distributors in the US,” Manningham says.
“What we see next is working with both demand partners, and bringing them into the equation.
“But, in order to do that, the base of the network will be working with some of the biggest identity enablers in the industry who have the right signals and have the rights to use those signals at scale.
Blockgraph Touts Data Control To Major Players, New CRO Schleider Says
Chain gang
For several years now, tech vendors have searched for an application for blockchain technology in ad-tech.
It works by using a shared, “immutable” – or, untamperable – ledger of actions like ad transactions.
Digital advertising, of course, is an industry that suffers greatly from lack of supply chain transparency, where intermediary vendors stand accused of obfuscating effectiveness and pocketing “ad tax”.
For Manningham, use of Blockgraph could be widespread. He continues: “Then likewise, other kinds of applications, whether it’s modelling, or being able to push segments to all of the programmatic platforms.
“So, we really see this as an ecosystem where we’re bringing together all of the right constituents for whether it’s for addressable TV, data-driven linear, or cross-channel video, which would also include OTT/CTV.
“So for us, it started with core addressable TV, and now we’re increasingly focusing on cross-platform, and working with some of the biggest identity and data partners in the world to make this a reality at scale.”
Comcast’s Blockgraph Sets Up As A JV With Charter, ViacomCBS
Kicking off
Blockgraph was launched in 2017. It uses peer-to-peer technology to let marketers, publishers and distributors match audience segments without sharing consumers’ identifiable information and without any technology intermediaries.
Blockgraph, which already included Comcast, ViacomCBS and Charter’s Spectrum Reach as partners, recently reconstituted as a joint venture, in which the three groups will take equal ownership. Jason Manningham, who was GM of the project, became CEO.
Comcast’s NBCUniversal also began integrating Blockgraph into AdSmart, the pioneering addressable TV platform it got when Comcast acquired Sky.
Video chain
Manningham, tells Spiegel the tech has application in digital video.
“The landscape is just inherently more complex when it comes to video,” he says. “You have distribution channels, and those are increasingly more fragmented.
“And those are not always the same party as the inventory publisher, as the brand advertiser or the data provider.
“So all of these companies need to work together, but they need to do it in a controlled, compliant fashion.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>The company, which is best known as a provider of consumer credit reporting, has made a significant push into advertising technology with several acquisitions including this month’s deal to buy Tru Optik. The company’s patented identity graph, Tru Optik Household Graph, has information on more than 80 million U.S. households, covering more than 90% of how people consumer content on internet-connected devices including smart TVs, gaming consoles and smart speakers.
TransUnion 18 months ago participated in a funding round of Tru Optik, and this year’s sudden jump in streaming media usage among homebound consumers during the pandemic demonstrated the need for audience-driven measurement.
“We recognized 18 months ago when we made the investment in Tru Optik that they were doing some amazing innovation in a part of the world that was clearly going to become bigger,” Matt Spiegel, executive vice president of marketing solutions and head of media vertical at TransUnion, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “We were sitting on a really amazing set of a data assets that I expected to become more important as the modern marketing world is becoming more people-based and more driven by identity.”
Cookie-Less Future
TransUnion plans to integrate Tru Optik’s platform into its suite of marketing solutions, making its service more nimble.
“We’ve been working over the last 18 months to connect our various views of identity, and the tools and products on top of that we think the market needs,” Spiegel said. “We had to do it as a single entity, we need to be able to move faster, get more integrated, provide the level of innovation that can only be done when you are truly one company.”
The buyout of the remaining interest in Tru Optik follows TransUnion’s acquisition in August of Signal, a technology company focused on real-time data consumer collection, and last year’s purchase of TruSignal, a provider of people-based marketing solutions.
The acquisitions come as growing demands for consumer privacy and stricter regulations on data sharing force the media and marketing industries to develop new methods of tracking audiences. Tech giants like Google and Apple are taking steps to improve privacy measures. Google has indicated it will stop supporting third-party cookies in its popular Chrome browser starting in early 2022, while Apple plans to make app developers obtain consumer consent to opt in to being tracked with its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), among other measures.
“It’s important that the market recognizes we’re going to have one big TransUnion market set,” Spiegel said. “The future of the media and marketing world is driven by identity- and people-based marketing, and that is done at the individual level, but also the household level.”
]]>Auto brands like Nissan have had no choice but to move to a more digital strategy. Many dealerships are not considered essential businesses and instead of forcing consumers into a shopping process that they’re not comfortable with, brands now want to offer options for both. This way, even when these businesses do open back up, the customers feel as safe and supported as possible.
“We and our dealers have been working really closely with our local governments on, how we can actually start to have virtual retailing, which, in automotive wasn’t very prevalent, and what we’ve done on our end is actually start to accelerate ecommerce projects and shopping tools that were maybe seven months if not a year down the road and accelerate those so that we could begin implementation and launch those over the next weeks into the next couple of months,” Witherspoon says.
According to Witherspoon, higher priced items like cars still aren’t retailing online at the same rate as they would at dealerships, but that this is due to regulatory reasons, and lack of infrastructure there, which is what Nissan is working to fix with more urgency. For marketing, Witherspoon and her team have tried to look more specifically at the consumer sentiment in these times, and then evolve their marketing messages accordingly.
“It’s definitely a different approach versus what typically happens which is, ‘this is what we as the brand or marketer wants to say, now we’re going to put it out there and let you adapt to it,’” Witherspoon says. “It’s definitely the other way around. And even now that we’re a couple of months in, we’re starting to tweak and adjust all of our existing communications over time based on the feedback that we’re getting from consumers and what the consumer sentiment is.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, this meant avoiding a heavy sales push and focusing more on instilling trust and confidence in Nissan as a brand and an awareness of what is going on in the world. Over time, this has adjusted slightly, with the brand pinpointing confidence factors, whether it is services they can provide, payment deferrals, or other more specific messages.
Plans have changed around planning large media buys as well. For Nissan, this meant pausing the launch of one of their newest Sentra model until a time in which there will be more demand.
“We’re looking at re-planning that,” Witherspoon says. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last several weeks looking at the ways that we can predict or project where consumer sentiment and where their media behavior is going to be.”
This includes considering a range of scenarios, from the optimistic outcome of a complete return back to normal, to the more pessimistic view of this having a long lasting impact on consumer sentiment. This requires flexibility, from brands to marketers to publishers.
“I think this will change what the Upfront process is,” Witherspoon says. “I think that it was already starting to move in a more flexible direction and a much more advanced targeting standpoint, but I think it’s really, ‘what is the flexibility with your marketing dollars?’ I think that’s where we’ll see the next shift.”
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page. We recorded Allyson in her home in Nashville and Matt at his in Chicago.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Spiegel, head of media at TransUnion, says diminishing ad prices, more opportunistic ad buys and targeting technology will combine to welcome in a new tier of brand advertiser that traditionally had not played in TV.
For one, Spiegel thinks seasonal “back-to-school” and holiday diary markers will see healthy ad spend.
“There’s going to be a lot of pent up demand come this holiday,” he says. “I think there’s going to be a lot of money there.”
Door is opening
Couple that with a raft of content, like top-tier sports, that otherwise have pocketed premium ad spend; Spiegel suggests it leaves remaining content, with cheaper ad rates, ripe for newcomers.
“I think it opens the door for a lot of new advertisers,” he explains. “A lot of new categories that have historically been crowded out (will) likely have room to play.
“TV has often been a big-marketer game, especially linear television, because it’s a high dollar commitment (and) often a longer-term commitment.
“As more dollars are kept to be spent at the moment of opportunity … you leave room for the torso of clients that are not the big spenders but are in many categories that, especially right now, can spend more money.”
Upfronts have changed
The upfront ad sales season is the time of year when programmers traditionally tout their upcoming content slates to secure upfront ad buy commitments.
But securing advance bookings from brands in this environment could be more difficult than before, whilst many TV broadcasters are significantly discounting their ad rates in a bid to stop haemorrhaging under-pressure advertisers.
Spiegel agrees that “the (TV) upfront has probably changed forever”.
He imagines new advertising coming from higher-education e-learning providers, all kinds of subscription services and from fitness operators launching digital content strategies.
eMarketer reports how ad costs are currently falling across the board.
Data-driven
The confluence of circumstances could be good news for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, which have already been advertising on TV over the last couple of years but which could use the opportunity of cheaper inventory to make a bigger impression.
They are the kinds of marketers that are “data-driven”, Spiegel says: “Those types of marketers are the ones that therefore expect their media partners, their ad tech partners, or a combination of the two, to do a better job allowing micro-segmentation, to do a general better job allowing frequency of optimizations, to do dynamic creative messaging, and to do the types of stuff that really leads to higher marketing ROI.
“Personalization is becoming ever more important. To enable those types of things, you needed a firm grasp on understanding individuals and understanding the households with various identity signals that are necessary to address the appropriate devices, in many cases meaning not relying on a cookie ID but relying other identity signals.”
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Ad tech has been on the front end of that curve for some time now, but there has been a shift in the speed at which every industry and individual has had to adapt to this digitization, from food delivery and subscription services to streaming services.
“When you’re forced to make a choice between not having access or accessing these types of goods and services through a digital perspective, it changes the game,” Spiegel says.
As a result, Spiegel believes that the industry has fundamentally altered the trajectory of consumer behavior for both short and long term. Now that people have picked up these digital behaviors, they likely will not ditch them once the world returns to normal.
“I think the more that we demonstrate to people that you can interact in this digital way and more people get comfortable with it, it’s just going to stick,” Spiegel says. “And I think that has implications not just for the short term but for the long term as well.”
For digital companies like TransUnion, part of the leadership process right now is accepting that there are more unknowns than knowns, and being transparent and honest organization-wide. It also means being active in seeking out more information.
“For my section of the industry within TransUnion that means how do we get a handle on what does the ad spending look like over the next six to twelve months, what categories are clearly going to go dark and what categories might replace them?” Spiegel says. “What’s the impact of the fact that there are no big TV tenpole events right now and how does that impact how spending will change?”
It all comes down to prioritizing information and figuring out what the trends are going to be for the remainder of the year, and from there making product and market decisions based on those realities. Spiegel recommends that companies be “conscious capitalists” in the near future, not simply chasing the dollar at all costs but rather providing value to clients and partners in information, analysis, and assessment.
“There’s a marathon aspect to this and not a sprint,” Spiegel says. “We’ve got to do right by all constituents and that will, at the end, all work out.”
]]>While Spiegel isn’t ready to declare the death of cookies for tracking consumers, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference that they’re increasingly less relevant.
“One of the things we’re spending a lot of time on is where is new consumption happening and what’s the identity signals in that new world,” says Spiegel, who joined TransUnion last August from MediaLink. “And a lot of that has to do with certainly not only devices but IP-based content.”
TruSignal uses its custom audience-building platform to deliver predictive scoring powered by artificial intelligence, making data available and actionable in almost real time for one-to-one addressable marketing. The combination of its technologies and information will allow TransUnion’s inherent accuracy to operate at scale, according to a news release.
Spiegel sees TransUnion, the consumer credit reporting agency whose data holdings include 200 million files profiling nearly every credit-active consumer in the United States, as an enabler capable of straddling both privacy and technology.
“We are fortunate to be able to actually leverage and utilize PII in a safe, secure manner,” he says, because TransUnion is used to government regulations “and leaning into the new privacy regulations that will come. A lot of the players in the ecosystem are uncomfortable leveraging PII. They don’t have the infrastructure to do that.”
As opposed to distributing information, TransUnion helps to be a “validation source to turn a lot of unknown information into known information. Get beyond devices, get beyond a thin slice of information about consumers into a full picture.”
While the company has invested in Tru Optik and is helping it “continue to power their solutions,” TransUnion sees its data science and technology capabilities as helping marketers understand “what to show to consumers and what next best action to highlight, what offer to show, what’s the contextual as well as personal experience, how do you make that more relevant.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>That comes after Facebook, suffering its own Cambridge Analytica scandal, last year shut Partner Categories, the program which it allowed advertisers to target ads using customer profiles bought from Experian, Acxiom, Epsilon, Oracle Data Cloud, TransUnion, WPP, Greater Data, Quantium and CCC.
So how is a company like TransUnion, a credit scoring agency, negotiating its new business initiative – selling consumer financial data to help marketers better target their advertising?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel explains: “We’re a company that’s been under various regulations given the data we touch for many years, and as the world becomes more and more highly regulated in the marketing space (through) things like GDPR and CCPA and the like.
“We’re used to having a compliance footprint that understands how to deal with regulations.”
So what is TransUnion, a credit score supplier, offering advertisers? Partly, a suite Spiegel calls “Digital Marketing Solution”, partly a data offering to big publishers and ad-tech agencies.
He explains: “How can we take the same type of assets that we have … and apply it to an industry which is clearly becoming more data driven, more driven by data making decisions and have a bigger need for data sciences?”
It’s something TransUnion is now bringing to connected TV, after a partnership with Tru Optik, the OTT targeting and measurement tech vendor, which sees Spiegel’s company invest in the Stamford, CT-based firm.
“What Tru Optik has built is an aggregator of that kind of data stack, that data marketplace, and we think has the best one that we’ve seen in the marketplace,” Spiegel says.
“We loved their approach to the market … being this kind of connective tissue between different source of inventory, different sources of data, to make the ability to transact in this OTT world much more simple and scalable.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>For years, marketers have talked about reaching a point in the advertising ecosystem where they can know so much about their audiences that they can craft and customize the most precise messages and content for consumers.
That is still the hope, but getting there is going to take some foundational components, a conference on the topic of “relevance” in advertising heard.
“Ultimately if media companies and advertisers and marketers are going to be able to deliver good, relevant content, it has to start with understanding consumer behavior and understanding consumer identity,” TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel told Beet.TV in this video interview.
“How we can provide information about consumers so that you can make sure you’re dealing with as much certainty as possible?”
That’s something Spiegel has been working on since this summer, when he joined TransUnion, a credit score and identity protection company, from MediaLink, a strategic advisory.
Why did Spiegel make the switch? In TransUnion’s words: “His expertise will further TransUnion’s ability to deliver the addressable solutions required by enterprise marketers and media companies to make informed modeling, strategic investment planning and digital targeting decisions.”
And that makes relevance, well… relevant.
“Part of what we’re doing is being able to use that kind of intelligence to provide targeting segments, both custom-built as well as syndicated audiences, that allow us to help be that fuel,” Spiegel tells Beet.TV.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>These are among the takeaways from a panel discussion at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. It brought together representatives from OMD, Nissan, true[X] and Wavemaker led by moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman likened the current wave of video ad format experimentation to the early days of digital media. While there were potentially innovative solutions, they came at such a pace that “you really didn’t get the time to absorb the learnings and focus. So it just became another version of spray and pray with new ad formats,” Richman said.
Her advice to the audience: “You want to choose your partners wisely. Because there is the potential risk right now where there’s a new-ad format fatigue, where everyone is coming out with different formats.”
Alternately, having worked with true[X], Richman suggested focusing on “learnings across a few different formats, understand the measurement, understand the operational impact all the way through billing, because that’s what really matters too when it comes to scaling solutions.”
true[X] President Pooja Midha said that engagement ads only belong in front of truly premium and compelling content, so as to offer a real value exchange. “We’ve done some incredible work with Nissan where we’ve gotten to talk about both a new model, the LEAF, as well as Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. That’s a lot to get across even in a 30, but when you’ve got this rich canvas you can really go deeper and I think that’s what engagement is all about.”
Allyson Witherspoon, who heads up Global Brand Engagement at Nissan, would like to add value-based ad measurement to the industry’s standard measurement metrics.
“Lead generation is a big thing in automotive, but that may not be the most important metric for an individual experience,” said Witherspoon. “So you have to look at it by experience. If we keep measuring agencies and media performance based on the last several decades, we’re never really going to advanced what we need to do.”
Asked by Spiegel “What do we have to do to be here next year or the year after and this becoming commonplace?,” OMD’s John Osborn said the industry has a habit of productizing new things and then trying to force fit them into legacy measurement. “And the two don’t always meet,” said Osborn. “I think that we need to figure out different ways of looking at different measurement systems that are matched to the types and formats that are coming out faster than ever before.”
One challenge with emerging ad formats is that “everyone’s kind of trying to attack it, but they’re all in their own swim lanes and I think we need to come together. It’s got to be intentional and deliberate and I think we collectively need to come together to tackle it. I don’t think any one party alone can do it,” Osborn added.
Richman described the role that marketer procurement people play in innovation as “huge.” They can either allow spending in new ways “or they can control and say, ‘no it’s year after year, it’s like for like.’ And you’re going to be judged only by the money that you save, which tends to lead just to measurement only being by the CPM cost.
“Until we bring them into the conversation, it feels like we’re still going to have this logjam of only so much money can be spent on innovation because we’re not being judged by anything but pricing,” said Richman.
Witherspoon has made progress on that front because procurement at Nissan has been open to new ideas. “That was kind of the aha moment for me is that they’re actually kind of dying for this innovation as well because they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again they don’t know any different. They were really open to it.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.
Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.
‘Not waiting’
“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.
“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’
“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”
Brands ‘thirsty’ for more
That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.
“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”
Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.
“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”
Tech ‘not ready’
Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Witherspoon was one of four panelists who discussed new video ad formats and how creative and media agency professionals are working more closely together to build stories relevant to specific audiences. It was one of several discussions at Cannes under the auspices of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television.
Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink kicked things off by asking “How much more will you pay for a non-standard ad?”
Responded true[X] President Pooja Midha, “It’s how much more will you pay for impact. Non-standard, who cares?”
That’s where things got complicated, as Witherspoon explained. “It’s difficult, because sometimes you don’t always know what the outcome is going to be. Within this campaign or within each kind of percentage of always on, what amount of that is going to be something that you’re going to be testing.”
Which is where Nissan’s “pilots” come in and how testing is needed to help change the thinking within procurement. “Once you take the results from that, how do you actually start to scale that? I think that’s when you can start to advance the financial discussion, once you’re able to show that impact across, in the case of Nissan, all of our models, across all of our markets, that’s a very powerful discussion to have,” said Witherspoon.
Wavemaker’s Amanda Richman said the test-and-learn approach also needs an activation plan. “So as you’re presenting a learning road map, you actually can say, ‘if this works we’re going to scale immediately.’ We’re not going to wait and have another committee meeting, it’s not going to be three months. Turn on a dime and then roll on to the next test.”
Along the way, people on both the creative and media side need to come together more than ever, said John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA, because media plans traditionally have been built in a process wherein storytelling has been relegated to creative agencies.
“There’s a gap in between, which is story building, and I think it’s amazing what happens when you get tight teams sitting together, working together from the onset, as opposed to the traditional iterative process where sometimes media comes in late in the game,” Osborn said.
He described the process with Nissan, TBWA and OMD “literally welded together at the hip, working on which types of data will better inform the right kinds of storytelling.”
true[X] does real-time creative optimization for Nissan as it simultaneously measures real-time brand lift. “We launch with one version of an engagement, and as we see the data coming back we’re able to actually build with Nissan and its agency a more elaborate version, or a version that lets you go deeper or let’s us hone in on what we see really lifting,” said Midha.
Spiegel wanted to know whether creative personalization is right for all brands, particularly the biggest ones with the widest target audiences.
“One of the things we’ve seen across the tens of thousands of engagements we’ve built is that strong, persistent branding, even for very, very well advertised brands, is really important in actually driving results for them,” Midha said.
Richman related that one of Wavemaker’s clients describes its target audience as “anyone with a mouth.” Still, such a brand might need to achieve relevance with a new generation of consumers or could be missing opportunities for frequency or selling across its whole portfolio.
“A level of personalization may not be one hundred segments, but looking it from the lens of two or three it will drive the business forward,” Richman said.
The panelists agreed that campaign measurement will continue to be one of the biggest challenges, given cross-platform content consumption. The fact that advertisers and publishers alike recognize this and want to change old habits, there are fundamental barriers that will take time to overcome.
“Right now, to launch anything, for example inside of CTV, which is such an important environment, it’s not one platform. It’s a bunch of different devices that are all built on different code bases. It’s not simple,” said Midha.
As the discussion shifted to things like total ratings points and sound media strategies, Osborn summed things up by observing “Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the media jargon there’s a great brilliance in just thinking as a human would think.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.
“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…
- Unification: “Premium television content now can touch consumers across many different points within a consumption journey, whether that is a traditional piece of glass on a wall, whether that’s a mobile phone, whether that’s a tablet. The ability to unify that around content, around this premium experience of television content, that’s sort of critical piece number one.”
- Cooperation: “OpenAP is sort of an incredible effort that has been bearing a ton of fruit over the past 12, 18 months. And over the next 12, 18 months I think it’s going to absolutely accelerate the ability for marketers to come in and buy television in a more comprehensive and cohesive way.”
- Bridging the activation gap: “I can go to Facebook, I can go to Google, I can go to Amazon, I can bring data, I can bring advanced targeting. We’ve been limited to Nielsen demography for the past 50 years in the TV ecosystem. But with OpenAP and with other efforts that are happening across the market, we are seeing that fundamentally change.”
Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.
Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”
She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.
Accept inconsistency
But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.
“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel prefaced the conversation by calling into question the age-old format of 40 minutes of TV content leavened with 20 minutes of commercials. Encountering no disagreement, Spiegel elicited the following condensed thoughts from the varied panelists.
Amanda Richman, CEO, Wavemaker US: “This battle for attention is really sparking different ways of working. And we’re excited about now it’s becoming less of a focus just on the precision and data and targeting and keeping that within the realms of digital media only. And maybe back to the creative agencies and a different level of collaboration to recognize that we need to actually help develop the stories and messages that are bespoke to these new ad formats and platforms and broader distribution.”
John Osborn, CMO, OMD USA: “I think media more and more is just as innovative and in some ways just as creative as the creative storytellers in a creative agency. No one’s ever gone wrong by considering the consumer first and foremost. You’re seeing I think some real evolution in terms of innovation in different formats if you think of what Fox is doing with JAZ pods or NBC with Prime Pods and you’re seeing a variety of different formats coming to life. But I think a lot of the conversation is around formats. I think more and more we have to change and tilt the conversation more to experiences.”
Allyson Witherspoon, GM, Global Brand Engagement, Nissan: “Relevancy becomes what the experience is because we know so much more about who our consumers are and what their interests are that we need to be serving up content and experiences to them that’s relevant. In the case of automotive, we know when they’re going to be in market, we even know what type of vehicle that they’re in market for. So we should not be advertising a van to them if they’re interested in a sedan and we know that type of information. And then it’s to the point of how you can combine media and creative to actually deliver that message, which I think is still not something that we’re able to do at scale but it’s definitely something that we’re trying to build towards.”
Pooja Midha, President, true[X]: I’m heartened and I love the discussion that’s happening these days around bringing the consumer back to the center. While I’ve not been with the company terribly long, true[X] has been around for years and really from the beginning said we need to think about the consumer. We need to respect the consumer. We have got to think about messaging and context, advertising and an experience that is worthy of that consumer’s attention. If we’re not delivering that, then we really have no right to be there and to be expecting something back. It’s nice to be in Cannes because everyone we work with is represented. The creative side of the business, the media side of the business, the agency side, client marketers even the technology companies and measurement companies we partner with to deliver.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“So now we’re talking about what’s the right messaging format, how do you tell interesting stories,” Spiegel adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recently concluded Cannes Lions 2018.
Such discourse generates lots of discussion about, among other things, interesting new ad formats, the role of engagement ads in television, more precise micro segmentation and ad sequencing.
There’s another side to the coin that is a rapidly changing television landscape, according to Spiegel. “The business of television is certainly dealing with figuring out how to equal itself as a platform at scale, much like you’d see from Google and Facebook. In many ways, television today already drives more scale, but for marketers they want to figure out how can I buy against many audiences in one simple way.”
A lot of what was talked about at Cannes is how the business of television is “evolving to do that, and how are the various traditional competitors playing enough together to enable that. I think that’s a good hot topic as well,” says Spiegel.
On the subject of ad loads, keep all eyes on consumers, because “millions and millions” have voted that they prefer an ad-free experience.
“The dichotomy from ad-free on hand to the traditional broadcast model on the other, which is as much as twenty percent out of an hour of content is commercials, is the other extreme. I think that choice for consumers is pretty easy.”
So there’s little doubt that the “ecosystem of media companies” understand that they need to shorten formats, create new ad experiences and rethink how they make the exchange between content and advertising. What will the impact be on media company revenue?
“I don’t think that’s fully solved. I don’t think anyone would tell you on the sales side that they have that question fully answered. But I think they realize they’re going to have to experiment,” Spiegel says.
“And maybe there might be some short-term up and down pain, but I think there’s also the reality that marketers are willing to potentially pay more for things when they have less clutter and they’re more engaging.”
Proving paying more is worth it falls to measurement, particularly when it comes to marketers’ procurement teams.
“You’ve got to bring procurement departments along to make sure it’s not only about cheaper, it is actually about more effective,” Spiegel says. “These things are alright and I think we’re going to get there, but I think as you point out we’re in for probably some years of some bumpiness as those revenue shifts kind of shake out.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>“I think we have to back up from that. What we’re really doing is talking about the integration of mass reach with sophistication of measurement, targeting and ultimately relevance,” says the Managing Director of strategic advisory firm MediaLink.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the RampUp 2018 conference, Spiegel talks about the “next wave” in identity resolution and why marketers should recognize the value of a blend of more granular targeting and pure scale.
“Identity is going to power the ad business and marketing, however you want to define it,” says Spiegel. “Identity is the underpinning of future success without any question.”
He observes that the gap between companies like Facebook and Google and big media companies in being able to more precisely target audiences is shrinking as the latter expand their digital footprints and seek better linear TV options. “You now have this whole more sophisticated level of targeting and measurement that the industry on the more traditional media side couldn’t have before.”
All the distribution points of content “built into that ecosystem is the power of identity, the potential of identity anyway, if they stitch it together the right data,” says Spiegel. That connected to “this massive world of linear television, which by the way is still really big and still a lot of money and still has a lot of value, those two things combined I think are huge.”
The trick, he adds, is understanding identity with sophistication. On-boarding data and employing device graphs is all well and good, but the hardest part is matching individuals to their households.
“We’ll keep talking about matching and on-boarding, and there’s value. But what we’ll really start to talk about is the applications built on top of a sophisticated identity resolution system. That’s what I think’s much more interesting.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.
Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:
“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”
Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:
“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”
Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:
“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”
Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.
To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”
Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
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