This article and accompanying video highlight interviews from this series
The series was produced by Beet.TV in partnership with the VAB and sponsored by Comcast’s Effectv.
NBC Sports was among the broadcasters that scrambled to reinvent its programming during the pandemic, recognizing the need for sports as people seek escapist entertainment during trying times.
“History proves that people need sports the most. There’s always this huge desire for sports coming from fans,” Dan Lovinger, executive vice president of advertising sales at NBC Sports Group, said.
He pointed to multiple occasions when sports viewership bounced back from interruptions ranging from player strikes to major disasters.
“What was different this time was that sports stopped for a long, long time — and that left the leagues, the fans, the owners in a much different position,” Lovinger said. “All those people did a terrific job in trying to wade through this no-sports environment.”
Sports have broad appeal, giving advertisers a way to reach a mass audience of consumers who are passionate about their favorite teams and players.
“When I think about the value of sports to marketers, I come back to scale, the audience composition and the incredible emotional engagement of sports,” Jason Wiese, senior vice president and director of strategic insights at VAB, said. “[Sports] is some of the most watched programming content across video platforms.”
Eighty percent of sports fans said that during the pandemic, TV was the centerpiece of the their households, VAB found in a study. Meanwhile, 63% of sports fans have bought a bigger TV screen to watch games, and many don’t mind viewing other events on a smartphone or tablet at the same time.
Live sports have the power to reach a broad audience, making them a key part of the media strategies for mass marketers. When sports were suspended last year during the onset of the pandemic, marketers looked for other ways to reach those audiences.
“With everybody inside, viewership was on the rise and marketers needed to reach those sports fans,” Melanie Hamilton, head of enterprise sales at Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “That’s really where data as our backbone and our set-top boxes came into play, and we were able to deliver this in real time to the buy-side community.”
Bringing live sports back to television last year required a significant effort by broadcasters, sports leagues and advertisers to pivot quickly to engage with fans. Turner Sports, the division of AT&T’s WarnerMedia, worked with sponsors to develop innovative campaigns that could be activated within the confines of the arenas that were mostly empty.
Advertisers can find ways to parlay that engagement with the “opportunity for an ‘always-on’ investment, whether the games are on or not,” Tina Shah, executive vice president and general manager of Turner Sports, said. “We’ve historically had large-scale media partnerships that are multifaceted with advertisers that really let us establish a lot of trust with the advertiser, and get a deep understanding of their goals, and really tailor solutions that meet their needs.”
Because many sponsorship deals with sports leagues consist of multiyear contracts, the level of investment in sports wasn’t affected dramatically. Instead, part of the spending shifting to digital channels that become key touch points with fans.
“The big opportunity for brands is surviving and thriving in this hybrid world that we’re going to live in, where live events and attending live entertainment are going to be very important, but so is playing in virtual world,” Jon Stainer, managing director of Nielsen Sports Americas, said. “The big thing for the sports industry is how they best play in the virtual and digital environment, alongside the live environment where they’ve thrived for so many years.”
The absence of live sports challenged sports leagues and broadcasters to provide programming that partly filled the void. For Disney’s ESPN, that meant getting creative with its approach to providing everything from documentaries like “The Last Dance” about NBA legend Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to reformatting events like the NFL Draft.
“Sports definitely has evolved a lot over the past few months,” Danielle Brown, vice president at Disney Advertising Sales, said. “It continues to be an effective reach vehicle across all platforms.”
ESPN’s internal research found that 90% of consumers describe themselves as sports fans, giving it a broad market to serve with programming.
Sports marketing traditionally has been experiential in its engagement with fans who attend games, but the disruptions of the pandemic led to more experimentation.
“We worked with a number of clients on: how do we get more innovative in how we engage consumers with brands?” Tom McGovern, president of Optimum Sports, the sports marketing agency of Omnicom Media Group, said. “How do we create and market outside of those 30-second pods, which is something we’ve always looked to do, anyway? But what other opportunities have come out of this to create some storytelling for the brand that is authentic?”
The immediacy of live sports is hard for other kinds of content to replace, with 97% of sports viewing happening in real time.
“Sports is a very important part of a number of my advertisers’ portfolios. The broad reach is certainly a big part of that, but also the passion of the people who watch and consume sports,” Adam Schwartz, senior vice president and director of sports media at Horizon Media, the world’s biggest independent media services company, said.
Live sports is one of the strongest genres on linear TV for advertisers seeking to reach a mass audience. While other genres of programming like drama and sitcoms face competition from streaming services, sports has endured in providing immediacy and excitement to fans.
“What I think that advertisers most sought in this Covid environment was the ability to deliver impressions,” Seth Winter, executive vice president of sports sales at Fox Sports, said. “With some of the challenges of not being able to execute on-site sponsorships in the manner in which we had originally negotiated, the advertisers very much worked with us.”
The pandemic’s disruptions pushed marketers and their agencies to come up other ways to engage consumers, and optimize their advertising efforts.
“The pandemic created the opportunity to pivot and actually compress the timelines to do things in a quicker, faster, more agile fashion, which really benefited all of our clients.” Gibbs Haljun, total investment lead of GroupM’s Mindshare, said. “That’s one of the great things that’s come out of this pandemic, that renewed sense of partnership. It’s not about saying, ‘no.’ It’s about saying, ‘yes, and…’ The reality is not every network, every client will be a great fit, but there are so many that are, that there’s always a solution.”
Sports fans will find a way to watch their favorite players and teams, giving advertisers a way to participate in programming among a wider variety of devices. Amid the fragmentation of the media market, audience-based targeting is central to reaching those fans, especially younger consumers.
“Whatever you’re a fan of today, you can find that sport. Younger audiences like that — because they want to control the experience,” Mike Law, president of Amplifi USA, the media buying agency owned by Dentsu, said. “It’s still one of the few places where you can create such excitement and buzz.”
Sports programming is an important anchor for advertisers in reaching audiences, not only when fans watch their favorite teams, but also when they consume other kinds of content. Reaching them takes an audience-based approach — and that become much more apparent last year when the pandemic capsized the sports calendar.
“Sports remains such an important anchor for advertisers who either want to target specific sports content, or take a more audience-base approach,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “What our aggregate set-top box data from Comcast allows us to do is derive really important insights into viewing behaviors of those sports viewers.”
You are watching “Live Sports 2021: What’s Next on TV,” a Beet.TV + VAB leadership series presented by Effectv. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“Whatever you’re a fan of today, you can find that sport. Younger audiences like that — because they want to control the experience,” Mike Law, president of Amplifi USA, the media buying agency owned by Dentsu, said in this video discussion on Beet.TV. “It’s still one of the few places where you can create such excitement and buzz.”
Speaking to James Rothwell, vice president of global agency, brand and industry relations at Comcast Advertising, Law said younger viewers are looking for sports content that’s easier to consume in shorter segments throughout the day.
“It puts a lot of emphasis on highlights. These audiences are not used to watching a three- our four-hour game at once,” Law said. “They’re going to consume 10 games within that window” by watching highlights and analysis. With the expansion of legalized sports betting, that analysis adds value to the viewing experience, too.
Audience-based targeting is crucial in reaching fans as they consume sports content among different devices and media platforms, including social media and video on demand.
“It’s the ability to follow that audience, to talk about audiences versus broad demographics,” Law said. “There’s only upside to it from an advertiser standpoint. It’s the addressability, it’s getting that passionate fan where they want to be.”
Amid the limitations on fan attendance, sports leagues, broadcasters and marketers adapted their strategies to engage viewers. They experimented with everything from new kinds of signage that was visible on-camera to video mosaic walls that showed fans cheering for their favorite teams while livestreaming games at home.
Law said he expects a return of fans in stands to make the viewing experience more exciting, especially for college basketball games that feed off the energy of the surrounding crowds.
“College basketball just isn’t the same without fans,” he said.
Broadcasters traditionally have made lives sports programming a central part of their schedules, but they may face growing competition from digital platforms that bid for streaming rights. Video-on-demand services have become more popular as households connect their TVs directly to the internet, and they need fresh programming to help differentiate their brands.
“This next round of negotiations is going to be interesting and really expensive,” Law said. “The digital players have a lot of cash that they can bring to the table.”
He cited the example of Amazon, which for the past four years has livestreamed “Thursday Night Football” alongside Fox and the NFL Network. Amazon has showcased its technological prowess, letting viewers see on-demand replays and data about players, and pick from a menu of multiple announcer feeds.
Amid the higher prices for broadcasting rights, advertisers will demand that media owners provide sponsorship opportunities that aren’t limited to a 30-second spot in a sports broadcast, Law said.
“What I’m not excited for is the price tag. That price tag is going to be high, and ultimately, that’s passed along to consumers, passed along to advertisers,” Law said. “We’re going to have to think about how we’re going to offset that and be more creative, and get the equal value.”
You are watching “Live Sports 2021: What’s Next on TV,” a Beet.TV + VAB leadership video series presented by Effectv, a Comcast company. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Case in point – newly-cautious brands, looking to prove the effectiveness of spending, appear keener to buy advertising that is based on real outcomes, something connected technology has been promising for the last couple of years.
So, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Amplifi’s USA president Mike Law says 2021 is shaping up to be a year when such schemes are committed to.
“What is exciting about going into next year is really the scale and the pace at which things have changed over the past nine months,” he says.
“COVID accelerated a lot of the ways that we needed to buy media across all channels but, in particular in the connected (TV) space. We saw more and more consumers moving to streaming; it really highlighted it for ad buyers, ad sellers, and for our clients to see what that change look like.
“Going into next year, the hopes of scaled, connected TV buying, the growth of addressable TV, the ability to continue to use better data to target linear television – these are things that we’ve been trying to do and wanting to do over the past few years, but there’s no better time than 2021.”
Amplifi is the media innovation and investment arm of Dentsu.
Amplifi’s goal is to help the whole of Dentsu identify and generate value across all media opportunities. It works on investment, global media partnerships, Dentsu’s Amnet programmatic group, its Story Lab entertainment company and commercial teams.
Dentsu-owned Merkle has recently been building out its identity chops, off the back of its Merkury.
It is an identity graph platform covering 96% of US adults aged over 18 that includes associated email addresses, device identifiers like cookies and device IDs.
Law sees an opportunity to help brands that have become concerned about performance, saying: “I think we really need to start talking about effectiveness and business outcomes.”
But he also doesn’t want the opportunity to be overly complicated.
Asked what one message he would advocate to publishers and broadcasters, Law responds: “Simplification.
“There are so many great options that exist inside the marketplace. And I think for buyers and for clients to begin to digest that and figure out, ‘How do we actually attack this marketplace?’ … I think, simplification. ”
You are watching “An Open Ecosystem is Key to Advanced TV Success,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by DISH Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Technology is reshaping the way that marketers reach target audiences, and AMC Networks is at the forefront of testing methods to help advertisers boost the efficiency of their media buys. The network also has partnered with a variety of media-buying platforms to expand their inventories.
“Our mentality was: We have a ‘viewers-first’ mentality around distribution, let’s develop a ‘buyers-first’ mentality around how we transact,'” Kim Kelleher, president of advertising sales and partnerships at AMC, said in an interview for the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “We have nothing to hide and everything to gain by showing how an audience is going to perform.”
Kelleher described AMC’s advertiser-focused strategy in a conversation with Mike Law, president of Amplifi USA, the media agency owned by Dentsu Aegis Network. AMC’s strategy includes partnerships with media-buying platforms and pilot programs to test addressable advertising.
AMC was among the networks that this year joined Xandr Invest, the platform from AT&T’s Xandr ad-tech unit that gives advertisers a way to reach 76% of U.S. households. The company didn’t stop there, and last month announced its participation in the OpenAP consortium, which is a rival to Xandr. AMC also is integrated with Dentsu’s M1 platform for media buying, Kelleher said.
As for addressable advertising, AMC last month become the first major network to join the On Addressability initiative from cable providers Comcast, Charter and Cox to target linear TV and video on demand households. AMC also is piloting the Project OAR consortium and researcher Nielsen’s addressable advertising solution that aim to provide better ad targeting.
AMC’s “viewer-first” mentality comes as many U.S. households are canceling pay-TV subscriptions while hooking up their TVs directly to the internet. The resulting shift in media consumption has challenged traditional cable and satellite TV networks to develop programming for streaming platforms, while also serving the millions of viewers who haven’t cut the cord.
AMC Networks is adapting to these changes in viewing behaviors by collaborating with digital platforms that help to extend its reach, cultivate new audiences and deepen connections with existing viewers.
“As long as we keep the viewer at the center, we’re going to win,” Kelleher said. “Where the viewer is, the advertiser will always follow, if they can.”
Kelleher pointed to AMC’s strategy with “The Walking Dead,” the long-running horror series that’s the highest-rated scripted show on cable TV. While the series draws millions of viewers who like “appointment viewing” at a set time, the network has developed ways to engage those audiences after each episode.
The company teamed with Reddit, the news and discussion website, to give fans of “The Walking Dead” a way to talk about each episode, Kelleher said. Those social conversations help to keep viewers coming back to the show.
“We know exactly what we are, and we are looking forward to partnerships and innovation on expanding that footprint,” Kelleher said.
Because AMC doesn’t own an advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) service, the network is finding ways to work with streaming platforms to extend its brand and reach a new audience. AMC recently collaborated with Pluto TV, the AVOD service that ViacomCBS bought this year for $340 million, on an exclusive channel called “AMC Stories.”
The channel is airing the first five seasons of “The Walking Dead” to connect with younger audiences who are using streaming platforms to discover hit shows from yesteryear like “Friends” or “Seinfeld.”
“Season one of ‘The Walking Dead’ is hugely valuable right now because there’s a whole new audience of people that are ready to discover it,” Kelleher said.
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Amplifi is a unit of the Dentsu Aegis Network.
Companies have gotten better at using data to identify clients’ most valuable audiences, and it’s important they don’t lose perspective of where those ads should run. Instead, it’s crucial to holistically focus on finding the right people in the right place, which is where this mix of targeting tools and contextual marketing becomes all the more crucial.
“It is really critical that we bring those two things together so we think about contextual alignment matched up against audience definition when we’re placing our buys across all channels,” Law says.
In order for Amplifi to do this, the company utilizes the M1 tool in partnership with Merkle as well as other data platforms. But a big part of finding success is for data analytics companies to forge partnerships with media owners that have vast content libraries and use them to inform the most appropriate buys.
Law added that audience-based guarantees are increasingly becoming a bigger part of the picture, too, as the industry moves from demographics to audiences. Access to greater data has meant greater precision in reaching people, and this idea of reach is particularly important looking forward.
“Reach is a big story in today’s marketplace,” Law said. “To make sure that we’re using the data not just to think about audiences per se, but how do we think about audiences defined by light TV viewers as much as we’re thinking about audiences as those most likely to buy a car, those most likely to shop at a retail outlet, those most likely to make a purchase in a bar or a restaurant?”
For these reasons, Law argues that the industry needs to move away from legacy behaviors, and trend towards reaching people in real time to drive business outcomes.
In these particularly trying times, Law says that Amplifi has been working off of a framework but with a recognition that the current obstacles are unlike anything before. Their course of action is to gather as much information as possible and be in frequent communication with partners to gather an understanding of their current challenges.
“Right now, we’ve just been in a hyper-communicative state, trying to share as much as we can,” Law says. “Consistency of communication, transparency of communication, partnership, and making sure we’re sharing all we can and making the best decisions for each and every one of our clients to get through this.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Moderated by consultant Matt Prohaska, the discussion touched on the eternal reality of supply versus demand in making sales decisions, along with the prospects for the OpenAP audience targeting consortium.
“We still have bifurcation in linear programmatic and digital, so that’s always something that we have to navigate,” said FOX’s Noah Levine. “We’ve seen a maturity begin to develop in the linear programmatic TV space, which is quite nice.”
From the sell-side, programmatic is “primarily about automating the buy and being able to empower the agency, the buyer, to do more. That’s a good thing for us as sellers,” Levine added.
“The fact that we still need to look at linear programmatic as kind of a separate beast is something we should all start to want to reconcile and maybe have some degree of concern about,” said Brett Hurwitz of OATH, the Verizon unit. And if all TV inventory becomes available on an IP-based delivery platform, a major concern will be getting “enough of a premium on the highly desirable target folks to make up for the fact that some of your other impressions are going to probably be going at a much lower price.”
The issue of brand safety still holds sway and stands in the way of 100% data-driven decisions, according to Mike Law of Dentsu Aegis Network. “We need to find the right balance of that, because some brands hold that way too close to them and some buyers hold that way too close to them,” said Law. “They fear that if I don’t say something then this computer will do my job for me or somebody will do it for me.”
Sellers have obvious concerns about total automation when optimizing their inventory across the multitude of buyers. “In linear, there’s a lot of pressure on the inventory. There’s a huge amount of demand,” said Levine.
“It’s true, the private marketplaces are really the path forward for the most part when it comes to especially linear television inventory,” said Hurwitz.
Given some marketers’ desire to cherry pick ad units versus having the ability to transact via automation, “There’s a very healthy tension between those two models that we’re seeing in the marketplace,” Levine noted. And while being able to leverage programmatic technology to access inventory and re-optimize plans “is a very desirable state for us to reach in the future,” it’s tough to do for sellers that don’t have lots of unsold inventory. “That’s one of the challenges.”
Asked by Prohaska about the prospects of the OpenAP targeting consortium launched by FOX, Viacom and Turner, Law said its premise “remains really strong and positive.” The missing piece to him is being able to transact collectively across all members.
And OpenAP is in a crowded space.
“There’s OpenAP and then I’ve got actually all the partners included in OpenAP trying to sell me their own platform, plus fifteen other networks trying to sell me their platform as well,” said Law. “And then I’ve got Simulmedia calling me, I’ve got Adobe calling me, I’ve got Videology calling me.”
OATH experienced its own version of too many choices upon the merger of AOL and Yahoo, Hurwitz recalled, given the existence of “I’m going to say eight DSP’s between the two companies” plus a number of DSP’s. OATH decided to sunset its linear TV programmatic platform, which Hurwitz called “a fantastic product,” because “we felt was going to serve the industry for some period of time and then perhaps not be the tool the industry needed.”
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.
]]>“We’ve really been optimistic about the space,” says Law, who is EVP, Managing Director, US Media Investment, Amplifi (Dentsu Aegis Network). “I think the innovation and the technology the scale of the number of people we can hit and the improvement of data sources across the board has made addressable that much more viable on a media plan.”
In addition to more scale, there’s more data to provide understanding about consumer behavior and the best ways to target them, Law explains in this interview with Beet.TV. at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.
“And then on the back end, being able to understand did they actually follow through, make a purchase, go to a store, follow them throughout the full process,” Law adds.
Asked about the workload required for addressable TV, Law says it takes commitment and harnessing different resources. “I think you need to work with your analytics teams, you need to work with your clients very closely about what their goals are. So it is bringing a lot of people together on both sides.”
On the program distributor side, each vendor can represent a silo of sorts, so “it’s really our responsibility to bring that together to think about how can we maximize what we’re getting out of this.”
Part of the process is helping clients determine how addressability fits into their overall planning, given its utility in targeting specific households. “As we think about it, you have reach happening across the marketplace, but in traditional television and across other channels we’re really getting to the top of that reach curve very quickly now and then it’s frequency and we’re just kind of running rampant at the top of the reach curve.”
In moving TV into the lower part of the funnel, it’s less about brand awareness than it is getting closer to consumers—right now at the household level. Law describes a “one ad in one room versus in another room” approach “the ultimate dream, although we’re not quite there yet.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
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