I call her the “mother of addressable TV”. Well, she didn’t exactly invent addressable TV but she was by all accounts the first buyer of the medium.
She was deeply involved with pilot projects in Colorado and Alabama in some twenty years ago. In our chat, she recalls those early days and her move to Starcom in 2005 to head the agency’s advance TV practice.
In 2016, she left Starcom to start her own company which is a boutique addressable TV buying agency and an industry consultancy. It is called Matter More Media.
In our conversation, Tracey talks about the evolution of addressable TV over the past 20 years. She speaks of her disappointment that its scope has been limited, increasingly by new “walled gardens of data” now in control of TV manufacturers. She shares her mantra: DATA MUST BE FREE.
We also talks about measurement and the importance of understanding the impact of creative.
A Personal Fight Against Cancer
As many of you know, Tracey has been a brave advocate in the fight against pediatric cancer. Her older son Ryan went through several years of treatment from leukemia. Now sixteen, he is five years out from his treatment and living life as healthy 16-year old. So happy to hear!
Tracy galvanized the media industry around non-profit she founded called TeamBrightSide. Mostly funded by charity triathlon in Chicago, the organization has raised $1.5 million in research money. A substantial amount has gone to the University of Chicago to research and track pediatric cancer.
Please join Tracey and TeamBrightSide team by joining the triathlon or by making a donation to: teambrightside.com
Thanks Tracey for your leadership and inspiring bravery.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.
]]>But how are advertisers adapting to the palette of options presented by OTT (over-the-top) and connected TV delivery?
In a panel called “Buy-Side Perspectives – The Big Asks” at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, four industry executives described how they see ad buyers adjusting:
Magna Global’s Anson said, when ad buyers make requests, “they don’t actually, they don’t know they’re asking for advanced TV”.
“First thing is, ‘I know I can get audiences, but I don’t really know how or why’,” she said.
“Second is OTT – they just know that there is a thing called OTT, they know they need to start spending there. And the number one thing that I get asked is, ‘What is the actual de-duplication between the offerings, between the Tubi, the Xumo, the Pluto? They may each have 20 million uniques per month, but how much of that is a crossover?’
“The third thing is probably putting it all together and that’s incremental reach. That is a big focus these days.”
DISH Media’s Sean Robertson said his company tries to clearly explain to ad buyers the over-the-top TV opportunity.
“The first thing is education and clarity in the marketplace about what offering should be utilised to solve what problems,” he said.
“When we enter the marketplace, we take a stance of ‘Let’s be very clear about what addressable is’.
“We talk about what OTT is and what our offering does and the skinny bundle versus the other competitors. We think that education in the marketplace helps us all. It truly is trying to raise all boats with the tide.”
Verizon Media’s Brett Hurwitz said ad buyers often “have a confused perception of what target they should really be using”.
“Fortunately, addressable television lets them kind of learn from their mistakes,” he said.
“For those that are really embracing it most fully, I think they’re looking to remove friction. They’re looking to bring down the walls and be able to have simplicity in the way that they’re achieving total reach.
“The process for (buying) a linear addressable (ad) is a lot more complicated than an ad in the traditional linear piece. And so I think we as an industry need to look toward simplification.”
The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.
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.
]]>Scheppach was a pioneering advance TV senior executive, at Starcom then Publicis Media, before starting her own firm.
Despite all of the scale that seen from the MVPDs, only about 3% of linear television inventory has been made addressable. According to Scheppach, everyone is leaning in to light up the national inventory, giving MVPDs the opportunity to increase scale from 3% to between 25 and 30%. A lot of work is being done on the Smart TV side, too. This lights up basically anything that hits the glass, both broadcast and cable, and could add another 21% of addressable inventory.
“I think even with a conservative estimate, we could see 35% of linear television inventory be in addressable,” Scheppach says. “And I would argue all of OTT is, or should be, addressable. It’s addressable-capable so if buyers are not demanding it and requiring it to be addressable, that’s their fault.”
Much of the hard work around addressable has already been done. Now the focus has shifted to scale, specifically unification and simplicity.
“How are we going to make this easier to buy, and unified so we don’t have to buy in pockets and I could transact on several technological solutions easily?” Scheppach says.
A lot of confusion also comes down to measurement. As Scheppach points out, knowing what to buy becomes more difficult if you do not know where all of the viewing is happening. This makes unification all the more important.
“We’re starting to see a lot of competition in that space,” Scheppach said. “A lot of people are saying that they provide a full look at video consumption from a consumer. You’ve got to ask a lot of questions like how was it built? What’s the validity of that data? Does it represent real people? Is it just households? Is it IP-based?”
This could lead to some growing pains, but will also lead to unification in common measurement across all viewing. Scheppach says that this measurement needs to come from a combination of several different things including set-top box and Smart TV data, and she also points out the value of having a panel to make corrections to.
“You need to have a truth set to always go back to, like who is in the house?” Scheppach says. “We don’t want to just know household viewing, we need to get to people. And I think the only way you’re really going to get to people is to have a truth set.”
Along with changes in measurement have been changes in streaming. While some services have decided to go ad-free, Scheppach pointed to data that shows that when given the choice, viewers are still choosing to have ads. Still, these ads will likely continue to decrease, so it’s up to advertisers to now get more value out of their spots by becoming more targeted.
“Now we have to move to a place where you can actually be willing to pay more for every ad that is seen by a viewer,” Scheppach said. “And the only way you’re going to do that is if it’s targeted and measurable.”
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.
]]>Scheppach was shocked to calculate that maybe 3% of all linear media has been made addressable. In 2020, however, she’s optimistic that the programmers and technology are available to push that figure closer to 25% of inventory.
“We’re going to see a lot of new opportunities coming for advertisers to take advantage of,” says Scheppach. “What’s most exciting is that the programmers are going to start bringing it to the advertisers.”
With all of the OTT services available, Scheppach is witnessing a technical shift in how content is being delivered. By its very nature, she says, OTT is addressable because you only receive the stream that you want which means you could see a unique ad. The issue, however, is that so much of this content is still not addressable.
“What they have done is they’ve really opened up their supply to the DSPs and they’ve made it so easy to buy that I don’t feel like a level of addressability that we’re seeing in linear is actually happening in OTT, which is interesting.” Scheppach says. “It’s kind of high price and not as targeted as we’re seeing in linear television.”
This comes as a result of a lot of people who were responsible for originally deploying the technology. They saw it as an advantage at the time to hoard the inventory, but now with all the acquisitions and mergers, we see people wondering why all of this inventory can’t be unlocked.
According to Scheppach, buyers likely will not care as much about technology as much as addressability. For this reason, she sees a need for further education across the industry.
“We’re starting to see so much flavor of addressability coming out, do we really know what we’re doing as a buyer and a seller? There’s so much need for education in the marketplace.” Says Scheppach. “We have to figure out how [this technology] works together, simply, so that a buyer can easily buy it.”
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.
]]>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.
]]>Former Starcom MediaVest Group advanced television specialist Tracey Scheppach has a foot in both of those spheres as CEO & Co-Founder of her agency, Matter More Media. Scheppach helps new advanced-TV technology providers while doing direct brand activation based on CRM and other data.
In this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018 conference, Scheppach refers to research presented by Forrester analyst Jim Nail showing that 15% of brand-side executives have executed addressable TV campaigns. “If you look at the law of adoption, we’re at the tipping point,” Scheppach says, echoing Nail’s conclusion.
However, the addressable TV work that’s been done so far has been derived from household address files. “Being at a digital conference with LiveRamp, the question is how can you bring digital data to household level addressable television. Which is hard because so far it’s built off a street address file versus an IP or cookie file or a device ID,” she says.
Scheppach points to emerging IP-based technology, noting that companies like Sinclair and Sorenson are pursuing dynamic ad insertion to smart TV sets. Then there is the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard for over-the-air broadcast TV.
With ATSC 3.0, transmission will be “IP-based, completely mobile, always on, census-level data, full addressability, which is going to open up more and more inventory to be addressable,” Scheppach says.
Since starting Matter More Media and being on the “front lines” with clients, Scheppach has a closer view of the impact of agency holding companies having separated their creative assets from their media operations. This can be a stumbling block to perfecting, executing and tracking the four elements of successful addressable TV campaigns: the idea, its production values, media channel selection and analytics, according to Scheppach.
“All four pieces work together, all four pieces should be at the table together, not in separate siloes not ever to meet. You just can’t throw the creative over the wall to the media people and just have them execute,” she says.
In its sell-side consulting work, the agency helps people “trying to bring product to market, like a Sinclair, like programmers. They have to figure out how to structure the technology and pitch it to clients.”
In the agency’s direct activation for clients, Scheppach is pursuing “anyone that has a CRM file. I think catalogers are just a natural fit.”
She thinks addressable can help marketers for whom the expense of traditional TV has been a barrier. Some brands with catalogs or direct-mail campaigns are trying to figure out “how do I make it more accountable? How do I make it more storytelling? How do I build my brand out of it? And sight sound and motion is going to do that better than paper.”
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.
]]>Thus says Tracey Scheppach, the former Publicis executive who spent upward of 15 years charting the future of more one-to-one targeted TV before forming Matter More Media. “At this event, what I have heard over the last three days is lots of talk about collaboration. And that is really encouraging because the infrastructure is getting there,” Scheppach says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have the tools to make media more efficient, more precise and now it takes the ecosystem to work together.”
One of her business goals is to bring more money to the TV space. She suggests catalogers take a page from marketers that have long known the power of the medium.
“They’re taking a list, they’re sending an asset which happens to be paper and putting it in a mailbox. Here we’re taking a list, we’re taking an asset that happens to be video and putting it into a set-top box or over the top in some IP-delivered way,” Scheppach says.
The 2018 TV Upfront “is going to be I think a watershed moment because the data is available and the programmers are starting to cooperate,” she adds. “We all know that TV works but they’re going to be able to prove it in a way that the Facebooks and Googles have been able to prove it to clients. Now TV is at that place.”
Looking back at the naming of her company just over a year ago, Scheppach recalls a meeting with Maurice Levy and other Publicis executives in which she presented “the future of addressable and data-driven television and what creatively Publicis needed to do.” When she made “waste less” one of her talking points, Levy chided her by advising “don’t ever say waste. That makes our clients feel like we were wasting their investment before.”
So she tried to make a positive out of it with Matter More. “We’re moving to a more precise one-to-one conversation that’s a progression. That’s the more part. You can’t just matter now. The world didn’t just change over night. It’s a progression to be able to matter more,” says Scheppach.
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.
]]>In July, the pair announced 605’s methodology and technology would be used by Charter to fuel census-based TV measurement and analytics.
In this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat, Charter ad products and strategy SVP Rob Klippel and 605 president Ben Tatta discussed the partnership, and what comes next.
“While we’ve deployed this application that now allows us to sell TV in terms of audiences and impressions, we realized the larger value really, of being able to bring insights and value to the programmers, to the national advertisers and agencies,” Klippel said.
“And, while I think we have great data assets and a census level data to us, really the value of 605 is to be able to take our data, to pull it together with other data sources and to better serve the national marketplace.
So what has the partnership yielded? Specifically, a software platform that allows Charter to develop custom audiences for ad buyers, helping along the migration of TV ad sales from an old, demographic-based world to one which is based on targeting audiences more accurately.
The biggest hurdle, with both Charter and for all operators making the switch, Tatta said, is in adapting to the collect data from the fragmented cable TV ecosystem.
“In the case of Charter is you’re talking about over 80 plus markets, over 1000 ad zones each of which have their own inventory and rates information,” he said. “It’s a lot of data ingestion, a lot of the work was processing the data, getting it to a state that it could be acted upon very quickly with low latency.”
But Tatta and Klippel opened up on examples in which the ensuring product can help advertisers understand audience preferences at the local level.
“Austin South indexed 2x against BMW and then the adjacent market was like 1 1/2 times for Kia,” Tatta said, citing an automotive advertising example. “It’s things like that the local sales people have never been able to see before. What’s interesting is just to see how this kind of rolls out on a really local level and then obviously, our broader ambition is to nationalize this so we can do this on a much broader basis.”
Klippel says the new platform “has fundamentally changed the conversation that we’re having with our customers”.
“They can sit down real-time and create custom schedules that are tailored to a specific audience and the output is very transparent,” he added. Under the old model, if you need to make changes you kinda go back to your research and planning team and you start that multi day process all over again.”
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.
]]>That’s the view according to Steve Murtos, an ad agency executive who co-founded a digital video activation practice to help advertisers take advantage.
“We’re counting upwards of 60n households in the marketplace, which puts us at more than 50% US coverage,” Matter More Media co-founder Steve Murtos tells Beet.TV in this video interview, referring to the current deployment footprint of addressable TV, the name given to a range of technologies that let advertisers target TV ads at the household level.
“The conversations are starting to change. Advertisers are starting to think strategically about how to link all of their audience data together.”
But Murtos wants more. Addressable TV advertising could revolutionise the game in local markets. But local pay-TV providers remain limited, only able to sell two minutes of ads per hour for themselves.
Asked if he thinks that will change, Murtos says: “I hope so.
“There’s a lot tied up in the carriage agreements between MVPDs and networks. We’ll start to see solutions coming over the top, which are already in the market today, that will help change that dynamic. As we look cross-screen, beyond the TV space, there will be opportunities in that space as well.”
Matter More Media was founded last year by Murtos and Tracey Scheppach to offer advice on next-generation, data-driven video and TV advertising strategy.
The company is focusing much of its efforts on bringing to TV direct mail marketers and mid-market brands—described as having smaller budgets and including “savvy digital marketers”—that have never before embraced the medium.
Last month, the pair announced an engagement with Tapad that includes the use of Tapad’s Device Graph to measure the actual performance of media across channels.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Scheppach is particularly excited about new addressable TV operators and the potential groundswell of interest she’s noting among national TV programmers to participate in the addressable marketplace. While the inventory for addressable TV is still small, the base is growing with companies like Comcast and Verizon having stepped in.
“But what’s really interesting is quietly I’m starting to hear national programmers starting to be interested in how do I actually bring addressable opportunities to market,” Scheppach says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
So while just one to two percent of TV inventory is addressable via a TV set, “there are a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes that I can feel happening that are going to explode that marketplace,” she adds.
Having worked with Murtos at Publicis for 10 years, the duo represents almost 50 years of experience in TV buying and advanced TV.
Among other things, Matter More’s engagement with Tapad includes the use of Tapad’s Device Graph to measure the actual performance of media across channels. In a release announcing the partnership, Scheppach said that achieving “unduplicated reach and frequency across all channels with true addressability, and the ability to measure outcomes, is marketing nirvana.”
Asked about creative versioning of TV ads, she says she’s “yet to really crack the code” but is impressed by companies doing 5,000 or more versions of an ad for online video. “When television becomes more real time and sophisticated, I think we’re going to see more of that coming. It hasn’t happened yet and I think that’s a big opportunity,” Scheppach says.
Her company is focusing much of its efforts on bringing to TV direct mail marketers and mid-market brands—described as having smaller budgets and including “savvy digital marketers”—that have never before embraced the medium.
“We think we can show them the way using these sophisticated tools, whether it be Device Graphs or Identity Graphs or addressable television,” Scheppach says.
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.
]]>“Over the last three years, (I’ve done) … 250 campaigns, addressable to the household,” recalls Tracey Scheppach, the former long-time SMG advanced TV exec who recently left to form her own Matter More Media.
“Over $100 million we’ve spent in the market. A lot of campaigns. So this is not a test and learn thing anymore.”
Scheppach was speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV to discuss the emerging strengths and weaknesses inside the opportunity.
Success inside failure
Scheppach and Jamie Power, managing partner at GroupM’s advanced TV unit MODI Media, had seemingly different takes on what happens what addressable TV ad campaigns fail.
“The value that’s brought is not only when a campaign works, but it’s also when a campaign doesn’t work,” Power said. “At the end of the campaign, if the campaign doesn’t work, I know why the campaign didn’t work.
“The retention rate is 85%, but, you know, there are a lot of times that it doesn’t work and we’re able to use that data and it’s really powerful to bring the advertiser back and do it bigger and better next time.”
But Scheppach commented: “I’ve used 29 different data providers to deliver those 250 campaigns. I see that addressable works for every single client. I have not had a failed campaign yet.”
The real question, Scheppach said is, “Does addressable work for everyone?” But that is just a function of the price put on the campaign, she said.
So, if the technology and the strategy is in place, what is left to do as addressable grows up? Both execs have a wishlist.
Addressable wishlist: Jamie Power
“In order to scale it, you actually do need some standards. Right now, the product is great, but everyone’s still doing it differently. A simple thing like media delivery … the impressions that ran, not only are we getting in a different format from each of the MVPDs, they have different methodologies.
“How do you scale this into a marketplace, especially when you want national broadcast buyers who are used to accountability and scale and standards when we still don’t have standards? The easiest thing to fix would be a standard media delivery report.”
Addressable wishlist: Tracey Scheppach
“I would love more inventory in the marketplace. We’re very fortunate that two satellite providers kind of got the real party started, so we had national scale. But, even when we’re stretching the number, 52 million households, it’s still 1% of the inventory.
“I would love to see Charter to deploy, I would love to see over-the-top be addressable. I would love to see the national programmers start to have a real conversation with operators about enabling their inventory. The one thing that we need, that would make me happy, would be to grow the inventory source from 1% to 25% by the end of the decade.”
This panel was moderated by The Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>That’s because the CEO & Founder of the agency Matter More Media intends to “push myself to do everything different than a normal agency would do,” Scheppach explains during an interview at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016. “Right now, a lot of digital players are building digital back to the couch. I like to think of TV as the first thought, not an afterthought.”
Interviewed by Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, Scheppach traces the genesis of her fledgling business effort to a personal desire to make media matter more for advertisers, consumers and programmers. “I do believe in the long term, all television is digital, all digital is addressable and all addressable is programmatic,” is how she sees the future.
Even though just about one percent of TV spending is done on an addressable basis, “I do believe that’s a great place to start,” she notes, adding “There’s a huge mid market” of advertisers that are great candidates for addressable.
One of her favorite examples is the $2,000 Peloton spin bike, which Scheppach thinks “is perfect for addressable” because of its price point and niche audience. To her chagrin, Peloton ran direct response ads during the recent World Series, “which I don’t think is right for their brand.”
As she seeks her first clients for Matter More Media, Scheppach has a good idea of her better prospects: marketers with between $10 million and $20 million to spend and an incidence size of between five and 15 percent.
Asked by Hanlon to place addressable TV ads on the spectrum of pricing—from premium to direct response—Scheppach says “I think of addressable as premium” but notes that it’s still early in the pricing game.
“Some categories are starting to get priced out of the marketplace,” says Scheppach, citing the example of consumer packaged-goods. “It’s very hard if you’re selling bleach and you make five dollars a year on a loyal customer to justify addressable CPM’s.”
It will be up to individual media sellers to understand where to price the marketplace. “It’s really early to make any kind of bets on where addressable should end. But I believe it’s a premium product,” Scheppach says.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Before starting her own agency, Matter More Media, Scheppach spent 15 years in the advanced TV space. Over the last three years she was involved with more than 250 campaigns and executed about $100 million of media.
“I’m a firm believer in addressable advertising, taking really advanced datasets and being able to finally deliver it to individual households,” says Scheppach.
Asked by interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, to cite examples of potential clients suited to addressable TV, Scheppach says, “I do believe that addressable television works for all advertisers.”
This is because all advertisers have a “true target” and Scheppach believes that target constitutes less than the 30% of U.S. households that can be reached via addressable ads. Her professional background also includes direct mail campaigns, which like addressable TV targets households by name and address.
“Direct mail is another place that I’m interested to see if I can convert some direct mail budgets to sight, sound and motion of television, because it’s the exact same principles,” she says.
Scheppach points to the Peloton indoor exercise bike as an example of a product well suited to very targeted messaging. The $2,000 spin bike is sold with a $30 monthly subscription to workout videos that can be viewed on its built-in screen.
“It’s a high-priced item with a fairly defined target set that’s below 30% of the U.S. population,” Scheppach says. “I think there is a key place for advertisers like that, the blue aprons of the world.”
Asked by Hanlon what drove her decision to leave the mega agency world for a startup of her own, Scheppach says she asked herself what it is she truly enjoys about the business. “It stemmed from a love of television and concern over the fact it wasn’t being properly monetized,” she says. Hence the name Matter More Media.
Direct-response TV advertisers also have much to gain from addressable ads, according to Scheppach. “It’s a really interesting category because they are incredibly data driven,” she says of DRTV. “That too is a potentially ripe category for matter more.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>But life forced Tracey Scheppach to do just that, when her son Ryan, then aged just seven, was diagnosed with leukemia.
The next three years were rough, as Ryan endured more than 1,722 admissions of 14 different types of chemotherapy, culminating – thankfully – in him being declared free of the disease.
During that time, Tracey – a friend of Beet.TV’s who spearheaded Starcom MediaVest Group’s advanced TV advertising operations until beginning her own consultancy last month – decided to fight, too.
Inspired by Ryan’s own determination, she formed a team to tackle the Chicago triathalon, raising money to help the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) to fund research to find kinder forms of treatment.
By now, Team Brightside – named after Ryan’s up-beat disposition through those dark times – has raised a total of $600,000, mom Tracey says, after she tapped up her SMG colleagues and a growing network of contacts in the advertising industry to run alongside her.
Scheppach, now heading up her own company Matter More Media, will be a keynote speaker at the Beet Retreat in Miami, November 16 to 18. And, on Friday, those around town can join for a 5k walk/run in support of Team Brightside.
More importantly, anyone can also make donations – right now – via Tracey’s Team In Training page.
We are grateful for Tracey coming to share her insights again, and hope that you can support her cause.
We interviewed Tracey and Ryan in their hometown Chicago last month.
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