“If you go to more performance-savvy advertisers and performance-savvy customers, the questions are about understanding cross-screen exposures to business outcomes or KPIs that the marketer may need,” Louqman Parampath, vice president of product management – advertising, at streaming-device maker Roku, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV.
Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Parampath described the current condition of cross-screen measurement and the challenges of combining data sets from different sources.
“Most measurement partners don’t have all of these data assets and identity graph capabilities, and a methodology all buttoned up for a complete solution,” he said. “It is going to be an evolutionary improvement on how we measure, how we improve our capabilities – and how the ecosystem itself works with each other. These are different datasets, often not controlled by a single party.”
Roku in March formed a strategic alliance with TV ratings company Nielsen aimed at improving media measurement and video advertising. Roku agreed to buy Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business that includes its video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies.
The partnership included a plan to integrate complementary Nielsen ad and content measurement products into the Roku platform and advance the Nielsen One cross-media measurement solution.
“It’s a step forward for traditional TV, and opens up new ad opportunities for other programmers/sell-side, but it also opens up all the data, targeting and measurement capabilities that marketers/buy-side has historically wanted,” Parampath said. “We can bring these addressable TV exposures into this cross-screen measurement solution.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“People are hearing what advertisers are needing in terms of cross-screen and cross-media measurement. What I would love, though, is if we could really bring it down to a level and speak every openly about what these solutions do and don’t solve for,” Jennifer Gardner, senior director of media for North America at household goods giant Unilever, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV.
Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Gardner offered her outlook for improving cross-screen measurement. She likens the development to past efforts to measure ad viewability and to eliminate ad fraud.
“The goal of viewability was to count first so that we could then look at attribution and the tie to business. I don’t think we’ve made it there. There’s still a lot to do in the attribution space,” she said. “There’s nobody else out there who wouldn’t want to be able to buy media in an outcomes-based world, but we know there are stepping stones to get there. That’s another place where we as an industry need to hold hands and get to.”
Unilever, whose brands include Dove soap, Lipton tea and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is working with GroupM on test cases to improve cross-screen measurement before beginning a pilot program by the end of the year.
“When I want counting, I don’t want people grading their own homework,” Gardner said. “We trust, but verify. The role of third parties is critically important.”
The growth in platforms that distribute user-generated content, such as social media and video-sharing sites, has increased the possibility that advertising appears next to objectionable content. In response, marketers have become more aware of brand safety and suitability in their ad placements. They also want to be responsible mindful of data ethics and other measures that respect consumers.
“Just because a platform, a publisher, a media seller declares a piece of content eligible for monetization doesn’t mean that we as marketers or advertisers want to be showing up in and around that content,” Gardner said. “The end goal is good experience for the consumer. It only helps all of us in the industry to continue creating good experiences for consumers because then our advertising and marketing messages have a much greater chance of breaking through.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>“We want to make sure the consumer is at the center of this conversation,” said Karthik Rao, chief operating officer of TV ratings company Nielsen, in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. Speaking to Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer at WPP-owned media agency GroupM, Rao describes Nielsen’s plans to provide audience research that is meaningful to brands and their media partners.
Rao said Nielsen’s plans rest on three principles: resiliency, coverage and comparability.
“Resiliency foundationally is about adapting to…the massive changes in the privacy landscape,” he said, referring to stricter regulations to give people more control over their personal data. A resilient measurement system includes an identity capability that’s scalable and can be integrated seamlessly in a privacy-compliant way with Nielsen’s clientele.
The company also seeks to provide coverage that reflects the many ways consumers engage with content and advertising on different platforms. Comparability describes the goal of measuring deduplicated audiences.
Nielsen last year announced a plan to launch Nielsen One as a single, cross-media solution for more comparable and comprehensive metrics across platforms. The company will introduce the single measurement service in the fourth quarter of next year, as it seeks to transition the industry to cross-media metrics by the fall 2024 season.
The coronavirus pandemic led companies to ensure the personal safety of their employees with work-from-home arrangements that limited physical interaction with others. Those steps to protect workers hindered Nielsen research that relies on personal interviews with members of its consumer panel.
“The panel ultimately fuels a lot of the measurement capabilities that we provide clients. We saw a little bit of erosion in the ratings,” Rao said. “More importantly than the actual erosion is the lack of clarity as to what is going to happen when we go back into homes.”
In developing Nielsen One as a single currency for measuring audiences, the company is seeking the insights from media buyers and sellers to avoid favoritism. Nielsen has partnered with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to develop cross-media standards.
“We don’t want to try to help the industry this time by only listening to one constituency,” Rao said. “As part of our engagement program, we put together special committee groups…with representation from all constituencies. We want to get this right this time.”
Sweeney agreed that an identity solution is fundamental to media planning and buying, giving advertisers a way to harness their first-party data and information from other sources.
“Within this context, it starts with an identity. We come back to understanding who those individuals are that we, on behalf of marketing partners, want to reach,” he said. “It is about reach and frequency, but it’s also about the impact of that reach and frequency…Having a currency across all of these different touchpoints is also vital.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>But GroupM is still kicking the tyres of a burgeoning range of suppliers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Matt Sweeney, chief investment officer for GroupM US, describes spending trends and his wishlist for platforms.
“We’re increasingly spending and investing more and more dollars against advance TV, and this year’s upfront,” Sweeney says.
“We probably grew another 25% on top of 25% the year before. So they’re meaningful numbers there now.”
GroupM operates Finecast, its own unit dedicated to buying ads in connected TV, which has become a major source of big-brands CTV ads.
But Sweeney says the agency is having to navigate through an array of new options.
He says he is trying out supply-side ad platforms (SSPs) – software through which publishers make ads available to buyers – like that from Xandr, for these criteria:
Sweeney says GroupM is having to pick through a proliferating array of options.
“There has been a proliferation of new streaming services,” he says. “There are just so many different options right now.
“What we’re deciding to do is to test all, or as many as make sense for our clients, and then sort of double down and invest with the folks who are delivering the best either extension or the best experience for consumers.
“We’re looking at a combination of those factors, as we figure out who the proprietary or preferred partners are in this space.”
And, though connected TV ads command a premium for their ability to target viewers and support tactics like frequency capping and attribution, he is urging publishers to drop their prices.
“I’ve encouraged the partners in this space to put some skin in the game and not look for some of the high premiums that they’ve traditionally been charging as a way to sort of incent and compel clients to test it out,” Sweeney says.
“Even with some of the challenges around ratings degradation and prices, the inflation that’s been paid, (TV is)s still a pretty efficient medium to trade.
“If you want to break into that and have some of those dollars migrate over to either a new platform or a new data set, you’re going to have to cede the water a bit and incent some of those tests.”
You are watching Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, a Beet.TV series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>At least the overall growth of connected TV as an overall category is giving them some reassurance. After all, connected TV services provide more precise audience targeting characteristics than traditional broad demographics, and the rise of advertising-supported, AVOD services is aiming to fill the gap.
So, how is the world’s largest media buying agency seeing things play out?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Group M chief investment officer says connected TV has reached a tipping point – and broadcasters need to go fasters.
“I heard that adults 18 to 34, over 50% of those folks now are watching subscription services” Sweeney says.
“We’re also thinking that, in 2020, (the) prediction is that the largest segment of the audience … 18 to 49, will also go over the tipping point – 50% of those people will be watching not traditional linear TV, but connected TV in some way, shape, or form.
“That’s a big change for the industry. So our hope and the hope of our clients is that that’ll open up the ability to move off of some of the traditional buying metrics that have been in place for 30 or 40 years and that were incredibly effective and efficient from a delivery standpoint.”
Across the landscape, a plethora of technology companies and consultancies is bringing software that helps better index and target inventory available in VOD shows.
Increasingly, that intelligence is also being applied to linear TV ad inventory, whilst broadcasters themselves have spent the last few years trying to apply more data to their ads, satisfying marketers’ craving for ever more precise reachability.
Asked what media companies need to do, Sweeney says: “Hurry up. Measurement is hugely important. Those things need to change.
“We’ve got to get our clients to understand how you can change a target from ‘adults 18 to 49’ … (That’s) hard to do when you just buy a daypart and demo on a traditional TV or cable network.”
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.
]]>“The reality is even in 2019, we still have big-brand marketers and people spending lots and lots of money measuring click-through rates or landing page visits. That kind of stuff,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
About four years ago, Xaxis invested in its own artificial intelligence platform called Copilot. Even though demand-side platforms typically offer great data and technology, “to provide advantages for our clients we had to go even further.”
Copilot was designed to augment DSP’s so that marketers and agencies can “find the metrics that matter most to their business,” Sweeney says.
“What we’re looking at is huge data sets that you can lift from a DSP, log-level files where with machine learning you can look at all this data and look for those multiple touch points. The multiple variables that lead to a better engagement for a client.”
Thus informed, buyers can be smarter about “how do you bid in a very, very competitive marketplace and find more people like those people that engaged with a customer and led to a successful engagement.”
Across all verticals, Xaxis uses what it calls “a custom outcome indictor” to find the best proxies for digital media success. “Stop looking at things like click-through rates and landing pages and start looking at things that drive to a better business outcome,” says Sweeney.
While Xaxis services mostly GroupM clients working with MediaCom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, it also has a direct team whose clients include so-called direct-to-consumer brands. Those tend to seek to combine brand marketing and performance.
“That’s what’s most exciting is very often you have sort of a brand KPI or performance KPI. But a lot of these DTC guys, they want both. We’re learning a lot and we’re driving great results for our partners in that space,” Sweeney says.
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“What they want to know is did you drive sales,” says Matt Sweeney, President of Xaxis North America, the programmatic specialty unit of WPP Group.
He thinks the pendulum has swung “so far to the right” in terms of having very timely data and being able to identify people who are most likely to buy in market.
In response, Xaxis continues to staff up Xaxis Ad Labs, which currently consists of a team of about a dozen people. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s twice that if it’s twice that size by the end of the year,” Sweeney says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
It’s within XAL that designers, producers and developers stay ahead of the curve of dynamic creative optimization. “They very often are working with the strategists who are creating the audiences and working within our DMP and, more importantly, finding partners who can help us with data activation,” Sweeney explains.
Decisioning factors that inform may include not only male/female differences but rural versus city locations and what the weather happens to be doing during a particular time of day. Client categories include e-commerce, retail and, increasingly, automobiles.
“The storytelling is something that I think folks in programmatic have to do a better job of embracing,” says Sweeney. “At the end of the day, even our best clients, our closest partners, are a little tired of hearing about ad tech stack and data integrations.”
Asked about the value proposition of investing in numerous creative iterations for targeting a variety of audiences, Sweeney says Xaxis can use benchmarks to show clients that with dynamic creative, “the incremental cost of being smarter in engaging customers has tremendous, tremendous ROI.”
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
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