But is full attribution really available today – or is it just a mirage?
In a spicy panel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a trio of executives disagreed on whether the relative absence of such strategies in the TV industry today is the fault of lack of technology – or lack of willingness:
- Bob Ivins, chief data officer, NCC Media
- Jo Kinsella, chief revenue officer, TVSquared
- Brian Wallach, chief revenue officer, FreeWheel
They were led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis.
‘Stop being scared’
Kinsella of TVSquared’s, whose platform helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites, took issue with sentiment expressed on an earlier panel – that measuring TV ads based on real outcomes, like sales, should not take precedence.
“That boggles my mind,” she said. “Why am I going to give you money if you can’t prove that it’s going to work? I’m not going to believe that bullshit. Currencies and GRPs? Just stop! We have the data, we have the technology – and people are getting in the way. It’s time to stop being scared. Use the data, use the tech, drive results. Simple.”
Outcomes are complex
Bob Ivins of NCC Media – the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter – that is measuring set-top box viewing data – said measuring “outcomes” is not so simple.
“You’re measuring an outcome, one outcome – and there’s a bunch of different outcomes,” he explained. “An outcome could be to ‘go to a website’, an outcome could be ‘do a transaction’, an outcome could be ‘do a search’. There’s a bunch of different outcomes.
“Unless you have all those outcomes with the metric on them that you can monitor with real-time and at scale the way you are, then we’re just doing one at a time. And I think when you think attribution, it’s not one thing.”
Real-time measurement
Wallach of Comcast-owned FreeWheel said the new technology allows ad buyers to change how they buy inventory in the middle of a campaign – a vast change from previously.
“A year ago, it would be six months after a campaign was completed before you first look at a report,” he said. “(By then), everything has changed – consumer behaviour has changed, the product may have even changed or the sales channel, etc.”
Kinsella said being able to do that across TV devices required consolidating from multiple distinct software platforms to one that gives a holistic overview.
Is change hard?
But NCC Media’s Ivins replied: “There’s a long journey though, until we can do that executionally in linear TV.
“I mean, there’s a long, long road ahead of us. It’s hard. I think it’s (because of) technology, I think it’s people, I think it’s just the cable plan itself is hard to work with. There is legacy infrastructure on the agency side and the brand side and the technology side.”
But TVSquared’s Kinsella disagreed with the “no”: “Just say ‘yes’. (People say) ‘there’s still so much’, ‘no, it’s hard’, ‘we can’t do that, the systems are old, what about Nielsen? I can’t fire that many people’.
“Just say ‘yes!’. Just say ‘yes’. We are doing it today. It’s happening. It’s real.
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.
]]>Next year’s presidential election will move the needle back up, but most people agree that TV ad spending is plateauing somewhat.
What can restore positive momentum? Showing advertisers how TV advertising really works, according to one man at the center of doing just that.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bob Ivins, NCC Media chief data officer, talks about how new attribution technology allows broadcast platforms to help brands truly understand the linkage between ad viewership and consequential outcomes like website visits, store visitation and eventual sales.
“Digital has had this narrative for the last 20 years,” Ivins says. “We’ve kind of just let it play out in front of us, from a TV perspective.
“Now for the first time, we’re passively collecting … set-top box data, actual viewing data from millions of households.”
Attribution technology comes in various forms. It relies on IP-based viewing devices and tracking for viewers’ consequential actions, including mobile geo-location tracking, all linked by identity resolution that bridges the gap.
Operated by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications, NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks.
The organization is repeating the effort for the reams of data now available to its owners in digital viewing devices.
“Intuitively, we all kind of know TV works, but now we can measure it,” says Ivins. “We as an industry need to be able to provide these metrics. Otherwise, flat is going to be the new up for a long time.”
He was speaking with Janet Balis of EY’s media and entertainment team.
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.
]]>“I think we’ll get to the day where it’s always on, real-time measurement,” says Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer of NCC Media.
Not that long ago, MMM was the sole answer to advertising/marketing attribution, when sales were seen as a function of everything. “Distribution, price, promotion and TV activity. You would get all of the data into one spot,” Ivins says. “You would harmonize it and then you would run regression models against it and that would be a year-long project, and that would cost a lot of money.”
Now activity data—ranging from ad exposure, website visits, point-of-sale transactions and more—are passively gathered at scale. “So it’s not a modeling exercise but a lining up exercise and making sure you can attach ad exposure at a household level to an activity.”
Asked about partners with which NCC works on determining ad attribution, Ivins cites TVSquared among others. “Especially for the DTC space or to advertisers that want to drive people to an online activity, they’re a fantastic partner.”
As for the differences between local versus national advertisers’ goals, Ivins says they are pretty much the same, with the exception of scale. If Ford Motor Co., for example, wants to send out a national brand, it wants to drive awareness, traffic and sales.
“If I’m a local car dealership, I want to drive awareness, I want to drive traffic and drive sales. They’re just doing it at a different level. So it’s a different part of the same campaign, but it’s at different stages of the customer journey.”
NCC Media is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned in partnership by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Because it reaches some 85 million U.S. households, the ongoing election cycle is of particular interest.
“I think there’s going to be a big pot of money that’s going to be spent early next year. I think that will put pressure on inventory as we think about advertisers trying to squeeze themselves into the pressure coming from the political arena,” Ivins says. “Unless the economy falls apart, we should have a good year both the Olympics and the political year.”
On a macro level, he thinks the traditional TV industry recognizes the need to neutralize the competitive advantage that digital media have in data, targeting and measurement.
“NCC Media feels that we need to work together as an industry to make this happen rather than have a walled garden.”
These will among the topics covered on August 7 when Ivins takes to the stage at the Beet Retreat in the City, “We Are Going Local.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.
]]>This theoretical game isn’t going to be won by the emergence of one overriding supply side platform, Pangis predicted in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Moderator Tracey Sheppach asked what it is that buyers can ultimately expect to see. “Once we move through this innovation, do I have two logins to two different systems Xandr and NCC? Is that what it looks like?” said Scheppach, the CEO & Founder of Matter More Media.
“I think the future of collaboration in television is a much different discussion than what a lot of people are having, which is like ‘come on my platform and then you can use my demand-side’…that is not the way we’re going to get far fast,” responded Pangis. “It’s how do we connect with one another and sort of bring each of our super powers together, and the demand side is always going to want to do something a little different.”
Allison Metcalfe, GM of LiveRamp TV, explained that about two years ago, LiveRamp began to focus on automation to better serve the sell-side. Last fall, the company sold Axciom, the data provider that had itself acquired LiveRamp in 2014. “Life has changed pretty dramatically since then,” said Metcalfe.
Along the way, LiveRamp figured out that it needed to pay more attention to the buy-side. “The reality is that LiveRamp sits on the CRM’s of close to four hundred of the largest brands in the US and internationally. Those brands rely on us for people-based marketing strategies. It’s very natural that they would look to us to help them understand what’s possible in TV,” said Metcalfe.
Easier said than done, she went on to explain. Her team of four full-time people whose daily mission is to evangelize advanced TV to brands typically come away from meetings with “a list of twelve questions” regarding how to reach those brands’ audiences across platforms “and it takes us months to answer those questions.”
Even when such discussions lead to a purchase order, the entire process can take six months. “If we could get that to maybe two or three months, that would be a win for both Nicolle and I.”
One advantage of distancing itself from Axciom is that it dispels doubts about perceptions of LiveRamp’s neutrality, according to Metcalfe. “We are a technology platform with a data marketplace.”
Under the leadership of Grant Ries, LiveRamp is helping companies that have data assets but never considered themselves to be data suppliers. Metcalfe cited the example of travel data co-op Adara, which came to LiveRamp because it wanted to get into TV.
“So now we’re able to offer some really unique targeting capabilities to the travel industry, which historically wasn’t a really big buyer of advanced TV strategies,” Metcalf said. “We’re seeing a lot of trends like that.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>“We are aggregating all our addressability, not just for the two minutes an hour we sell to our local national spot buyers but soon national networks like AMC or USA Network, or pick any network, will be able to come to NCC and be able to make their national time addressable on our platforms,” Kline says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.”
NCC is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Three months ago it expanded into digital ad buying so as to be able to deliver cross-screen campaigns across linear, VOD, addressable TV, digital video, display, social media, out-of-home and mobile, as Multichannel News reports.
“We’re going to make it very easy for networks to be able to make their inventory, the fourteen or twelve minutes an hour, addressable using our two-way interactive platform,” Kline says.
“Right now they can all do it on our digital feeds and on our set-top box dynamic ad insertion, our Spectrum TV app where they can do streaming on linear addressability or even VOD on our streaming apps addressably.”
With the bulk of ad impressions being on linear TV, “Coming soon you’ll be able to buy literally our full footprint, which could be up to fifty, sixty million households addressably on linear as well as on demand as well as on demand as well as on streaming.”
Kline says the local TV marketplace has changed dramatically in the last few years because of viewing data and infrastructure.
“Part of what we’re trying to do with the VAB is to take some of those wonderful things that we do locally and apply them nationally to our national network partners. And we’re working fast and furious on that. NCC is going to be the hub of that. More on that in the coming months.
“It’s really a great time to be in local advertising.”
This video is from a Beet.TV’s coverage of the VAB’s Direct to Success summit held on June 12 at Viacom in New York City. Please visit this page for more segments.
]]>The panel titled Making Identity a Reality in a Multi-Screen World brought together Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media.
Moderator Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting, kicked things off by asking about the much desired “leap forward” from household to individual person addressability.
“I think we’re still in the early days of that as an industry,” said Krepsik, who believes the quest for a curated, omni-channel experience rests on “insuring that we have that common view of an individual person, regardless the screen or the device that they’re watching content on.”
No one seems to think that’s on the immediate horizon. Hinnant touted the actionable nature of household data, saying, “We’ve had great progress with it. I think it does come to scale at that point.” When used at scale, “it actually proves to have better results.”
Asked to quantify where the industry stands on achieving true one-to-one targeting and suggest a wish list of improvements, Ivins said that while for TV advertising spending “flat is the new up,” digital has been going up for 25 years.
“We should have seen it coming. What were we thinking? I think the industry is now woken up to that,” Ivins said. “All the media owners, they have the reach,” but that alone isn’t not enough.
“NBC can reach almost any household in the country if they wanted to because of their portfolio of products, but they don’t have the first-party relationships or some of technology. And the distributors have the technology and first-party relationships but they don’t have the reach,” Ivins added.
“TV as a platform, we have to get there,” said Hinnant. “We’ve got to stop the silos that are merging and I get that data privacy is an issue on that. But if we can come together as a platform, then we could actually compete.”
Five years ago, technology was a common barrier to advancement, according to Krepsit. Now cooperation is a bigger hurdle.
“The hardware manufacturers are beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in this ecosystem as well,” he said. “So it’s moving beyond the set-top box and actually moving to the actual devices. I think it’s only going to get more complicated.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>To help shed more light on the subject, Beet.TV will conduct a half-day forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5. It will be hosted by Viacom at the company’s offices at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan and sponsored by 4INFO, a provider of identity graph technology. Swartz will be one of the event’s moderators.
In this video, Swartz explains the complexity of determining who is watching what content on what device and when they are doing so. It starts with the myriad ways that individual TV viewers can be tracked—including mobile apps that can hear what’s being watched, digital IP-enabled devices, mobile device ID’s, automatic content recognition and watermarking.
Then there are companies like Nielsen and Comscore that are “trying to develop currencies that leverage all these technologies to actually track what is real reach for a specific piece of content delivered to an audience across an ecosystem and broad reaching selection of devices and platforms,” Swartz says.
So how does it all become real? For Swartz, it boils down to being confident about the data involved and data providers working together, because no one media company has an audience with the “order of magnitude of the breadth of an audience and the reach of an audience that television provides.”
Ultimately, “multiple data providers and platforms and content recognition providers are going to have to come together to marry their data sets to maximize the total audience within an identity graph they make available,” she says.
“The data I get has to be reliable, easy to use and integrated into ad delivery systems to plan against and has to be easy to buy. Not just easy to buy from the perspective of understanding the value of the inventory and what you’re getting for your dollar or what the effective CPM or effective rate is. That’s complex.”
At the Beet.TV event on March 5, Swartz will be joined by moderators Howard Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now a consultant, and Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting. The entire program will be taped before a studio audience for publication on Beet.TV.
]]>NCC Media’s Bob Ivins says the industry is “at the beginning stages” of so-called household-level “addressable TV”, the collection of technologies which allows ad buyers to target, deliver and measure ads against individual households.
Why “beginning”? “The media owners, they have the reach, the programming reaches a lot of people, but they don’t have the first party relationships,” says Ivins.
“They don’t have the technology and the infrastructure to be out and execute. So they’re out there …. Viacom bought Pluto, or NBC has their own application. They’re trying to move their first party relationships into third party relationships.”
NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks. Now it is setting out to repeat the trick in the new, internet-connected era.
Three of Ivins’ five last roles have had “data” in the name. He joined after stints as Mindshare’s chief data officer, comScore and Slice Technologies.
“The distributors, they’re the ones with the first party relationships, but they don’t really have the reach,” Ivins continues. “So I think they need to combine all their initiatives, they’re all kind of doing something as a one off.”
He says he wants them to “work together in an open environment and build a platform” to move addressable forward.
says Bob Ivins, NCC Media , in this video interview with Beet.TV
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Over the last 18 months, TV networks have wrestled with that question, as booming VOD subscriptions has gone hand-in-hand with growing consumer frustration toward excess interruption.
That has spurred many networks to rip up and re-shape the norm for what a commercial break looks like, and how long it runs.
A Beet Retreat panel convened during three days of debate in Puerto Rico to discuss ad load and the viewer experience…
The big reduction that wasn’t
The debate kicked off when the analyst leading the discussion confronted two networks that have launched initiatives to reduce ad loads with data showing, in many cases, it has not come to pass…
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
“I saw this really interesting research from Kantar that ad load, for all the talk, had not actually declined from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Actually, it had data on all of your properties which was super interesting to look at…”
Peacock’s cut is coming
Answering O’Connell, a leading NBCUniversal executive re-stated the company’s intention to reduce at load by 20% in some TV formats…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“It’s really a challenge because we need to find a way that the consumers will enjoy the experience and the advertisers will get their message out, and of course we will make money … How do we produce content that’s meaningful to consumers? It’s something that we’re very focused on for the next year.”
Linear is hard to change
Another network exec echoed recent industry sentiment about the pace with which TV is turning itself around, suggesting that the traditional TV business as defined by its legacy medium may not change any time soon…
Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks:
“In the linear format, we have an existing business model that unless I can figure out a way to sustain it and grow it the way I have to in my role, yeah, it isn’t just necessarily going to change. You have the opportunity in OTT and in new formats to build the ad model from the ground up.
Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:
“We obviously still have challenges as it exists today, I think, beyond just the consumer we’ve all experienced where you see the four ads. There are a lot of technical reasons why that happened. With video on demand, the ad load is a bit reduced compared to linear TV, but more importantly for the consumer experience, there are caps put in place. An ad can’t run more than two times per hour.”
Tech can solve for excess
If linear is hard to change, panel speakers suggested that technology platforms could help the networks and all parts of the value chain to make good on promises to reduce the frequency with which ads are seen, if not quite yet the number of them…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“It’s really incumbent on the technology providers to solve (it), regardless of who buys the ad, who puts it out there. It needs to be frequency-capped.”
Danielle Seth, VP, Client Partnerships, NCC Media:
“NCC’s point of view is through partnering with the likes of Freewheel, who is really focused on this topic, and can help control for frequency across platform, but then also building scale.”
Viewers are revolting
Beyond these implementation challenges, though, a bigger threat is evident. In 2019, the booming success of subscription video on demand, which often comes minus ads of any kind, is inculcating an ad-free viewing culture. Steadily, viewers used to immediate content are discovering a disdain for advertising they always knew was latent but which has now bubbled to the surface…
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU:
“Our woes are certainly existent, but really the reason why (consumers are) fleeing the ad model is because we make it unbearable.”
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:
“Generally, so far, television has fared better from an attitudinal standpoint than digital channels, but I fear that that will change because of the exact things that we’re talking about right now. (Consumers) understood the role that the ads played (in linear television).”
Re-think the ad unit
Panelists agreed that the very nature of an ad needs to be re-thought – and not just in terms of its length. Custom creative and interactivity should all be on the table…
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester:
“Creative management platforms and DCO (dynamic creative optimization) technology is the most-under appreciated category of technology out there. The things that you can do with these technologies are really amazing, and yet the awareness is almost null in the industry. These guys are (just) playing around in formats like OTT.”
Proof of the pudding
Networks are more likely to respond positively and fully implement consumer-friendly advertising breaks if they can see data showing effectiveness – one panelist said that poses a problem in TV…
Lisa Lutz, VP, Product Management – Advanced Advertising TiVo:
“If I replace my (traditional advertising) pod with two 30-second (spots), instead of seven spots, what’s the retention? What’s the migration? Where are people going? Did this work? Did this not work? There’s always been such latency in terms of being able to get the data and measure it. (But) now (there is) the ability to have data at your fingertips and be able to really measure a few days after you run something.”
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 kind of fill the gap that the education system leaves in Puerto Rico,” Ramos explained in a one-on-one discussion with Phil Cowdell, formerly Global President of Client Services at GroupM.
In Puerto Rico, nine out of 10 schools “are failing schools” based on standardized tests, according to Ramos. Add to this some “crazy stats” cited by Cowdell: Maria damaged 82% of the island’s homes, 42% of the population had daily food shortages and 44% of children have a registered mental health impact from the storm.
“That’s pretty cataclysmic and we’re talking about this is part of the United States of America,” said Cowdell.
The bottom line education-wise was that children in Puerto Rico missed a half a year of schooling in a system already burdened by systemic failure.
“In Puerto Rico, we tend to be short minded, so we forget really quick, and we will say that we reopened schools six months after and that we passed our students. We pass them,” said Ramos. “How do you insert those kids in the formal economy later on, ten years from now?”
In the aftermath of Maria, her organization reframed its services to include things like yoga and mindfulness “so we can try to help the country doing the job they should have done with the storm.”
Having been involved early on in emergency relief efforts, Cowdell recalled that just over a month after Maria, “the far end of the island hadn’t seen milk for six weeks.” At a Costco store, “there were people there buying flat screen TV’s because they live on Ashford Avenue in the downtown part of San Juan.”
His point was that when the storm first made land, “it was a very democratic storm, it impacted everybody. It became very economic the week, the month and then the period after it. And what we see now is an economic impact.”
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.
]]>Operated by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications, NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks.
In this Beet Retreat interview with Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV, NCC Media’s CEO Nicolle Pangis says: “What NCC did is literally brought together a fragmented industry and became the one place where you could buy across all markets in the United States, across all networks.”
But that was “NCC 1.0”.
Under the new CEO, the group is transitioning to a more consulting role – but it also aims to solve a familiar problem.
“Ironically, we all know that the world is again very, very fragmented from a media perspective,” Pangis says.
“A fragmentation problem now exists across different data sets that are not pulled together in a cohesive way for the buy side to be able to leverage in a scaled way.”
Pangis says that problem doesn’t just exist across smaller distributors, but larger ones, too, like NCC co-owner Comcast, which has a large footprint of addressable TV-viewing households.
What do ad buyers want? “To be able to look for audiences that they need to reach, wherever they need to reach them,” Pangis reckons.
Put simply: “Anybody who buys addressable advertising knows this… there’s nobody from an addressable perspective now who has a big enough addressable footprint to be relevant to a large national advertiser.
“So that’s the 2.0 version of NCC – pulling together the largest data set in TV, which is part of the ownership of NCC, set-top box data, broadband, IP data … and leveraging that data set in conjunction with the supply that we have access to from a national addressable perspective.”
For NCC, it is perhaps a repeat of its founding mission, but with a different slant. “Addressable” TV is when internet-connected TV sets allow for the targeting of individual households or viewers, going far beyond the old way in which advertisers bought ads in shows whose audiences were deemed to be broad demographic matches.
2018 US spending to over-the-top (OTT) TV platforms was due to reach $2 billion, Magna recently forecast.
As much as that is an amazing opportunity, making it happen to the fullest extent means guaranteeing a degree of commonality across systems – or, as Pangis puts it, “making the dirty data clean”.
How will Pangis do that?
- “One piece of the puzzle is making the operational workflow between the agency, the buy side … make it easier for agencies to buy inventory that isn’t upfront inventory.”
- “Two is (to) just transact that down to the sell side with the make-good process in a more efficient fashion. We’re working through that right now with workflow tools. There’s things that are manual (that) can be automated if we put a little time into it.”
Which means NCC’s role will be that of “an aggregator of aggregators”.
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.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, the VP of Client Partnerships explains how NCC leverages its MVPD unique subscriber identifiers matched to set-top box data and then marketers first- and third-party data “not just for addressable that NCC Media is selling but across their national TV investment.
“So when you start to see how your specific first-party audiences are being exposed across those huge TV video channels, it opens up a lot of possibilities to start to understand reach, frequency the best ways to make the plans to reach your audiences more effectively and efficiently,” Seth says during a break at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018.
One topic that’s starting to come up is how to consider audiences to help with advocacy and loyalty. “You of course aren’t going to build an audience segment against something for advocacy, because that’s going to be a really small audience,” Seth explains. “The returns on that aren’t going to be efficient.”
The way to make addressable work for big national brands is to start building audiences with sub segments with each of the funnel steps in consideration. It involves using data combined with brand health information “that can indicate that it will eventually drive to a different behavior, or to the behavior you want, and how do you start to layer in building those audiences to serve up more robust audiences across screen.”
The “cool thing” about that longitudinal approach is measuring it across time with the help of partners in the multi-touch attribution space. NCC uses Data Plus Math to trend data “so that you really see how you’re driving that path to purchase or that path to advocacy.”
Seth cites the example of building an audience using an audience that has visited a website and then layering on subset of lookalike audience to website visitation. When measured over time, “you can see pretty immediately that the website audience was driven to conversion more than the audience that was the lookalike model. But the lookalike model was driven to the website and so you can start to see how you can robustly build that out to track how your efficiently moving that consumer through the funnel and hopefully it’s more than just than just your advertising plan.
“You’re starting to leverage that data in a way that helps impact your creative strategy, your platform strategy, the ad load strategy and such.”
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.
]]>For Davina Kent, it is increasingly about data.
Kent is the Comcast VP of advanced TV sales who, earlier this year, came on board at NCC Media – the cable sales group Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications – as VP of client partnerships.
Together with Nicolle Pangis, the GroupM exec who joined NCC as CEO, Kent has been transitioning NCC more toward consulting.
“We have kind of restructured the company and a big focus is on client partnerships,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Our goal is really to transition the perception of NCC as a media vendor to a trusted strategic partner with brands directly.
“We really want to be sitting at the table with these large brands and innovating together and co-creating together on how best to navigate that.”
A big part of that is helping brands use data and a holistic view of their marketing efforts. Kent says NCC is trying to help advertisers figure out what they should be doing differently.
That means NCC, which is still staffing up at the senior level, is taking on a more proactive, advisory approach than previously.
“Not all clients are ready for this,” Kent says. “When we first kind of started branching out on the client partnerships and started talking to brands, they said, ‘Well, just give us your data and go away’.
“What we learned is they really don’t have the resources to really dive into that data and make sense of it. The data is only as good as what you can activate off of it.
“So what we’re finding is, we’re building a very large analytic practice, that partners with the client partnerships team where we’re actually sitting with the brands and their data teams and helping them kind of go through all of the data and really doing a clear needs analysis with them.”
NCC recently added NBC’s Marion Hargett, who helped that network sell ads during the last Summer Olympic Games, and Audience Partners’ Andy Addis, who assisted the roll-out of IP-matching technology, as senior vice presidents.
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.
]]>After Maria struck, “there was no electricity, there was no phone, there was no cable,” says Freddie Hernandez. “So we undusted the radio book and started using radio and outdoor as the main vehicles to really communicate with our consumers.”
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. Among other topics, Hernandez and other executives will discuss how in the absence of broadband advertisers turned to over-the-air broadcasting along with traditional media like outdoor, radio and print.
In this interview with Beet.TV conducted on the island, Hernandez explains how many Puerto Ricans have been cutting their cable cords and migrating to digital services like online shopping after their experiences in dealing with the devastation wrought by Maria.
“We were on the verge of re-launching our media investment, trying to look into digital and how things are changing with Millennials and how media is being consumed on the island,” Hernandez recalls. “It doesn’t necessarily follow how it is consumed in the States and other developed areas as we’re lagging a little bit behind. But we know that we need to get into the digital arena.”
Having to rely on traditional media “was a great exercise to really acknowledge that radio is still there. And we sometimes take it for granted and focus so much in digital, in mobile and other platforms that we forget about radio. It was very helpful for us,” Hernandez explains. “After that we have seen a quantum leap in terms of the media consumption by the consumers here in Puerto Rico.”
Lacking cable television and electricity, many residents migrated to phones and wireless communications where possible.
“So we’re seeing a lot of movement in that direction and you can see in the trends of people not renewing their cable system and looking at other options to consume media. So we are really on the verge of understanding what are the different venues that people are using to really change,” Hernandez says.
Before Maria there was one online grocery provider. “We have three now and they are expanding aggressively because consumers are ready to embrace what digital can bring to their lives and how they can do better by using this technology advances that we have available.”
P&G has customers who are doing 10% of their business “with online selling that was nonexistent a year ago. It’s a movement that is moving very fast and it’s here to stay. So we need to make sure that we get ahead of the curve and start looking at what are the options we can tackle…try to be the number one investing in technology, investing in venues that are going to help us continue leading the market in the categories that we compete in.”
Joining Hernandez to discuss media in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Maria will be Melissa Burgos, Marketing Director USVI/Puerto Rico, AT&T Mobility; Jose Cancela, President, Telemundo/NBCUniversal 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, who will present data on the impact of the storm on the island’s youth and her organizations’ efforts to improve their future.
]]>Deprecated: ltrim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/superbeet/dev.beet.tv/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 3030
The annual gathering will unite dozens of executives in advertising and media, with this year’s theme being It’s Consumer First in TV Land. Among the participants will be representatives from GroupM, IPG MediaBrands, Target, Nissan, Discover, Comcast, NCC, Oath, Google, comScore, Nielsen, DISH, Amobee, FOX Networks, Turner Broadcasting and NBCUniversal.
“I really think we’re at a turning point,” says Colella. “Now we’re seeing giant publishers come together making the inventory available. We’re making standards like what we’re seeing happen in digital, that’s happening now for linear.
“We’ve always participated in the Beet Retreat so we’ve made a lot of great connections,” Colella adds. “But I also feel that the conversations that happen with the other providers really moves the industry forward.”
And while advertisers and agencies heretofore have “really struggled” with the difficulties involved in audience buying and advanced advertising, “we continue to make it easier and band together to really work on what’s going to bring the whole industry forward, not just ourselves,” Colella says.
Beet Retreat 2018 will involve three days of high-level panels, group conversations, one-on-one video interviews and extraordinary networking events and interactions.
In addition to covering the world of advanced TV, the Retreat will examine the changes and broader implications for the media industry from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017 led by executives from Procter & Gamble, Hearts & Science, Telemundo and GroupM
Confirmed speakers:
Kevin Arrix, SVP, DISH Media
Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu
Robert Bareuther, SVP, Business development. iSpot.tv
Craig Berkley, Head of Revenue, TV | LiveRamp
Mike Bologna, President, one-2-one media, Cadent
Joe Cashan, Chief Marketing Manager, Nissan
Tal Chalozin, CTO and Co-Founder, Innovid
Dave Clark, EVP, Advanced Advertising, Comcast & GM FreeWheel
Andres Claudio, Managing Director, Hearts & Science/Omnicom, Puerto Rico
Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy NBCU
Jacqueline Corbelli, Founder, Chairman, CEO BrightLine Partners LLC
Jose Cancela, President, Telemundo/NBCU Puerto Rico
Brad Danaher, Television Partner Director, Experian
Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu
Peter Dolchin, Head of Telco/Video Partnerships, Google
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso
Adam Gerber, President, Global Media Investment, Essence (GroupM)
Anupam Gupta, Chief Revenue Officer, 4C Insights
Jason Harrison, President, Client Partners, Essence (GroupM)
Ethan Heftman, VP, Precision/Performance, A+E Networks
Freddie Hernandez, Managing Director, P&G, Puerto Rico
Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, comScore
David Hohman, EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen
Walt Horstman, SVP, Advanced Media,Tivo
Evan Hovorka, Director – Digital Media and Data Products, Target
Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, OATH/Verizon
Nick Jazarian, Media Director, Target
Marissa Jimenez, President, Modi Media (GroupM)
Brad Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal
Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover
Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising, Data and Technology, FOX TV Networks
Adam Lowy, Director of Advanced TV & Digital Sales, DISH Media
Eric Matthewson, CEO, WideOrbit
Jodie McAfee, SVP, Sales Marketing, Inscape (VIZIO)
Matt O’Grady, CEO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions
Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy/Business Officer, VideoAmp
Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal
Nicolle Pangis, CEO, NCC Media (Comcast/Charter/Cox)
Jessie Reddis, Chief Innovation Officer, Turner Broadcasting
Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik
Andrew Ward, President, NCC Media (Comcast/Charter/Cox)
Anthony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee
Moderating the discussions will be:
Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services, GroupM
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Matt Prohaska, CEO, Prohaska Consulting
Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy and Insights, LLC
Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp Special
Guest Speaker: Olga Ramos, President, Boys and Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico
To attend the conference, contact info@beet.tv
The Beet Retreat is presented by
Title Sponsor
Presenting Sponsors
]]>“Historically, we were seen as just an ad rep organization and what we’re trying to do is build adtech underneath it that supports it and drive operational efficiencies into that space,” says NCC Media Chief Data Officer Bob Ivins. In this interview with Beet.TV, he discusses how NCC hopes to unify audience targeting transactions across TV distributors and shares his thoughts on viewer data and privacy.
“I think that the cable operators have all operated in their own swim lanes,” Ivins says. “They’ve taken their subscriber files, they’ve appended variables to it or attributes to it, they’ve used that within their infrastructure to do zone-based addressability, but they’ve all been kind of one-off.”
Some operators are versed in video on demand and digital but there’s no uniformity.
“You end up with this bingo board of distributor and capabilities and there’s no one line or one row that matches for everybody. What NCC is trying to do is we’re trying to harmonize, standardize and federate those capabilities so that you can actually do one buy, one place and have national capabilities within an infrastructure.”
Consumer TV and digital data from NCC owners Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications forms the basis of a converged data set that NCC says will represent “the largest data set in television,” as CEO Nicolle Pangis explains in this video interview.
Ivins joined NCC in July 2018, having played a pioneering role in the development of the data-driven advertising ecosystem for three decades. He held executive roles at comScore, Mindshare, Comcast, Yahoo and Nielsen.
Noting that “we rationalized the irrational going back in time,” Ivins refers to a period when executing a local spot cable buy in a market like Philadelphia required transacting with anywhere from four to six operators.
“It was really hard to do an operation like that. NCC stepped in, they harmonized the process so you had one order, they distributed the execution, you had one set of affidavits that went back to the client,” Ivins says. “We’re kind of doing the exact same thing, but now instead of in that environment we’re doing it a new environment and hopefully we’ll extend it to cross-platform.”
Asked about data and privacy, Ivins believes the industry recognizes its responsibility in ingesting and understanding behavioral data. Given the head start that digital media companies have in advanced consumer targeting, “I think it’s now time for the TV industry to really take advantage of that.”
Consumers should have an “active opportunity” to understand what companies like NCC intend to do with their data, according to Ivins. “And I think that notice and choice needs to get really solidified in the industry and if it does, I think we should have the rights to do it. As long as the consumer knows what we’re doing with it.”
]]>One major advance is that NCC is marrying set-top box data showing content consumption and advertising exposure with household IP addresses, CEO Nicolle Pangis explains in this interview with Beet.TV in which she also talks about new OTT partnerships with CheddarU and Roku.
“So we can actually start for an advertiser frequency capping across household TV viewership, so we don’t have the same message being pushed to the same households ad nauseam if it’s not appropriate for the household. This sort of convergence from a demand side perspective becomes very interesting because right now, those channels have been planned and bought separately historically,” says Pangis.
The former Global Chief Operating Officer of GroupM’s [m]PLATFORM was named CEO of NCC Media in May 2018, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
NCC is “working with some very major brands to do that right now in a very test and learn scenario,” she adds, predicting that the “pendulum will swing back” from digital to television “because we will show the power of television from an attribution funnel perspective, from exposure down to the transaction.”
The converged data set from NCC’s three owners has three elements:
• A deterministic view of the household “because there’s a direct-to-consumer relationship that all these companies have with their consumer.”
• A broadband IP address, “which is a way to marry digital and television.”
• Set-top box data showing what advertising and content households consume.
Because the Xfinity system is in the cloud, “you can consume that video on your iPad, on your phone when you’re traveling to work and also on your living room television and all of that data can be tracked and converged into the single data set. It becomes the largest data set in television.
“By putting those pieces together across the ownership, we can use that data in a privacy compliant way to work with brands to reach audiences wherever they watch content “because we have that bridge into the household into digital venues as well.”
In July, NCC announced an exclusive partnership to sell the inventory of CheddarU, the live news network for college campuses, formerly known as MTVU. Pangis says NCC also “signed with Roku to sell into their inventory, so we’re expanding the pie.”
]]>“That doesn’t mean that all media will be bought programmatically,” Jenckes adds in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018 in which he talks about the collaborative progress being made by NCC Media, in which Comcast is part owner. “Having those tools in our toolset, when you add them to the scale, quality and engagement of television, there’s no better marketing platform on earth.”
The best thing about NCC Media—whose other owners are Charter Communications and Cox Communications—is that “it is a collaboration across multiple players in the marketplace,” says Jenckes, who is President of Advertising at Comcast Cable.
“Historically, it focused on national sales for local media and that’s really good. It took it from something that was different in every market to a consistent way to buy across the U.S. and in doing that it created what is a six-billion-dollar local national market.
“I think ultimately, remnant or unwired networks will also work well at a national level. I think the ability to turn on addressability at the network level so it’s not just the distributors that do it will also likely happen through a vehicle like NCC.”
While infrastructure, programming rights and extracting data continue to pose challenges, there’s been a lot of progress over the past four years, according to Jenckes.
“Technology is now in place that helps unify audiences across screens and devices,” he says. “That was always one of the big benefits of television the unparalleled scale and fragmentation kind of fought against that a little bit.”
Now that marketers have figured out new ways to run campaigns across platforms and devices, “We aggregate the scale that allows people to find audiences.”
Asked about advances in data, Jenckes cites John Wanamaker’s oft-referenced complaint about not knowing which half of is advertising budget was being wasted.
“That’s just sad. It was the reality for a long time and I think TV got away with it because it was so effective as a medium that you could waste half and it was still okay. But I think the waste just needs to be addressed.”
By unlocking data to find household-based audiences across every screen “makes us much more competitive with digital than we ever have before,” Jenckes says. Household addressability is now available in 70% of TV households. “There’s still a lot to do around standardization, but the promise is there.”
Comcast has made big investments in attribution models because if TV can show it’s true impact for marketers, “everybody will see that the truth is on our side.”
We spoke with him earlier this week after his panel at Advertising Week.
]]>NCC Media is owned by Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications.
“Really what we’re talking about is all of MVPD inventory in the live linear environment, the on-demand environment as well as the digital environment,” Ward adds in an interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event.
“That’s really one of the primary drivers behind the creation of the enterprise. How do we begin to federate those solutions” in a horizontal manner.
Comcast Media 360, Comcast Spotlight’s former national advertising sales team, will form the foundation of the new unit together with resources from NCC Media, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, NCC media said in a news release.
The second goal—data consistency—will address such advertiser concerns as audience segment definitions, which can vary from one media company to the next. Ward also wants to extend that consistency to analytic and data partnerships to bring uniformity to “what is currently an irrational marketplace.”
Simplification will require structuring “an end-to-end solution” to ensure that transacting national addressable TV campaigns is profitable for advertisers.
“Nobody doubts the sound strategy of using richer data to more precisely deliver audiences and measurement those audiences in more robust ways,” says Ward. “But we’ve got to encase that transaction in elegant architecture from pitch to pay, such that the process is simplified.”
The new unit within NCC Media will use viewers privacy compliant, non-personally identifiable data. This is not an issue because the companies involved are subject to 1980’s rules that Ward characterizes as “probably the strongest consumer protection language in the marketplace.”
All of the aforementioned goals have one common thread: To move national TV targeting, measurement and attribution into the future.
“We don’t fundamentally believe that the future of television planning, buying and measurement will sit on top of an age/gender definition and on top of a panel-based survey methodology,” Ward says.
He takes a broad view of the term “addressable” and points to other forms of audience targeting, including by geography. “Our addressable strategy is part of an overarching targeting approach that also takes into consideration various lenses. Context, device, geo and ultimately household,” Ward says.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”
Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.
“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.
As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.
“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?
“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”
At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.
“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”
OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”
When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”
That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>