In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them.
Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies, they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.
An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
In a panel interview at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis, two executives were asked how they are reconfiguring to service D2Cs…
In October, NBCU partnered with the agency Giant Spoon, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, to start Direct To Scale, an advertiser offering specifically geared toward helping D2Cs.
Norris says it “is really designed to help brands that were typically born in social scale beyond social – they hit a ceiling and they need something a little bit bigger.
“What we ended up finding is that these brands spent so much time on segmenting their audience, coming up with a really sound strategy for growth,” Norris said. “They spend a lot of time, money, effort, consideration, and then when it’s time to execute, they go buy a DR (direct response) schedule.
“The brand will have to retrofit their strategy to fit the inventory that’s available. We kind of didn’t think that that was the right way to go about it.”
Norris and Lee agreed that, just because ad buyers can now laser-target ad campaigns at cohorts of individual households, that doesn’t mean they always should – at least, not in isolation.
WideOrbit’s Lee said: “We’re allowing you to buy by daypart, by specific market programme, and it really is getting a lot more granular and giving them the capabilities to really see how they want to carve up their campaign based on the results they’re seeing.”
Norris said: “There’s a place for both (precise targeting and mass reach). Especially with direct-to-consumer brands, it’s not just good enough to do one.”
Lee agreed: “We can get too granular with that data. I think we have to find that balance. The more precise we get, you’re shrinking that funnel and you’re missing that whole audience… You need to make sure that you’re not trying to get so precise that you’re missing out on the big picture.”
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.
]]>For about six months, the media entities “were basically in a stall as a business,” Cancela, who is President and GM, Telemundo Puerto Rico & NBC Puerto Rico, explains in this video interview with Beet.TV conducted on the island. Among other effects of Maria, he says an “exodus” of people leaving the island scared advertisers, and cable TV providers suffered two storms: the hurricane and the destruction of broadband lines during the subsequent cleanup.
At Beet Retreat 2018 in San Juan from Nov. 28-30, there will be a special session titled Lessons Learned: Hurricane Maria’s Impact on the Media Industry of Puerto Rico. Cancela and other speakers will discuss how in the absence of broadband advertisers turned to over-the-air broadcasting along with traditional media like outdoor, radio and print.
For Puerto Rico, it took from September to March before “the market really started to react to TV,” at which point 70% of the island had regained electricity, Cancela says. “One thing we learned during that time is the importance of your digital platforms and being able to broadcast through your digital platforms. We never stopped broadcasting but we were broadcasting through our digital platforms.”
Asked to describe the TV market currently, Cancela says “What we’re definitely seeing now is that over the air has grown a good ten percentage points.” He adds that cable providers “actually had two storms,” Maria and the aftermath with “people just sawing through stuff and they cut down a lot of their broadband. It’s taken them a while. They’re still in recoup mode. I’d say the satellite providers have recouped a lot quicker.”
Maria’s impact on audience sizes won’t become clear until the first quarter of 2019 when new Census data become available, according to Cancela. He says the “overlying scenario is the exodus of people, and that scared a lot of the advertisers.” Estimates range from 150,000 to 300,000 people leaving the island within a six-month window. The human outflow scared the market, with some advertisers holding back on ad budgets. “That’s kind of stabilized.”
Throughout the whole ordeal, content remained king. “We produce over forty five hours of local content and we see that as an area of continued opportunity for us,” Cancela says. “No matter what platform they may watch us on, that content is unique to us, unique to Puerto Rico and therefore relevant to our potential viewers and our viewers.”
Joining Cancela to discuss media in the aftermath of Maria will be Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility; Freddie Hernandez, General Manager, Procter & Gamble, Puerto Rico; and Andres Claudio, General Manager, Hearts & Science, Puerto Rico. The session will be moderated by Phil Cowdell, President of Client Services at GroupM, who has been deeply involved with Puerto Rico relief and recovery.
The session will conclude with a briefing by Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. She will present data on the impact of the storm on the island’s youth and her organizations’ efforts to improve their future.
]]>“Think of this new platform like the Apple iOS platform where developers can come and develop new applications and services that can ride on top of our broadcast platform,” says Anne Schelle, Managing Director of Pearl TV.
We spoke to her after her keynote speech to hundreds of local TV and radio executives at the the WideOrbit Connect conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Washington-based Pearl TV was created by broadcasters to bring ATSC 3.0 to fruition, Schelle explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. Its members—Cox Media Group, the E.W. Scripps Company, Graham Media Group, Hearst Television Inc., Meredith Local Media Group, Nexstar Media Group, Raycom Media and TEGNA, Inc.—operate more than 220 network-affiliated TV stations.
Finalized by the Federal Communications Commission in January of 2018, ATSC 3.0 will be dependent on spectrum allocated by individual broadcasters for a consumer rollout set for late 2020. Now its various stakeholders need to agree not only on its infrastructure but also how to explain its attributes to consumers.
“We need to commercialize it,” says Schelle.
Pearl TV chose Phoenix as its test market, setting up one lighthouse station to emit signals under the new standard to kick off the transition from ATSC 1.0. “The trick will be to do that, we have to also maintain our 1.0 services. And we want to. That’s our bread and butter business as well as our multicast.”
Fox, NBC, Univision and PBS are collaborating on the test platform in Phoenix.
With a modernized user interface, ATSC 3.0 will provide free, live linear programing and a host of over-the-top streaming content.
One of the big payoffs for broadcasters is the viewership data they will be able to collect, fueling interactive TV and addressable advertising. “Broadcasters have never had access to their own data on their own channels,” notes Schelle.
The FCC made ATSC 3.0 voluntary as opposed to mandatory for broadcasters at the industry’s request, as CNET reports. It will be segmented into Designated Market Areas like current broadcast TV.
Initially, monetization ROI will come from viewer retention, data and advanced advertising. “It also will enable us to do data-informed sales,” Schelle adds.
The capabilities of ATSC 3.0 extend to the Internet of things, particularly smart vehicles. “This is a really economical pipe,” a one-to-many system with which “we can deliver at a fraction of the cost large data files, information, navigation, maps to connected cars and autonomous vehicles. That brings a whole new world to broadcasters.”
In the meantime, Pearl TV will be setting up consumer labs to explain the new technology, “what to call it” and how best to market the TV sets and other technology needed to make it happen.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“What we’ve done is we’ve created a further opportunity beyond enhanced ads at scale for brands to buy household addressable and targeted ads across the entire OTT landscape,” says Jacqueline Corbelli, who is Founder, Chairman and CEO of BrightLine.
In so doing, BrightLine has focused exclusively on major broadcast and cable networks, building a national footprint for full scale across the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, A&E, AMC, Turner and Viacom, among others. Hulu, which represents approximately 70% of ad-supported streaming, is a “very important partner,” Corbelli says in this interview with Beet.TV.
DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example, automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be delivered to those households.
For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.
“In addition to providing enhanced ads, we are now able to provide a targeting and household addressable solution that is as simple to buy as a thirty-second commercial has been all these years,” says Corbelli.
Because of the way that BrightLine has brought its new technology to market and the data it is able to collect, it can map devices to a home and create “a now 68-million household graph that allows for this type of targeting to occur. And the reason it’s important is it’s a reach extension for household addressable that is bought on the linear side of the TV equation. It brings that OTT layer to the opportunity for brands to get increasingly targeted.
“We talk about one to one. But in the home and where TV is concerned, household addressability is really a much more appropriate way, as advertisers believe, to reach their audience. And that’s what we’ve built,” says Corbelli.
This segment is from a Beet.TV series, “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.
]]>Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.
“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.
This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.
Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.
As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.
In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.
Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.
One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing that.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So while “we’re taking a lot of first steps in lots of different directions,” sometimes there’s progress in the TV space and sometimes not, says the EVP, Director of Strategic Investments, for Havas Media.
“The data conversation is I think somewhat overblown right now,” he says by way of preamble. “We have been buying using data for years. It’s not something new to us.”
What’s interesting to Kanefsky is the fact that TV networks “are trying to infiltrate that space,” and “they’re charging to infiltrate that space.” He notes that the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom designed to unify audience targeting for advertisers is seeking “a 10 percent up-charge on your media cost.”
He’s not disputing the need for a more unified currency across multiple networks. “With that said, we have a long, long way to go to solve the data issue.”
Kanefsky believes the best way to make TV buying more efficient is to actually have more ratings points available to buyers and that using data to optimize media is not a new concept.
“What we need the networks to do is find more ways to put more rating points back in the market, not necessarily from C3 to C7 but to actually perform better,” he says. “We’re in a marketplace that’s driven by supply right now. But what’s driving marketplace inefficiencies is the fact that supply is down so much.”
Advertisers still expect big ratings impact great content but would like to be able to obtain both while reaching audiences in difficult time frames like 8-11, according to Kanefsky.
Asked what he’d like to see most from the networks, Kanefsky says “a strategy” that would provide a vision of “how are we going to get from point A to point B.”
To his mind, ABC is the closest to having such a strategy, NBC is “all over the place” and CBS “has their model built out kind of perfectly.”
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.
]]>An audience target for a client “that is actually going to move their business is a very different animal anyway,” says Jon Stimmel, EVP, Chief Investment Officer, UM.
Progress on the targeting front has been slowed in part by inventory constraints, Stimmel explains in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he refers to the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom as “the Hulu of data.”
“It’s been a really small portion against each one of those media owners that have undertaken this endeavor and I don’t see that changing in the near future,” Stimmel says of advanced audience targeting. “But I do see more and more of them being able to execute in a way that matches up with how we build our plans.”
Asked for his assessment of OpenAP, Stimmel says it’s a step in the right direction but too early to judge completely as some details have yet to surface.
“I was surprised, not that I’m not an optimist. It’s just you don’t see a lot of media owner collaboration all the time,” he says.
Stimmel likens this cooperation to the advent of Hulu just over a decade ago. “Hulu was a big endeavor when Fox and NBC came together to sell their digital inventory. This is like the Hulu of data,” he adds.
UM research experts will be going under the hood of OpenAP to determine things like how the networks are defining the audience segments they’re offering for advanced targeting and whether they’re in sync with the way advertisers define them.
“That collection of the data is probably the most important in our desire to move from this respondent level data to more behavioral. It’s really the path we’ve been trying to instill,” he says.
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being best, Stimmel rates the current state of cross-screen measurement at “a patchwork five.”
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.
]]>“I really don’t see any other answer given this confluence of trends,” Rogers told the audience at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes, presented by video marketing technology provider Eyeview. In a one-on-one interview conducted by Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer at MediaMath, Rogers referred more than once to a “true crisis in traditional linear TV viewing.”
While the viewing decline has been happening for about 25 years, Rogers thinks it’s coming to an inflection point. A major contributing factor is the continued rise and popularity of non-ad-supported programming. Hours of YouTube viewing “is just about to hit a level that exceeds all global traditional linear TV viewing,” said Rogers, who is Executive Chairman of WinView Games and Chairman & CEO of TRget Media.
However, the plethora of data and technology providers that cater to one segment or other of the audience targeting and measurement business doesn’t make things easier for advertisers and agencies, according to Rogers. Which leads some advertisers to throw up their hands in frustration and cede that ground to their agencies.
“To be frank about it, the agencies are for the most part not the people with the greatest incentives in the world to kind of drive a more cohesive integrated simple approach to this,” Rogers said. “They kind of thrive on that complexity because it makes it more necessary for advertisers and brands to rely on them.”
On the TV sales side, as better targeting and addressability drive more efficiency and ROI, waste is removed but most likely less money will change hands. “And with less spending, those particular players in the equation have a harder time seeing how they win,” he added.
Rogers likened consumers chasing skinny bundles and other alternatives to watch their favorite programs to the dynamic between a wealthy husband and a younger wife. Asked if she would still love him if he lost all his money, her response was: “Of course honey I would still love you, but I would miss you very dearly.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>From year to year at CES, Shlachter sees a lot of incremental changes in technology, particularly regarding connected vehicles and homes. “For me what’s most interesting is what can we do with that? It’s been a promise for a long time and I think it’s going to become more of a reality now, particularly between the car and the home and the person itself,” he says.
Uniform standards for targeting people with ads one-on-one and measuring the results will provide “better value for consumers and make more use out of the space that we play in,” he adds.
The convergence of the digital and traditional media worlds now more than ever is opening a whole new world of opportunities from a creative standpoint, according to Shlachter. However, new approaches are needed to move things along.
“We have to get past the days of trying to fit one creative concept into a lot of different screens and formats, because we see that it doesn’t work as well,” Shlachter says before acknowledging that it’s hard to create a lot of native experiences for every single platform across a 360-degree media plan.
Finding better ways to integrate data and technology to automate creative delivery will be more useful than trying to “create some one-size-fits-all messaging that may help us scale but may not pay off,” he says.
In the meantime, Shlachter is excited about the one-to-many approach that Verizon took when partnering with other companies to live-stream the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016. As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCUniversal produced a live stream of the parade separate from NBC’s broadcast that was shot with 360-degree cameras and viewable on Verizon’s YouTube page.
Calling it a “monumental effort,” Shlachter says Verizon garnered “a ton of positive feedback and sentiment from everything we were able to measure.”
This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“What I think we’re going to start seeing with new technologies is using addressability as a way of versioning for national TV,” Winkler says in an interview with Beet.tv. “That’s really exciting stuff, particularly for our set of clients, many of whom are portfolio clients, all of whom are looking for growth.”
Media agencies have always touted their clout in getting the most advantageous rates for their clients owing to the sheer amount of money they spend. The same principle is still at play, but it’s just the starting point.
“Using technology, you can take the clout and those great rates but then deliver the right ad to the right person within that national buy,” Winkler says. “That’s a remarkable opportunity.”
More TV networks are realizing that in lieu of an increase in viewers, they need to bring more value to the table, according to Winkler. He cites NBC and Turner Broadcasting as examples of programmers using various data sets to optimize schedules on the fly. “And that’s a good thing. Just because we’re not doing pure programmatic doesn’t mean we’re not happy about the better performance we’re getting for our clients,” Winkler says.
For media agencies seeking to transition to the all-things-data approach to media planning and buying, the biggest change that Winkler has seen has been taking data out of the data silo “or even out of the digital silo, for that matter.”
OMD is seeing the biggest impact for its clients by “making data part of the beginning of the process and therefore affecting every medium that we plan and buy on behalf of our clients,” says Winkler. “When you do that, suddenly it’s 10X the impact. But only if you talk about data up front.”
As he looks ahead to CES 2017 in Las Vegas, Winkler will be trying to discern the most meaningful advances in television technology from the passing near-fads.
“We’ve seen a lot of gimmickry over the last few years, whether that’s curved TV’s or 3D TV’s,” he says.
So what went wrong? According to Winkler, manufacturers were focusing on the wrong types of technological advances.
“People want technology that makes it easier for them to watch more TV,” he explains. “Technology that lets you watch more TV is going to be embraced by the American public because we love to watch TV.”
Voice recognition could be that technological magic bullet. The ability to tell your TV set to play episode #4 of Seinfeld or a particular pro football game.
“Once you have the experience of asking technology to do something for you and it does it instantly and without hesitation and without a mistake, you will never go back,” Winkler says.
Who’s going to deliver it? Siri with Apple? Amazon Echo? Google?
“I’m not sure,” Winkler says. “That’s the new battlefront. Voice activation in the living room with a TV and may the best man win.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“The rights restrictions have often lagged behind the technological capabilities,” says ABI Research practice director Sam Rosen. “What we’ve started to seen in the last couple of years – especially with the NBC Sochi Olympics – was that the business models have caught up with the technology and the demand.”
“Consumers – especially millennials – like to see their content whenever they want, wherever they want, on any device,” says Rosen.
We interviewed him at the NAB Show, where our coverage was presented by Adobe Primetime. Please find more video reports from the show here.
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