Demonstrating the power of TV advertising increasingly requires more complete data that show how consumers follow the path from seeing an ad to acting upon it. Tracking consumers along this journey, often called the “purchase funnel,” is a key part of making TV more competitive with digital rivals.
“We need to prove that television can do more,” Noah Levine, chief revenue officer of TV analytics firm 605, said in this episode of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “The efficacy of television is greater than display, it’s greater than search.”
Speaking to Sean Cunningham, president and chief executive of VAB, Levine recommended that advertisers abandon “last-click” attribution that tends to favor companies further down the sales funnel. Those companies include the digital media giants that are adding more online shopping features to drive direct sales for retailers and brands.
“Last-click attribution has done a major disservice to marketers, agencies, media sellers — basically everyone except for Google and Facebook,” Levine said.
“Full-funnel attribution” that starts with brand lift at the top of the purchase funnel is one way for TV networks and marketers to gauge the effect of ads on “mid-funnel” activities like website visits, foot traffic through mobile geolocation and direct sales, he said.
To track TV viewership, 605 combines set-top box information with automatic content recognition (ACR) data to provide a more complete picture of what viewers are watching. 605 tracks the viewing habits 21 million U.S. households, and projects the information among the general population.
While audience measurement has come a long way since asking people to record their viewing habits in written diaries, there is still room for improvement. Measuring audiences across platforms, including “walled garden” environments like Facebook, and achieving unduplicated reach are a challenge.
“Unfortunately, I don’t believe we as an industry have solved the cross-platform, unduplicated reach problem yet,” Levine said. “We have to be able to process that digital exposure data.”
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>But it will count for nothing if it is not underpinned by a solid data foundation.
So says Noah Levine, chief revenue officer at 605, a company helping advertisers buy smarter using TV data.
“As an industry, everyone’s aware that … attribution and outcomes are a huge shiny object in the room and there’s an increasing embracing of outcomes across the industry,” Levine says in this Beet.TV interview.
“Where I think we fall down is there isn’t enough focus on the viewership data that is being used to actually say ‘These households or devices were exposed to this ad’ and then marrying it up in a scalable, accurate, powerful manner to whatever the outcome is you’re trying to measure against.
“A lot of it is built on a house of cards.
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from
In February, 605 launched 605 Platform, a software system that will help programmers and advertisers plan, buy, assess and attribute advanced advertising campaigns.
It is the latest such platform to emerge offering ad buyers similar capabilities.
“This is our foray officially into the television measurement space,” Levine says. “We’re absolutely excited. We have launched pilot customers of Discovery and AMC with more to follow and it’s not only for programmers. It’s also for agencies and brand marketers.
“The reason why we named 605 Platform is we believe that the television marketplace needs to view itself as a platform in and of itself
The interview was conducted by Forrester VP and principal analyst Joanna O’Connell.
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 that is the kind of optimism that is applied to every business sector that finds itself at the mind-expanding show.
Whilst at the show in January, Noah Levine, chief revenue officer at 605, a technology company helping advertisers use data to better target TV ads, reflected on the technology-driven pace of change in the TV and advertising industries.
He spoke about industry imperatives in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s about the audience and consumer experience with television,” he says. “It can’t (that) be 20% of the time spent during a program (is spent) watching ads.
“(Broadcasters must) retain that audience, when so much of the marketplace has the option of buying their way out of the ad support in the television ecosystem.”
Levine, most recently at senior executive at FOX Networks, was alluding to subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, which have experienced a rapid rise in popularity as a segment of the viewer marketplace has chosen to pay for ad-free programming.
All of that and more is keeping companies on their toes.
“And so, there’s a huge amount of dynamism in terms of the conversation and the solutions that are taking place, to really let television rise above, and to continue being the premium entertainment, news and advertising medium,” Levine adds.
“Television can do a lot more than what it has historically done.”
Noah Levine will be speaking at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5 to 7, 2020.
]]>During “Data Activation, the New Tool for Programmers”, a panel convened at Beet Retreat In The City, executives held a refreshingly frank discussion on the true state of two of the most talked-about tech…
They were questioned by Howard Shimmel of Janus Strategy & Insights.
This year, executives like Levine have started describing the ability of advertisers to truly know who they are targeting with connected TV as “deterministic TV“, a proposed label that is in its infancy.
For Discovery’s Garfield: “I think about it as known versus inferred (audience profiles). As a national programmer at Discovery for 30 years, what we really knew about our audience was on an anonymized basis … age, gender…. inferred from a panel.
“Today, through our affiliate agreements, we actually have access to known (ad) exposures on set-top boxes where they know that person, they know what they’ve watched.”
WarnerMedia’s Aversano cautioned against expecting that the capabilities enabled by “deterministic” will grow to account for all TV targeting tactics.
“As an industry there’s been a ton of lip service given to this idea of a pure deterministic world,” he said. “It just will never happen. You’re never going to have perfect census-level measurement of everything. I don’t think you will. We need to accept the fact it will never be perfect – (instead), just make it a little bit better.”
Levine, deterministic’s champion, agreed. “Deterministic data today, unless you have a hundred percent of the U.S population, it’s not going to work, which is why you have to apply the projection methodologies,” he said. “But deterministic data activation allows us to do things on television that historically have been very hard to do.”
Which brought the panel to the second much-lauded technology – the new ability to attributed advertisers’ intended brand outcomes (be it a purchase or a click) directly back to a viewer’s exposure to a TV ad.
New services allow a line to be drawn between those things. But WarnerMedia’s Aversano says the cost of real attribution is prohibitive.
He explained: “The attribution marketplace today… you have a handful of vendors who I think have really good solutions, but they are cobbled together from lots of different third-party datasets that they have to pay for in licence that they in turn then charge advertisers, agencies and media companies for. A typical attribution study that we run for a specific campaign costs $30,000 to $120,000 for one campaign.
“That’s a million-dollar campaign and we have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to measure it. That will never scale.”
Aversano said the reality of this kind of attribution measurement is, it isn’t effective enough.
“The state of the industry today and this ecosystem of vendors is … none of it is at scale and none of it is always-on, (it) almost makes that impossible,” he said.
Discovery’s Garfield urged publishers not to dive farther in to offering guaranteed outcomes against ad purchases.
“We just don’t have enough of that understanding or benchmarks around what’s driving these numbers to really start guaranteeing on that,” he said. “And I think we all have to take a step back and understand one step deeper around what’s driving some of these outcomes.
“If the same audience is seeing the same creative across a bunch of networks, then what really is the differentiator in that outcome? And that’s what we’re trying to understand and we’re working with vendors and talking obviously to agencies about helping us together to understand that.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>It is the new practice of attribution, and technology vendors like TVSquared are busy helping broadcasters prove to advertisers how an ad exposure can correlate in to a website visit, a drop-in to a store or even a purchase.
But, in this panel discussion with Beet.TV, one executive says “attribution” technology doesn’t only prove specific outcomes like that – it can also evidence the traditional metric of brand uplift.
Attribution is “being able to measure very specific outcomes, return on ad spend, actual conversions, mid-level activities, whether that is site traffic, foot traffic in the real world, but also to be able to measure the impact of what advertising does to the brand, what is the lift that it has on the brand”, says 605’s chief revenue officer Noah Levine.
But Levine says the same technology can be used for something more.
He says: “There is the lifetime value of a maybe a six-year-old who … sees a luxury car ad … that (ad) impression has an impact on that six-year-old to aspire potentially to something later in life saying, ‘Hey, I want this BMW. I want this Mercedes,’ et cetera.
“That’s something that, particularly with deterministic television and where we’re going with television measurement, we’re more and more able to do this.”
Brand uplift is the ill-defined and hard-to-discover outcome that advertisers have traditionally fallen back on seeking, given TV’s historic inability to measure specific audience behaviors.
Now TVs are gaining the ability to observe specific content and advertising viewing, whilst software platforms can link those profiles to consequential online actions. So, how would Levine use it to measure brand uplift?
He says his company’s technology enables “full-funnel” attribution, meaning it encompasses brand uplift, too.
“The way that you measure the impact on the brand is a qualitative exercise. And the nature of it being qualitative allows for it to be unique in every single application,” he says.
“Different brands will ask different questions in surveys that are delivered in different and through different modalities, digital, telephone calls, mail, and so forth.
“We’re moving away from the one size fits all currency and we’re moving towards providing the data, and technology, and solutions to be able to allow each agency, each buyer, each brand to come up with the way that they want to transact and measure, and the same thing on the sales side.”
Levine was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy, by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.
Still, at this stage in the game, too few executives understand enough about the new deterministic opportunity – according to an ad-tech exec urging more awareness.
“I hope that the marketplace at large develops a better understanding of what deterministic data is for television, and what it can do,” says Noah Levine, chief revenue officer of 605, ahead of Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media, an industry discussion event in New York on Wednesday.
So, what is “deterministic” TV data, exactly?
Levine says it includes cable set-top box data, automatic content recognition and (ACR) viewership data – real data about what real viewers are watching.
“Deterministic data obviously supports the ability to see at a granular level who is exposed or what households are exposed to a particular ad, and then to be able to perform a whole slew of attribution,” Levine says.
“What is special about deterministic TV is that it supports extremely powerful data activation onto the television ecosystem, and that’s something that other types of TV viewership data can’t support.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households. It combines viewing data from:
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But its flip side, “deterministic” targeting, promises to give advertisers more accuracy by using real viewer data to find the known audiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, 605’s chief revenue officer Noah Levine describes the value of that deterministic data, which connected TV devices can now supply.
“The key difference about what deterministic TV viewership data is, compared to others, is that there’s an ability to associate identity through a safe haven so that data can be activated at that individual household level,” he says.
Despite the existence of a fragmented TV ecosystem with distinct buying methods, that real viewing data will allow advertisers to buy seamlessly, Levine reckons.
“We have a national ad market, we have a local ad market, we have an addressable ad market – they’re all planned and transacted separately in silos,” he explains.
“Deterministic TV viewership data … allows for the types of insights at scale to be able to combine these three disparate television advertising markets.
“But also (you can) take deterministic digital data or deterministic CRM data or deterministic purchase data or whatever first-party data an ad seller or a marketer might have, or third party data… to be able to plan, activate, measure and perform attribution and then close the loop from an optimization perspective.”
605 provides aggregate set-top box and automatic content recognition (ACR) from 21 million households.
It combines viewing data from:
But Levine says data isn’t enough. In TV, deterministic – which still isn’t captured by 100% of all TV sets – also depends on a projection model which can extrapolate out across the national footprint.
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.
]]>“The streaming wars are literally raging right now. I believe that the next area for innovation is around the data and measurement that is surrounding television.”
In addition to Levine, 605 simultaneously hired Caroline Horner as SVP of Product Management. She previously led TV and cross-platform product innovation for Rentrak-comScore’s advanced measurement and optimization services and spearheaded new video product launches for comScore, according to a news release.
Levine says he was initially attracted to 605 because of its access to linear TV household viewing data, data rights and matching capabilities. “What I found upon deeper investigation was that there’s a very powerful set of technology infrastructure and process that 605 has put in place to support a multi currency future,” Levine explains.
Founded in 2016, 605 has mainly focused on working with brands and MVPD’s. “This year, we’re really expanding our focus into programmers and we also do work with agencies.”
While attribution is a “very significant focus,” but we’re not just looking at what was the immediate sales lift, what happened in the next seven days after someone saw an ad. We’re looking at full-funnel activity,” Levine says.
Such insights are the result of “looking at a large percentage of the U.S. population” instead of just focusing on 40,000 households “or having to take data and essentially match against a few million households and then model it out for the rest of the U.S. population. We’re entering an era where we can actually see for twenty or thirty percent of the U.S. population second by second what are they actually watching.”
He calls what 605 is doing as moving the industry beyond single-source viewing to what it calls multi-source. That means “taking the best of all the viewing datasets that happen to be available” from MVPD set-top boxes and comingling it with smart TV ACR data.
“We’re continuing that quest of building out a larger footprint of more MVPD data as well as additional ACR data so that we can see everything that’s playing back on the TV glass as well as throughout the home as there are multiple TV sets within the home.”
]]>Moderated by consultant Matt Prohaska, the discussion touched on the eternal reality of supply versus demand in making sales decisions, along with the prospects for the OpenAP audience targeting consortium.
“We still have bifurcation in linear programmatic and digital, so that’s always something that we have to navigate,” said FOX’s Noah Levine. “We’ve seen a maturity begin to develop in the linear programmatic TV space, which is quite nice.”
From the sell-side, programmatic is “primarily about automating the buy and being able to empower the agency, the buyer, to do more. That’s a good thing for us as sellers,” Levine added.
“The fact that we still need to look at linear programmatic as kind of a separate beast is something we should all start to want to reconcile and maybe have some degree of concern about,” said Brett Hurwitz of OATH, the Verizon unit. And if all TV inventory becomes available on an IP-based delivery platform, a major concern will be getting “enough of a premium on the highly desirable target folks to make up for the fact that some of your other impressions are going to probably be going at a much lower price.”
The issue of brand safety still holds sway and stands in the way of 100% data-driven decisions, according to Mike Law of Dentsu Aegis Network. “We need to find the right balance of that, because some brands hold that way too close to them and some buyers hold that way too close to them,” said Law. “They fear that if I don’t say something then this computer will do my job for me or somebody will do it for me.”
Sellers have obvious concerns about total automation when optimizing their inventory across the multitude of buyers. “In linear, there’s a lot of pressure on the inventory. There’s a huge amount of demand,” said Levine.
“It’s true, the private marketplaces are really the path forward for the most part when it comes to especially linear television inventory,” said Hurwitz.
Given some marketers’ desire to cherry pick ad units versus having the ability to transact via automation, “There’s a very healthy tension between those two models that we’re seeing in the marketplace,” Levine noted. And while being able to leverage programmatic technology to access inventory and re-optimize plans “is a very desirable state for us to reach in the future,” it’s tough to do for sellers that don’t have lots of unsold inventory. “That’s one of the challenges.”
Asked by Prohaska about the prospects of the OpenAP targeting consortium launched by FOX, Viacom and Turner, Law said its premise “remains really strong and positive.” The missing piece to him is being able to transact collectively across all members.
And OpenAP is in a crowded space.
“There’s OpenAP and then I’ve got actually all the partners included in OpenAP trying to sell me their own platform, plus fifteen other networks trying to sell me their platform as well,” said Law. “And then I’ve got Simulmedia calling me, I’ve got Adobe calling me, I’ve got Videology calling me.”
OATH experienced its own version of too many choices upon the merger of AOL and Yahoo, Hurwitz recalled, given the existence of “I’m going to say eight DSP’s between the two companies” plus a number of DSP’s. OATH decided to sunset its linear TV programmatic platform, which Hurwitz called “a fantastic product,” because “we felt was going to serve the industry for some period of time and then perhaps not be the tool the industry needed.”
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.
]]>“Each source of viewing data has its own virtues and benefits. They have challenges as well,” says Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Levine puts those virtues and benefits into the context of the industry’s ongoing quest for more unified targeting and measurement.
Panels tend to be smaller than other options but can go deep in terms of being able to get a vast amount of information about the individual members of the panels. “Panels can typically go down in terms of Nielsen to the person level, and that is a powerful thing for the TV advertising ecosystem,” says Levine.
With cable set-top boxes, “what you’re doing to a certain extent is you’re moving away from person-level measurement to household level measurement.” This comes closest to census-level so that “you can get into the multiple tens of millions of households tracking what they’re viewing.”
The downsides to set-top boxes: they don’t capture over-the-air, over-the-top or connected-TV viewing behavior. “So that’s missing a lot of viewership potential,” says Levine.
Which leaves automatic content recognition, which provides second-by-second viewership information. “ACR by nature defaults to that very, very granular level.”
More granular than just having household mailing addresses, ACR provides “a different level of identity resolution and matching” owing to user registration information and home IP addresses.
“ACR not only allows viewership of what you’re watching through your cable operator it would potentially, provided your TV set’s connected to the Internet, allow you also capture over the air viewership,” Levine says. “But what’s even more interesting is combining that with connected TV viewership.”
Layered on top of panel, set-top box and ACR data are additional datasets for targeting purposes. “So it’s exciting, it’s diverse, it’s a little bit of a Wild West environment. It creates a lot of opportunity but it’s going to be a while for the industry to normalize and accept what is good and what is great,” he adds.
For now, a big focus is on figuring out how many impressions are available to sell and how many end up being delivered against precision targets, with unduplicated reach a key goal.
]]>Advertisers are looking to solve two particular types of problems, Levine explains in this interview with Beet.TV. They are seeking more concentration of impressions against “whatever it is that they looking to target,” or “looking to get incremental reach beyond the audience that they’re currently able to be exposed to.”
He dubs “exciting” some synergies that exist between the way Fox offers its inventory and how agencies plan. The latter wants to optimize against a precision target across all the media sellers within the TV ecosystem. This is typically done by networks and dayparts.
“We can optimize down to the selling title level, we can optimize down to the quarter hour level, we can optimize down to the spot level,” says Levine. “That’s a really big part and then the other part is frequently what we do with this new type of conversation about buying against precision audiences is we help de-risk.”
This is done by offering guarantees against advertisers’ actual audiences “that the advertiser and the agency is investing a lot of time and energy and money and resources into planning against.”
Levine divides the video market into three segments: linear, addressable TV and digital.
Linear is extremely well-defined with a currency and rating system that, while still panel-based, provides “a concept of unduplicated reach” along with “an agreement for calculating impression delivery.”
Calling addressable TV “a younger market,” Levine notes that while early movers tended to be MVPD’s, Fox currently can offer advertisers access to between 10 and 12 million addressable households.
“What’s different between a lot of the programmers and MVPD’s is that we’re selling our national ad minutes,” Levine says. “We have a lot more frequency, depending upon if you have broadcast only or cable network only, or a mix of the two. It’s somewhere between five to eight times the amount of ad minutes that an MVPD has.” As for digital, the “vast majority” of Fox’s inventory “is actually viewed on the TV set.”
Digital TV impressions, he adds, are “actually the same type of impressions as addressable and, by the way, they’re not all that different from the impressions that are delivered in the linear world.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>For companies more used to selling the context of their content to advertisers, the hot new possibility – in the over-the-top TV era – is to instead sell individual viewers, thanks to the myriad data points on offer.
But which are the most viable revenue opportunities, and which choices should distributors leave on the table?
In this panel debate convened at the Beet Retreat, executives from several publishers and distributors weighted up how they tackle the wealth of new options available.
NBCUniversal sales and strategy EVP Mike Rosen:
“I like the word ‘balance’. The culture of our company should be about content-plus-audience. We’re not abandoning content. We don’t want to go to our agencies, our advertisers, and make them choose between the two.
“We sort of see that balance, where, yes, you’re going to sponsor some shows, because your brand belongs there. But, at the same token, there may be other strategies that involve looking across our entire portfolio, and finding the audiences. The two, I think will coexist for a really long time.”
Fox Networks Group Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions Noah Levine:
“A year ago, I was very digitally focused. I’m very convergence focused right now. My team is probably spending about 70% of its time focused on linear. My team focuses on audience, and programmatic solutions across linear, addressable, set top box VOD, and digital.
“A lot of my time, and my leadership’s time, is spent socializing these concepts internally, getting buy-in, developing excitement around these initiatives, because part of our job is to be disruptors, to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been using age, gender as a way to guarantee for very long time’.”
Acxiom VP, Television Partner Development, Craig Berkley:
“I think most of the organizations in traditional TV are aware that this needs to happen, that we need to move towards addressable, and audience based buying, and incorporate all of these into our platforms. Different organizations are in different stages in accomplishing that internally.”
Oath Business Lead, Advanced TV, Brett Hurwitz:
“I kind of go through work each day, wondering ‘What are the obstacles’? There’s obstacles, I think, on the supply side. I think there’s obstacles on the demand side. I think we have to, as an industry, as leaders in the industry, really start breaking down those issues, and tackling them one by one, because I think the evolution is happening remarkably slowly.
“I think traditional linear television delivery has a certain amount of life ahead of it. It doesn’t make sense to me that money is still being spent the old way.”
A+E ad sales president Mel Berning:
“We have all sorts of balls up in the air right now. We would all prefer to get to a world where we’re talking about (advertising) outcomes.
“Until clients, agencies, and all of us are able to get into a real dialogue about what is the right metric to gage the effectiveness of the medium, I think we’re in a difficult spot.”
The panel was moderated by MediaLink A+E managing director Matt Spiegel.
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.
]]>That narrative is about “advancing the conversation away from adults 18 to 49 to what is your actual target, what is your actual goal” as an advertiser, Fox’s SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Fox unveiled the trial with Comcast during NYC TV Week. With on-demand programming and streaming, Fox’s addressable advertising can reach audiences that may not be watching linear, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
“We have the ability to sell and activate data in the same exact ways that MVPD’s are out there selling addressable today,” Levine explains.
The link with Hulu is to reach viewers who use connected-TV devices like Apple TV and Roku but it also applies to Hulu’s mobile and desktop viewing experiences, according to Levine.
On its cable network properties, MVPD’s get two minutes per hour of ad inventory to sell. Fox gets to monetize all of the remaining ad minutes.
“What we’re doing is packaging up that inventory to allow advertisers and agencies to take their first-party data, any combination of third-party data, and be able to match that against the MVPDs’ sense of identity through a safe haven,” says Levine.
Both Fox and Comcast use FreeWheel to handle ad insertions.
Fox has been offering addressable ads via its Fox AIM solution to reach its linear TV audiences. By adding in Comcast, “It’s now a cross-platform solution. We can provide the best worlds to an advertiser,” says Levine.
The Comcast and Hulu endeavors are the latest steps in Fox’s desire to “bring the future of TV advertising to market today.” It’s already rolled out six-second ads in linear-delivered programming and sponsored streams in VOD.
Reducing waste is one of the goals. “A lot of people argue that, ‘hey there really is no waste.’ There actually is waste and the waste is wasting the audience’s time,” Levine says.
“We as the media seller take on the responsibility to provide a better end user experience by having the option to cut down the ad load and be able to ensure that they’re the most relevant ads that are going to drive the highest ROI for the buyers.”
This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.
]]>“Our biggest form of competition in human attention in the entertainment television space is ad-free viewing environments versus ad-supported viewing environments,” says Noah Levine, Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions for Fox Networks Group.
Fox aspires not only to preserve TV as an ad-supported medium but also to “enhance its market messaging, its brand safety, its effectiveness and the quality of ad recall,” Levine says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Fox used the occasion of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity to lend its weight to the six-second ad format that YouTube launched last year, as Advertising Age reports. Fox’s six-second ads will be shown to viewers across its digital and on-demand properties, where they will be unskippable, along with linear TV.
The rationale behind supporting six-second ads is that if agencies and advertisers are embracing a format that reduces the amount of time people are obligated to spend watching commercials while supporting advertisers’ goals, “That’s something that we’re absolutely willing to embrace and experiment with,” Levine adds.
Fox’s FX Networks already has some of the most Emmy nominated and awarded TV content that is ad-supported. To preserve and enhance the viewer experience, FX has crafted an option for set-top box, video-on-demand and digital content.
Under this scenario, “essentially an advertiser would own the entire ad viewing experience for an individual viewer and craft a story from a brand messaging perspective, from pre-roll to each and every mid-roll,” Levine explains.
Another FX offering consists of sponsored ad breaks wherein mid-roll positions “can be one ad that isn’t competing for attention along with four other 30-second ads for the viewer.”
Fox’s limited-ad options can be targeted to specific types of content, whether it’s FX originals, movie or other programming, according to Levine.
With audience-based targeting, Fox seeks to go beyond age and gender. “Let’s go into enhanced demographics. Let’s look at the third-party data sets that are out there” to deliver the most effective and engaging advertising “that’s as relevant as possible to the end user.
”This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying the New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.
]]>That may be an intriguing possibility. Indeed, on many over-the-top devices, it may even be the norm.
But, for a television industry whose infrastructure has been built up around the concept of the household, that may be about as granular as advertisers can get, or should want to get.
That was a view expressed at a panel Beet.TV convened to discuss the new techniques.
“Television is bought and sold at the household level,” Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanton said. “You don’t necessarily know who in the household is consuming the content at that time. That is ‘solutions 2.0’ to figure out.”
And Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed that view, saying current currencies for measuring TV ads were built to fit a model based on households, not viewers.
“Nielsen has done a beautiful job in the linear television market,” Leine said. “It’s an extremely trusted currency. There is no equivalent outside of linear television.
“… It’s less important to have a very specific currency for very specific data segments, of which there could be thousands. But there must be an evolution so that we solve for unduplicated reach, cross-platform.”
Regardless of the level of targeting precision, there will be value simply in TV ad delivery over new connected devices, said Ooyala ad platforms GM Scott Braley.
“Television ads are not being viewed, they’re not being seen, they’re not impacting me at all,” he said. “So unskippable OTT inventory is actually pretty sizeable opportunity from a viewability and impact standpoint.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>That was the verdict of several executives on a panel of industry folk assembled to discuss TV companies’ response to the burgeoning new multi-screen future.
The key question – how to approach ad sales when platforms are proliferating – leaves many with a sore head. But executives suggested one response: embrace chaos.
“We have to provide consumers with choice,” said video ad-tech firm Ooyala’s ad platforms GM Scott Braley.
“The broadcasters really need to be thinking about it holistically, and deploying analytics sitting across the licensing of content, subscription services, AVOD businesses and connect all of that together to produce a holistic content ROI across all of those models.”
Braley said his company is helping deliver that right now to clients in France, Germany and Sweden.
Fox Networks Group advertising data and technology group SVP Noah Levine echoed the view.
“My crystal ball is foggy,” he conceded. “(But) the future is one where there can be multiple eventualities, multiple currencies, flexibility to support (many advertiser choices), different types of datasets and so forth.”
And Viacom data strategy SVP Gabe Bevilacqua said his firm thinks the future will look similar, but more so.
“We are investing in the belief that a transition is happening,” he said. “There is a rate of change that you can’t necessarily, granularly predict.
“But the way you want to address that transition is, ‘Ok, so what do marketers want to buy, how do agencies want to buy this?’ Where the audience is in 2019 versus 2021, I think there’s going to be a lot of similarities in the way a marketer wants to address them.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>The roots of OpenAP, an unusual collaboration among longtime competitors, can be traced to information conversations about a growing desire on the buy side, according to Noah Levin, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks.
“What ended up happening was Fox, Turner and Viacom would bump into each other in the lobbies of agencies and the agencies were talking to us all about the same thing,” Levine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show. “Hey, I actually want to move beyond age and gender. I want to be able to target high-income households. I want to be able to target my first party data.”
Buyers’ desire was borne out of frustration at having to deploy advanced audience targeting piecemeal.
“It made it very, very difficult to be able to allow that agency and that buyer to understand the results in a consistent manner,” Levine says.
“While demand for audience targeting has grown significantly, adoption has been limited by the fact that audience buying is not as transparent, as consistent and as easy as traditional guarantees,” the founding OpenAP members said in a joint statement on March 15. “It doesn’t need to be that complicated. That changes today.”
The first phase of OpenAP enables buyers to consistently onboard precision audience segments across its participating members for easy activation and receive third-party campaign reporting. So far, Accenture, comScore and Nielsen are providing support to the consortium.
“One of our favorite things to talk about at Fox as an example is self-actualizing truck intenders. You could take the self-actualizing segment and take truck intenders and do a fusion of the two,” Levine says by way of example.
Phase two of OpenAP is still in the defining stage, according to Levine, but it will involve additional datasets and panels for targeting purposes and it “will also include a focus on digital.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Just don’t expect that prospect to go large any time soon.
“There’s a lot of experimentation going on right now in the television industry,” says Fox Network Groups SVP, Advertising, Data and Technology Solutions, Noah Levine, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Agencies and brands are starting to lean in, saying, ‘We want to move beyond doing basic age-gender demographic targeting’.
“We’re also seeing a select number of advanced buyers or brands that have taken their digital best practices and say, ‘Hey, I can activate my first-party data across the internet… how can I do that on television?’ We’re looking at how we can solve those problems.”
But Levine urges caution on over-reading the future of TV ads as here and now already. And he is not the only one expressing that realistic view.
“This is still early days in terms of market adoption and in terms of dollars flowing to what we might call ‘advanced advertising’,” Levine says.
Levin’s Fox is not a bystander as this evolution plays out. Fox operates is own service called AIM, Audience Insights Manager, offering brands and agencies the ability to optimize against Nielsen’s conventional gross rating point and secondary data layer across its linear TV channels.
“We at Fox definitely see some significant traction in optimised linear,” Levine added.
This interview was conducted by MediaLink MD Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>“We’re seeing a lot of major operators and programmers aggressively working toward delivering simulcast across a wide breadth of IP-connected devices,” Adobe senior product evangelist Noah Levine tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“The focus is definitely on Android and iOS right now. iOS is seeing higher viewing numbers than Android, but Roku and Xbox are definitely next on the horizon.”
Microsoft has big television ambitions for its upcoming Xbox One while News Corp’s BSkyB has invested in Roku.
Levine was referring to broadcasters’ simulcast plans. We interviewed him at the Admonsters video summit in New York last week.
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