But the partnerships won’t stop there.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp president Michael Parkes explains the company is non-monogamous with agencies, and has big growth plans.
As we look to the future of how media investments are made, we couldn't be happier to have partnered with @dentsuUSA on their launch of DELTA. The new team will use VideoAmp's data as a currency to make advanced audience guarantees https://t.co/UPm3G4iKFk pic.twitter.com/vMJlNNcXBv
— VideoAmp (@Video_Amp) April 13, 2021
In April, Dentsu Media announced the creation of Data-Enabled Linear TV Activation (DELTA).
The suite will supposedly “reimagine” the way it has been programmatically buying data-driven, people-based TV ads for clients.
It integrates audience and viewership data for planning, buying and measurement reporting into a single source, supposedly reducing reliance on third parties.
But DELTA relies on VideoAmp.
To address lack of standardization in audience based buying, Dentsu developed DELTA (data-enabled linear TV activation). Consolidates audience-based buys across all TV nets using VideoAmp's single source of viewership (Frontier, Dish, and TiVo’s STBs). https://t.co/qJS1NUjGDg
— ashfollenweider (@ashfollenweider) April 20, 2021
“We’ve been working with Dentsu for a while, and this is really indicative of a broader trend that we’re seeing with clients looking to adopt VideoAmp as an alternative currency for advanced audience guarantees within the linear TV, as well as extending into OTT and digital marketplaces,” Parkes tells Beet.TV.
“Dentsu has a very advanced capability with (people-based agency platform) M1, and their ability to create custom audience definitions for their clients is a big part of their differentiation as a holding company. So we’re enabling them to leverage that and be able to guarantee audience delivery with the networks and the supply side, so they can unlock more value within the marketplace.
“I think the industry has been unhappy with the status quo and the legacy measurement and currency solutions in the market. And we’re seeing a lot of demand for VideoAmp solutions to transition from the traditional measurement capability into currency, and being able to do audience guarantees based on the custom definitions that any client brings.”
VideoAmp says its platform offers walled garden, linear TV, OTT and digital data within a single platform, and that its software transforms how advertising is valued, transacted and measured across all channels and devices.
And it has been evolving after its launch back in 2014.
Parkes recalls: “Our strategy was always to start with the buy side and change the measurement behaviour, get clients used to planning and measuring against audiences that are beyond traditional age and gender, allow them to use their own first party data, bring in third party data that they may want to use for audience definitions.
“And then now we’re moving to work with the media owners to establish a trading currency that can be used for traditional television, as well as OTT and the more emerging spaces.”
]]>So companies like VideoAmp are aiming to build a more reliable way to gain a single, cross-device, cross-service profile of a viewer.
In its latest such effort, the LA-based company has built a platform that unites two key types of disparate viewing-platform data:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Michael Parkes, VideoAmp’s chief revenue officer, explains why such a system is necessary for planning, buying and measuring ads.
“OTT (over-the-top TV) has been a huge challenge to measure,” Parkes says. “Not all of the devices within the OTT landscape pass IDs that can be used for advertising.
“IP address is an identifier used within OTT which can be reliable (or) unreliable. So OTT and the ability to match that to traditional digital mobile IDs and cookies is a big challenge, and something that we’ve been working to solve.”
VideoAmp’s solution is one of several that aims to “commingle” viewing data from OTT devices and more conventional set-top boxes, both of which may be used alternately by a household, and to assign ownership of those devices to a given, anonymized household, in order to help advertisers avoid repeatedly exposing viewers to the same ads.
VideoAmp’s covers 26 million households and 37 million devices.
“We can see full TV viewership as well as ad exposure data across all of those households,” Parkes says. “We can measure almost any audience across that, whether it’s an in-market auto buyer, or whether it’s someone that purchased (a) particular product. Clients can overlay that understanding against their traditional Nielsen age, gender, GRP planning and measurement capabilities.”
VideoAmp’s dataset doesn’t just splice the two major platform sources together. It also includes using demographic weights to correct for demographic skews, as well as modeling audiences to match the size and composition of the US census.
And it purports to mitigate the effects of “phantom viewing” sessions, where cable TV boxes are often left on even when the TV is turned off.
Omnicom Media Group is using it within its own Omni TV planning and measurement tool, and it hopes the suite could be the foundation for an industry-wide measurement dataset, according to chief research officer Jonathan Steuer, quoted in VideoAmp’s announcement.
]]>At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:
Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.
“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.
“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”
Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”
As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.
“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.
“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.
“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”
VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.
“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”
However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.
“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”
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.
]]>GDPR, CCPA and other new privacy regulations challenge seek to limit companies’ use of consumers’ data.
But Michael Parkes doesn’t see speed humps, he sees a ramp.
“I actually think privacy is going to be a good thing for us in terms of increasing access to data and sharing of data,” says Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp, in this interview with Beet.TV.
“The privacy debate, I think, is actually a good thing because it’s forcing the creation of data clean rooms, new privacy-enabled APIs where people don’t have to send their data to make it available for measurement. They can actually create an environment where data can be queried, but it never actually leaves their wall.”
VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.
Earlier, the output acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data for eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data, to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes.
Parkes wants to guard against the emergence of a “future being owned by eight to 10 big walled garden” platforms.
“If they have ways where they can share that data, which will enable better planning, better measurement, and ultimately move more media dollars onto their platform, then it’s in their interest to be sharing that data in the right way,” he says.
“It’s in the interest of big platforms to share data in a way that’s going to enable them to get more spend.”
The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
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.
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