This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
The deal brings a robust offering of ACR (automatic content recognition) from Nielsen to an existing ACR operation at Roku. It also brings Nielsen’s dynamic ad insertion tools to Roku.
The solution is for the Roku “glass” – meaning TVs that use the Roku operating system.
In its most recent earnings report, Roku said it was the number one smart TV OS sold in the U.S. and Canada, citing NPD’s Weekly Retail Tracking Service. Roku held 38% of the market share in the U.S. and 31% in Canada, the company said, citing NPD.
Late today, we spoke with Louqman Parampath, VP of product management at Roku, about the deal and its implications for marketers and national programmers. He explained that the new scenario will bring fundamental change to linear TV advertising by allowing advertisers to target consumers on a household or regional basis with specific advertising.
He calls the development a “transformational” moment for programmers and marketers.
The deal also expands the collaboration between Roku and Nielsen around cross-screen measurement.
]]>The company just announced it will add measurement of 55 million addressable devices, including smart TV and set-top box return-path data, into its national TV currency ratings.
Specifically, Nielsen will add DirecTV (Xandr), DISH, Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising and Vizio data using the Vizio-backed Project OAR standard. It represents a big shift for ad buyers that have been calling for better, more TV-like measurement of a promising ad channel.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen audience measurement GM Scott Brown describes what is happening.
Unlocking inventory
“It really kind of unlocks the C3, C7 inventory,” he says. “It allows those providers that were certifying to insert addressable ads in the actual live linear ad mode in the future.”
C3 and C7 ratings shine a light on ads that viewers have actually watched.
“Addressable TV is growing, but it’s mostly been limited to those two minutes per hour,” Brown adds. “We think that the big domino that’s going to eventually fall is that now we’re unlocking those 14 minutes per hour, now the opportunity for growth is much wider.
“So, we’re giving networks and agencies the opportunity to have much more scale if they so choose, while still having the accuracy of the underlying linear currency.”
Join the dots
EMarketer estimates that addressable TV advertising spend will reach $3.6 billion by 2022–up 75% from August 2020.
Connected TV and some addressable platforms boast digital-style targeting, frequency-capping and other features – but many in agencies would like to think of it more as TV than digital. And that means making it buyable like TV.
A key challenge has been translating the two worlds of TV and digital in buying currencies. Nielsen’s announcement aims to do just that.
According to the company: “Nielsen will calibrate tune-in and exposure
data from MVPDs and Smart TV OEMs against its gold-standard panel to correct for bias and deliver robust persons-level data for more granular and stable measurement.”
Best of both
Nielsen says: “Measurement of addressable TV will supplement its growing CTV offerings, providing comparable campaign measurement metrics.”
Brown adds there is still a critical role for traditional TV measurement panels in the new world.
“We use the panel to correct for data anomalies that we see in smart TV data and set-top box data,” he says.
“That data is not perfect in isolation. It’s great for scale. The panel is still going to be used in a big, big way, and it’s why we continue to invest in it going forward.”
]]>Nielsen recently began working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable advertising technology for linear TV. Then Univision joined A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s SVP for product management in advanced video advertising and identity, Jessica Hindlian, says that partnership is “foundational” to what will now be an imminent fuller launch.
Identity graph for TV
Tru Optik brings an “identity graph” of information on 80 million US connected TV households. That has now enriched the data of Nielsen’s own solution.
“The partnership with Tru Optik is very important because it will provide a baseline from which we can match our OEM smart TV device footprint to a strong identity backbone to really allow us to target at scale on our own footprint addressably,” Hindlian says.
“With the combination of our device footprint and Tru Optik’s graph, we can ensure that there are real households at the other end receiving the message.”
Consumer data company TransUnion recently said it would acquire Tru Optik to build out its own media targeting business. That deal has closed.
TransUnion to Acquire Tru Optik To Bolster Connected Identity Matching
Smoothing the path
Nielsen’s is the latest initiative aimed at simplifying access to addressable TV ad-buying, which is splintered across many devices and services.
Its linear capabilities may be particularly appealing for connected TV, which, despite the growth in VOD, also boosts live linear as a strong suit.
Other consortia include Vizio’s Project OAR and the On Addressability consortium.
Almost a year ago, eMarketer forecast 2020 US connected TV ad spend would reach $8.88 billion, growing to $14.12 billion by 2023. But a plethora of companies is working to iron out what can often be bottlenecks in buying.
Bringing first-party to the party
Hindlian says Nielsen’s offering makes it possible for brands to bring their own CRM data to enhance targeting.
“Our clients are really looking for the ability to use a single audience segment, a single audience target and activate that segment or target across a variety of different addressable platforms,” she says. “That’s really what we’re driving towards right now.
“Our partnership with Tru Optik allows us to very quickly onboard client’s, brand’s, and programmer’s first party data in order to use that data to actually to target.
“And we do expect to see demand for first-party data from an addressable targeting standpoint increase significantly as we get through our beta period.”
]]>
Notwithstanding, the Black woman show up and “show out.” We have “no choice.”
She addresses the issue of diversity and inclusion and disparities where well intentioned programs have been weighted toward gender diversity vs. racial diversity.
This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here.
]]>Nielsen recently began working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year.
A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January. And now Univision is in on the act.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s Kelly Abcarian says: “Total TV time spent … (has) grown by 3.4% in the month of March, and that equates to 37.6 billion hours.
“If we want to unlock addressable in linear across those 37 billion hours of television, it’s important that an advertiser gets an accurate understanding of the linear reach of that ad … have confidence in the data they’re using to transact.”
Nielsen announced its beta test at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It will run in three phases – understanding broadcast companies’ workflow and commercial models, a “light” technology installation in order for broadcasters to identify which ads they want to replace, and selling actual ads that are shown in consumers’ homes.
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Univision Joins @nielsen For First Linear Addressable TV Platform Beta Program https://t.co/DHjJnPexK6
— Univision Public Relations (@UnivisionPRTeam) May 7, 2020
Abcarian thinks the current global pandemic has put a new spin on targeted TV ad capabilities.
“Pre-COVID, you saw about 17% of total TV time usage,” she says. “Now, the week of April 13, we have seen that that has grown to 83% from prior year. So that’s tremendous growth, and it’s eight hours per week.
“We know that the consumer is changing. And therefore, helping a marketer and a programmer understand how to package inventory, price it, as well as optimise against that experience is going to be critically important. We’re very, very focused on delivering on that total audience, reach and frequency, duplicated metric for the industry.
She credits companies like Clypd, Xandr, OpenAP, Mobi, TransUnion and LiveRamp with helping connect up platforms to deliver addressable TV ad scale.
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But how can they best serve audiences in order to hold on to new users after the lockdowns end?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s EVP for media and marketing effectiveness Tina Wilson says traffic is booming – but publishers need to think hard about what to do with it.
“We had estimates of close to 12 hours a day that consumers were connecting with media and that continues to increase,” Wilson says. “Right now where we’re seeing the biggest increase is in streaming.
“We’re able to look at the last week of March relative to the first week of March, and it’s up almost three hours per person per week.”
Holding on
When it comes to their strategy, news and video publishers are faced with interesting choices, because users fall into different camps.
Much of the new news traffic is going to coronavirus stories, as consumers show a voracious appetite for virus content
But, for many consumers, the whole episode is also an anxiety-inducer, pushing them to seek out content on different topics.
Parsely data shows coronavirus-focused users are engaging with content for longer.
But Taboola published data it says shows news website traffic “returning to normal”.
News website traffic is quickly returning to normal. Compared to a 6-month, pre-corona average, traffic was up just 7% globally and 13% in the US last week.
The peaks were +41% globally and +52% for the US. pic.twitter.com/SLVknE75AB
— Fran Berkman (@FranBerkman) April 13, 2020
So, what should publishers do?
Choice & connection
Nielsen’s Wilson says it is about “ensuring that there is the content (available), that there is this selection and the choice that draws people in from an originals and from an exclusive standpoint”.
“Really understanding the role that the content plays not just for educating, or informing, or providing an escape, but also that it’s providing a social connection right now (is important),” she says.
“I think (that) is really, really important and one for them to look, to sustain past this time that we’re in today.”
Wilson says Nielsen wants advertisers to move beyond demographic ad targeting, toward understanding audiences and measuring outcomes. Finding the right content is key, she says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>This uptick is consistent with other major events like the Snowpocalypse and other weather phenomena, and also in line with the behaviors of people who work remotely, who typically spend a few more hours every week engaging with media.
In some areas that have been quarantined, there have been significant spikes, such as Seattle, which is up 22 or 23 percent across demographics. For younger demographics, consumption has almost doubled, especially for gaming devices.
But what is changing about the greater media landscape due to coronavirus? It’s already clear that there has been a mass production halt, both in scripted programming and in live events like sports.
“There definitely is a change in the content that will be available for folks to consume.” Bradbury says. “That’s irrefutable at this point.”
Instead, people are choosing to spend more time binge-viewing, catching up on old programming, and gaming.
“So although the supply of new stuff is certainly going to slow for a bit,” Bradbury says. “We don’t see any sort of trail off in consumption. Just the opposite, significant increases.”
It remains to be seen how this will affect the buying and selling ecosystem. Guarantees that were made in deals for current programming were made in a pre-Coronavirus world. This should be good for both the sellers and the buyers who will get larger audience exposure.
These trends are all consistent with early reads coming from countries like China and South Korea who experienced Coronavirus before the US. As people in these countries have been out of the workplace, they have spent more time consuming media.
“They’re catching up on world news and local news to understand the impact of the pandemic,” Bradbury says. “But they’re also just viewing a lot more entertainment, playing a lot more video games, and choosing to binge watch shows and get caught up. It’s a good way to take a break from the news cycle.”
Bradbury was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam powered by Zoom.
]]>But that is all set to change. US addressable TV is going national.
In a session dubbed Addressable for National & Linear: Solving the Problems, panelists at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 discussed that prospect:
- Kelly Abcarian, GM, Advanced Video Advertising, Nielsen
- David Porter, VP, Ad Innovation, WarnerMedia
- Julian Zilbebrand, EVP, Audience Science, ViacomCBS
A watershed for targeted TV
It was kicked off by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media and a veteran of early addressable TV infrastructure initiatives.
“I literally have goosebumps at this idea,” she said. “Sixty million households have addressable capabilities, some through DirecTV and DISH and Comcast and so on.
“But it still only amounts to 3% of the inventory because it’s sitting on the two minutes (per hour of ad inventory that TV networks allow cable and satellite operators to sell in their live feeds).
“So, one of the things that we’re going to see in 2020 … is lighting up the smart TVs, which could take us from 3% to my estimation of 21%.”
The expansion, she said, is being driven by initiatives like Inscape’s Project OAR and Nielsen’s acquisition of Sorenson Media, plus the application of software from vendors like INVIDI and FreeWheel to a wider, national set of inventory – something which could make as much as 35% of inventory addressable, she said.
Start at the bottom
WarnerMedia’s David Porter said he won’t be putting WarnerMedia’s best content in to addressable bucket just yet, and not in the upcoming 2020 upfront ad sales season.
“While the technology … is getting better, it’s still not perfect and we want to make sure it is perfect,” he said.
“When we begin our technology pilots this summer, it will not be on a primetime inventory, it will not be on our sports inventory.
“We are going to find some lower-viewed inventory. We’re going to take one unit and we’re going to convert it on one network, and we’re going to test that.
“And then we’re going to test it on another network and another network, and then we’re going to start converting multiple networks per day and then multiple units per day, multiple units per hour. So we’re going to grow it very, very slowly.
Set-top box data
Nielsen’s Abcarian said future TV measurement will need to combine specific data straight from connected devices with audience panels.
Scheppach said “measurement” would come to include attributes about a person and a home, augmented with automatic content recognition (ACR) like that from Nielsen’s Gracenote, which can identify real viewing behavior from digital fingerprints. Abcarian replied: “And set-top box data.”
Abcarian agreed that panels and big data would go hand-in-hand.
Nielsen is working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year, following its acquisitions of Sorenson Media and Gracenote, and spent “gruelling 11 months of integrating different companies, different cultures, different technology”, according to Abcarian.
Critical mass next year?
But, the pathway for scale is being laid, panelists didn’t believe it would be in place during 2020.
“It’s progression (this year), because I don’t think we’re going to reach critical mass,” said WarnerMedia’s Porter. “I don’t see critical mass in 2020. I see it in 2021.
“But I want to get to 50 million, and I believe that we can aggregate all of these different distribution endpoints to get to 50 to 60 million by 2021.
“I do think we’re going to have some buyer education. We’re going to have to talk to a lot of agencies to understand how they want to leverage it.”
The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January.
“The point of the beta is to start to integrate their linear workflow in a true addressable world and allow them to understand the commercial and business models that they want to execute and go to commercial launch in the second half of the year,” says Nielsen’s general manager of advanced video advertising, Kelly Abcarian.
“The programmers will work in our beta environment to really understand how to execute linear addressable, really testing their end-to-end workflows that are very unique in a linear television environment… things like setting up inventory roles like brand separation, or rules they want to apply around when they want to have ads replace, like do not replace any ads during prime time.”
Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.
Other industry initiatives include Project OAR, a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.
“We published an addressable measurement framework a couple of weeks back that we’ve made available to everyone in the industry,” Abcarian adds. “It’s really an instruction booklet around helping to understand what we’re doing to clean up and calibrate the data sources, the methodology we’re applying to combine the panel and the big data together, so that we can accurately understand the true linear audience and the addressable audience.”
Abcarian was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>But automatic content recognition (ACR) technology is now beginning to help advertisers and broadcasters know for sure.
It works using a range of hardware and software that either listens to or sees the content viewers are watching, typically matching the fingerprint against a cloud-based database of TV shows.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Karthik Rao of Nielsen, which offers such ACR capability, says the aim is to deliver “One Media Truth”.
“One Media Truth for Nielsen is all about the ability for us to measure these interactions between platforms and brands and the end consumers,” says Rao, the chief product and technology officer of Nielsen Global Media.
“Addressability, the excitement about that at CES this year, is one version of that, the most exciting versions for this year.”
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables real-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Rao’s Nielsen has also been enabling ACR for Amobee, the video ad-tech supplier, as it seeks scale for its offering.
“That helps Amobee create great experiences for what they do as a business,” he says. “And so it’s just amazing to see such granular data being brought to life in very different ways and helping new use cases that was just not possible before, in the case of Amobee as an example.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Nielsen announced the beta on Monday. It will run through the first half of 2020 ahead of a planned full commercial launch later in the year.
Speaking with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Nielsen’s general manager of advanced video advertising, Kelly Abcarian, said: “We’re … unlocking true live linear. It’s really any kind of telecast, whether that’s sports or drama or comedy; we’re enabling any programmer to basically execute ad replacement in real-time as that telecast is being watched and viewed in real-time in a consumer’s home.”
Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables teal-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Abcarian says the beta will take three phases:
- Understanding broadcast companies’ workflow and commercial models.
- A “light” technology installation in order for broadcasters to identify which ads they want to replace.
- Selling actual ads that are shown in consumers’ homes.
“I think what they’re hoping to learn out of the beta is to understand how their workflow needs to evolve and change,” Abcarian says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Nielsen last year acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV, Brian Jentz, who was an SVP at Sorenson for five years and who is now SVP at Nielsen’s AVA, explains the way ahead.
“By the end of 2020, we want to have a scale deployment,” Jentz says. “We’re talking multi-million number of devices in the field working across at least five to 10 programmers to open up their addressable inventory, and starting to work with others to make sure that we can scale that.”
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables teal-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Jentz says Sorenson already had some scale, calling it “one of the only ACR smart TV driven addressable TV platforms to operate at scale across 17 million TVs back in 2018/2019”.
But, over the lsat year, several initiatives and cooperatives have all come together to make the path to buying targeted TV ads at scale smoother.
“We know that we are going to be one of a few different platforms out there, and scale is going to be key to all of this,” Jentz adds. “We really want to make sure, by the end of 2020 that, not only do we have scale in our own footprint, but we’re enabling overall scale of addressable by working with other players in the industry.”
Jentz was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That precipitated a range of initiatives, collaborations and consortia aimed at making things simpler, achieving scale and reducing the number of players buyers need to work with.
But, outside of the US, things are already neatly packaged in this way.
That is according to Matt O’Grady, chief commercial officer of Nielsen Global Media, the media measurement house.
Matt O’Grady relocated to London earlier this year, after a decade with the company in New York.
In this video interview with Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV, he says: “The nice about all of the international markets outside of the US is that they usually either have a committee – a joint industry committee, or an informal committee – that decides on one particular measurement company to come in and be the measurement provider for TAM or for digital or for advertising intelligence. And I think that model works quite well.”
In 2012, UKOM (the UK Online Measurement Company), which uses both a panel and a tag-based census network to measure online audiences, picked comScore to replace Nielsen as its provider.
Earlier this year, BARB (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) selected Kantar Media to provide in-home broadband “router meters”, allowing BARB to distinguish between broadcaster-VOD service viewing and PVR viewing, and to better measure smartphone viewing.
Nielsen’s Television Audience Measurement (TAM) is deployed in 12 other European countries.
“What people really need to measure is the streaming content on any device in or out of the home, they need to measure both the content and the ad,” O’Grady adds.
“Measuring streaming ads for connected or over-the-top or IP is more difficult. But Nielsen does have an international solution that allows us to measure both in-home viewing, any streaming in or out of the home, and requires the broadcaster or the distributor to cooperate with us to ensure that we collect all of that viewing.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>OpenSlate provides data about the content, subject matter and suitability of more than 600 million YouTube and Facebook videos for advertisers to determine whether the inventory is a good fit for their brand.
It is one of a growing plethora of “brand safety” tools aiming to give ad buyers more control.
“What Open Slate does is it uses machine learning to work out what a brand-safe environment looks like for a particular brand, and it’s able to score back to the advertiser whether or not their advertising got into the right content,” says Nielsen Global Media’s chief commercial officer Megan Clarken in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We think that that is imperative to a hygiene metric, a true reach metric, and it’s an important output for the advertiser to know that they got what they paid for.”
Meanwhile, Clarken says, whilst cross-screen measurement of TV shows with linear ad shows is rolled out, comparing apples to apples when different TV environments include different ad sizes and ad loads remains a complex challenge.
“Being able to credit based on something like, ‘was somebody watching a TV programme, but at the same time on their iPad and on their phone looking at content at the same time?’ – how do you credit that to the minute? It’s really tricky,” she says.
“The devil’s in the details somewhat. It’s very tricky to put the rules around that and make sure that you ground yourself on a standard which is a common standard that the industry agrees to so that you can implement.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But the world of data underpinning the execution is still coming together. Lana Busignani fears that, for many marketers, it may be too piecemeal.
“A lot of players in the digital publisher space have been offering measurement to their advertiser community as an add-on to … their service,” the EVP of US analytics at media measurement house Nielsen tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“They’re very helpful for optimising within the properties of that publisher. Publishers are wading into the water and demanding that as well. They want to prove their value relative to other offerings and they want a comparable measurement as well.
“(But) what advertisers are really asking us for is, how do they measure comparably across the walled gardens?”
Busignani suggests that creates the need for technology which can understand not only whether an ad seen through a specific publisher led to a brand outcome, but how exposures to ads from across the whole universe of sources join up.
That is why “identity graph” technology and attribution software have become so hot in 2019.
Busignani says the technology connects brands’ own sales and outcome data back to ad exposure.
“In terms of the walled gardens, we also have integrations where we work with them collaboratively and we’re able to measure that from within the walled garden in a space that’s Nielsen-specific so that we are really managing that and responsible for it,” she adds.
“But we’re working very much in collaboration with those publishers to be able to measure accurately and then bring it out for comparison.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.
What is it going to take for the addressable opportunity to be realized at greater scale, across the country?
At Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, a panel of executives was asked by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel how to make national addressable sing…
- Mike Bologna, President, Addressable, Cadent
- Kelly Abcarian, General Manager of Video Advanced Advertising
- Stacy Daft, GM commercial and business development, Amobee
Partnerships needed
“There is not a scale problem with addressability,” Bologna said. “There are 60 plus, 70 million households where you can dynamically insert an ad to a household. It is with the local two minutes per hour. It is system by system. That’s not a longterm scalable model in order for it to really scale.
“National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
Device-level deals
“We are working with one of the largest chip set manufacturers globally, media tech and which to embed our technology directly into smart TV chip sets,” Abcarian said. “We are working alongside directly the OEMs in which to better our tech directly into their software layer.
“All of this enables you to unlock all 16 minutes in real-time.”
Software must be linked
“We believe has been holding back linear addressable … is a lack of technology and tool sets that really fit within the seller’s workflow,”said Amobee’s Daft.
“It’s not enough to just have a linear addressable insertion technology or have data technology. It has to be linked together with the sales process, which has to do with making them confident to be able to sell that inventory.”
Consistency is key
“If they all work in a different way, if 50 different networks are treating at addressable or a dynamic ad insertion differently, then it’s just going to be the same mess we have right now with seven different MVPDs – just four times worse,” said one2one’s Bologna. “And that’s not going to make it any easier for buyers and agencies and advertisers.”
Eyes on the prize
Bologna said addressable ads could end up commanding much greater returns overall.
“In an addressable world, you could take that unit and you could sell 20, 30, 40% of that unit at three or four times that CPM to multiple different advertisers,” he said.
“Then, of, course you have what’s left over that you would then ultimately sell at perhaps a 10, 15, 20% discount. The net-net in a perfect world would turn into a 10, 15, 20 perhaps 50, 60% increase in the overall value of the unit. So. instead of the network collecting $2,000 for the unit, they end up collecting $3,200 for a unit.”
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.
]]>eMarketer puts that figure at 5% of the total in 2019.
That opens up a disconnect with the proportion of TV viewing that is itself getting delivered through internet channels.
In this discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, Kelly Abcarian, GM of video advanced advertising at Nielsen, says US smart TV adoption has exploded from 16% four years ago, to almost half today, approaching 250 million TV sets; source unclear.
The gap between adoption and ad spend is reminiscent of the early days of mobile advertising, when consumer media time on mobile far out-flanked the proportion of ad spend brands were putting to the same channel.
But Nielsen’s Abcarian says publishers are nevertheless intensely interested.
“Programmers are looking at ways in which they can drive better yield for themselves, but even more importantly yield for their advertisers,” she says, speaking with Howard Shimmel, president of his own Janus Strategy & Insights.
“They see real value of being able to take a first-party or third-party (audience data) segment and really activate that on behalf of their advertiser. And so I think they’re really leaning in.
“You’re seeing a lot of that and kind of the audience-based buying, being able to … reach an ad schedule against a consumer segment defined very uniquely by that unique advertiser. And then as we do one-to-one addressable, really being able to kind of fine-hone on how you get that right message at the right time in front of that right consumer.”
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.
]]>Case in point – the company’s global head of analytics Matt Krepsik thinks brands should actually look beyond merely media measurement, and beyond counting existing audience members, to return to bringing in new audiences in the first place.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Krepsik issues a call-to-arms for getting back to brand-building.
“Over the past three to five years, we’ve focused on metrics, and metrics have been indispensable to helping ad brand advertisers drive accountability, drive transparency and drive clarity,” he says.
“However, those metrics have also made it easier to focus on short-term outcomes. That’s come at the expense of brand building. And brand building takes time.”
Many brands have taken advantage of the arsenal of digital tools available to develop sophisticates, data-enabled strategies that increasingly veer toward targeting consumers known to be in-market for a particular product.
And many publishers and intermediaries are now on-hand to price those ads based on known outcomes, like when an actual purchase occurs and can be attributed to an ad exposure.
But Krepsik thinks that more brands need to get back to building initial awareness.
“The biggest gap that a lot of brands see today, is they need to continue to nurture that upper funnel,” he says. “It’s not just about that last click, that last conversion and getting a customer once they’re already in the store.
“It’s about ensuring that your brand is in the consideration set. So before they go to the store, before they go to your website, before they engage at an automotive dealer or a bank or a financial institution, you want to make sure that your brand has that awareness.”
Krepsik says Nielsen has picked up know-how from service auto companies, whose products typically operate on a longer consume awareness-to-purchase cycle, and has been applying that timeline to things like financial services and consumer packaged goods.
He is telling a new generation of brands: “It’s not just about the next transaction, it’s actually the next five transactions, it’s in the next 10 purchases.
“It’s ‘how do we make sure our brand stays in the basket, our brand stays in the consideration set, and build that strong connection with this next generation of consumers?'”
In a sit-down discussion at Cannes Lions, Tracey Scheppach – who encountered that challenge over years spent specialising in smart TV at Publicis and Starcom, and who now runs her own Matter More Media – led a discussion on the conundrum with two execs focused on improving measurement…
- Kelly Abcarian – General Manager of Video Advanced Advertising, Nielsen
- Jonathan Steuer – Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group
Abcarian began by excitedly illustrating the growth the industry is seeing in smart TV adoption, something which is lighting up the opportunity for broadcasters and marketers alike.
“When you look at the growth of smart TVs, it’s been incredible,” Abcarian said. “Almost half of the homes have at least one enabled smart TV, 47%. We look four years back, that was at 16% so it just shows you the hugest acceleration.”
But that growth is driven by proliferation. There are many smart TV viewing systems, many ad delivery mechanisms and many ways to measure the ultimate consumption of smart TV ads and content.
“The thing that concerns me … is, we need all of the smart TVs to be available under the same umbrella … both from a data-for-targeting-and-measurement purposes, and from an addressable-inventory point of view,” said Steuer, who also spent years in the trenches on the same issues at TiVo.
To that end, both Abcarian and Steuer both recently helped drive a new “measurement taskforce” in June, focused on improving data readiness, transparency and reconciling smart TV consumption to Nielsen C3 and C7 ratings.
That, says Abcarian, is the “number one thing I tell everyone that is the core focus for me and my team to solve this year”, because she believes that has been holding back the industry’s ability to realize full advanced TV ad benefits.
“Our target is June of next year,” she said. “We’re working alongside the committee and based on kind of progress and feedback and the bringing that transparency and ensuring the methodologies right is critically important.
“With C3 (and) C7 we’re under penning $70 billion, so there’s real money at stake here, so we have to get this right and we’re very committed to doing so.”
Omnicom’s Steuer said his agency holding group, like the others, wants to achieve a person-based view of consumers, usable across all media platforms, built out in to a unified measurement framework.
Hard problems don’t have easy solutions. But, if the growing raft of initiatives and working partnerships is anything to go, the “umbrella” may become a lot more effective soon.
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.
]]>So says the recently-appointed global MD of Nielsen Media.
Matt O’Grady just relocated to London after a decade with the company in New York.
Nielsen recently acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising, which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
And O’Grady says Nielsen wants to bring Advanced Video Advertising to the UK.
“It’s starting in the U.S.,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But, I have to say, Sorensen first started in the U.K., and then they went over the pond. So my intention is bring them back over the pond, because the broadcasters in the U.K. are keenly interested and were, because Sorensen had a big position in the U.K..
“That’s really where they got started. So they want me to bring it back, so I’ve got to bring it back over there. We’ll start probably in the U.K. with that.”
Compared with the large but fragmented and often disjointed US media market in which O’Grady operated throughout his career, media markets like the UK are relatively more straightforward.
Often, there are fewer partners to deal with, fewer links in the chain. O’Grady says smaller media markets are more nimble.
“I’m really surprised at how quickly you can move in some of these smaller markets and how different some of the broadcasters operate in different markets,” he says.
“In many of these other markets, they already have OTT platforms that work very well. Netflix and Amazon Prime are obviously there, but (broadcasters) were monetizing their own content with over the top prior to a subscription video on demand coming in.
“A market that’s smaller and a market that’s evolved often does things that are very innovative, that take longer in a big market like New York.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
]]>Many ad buyers, of course, want specific metrics to indicate real viewership and attribution of consequential purchase actions.
But many brands, even digital ones, are now getting frustrated by the fragmenting array of measurement opportunities – and are turning back to align their video efforts more closely with traditional TV campaigns.
That is according to an executive from media measurement house Nielsen.
“What we actually see now happening, is that the digital first players and the digital platforms, for premium video, have decided that all of the data that they have is just confusing the advertiser,” says Megan Clarken, Nielsen chief commercial officer, Nielsen Global Media, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“So they want to compete against TV, and so they’re moving across to be able to compare to TV. Things are coming back to the more simple.
“If you look at the digital players, they want to compete, video is video. So we don’t think about linear TV or digital video. We see video, as video. And premium video, as video. What we know is that the TV landscape, the traditional TV landscape has always based their buying and selling or the way in which they talk about their audiences, in the same common currency.”
Such a trend, if it is happening, would be big news for a media landscape that offers so much opportunity for precision measurement.
But it could also be a warning sign for that same industry – rationalize your confusing array of measurements now, or risk TV continuing to call the shots.
Clarken acknowledges that the “journey” of the evolution of media measurement “never finishes”.
And her Nielsen itself continues to go through its own redefinition – adding digital measurements to its classical panel systems, and restructuring itself.
“We’ve had a new CEO come in, at the end of last year,” Clarken says. “He went through some organizational change in the beginning of the year and like anything internally, it takes a long time to do.
“Our company is going through a strategic review, and like anything, it’s a lot of work.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
]]>How marketers engage with agencies:
“The needs of how clients engage with media agencies has started to really shift from the sense of how do we buy media more efficiently and how do we connect with the consumers but how do we act as their guide to finding the next opportunity for growth.”
From impressions to outcomes:
“Just measuring the fact that the impression was delivered is where we used to work in the space. Today it’s all focused on outcomes. So yes, there’s an expectation of how we report on delivery of media, but then how are we delivering the experience, how is that driving through to sales, how are all the channels working collectively together, what are the forms of content people are engaged with, how can we serve up more of that with sequential messaging so that we’re bringing them through the entire purchase journey and not just building brand bias but building it all the way into sales and loyalty.”
Why values matter to brands:
“Brands are shifting really from the sense of a campaign around change into how do we think about our values as an organization, how do we think about representing those values in the culture of our organization, do our partners reflect that and how collectively can we actually bring that into culture and better reflect the diverse culture in particular.”
On direct-to-consumer brands:
“They’re leaning into traditional media because they realize actually once they’ve gone through their own in-housing with search, with social, with display, with programmatic and have flooded enough of those channels and have enough performance driven from that they realize that next customer needs to come through other ways and other channels. And so they’re leaning in and helping to reinvent digital out of home, as they’re leaning into television and understanding how to bring data and actually make that more of a relevant experience as well. They’re leaning into print they’re leaning into all the channels that used to be seen as maybe not digital enough but through the last years as they have reinvented, as they have shown how they can drive outcomes, they’re driving some performance for DTC brands.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
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That is something video and TV programmers – all facing competition from digital-native ad platforms that have long offered super-targeting – need to remain competitive.
“I think there are finally real ways for them to bring addressability to television,” says Vikram Somaya, Nielsen chief data officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“I think a lot of the issues had been – certainly from the sell side when I looked at it – was, ‘How did this actually work with measurement on which everything was transacted?'”
In February, Nielsen formed Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), a new group focusing on developing addressable advertising initially for internet-connected smart TVs.
That came after it acquired Sorenson Media, which had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, for $11.25 million.
Somaya says gives Nielsen the ability to give programmers addressable capabilities which also address how the opportunity is managed against ratings.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series “Creativity & Data Meet at Cannes” presented by Nielsen. For more segments from the series, please visit this page. You can find all Beet.TV coverage of Cannes right here.
]]>One of Nielsen’s most recent acquisitions was of Sorenson Media. The company now has technical underpinnings of a platform for targeted TV ads that encompasses delivery, data-driven targeting, unified campaign management, and measurement, as Variety reports.
“All media is going to go addressable,” Kelly Abcarian, the GM of Nielsen’s new Advanced Video Advertising unit, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
She says some $4.7 billion worth of addressable ads will be bought next year. “That’s made up of OTT, advanced linear-driven audiences, as well as the cable two minutes of addressability that they’ve built a sizeable business against as well.”
In addition to Sorenson, Nielsen acquired Qterics, a smart-TV software and privacy management vendor, and Gracenote, which does automatic content recognition.
“First and foremost, measurement is the bedrock of what Nielsen provides to the marketplace and what we’ll continue to do,” Abcarian says. “We’re really trying to focus on how we unlock addressable in a way that brings standardization across all those impressions.”
She envisions an open platform. “As we look to do ad replacement on a television screen, we’re also creating unique capabilities in the ad decisioning space to enable buyers and sellers to execute against that efficiency alongside of other ad decisioning engines and algorithms and capabilities in the marketplace.”
Going beyond the traditional two minutes per hour of addressable TV ad inventory that goes to distributors, “We’re really unlocking the full sixteen minutes of inventory so that programmers, both broadcasters cable networks, can truly execute in a one to one addressable way.
“It’s a matter of setting up campaigns and getting those instructions across the buyers and sellers around what ads are eligible across linear television for replacement. We’re really sitting in the middle providing the measurement and the simplicity around understanding what was reached, how often were they reached across what platforms. Then providing mechanics to actually do the true ad replacement on the glass screen itself.”
In addition to Sorenson’s smart-TV data from Samsung, Nielsen is working with LG and chip maker MediaTek, according to Abcarian.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Eric Ferguson, Nielsen VP media analytics, reveals the sheer scale at which over-the-top TV devices have gained US traction:
- “238 million Americans in a given month have access to a Connected TV device.”
- “That’s almost 80% of all Americans with a TV.”
- “Vast majority of those, almost 90%, are using those Connected TV devices in a given month.”
- “We’re seeing, on average of 1.5 hours a day of usage of those devices among users.”
The data comes from Nielsen People Monitor, the panel through which Nielsen quantifies behavior, and was issued in November.
With that kind of consumer up-take, attention turns to how marketers can best reach the target audiences.
Ferguson talks about how Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings system measures ad exposure on, first, computers, evolving in to mobile and now connected TV after it added Roku and Hulu.
If those services only represent a partial picture of the burgeoning connected TV landscape, Ferguson acknowledges: “There’s more work to be done.”
He says: “There are some things that are more difficult than others to measure but, by and large, we’re capturing the vast majority of it through infrastructure that’s agnostic regardless of platform, in platform.”
This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.
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