“If all we do as an industry is make television look like digital programmatic today and the mess of the supply chain that exists out there, then we will fail,” says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. “We need to keep the economics of TV today and leverage the targeting and the data available for digital but we need to do it efficiently.”

Wise sees convergence “as not necessarily a buying problem but a planning and measurement problem” that it has sought to help remedy with internal solutions and partnerships with 4C Insights, VideoAmp and TubeMogul, among others, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Since Mediaocean’s sale in August 2015 to a private equity company, it has made six acquisitions, expanded globally and expanded its customer base, 90% of which had been agencies. It now deals directly with CMO’s on a planning workflow solution called Lumina and with TV broadcasters and publishers through Prisma for Sellers.

“Planning and buying need to come together and buying and selling need to come together,” says Wise.

He notes that 4C has done “an amazing job of creating platforms” to plan, buy, measure and optimize all in one system, through advanced data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“The tricky part is being able to respect what makes TV the most efficient media marketplace in the world today and it continues to be. While moving it into the digital future.” Wise thinks the next few years are going to be “very interesting to watch” in the measurement space.

“I think Nielsen has done a really, really good job of expanding their datasets to be more relevant in the digital age,” Wise says, adding that comScore “has actually created a nice, viable alternative.”

Others will follow as MVPD’s “are leaning into platforms like 4C and VideoAmp and potentially TubeMogul” to leverage set-top box viewing data “and what we’re seeing is the market is almost open to there being another player in that space.”

Then there is Oracle with its acquisitions of Datalogix and Moat. “We will evolve as the industry evolves,” Wise says.

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

“That is certainly one of the objectives for us as well as for a number of partners that we work with in the space, and it certainly seems like it’s going to require a number of stakeholders to get to where the industry wants us frankly to be,” says Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud.

With 97 of the top 100 US advertisers and slightly less of the top 100 globally, there’s very little in the way of data that Oracle hasn’t seen on the digital side. Now a core focus, according to Harrison, is to “deliver solutions to all flavors of TV, from national linear to addressable VOD, linear to connected and OTT.”

Oracle doesn’t lack for partnerships in the TV space, counting Hulu as an early collaborator and also The Trade Desk, DataXu and TubeMogul, all of which have been “investing quite a bit to solve for TV through their own initiatives so we are working to align closely with them,” Harrison says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

The first time that Oracle Data Cloud enabled its purchase-based audiences for linear national TV was through a linkup with Simulmedia, something company founder Dave Morgan called “a defining moment in the transformation of TV to a data-driven, audience-targeted business.”

Asked about the quest for unified, cross-platform measurement, Harrison says clients are indeed looking for a more holistic approach to planning and activating both digital and TV. That would mean no longer having to ““drop that digital audience that you’ve customized and invested a lot of time and effort into at the gate and then pick up a totally different audience derived very differently to solve for it in, let’s say, TV and other media.”

A second priority for Oracle’s clients is measurement, i.e. what’s really driving lift, and to bring its digital methodology to the TV space. “That’s where again you come up against the uniqueness of each of these different media types and the need to address them first in and of themselves and then in a more overarching way across media.”

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.

New York-based Moat, founded seven years ago, has signed an agreement to be acquired by Oracle in what will be one of the biggest examples yet of marketing technology companies acquiring in to ad-tech.

And now Moat is taking its viewability technology in to the upfronts, the season in which US TV networks tout their upcoming content in order to sell to advertisers.

Speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV, Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart revealed Fox, through its true[X] ad engagement subsidiary, will be trying to sell advertisers based on “attention” as measured through a Moat partnership.

“We’re specifically doing something with Fox, coming up for this year’s upfronts, where they are really focused on attention, on how to understand … attention in television, connected TV, other types of environments,” he said.

“We are Fox’s partner where we start with measuring viewability, moving on to time and ultimately asking questions like, ‘How long was somebody there? What did they do?’, ‘Did they interact with the ad?’ [and] ’Did they choose do be there?… ‘

“With Fox, we’re applying [our] technology to understand attention in the environments they create.” Fox’s upfront presentation takes place on May 15.

It comes as Moat’s acquisition by Oracle serves as another indicator of ad-tech consolidation, after TubeMogul was acquired by Adobe late in 2016.

Moat’s product suite includes online analytics for advertising, including insight in to the visibility of video advertising. Oracle plans to integrate the company in to its existing Oracle Data Cloud – a suite for targeting, delivering and measuring online advertising which claims to have over five billion unique consumer profiles.

Oracle has bought in to ad-tech in recent years through Bluekai and Vitrue. It says Moat “will remain an independent platform within” its own offering.

Moat’s star has risen as concern has grown over the extent of fraudulent ad impressions and inventory that is not even viewable by human users, and especially since the Media Ratings Council (MRC) codified guidelines for viewable ad impressions as a consequence in 2014. Now the company claims over 600 clients.

In a letter to its customers, Oracle says:

“Oracle plans to continue investing in Moat. We expect this will include more functionality and capabilities at a quicker pace. In addition, Moat customers will benefit from better integration and alignment with Oracle’s other product offerings.

“Oracle and Moat are committed to keeping Moat an open measurement and analytics platform, with deep integrations and partnerships across the entire digital publisher and adtech landscape.”

Oracle claims media spending worth more than $4bn was enhanced by capabilities of its Data Cloud last year.

Update:  Peter Kafka reports in recode that Oracle is paying over $850 million for the acquisition.

This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront.  It is presented by FreeWheel.   To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That is according to a trio of ad-tech execs whose companies help bring some visibility to the problem, but who say the challenge is greater than that.

Almost three years after the Media Ratings Council set guidelines for what constitutes a viewable ad impression (50% of the video player in view for at least two seconds), Beet.TV convened a panel to discuss viewability at the Beet Retreat.

The discussion, viewable in our recorded session, showed a general appreciation for viewability – and a recognition that it should be used as just part of an overarching strategy.

Moat sales director Peter Kuhn:

“Viewability should be a baseline standard but it shouldn’t drive investment.

“We fundamentally need standards. If we’re all going to grade, as Mark Pritchard of P&G said, a yard the same way, it’s impossible to start asking questions around where investment should go, what effectiveness is, if we’re not all measuring things the same way.

“(But) the consumptive patterns of consumers is outpacing the ability for a marketers to … come up with the right standards for success.”

Ooyala advertising platforms GM Scott Braley:

“The idea of needing standards is categorically right. (But) the intimacy between buyers and sellers has, for a while now, been lost and needs to be regained.

“When you rely on those (companies) that are all too willing, ready and happy to be intermediaries – to rely on the platforms without understanding who you’re buying, what the inventory is or what you’re selling to – that’s when you start to over-rely on the idea of metrics as a universal truth for good and bad. That’s a subjective thing.

“They’re so myopically focused on the idea of this metric, and not what you’re buying.”

Eyeview Digital TV SVP and GM Boaz Cohen

“We need standards – but for us, our standard is sales. Instead of focusing on media metrics – viewability, completions and other stuff – we focus on sales. Give us $100k for video budgets, we’ll deliver you $300k in sales.

“We do need viewability … but that’s our problem, the supply problem, the ad-tech problem – not the marketer problem. Their standard should be sales; focused on offline and online sales.”

Cohen countered the suggestion that video outcomes are only for driving immediate actions, saying that marketer outcomes linked to video – including car dealership visitation and loyalty card-linked retail purchases – can be measured up to 30 days after an ad is watched.

The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But CTR is undergoing an assault, as brands worry that a simple click is no longer the whole story and search for an alternative.

Put simply, the foundational mechanisms of digital marketing effectiveness are in flux.

It’s a challenge that Moat Director of Sales  Peter Kuhn, whose company sells analytics software to help advertisers understand the potential effectiveness of their advertising, understands. His company is now launching the Moat Video Score.

“(It is) a new impression-level metric for measuring digital video exposures that focuses on length of creative, plus its sound and viewability, along with the portion of a user’s screen in which it appears,” Kuhn tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Brand marketers are trying to move away from an ad-served impression currency and click-based KPI model to asking other questions (like), ‘What lens can we look at success through in digital?'”

The video score was announced back in the fall and is now ready to go live, Kuhn says. But Moat has been offering related at-tech solutions since 2010.

In that time, Kuhn has seen the evolution of the industry from a CTR-based economy, to one plagued by a crisis over viewability, to one in which that thorny problem has died away.

“In 2014, we saw the guidelines getting set for viewable impressions,” Kuhn adds. “We saw in 2015 agencies updating their trading models to purchase and transaction off of viewable impressions.

“And now we’re starting to see brand marketers and agency partners ask different questions around what effectiveness might be in digital.

“Now it’s not just viewability at all costs – viewability is a table-stakes question that you need to answer about what could potentially be effective.

“We’re looking at other questions like, ‘In video, how do I compare cross-device, cross-screen, what effectiveness can mean for me?’, ‘How do I understand if my audience is paying attention to what I’m trying to market to them?’ or ‘If I’m a publisher, how do I sell that attention and find ways to engage better with my brand marketers?”

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Streaming music provider Spotify has no shortage of insights that define its users, as the company’s Head of Video Sales, Brian Danzis, explains in this interview with Beet.TV. Foremost among the tools for understanding what Spotify users are doing and feeling is their persistent identity.

With a user base that’s 100% logged in, there is “no opportunity for fraud on our platform, ever,” Danzis says during a break at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

Always on the lookout for new metrics that are unique to particular users, Spotify sees things on a continuum—from people who prefer the music the company programs for them to those who prefer a la carte selections, and everyone in between.

“These people are very different and we’re learning a lot about what those differences and behaviors are,” says Danzis.

Another metric is discovery, meaning whether users opt for tunes most familiar to them or whether they delight in finding new artists and use Spotify playlists to discover them. Then there is diversity, as expressed through the exploration of new types of cultures and genres, according to Danzis.

Having introduced its video advertising formats two years ago, Spotify “was in a unique position to not have to retrofit our ads to meet the needs of our customers” who were concerned about viewability, he adds. Spotify’s mid-roll ad units, consisting of video takeovers on both desktop and mobile, are served at key points in between songs, “only when an ad is in focus, so we know someone is looking at it,” Danzis says.

Each mid-roll video is billed to advertisers based on Moat’s Human, Audible, Viewable on Complete guidelines, meaning videos are viewable not just a the start or in the middle but upon completion.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart tells Beet.TV, in this video interview, that “viewability is a baseline”.

“There are folks profiting for so-called ad fraud … the reality is, we’ve set up a industry that has a tremendous amount of money flowing through it … so there’s an appetite for bad actors to come in and take a chunk of that,” he says.

“The rest of us … have to be diligent, we have to say ‘We’re not going to allow that to happen’.

“We’ll never have an industry where there’ll be zero fraud – in credit cards and no other industry does that exist. But we can do our part to make the market a little bit better.”

This year, Moat’s ad fraud detection tools began helping both Facebook and Twitter root out fake ad views.

This video is part of the series Programmatic Video at a Turning Point, presented by SpotX. You can find additional videos from the series here.  

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a big feature that has taken this new idea, the dirty secret of true, “viewability”, to a much wider audience.

The article, “The Great Unwatched“, quotes Aaron Fetters, director of Kellogg’s Insights and Analytics Solutions Center, who partnered with ad tech firm BrightRoll on a 12-month analysis to uncover the viewability of Kellogg’s ads.

“Completion rate would have been a success factor in the past,” Fetters said at the recent BrightRoll Video Ad summit. “Today, we want to look at: ‘Is the video audible and viewable on completion?’ You start to see, wow, a publisher I previously would have considered very effective at a high completion rate, maybe they have (only) a 20% audible-visible on completion – I need to optimize out of that.”

Appearing alongside Fetters, video ad verification vendor Moat‘s CEO Jonah Goodhart explained viewability: “When I go to watch a TV episode, I click play … as a consumer, I go open another tab, I go check my email, I do other stuff until my content comes on – when I do that, my ad is not viewable. This whole rise of bots and nefarious strategies (faking ad views) is something that’s real.”

You can find more coverage of the BrightRoll summit here. Disclaimer: BrightRoll sponsored Beet.TV’s coverage of the event.

“The key for viewability is to make sure that the measurement is independent, that it’s third-party and that it’s MRC-accredited,” says BrightRoll engineering SVP Christopher Amen-Kroeger.

“If people are putting viewability inside their (own video) consoles and playing both player and referee, how can you trust that data?”

Ad management platform Vindico reckons four in 10 video ad views could be fraudulent. The MRC (Media Ratings Council) and IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) have now defined an industry standard for measuring views that are truly generated by humans. Programmatic video ad platform BrightRoll has announced it will use Moat to produce viewability metrics.

Amen-Kroeger was interviewed at the BrightRoll Video Summit. You can find more coverage of the BrightRoll summit here. Disclaimer: BrightRoll sponsored Beet.TV’s coverage of the event.

At the BrightRoll Video Summit this week, the company announced its integration into the BrightRoll product.  Goodhart explains the significance of the deal with BrightRoll and progress in combatting the the issue of fraud and viewability.

For more coverage of the BrightRoll summit, visit this page.