Started seven years ago, Tapad was one of the first of what is now a rash of vendors claiming to do just that – it has even trademarked the term “the device graph” to describe this cross-device consumer profile.
Speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV, Tapad media business SVP and GM Kate O’Loughlin explains the concept and the necessity behind the approach.
“If you were to only know the audience of a person from just their other TV, digital TV consumption behaviour, you would have an incomplete view of the consumer’s audience,” she says.
“If you know better that this person has these interests, these actions, these behaviours on their phone, and … from their computer, next to what they’re consuming on television, you have a much more clear understanding of who this human is, a more well-rounded understanding of the audience, so you can be much more precise when you do make these (advertising) buys.
Tapad became one of the many ad-tech players to be acquired by a telecom operator in 2016 when it was bought out by Scandinavian Telenor.
The company just released a white paper explaining the Viewable Exposure Time, a new metric it invented last year.
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.
]]>New York-based Moat, founded seven years ago, has signed an agreement to be acquired by Oracle in what will be one of the biggest examples yet of marketing technology companies acquiring in to ad-tech.
And now Moat is taking its viewability technology in to the upfronts, the season in which US TV networks tout their upcoming content in order to sell to advertisers.
Speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV, Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart revealed Fox, through its true[X] ad engagement subsidiary, will be trying to sell advertisers based on “attention” as measured through a Moat partnership.
“We’re specifically doing something with Fox, coming up for this year’s upfronts, where they are really focused on attention, on how to understand … attention in television, connected TV, other types of environments,” he said.
“We are Fox’s partner where we start with measuring viewability, moving on to time and ultimately asking questions like, ‘How long was somebody there? What did they do?’, ‘Did they interact with the ad?’ [and] ’Did they choose do be there?… ‘
“With Fox, we’re applying [our] technology to understand attention in the environments they create.” Fox’s upfront presentation takes place on May 15.
It comes as Moat’s acquisition by Oracle serves as another indicator of ad-tech consolidation, after TubeMogul was acquired by Adobe late in 2016.
Moat’s product suite includes online analytics for advertising, including insight in to the visibility of video advertising. Oracle plans to integrate the company in to its existing Oracle Data Cloud – a suite for targeting, delivering and measuring online advertising which claims to have over five billion unique consumer profiles.
Oracle has bought in to ad-tech in recent years through Bluekai and Vitrue. It says Moat “will remain an independent platform within” its own offering.
Moat’s star has risen as concern has grown over the extent of fraudulent ad impressions and inventory that is not even viewable by human users, and especially since the Media Ratings Council (MRC) codified guidelines for viewable ad impressions as a consequence in 2014. Now the company claims over 600 clients.
In a letter to its customers, Oracle says:
“Oracle plans to continue investing in Moat. We expect this will include more functionality and capabilities at a quicker pace. In addition, Moat customers will benefit from better integration and alignment with Oracle’s other product offerings.
“Oracle and Moat are committed to keeping Moat an open measurement and analytics platform, with deep integrations and partnerships across the entire digital publisher and adtech landscape.”
Oracle claims media spending worth more than $4bn was enhanced by capabilities of its Data Cloud last year.
Update: Peter Kafka reports in recode that Oracle is paying over $850 million for the acquisition.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But these realities are what excite Stephanie Stopulos, the SVP of Advanced Analytics & Insights at Starcom USA. And she can’t wait to start influencing the “machine ladies.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Stopulos says the biggest challenge facing marketers today is engaging with consumers via multiple screens in ways that try to predict the unpredictable.
“Consumer journeys are interesting. Marketing models are helpful. But at the end of the day you never quite know how someone is going to make a decision,” says Stopulos. “People are unpredictable and they are messy.”
Trying to divine a peoples’ true desire line and connect what they want to what brands need is an opportunity that’s “both scary and exciting at the same time.” She feels that the biggest challenge in tying together a cohesive story is making sure that “you have a set of luggage that isn’t too matching, and appropriate for that environment.”
One example is food content, which on platforms like Pinterest and Snapchat needs to be very different to break through than it does with a mass delivered audience like television. “Thinking about that in ways that are flexible and take into account marketers’ realities within non-working budgets is a very real challenge,” says Stopulos.
She finds it most reassuring that more chief marketing officers are recognizing the value of and embracing their own data and evangelizing it as part of their organizations. “They’re mining it more effectively.”
And she’s ready to wade into the realm of machine learning to see where it leads.
“I can’t wait to get the first brief that says my audience for a campaign is Alexa and Siri. Those are the ladies that are really powering the decisions of the future,” Stopulos says. “Mom will always be important in a lot of households, but Alexa and Siri are coming right after her.”
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.
]]>“Data is paramount to every strategy we put together with our clients, with our partners. It’s sort of the universal language that we have not just to transact on necessarily but to plan against,” says Adam Shlachter, President of Global Innovation at Publicis Media.
This language translates into understanding people as people, not just as broad-based segments to be traded on or targeted against. Tapping into mindsets and behaviors while grasping the effect of ad environments can unleash many useful changes.
“We can create better ads, we can certainly create better experiences and over time we can probably eliminate a lot of the waste that exists today,” Shlachter says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat.
That wastes derives from a lack of transparency, lack of connectivity and “quite frankly an overly complex media ecosystem that is not as connected as we’d like it to be.”
It’s been just over a year since Publicis Groupe began to transform its media operations, eliminating some divisions while merging agencies, as The Wall Street Journal reports. From a central perspective, the realignment facilitates greater intelligence sharing while providing better access to talent, resources and technology, according to Shlachter.
“I do believe that these transformations take more time,” he says. “You have to make sure you have all the right pieces in place. Nothing’s going to happen overnight.”
Nonetheless, he’s excited about the momentum Publicis has exhibited in recent months. And he marvels at the pace of the long-discussed convergence of data, technology and platforms, plus the growth of industry partnerships.
“We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. The next three to five years are going to be super interesting,” Shlachter says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For Steve Erich, “not your typical agency model” means contracting for the best creative talent for the nascent Erich & Kallman shop based in San Francisco. “Agencies on the whole are too slow, they don’t have enough talent and they’re too expensive,” the E&K Founder & Managing Director explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
Having spent about 11 years at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, last year Erich finally was able to join up with Eric Kallman and give the biggest agencies a run for their money.
“My partner Eric Kallman is a gentleman that we tried to hire about three years ago” at CP+B. “He took a job at Goodby instead” and produced iconic work for companies like Old Spice. “We got together after we both left our agencies to create a new model.”
Erich likens their creation to a small, core group of individuals that contract creative work out to the best in the business “just for the amount of time we need. It makes us faster, it makes us more efficient.”
E&K’s account wins include a piece of business from General Mills, which was “looking for a new model. Faster, more nimble,” Erich says.
As regards creative briefs from clients, there’s noting out of the ordinary at E&K, although it is a big believer in the power of video. While television is still “the main thing that’s asked for” among advertisers, there’s a learning curve when it comes to digital.
“Just thinking you can cram a 30-second television spot into a Facebook post or whatever else is just not that effective. It’s better than not, but there are so many other ways to create video and content format-wise,” says Erich.
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.
]]>“It’s not about writing a check and being part of something,” says Chris Weil, Chairman and CEO of brand marketing agency Momentum Worldwide. “You’re borrowing the equity of a team, a celebrity, a league and you’re borrowing their audience and you’re trying to connect with them.”
In the sports sponsorship world, whether it’s American Express, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, SAP or Verizon, “A sponsorship is a borrowed equity programming,” Weil says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
So if one looks at what brands are trying to do with content, the learnings from many years of sponsorship marketing come to the fore. It’s about how to create content “that is not just push messaging but is about how you add utility and value to the consumer’s life and to their experience,” Weil says.
In other words, successfully sponsoring content always begins with the audience and the value exchange, but the most important part is the desired connection. “Everybody talks about targeting, targeting, targeting and how we’re going to deliver the specific message at the specific moment,” says Weill. “The reality is that more than targeting it’s the creative. How are you actually going to deliver a message that somebody cares about at a given time.”
Asked about measuring ROI on sponsored content, Weil eschews things like viewability and click-through rates. “Those are just distractions to what the real game is, which is to drive growth for our clients,” Weil adds, citing Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard’s comments at Transformation about the importance of P&G’s agency partners.
When it comes to leveraging influencer audiences online, Weil says that in order to guarantee earned reach there has to be a buy involved. “Things don’t go viral just simply to go viral. You have to look at how you use influencer audiences to help expand and amplify your message. And that is a value exchange that typically is money,” Weil 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.
]]>But the new broadcast contenders should not just assume they will become all powerful.
One executive brokering the future of connected TV advertising thinks quality of experience must be the watchword.
“Television is at the mid-stage of migrating in to the digital world,”Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Beyond Sling, Sony Vue and DirectTV Now, YouTube is coming along, Hulu is delivering their live television service, maybe Apple will deliver their service.
“More and more people will stop paying or not even start their cable bill and immediately pay Google or Hulu and that will be their television service.
“Companies have a responsibility to create television quality equal to television now. Which means television should never buffer, should be high quality, volume should be correlated. All those things which seem very simple are actually hard to do.”
Chalozin’s Innovid, which helps advertisers personalise their video messages for viewers, claims to be processing a third of all video ads in the US.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These and other insights emerged from a discussion about enhancing the value of traditional TV at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Moderated by MediaLink Managing Partner Matt Spiegel, it featured Arthur Mimnaugh, Head of Advanced Advertising for Adobe, and Marc Siegel, the CRO at advanced TV provider Simulmedia.
Siegel described the process of using advanced data sets to both predict where people are going to be watching TV and reaching them in a cost-efficient manger. Finding untapped audience potential can be counter-intuitive, as in “We’re seeing that if you’re a sports enthusiast, there’s plenty of those watching the cookie channel,” Siegel said.
The goal for Simulmedia is to generate unique audience reach by gauging how many new people a particular ad inventory unit will bring to an advertiser. This is typically a complement to an advertiser’s Upfront or base buy.
“There’s certainly a wide debate on what the right attribution model is,” Siegel said. “There is not a one-size-fits all when it comes to measurement.” It can range from a direct-to-consumer brand with lots of data to work with to those in consumer-packaged goods where data sets can have “a little less fidelity.”
Mimnaugh explained how Adobe helps marketers extend the information they already know about the users they already have in order to improve their viewing experiences. “One big area of focus is the collective group and the value of it,” he said in a reference to Adobe’s Device Co-Op, a network to brands to work together to better identify consumers across digital touch points. “So you can look at ad sequencing and targeting and other types of storytelling, when you’re merging that between what you’re going to do on traditional linear versus what’s actually happening on digital.”
Asked by Spiegel how advanced is the conversation about consistent consumer ID’s, Mimnaugh said, “I think we are seeing more and more of the notion of a common ID. It’s a process.”
For his part, Siegel noted that Simulmedia isn’t in the personally identifiable information business. “What we’re seeing is CRM’s collapsing with DMP’s identifiers and being able to transfer that over to linear has been a huge move,” he said.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Speaking on this Beet Retreat panel, representatives of the networks explained their strategy.
The recent announcements included:
NBCUniversal advanced advertising SVP Denise Colella:
“We’re going to avail up to $1bn in inventory to be traded on non-Nielsen guarantees, or audience guarantees.
“Our clients are investing a lot in data, they really want to put that to use. We’re willing to put our money where our mouth is. We’re not reserving inventory per se. We’re making all our inventory across all of our networks available for audience.”
Turner Broadcasting ad innovation and programatic VP David Porter:
“OpenAP does three things – helps define audience segment, allows an advertiser to choose wha publishers they want to share that segment with, and aggregates reports. That solves a lot.
“There will be no commingling of inventory in this platform, this is not a transaction platform. This is just a way to get a consistent definition. Then the advertiser can send that definition out to any publisher.”
Viacom audience science EVP Julian Zilberbrand:
“It is uber-complicated to have different methodologies when you have one data set you’re working off of.
“This is about enabling the advertiser to have an easier experience.”
ABC TV Group programmatic VP Michael Dean:
“We’re excited about it and we’re supportive. This is all the right things to do. Removing friction, removing cost, lowering complexity is absolutely where all of us want that market to go – as long as we can make differentiation, that’s the key.
“The devil is in the details. For Disney Company, it’s about ‘How do we bring our unique data assets – what we know about families, homes, from the parks, from our games network?’”
605 president Ben Tatta:
“It’s great news. We felt, for a while, that there will be a shift to more audience-based buying, selling and measurement – but that starts by moving off a panel, which is really just a large focus group. It drives demand for census-based data. The market is demanding that more granular attributes, other than age and gender, are available.”
Panelists also discussed the emergence of addressable TV advertising technologies and amateur versus premium video.
This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>When MDC launched Assembly three years ago, it combined the prowess of TargetCast, RJ Palmer and Doner Media under one roof. Lee joined in 2015 from MediaVest, where he had spent 16 years and seen enough silos.
“We had a lot of leeway to build what we need in the marketplace versus inheriting what’s already there,” Lee, who is EVP of Investment at Assembly, says in this interview at the 2017 Beet.TV Executive Retreat. “Having everything under one roof helps us build a pipeline that goes through the entire company in sharing, accessing and analyzing the data.”
Lee’s background is in traditional TV video landscape, where there was far less data to inform decision making. “We have more information than before in seeing what networks, what dayparts, what spots are working harder for us,” he says. “I’m excited about having more data available to me in the way I activate.”
Having all teams under one roof is another plus. “I sit very close with the analytics team to see what’s working, what’s not working. Having everything under one roof helps us build a pipeline that goes through the entire company in sharing, accessing and analyzing the data.”
In addition to having data and analytics at the company’s core, Assembly takes a different tack when it comes to media buying practices that have raised eyebrows in the client community.
“We also strongly believe in building everything around a very transparent model,” Lee says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>West Elm has shied away from spending money on TV commercials because “there’s no real specific ROI that you can pull out from it without doing a lot of very sort of fuzzy math,” says Luke Chatelain, Vice President of Innovation at West Elm. Chatelain was among the many industry executives who attended the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview.
During one panel discussion, he explained the beauty of small budgets, small steps and ramping up successes. “Digital allows us to do a really small spend to set a benchmark and understand what the benefits and the potential are for an application, or piece of content, a technology, a delivery mechanism, and scale that up as we start to see success,” said Chatelain.
“We tend to have this desire and ability to validate those things before we actually go out there and spend large dollars on them,” he added.
Asked about the challenges of personalizing video to engage with specific audience segments by moderator Rebecca Lieb, who is an Advisory Board Member at Netswitch Technology Management Inc., Chatelain again stressed small steps. “If you look at it from an entire business perspective, it’s a rather massive potential,” he said. “Understanding small steps toward bringing your business forward is really important in how you can handle personalization.”
Chatelain is no stranger to industry jargon. “If I had a nickel for every time someone said machine learning, without actually understanding what machine learning was, I would have a yacht at this point,” he told the audience.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to a trio of ad-tech execs whose companies help bring some visibility to the problem, but who say the challenge is greater than that.
Almost three years after the Media Ratings Council set guidelines for what constitutes a viewable ad impression (50% of the video player in view for at least two seconds), Beet.TV convened a panel to discuss viewability at the Beet Retreat.
The discussion, viewable in our recorded session, showed a general appreciation for viewability – and a recognition that it should be used as just part of an overarching strategy.
Moat sales director Peter Kuhn:
“Viewability should be a baseline standard but it shouldn’t drive investment.
“We fundamentally need standards. If we’re all going to grade, as Mark Pritchard of P&G said, a yard the same way, it’s impossible to start asking questions around where investment should go, what effectiveness is, if we’re not all measuring things the same way.
“(But) the consumptive patterns of consumers is outpacing the ability for a marketers to … come up with the right standards for success.”
Ooyala advertising platforms GM Scott Braley:
“The idea of needing standards is categorically right. (But) the intimacy between buyers and sellers has, for a while now, been lost and needs to be regained.
“When you rely on those (companies) that are all too willing, ready and happy to be intermediaries – to rely on the platforms without understanding who you’re buying, what the inventory is or what you’re selling to – that’s when you start to over-rely on the idea of metrics as a universal truth for good and bad. That’s a subjective thing.
“They’re so myopically focused on the idea of this metric, and not what you’re buying.”
Eyeview Digital TV SVP and GM Boaz Cohen
“We need standards – but for us, our standard is sales. Instead of focusing on media metrics – viewability, completions and other stuff – we focus on sales. Give us $100k for video budgets, we’ll deliver you $300k in sales.
“We do need viewability … but that’s our problem, the supply problem, the ad-tech problem – not the marketer problem. Their standard should be sales; focused on offline and online sales.”
Cohen countered the suggestion that video outcomes are only for driving immediate actions, saying that marketer outcomes linked to video – including car dealership visitation and loyalty card-linked retail purchases – can be measured up to 30 days after an ad is watched.
The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Fortunate, then, that a whole new raft of data sources is coming on-stream to help them do that.
In a panel discussion convened by Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat, executives from advertising technology and data vendors got excited about:
Here is a flavour of what they said…
Alphonso CEO Ashish Chordia:
“In 10 years’ time, there’s no reason to believe that every device in your house runs ACR – we’ll get there.”
Chordia says his technology, running on consumers’ mobile phones amongst other devices, has already helped a mobile studio know for sure whether a consumer is in a movie theater watching its movie.
TruOptik CEO Andre Swanston:
“We marry the app data we get from OTT and connected TV with the open network. You get content viewership data, second-by-second, across half a billion unique IPs in every market in the world. For people coming from desktop and mobile, this is what they’re used to.”
Neustar strategic partners head Ted Prince:
“(We have) a persistent key across household, phone number, address, cookie, mobile ad ID, set-top box, IP address, mobile phone number.
“We try to make sure you, as a marketer, can get to the household you want. You can put your CRM file on there, the segments you want to reach. We have 200m individuals. Set-top box data is about 40 to 45m households.”
605 Group VP Gaurav Shirole:
“We’ve been focused on achieving scale around census-level set-top box data.”
Shirole said there is an opportunity to use data-targeted TV ad technologies first to sample limited precision-targeting, before going all-in with a targeted campaign.
Amid this proliferation of new data sources, it is becoming a more complex media world for marketers. Whilst some vendors may profess to do it all, TruOptik’s Swanston said it is important for brands to piece together multiple specialist vendors.
“There’s nobody in the industry can be a one-stop shop for everything, and there have to be the ability to sync different data together,” he said. “That’s pretty commonplace across the industry – you have to be able to work with different partners.”
The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Alphonso, which offers the ability for buyers to serve ads on to digital devices based on an understanding of consumers’ TV viewing behaviour, also this month launched closed-loop attribution.
The product is the paid version of the company’s otherwise-free Alphonso Insights, using data tracking from partners like SafeGraph, IRI and MasterCard.
“‘Did my TV campaign work?’,” Alphonso chief revenue officer Mark Gall asks in this video interview with Beet.TV. “TV to closed-loop attribution organisations doing analysis (take) six months …getting a report.
“We’re able to shrink the amount of time from weeks and months and quarters… to a couple of days
“You can take a TV creative, measure back and see the results. What was the foot traffic to the store, to the dealership? That’s never been done before. You used to have to wait a month and a half.”
Alphonso suite includes real-time data on what’s being aired across more than 200 US TV networks. It then uses automated content recognition (ACR) technology embedded on consumer devices like smartphones to listen out for what’s airing on nearby TVs.
The ensuing data, indicating what consumers are watching, can be used to target ads on digital devices. But a better way of looking at it may be to target based on what consumers are not watching, Gall says.
We have known for years how brands recognise consumers are “second-screening”, using a phone or tablet to distract themselves from TV commercial breaks.
“If people are looking down (at their phone) when my commercial comes on – that million-dollar, beautiful commercial – I’ve got to think, is that beautiful TV ad now a really expensive radio ad?,” he says. “We can take that, and serve that same ad … in your lap, to a phone, tablet or desktop.”
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.
]]>In its last-published quarter, Q4 2016, Twitter made $638mn from advertising, slightly less than the same quarter a year earlier, as ad sales in its native USA dipped slightly, pushing it to a quarterly net loss of $167mn. Meanwhile, publishers are reportedly turning bearish toward rival Facebook Instant Articles.
But, with news from the White House and overseas proving a big hit, Twitter’s global news content partnerships director Peter Greenberger says his platform can prove valuable.
“Twitter has never been more influential or more relevant,” Greenberger tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Every day, the story of the day that leads in the newspaper, online and television is very often based on what the president tweeted or how people responded to that tweet. Only on Twitter are you able to instantly find out what’s going on in the world. The world turns to Twitter first to see what’s going on.”
Asked whether bad news stories might dissuade brands from buying ads in Twitter, Greenberger, who succeeded former Twitter news head Adam Sharp, said: “This isn’t new. Monetising straight news and breaking news and controversial or uncertain news has always been difficult, long before Twitter – that’s why the newspaper has a travel section and a lifestyle section.
“Similarly on Twitter, there are opportunities to monetise other types of news, whether that is tech news or financial news, entertainment news, sports news. There are many types of news content that are more acceptable to advertisers. In some cases, brands are happy to be associated with any type of content, whether that’s political or breaking news.”
Greenberger has Bloomberg airing three hours a day of its live TV channel on Twitter.
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.
]]>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.
]]>“I think the opportunity around creativity is to divorce it from the visual design standpoint,” says Doug Rozen, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer at global media agency OMD. Rozen and his teams spend a fair amount of time thinking through the role of media in driving creativity and creative decisions, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
In this manner they constantly seek to push contextual understanding to reach people better. “I think the most important thing is to find ways to think beyond a box, think beyond a screen, beyond an ad and create content that a consumer really wants,” says Rozen.
Part of the job is reaching audiences and then engaging them and breaking through to make a meaningful connection. “I think at times we get lost about either just making a connection and failing to reach, or reaching them without that connection. A lot of what we’re trying to do is how to bring those two things together,” says Rozen.
Asked about OMD’s experience to date with artificial intelligence technology, Rozen says it ranges not only from conversation assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to Google Assistant but to insights that can be gleaned from AI to inform media knowledge of things like audience segments. He likens AI in human terms to a toddler in a hurry.
“What’s exciting is that it’s growing up fast. It will not take years for it to be a teenager and adult,” Rozen says.
Transformation in advertising and media means different things to different people. People usually talk about how creative or media agencies have changed to keep pace with consumers and clients, but not Rozen.
“What transformation means to me is evolution. We cannot stand still. If we stand still we are dead,” he 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.
]]>David Shim, Founder & CEO of Placed, which specializes in ad-to-store attribution, shared the results of an analysis Placed did for a large client in an undisclosed business category. The client wanted to know the difference in incremental lift between 15- and 30-second spots.
With one impression, both versions provided lift. But beyond five impressions, the 15-second spots continued to show lift for each incremental impression that was added while the 30-second spot flat-lined, according to Shim.
“That actually gave them ammunition to go out and say what are the spots we’re going to go after,” Shim said. The client decided not to stop doing 30-second spots “because it does help us tell a better story,” Shim explained. “But the 15-second spots have a high amount of value that we do want more reach, we do want more frequency on that one, so they’re actually adjusting their spending.”
Asked by moderator Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer at MediaMath, to define “lift,” Shim cited incremental store visits. “Being able to say not that I served you an ad, because if you see a Walmart ad, about 40% of the U.S. population is going to go to Walmart in a 30-day window,” Shim said. “You shouldn’t get credit for a 30-day conversion window to get all those people because you’re going to get 40% conversion rates.”
Such analyses become more difficult to accomplish with omni-channel advertising, particularly where addressable and linear television are involved. “Those aren’t things that you can hold out a cookie pool for,” Shim said. “It requires a little bit more effort to identify those exposed and unexposed groups and measure that lift.”
Nonetheless, advertisers “know they need to do it. They just need help to get that way,” he added.
Because some of Placed’s partners their inventory sources, it knows that with five different providers there can be a dropoff of lift of 70% from the best to the worst. “Just by optimizing on your inventory source alone you can immediately see gains,” Shim said.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>“I think it’s becoming more viable and scalable every day,” Gotlieb says of set-top box, dynamic ad and smart TV addressability that can “aggregate a pretty substantial chunk of the population. I think this is the year that it becomes a truly scalable proposition.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Gotlieb goes on to explain that GroupM’s initial focus on addressable ad targeting has been with clients that can do the “cleanest and quickest attribution” and for whom the value of an acquisition is highest. He cites financial, automobiles and the studio sector because the data are reasonably good and closed-loop attribution can be accomplished.
“Once that gets laid down properly, we will scale it out to the broader client list,” he says.
Creative versioning is something “we need to do a great deal of work on,” Gotlieb adds. “There are a couple of technologies that we’re working on that will enable things like segmentation. More to come.”
On the issue of brand safety, he says one’s response to recent headlines about digital ads appearing alongside objectionable content depends on “when you arrived at the party. We arrived at the party a long, long time ago.”
He goes on to outline the steps GroupM had taken to blacklist websites that “thrived from privacy violations” and once that list had been established “we began to add to that from a brand safety perspective.”
Gotlieb expresses wonder at “those people who are just waking up to brand safety issues,” citing the appointment last year of John Montgomery as Chief Brand Safety Officer.
“I don’t think the issue is one that we can throw the media owners under the bus on,” he says. “I think we have to take some responsibility for it and we have to work collaboratively to provide an ecosystem that is friendlier to our clients.”
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.
]]>Publishers and platforms go on tinkering with offering new ad experiences in a never-ending quest to push the boundaries and increase consumer attention.
But what happens when publishers innovate ahead of the standard curve, how do they approach inventing a new format, and what are the results? A panel of executives convened at the Beet Retreat summit discussed during this panel debate.
true[X] east coast sales and partnerships SVP Sam Amiri:
“Digital has always struggled because it never had its own native ad break or format. We just, as an industry, took pre-existing platforms, took a TV spot and called it pre-roll, took a newspaper ad and called it display.
“As a consumer, it’s difficult to find a reason to support advertising in our daily experience. There’s no reason to want to see those ads.”
Spotify video sales head Brian Danzis:
“What if you could speak to someone when they’re going for a run, or lifting weights? Music gives us a unique opportunity to look at what people are feeling, what they’re doing and decide on multimedia ad formats to reach them with.
“Knowing what people are feeling and thinking about based on the music that they listen to gives marketers the ability to reach somebody in a proper mindset.
“We released a new ad format in the fall called ‘branded moments’, where you could take existing creative, we would help retro-fit it for vertical, allowing advertisers to speak to users in these moments that matter.”
Facebook agency partner manager Jason Dailey:
“We start with watching consumers. Once we find something that seems to be a common thread across all of them, we figure out how to build a solution or produce around it.
“Right now, we’re trying to create ways for people to create, share and consume video in all the ways they want to – vertical formats, live formats, ephemeral formats… short-form… long-form … creating the widest possible palette of options there is.”
Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin:
“The problem is scale. (Marketers say), ‘I need my message on YouTube, Snap, Hulu and many other places and I don’t want to work with each and every one of them to build something that is (only) a little different’ … that doesn’t translate well between devices.”
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Speaking at the Beet Retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the middle of March, the satellite platform’s advanced TV director Jamie West said: “Sky AdSmart launched in Italy six weeks ago, it launches in Ireland on April 7 and then in Germany in 18 months’ time.
“It’s important than all advertisers can expect the same quality of service and execution across the different territories.”
AdSmart was launched four years ago, and allows advertisers to pre-fill subscribers’ set-top boxes with ads for custom-targeted play-out during linear TV commercial breaks. It is helping smaller and local businesses buy ads in TV for the first time.
Sky has since launched AdVance to help ad buyers understand frequency of play-out to deduplicated consumers across Sky’s advertising offering, which includes online sales, as well as an analytics tool.
As he aims to deliver an advertiser offering that can match those of Google and Facebook, West says the changes are prompting a reboot of how Sky wants to price its advertising, having introduced a commitment, four years ago, that it would only charge for ad views that were 75% completed.
“TV has the best opportunity now to really differentiate itself,” West said. “TV as a business should have standardised currencies, measurements and metrics. We need to start thinking about the differential between a view on a three-inch screen versus a 52-inch screen.
“We will be transitioning all of our currencies – whether it be long-form video – to be all 75% view-through rate – in a high-engaging, lean-forward environment, where brand messages excel and excite on he big screen.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These are two subjects that occupy the mind of Kathleen Brookbanks, Chief Operating Officer of Omnicom’s much-celebrated Hearts & Science media agency. Addressability in particular is “something we’re looking at in a deeper, much closer way,” she says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
Brookbanks doesn’t think about addressable as being about an individual. H&S uses data to understand the individual and then “cluster that together to understand their behaviors so that when we look at addressable we can make better matches between that behavioral targeting and where we place it.”
Addressable is very hard to do in linear television despite its mass audience reach, something that contributes to an overall shortage of forums, according to Brookbanks.
“Finding the forums for it is harder than ever,” she explains. “You have ratings declines in linear media and then you have some of the safety issues that we’ve now run into with a platform like YouTube in the social space.”
She describes creative versioning of ads as something that’s very detailed “and has to happen incredibly fast,” adding that it helps to change one’s view of what creative has traditionally been: something that takes time to develop. While media agencies have a view of “what’s happening with that versioning” it’s not to say they are the ones that should be doing it as opposed to creative shops. This debate “is more about the operational and skillset combined,” says Brookbanks.
She attributes the impressive rise of H&S—winning major business from Procter & Gamble and then AT&T in less than six months—to the culmination of some five years of investment in data and technology by Omnicom in its Annalect unit. “When we were ready to launch a new agency that is about data, we had already learned and had access to the technology, the forms of data and were able to quickly move into how that data informs decisions,” says Brookbanks.
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.
]]>“We as an industry, in trying to learn each thing, create isolation, create separation and create a break in the consumer experience,” says Phil Cowdell, President of Platform Services for global media investment group GroupM.
Part of GroupM’s response is [m]PLATFORM, which allows all GroupM agencies to present clients with a more fully unified suite of ad planning, tracking and targeting tools, as ADWEEK reports.
Cowdell describes [m]PLATFORM as an amalgam of technology, data, people and expertise coming together “into one seamless, horizontal utility to client and agency teams.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Cowdell shares his vision of a world in which advertisers earn the right to consumer data by creating meaningful ad experiences for them. And he posits that data sharing among non-competing marketers can create a powerful alternative to first-party and third-party data, something he calls “closed-second” data.
Tackling semantics first, he says the terms first- and third-party data are off the mark because it’s the consumer’s data. “It’s consumer first.”
He offers an anecdote involving two men discussing who’s going to “chat up the girl” they encounter in a bar. “The reality is, the lady in the bar can decide who she’s like to spend her time with, and it’s not the choice of these two people.”
What really matters is how agencies and brands actually deploy all of that information. “If we don’t respect their data, if we don’t add value through their data, their own experience, we’re not going to get it,” Cowdell says.
He fully expects to see more data sharing in which brands in non-competing categories share useful consumer information to the benefit of all. “If we make it too isolated within our own narrow set, we can’t activate it,” he explains. “So the thing we’ll start to see in data is this emergence of closed-second.”
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.
]]>“Because we’re a retail organization, we’re able to really understand who our guests are and how they shop,” Argyilan says. “As a result of that, we’re able to create these rich marketing programs that are very specific to groups of human beings and what their natural interests are.”
The next step is taking that first-party data and applying it to mass media, television being “the frontier that we are going to attack in 2017,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
Knowing not on a demographic but more granular basis how Target customers view video has a direct impact on its program and content rankings “in ways that we didn’t necessarily expect.” Traditionally, marketers and media companies decided this while focusing primarily on high attentiveness and premium programming.
“But now we’re actually able to go right to our guests and ask them what do they consider their favorite programming, and those lists are very different,” Argyilan says. “So you can imagine the power of understanding that when we go to any of the media companies and talk about the kind of programming we want to buy from them or the kind of content we want to develop with them.”
Target hopes to get to a “more sophisticated place” with creative versioning, according to Argyilan. While it believes that addressable TV “has been stuck in this kind of awkward place for a very long time,” the retailer is hoping to find ways of doing addressable at scale for individual markets.
“We’re not to the place yet where we can start to understand patterns across the country that start to aggregate so it makes it easier for us to execute,” says Argyilan. “We’re still looking at it one store at a time, one market at a time, which just makes it hard from a mechanics standpoint to really be able to execute it at scale.”
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.
]]>“Guess what happened? Nobody was buying,” recalled Carl Fremont, Global Chief Digital Officer at media agency MEC.
That’s because there was no measurement around digital viewing and digital really couldn’t be compared to broadcast buys, Fremont said in a keynote interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
“It was a complete buyer’s market,” Fremont added, in response to a question from Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz. “It forced us to really look at the measurement pieces of it, both the planning side and the buying side.”
While some things have changed since those first NewFronts efforts, much remains the same in the absence of uniform digital video audience measurement. This is a source of much frustration given the universal appreciation for the sight, sound and motion characteristics of advertising messages delivered every second of the day to ubiquitous screens small and large.
“It’s so fragmented,” Fremont continued. “It’s still a confusing marketplace.”
Swartz sees it more an issue of EQ (emotional intelligence) as opposed to IQ, requiring buyers and sellers to come together and forge solutions. “It’s not about cherry picking problems. It’s about providing solutions,” she said.
Both agreed that removing complexity from the ecosystem would lower costs as more brand marketers embrace addressability and an audience-based world. “We do need one way of measurement. We need one way of planning,” said Fremont.
One of the challenges of planning video buys is there’s no line of sight to inventory, particularly premium video. A system that could look across different platforms like OTT and connected TV would be akin to utopia if buyers could gear the right content to the right consumer experience in the right channel.
To Fremont, programmatic is a key component but not just for the sake of technological convenience. There still must be human interaction among partners whose interests are common but whose approaches vary.
“It has to be done in a dialogue manner,” said Fremont. “The relationship that I think we need to have is less about the complexity of the buy side and more about how do we use data to find audiences at scale.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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