CTV Has Room For Improvement in Ad Pods

Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor

Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.

YouTube Drives Significant Share of CTV Viewership

Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence

YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.

More Brands See CTV Opportunities on YouTube

David George, CEO of Pixability

The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.

CTV Ads Help to Drive Purchase Intent

Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony

Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.

CTV Success on YouTube Takes Know-How

Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’

“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”

Brand Suitability More Nuanced Than Safety on YouTube

Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability

While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.

Consumer Intent Emerges as Key CTV Audience Signal

Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability

“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

Responsible advertising “goes a step deeper, and it does get into a little bit of the idea of corporate responsibility and corporate welfare, and really making sure our workflows, our transactions are transparent,” Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s media agency GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

Making advertising work better for people is a key goal for GroupM’s media-buying framework called “Responsible Investment.” The idea is to create a healthier advertising ecosystem that advances brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

As much as advertisers want to ensure they’re reaching consumers with relevant marketing messages, they need to be mindful of people’s demands for privacy and willingness to opt out of data sharing. Advertisers also help to create a positive media environment by supporting the production of quality programming.

“Yes, there are subscription models out there that do work and do create good content, but what a lot of people sometimes forget is that advertising does drive a lot of content production,” Fisher said. “It’s a responsibility for us to ensure not just that advertising is used to deliver a message, but also to deliver strong content and create that content.”

Shift in Viewing Habits

The pandemic led many people to spend more time at home and further embrace streaming services that let them time-shift programming and discover other content. The rapid growth in digital platforms led advertisers to shift from daypart-based media buying and planning to impression-based methods. Streaming has become a major complement to linear TV.

“That means that we as an agency needed to change our approach very quickly as well, understanding that when everybody is at home during the pandemic and wanting to watch primetime content at all hours, every hour of the day became a theoretical ‘prime’ hour,” Fisher said.

Digital media companies, advertisers and ad-tech companies have fretted that the loss of tracking  cookies and device identifiers is making audience targeting more difficult. Providers of ad-supported streaming video already work in a cookieless environment that’s mindful of the consumer experience.

“The lessons in a way that smart TV or CTV advertising is creating a standard that all digital advertising has to live up to,” Colin Petrie-Norris, chief executive of streaming video service Xumo, said in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. “The fact that is operating in a cookieless environment has very much direct bearing on how display and mobile and others work.”

Xumo has a responsibility to a variety of constituencies, including viewers, advertisers, electronics manufacturers and content providers, Petrie-Norris said to Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM. Xumo’s platform offers viewers with 220 live channels that have been vetted to ensure they are legitimate providers of video content.

“We have to treat their brand as if it was our own.  We have an obligation to them to make sure they get the scale, get the reach which advertisers enjoy; to use data to appropriately target users; and also to manage ad experience,” Petrie-Norris said. “We do a lot of work optimizing the ad experience, and making sure that we’re not overdoing the ads. It does work better when you can serve fewer ads which are more relevant. You can more engagement, more return users.”

Trusted Media Partners

Advertisers have grown more concerned about ad fraud amid discoveries of illegitimate CTV providers that spoof valid household internet addresses and generate fake viewership numbers. Petrie-Norris recommends that advertiser work with trusted partners and third-party verification providers to avoid this activity.

“The solution is: know who you’re buying from. Having a good guide who can take you through that is incredibly important for that,” he said. “The issues that the industry is faced with are on the decline relative to the scale emerging from the robust, reputable players.”

Comcast Integrations

Comcast last year acquired Xumo as part of a broader expansion into streaming video, which has become a popular way to see programming without a cable or satellite TV subscription. With Comcast’s backing, Xumo has plans to offer a broader range of programming.

“We are very encouraged by the future in front of us in terms of as we start to bring all of that muscle to bear in the space, we’re going to see very exciting things to come,” Petrie-Norris said. “We’ve earned a place in people’s living room during the pandemic, but now we have to show that we can continue to provide them and earn their time.”

Making advertising work better for people is at the heart of an effort by GroupM to promote a media-buying framework it calls “Responsible Investment.” The idea is to create a healthier advertising ecosystem that advances brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.

This video is a summary of interviews with executive who spoke in the TV transformation track presented by PubMatic, the sell-side platform (SSP) for programmatic advertising: 

 1. TV’s advertising model needs overhaul

Many consumers have shown a greater preference for streaming services that don’t carry ads, a trend that will challenge ad-supported channels to improve the consumer experience. The future of ad-supported TV depends on it. 

Instead of loading up on advertising that becomes a nuisance and pushes audiences to pay for ad-free programming, media outlets will have to focus on improving the consumer experience, said Adam Gerber, global chief investment officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM.

2. Prioritize consumer experience

Media outlets also recognize the importance of giving consumers greater flexibility in controlling the viewing experience. Improvements to the consumer experience can include a reduced ad load, innovations in ad units and other opportunities to engage viewers. Combining the efficiencies of programmatic buying with premium content at scale is a key goal.  

“It’s about on-demand access and meeting consumers where they are, but it’s also about the user experience and keeping that at the center,” said Ashley Luongo, senior vice president of advanced TV and programmatic digital sales at NBCUniversal.

3. Brands want to buy premium inventory programmatically

The upfront market traditionally has been one of the best ways for media buyers to reserve premium inventory. But the marketplace is changing amid a shift in viewing habits and the growth of quality content that’s available in the programmatic market.  

Buyers awakening to idea of wanting security of reserving scarce, premium inventory, but want a biddable environment, said Nicole Scaglione, global vice president of OTT and CTV business at PubMatic.

4. Data and metrics offer more than a cross-screen currency

Consumers are viewing content among a wider variety of connected devices, spurring discussion about a cross-screen currency for measurement. But data and metrics can be used for more than just a currency, said Christine Grammier, head of TV measurement at data connectivity platform LiveRamp.

5. Pandemic will have lasting effects on media buying

Millions of people were stuck at home during the pandemic, spurring a significant shift in their media consumption habits. Advertisers have responded by de-emphasizing dayparts as people spend more time with streaming platforms. 

“When everybody’s at home during the pandemic and wanting to watch primetime content at all hours, every hour of the day became a theoretical prime hour,” said Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence. “It changed up the way we did our planning and our buying.” 

This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.  

The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here. 

So why aren’t advertisers taking it more seriously when it comes to developing a connected TV advertising plan?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, media agency Essence’s Mike Fisher explains the value of YouTube.

Shifting viewing

“Within the last couple of years, we found YouTube really becoming one of the largest sources of ad-supported streaming happening on the TV screen,” Fisher observes.

“Historically, a lot of marketers did not look towards YouTube as that true TV replacement. People are still going to watch Saturday Night Live content – they’re just watching it in a way that fits their viewing habits; that includes now going to YouTube the next day, watching three or four Saturday Night Live clips.

“A lot of people are at home during the pandemic and that younger viewership who grew up on YouTube is starting to age out of living at home and going out on their own.

“We’re really starting to see a rise in YouTube as a viable alternative to other streaming happening on that TV screen, which has really led to a rise of the need to find a combination of premium television content, coupled with premium television audiences inside of that YouTube environment, and really make a case to our clients on why they need to consider that television.”

YouTube’s growth

Nielsen Streaming Meter says, of the 25% of TV time spent with streaming video, 20% goes to YouTube, making it the second-most-watched digital video platform after Netflix.

Accordingly, YouTube’s CTV ad revenue is growing fast, according to forecasts.

In Q1, YouTube brought in $6 billion in ad revenue for the period, up 49% year-on-year, putting YouTube on course to beat Netflix in annual earnings.

In March, YouTube’s chief product officer reported:

“Our fastest growing viewing experience is on the TV screen. Last December, over 120 million people in the U.S. streamed YouTube or YouTube TV on their TV screens.

And there’s another interesting viewing behavior emerging. A new generation of viewers chooses to watch YouTube primarily on the TV screen: Also in December, over a quarter of logged-in YouTube CTV viewers in the U.S. watched content almost exclusively on the TV screen.”

Context for safety

But Essence’s Fisher wants to ensure connected TV providers like YouTube can offer ad buyers adequate control over ad placement.

“We want to make that ad messaging doesn’t collide,” he says. “If you have humorous ad messaging, we want to certainly make sure that it’s not paired with anything that’s not brand safe or not on target.

“You don’t want to come out of something very serious with a very funny message. It impacts both the content and the ad message in those cases.

“So we’re really starting to think more about how we can use contextual signals, how we can couple audience plus context to really tell a better story.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Buyers are looking for reach and frequency measurement across all screens, touchpoints and buying formats,” Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s media agency GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “As our industry gets closer to a point of unification, bringing together both programmatic traditional buying, linear TV buying, addressable buying into a workflow where the data’s able to feed and inform itself from a higher-level view is super important.”

The supply chain for advertising has become more complex with the rise of online exchanges that let buyers bid for ad placements, while relying on data providers to help improve their targeting.

“Buyers need to understand who’s involved in the transaction, what tools are being used in the decisioning, how the workflow is working,” Fisher said. “When there’s multiple vendors, multiple data partners, multiple buying paths involved in a transaction, it’s important for us as an agency and for our clients to really understand what value is being created by each of those initiatives.”

Meanwhile, content providers need to develop solutions that help media buyers to optimize their campaigns.

“The responsibility of sellers is to start to take their inventory, and add value to it beyond just standard buying, either in a digital landscape/impression-based, or in a linear environment reach-and-frequency-based,” Fisher said.

Providing a more unified view of the linear TV and digital video landscape will take a few more years, with ad ratings company Nielsen announcing last year that it had begun developing those metrics.

“Nielsen had a really good roadmap that they outlined, but that’s three to four years away,” Fisher said. In the interim, buyers and sellers of video need “to figure out ways to better leverage technology to figure out consistent measurement,” he said.

You are watching “Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.

“Over the last 18 months, addressable has evolved to be something that buyers both on the agency and marketer side themselves really do care about because the scale is there,” Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a unit of WPP’s media agency GroupM, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Addressable to us is anything that’s targetable at a household level.”

Essence’s roots are in data-driven targeting of digital advertising, a background that helps to support its buying platforms in addressable video on demand managed by set-top boxes and addressable linear ads managed by third-party partners working with broadcast network brands owned by ViacomCBS, Disney and NBCUniversal.

Source: Nielsen

“We’re really excited about what Nielsen and Vizio Inscape are bringing to the table along with some others on the linear addressable side,” Fisher said. Essence is enthusiastic about “the ability to buy addressable from them in a linear environment and be able to better target that ad message to a specific household, not necessarily to replace one brand’s ads with another, but really … make them work harder, smarter and better by customizing the message and customizing the creative.”

As part of its work on measuring addressable ads, Nielsen on Dec. 8 announced a plan to replace its TV ratings system by 2024 with a metric that combines audiences of linear TV and viewing of digital streaming channels. In developing its Nielsen One service, the ratings company next year will preview the new data alongside its existing ratings.

Too Early to Compare Costs

Because addressable advertising is a relatively recent development for national broadcasters, pricing comparisons for media buyers are in the early stages, Fisher said.

“It’s still new enough in the ecosystem that costs do vary by what the networks are doing. Some of our networks are pricing dynamic ad insertion linear addressable more like a digital model on an impression basis,” he said. “Others are including it as part of an upfront commitment, while still others are looking at it like a traditional reach and frequency buy on top of an existing linear schedule.”

While the needs of advertisers vary, Fisher still would like to see more information to compare various platforms with each other. Developing a market for addressable advertising will take time for marketers to become more familiar with the latest technologies, while reserving part of their budgets to try out innovative products as they come along.

“One of the things I’m looking for in 2021 is more consistency across how the different networks are doing it from a pricing, planning and reporting perspective,” he said. “We’re going to see a lot more scale when it comes to how the networks are approaching this, what they’re including in their upfronts, what they’re including in their offerings.”

You are watching “Addressable Advertising: A New Reality for Linear TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by SpotX. For more videos, please visit this page.

In the new world, the emerging medium of over-the-top TV is going to need to convince marketers that their ad was truly effective.

That’s the view of one ad agency leader charged with plotting the course to the OTT future.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Fisher, Essence VP of Advanced TV & Audio, says he welcomes ad verification providers branching out into ad measurement.

Finding effectiveness

Fisher says brands have some worries about how their OTT ad money is really being spent, and whether it is really effective.

“With that comes client concern, and really the need to understand more from a third-party perspective, where these ads are running, how they’re reaching their viewer and ensure that they’re being delivered on target,” he says.

“The premium publishers, who have a lot of skin in the game and want to continue to drive substantial tier-one marketing budgets through their platforms, they’re trustworthy.

“The questions that marketers have (are) more around the longer-tail publishers, the aggregators, the programmatic buying pipes. They want to make sure that they’re upholding those buying channels and modalities to the same standard that they’re holding the premium television networks do – knowing what type of content it’s running in, making sure it’s brand safe, making sure it’s viewable and measurable.”

Personalization, democratization, globalization, diversity, and commerce: @gschmitt sets out five ways the pandemic is catalyzing a new creative era in an op-ed for @CampaignLiveUS today – and why there's no going back. https://t.co/5nGHWcpyzx

— Essence (@essenceglobal) September 25, 2020

Plugging the gap

But Fisher sees a role emerging for ad verification software providers. They have typically been focused on simply establishing whether an ad impression was viable – in other words, whether it was viewable by a real human.

“Move on beyond just validating that the impressions were delivered to a human,” Fisher says.

“The third-party ad verification platforms have an opportunity to step in and be that trusted validation partner – not just for the advertiser and agency, but for those tier-two tier-three publishers and tier-one programmatic buying pipes.”

Fisher hopes that will plug a “gap” he sees in OTT ad sales. He says TV buyers are still trying to use traditional metrics.

“Brands want the flexibility now to turn things on and off and not have a pre-agreed-upon commitment.” Smart stuff here from @essenceglobal's Anthony Rinaldi about why #ProgrammaticAds have been able to weather #COVID19. https://t.co/a2LhLpS7Kk pic.twitter.com/29Ewwcj7RN

— Ben Zimmerman (@BenZimmermanMDG) September 15, 2020

This video is part of CTV Grows Up: Making a New Medium More Efficient & Effective, a Beet.TV series presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

After a decade in which so much display ad inventory was traded through open programmatic exchanges, the emergence of connected, over-the-top (OTT) TV ads is coming with a key difference – broadcasters want to stay in control of the ads they sell.

But that doesn’t mean they want to continue selling ads through traditional direct-sold insertion orders.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Fisher, SVP of advanced TV and audio at Essence, a GroupM media agency, says supply-side platforms (SSPs) are becoming pivotal.

In control

“I truly believe that OTT is one of the safest forms of digital video that you can be buying programmatically,” Fisher says. “True television streaming content, that’s still sold directly by the end seller.

“We increasingly see our clients buy from who they’re comfortable buying from – the NBCs, the Viacoms, the Discoverys, the Hulus, the Comcasts of the world.

“Even though they’re executing it via programmatic pipes. They’re not buying in open auction because there’s really none of this inventory being made available inside of an open auction environment.”

Many of the networks Fisher mentioned have tooled-up with their own initiatives and platforms to sell ads. But many also want to use supply-side platforms to carve out private marketplaces or enable guaranteed deals.

SSPs in focus

Congratulations to @essenceglobal who was crowned #CampaignTechAwards 2020 Agency of the Year and to @kineticwwUK, @MediaComGlobal, @mindshare, @Ogilvy, @WavemakerGlobal who also scooped awards @Campaignmag https://t.co/pOfMv1oKmD

— WPP (@WPP) June 26, 2020

“The SSPs have a really unique role in this space,” adds Fisher. “They’re not just a pipe for the publishers anymore, in order to get access to the buy side.

“They’re really also providing yield management, unified ad decisioning, server-side ad insertion, the ability to better manage a pod or an ad load, to more mirror television.

“That really becomes important as buyers look to migrate their linear TV budgets to streaming. As they look to say, ‘I still want to maintain competitive separation inside the (ad) pod’, or frequency rules that you would normally put in place with a direct buy.

“It’s really up to the SSP to develop the technologies that allow the publishers to do that.”

Evolving the SSP

By the same token, SSP vendors have to work hard to give publishers tools in a world where more of them want to take more control of their business and software.

They need to shake off the perception that the category still lingers in the older, open-auction programmatic world, where they facilitated long-tail, less-than-premium ads.

That is not something the TV industry is going to stand for.

So off-shoots like private marketplaces, which help publishers govern whom they trade with, may help assuage concerns.

Three tiers of viewing

COVID-19 has forced people to find new ways to do old things. It's also catalyzed entirely new behaviors as well. Sarah Walker, Global Chief Business Strategy Officer, outlines how to identify and respond to both replacement and displacement behaviors: https://t.co/gsDg9Ab4qT

— Essence (@essenceglobal) June 30, 2020

Either way, Essence’s Fisher thinks the existence of both SVOD and a new wave of advertising-supported video (AVOD) services is settling down into a three-tiered co-existence.

1. “The average consumer is going to subscribe to one or two premium SVOD services, (like) Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max,” he says.
2. “And then they’re going to fill in the holes with two or three different lower-tier paid services like the on demand portion of Hulu, CBS All Access, or others, which has a lighter ad load, but still ad exposure.
3. “And then that’s really where they’re then going to turn to the free ad-supported services like Tubi, Pluto, Xumo.”

Fisher thinks the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing this kind of setup. According to him, consumption has boomed but many networks have struggled to commission new premium programming, leaving lower-tier, library-based content like that offered by AVODs to fill the gaps.

This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic.  for more videos please visit this page. 

Whilst online ad buyers, over the last few years, have wrung their hands over viewability, fraud and supply-chain transparency issues, television – if only because it has been, by definition, disconnected – has sailed on by the controversy.

Could the new connection of TV devices to the internet change that, however?

Integrated Ad Science, a maker of ad fraud detection software, says it is gearing up to launch a product for connected TVs by Q1 2020.

But Mike Fisher, the VP of advanced TV at online ad platform MediaMath, says the problem isn’t necessarily a problem… if you buy from the right places.

“Connected TV is inherently 100% in-view, unskippable and fraud-free when buying through the right pipes,” he says, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“MediaMath’s philosophy is to always buy directly from the end seller, and from premium-end sellers, especially for connected TV… the Hulus, the NBCs, the Viacoms, the Discoveries of the world.

“We know that they are the good actors in the space. They’re not sending impressions saying they’re one thing (but) that they’re another. We’re not worried about impression spoofing or server-side ad insertion spoofing. We know what we’re buying is what we think we’re buying because of who we’re buying from.”

Fisher acknowledges some lingering issues like the inability of TV to truly indicate digital viewabilty signals, like whether a viewer walked out of the room during an ad playback.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

That is why MediaMath, a digital ad-buying platform, has just teamed up with IRIS.TV, a video technology vendor, to provide a “sentiment score” brands can use in their buying decisions.

“It’s better for the buy side, ensuring there is a brand safety and relevancy component to where they’re buying video content through my pipes,” says MediaMath’s Mike Fisher, head of advanced TV and video, in this video interview with Beet.TV

So, what is IRIS.TV? As a starting point, the LA company’s technology is already deployed on many broadcaster and publisher sites, for which it uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.

That data now also signals the context of videos to ad buyers, and IRIS.TV even allows buyers to buy ads right in its own publishers’ video units.

“We’ve partnered … to allow our clients to leverage their technology, which scores video content, a brand sentiment about that video and really be able to leverage that for advertising using a DSP workflow,” Fisher adds.

“A client is able to say, ‘if I’m looking to advertise an electric car, find the right video content to be placed adjacent that maybe talks about why electric cars are better’.

You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.

But, little by little, other platforms are getting lit up with these new tricks, too.

That’s why the man who heads MediaMath’s video operations expects programmatic to hit TV in a much bigger way.

“I think that, during the back half of 2019, you’re going to start to see more linear inventory become available in a way that looks more programmatic,” says Mike Fisher, head of advanced TV and video at the ad-buyer platform tech vendor.

“(This will happen) via either optimized linear buying pads like what Viacom Vantage is doing, or through true addressable set-top box VOD which some of the MVPDs are starting to roll out, connections to SSPs.”

Programmatic technology processed just 2.5% of all US TV ad spending in 2018, expected to rise to 6.8% by 2020, according to eMarketer, which estimates: “Live TV Isn’t Ready for Programmatic Yet“.

But a host of technology companies is approaching the idea of “programmatic TV” around the edges, bringing more intelligence to linear TV ad buying, all eager to claim a slice of a US TV ad market that, whilst it is in slight erosion, is still worth around $70 billion.

Fisher says there is an opportunity to impress direct-to-consumer brands which, previously, may never have had the resources to buy a TV campaign.

This videos was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan.  The series is sponsored by MediaMath.  For more videos please visit this page.

This is particularly appealing to so-called direct-to-consumer brands with traditional digital video assets they can now extend to TV, the company’s VP and Head of Advanced TV and Video says in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

What those newer brands have in common is that they probably haven’t had a relationship with a traditional agency while growing their businesses on the Internet with one-to-one, measurable marketing. They’re attracted to things like programming and tent-pole events they’ve never been able to access. “Programmatic really fits well into that pipe especially for TV, which is why direct to consumer is so big for us,” Fisher adds.

As video SSP’s continue to evolve, MediaMath’s model is “to focus on running on the rails that the publisher wants us to run on. A lot of our partners build leverage, Telaria and other video SSP’s, as their connection point for us into their inventory.”

This, in turn, “allows us to connect to multiple supply sources. It allows them to connect to multiple demand sources without having to do one-to-one integrations with networks.”

Working closely with its supply-side partners and TV networks yields lots of “cool things,” including enabling the passing of show titles, obtaining more information about viewing habits, which can then enhance the bid stream.

“Another really exciting we’re working on is being able to know how long someone has been in a viewing session,” Fisher says. “If someone’s spending four hours binging TV content, being able to hit them early with a message is so much more memorable and important than hitting somebody later in a binge session with a message.”

Working with SSP’s “we’re really able to determine how many ads that person has seen and use that to determine bidding.” Fisher describes the strategy as “this is what our outcomes are, this is where we want to be spending, but make sure we’re surfacing the right message and the right creative at the right time for that person, without needing to set up a separate strategy for video, and a separate strategy for TV and a separate strategy for display. Letting it all talk to each other, letting it all optimize across full funnel.”

Asked about the use of custom creative at various points in the purchase funnel, Fisher recommends that marketers use the same creative spots in connected TV as in linear.

While MediaMath isn’t seeing 10,000 different versions of a piece of creative, “some of our smarter clients are saying that after first impression happens with that mass-market creative, then start focusing more on driving a message for that specific user based on what we know about that user and their online behaviors.”

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.

There are 65 million households using some type of device to access premium video content in the living room and, for the first time, more than 50% of video starts being delivered on a connected-TV device are ad-supported, the Head of Advanced TV & Video explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You’ve seen the viewership change, you’ve seen people embrace it as their primary source of content and you’ve seen these devices take over control of HDMI1 on the TV, which is the most important thing to control,” Fisher says. “No longer is a Roku device a way to get Netflix on your TV. A Roku device is a way to get TV.”

While connected TV definitely is the “low-hanging fruit for what we’re doing at MediaMath today,” within three to five years all linear impressions will become one-to-one addressable and targetable through the rise of IP video, “so we want to be well positioned to be able to play in that space as well.”

MediaMath doesn’t buy or arbitrage TV inventory. Rather, it sees itself as the connection point between buyers and sellers, according to Fisher.

“We’ve curated our list of supply sources that we do most of our transactions with down to, say, the top twenty percent of supply sources that drive eighty percent of the meaningful impressions that marketers are looking for,” he says.

Those sources include five network groups and three big virtual MVPD services in a fraud-free environment. “We’re never more than one hop away from the end seller,” Fisher adds.

MediaMath’s pitch to traditional TV buyers is one of reach and frequency and how they can shift a portion of their spend “to the same inventory and the same viewer model and the same screen they know how to buy but doing it in a smarter, more measureable way.”

The company tells the same story to digital buyers but with a twist since they already know how to buy audiences, measurable impressions and retargeted campaigns. “For the first time, a digital buyer has the ability to transact on the biggest most trusted screen in the house in a way that they know how to do and in a way that fits into their business model.”

With its cross-device graph and audience targeting capabilities, MediaMath sees itself as leading the charge in tying back actual down-funnel attribution to upper funnel branding metrics.

“Being able to say the first time a viewer is exposed to an ad campaign or a brand’s message should happen in video. Whether or not that’s web, mobile, tablet or TV, video is the best way to tell that upper-funnel branding story,” says Fisher.

“But that doesn’t get you all the way there as a marketer. You want to be able to find that household, find the users in that household, and tell a down-funnel story to drive attribution and actual action on the right screen with the right message at the right time.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.