NCS is the unit which uses consumer data to help consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies target ads more effectively.
Coinciding with Cannes Lions, it announced it would add machine learning – the practice through which algorithms can learn underlying patterns so as to perform repetitive future tasks without explicit instruction – to its targeting and measurement products:
“We’ve been working on machine learning and artificial intelligence for the last five years, with a lot of testing and rigour,” says NCS’ CEO Linda Dupree, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We’re harvesting a lot of the innovation work that we’ve invested in for a long period of time.”
Why is NCS adding machine learning? In order to speed up the creation of audience segments and the measurement of sales lift from advertisements – so that Nielsen Catalina Solutions can begin to play a different role for customers.
“We have to find new ways to accelerate, to add agility to the system,” Dupree says. “It’s really to add more time, time for reflection, for reflection around insights for our clients, reflection time and consulting time for Nielsen Catalina associates, so that they can actually dig in with clients and with brands and better understand what those data are telling us.”
There are few specific details as yet on how machine learning will be deployed to speed up these processes.
A year ago, a survey found almost a third of advertising and publishing professionals do not confidently understand the potential application of artificial intelligence to their work.
NCS’s Dupree tells MTM co-founder Jon Watts for Beet.TV that, in 2019, many brands are finding it harder to win new customers, so there is a renewed focus on retaining existing ones.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of the Future of TV is Now, a day-long event presented by Innovid. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page. You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page
]]>A consensus also emerged during the session that ultimately, one or more companies will figure out how to compensate consumers for their data beyond simply dispensing coupons and swag, perhaps one of the major credit card providers.
The panel was moderated by consultant Howard Shimmel, most recently of Turner Broadcasting, who at the outset mentioned the Starwood data breach because it was in the headlines that very morning. He asked whether despite the availability of great content and technology, “immense demand and an appetite to scale,” there will be enough data available given new legislation like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California.
Jodie McAfee of Inscape, a subsidiary of smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO, related the “classic case of no good deed goes unpunished” that occurred in 2015. VIZIO had just pushed to TV owners notification of how it collects household viewing data and where the data ends up. One of those owners was a reporter for Pro Publica who wrote a mostly “inaccurate” story about how TV’s can spy on them, according to McAfee.
“Two class action lawyers saw the article, found two plaintiffs and sued us and the rest was a complete mess,” said McAfee.
Among the more interesting learnings from the whole episode, the Federal Trade Commission thought that the language explaining what VIZIO does with owners’ viewing data was too buried. It should be “separate and prominent” from the TV setup process, which is what VIZIO ended up doing.
“Unless and until the consumer clicks ‘I accept,’ data collection is default off on our TV’s, so it is a full, true opt-in regime,” said McAfee.
Another relevant learning was the FTC’s view of the so-called value exchange that most advertising and media companies believe underpins the collection of consumer data. The government said “everybody needs to stop promising this idea that when the consumer opts in they’re going to get these bells and whistles around greater search and recommendation or whatever. Just knock it off. That’s not necessary and it’s kind of bullshit. Just tell them what you’re doing,” McAfee said.
The architects of GDPR hold the same view, according to McAfee. “It’s in GDPR. Don’t promise anything special. Just be clear about what you’re doing. That’s all anybody cares about.”
With an opt-in rate of 90% in the United States, “What we’ve learned is if you’re front and center with it and you are completely transparent about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, pretty much everybody, at least in the United States, they’ll opt in and they’re fine with it,” McAfee added.
Robert Bareuther of analytics and measurement firm iSpot.tv said the company gets “a tremendous amount of raw data from our valued partner VIZIO and we take that raw data and we decipher it into how households view content” and then measure business outcomes for advertisers. “We never see any private data, but it’s very important to us that rules are followed and you don’t breach anything. I think VIZIO’s done a spectacular job of making sure that everything’s on the up and up,” said Bareuther.
Nielsen Catalina’s Matt O’Grady said his company doesn’t touch any personally identifiable information about consumers, “but our applications for measurement and targeting are highly dependent upon PII. I’m dependent upon everybody in the ecosystem not violation or for lack of a better expression not screwing up.”
As for the impact of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica misadventure, “that made our liability statements and our onboarding much more difficult than it had ever been before,” said O’Grady.
Asked by Shimmel whether CPPA in California will end up looking like GDPR, O’Grady said the initiative is “a very healthy democracy in the sense that the pendulum can swing and people can really get a chance to voice their concerns. But I think a good substantial part of that opt-in is going to be re-written” before the law takes effect in January of 2020.
So will marketers ever end up having to actually pay consumers directly for their data, along with letting them control their data? “If I was involved in that, I don’t want a coupon,” said O’Grady. “I want true compensation for that. Somebody’s going to come along and figure out how to crack this nut. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or twenty years from now, but I really do believe that we’re heading in that direction and there’s an enormous opportunity for somebody to come up with the vault concept.”
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 fact, it’s “nirvana in a sense,” O’Grady adds in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018. He was interviewed by TV research veteran Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV
“It’s where all marketers are heading. They want to know for every dollar they spent what’s the return on the investment.”
Not that it’s quick or easy, like perusing overnight television ratings. “So we’re lucky to be in that business, we’re lucky to have all these assets, but a lot of it is still manual. A lot of it is putting the pieces and parts together.”
Things are headed beyond just activation targeting and measurement. “It always has to start with planning. So we call that purchase-driven planning,” O’Grady adds.
Asked for his view of consumer data mishaps in general and the recent Marriott breach of its Starwood guest reservation database, which exposed the personal information of up to 500 million people, he points to Catalina’s “flawless track record” on the use and protection of such data.
“Data protection was always on our mind before privacy was branded on our forehead,” he says. “It’s actually the retailers that have the permission base to use the loyalty card data with the actual shopper. That is extended to Catalina.”
He doesn’t think the trend is toward an opt-in model, “but opt out is definitely an opportunity at all those retailers and so we’re going to have to watch that very closely.”
Because consumers really don’t fully understand how their loyalty data are being used, O’Grady believes it’s incumbent on the industry to educate them. The first step is making things clear. “They’re probably not going to resent it. They resent probably surprises.”
Step No. 2 is give people a chance to opt out of data-sharing, followed by making sure “your partners are being really, really clear and disciplined about how they protect the data. Because any of those three things could derail you very quickly.”
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’ve had to establish relationships basically all or the main MVPD’s in order to know who their universe is. We apply our data on top of that,” Eaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
It’s all about delivering “hard data” as opposed to intent-based metrics. “It’s actual people or homes who went out and bought a product.”
As an example, Eaton cites peanut butter. If Skippy is the brand doing the targeting, “you want to talk to Skippy buyers. It could be competitive buyers as well. The idea that it’s the people who are buying the product are the ones you want to target. Not necessarily an age gender or a loose demographic.”
As the result of years of “evangelizing” the utility of its data, Nielsen Catalina is seeing many advertisers taking its data onto new platforms. The company didn’t have the luxury of saying it wasn’t ready for, say, addressable TV, according to Eaton.
“When a big advertiser comes and says ‘I want to use the data that I’ve been using digital but I’m going over to,’ name the MVPD, we had to find a way to do it. So we did.”
It all comes back to the shopper loyalty data, along with names and addresses of the shoppers. “And every MVPD has a name and address on the set-top box,” says Eaton. Nielsen Catalina uses Experian to combines an MVPD’s set-top box universe to its shopper card universe.
“We have what we would like to call panel. They tell us a product they want to market, we tell them the homes where the people live.”
Using the same data can change the way networks sell their inventory, from targeting based on age and gender to specific product consumption.
“It does change how a plan can be built by the networks. Or how it’s planned by the advertiser,” Eaton says.
As MVPD’s get deeper into the addressable game, linear broadcast networks are saying “we have to come up with a solution that allows the marketers to have a more precise delivery of a campaign. It’s meeting the need that the advertisers want to be more efficient in the way they plan and buy their media.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Transparency is unquestionably the table stakes at this point,” O’Grady says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“It’s a lot more than viewability, it’s a lot more than preventing fraud. Everybody along the supply chain is responsible for transparency. I really think we’ve hit a tipping point where everybody is acknowledging that we’re all collectively responsible.”
He feels that Nielsen is in a unique position because its data offerings combine television ratings, digital ad ratings and purchase insights from consumer shopping panels. For marketers, everything should add up to top quality in both data and match rates.
“If it isn’t, you just have to acknowledge and be transparent with what can work and what does work. The responsibility is across the whole supply chain,” O’Grady says.
Cross-screen measurement and cross-screen access to advertisers has changed dramatically, he adds.
“I really think we’re at an inflection point for TV or TV content, premium video content, we can measure it. We have a holistic means to measure the impact across all these different channels and then add it up.”
O’Grady considers blockchain technology for advertising and media to “potentially be a very valuable tool” whose true utility remains to be proven. “It’s just not known yet.”
One key promise of blockchain is the security of data that blockchain participants agree to share. “I think there’s great promise there. But it’s very early stages.”
O’Grady likens the industry’s interest in blockchain to artificial intelligence and virtual reality “and I’ve yet to see an application for the advertising ecosystem that’s truly made an impact. Maybe on the creative side it has.
“But if blockchain’s really going to manage or improve that work stream, particularly in the programmatic space, there’s great need for improvement.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.
They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:
“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”
Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”
Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”
More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.
Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”
Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Take low-penetration brands. Advanced targeting is challenging “because you may not find the reach that you want, but you can certainly find the audience,” says Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “We can deliver the audience and if you’re using real data, which we are, we can ensure that these are actual buyers and not bots because buyers go shopping, bots don’t.”
As O’Grady goes on to explain in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, a high-quality buy sometimes means less reach. “Advertisers are used to certain CPM’s and certain reaches, so it’s different. Everyone’s got to be willing to put up with the disruption that goes along with that change.”
Categories like food and beverages, which traditionally spend large amounts on TV, have already taken the plunge with advanced targeting. But brands that probably need it the most—low-penetration, niche players—typically don’t have the resources.
“But the bigger brands, particularly in the salty snacks and beverage categories, which are highly competitive, for any percent or micro percent of a share, they’re using it quite actively,” O’Grady says.
While most agencies “listen intently” to a discourse on advanced targeting, many “are really tightly strapped, but the creative ones are looking for ways to buy those audiences.”
One of the biggest unspoken challenges: the size of the buy and its cost per thousand impressions, given that many marketers are used to paying what they have in the past.
“You might have a far greater sales lift, but they may not want to put up with the tradeoff of lower reach,” says O’Grady.
While Nielsen Catalina is knee-deep in consumer segmentation data, it’s not about simply selling segments. “They’re just not buying a heavy Tide buyer. You also will understand the reach and frequency,” says O’Grady. “That’s nirvana I believe for the advertiser because that will bring the accountability and disciplines that a lot of the CMO’s in the CPG space have been very vocal about.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“From an advertiser perspective, we’re seeing a lot of that right now. Brands that are actually taking sales impact as a KPI and then adjusting all of their media tactics to meet that,” Feigenson says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Meanwhile, on the publisher side, what interests Feigenson, who is Chief Revenue Officer at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, “is a wholescale embracing of this.”
The company has about 90 million households worth of frequent shopper data garnered from retail partners frequent shopper data. “That means we can go really deep in terms of creating segments for activation or in doing closed-loop attribution,” Feigenson says.
That data is complemented with insights from the Nielsen Homescan panel, “which allows us to create a representative view of what’s going on in the market beyond the retailers that participate with us through Catalina.”
Since the beginning of 2017, Nielsen Catalina Solutions has announced new relationships with Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and Spotify.
With regard to business outcomes for advertisers, TV is still an easier medium to mine, according to Feigenson.
“It’s somewhat easy to look at effectiveness because you have one format and you can take that format and put it against a media mix model and get pretty predictive about what results are going to be,” he says.
Digital involves many different formats and ways of targeting, so outcomes can vary widely. “So from a publisher perspective, first and foremost they need to show that what they’re doing works.”
Some publishers exceed these expectations by using outcomes to influence their own product strategy. “In other words, they use outcomes as a way to figure for them what works, they work backwards to make it better.”
At Cannes, Feigenson is optimistic that all parties can come together in the common interest of advancing the ad industry and lifting certain clouds that have lingered overhead, among them digital ad fraud.
“I’m hoping here we address issues honestly and creatively and we come up with ways to make this industry better.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>These were key takeaways from observations shared by Nielsen Catalina Solutions Chief Revenue Officer Andrew Feigenson at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview. With a background at Nielsen and having most recently joined the joint venture that is NCS, Feigenson offered some perspective on today’s media landscape.
Television, he noted, has long been a mainstay for marketers and “great, very predictable, very effective.” However, audience migration to various platforms has upset this scenario. “The problem is we have this crisis of confidence right now,” Feigenson said.
While the reasons include viewabilty, fraud issues and the shortcomings of the digital supply chain, “Part of it also is that I think to some extent we’ve forgotten some of the basics.”
Comparing the effectiveness of TV versus digital shows that TV is typically about 50 to 80 percent more effective on average, according to Feigenson. This prompted moderator Joanna O’Connell of MediaMath to observe “That’s probably super controversial to the people in this room. So say more!”
Feigenson cited research from last year involving NCS and CBS spanning nine years of mapping media exposures to actual sales. “Not surprisingly, creative was number one. Number two was reach, but specifically involving the purchase occasion. “If someone’s going to the market today, you don’t want to get them tomorrow right? You want to get them before they go,” Feigenson said.
The third factor was context. “When we come back to why things do or don’t work, that’s the one I think we’re going to be doing a lot of deep dives into is context,” he said. “Because in digital there’s so many varieties of that pie, how you can target, the kind of formats and devices that I don’t think we fully understand right now.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>If the advertising industry maps measurement as a key performance indicator, it we can start addressing some of the issues of confidence “and figure out how to advertise better,” Feigenson says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview.
He cites recent remarks by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard calling for a cleanup of the digital advertising ecosystem as “a pretty bold statement for the industry.” As Advertising Age reports, Pritchard told a gathering of the Internet Advertising Bureau that “the days of giving digital a pass are over.”
Historically speaking, television advertising has been effective and predictable, according to Feigenson. Using media mix models, advertisers have had a pretty solid understanding of what their outcomes would look like.
But as audiences continue to migrate to the digital world and advertisers aggregate them through targeting, “what you find are there are gaps in some cases,” says Feigenson.
In addition to digital fraud and viewability issues, there can be a lack of understanding or “forgetfulness” of the basics of good advertising,” according to Feigenson.
Brands have always spent lots of time testing television creative in advance of launching campaigns. “We find over and over again creative is the most important variable in effectiveness,” he says.
However, “The way of doing that in the digital world is to test more of a feedback loop against effectiveness. I think that’s where there are some interesting opportunities,” says Feigenson. He does believe that progress is being made in the way publishers are proving their contributions to sales lift.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>Moore is one of many industry leaders who will gather in New York on March 9 at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes: Connecting Video Ad Spend To Sales. The event is sponsored by outcome-based video marketing provider Eyeview.
In an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Moore notes that one neglected aspect of “the fantastic growth of digital over the last ten years” has been creative.
“And what we have now seen is a whole host of creative management platforms, as well as dynamic creative optimization companies that provide one more way for us to optimize a campaign,” Moore says.
Alas, most of this creative customization has been relegated to display ads. “Today video is not being put together on the fly in order to create an ad specific for a user. That will happen in the future,” Moore predicts.
“Right now, most of the video renditions tend to be downloaded overnight into a cable box or made available in some other fashion,” he adds. “However, over the next few years you will see video become an increasingly important part of the dynamic creative optimization marketplace.”
Among the speakers joining Moore on March 6 at the Andaz 5th Avenue for the Beet.TV Outcomes Leadership Summit are: Lisa Archambault, Senior Director, Global Advertising, Caesars Entertainment Corporation; Tal Chalozin, CTO and Co-Founder, Innovid; Brad Danaher, Television Partnership Director, Experian; Andrew Davis, Founder, Monumental Shift; Bob Estrada, EVP & Director of Strategic Partnerships, BBDO New York; Andrew Feigenson, Chief Revenue Officer, Nielsen Catalina Solutions; Oren Harnevo, CEO, Eyeview; Rebecca Lieb, Advisory Board Member, Netswitch Technology Management Inc. and OneSpot; Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer, MediaMath; Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal, Prohaska Consulting; Tom Rogers, Executive Chairman, WinView Games, Chairman and CEO, TRget Media; and David Shim, Founder and CEO, Placed.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
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