You are watching “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio. For more videos, please visit this page.
But now the set of capabilities and consequences produced by that data is changing shape.
What will the future look like? That is what “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” our recent Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio, set out to uncover.
In these highlights, hear the takes of nine advertising executives on the issue.
Joao Machado, marketing SVP at Sabio, a company which powers connected TV ads using mobile data, says the combination is a win.
“The mobile device is the perfect mirror of a person’s affinities, their likes, where they are in their life stages,” Machado says. He wants to “couple it with the promise of what CTV digital television offers”.
Reborn, QR Codes Are The Glue Between Mobile & TV: Sabio’s Machado
When it comes to new-wave TV, AJ Kinter, head of advanced video strategy at Publicis Media Exchange (PMX), says the opportunities are burgeoning.
Kinter draws a distinction between “programmatic CTV” and “direct CTV”. “Since the CPMs have started to become much closer to programmatic CTV, you now have a linear, addressable TV and programmatic CTV kind of range in the same type of CPM,” he says.
Data Tell Story of Changing Viewership Habits: PMX’s AJ Kintner
Device data needs to inform media buys. That is why Aziz Rahim, Sabio CEO, says his company also started an app analytics division.
“Sabio is focusing on the media aspect of the industry, providing a deeper, unique targeting, reach and capabilities, and then along with creative capabilities,” he says. “The App Science side is to provide agnostic analytics and insights on CTV and OTT, along with mobile campaigns.”
After IDFA, Mobile Is Identity Gold For CTV: Sabio & App Science’s Rahim
Ad buyers need to avoid exposing consumers to the same ad across multiple devices, says Dave Kersey, executive media director at GSD&M.
“Duplication is certainly a challenge in the industry,” Kersey says. “(We need to be) understanding the entire consumer journey across all video platforms.”
Mobile Data Help to Avoid Ad Duplication: GSD&M’s Dave Kersey
At MBuy, a unit of Mediaocean, media strategy and operations SVP Michael Parent is using data to welcome back travel brands that want to resume spending.
“We’re taking the data that we’re getting — everything from geography to programming to dayparts to the response that we’re getting,” Parent says.
CTV Data Provide More Insights for Ad Targeting: MBuy’s Michael Parent
At Sabio’s App Science, EVP Helen Lum says ad duplication is starting to worry more ad buyers.
“I think a good way to solve for that is actually to track and reduce that duplication and monitor that reach and frequency across partners and publishers, so that advertisers can reinvest those wasted dollars in real-time for their buys,” Lum says.
CTV Offers Faster Data Insights Than Linear TV: App Science’s Helen Lum
Mobile is evolving toward becoming an e-commerce driver for TV ads, says Jeff Liang, head of digital product at WPP’s MediaCom.
“We’ll eventually get to a point where we’ll be able to allow for comparison shopping on CTV and give consumers the ability to transact within that single remote device rather than driving people to their mobile phones,” Liang predicts.
Mobile Data Enable Audience Targeting on CTV: MediaCom’s Jeff Liang
It’s no longer an “either-or”. Kelly Metz, managing director of linear activation at Omnicom Media Group, says ad planners must understand how consumers use mobile and TV in tandem.
“The way we choose to manage that or support that from a planning perspective is by emphasizing holistic campaign planning and holistic campaign measurement,” she says.
Mobile, TV Data Provide Holistic Audience Insights: Omnicom Media Group’s Kelly Metz
The ability to target TV ads can revolutionise healthcare advertising, according to Starcom’s EVP Melissa Gordon-Ring.
“We can double-down on things like connected television or addressable television, and have a higher likelihood of reaching our patient in their household, versus hoping that this is the right target audience for us to be purchasing against,” she says.
Mobile Data Support Personalized Healthcare Marketing: Starcom’s Melissa Gordon-Ring
You are watching “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio. For more videos, please visit this page.
But what if it could recalibrate the creative works that make all that happen?
That is what is beginning to happen, as a new generation of AI-driven technology sets its sights on the creative process.
In this video interview with Anush Prabhu, MediaCom’s US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell explains the new age of “creative advertising technology”.
O’Connell and her colleagues authored a report on the sector, which includes dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and similar tactics, in Q4 2020, covering companies like Adacado, Bannerflow, Celtra, Clinch, Flashtalking, Innovid, Jivox, RevJet, and SundaySky. She recently delivered this presentation on the topic.
O’Connell says it is made up of “companies that are solving for various parts through the creative process… everything from kind of ideation at the kind of beginning through to having things out in the wild”. And that creates two kinds of benefits:
Production – “Create 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 variations without paying a whole bunch of production people to do it manually. That saves money, that money can be reinvested in people or media or whatever.”
Performance – “Does it work better if I deliver a creative that’s more relevant or more timely or whatever, more resonant?”
So, how big is creative advertising technology, and where will it go from here? Forrester’s O’Connell sees the category is an “awkward teenager”:
Immature stage: “We used technology as a substitute for good thinking.”
Awkward teenage years: “Where you’ve got the really cool kids that have leaned in and are doing the cool things, but it’s still sort of fringy.”
Mature: “Technology as an enabler of creativity, rather than technology as a substitute for creativity.”
The content of advertising could be revolutionized by technology, including artificial intelligence, some think.
MediaCom’s Prabhu says that includes “equalizing” for diversity. “Tthere is a new majority coming in that is more diverse, more in-tune with what we see America as,” he says. “Data is allowing us to get to know those audiences and talk to those audiences equally and in a better way.”
O’Connell says that is an appealing theory – but complexity will continue to make the reality difficult.
“You can do that in a very basic human way, but you can also do that using technology, using artificial intelligence to look for patterns in massive data sets that would help just generally point you in a better direction in terms of something like the zeitgeist,” she says. “But I don’t want to minimize actually how hard it really is.”
Still, O’Connell predicts AI will show itself front-and-center in advertising, not just in the back-end.
“The thing about AI,” she says, “is that it is omnipresent in advertising, we just don’t know it – in everything from planning to optimization to creative (through) natural language processing and … machine learning.”
“(It will go from a) behind-the-scenes, important workhorse to something that starts to also feel like it’s front and center in terms of the consumer experience.
“And I think we’re going to see so much more there.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on creativity, advanced technology and advertising is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos on this topic, visit this page. For more information on IBM Watson Advertising, please visit this page.
]]>But, increasingly, artificial intelligence algorithms are proving they can restore the primacy of ad creative.
That is what a host of industry executives discussed when they gathered on June 23 for the Global Forum on Responsible Media,
This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the creativity/technology advertising track presented by IBM Watson Advertising.
The New Majority: MediaCom’s Prabhu Aims To Make Advertising Addressable
Dynamic creative versioning is allowing advertisers to deliver a diverse range of re-mixed ad creatives for consumers. But Anush Prabhu – US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, for MediaCom – says companies need to lean on software for something that is becoming too complex for humans, in two areas:
Robert Redmond thinks he has the answer – if producing a plethora of different ad creatives for a burgeoning range of audience types if complex for humans, call on the machines to help.
Specifically, machine learning like that offered by Redmon’s IBM is increasingly being called on to anticipate and remix the optimum ad creatives for different viewers.
“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer,” says Redmond, whose IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions.
“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”
‘Data Artistry’ Unlocks Context & Cohorts: Mindshare’s Clayton’s Post-Cookie Dreams
Creative-focused technology is important because there is a growing sentiment that ad creative, in the programmatic era, has been overlooked in favor of super-targeting alone.
But it also comes as ad buyers look for solutions in the era after third-party cookies and digital identifiers. And that is seeing the re-emergence of contextual targeting.
“Context has always been considered this old-school thing of the past,” says Sean Clayton, executive director, solutions officer at WPP’s Mindshare. “But, really, as you start understanding that people move in waves, they move in larger cohorts, the ability to start executing against those cohorts is actually pretty exciting, especially when you can look within the programmatic ecosystem.”
Machine learning can help advertisers in the new world, despite declining usefulness of traditional identifiers, says Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at GropM’s Wavemaker.
“The power of machine learning is really to build this layer of intelligence on top of a more limited amount of signals and translate that into something which is quite meaningful,” she says.
“It may be insight, it can be intelligence that is going to optimise media planning, but it can also be the predictive piece. Everybody’s looking to really know where you need to put your media dollars to maximise the return on investment and contribute more to your bottom line.”
Xiao Lin of Xaxis wants to make sure clients have really bespoke creative that speaks to consumers. But he, too, wants to lean on technology to get there.
The GroupM division uses a tool called Copilot that uses signals like browser, location, time of day and the weather “to create thousands of creative variations on the fly”, Lin says: “It introduces thousands more different data inputs to which then our AI Copilot could actually optimise towards the output or the client’s outcome.”
But that is only going to come about if ad production and delivery channels are themselves wired up to support this addressability.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Anush Prabhu, US Chief Strategy Officer and Global Chief Strategy Officer, Creative Transformation, for MediaCom, describes what it’s going to take – and how it will help.
Prabhu sees a world in which consumers are increasingly happy to share private data with brands. But he thinks brands have to catch up to that.
“Right now, about 80% of our media is addressable whereas only 2% of that content is being addressed,” Prabhu says. The reason?
“Brands have found it very difficult – from a production, from an operation perspective, from an optimization perspective – to do it themselves.”
“That is the opportunity we see for marketers tomorrow – to get a lot more personally relevant with their messaging with their media.
That personal relevance could move the needle, Prabhu thinks.
“The fact is that media (inventory) in any system only accounts for 50% of the impact of any marketing, the other 50 still rests with creative.”
He says brands that do engage in a lot more personal, relevant messaging can see over 45% increase in their performance.
“We need to make a lot of strides there and bring the opportunity that we have gone into from a media perspective into the creative world as well,” he explains.
Despite years of talk about dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the art of re-mixing ad creative assets into new versions for different audiences, Prabhu’s message will come as a shot in the arm. He is saying it’s time for ad creative to get personal, to resonate with a splintering range of audience and to boost effectiveness.
And he thinks the route to that future has two lanes:
It is all so important because, if consumers as individuals weren’t already distinct enough to merit personalized advertising, cultures are.
“So far, media and the world of advertising and marketing has been very biassed towards the majority, but that majority is changing,” Prabhu says. “The new majority today is going to be those ethnic populations, diverse people with different skin colours, different choices.
“Not only in terms of the way they live their lives, the way they approach religion, the way they approach their sexual preferences. Making sure we as a media industry or an advertising industry connect and equally treat all those opportunities for every brand is key.”
As far as opportunities for creative optimization, Savic says that in years past it has mostly centered around content creation and partnerships. The last year, however, has shifted more towards how we can develop processes or capabilities that will deliver a mass of content pieces for any given client in a calendar year.
“Basically we build a platform, which uses personal profiles to understand personal affinities and preferences,” Savic says of the work that MediaCom is doing. “Merge that with a DCO platform that creates a combination of facets to personalize an ad for every single person.”
Savic believes that technology is now in a place where we’re capable of delivering on this; we’re now using technology to enhance the purpose of a brand.
“This belief that we should create and own our technology,” says Savic. “I think we went away from that because that’s not the business we’re in. We’re in the business of creating the best possible solutions for our clients and partnering with anyone who is in the latest and greatest rank.”
As far as expanding this creative capability, Savic, sees both an opportunity and a client need in many often-overlooked areas. Many companies are delivering at the very top, meaning TV campaigns and ads, and on the very bottom, such as programmatic ads and display, but ignoring everything in between—social, cultural outreach, purpose-driven advertising, all of it was never quite there. Savic hopes to fill that void in order to be relevant in today’s media landscape.
Reaching a large audience and repeating a message over and over just isn’t enough anymore, and Savic is noticing that with the clients that approach them. He’s finding that DCO is a big element moving forward, as well as opportunities in sports and advertising, and having a clearly communicated purpose.
“Especially when it comes to millennials and younger people,” says Savic. “They want you to know them by name and they expect you to create advertising that is meaningful to them that talks to them, and communication for brands that goes beyond ‘this is my product or service and this is the price we hope you’re willing to pay.’”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>There will be more storms and “people are still living under roofs with plastic tarpaulins…there are still people who don’t have power. So what we have to do is help to sustain relief to make sure that people live their own lives and be independent.”
At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Cowdell provided an update on those relief efforts. He presented an overview of what he and his colleagues from GroupM undertook in tthe weeks after the storm.via slides and video. In this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, Cowdell explains how a GroupM team including people from agencies like MediaCom, Media Edge and Wavemaker responded after Maria struck on Sept. 16, 2017.
“What happened immediately after the storm is I reached out and said, ‘how is everybody’? It took a couple of days to find out at least they’re all okay and they’re alive,” says Cowdell, who is Global President, Client Services. “And then when you get a message from a colleague who says ‘but I have no drinking water for my 13-month old baby,’ what do you do? You have a choice.”
While some people donated money or made pledges to do so, Cowdell chose to “get on a plane and you can take water purification. I managed to get on a phone, collected water purification, filters, solar lamps, medications, etcetera.”
Cowdell expresses frustration when he recalls seeing events on the ground versus what the news media was reporting during the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. He says the national narrative the weekend after the storm was characterized by people tweeting “about the NFL and taking a knee. They weren’t about thousands of Puerto Ricans at risk and potentially thousands dead.”
Some news reports conveyed the impression that there were lots of relief efforts going on by individuals and the military.
“What was being told didn’t reflect reality on the ground. I know we’re in a world of fake news now, but for me personally it was my first real experience of seeing the reality of a situation on the ground and what’s being communicated through the storytelling of the media,” Cowdell says.
His focus going forward is to continue to help marshal continued assistance to Puerto Ricans in the face of inexorable threatening weather conditions.
“The real issue is, the storm when it first hit was a weather disaster. What happened after it became an economic disaster. People who are very rich paid $25,000 they flew out and moved to their houses in Miami. Then it got to the next class and the next class.”
Meanwhile, in places like the hills of Campos, “They are still in desperate need. There was no real tolerance for a storm like this. Those are the people who need help.”
At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised some $20,000.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts 2018, Badigian, who is Account Lead at the GroupM media agency, talks about why consumers are more sensitive than ever to brand alignment with content and the utility of downloadable video content from Hulu. And she predicts a heyday for audio.
“I think Studio71 actually had a really interesting approach” consisting of computer-driven text and image screening plus a third variable that’s not always found, says Badigian. “They actually have a human element, which I thought was really interesting because not all publishers or content creators are doing that. And it allows them to really understand what’s the difference between maybe a child holding a water gun versus an actual weapon.”
While she doesn’t think there’s a “solve” yet for the overarching issue of brand safety in digital environments, “It’s a very sensitive area and I think it’s one that we’re going to have to be more careful about as advertisers and people as consumers are going to be looking for.”
Asked about tactics for brand alignment, Badigian says a client might be getting “great reach” out of YouTube but not all of the content the client is aligning with on the platform might not be relevant enough to the actual brand or product. “I think that’s where a lot of these smaller publishers or content creators are really important for us because their content might be more customizable to our brand,” she says.
“Studio71 has a lot of different content integration opportunities where you can more tightly weave your brand into that platform. They really do have a ton of very loyal followers.”
In this interview, Studio71 Media Sales EVP Matt Crowley explains the company’s vetting process.
Badigian says Hulu’s NewFronts announcement about viewers being able to download content, including programming containing ads, is a nod to the reality that people don’t always consume video in the same way.
“Sometimes we’re in our homes, sometimes we’re in a train, sometimes we’re in a plane. So downloadable content’s important because we’re not always online even though we probably always want to be online.”
More details can be found in this interview with Hulu’s Peter Naylor.
Badigian was surprised she didn’t hear much about audio content at the NewFronts, given the ascendance of podcasts and similar formats. “I think video had its heyday. I think audio is about to have one.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“One of the refreshing parts of the conference today is seeing the marketing community galvanize as trying to be a single voice and just renewing the importance of the investment and what marketing can do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV, Zambianchi reflects on the importance of measuring campaign results and how quickly the digital media ecosystem has advanced when compared to the traditional television business.
“Measurement is everything,” says Zambianchi. “I don’t think anyone’s comfortable anymore with just having communications out there but really tying it back to how we can affect the business.”
Agencies can be “very powerful” by collaborating and setting up frameworks to measure their efforts to determine “what we’re doing is moving product off shelf, is bringing foot traffic into stores.”
Asked about the growing potential of reaching consumers with premium video, Zambianchi references the evolution of TV “let’s say from how prevalent it was in the 1950’s, when it was in fact in every household.”
It took roughly 30 to 40 years to get beyond three TV networks, and 40 to 50 to get into cable and satellite offerings. Comparatively, digital consumption and the accompanying ecosystem has changed dramatically in just 20 years and shows no signs of slowing down.
“It’s so difficult to even project where it’s going to go, it’s moving so rapidly,” says Zambianchi.
He believes advertisers and agencies have just started to tap what premium video can do.
“Consumers have proven that they’re willing to trade their time to spend with brands with interesting content.”
MediaCom counsels its clients to “be true to their own brand values, bring interesting, engaging stories, be more creative. Media can be a force for that. It’s just beginning to blossom.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>These days, that kind of digital-to-physical attribution is totally achievable, and agency Mediacom is amongst those taking advantage of technology that uses mobile phones to follow consumers right up to the cash register.
“We’ve been working with tracking technology companies like Foursquare to allow us to tie back everything we do across channel and in content, back to traffic within stores, and then making those linkages to sales,” MediaCom advanced analytics managing partner Rachel Brook tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“When we go out of in commerce to in-store, we have the opportunity to find the individual … It’s an opportunity to act.
“We’re working with a couple of different location partners to really understand what best practice there looks like, and how we need to develop an implementation and execution process.”
A number of tech vendors are in the marketplace offering location data, much of it embedded in apps like Foursquare’s or in served ads that reside in other apps, to indicate where in the world a customer is.
Linking that location data back to a unified profile of a consumer who may have seen a prior ad gives brands the ability to close the loop on figuring out ad effectiveness and return on investment.
Next up, Brook says she is targeting new data partners and machine learning capabilities for Mediacom’s toolset.
This interview was held at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.
]]>But the two hemispheres of the industry don’t have to be divorced from each other, says one leading agency exec. MediaCom’s US CEO thinks data can now help to power ever-more creative advertising.
“Data is the new business fuel, data allow you to design new creative,” Sasha Savic says, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Data will change creative to be more precise and to be more relevant.”
In 2017, we have heard plenty from advertising executives – even many in the data vendor community – who want to talk more about creative enablement. Savic is on board with that – but he doesn’t see enough chat from peers.
“There is reluctance from traditional big agencies to embrace data as the fuel for creativity,” Savic claims.
The industry is now entering a next phase in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are promising to even better target consumers. For MediaCom, Savic says AI “surprises us every day with new opportunities that we didn’t dream about yesterday”.
And, whilst it will be possible for algorithms to mine consumer records to form a better understanding of them than perhaps they even have of themselves, Savic thinks privacy concerns won’t be as big a deal for audiences, if the campaign hits the right note.
He cites an example last year in which Coke wanted to show a bottle bearing viewers’ first name at the end of TV commercials – something which required both viewer data and viewer permission. ‘Eighty percent of people said ‘yeah, do it’,” Savic adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>They were interviewed on stage by Paul Kontonis at the Beet.TV video advertising summit on “outstream” advertising presented by Ebuzzing & Teads. Please find more videos from that event here.
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Given the changes in consumption, the industry needs a streamlined analytics approach to cross-channel behaviors, he says. “If we are going to acknowledge that people are going from Place A to Place B to Place C, we shouldn’t just look at what they do last…We need to make sure every impression counts to some degree,” Lampert says. That means marketers need to understand how consumers are moving across properties and what is making an impact at each point in the journey. He points to both Google’s and AOL’s purchases of attribution firms this spring as evidence of the importance in understanding the links in consumer behaviors across platforms.
Lampert recently moved from Digitas to MediaCom, and works with clients such as Dell and Volkswagen. Lampert was one of the speakers at the Beet.TV video advertising summit on “outstream” advertising presented by Ebuzzing & Teads. Please find more videos from that event here.
]]>Real-time marketing and digital venues are putting more data in the hands of marketers immediately, while consumers have more choice. “The proliferation of all these channels will bring the necessity to have much more content and open-ended content that gives the consumers the choice to [pick] the stories they want to see or hear from the brand,” says Savic, who is also a filmmaker.”That’s the next level of marketing.” But that kind of segmented targeting is not feasible for everyone. “You can talk to targeted audiences for 15 to 20 seconds, but how many brands will have the money to do that? That’s where algorithms will come into play.” He adds that most creative agencies are adopting an all-inclusive view of video across all screens. “You need to tell a story in a way that will travel across TV, mobile and digital platforms.”
We interviewed Savic at the MediaCom penthouse suite at the Martinez Hotel.
Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here
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MediaCom’s global media head Ben Phillips tells Beet.TV mobile ad formats have moved on significantly over the last decade: “We’re seeing a lot more branding opportunities come in, like rich media advertising. Consumer are expecting us to provide them with a lot better advertising units, as opposed to the 320×50 banner.
“The engagement layer is completely different. We need to start understanding a little bit more about how the consumer interacts on that device.”
We spoke with him at the Mindshare party at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
We taped this segment at the rooftop suite of the the MediaCom at the Martinez Hotel.
]]>“I don’t think anyone signs up for our industry to be staring at an Excel spreadsheet. moving click-through analysis rates from one cell to another,” MediaCom Worldwide CEO Stephen Allan tells Beet.TV. “They actually want to add something, bring creativity, bring innovation to a client’s business.
“The more we can redeploy people toward making a difference rather than just being spreadsheet analysts – that’s a win-win for everyone. If we can use technology to take out the drudge and the mundane, I’m all for using it.”
He spoke with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more coverage of the festival here.
Producer’s Note: This video and several others were recorded at the MediaCom rooftop suite at the Martinez Hotel. Thanks to the MediaCom crew for hosting us.
]]>“The reason content is now so topical is, brands are increasingly looking for much more ROI,” MediaCom’s global MBA head James Morris tells Beet.TV.
“Content elevates itself over and above advertising. Advertising is still an important part of the mix – but it’s not the answer to every communications challenge.”
Morris helps devise content-led strategies including viral videos, blogger outreach and search engine optimisation for MediaCom clients.
He spoke with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more coverage of the festival here.
]]>“Content marketing has always been around but it’s getting more attention, and now we are just adding a layer of accountbaility,” he explains. “Look at orginal daytime shows. Brands were weaving themselves into content. Now we can track. We can take that content and do it in a way that’s engaging and trackable. We have the analytics to say what is engaging, what is the time spent, the unique views.”
One of the biggest challenges in reaching consumers with branded content is distributing it, given Facebook’s crackdown on serving up posts, he adds. Nonetheless, more brands are investing in content production and aligning the content with KPIs.
“The video needs to be aligned to the business goal,” Black says.
Black was a panelist at the Beet.TV Content Marketing Summit held at the New York offices of Mindshare this week. You can find more videos from that event here.
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He adds that the vital element to any sort of content creation lies in authenticity. “We are trying to weave in brands that are authentic and matter to the customers. Then you need to build relationships with customers and the brand attributes neede to be seeded throughout.
Distribution, investment, and a balanced strategy across the brand will all play a part in the potential success of branded content, Black adds.
Black was a speaker at the Beet.TV Content Marketing summit hosted by Mindshare and presented by Taboola. You can find more videos from that event here.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show, media agency Mediacom‘s USA CEO Sasha Savic gets excited about the prospects for brands.
“The depth of intrusion of new technologies in to every sphere of our lives … is just amazing,” Savic says.
“When you start talking about your kitchen, basic functions in your life relating to movement, it’s just amazing. It is going to truly change our lives – we nee to be ready for that.”
]]>“There’s a tendency to want to revert everything back to one level,” Damien Hodge observed. “We’re in danger of a commoditised market.
“If somebody starts off with a 20-second pre-roll but opens it up and interacts for three minutes, that’s a very different route from a 30-second TV spot. So it’s important we don’t look at it on a purely like-for-like basis.”
]]>“There are 30 billion monthly impressions for content, and four billion in full-episode players,” he says, adding that marketers should pay more attention to those 30 billion views because they represent consumer interest. “That is where the next opportunity should be and where the discussions should be had with clients because that’s where the consumers are.”
Privates marketplaces are growing, but clients are still for the most part looking at videos as brand awareness, he adds. Hinz also talked about the role of the New Fronts in driving digital video advertising spend prior to the TV upfront. He points to Netflix’s strategy with House of Cards as a good example of where the market is headed based on consumer demand.
Beet.TV’s coverage of this event at SXSW is sponsored by Videology.
-Daisy Whitney
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