“There’s a greater pressure on understanding the TV ecosystem, knowing if you keep doing the same thing you’ll get diminishing returns,” Hartofilis told Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Zenith’s response has been to build out a platform that lets clients take their typical ad buys and make them addressable by dividing up national inventory and creative into more targeted content identified by household demographics. This helps clients fit addressable advertising, including in mediums like MPVD, satellite and smart TV, into their existing budgets, making it an easier sell to CMOs.
“This is an addressable experience in a unique way we haven’t seen before and it’s super intuitive for clients,” says Hartofilis. “It’s something they see a lot of possibility for and use case for.”
At the center of Zenith’s addressable strategy is ACR, or automatic content recognition, which Hartofilis says has gotten the company close to true outcome measurement, helping clients to better understand engagement and action in response to TV ads. Now, Zenith is focused on bridging the gap between TV and digital. The next step: unification.
“We’ve done great things in linear TV but we need to expand that supply space, that aperture in which we’re operating in a total video environment,” says Hartofilis. “ACR tech is key to building more robust panels and smarter predictive engines to do that effectively and bridge digital and television.”
This video is part of a series produced at CES 2020 called Television Redefined, sponsored by Samsung Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:
They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…
Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.
“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”
But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.
“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.
“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”
Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.
Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.
“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.
“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”
FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.
“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.
“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.
“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“Have [advanced TV] be a complete choice in what targets we can apply, the ability to actually get to a point of true automation, going full end-to-end, and being able to do that at speed and scale. That’s not where we before,” Hartofilis tells Jon Watts, the co-founder and managing partner of MTM London at the Beet Retreat, a half-day Beet.TV event in New York hosted by Publicis Media.
Right now, these capabilities aren’t yet matured, except for data-driven linear, Hartofilis says, which has helped precision in planning and audience targeting and in getting more yield out of TV. “We just now need to get to that next phase, which is beyond planning,” says Hartofilis.
That’s where Zenith’s 2.0 phase comes in. After launching a precision TV service two years ago, returns have diminished as the industry has continued to evolve and the company is now expanding. “[We’re] getting to the point where with one lens you can see a much broader landscape, and starting to take it to the next level,” says Hartofilis. That includes a focus on convergence – taking areas where companies are spending a lot of money and bringing them together in order to make the most of those investments.
More convergence and collaboration will take shape in 2020, says Hartofilis, as companies leading transformation in the industry will need to work together instead of partake in a “data arms race.”
“There’s definitely an arms race – there’s a data arms race, an addressability hidden arms race going on right now and at the end of the day, we need to come together to be able to scale as all collective stakeholders to make sure that what we bring to market is right,” he says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>