That is the hope of the addressable TV leader at Modi Media, the advanced TV wing of media agency Group M.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Marc Cestaro says his company is currently trying to process and understand the dizzying number of new over-the-top TV services, and their relative capabilities when it comes to ad targeting.
“Unifying and understanding (ad) overlap and duplication across them (is) more of a wish at this stage of the game,” he explains. “(We are) just understanding what everybody has to offer, and then taking a step back and seeing how any similarities or differences. It’s changing so quickly.”
Cestaro says he has seen “addressable” TV – the technology through which ad buyers can target audience members on a one-to-one basis, rather than through large cohorts of TV show audiences – evolve, from taking place at the TV box level, to being supported by new over-the-top service operators, like Peacock.
That brings a new set of learnings to make.
“There’s questions around fragmentation and ‘Is it a national sample with one footprint versus another?’,” Cestaro says. “I think sometimes we (in the industry) want the perfect answer (to fragmentation) instead of a better answer.
“Right now, I think it’s a big improvement from where we were, and we expect that to continue and scale as smart TVs continue to take over, especially during the holidays.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 202, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January. The series is presented by Samsung Ads. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>The ability of marketers to target individual viewing households with specific messaging seems revolutionary. But, though it has existed for several years now and though consumer technology deployment is wider than ever, discussions from successive Beet Retreats suggest some advertisers are still getting up to speed, and are still yet to be convinced.
eMarketer recently revised down its 2019 forecast for US addressable TV ad spending, from the earlier $2.54bn to $2bn. The earlier forecast had pegged addressable spending at just 3.7% of total US TV ad spend in 2019.
As connected TV ad spending continues to grow — addressable TV ad spending is slowing down. Check out eMarketer's revised forecast. #DigitalMarketing #ProgrammaticMarketing pic.twitter.com/ZJwfn7rd1V
— IXS Performs (@ixsperforms) June 28, 2019
Whilst that was attributed to connected TV platforms gaining a faster share of spend than traditional MVPD platforms will, we continue to hear brand views at both ends of the spectrum… from skepticism that addressable presents any brand benefits, to brands needlessly hoping to fine-target audiences.
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, an executive from a company which has been a canary in the mineshaft for addressable TV said he sees varied willingness on the part of brands.
Marc Cestaro, MODI Media addressable lead, was interviewed by Howard Shimmel, president of Janus Strategy & Insights.
“Whether clients are willing to abandon or learn something new is kind of where (growth) lies.
“I think it’s just (about needing) a unified march to understand and push and accept that it is fragmented, but it’s really not that hard.”
“People tried this (technique) three or four years ago and say it didn’t work or it was too complicated, (but) it’s totally different now. We’re not reinventing the wheel, but it’s just, with repetition, comes ease.”
“Another misconception is, (when marketers say), ‘My brand is not fit for addressable because my target is very broad’. And, I’m not going to say that’s not true, but it’s all about how you look at it…
“If I own a tissue company … would it make sense to target that (precision) way? (No), everybody’s using tissues. But, within that, you can have a subset:
“I think we’ve kind of moved beyond the challenges that were just six months away.”
Asked to rate advertisers’ acceptance of the tactic, Cestaro rated it four out of five on average.
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.
]]>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 doesn’t look like happening any time soon, says one man leading advanced TV for the world’s biggest ad-buying agency – but it also doesn’t matter.
And, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Marc Cestaro, MODI Media director, addressable lead, says the industry may never get there.
“I need a magic wand,” Cestaro says. It would make my life awesome, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get there.
He rates advertiser acceptance of addressability – the practice through which they can target TV ads to household-level using IP-connected viewing devices – at only four out of five.
“The connected partners are sort of coming from a different angle,” Cestaro observes. “The traditional cable partners have zoned legacy business, their spot business. You have internet providers, 5G could come into play somehow. That would be awesome. But I’m not sure that they’ll all play together.”
MODI Media helps brands navigate the new opportunities presented by advanced TV capabilities.
Peers report initial confusion amongst brands, followed by a period of education. Over the years, Beet.TV has also heard some brands present with too-specific an idea of the targeting they want to achieve.
Cestaro does see a range of consolidations happening. He imagines connected TV hitting two-thirds household penetration, centering on a core range of services and devices, plus groups like NCC Media, Xandr and Nielsen all helping normalize the playing field. It’s getting much “easier”, Cestaro reports.
Regardless, he doesn’t necessarily think the holy grail of a single universal addressable TV marketplace is needed.
“I don’t know if we need that to really scale it,” he says. “I think (the opportunity is) there.”
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.
]]>If the new technology is going to help restore growth to TV ad revenue, it is going to need to go large.
In other words, more TV operators are going to need to put more addressable technology in more viewers’ homes.
But that is a future Marc Cestaro sees coming in to focus.
The director and addressable lead at GroupM’s dedicated MODI Media division, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says: “I think scale comes from different places now. Scale comes from new households lighting up.
“You have Frontier and Cox joining Xandr and NCC respectively. We can expect some of the older legacy homes to kind of grow from a Comcast standpoint. Their X1 boxes are rolling up, they’re creating more linear insertion.
“We can expect some new providers, and I think there’s more of a merge coming between the connected and the app space and the networks, to the household addressable. We’ll see some kind of some movement there as well.”
Stats on US household addressability vary. In December, AT&T’s Xandr was citing 60 million.
Cestaro will speak to the growth of addressable TV at the August 7 Beet.TV industry summit hosted by GroupM.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, MODI Media’s Garrett Winkler talks about the growing practice of “layering on” viewing data and how cross-platform measurement needs to advance.
Like other business units, GroupM’s MODI Media is helping advertisers gain incremental reach and frequency against priority audiences by working with data companies like LiveRamp and Experian. Connected-TV viewing insights are being augmented with smart-TV ACR data “to get at those who are either underexposed or unexposed from a potentially linear television schedule,” says Winkler, who is Director, Connected Television Lead.
Where the industry is hoping to go is in unifying cross-platform measurement solutions.
“So we’re not just measuring linear TV and connected TV, or connected TV and a digital video buy. I think those things really need to come together and we need to do a better job of showing that to brands and expressing that.”
One of the more formidable hurdles is the fragmented marketplace, according to Winkler.
“We’ve seen a number of publishers wanting to sell directly, and then also at the same time sell programmatically and then also make their inventory available to aggregators or networks or even device partners,” Winkler explains.
“Where we want to work is using connected TV as a way to find that incrementality and drive incremental reach, or additional frequency where we know a brand’s customers are more likely to convert.”
He sees a future in which there will be more layering on of “personalization or dynamic creative.” This would give brands and agencies the ability “to go to the same publishers or content producers that they know and love as consumers and they’ll be buying broadly, but they’ll be able to deliver personalized messages to different groups of their customers.”
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, the WPP agency’s Director, Addressable Lead talks about the complexity of executing addressable TV campaigns for GroupM agencies across various MVPD’s from clients, ranging from adult diapers to luxury cars.
“They’re not necessarily one provider,” Cestaro says. “When you think of adding the satellite guys and the cable guys together, that’s all incremental reach. But where Sorenson is unique is they sit on top of that. So they can extend reach and they have access to different inventory that we haven’t really tapped into yet.”
MODI has seen good results for clients using addressable but it’s a fluid playing field. “There’s a lot of learning curves, there’s a lot of new growth in the space and with that comes new clients and new opportunities,” he says.
“The providers don’t necessarily work together. Everybody has their own data, their own buys, there’s no magic solution that goes across everyone so it’s a manual process.”
Cestaro likens Sorenson’s positioning in the market to that of Apple Pay.
“Meaning they’re not Visa, they’re not Mastercard they’re not Discover. Those companies kind of sit there. But they’re kind of sitting on top of that and they’re helping direct or being the pipes behind a more aggregated approach and a more wide-scale approach,” he says of Sorenson.
From an inventory standpoint, Cestaro doesn’t think there’s limited supply of addressable TV inventory. “Can there always be more? Absolutely. The demand is high.”
With about two-thirds of U.S. households able to be targeted with addressable ads, some marketers are testing addressable while others keep returning to it, having navigated the learning curve.
“You’re going from GRP’s to impressions,” says Cestaro. “The way we buy it is different. The way we target is very different. Even the back end piece is all different.”
As addressable continues to scale, “What Sorenson is doing is taking what was there and really just doing it a different way that hasn’t quite been done yet and it’s really allowing for more of a top level approach.”
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.
]]>“Measurement is essential to moving OTT forward within the media and advertising space,” says Dan Robbins, Head of Ad Research & Insights, Roku, in this interview with Beet.TV. “Our mission is to be the operating system of television.”
As the #1 streaming platform, Roku wants to “create advertising with light ad loads, engaging interactive experiences that bring the best of TV, the branding and safety of the living room screen, with the best of digital,” Robbins says.
Roku Ad Insights consists of:
Reach Insights, wherein advertisers can quantify unique campaign reach by demographic segments across linear TV, OTT, desktop and mobile.
Tune-In Insights, so that TV networks and content owners can measure the effectiveness of content promotions they run across linear TV, OTT, desktop and mobile. “If you’re running a promo for a show on Roku, what’s the lift on traditional TV, or if you watch a promo on traditional TV what’s that lift back on streaming,” Robbins explains.
Cord Cutter Insights, for campaigns delivered to Roku users who don’t have traditional pay TV subscriptions so that advertisers can “validate that your one-to-one targeting actually reached that that cord-cutter cohort.”
Survey Insights, which enables marketers to gather real-time feedback and demographic insights with short, on-device viewer surveys. Insights can include “how these folks think, who they are, what they like, how they receive and interact with advertising,” says Robbins.
Roku is working with more than a dozen advertisers on the Ad Insights Suite, according to Robbins.
In addition to registration data about Roku users on a household basis and streaming data about programs and advertisements, the company’s TV sets have automatic content recognition capabilities to track linear TV program consumption and ad viewing.
A news release announcing the Roku Ad Insights Suite quotes Marissa Jimenez, President of GroupM’s Modi Media, as saying that the offerings “allow us to better understand how OTT ads perform compared to other platforms, which in turn can influence media spend.”
]]>His focus is on emerging platforms like Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV Stick. “Our North Star is truly addressing audiences at a household level,” Walters explains in this interview at this year’s Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
One of the benefits of connected TV and a “profile-type environment” is being able to take targeting down a step further and pinpoint specific household members, according to Walters. “Increasingly, we’re trying to work with our partners to help enable this for clients,” he says.
Modi approaches video investments for its clients at a portfolio level, paying particular attention to decision creative iterations for targeted households. For example, a household whose known annual income is $250,000 might see an ad for the American Express Platinum Card.
“We’re also able to look at the outcome and understand if that exposure is driving traffic to the website and conversions, to really move that altogether to create more value,” Walters says.
His passion for commerce-enabled interactivity derives from being able to pre-qualify an audience and target them based on purchase behavior. Or to provide people with the ability to purchase something immediately or “at the very least add to a cart to move them down the funnel.”
He cites Amazon as a major player in using first-party and purchase behavior to understand and motivate its users. “I’m excited when it goes beyond just enabling through a tile on Amazon Fire TV to something we can actually build throughout our entire video investment on their platform and off,” says Walters.
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.
]]>“Over the last three years, (I’ve done) … 250 campaigns, addressable to the household,” recalls Tracey Scheppach, the former long-time SMG advanced TV exec who recently left to form her own Matter More Media.
“Over $100 million we’ve spent in the market. A lot of campaigns. So this is not a test and learn thing anymore.”
Scheppach was speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV to discuss the emerging strengths and weaknesses inside the opportunity.
Success inside failure
Scheppach and Jamie Power, managing partner at GroupM’s advanced TV unit MODI Media, had seemingly different takes on what happens what addressable TV ad campaigns fail.
“The value that’s brought is not only when a campaign works, but it’s also when a campaign doesn’t work,” Power said. “At the end of the campaign, if the campaign doesn’t work, I know why the campaign didn’t work.
“The retention rate is 85%, but, you know, there are a lot of times that it doesn’t work and we’re able to use that data and it’s really powerful to bring the advertiser back and do it bigger and better next time.”
But Scheppach commented: “I’ve used 29 different data providers to deliver those 250 campaigns. I see that addressable works for every single client. I have not had a failed campaign yet.”
The real question, Scheppach said is, “Does addressable work for everyone?” But that is just a function of the price put on the campaign, she said.
So, if the technology and the strategy is in place, what is left to do as addressable grows up? Both execs have a wishlist.
Addressable wishlist: Jamie Power
“In order to scale it, you actually do need some standards. Right now, the product is great, but everyone’s still doing it differently. A simple thing like media delivery … the impressions that ran, not only are we getting in a different format from each of the MVPDs, they have different methodologies.
“How do you scale this into a marketplace, especially when you want national broadcast buyers who are used to accountability and scale and standards when we still don’t have standards? The easiest thing to fix would be a standard media delivery report.”
Addressable wishlist: Tracey Scheppach
“I would love more inventory in the marketplace. We’re very fortunate that two satellite providers kind of got the real party started, so we had national scale. But, even when we’re stretching the number, 52 million households, it’s still 1% of the inventory.
“I would love to see Charter to deploy, I would love to see over-the-top be addressable. I would love to see the national programmers start to have a real conversation with operators about enabling their inventory. The one thing that we need, that would make me happy, would be to grow the inventory source from 1% to 25% by the end of the decade.”
This panel was moderated by The Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.
This panel 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.
]]>“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.
]]>Prompted by panel moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp., to reflect on the transformation of Comcast over the last several years, Smith, who is SVP of Comcast Media 360, invokes the fictional Philadelphia-based company Kabletown.
“When you look at the legacy cable company created by Ralph Roberts, which was parodied on a show called 30 Rock, which is on a network we owned, and you look at where it is today, the way we look at it is in the eyes of the customer and certainly the advertiser,” Smith says.
He goes on to cite the “radical evolution of measurement” from C3 and its innumerable permutations along with the many choices consumers have for viewing video content. “I think it’s constantly evolving, but the one thing that we really do focus on and we have to be cause it’s competitive is the consumer experience,” says Smith.
When he mentions addressable TV advertising, Smith puts it into a larger perspective. “I’m so glad you’re taking this beyond just addressable,” Smith says. “I think addressable is a tactic. It’s part of a plan. It’s evolving. We’re all learning.”
While specialist companies like GroupM’s Modi Media are “very advanced” in the addressable TV space, “others are getting up to par,” according to Smith.
He then acknowledges the benefits of addressable TV for providing more accountability for advertising spending, in the process offering a caveat that’s close to home at Comcast.
“And for us, we want to do that,” Smith says of addressable. “But we’re a big advertiser. We spend a significant amount of money. So we want to use it too. But it’s all in the context of our overall media plan and the tactics that we deploy.”
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.
]]>Jamie Power began to learn this about three years ago when she joined the launch of GroupM’s Modi Media advanced TV unit, now employing some 30 people. Nonetheless, it’s a challenge she’s heartily embraced.
“To be honest, it’s been the best three years of my career, it’s been so much fun,” Power says in an interview with Beet.TV. “TV is in such a transformational state, so that’s why I feel just lucky to be a part of that.”
She started with tune-in advertisers because set-top box data from MVPD’s was readily available, and then scaled the process out to categories like automotive and financial. “Even if the data set isn’t currently hooked directly with an MVPD, we can work directly with Acxiom or Experian and they can do rev share,” Power says. “So basically the answer is never no. The answer might be, ‘give me three days to let me figure out how to connect all the pieces.’”
While it’s easier to justify the cost of addressable for more expensive products or services—say, a $7 allergy medicine versus a $40,000 car—there are no limits given a proper analysis of the effective cost per thousand impressions, according to Power.
She views Modi as unique in that the background of most of its people is either in TV, strategy or research, whereas other holding companies have their digital leads heading up addressable advertising. “Our understanding is it’s TV first,” she says. “We understand it’s TV and respect that it’s TV. Now data and tech are just bringing new opportunities.”
Asked by interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, what would make her daily work easier, Power points to automation and standardization. “There’s definitely a need for pieces of the process to be automated. There’s definitely a need for standards. You can’t scale anything without standards,” Power says.
Nonetheless, “The future holds amazing things for addressability. We just have to connect the pieces and stay positive,” Power adds.
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.
]]>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.
]]>Innovid, which helps brands create, deliver and measure video ads for a range of 25 online TV platforms, was recently picked by MODI to power its over-the-top TV ad delivery and analytics.
“Video is everywhere,” CTO and co-founder Tal Chalozin tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Our vision is to be the pipes that orchestrate everything and help the marketer deliver and understand what’s going on there. We’re working really hard to integrate in to every platform.
“Every platform has created a walled garden – Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Roku, YouTube – each and every one is a giant that would like to create their own world.
“We are complete media-netural, we’re not owned by any other media giant. All of those giants open their gate to us and allow us to integrate and act as the unbiased measurement company.”
Broadcast outfits like Comcast and RTL have invested in or acquired ad-tech vendors in the video and TV chain. But Chalozin seems to be championing Innovid’s independence.
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At the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London earlier this month, we interviewed Ben Tatta, President of Cablevision Media Sales, about the deal with and how the company will work with Modi.
Also in London, we spoke with Modi CEO Mike Bologna about the new agreement. You can find the Bologna interview here.
These videos are part of a series produced in London about advanced TV advertising. The series is sponsored by Xaxis. Please visit this page for more videos.
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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.
]]>One school of thought says that kind of dynamic personalization is “science-fiction“.
And a leading addressable TV advertising exec is similarly bearish.
“I don’t think true personalization, where you call somebody out by name and location, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen,” Modi Media’s Joanna Thissen tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see an ad where somebody’s like, ‘Hey, Joanna, who lives in East 36th Street, come and buy my car’ – the ad tech just doesn’t exist for that to happen.
“But I do think that the next wave of addressable will be kind of creating creative that speaks more to the lifestyle of the target you’re looking for … That way, that content is now connecting with the intended audience – rather than just showing them a generic commercial, you’re now starting to speak to them even more on a one-to-one basis.”
The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>“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 what humps are still in the road to an addressable future? In a panel on the topic, these executives discussed the topic…
Modi Media president Mike Bologna
“Almost 50%, 47 million households, of the United States now has the ability to insert an ad at the household level.
“Demand is where it gets a little bit tricky. To truly benefit … the advertiser needs to know who they really want to reach… a really granular segment. This requires advertisers to think about, ‘Do I want to reach drivers of a specific vehicle?’ That requires pooling together different data sources.”
Starcom MediaVest SVP Steve Murtos
“As we start to scale, we need more automation. Agencies need to help advertisers understand how to think about this, what the right sequencing of messaging is.”
AT&T AdWorks Rick Welday
“It’s such a different mindset from an agency perspective. This is very different (from traditional ad-buying). There’s an evolution that still has to occur within the agency space to help customers understand that we’re no longer purchasing premium content – we’re pursuing the audience; the audience becomes addressable.”
Citi senior media manager Kim O’ Connor
“On our end, people are way more excited about the idea of being targeted and addressable than the idea that you’re going to run spots in Big Bang Theory
“The challenge is, the space is a little bit fractured. Five different providers, you have to go to each provider to get individual cost, there are five different research studies.”
Programming Note: Murtos will be speaking at the Beet Retreat next month in Floridaabout this and related topics.
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
]]>Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on just that proposition, says 2015 is the year it has begun to happen – but he cautions that advertising may need to adjust to the new realities of the possibilities.
“If we still live in a world where we spend a million dollars to create a spot, that’s not economically feasible for this data- and tech-driven world,” he told a Cannes Lions panel discussion, recorded by Beet.TV.
“We need to figure out a way to take these big, beautiful million-dollar spots and cut them three, four, five, 20 different ways so that the right message goes to the right consumer at the right time at the right frequency.”
Fellow panelists agreed that the prospects are vast:
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions aboard the AT&T AdWorks yacht, sponsored by AT&T. For more clips from the session, please visit this page.
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