TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.
What is it going to take for the addressable opportunity to be realized at greater scale, across the country?
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a panel of executives was asked by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel how to make national addressable sing…
“There is not a scale problem with addressability,” Bologna said. “There are 60 plus, 70 million households where you can dynamically insert an ad to a household. It is with the local two minutes per hour. It is system by system. That’s not a longterm scalable model in order for it to really scale.
“National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
“We are working with one of the largest chip set manufacturers globally, media tech and which to embed our technology directly into smart TV chip sets,” Abcarian said. “We are working alongside directly the OEMs in which to better our tech directly into their software layer.
“All of this enables you to unlock all 16 minutes in real-time.”
“We believe has been holding back linear addressable … is a lack of technology and tool sets that really fit within the seller’s workflow,”said Amobee’s Daft.
“It’s not enough to just have a linear addressable insertion technology or have data technology. It has to be linked together with the sales process, which has to do with making them confident to be able to sell that inventory.”
“If they all work in a different way, if 50 different networks are treating at addressable or a dynamic ad insertion differently, then it’s just going to be the same mess we have right now with seven different MVPDs – just four times worse,” said one2one’s Bologna. “And that’s not going to make it any easier for buyers and agencies and advertisers.”
Bologna said addressable ads could end up commanding much greater returns overall.
“In an addressable world, you could take that unit and you could sell 20, 30, 40% of that unit at three or four times that CPM to multiple different advertisers,” he said.
“Then, of, course you have what’s left over that you would then ultimately sell at perhaps a 10, 15, 20% discount. The net-net in a perfect world would turn into a 10, 15, 20 perhaps 50, 60% increase in the overall value of the unit. So. instead of the network collecting $2,000 for the unit, they end up collecting $3,200 for a unit.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is according to an executive who thinks critics of the emerging opportunity are wrong.
Addressable TV, which gives brands the ability to buy ads targeted at the household level, has made particular in-roads in certain local cable operators and in particular OTT services or TV devices.
Mike Bologna, the former president of GroupM’s MODI Media advanced TV unit who later co-founded Cadent’s one2oneMedia addressable TV arm, says there are two ways of assessing addressable TV’s deployment:
“Getting the national inventory into play addresses the scale issue as it comes to impressions available,” he says. “That’s the part that we need to focus on so this can really start to take a chunk out of that $70 billion (total US TV ad spend) that everybody’s chasing.
“How do we get all of the national TV networks? How do we get their inventory, which is the bulk of the television inventory, enabled so they can start offering up an addressable option to advertisers?”
Doing so won’t necessarily be straightforward. Whilst many new OTT entrants are offering dynamic addressable ads out of the gate, incumbent national TV networks still have their traditional direct-sold ads business to manage, often going through cable operators.
“(National broadcasters) don’t have the ability to light up the inventory,” Bologna explains. “It’s not within their control. No national network can light up the inventory by themselves.
“They have to create a relationship, make a deal with either a cable system, a set-top box maker or a smart TV because, for the foreseeable future, dynamically-inserted commercials over live linear programming is going to happen either through the set-top box or through the smart TV.
“Then they need to go through the calculations and figure, out of their programming, which is best suited for an addressable insertion and where are they going to generate the most yield?”
He was interviewed by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV in Puerto Rico discussed that topic.
The debate kicked off with some data points quantifying the size of spend in US addressable TV advertising today…
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC:
“Two percent of all national media (is) being spent via addressable. Forester issued some research last summer that said about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines. Are you happy with the level of adoption? Are we behind?”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“For the advertisers where the return outweighs the work and the pain, they’re involved. For the advertisers and the brands where it doesn’t, they’re not there.
Whilst media buyers are certainly spending in addressable TV, executives bemoaned that the budget was still experimental or occasional…
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Our (clients’) spend is actually about flattened down a little. But the number of brands interacting is growing because we’ve had some brands who went in just way too high early on. What is worrisome is the amount of (spending that) is still considered ‘test and learn’ – it’s just a little bit of money and then it goes away.”
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“That’s very true. That is the single biggest issue with scaling the dollars in addressable television today. Many advertisers want to do it for the wrong reasons. They want to check off the ‘innovation’ box.”
Panelists discussed how limiting the availability of inventory with the right audiences against it could actually work against addressable…
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent:
“Historically, television has always been (about) supply and demand. When the supply decreases, the knee jerk reaction is to raise the price. As we all know, in television, at least in recent times, the advertisers still stand in line with the checkbook.
“That’s not going to work with addressable television. If we run out of inventory, or we get to a point where there’s a finite supply of inventory, it’s going to drive up the price.”
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV, LiveRamp:
“You’re going to have ownership of programmers by MVPDs or at least a fusion of the two. That inventory will open up and I think OTT is also growing rapidly.”
The debate heard one view that addressability should not be about targeting audiences at all – especially for certain brands…
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM):
“We’re thinking about addressability wrong … The math is not going to work, right? I would question, are we thinking about addressability the right way as being about audiences? Or should we be thinking about it a different way, in that it can solve frequency distribution? The better option for us is, how do we use addressability to manage frequency, not target audiences.”
Michael Law, EVP, US Media Investment, Dentsu Aegis Network:
“Right now, there’s a lot of categories saying, “How do I (target) toilet paper (which everyone needs)?”
But the panel also heard how addressable or some alternative to conventional linear TV advertising is essential…
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:
“Part of the problem now, with the way viewership behavior is shifting, is that there are a lot of people who you’re just never gonna get on linear TV because they don’t do that anymore. Whether it’s linear or addressable, or anything that looks like broadcast, to try to reach people who don’t have an antenna or cable subscription ain’t going to work.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“What I think that we should focus on more is the value proposition of addressability. If you plan your segment properly, if you pay the appropriate price and most importantly you measure it accurately, you will see a return on your investment that far exceeds the work required to get there,” Bologna adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.
Putting the considerable work involved aside, would it be better to just pitch addressable as a smarter way of buying than traditional age/sex demographics? Only if advertisers are willing to accept the math at face value, according to Bologna.
As an example, he cites an advertiser that thinks it’s paying a $25 CPM to reach women ages 25-54. But if its real target is women 25-54 who have two children and purchase a particular brand of yogurt, that $25 can end up being $75. “So if you can hit that target at thirty-seven dollars in an addressable manner, you’ve far exceeded the value. And then you tie it back to sales and you measure the lift. And nine times out of ten, it’s going to wind up in your favor.”
While there’s plenty of brands for which addressability doesn’t make sense, even categories like toothpaste and shampoo might try it in search of market share shift. “There’s so many strategic approaches, which goes back to some of the logistical challenges.” Given the work and time involved, “many agencies and advertisers don’t have the bandwidth or the skillsets set up internally to execute it on.”
One major hang-up is the desire for some common denominator to arise “and there just isn’t one. “So where we’re all looking for universal media execution, measurement and analytics we’re pretty far from that.”
With some 20 years of agency experience behind him, Bologna’s advice is “You can’t stop the train. “The television train is going to continue to move and all we can do is evolve it as it continues to move with some of these new tactics as opposed to stopping it and rebuilding it along the way.
“And I think that approach is what we need to apply to addressability. Figure out how it works for you, use it to the best of your ability, use it as a means to increase your frequency against your core customer segment without the burden of the waste, and then do the best you can to extract the learnings and apply it to the larger television campaign.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>That’s how Mike Bologna sizes up Sorenson’s “somewhat unique” position in the addressable marketplace in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he discusses the lack of consistency in executing and measuring campaigns and the financial hurdle of producing multiple creative iterations.
Sorenson uses automatic content recognition to discern what’s happening on smart-TV screens, paving the way for advanced audience targeting and measurement.
“Sorenson’s product introduces a little bit of a new proposition to where the gatekeeper is really the smart TV and the inventory could be either cable or broadcast, national or local,” says Bologna, who is President, one2one Addressable, Cadent. “That’s a little bit of a different spin on it and I think it introduces some addressable diversity to the marketplace, which is a good thing.”
Meanwhile, “business is booming” at one2one Addressable (formerly one2one Media), according to Bologna owing to the company’s efforts to simplify a marketplace that is totally lacking in consistency, from data to tech pipes.
“There is no standardization when it comes to addressability. There’s no standardization, there’s no automation, but what there is is a very high valuation proposition and a very high return on investment,” Bologna says.
“The lack of standards generally translates into complexity. What we do is we simplify the addressable business in the absence of agreed upon industry standards.”
What has changed recently is that advertisers and agencies are spending less time “picking apart all the different data sources” that can be used for advanced TV targeting and “refining how that data can be used to fill a strategic objective of a particular brand.”
For the most part, “The creative remains as is,” meaning addressable campaigns are still largely the domain of campaigns created for traditional, broad TV audiences, according to Bologna.
“We love to send different pieces of creative with different messages to the appropriate audiences and then tie that back to sales analyze accordingly. But in many cases, the cost to produce the creative outweighs the value of that small segment.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re a one-stop-shop for national addressable scale,” Bologna adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “We package everything together.”
To improve simplicity and reduce complexity, “Our business is, for the most part, identifying a particular segment, dynamically inserting a television commercial to that household via that segment, and then tying that ad exposure back to a sale.”
In describing the addressable marketplace, Bologna depicts a landscape with multiple systems, technologies, data sets and reporting scenarios.
“In the absence of a single platform that ties all of that together, it makes the process laborious, cumbersome, sometimes monotonous and frankly difficult and frustrating.”
To execute addressable TV at scale typically entails “making phone calls to eight, ten different systems,” among them MVPD’s, satellite operators, telecom companies and smart-TV providers.
“You’re applying multiple different data sources, you’re integrating multiple different measurement systems. That’s where the bandwidth comes in and that’s where the complexities come in,” Bologna says.
So even if there’s no question that if executed properly, the return on investment is there with addressable, sometimes that return “from a time perspective might not necessarily be there and that’s what we solve. We have everything already aggregated together.”
The majority of one2one Media’s inventory derives from the local two minutes per hour of cable inventory that is owned and operated by MVPD’s. While some national TV networks also make addressable inventory available—the majority of it VOD—along with some broadcast inventory via smart TV’s, those two sources comprise “less than ten percent of the inventory in the business right now.”
One indication of the value of addressable TV, according to Bologna, is that more than 95% of one2one Media’s advertisers “come back and they usually come back at a higher budget because they see the results.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>While pursuing these topics can lead to circular conversations—everyone agrees on the need for change but no one thinks it won’t happen soon, if at all—such discussions actually help to clarify a very complex landscape. This was the goal of a panel at Beet Retreat Miami 2017 featuring executives from FreeWheel, one2one Media and digital-first agency Essence.
Moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of strategic advisory and business development firm MediaLink, kicked things off by asking for specific suggestions that would remove roadblocks from the advanced TV space. What follows are a sampling of responses.
Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America Essence: “Everyone’s got different agendas. The MVPD’s don’t want to allow me to bump my first-party data up to their set-top boxes unless I’m buying local media through them. That’s not a long-term success for anyone in this business, to link business models that don’t need to be linked. On the distribution side, there are affiliate agreements that restrict national networks from selling local inventory. That’s going to cause a problem if we’re talking about moving to an addressable model where national networks want to be able to sell.”
Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media: “Unfortunately, I agree with a lot of what you said. It really comes down to how we articulate change in our business. Everybody around here knows that nothing moves quickly in this business when it comes to change. We’re all used to thinking cheaper is better. So in terms of moving this along, it’s about identifying how something might cost a little bit more but the return on it might be more than the X factor of that cost.”
Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel: “We’re living in a world where video sits in two worlds, basically linear TV and digital video, and these are still two silos and they’re run separate at the agency level but also at the publisher level. We think that needs to become a lot simpler, it needs to become one pool of inventory, it needs to become one way for the buyer to find their viewers, as opposed to two different ways.
So how long will silos hold back progress, asked Spiegel.
“I think we are going to continue to see it rise in silos because there isn’t one person that can actually snap their fingers, make a decision and bring it altogether,” said Bologna. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth doing all the work and working through all those silos if the return pays out, which can be demonstrated with the proper data.”
Gerber pointed out that consumers want two things: live and on-demand programming. Delivery mechanisms are irrelevant. “They don’t give a rat’s ass whether it’s through a DVR, through their VOD platform, through a connected TV app, through any other number of mechanisms that get the content to their screen,” said Gerber. “It’s not about platforms it’s about experiences and it’s about delivering an ad in those experiences.”
Organizational malfunction isn’t going away anytime soon, noted Bologna. “It exists at agencies, it exists at media companies, it exists at the brands. In my opinion, the best we can do is work within the organizational malfunction and do the best we can.”
Gerber cited the status quo of how brand portfolios do business, beginning with their budgeting processes, explaining how it works against an addressability model. Using the hypothetical example of a telecommunications company, he said it should be able to message across various product suites based on what it knows about its customers.
“But if they’re building their brand budgets and their campaigns from the product level up, addressability doesn’t scale,” said Gerber. “Because what you want to be able do is push addressability from the top down. When you know about a consumer and they’re in a particular mental state in terms of purchase you want to serve them the right product. Serving them the right product that’s out of flight because it doesn’t align with the brand budget doesn’t work. So client org structures have to completely flip in terms of how they manage their marketing budgets for this to work.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Now the big issue is “consistency,” Bologna says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“Addressability is still very much a system-by-system product. And the advertiser wants scale. So in order to really give them that scale, the various systems and products need to be stitched together and presented as one.”
Bologna will be one of more than three dozen featured speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat Miami, where industry executives will gather to discuss the coming of age of targeted TV advertising.
The scale of addressable linear TV is another longtime industry talking point. Now Bologna says it’s no longer an issue because by the middle of 2018, there will be in excess of 70 million households capable of being targeted with addressable ads. “That’s huge. So scale isn’t a problem.”
Inventory is a different story, being limited as it is to the two minutes of local time made available for addressable campaigns.
“There’s a lot of discussions going on now about once we’ve utilized all of the two minutes per hour that we’re currently working with now for inventory that there will be some national inventory involved,” says Bologna.
Last spring, one2one Media set out to leverage an integrated set of systems and technology to drive efficiency and yield by automating workflows and providing a unified reporting approach for addressable video. It also works with skinny bundle pioneer Sling TV, which like other OTT providers is expanding the pool of targeted TV avails.
“The beauty of Sling, because of the way it’s technologically set up, is it has the ability to deliver real time addressability in the forms of both targeting and attribution,” Bologna says. ““So the addition of Sling to the addressable pool is actually a very good thing and something we’re excited to expand in.”
The flip side to OTT generating more ad inventory is fragmentation, according to Bologna, something that one2one Media has set out to alleviate.
“I can’t say I’m terribly upset about it,” he says of fragmentation.
This video is part of series on developments with OTT. The series is presented by Sling TV and DISH Media Sales. Please find more videos from the series here. For the Sling/DISH report on OTT and the marketplace, download this report.
]]>Last spring, one2one Media set out to leverage an integrated set of systems and technology to drive efficiency and yield by automating workflows and providing a unified reporting approach for addressable video. Six months later, President Mike Bologna voices no regrets.
“Our thought process has been spot on. There’s huge demand in the market for what we’re doing and the reception from agencies and advertisers has been fantastic,” Bologna says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
One-to-many could well describe advertisers and agencies “having to communicate and talk to 12 different systems using 40 different pieces of technology and 100 different data partners,” Bologna adds. “We do that all for them.”
Right now, the primary source of addressable video right comes via the two minutes of ad inventory each hour that MVPD’s serve up either through linear or the video-on-demand stream. This represents most of one2one Media’s campaigns, with the other 30 percent extending out on to connected television, tablets and smartphones.
“Because we use the same data sets and the same matching agents, we’re able to create an unduplicated reach and frequency of the ads delivered to those specified segments and then tie it back to sales,” Bologna says.
Advanced TV company Cross MediaWorks launched one2one Media in April of 2017, adding to a portfolio that consisted of creative and media agency TCA and video solutions provider Cadent.
“Over last six months alone we’ve seen an increase in customer billings by over 50 percent. That leads me to believe that the industry is really starting to tie together the value of a one-to-one video spot and the sales attribution associated with it.”
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.
]]>Mike Bologna and Jamie Power – who were CEO and managing partner, respectively, of Modi Media – now become president and COO of one2one Media, a company helping agencies to plan, implement and measure advanced TV advertising on multi-channel video programming distributors.
“This is the third job of my life,” Bologna tells Beet.TV. Prior to that, I was with GroupM and WPP for 19 years and, before that, I was pumping gas at Texaco gas station.
“What the industry lacked was an independent entity to bring together all the various constituents to make this a one-stop shop. Taking data, matching it against subscriber files and sending different ads to relevant households and tying it back to sales… that’s a lot of work, and a specialised skill set.”
one2one sets out to aggregate addressable inventory and create a managed service so that, instead of talking with multiple MVPDs and working with multiple different data sets and trying to stitch together measurement and sales data, it can all be done by one2one.
The move connects back to Bologna’s association with Nick Troiano, the former CEO of advanced TV advertising company BlackArrow, whose acquisition by Cross MediaWorks in 2015 also made Troiano CEO of the group, which serves as a holding group to Cadent, The Cross Agency and now one2one.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s what advertisers are looking for,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.tv. “They night not necessarily need the data all the way down to addressability, but they could very much use the data to pick and choose their networks and programs and dayparts.”
Noting that for the longest time in TV, data has been based on broad demographic segments, “What we’re starting to see now is advertisers looking to plan their advertising based on much more granular segments, as has been identified through the digital marketplace,” Bologna explains. “But they want to do that more now in television.”
Modi typically works with some 75 different data sets, according to Bologna, and within each category one or two sets are more effective than others. “But at the end of the day, if you just take Experian and Acxiom, most of the other data sets are piped into them,” says Bologna.
While “television is still television” with the traditional GRP delivery, econometric models are improving. “We’re learning a lot from addressability, because addressability is true attribution,” says Bologna. “We’re taking the learnings that we’re getting from attribution and sales in addressability and we are starting to work on ways to project that up toward the larger business.”
A lot of the campaigns MODI is doing for clients involves targeting a specific consumer segments but not just on television. “Yes, household addressability is a piece of it. But it’s also addressing computers, mobile phones, smart TV’s, it’s addressing tablets. And it’s all being aggregated and measured together,” says Bologna.
This is happening in every product and service category, “whether it be data- infused or addressable or somewhere in between,” he adds. “We’re doing our best to tie it back to attribution, and that’s what the advertiser wants.”
We spoke with Bologna at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.
To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. “These are three very distinct and different tools,” observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. “They are not currently easily melded together. That’s where we have to go.”
Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it “might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space,” a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. “On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn’t the right approach,” said Bologna.
Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. “This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects,” said Bokor. “And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it.”
But there’s still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn’t going away anytime soon.
“There’s always going to be that top of the funnel and there’s always going to be the mass GRP’s being pushed there,” said Bologna. “But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it.”
Added Mantel, “It’s finding the balance” and for advertisers “not caring where your airing but who you’re reaching and that you’re reaching the right person.”
Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. “It’s absolutely both. There’s nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics.”
Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. “The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient,” Bokor said. “We have a marketplace that doesn’t truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme.”
Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in “all hell is going to break loose” because the CPM’s could skyrocket.
“I want a holistic marketplace so that it’s not just about TV,” said Bokor. “I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I’m paying for and I might be willing to pay more.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>The new connection of TVs and TV boxes to the internet is offering up household-level targeting, when ads are fuelled by smart data sets.
In this panel video interview at Beet Retreat 2016, Group M’s MODI Media president Mike Bologna, whose company is working in the emerging space, talks about how things are panning out.
“We all know that that business is developing and it’s building and we’re about half of every US TV household has that capability, and that’s great,” he says.
“You wind the clock back 18 months and you ask an advertiser who they want to reach, and they’ll look you straight in the eye and say adults 18-49. That’s pretty stupid. That’s changing.”
It’s not just targeting that is changing, however. Advanced TV is also getting plugged in to sales data, to show advertisers something approaching the ultimate ROI.
“When the campaign’s over and you tie it back to sales,” Bologna adds. “That’s the beauty of addressable television: if you execute it properly, meaning you get the target right, you pay the right price, and you measure it properly, you will show a higher return on ad spend than most national initiatives.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
]]>In addition to revising carriage agreements, “They’re going to have a lot to work out,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.TV. Issues include technology, business models and infrastructure economics. “But they will get there,” he adds. “Both parties seem to be ready, able and willing to at least begin the conversation seriously.”
With newer entrants like Charter and Verizon boosting overall addressable penetration north of 60 million homes, “There’s more and more clients involved than ever before in this space,” Bologna says. “We continue to have a repeat base of clients on addressable campaigns at over 90 percent.”
While noting that addressable advertising isn’t for every marketer, only about one-third of the plans MODI writes result in the recommendation that a client is “better off buying nationally and absorbing the waste and taking advantage of the much lower cost per thousand,” Bologna notes.
“Generally when you’re talking about an advertiser with a smaller segment, a more expensive product or service, they generate the most value out of addressability,” he says. “They continue to come back because they’re seeing that it’s generating sales and we’re seeing a positive return on investment.
The addition of national avails would enhance frequency as opposed to expanding reach.
“With only two minutes per hour and with all the new advertisers coming on, the demand will eventually outweigh the supply,” even if the addressable footprint expands to 75 million households, Bologna says. “But without the inclusion of national inventory and the influx of all these incremental advertisers, we’re going to need supply. And that supply can only come from one place, and that’s the national avail.”
This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:
]]>MAC identifiers and cable TV subscriber files matched with first- or third-party data have traditionally been the building blocks for addressable advertising campaigns, Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media, says in an interview with Beet.TV.
“As we go over the top, then we would be doing more of a user ID or an IP address or some type of registration as opposed to a subscriber file,” Bologna explains in response to a question from interviewer Ashley Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp. “What over the top does it allows us to not be limited to just the set-top box. Ads can be served addressably directly to the television via the television being connected to the Internet.”
All of this change generates new and perhaps unforseen competition among various TV industry heavyweights, as evidenced by a news story Bologna cites. AdExchanger reports that Samsung plans to offer an addressable TV ad product that uses smart-TV data to target ads across linear broadcasts.
In the story, Bologna is quoted as saying “Samsung is now competing with AT&T, Comcast and Dish.”
Bologna goes on to suggest that multichannel video programming distributors will still play a key role in the advancement of addressable TV ads even while many of their subscribers cut back on their cable packages.
“As we get into skinny bundles and non-traditional pay TV packages, these people are essentially cord cutters but still paying the MVPD for a service,” Bologna says.
Bologna and Swartz will be among the featured speakers at this year’s Beet Retreat for industry executives, scheduled for Nov 16-18 in Miami.
We interviewed him last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.
]]>“So you could argue that the most sophisticated and exciting part of the television business is the most manual,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.TV. “There’s more automation or automatic execution with legacy national television than there is with household level addressable television.”
In the interview, Furious Corp. CEO and Founder Ashley J. Swartz asks Bologna whether true, unduplicated reach exists for cross-screen addressable ad campaigns. “We’re there today,” he says.
Working with individual multichannel video programming distributors, MODI takes audience segments like “in the market to buy a luxury vehicle,” or “purchased soup in the past 30 days.” It identifies those segments on TV and then replicates them on mobile devices.
“We measure them together via an Experian or Acxiom. And what we end up with is unduplicated reach and frequency of an addressable spot cross device. So it is here today,” Bologna says.
Asked how everything comes together from a systems and workflow perspective, Bologna says, “Everything’s manual. There’s nothing coming together from a systems perspective.”
His crew toils away in Excel spreadsheets and its pivot tables to make addressable work. “I hope to change that,” Bologna says. “I don’t know how to fix that myself. I’m relying on other people to figure out that.”
This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.
]]>Bologna expects the growth of addressable households in the U.S. will reach 50 million next year. He says his agency will deliver addressable ads for some 70 advertisers in the year ahead.
While technology from the cable and satellite companies are driving this trend, there is a limited amount of inventory which can be “addressed.” It is just two minutes out of every hour of cable programming. But Bologna sees the eventual movement to inserting ads into national programming once carriage fees are renegotiated.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>“That data’s not free,” according to Modi Media president Mike Bologna.
“Of the 50-plus household campaigns we’ve run so far this year, we’ve used pretty much a different source or a different piece of a single data source of reach and every different campaign. It is expensive.”
So far, ad tech vendors tend to boast to clients that they can unite a varied array of data sources to bring about super-targeting. The combined price of so much data is not a challenge often discussed. Time to go back to basics?
“We always recommend that an advertiser use their own data,” says Steve Murtos SMG SVP. “That’s the most accurate data. We’ve sent the best results (from that).”
Murtos predicts a “shake-out” of ad data providers. “The ones that are the best will rise to the top and be the standard,” he is betting.
Programming Note: Murtos will be a speaker at the Beet TV executive retreat in For Lauderdale this month.
They were interviewed last month by LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja, at an event about the future of addressable TV presented by AT&T AdWorks in association with Beet.TV Please find more videos here
]]>But what are the building blocks of planning out an addressable-TV ad buy? Mike Bologna, CEO of GroupM’s addressable-TV ad unit Modi Media, offered up in this template in an industry discussion panel:
“Three things need to happen before any addressable campaign gets executed:,” he said.
“Once those three things are determined, the campaign launches. If we don’t do those three things, it falls apart.”
He was interviewed last month by LUMA Partners CEO Terence Kawaja, at an event about the future of addressable TV presented by AT&T AdWorks in association with Beet.TV Please find more videos here
]]>But addressable TV is not just about more refined TV targeting – the device in the living room is one platform that will feed in signals to an overall system which will produce unprecedented customer granularity – that’s multi-touch attribution, according to SMG precision video director Tracey Scheppach.
“We can combine that with other digital signals … and connect them in a unique ID through companies like Liveramp,” she told a Cannes Lions panel recorded by Beet.TV. “Make those connections to say, ‘This is a handheld device that belongs to this home’. You’re able to say ‘What piece of the media pie drove the conversion?’ That is new.”
Scheppach credits location-based ad tech platforms like placeIQ with helping enabling the change, but says many others are also advancing the possibilities.
Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on addressable TV ads, said: “For the past 15 years, we’ve been putting ads on television, ads on the internet and, for two thirds of that, ads on mobile phones. We have very little of an idea what the unduplicated reach and frequency is between all those screens. To (show that), that’s a really really big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly.”
Also commenting is Mike Welch, president of AT&T AdWorks. The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of boutique investment bank LUMA Partners.
This session was part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising co-presented Beet.TV and AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>“Being able to utilize the technology that’s been installed in set-top boxes to identify households and zip codes and ad zones based on various segmentations, sending commercials just to these homes and reducing the waste – that’s ones of our core products,” says Mike Bologna, president of Modi Media, the unit created in January.
“We were doing a lot of talking about how to fuse data and technology – but not a lot was actually happening – there was a lot of diff technologies, it got very complicated. Creating a unit where we have 25 people doing nothing but this was a big step in the right did for us.”
You can find more coverage of the festival here.