Kevin Lemberg, head of partnerships for advertising solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions
“There has to be some sort of unification and some sort of common language and goals between the partners within a solution or technology that we’re offering out to the industry,” he said. “Partnerships are going to be very important to round out the technology offering and the solutions for the industry in order for us to move forward.”
Jen Soch, executive director of specialty channels at WPP’s GroupM
“We’re really seeing an idea where we can be with addressable and CTV part of the main video recommendation that goes into what we’re doing with a client, and look at it more holistically.” she said. “I do see a lot more interest in bringing it [addressable and CTV] very much to the forefront and being a bigger part of their overall play.”
Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal
“Interoperability across linear and digital without losing the value of premium content along the way is going to be so critical,” she said. “If we lose and swing the pendulum too far to ‘audiences only,’ imagine content being cheapened over the coming years and basically creating a society that the value is placed on audiences alone….I look forward to working with the industry on how, as we try to equivalize and become more interoperable, we don’t lose the value of premium content.”
Kristine Bayles, vice president of advanced advertising sales at AMC Networks
Addressable TV “enables us to get the insights into communication and driving deeper understanding in the industry,” she said. “We all know TV is important, but CTV and VOD is just as important…Viewership is truly fragmented now, and it’s not that less people are consuming, they’re just consuming differently. We need to understand this, and move forward with converged impressions.”
Mark Marshall, president of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal
“Our goal on that [automated workflows] is to work with our partners on the agency side be able to get rid of about 30% of the manual work that we do,” he said. “How do we find different APIs [application programming interfaces] and different ways to interact, and take out some of the manual elements to allow us to move faster and hopefully improve margins for clients.”
Nicole Whitesel, executive vice president of advanced TV and client success at Publicis Media
“We need systems that collaborate — tools that talk to each other, data that can break down those walls, IDs that can understand each other,” she said. “Better sharing of that data enables us to have conversations with our clients about outcomes, and outcomes that deliver change to their business, and outcomes that change the way they decide media mix.”
Vicky Fox, chief planning officer at OMD UK
“We’ve moved from a place where people were quite wedded to a linear schedule,” she said. “Self-scheduling is going to be the norm for everybody. Anybody who switches on the TV and either looks at their connected TV menu or their EPG [electronic programming guide] can see how much has changed, because some of the linear schedules may take second place.”
Richard Nunn, vice president and general manager of advertiser solutions at Comcast Technology Solutions
“Through automation and understanding what has worked and what hasn’t in more real time across channel – that in principle, should mean a greater ROI across what is a fragmented channel base,” he said. “They’ll drive that solution a lot more efficiently because of technology.”
You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.
Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Jon Watts who collaborated and reported for this series.
]]>The EVP of advanced TV at Publicis Media has seen an explosion in video viewing and, as a result, ad opportunities.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, she says that can cause as many headaches as solutions.
“We saw a hockey stick rise in streaming services, both AVOD and SVOD, more than we expected,” Whitesel says.
“That fragmentation has continued to disrupt … in a period that was more condensed, which has added to the challenges that we have already seen over the last four to five years within the ecosystem.
“From a video standpoint, that makes the challenges that we deal with on a day-to-day basis just more pronounced. The aggressiveness with which we need to attack it both from a client side and agency side (is) all the more important and more pronounced today than they were probably a year, 18 months ago.”
EMarketer forecasts US digital video consumption among adults rising from an average 133 minutes per day in 2020 to 145 by 2022.
After Roku Channel, Tubi and Pluto TV are amongst the leading suppliers of ad-supported options.
But Publicis’ Whitesel says brands need to think calmly about where to place their money.
“Everyone is excited about everything, which is probably part of the problem,” she says.
“There’s only a limited amount of funds to invest. And there are unknown amount of quantity of things that we know that work.
“For many of our clients, it’s about ‘What is the opportunity cost and what can they afford to risk in test?’
“Leaning into everything everywhere can make for a lot of excitement and a lot of anticipation for results, but can also make for a lot of chaos where you don’t necessarily know what’s working and what’s not.”
You are watching “What’s Next For Advertisers? Key Changes That Will Drive The Industry Forward,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comcast Technology Solutions. For more videos, please visit this page. For Comcast Technology Solutions’ paper on these topics, please visit this link.
]]>“There was a lot of hope that we would be further along than we are,” Nicole Whitesel, executive vice president and managing director of Publicis Media, said about the evolution of omnichannel marketing and measurement. “There is opportunity in the chaos, and the chaos can actually deliver new things that you haven’t tried before.”
Whitesel spoke about the media environment for this episode of “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean.
Advertisers are grappling with comparisons of traditional metrics like a total rating point (TRP) for linear television with the measurement of impressions on over-the-top and streaming channels that have exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 health crisis.
With many households canceling cable and satellite service while connecting their TVs directly to the internet, media companies are backing platforms like Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi and Xumo that carry advertising and are free to viewers.
“We’ve been working really closely with some of our clients who have an appetite to test out this new area and get some learnings under their belt,” Whitesel said. “When thinking about OTT and the hockey stick consumption that COVID brought on, what are the different ways you can buy? Programmatically? Direct? Are there innovative ways you can think about buy paths and get ahead of your competition?”
Mass marketers would like to see more scale on OTT and streaming platforms, which is challenging amid the splintering of the media landscape and the migration of viewers to “walled gardens” like social networks that have their own first-party consumer data. Programmatic advertising adds another dimension to the process of buying media in “waterfall” auctions that prioritize bidders.
“Most of the time we’re asking for more scale then a lot times those platforms are delivering, and the reason why is because it is such a fragmented ecosystem,” Whitesel said. “As you’re going through that waterfall, understanding where that inventory is accessible and how you can buy it has been a bit of a challenge. That is going to be a key to unlocking the growth there and really getting into a place where you have transparency around which inventory you can access at what cost.”
The coronavirus pandemic helped to drive a surge in media consumption, though it also profoundly disrupted the production of new programming and broadcasts of live sports. As professional sports leagues like Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association suspended operations, many advertisers scrambled to find audiences.
“A lot of clients were caught off guard,” Whitesel said. “Working through that has probably been one of the biggest challenges career-wise for a lot of us that were on the front lines with clients trying to decide what to run.”
Marketers also needed to change the tone of their messaging to match public sentiment that had grown increasingly worried about the health crisis and its effect on the economy. The pandemic also became a chance to test promising technologies like addressable advertising.
“We saw some really unique opportunities on shifting more into those OTT channels where their consumption was larger,” Whitesel said. “Most of our clients … were just trying to figure out what the right tone and tenor was, while still supporting their business.”
You are watching “Delivering on the Promise of Omnichannel Advertising,” a Beet.TV series presented by Mediaocean. Please click here for more videos.
]]>During a fireside chat with Jon Watts, co-founder and managing partner at MTM London at the Beet Retreat, hosted by Publicis Media, Whitesel explained why clients are “terrified” of current measurement strategies across linear TV, data-driven linear TV and advanced TV, mainly because multiple partners and approaches are required to get a clear picture of what’s driving results.
“We are in the Wild West. There are clients depending on the metrics and business goals. We could spend a day on TV measurement,” says Whitesel. “There’s a huge issue when it comes to TV measurement with a digital mindset, where people are like ‘Just give me exposure data and I’ll make decisions based on that.’ Thats a huge issue. If you do that you can run yourself right out of TV.”
Whitesel’s concern is that a singular view of data will mislead advertisers into ignoring some channels and spending more on others because of a lack of transparency across mediums. As advanced TV rises and linear TV changes, Whitesel is observing big shifts in the industry. Here are her biggest takeaways.
For advertisers, TV is a spectrum.
Whitesel says there’s still a misunderstanding about what advanced TV actually is – the conclusion is that it’s all OTT, CTV and one-to-one addressable TV. But there are more opportunities that get overlooked that fall between linear and hyper-targeted addressable TV, including data-driven linear, which helps brands make the most of big TV moments with the most reach, like the Super Bowl, while still collecting information on audience and lift.
“We have to understand that not all [channels] are equal across and they all contribute in different ways to different outcomes for brands and clients, and that’s the gap.”
Frequency remains the biggest issue for advanced TV.
Because transparency remains an issue for the advanced TV market, there’s a responsibility for agencies to improve the ability for clients to understand what they’re paying for and where it’s going, and tying that directly to business outcomes, whatever those may be. Those are going to be different for different companies, which is where multiple measurement partners come in.
“TV measurement is the great democratization we need to understand how each [of the channels] is tied to a business outcome at the client or brand level. Whether it’s retail store visits, website metrics, sales in aggregate – we need to get better about tying those things together, so we can deliver the right amount by channel for clients to deliver the best outcomes.”
Walled gardens come with both benefits and challenges.
Moving toward network and platform walled gardens, which Whitesel says some currently are but wouldn’t name names, would give advertisers more data and more transparency, because the data providers own the data. But that data comes at a cost.
“The cost is there of not seeing the rest of the universe, and there’s learnings where you’re not going to listen because you don’t have enough trust in the evaluation of the rest of the landscape,” says Whitesel. “What learnings can you get from the walled gardens without the cost of everything else?”
The next five years will be about content.
Whitesel’s prediction for the next five years in TV and advanced TV is that there will be a shift to control over content.
“There’s been a lot of disparate sources where you can buy audiences, through premium, TV-like content,” says Whitesel. “Now you’re starting to see the TV giants put their arms around that content, seeing how valuable it is and [wanting] better control of it regardless of where it’s being viewed. Owning that content and getting the exposure data is allowing for more insight.”
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.
]]>“Seven, nine years ago in digital, it was a wild wild west,” says Whitesel. “Everyone was running all these ad networks and DSPs and some people had DMP, some didn’t. The advertisers that were willing to take risks and understand that, yes, I may not understand what I’m buying right now but I need to jump in early and build learning and understanding … those are the advertisers that we’re seeing in TV that are also applying that same risk perspective.”
Whitesel notes that there is some discomfort in putting money, time and resources into methods that aren’t necessarily tried and true, but this is the thought leadership that can give companies the edge on competitors vying for the same viewers, content or ratings.
“I think you see some of our clients really setting themselves up within this Upfront to make those changes,” says Whitesel. “But it’s a three or four-year vision, and they know that it’s tiny twists of the knob each year as they can go and more forcibly ask for the things they want versus ‘I think I might want this, but I don’t know’.”
Looking ahead, Whitesel also mentioned the importance of networks viewing their specific services or focus within the greater media ecosystem, particularly as it pertains to the evolving world of advanced TV.
“What are the ways [companies] can control their content across an ecosystem to really deliver more for the advertisers as well as managing what they can control?” Whitesel says. “Even though they may not control every platform that it’s viewed on, they still have ownership over the content, which is a big piece of the pie.”
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.
]]>But, if addressable TV ad spend is still small-scale, it may be a function as much of available ad space and success proof as of ad buyers’ reluctance.
In this video interview with Beet.TV during CES, the enterprise strategy EVP of Publicis Groupe’s planning and buying division, Publicis Media, outlined the way ahead.
“Clients’ appetites (are) larger than ever before to explore,” said Nicole Whitesel. “And, where in the past, it was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach, I think you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.”
If that is a change of attitude on the brands’ own part, what about those brand’s media planners themselves? How do they regard the emerging connected video landscape?
Whitesel says her own company is responding to growing demand by more closely aligning its teams, just like the new media landscape is melding together classical TV with the qualities of online delivery.
“There’s an opportunity to get in early, test things, build operational muscle between teams that maybe haven’t worked together as closely before,” she says.
“Historically, broadcast teams and national teams have bought broadcast and (separately) you have teams that maybe are more precision- or audience-driven that buy programmatic. You’re seeing a lot of work between those teams now to think about the way we’re buying connected TV.”
That plays out by the broadcast-buying team doing so during an annual upfront whilst an activation team buys an ad during quarter.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
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