Today we kick off our second season with our new sponsor in Mediaocean. A huge thanks for the continuing partnership.
Our guest today is Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand, the cable TV sales and data company owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox. More on Ampersand and its expanding business in my chat with Nicolle.
Nicolle is one of the most accomplished media innovators we know. She started her career at 24/7 RealMedia, moved on to and Xaxis and then to GroupM in senior positions. In 2018 she joined NCC Media as CEO. The company was later rebranded a Ampersand.
Fascinating to chat with Nicolle. We spoke about her personal ambitions, her advice for women aspiring to leadership positions and a deep dive around the transformation of Ampersand from a cable “sales house” to powerhouse in audience buying, in data & analytics and in addressable TV.
Great session.
Thanks again to Mediaocean for sponsoring.
And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>Pangis is CEO of Ampersand – the initiative of Comcast, Cox and Charter designed to make the buying of addressable TV easier – and sat down for a video interview with Beet.TV after the group launched a new tool for that.
Ampersand began trialling a self-service version of its AND planning and buying platform early in October after the platform was first launched in January.
Beta clients are testing out the buying of advanced audience segments across Ampersand’s national and local addressable footprint.
It is the latest to try offering a self-serve capability in a world that is still more used to manual buying and heavy lifting.
Pangis says the platform is “really building momentum”.
Ampersand Launches ‘The AND Platform’ to Unify Audience and Measurement Across Inventories
CTV holds the potential for digital-style ad buying – that is, buying actual ad impressions, which can be accurately measured and provided, rather than on a rough idea of viewing from extrapolated panels.
But, whilst that is the potential, the reality is often different. Some in the industry say the opportunity is still more “programmanual” than programmatic, with lots of old, TV-style heavy lifting still involved, whilst others say TV ad buyers are happy to achieve the broad top-of-funnel exposure that TV provides, rather than digital-style precision.
“I absolutely believe that television will – and needs to – move to audience-based buying,” Pangis says. “I think, most, if not everybody, believes that as well.
“With that will have to come in (a) difference in currency because there’s no reason for a currency to be panel-based of a few thousand (viewers), when you have census-level and deterministic data that can much better inform what a currency should look like.
“So I do think the television ecosystem will move to impression-based (measurement) simply because it can, it’s just going to take time to do that.”
On this episode of Fairygodboss Radio, our CEO @NicollePangis, shares her career journey and the lessons she's learned along the way. Listen to the full episode on @Fairygodboss, here! https://t.co/3ggFBvYy3I pic.twitter.com/ps2pZ28uwR
— Ampersand (@MeetAmpersand) October 28, 2020
Ampersand is a way for ad buyers to get addressable placements across Comcast, Cox and Charter cable services, in addition to the companies with which it has expanded the fooprint – Altice, DISH, Verizon Media, Xandr and AT&T.
Its capabilities include set-top box data from the three main cable companies involved, stretching to around 40 million homes. All in all, Ampersand claims 85 million households, 120+ cable networks and more than 60% of all U.S. addressable households.
As connected TV rises, the industry is focused on breaking down the barriers to buying across a proliferating number of services, and on making measurement across screens more efficient.
“I come from a very digital background,” says Pangis, who previously was an executive at GroupM’s audience-based platforms. “Digital is transacted via impression-based and typically audience-based buying. When I moved into TV two and a half years ago, it really was kind of a foreign language to me.
“As there is more inventory and more data that, the television ecosystem can bring the best of digital, which is deterministic, census-level data insights, from an audience perspective, and leverage that in a deterministic way that is privacy compliant to better inform planning, buying/execution of, and measurement/attribution of television buying.”
This video is part of Advancing Toward a Common TV Measurement Currency, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comscore. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Called The AND Platform, the launch follows NCC Media’s rebrand in September to Ampersand, a move that intended to bring attention to the company’s goal of uniting the TV advertising ecosystem across screens, inventories and audiences.
“[Our data] is the largest TV set-top box data that exists in the United States to define and find an audience, execute on that audience across that multi-screen television environment and then measure and report against that audience in a single platform in a single interface,” Ampersand CEO Nicolle Pangis tells Beet.TV. “It’s a first of its kind buy-side platform that we’re launching.”
Pangis joined Ampersand 18 month ago, and says she joined the company, then NCC Media, because it was clear the future of TV would be data-driven. Previously, Ampersand’s ability to understand linear TV data at scale wasn’t understood at the scale it was able to operate. Pangis says that in 2019, the company sold 65 million spots of TV advertising across 3 billion hours of programming. The launch of The AND Platform is meant to formalize the company’s capability to connect audiences across screens and inventories, giving buyers a clearer picture of how to best target their ad dollars, and put suppliers’ inventory to best use.
“The ability to create a plan off of traditional age and gender demos and television, we’ve moved that into audience-based now that we have the data to power it and created an interface,” says Pangis. “You can create audiences on the front end and measure them on the backend so it’s exciting for us and the marketplace as well.”
This audience measurement has functioned as an internal workplace flow tool for Ampersand for years, says Pangis, and the difference the platform brings is the partnerships. Ampersand is partnering with databases like L2 and Experian to add attributes to its dataset, better informing buyers as they target ads by type, like political ads. According to Pangis, Ampersand is behind about 30% of the political TV dollars in the US. Meanwhile, backend partners like Data Plus Math and TVSquared help to inform measurement practices. Crucially, Pangis says, a single-platform approach creates consistency in measurement that the advanced TV has so far lacked.
Now that Ampersand has worked through this evolution of its platform, Pangis says the goal is to work with clients as they navigate the quickly changing advanced TV market.
“There are a lot of problems, complexities – marketing vs reality is not the same – so we’re buckling in to work with clients to drive business outcomes,” she says.
Nicolle Pangis will be speaking at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5 to 7, 2020.
]]>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.
]]>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?
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.
]]>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.”
]]>In the past 12 months alone, GroupM launched its global [m]PLATFORM and then bolstered its Xaxis programmatic digital media platform with the machine learning initiative called Co-Pilot and finally the acquisition of Triad Retail Media.
[m]PLATFORM is aimed at “streamlining and simplifying” so that GroupM’s clients can “see their consumers and prospective in the same way across the globe,” Nicolle Pangis, the Global COO of [m]PLATFORM, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
From an organizational standpoint, [m]PLATFORM has brought together teams that used to plan, activate, execute and optimized clients’ investments across channels. This process had historically been done “in different pockets in the agency,” Pangis says. “Now we’re at the point of maturation of our industry that it makes sense to bring those all back together and create a single view.”
The biggest single acquisition by Xaxis was that of Triad, which helps retailers sell ads on their websites, for a sum in the neighborhood of $300 million, as The Wall Street Journal reports. Scaling through Xaxis’s many international offices affords Triad the opportunity to help retailers that don’t already sell ads on their websites.
Co-Pilot represents the entry point to machine learning, which is one aspect of AI. In the simplest terms, Co-Pilot’s contribution to brands engaging effectively with consumers is its ability to predict what may happen when ads are served “or what has the highest probability of happening” based on what it’s seen in the past.
“The great thing about technologies like this is that it can take both data that is specifically advertiser driven or just macro economic driven,” says Pangis.
Like other AI-inspired technology, Co-Pilot “learns as it goes.”
Among its abilities are predicting whether a particular ad impression might be viewable based on history and whether a specific consumer has engaged with ads before.
“As a technology it’s not one that is stagnant,” Pangis says. “It’s not like you put a model in and you leave it forever. You’re constantly putting in models and they’re constantly learning.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We always talk about how much movement there is in the industry,” says Xaxis chief revenue officer Nicolle Pangis. “But the fact is, that’s the norm in this industry. Every year, we always seem surprised at the acquisitions, the mergers or partnerships – but it’s the norm now for this to be an evolving ecosystem.
“There’s a lot of players in the market, which makes for a lot of noise… It’s hard to differentiate between what’s real, what’s not, what’s going to work for a particular advertiser, vertical or sector.”
Pangis says video will become a bigger part of ad spending in 2015.
She was interviewed for Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all the coverage here.
Pangis will be a participant in the Beet.TV executive retreat in Florida next week.
“Technology will catch up to the creative,” Real Media Group president Nicolle Pangis tells Beet.TV. “We’ve seen it in display, mobile, video – now they can all be bought programmatically.
“Some of the really compelling creatives cannot be bought programmatically – yet. Over time, I believe technology will catch up and be able to do less standard formats that are super-engaging.
“It will happen. Everything addressable will become programmatic. It’s just a matter of time.”
Pangis says the merger in Group M of data unit Xaxis with her Real Media “brings together the demand side with the supply side”.
Pangis was interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley Swartz at Beet.TV’s TV Programmatic Summit, hosted at Xaxis and presented by Videology.
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