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.
]]>While “it’s early days” in such use of AI, “it’s an exciting solution to bring to market,” says Scott Braley, GM, Advertising Platforms, Ooyala, which recently announced a partnership with Microsoft’s machine learning platform.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 NAB Show, Braley outlines the potential benefits of machine learning for helping advertisers steer clear of unsafe environments. He also suggests a “do over” in which the best practices of linear and digital television would be brought to bear on engaging viewers in the quickly expanding OTT space.
There is some labeling and metadata associated with individual pieces of content, but the process usually doesn’t go far enough, according to Braley. “Certainly when you get into user-generated content, it’s very difficult to get all of that labeled properly,” he says.
AI can be deployed to score, label and categorize content “at scale and with more efficiency.” This would pave the way for more content available programmatically “without having to deal with armies of people just reviewing content manually.”
As more consumers opt for alternatives to pay subscription TV models, younger audiences in particular are flocking to OTT viewing. Common traits among this cohort are media gratification and choice.
“We think from targeting standpoint, the OTT environment is a great hybrid opportunity to do over in a sense,” says Braley.
Combining the best practices of the digital and television worlds would mean not deploying the hyper targetability and addressability of digital and eschewing “index-based measurement models like Nielsen for TV.”
Braley sees this approach involving targeting on a household level using as much census-level data as possible and “decisioning dynamically but maybe not with the one-to-one, user-base that we’re doing in digital today.”
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.
]]>“Monetization is certainly front and center,” Jeremy Helfand, VP, M&E Industry Solutions, Adobe, and VP, Adobe Primetime, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
He likens the shift in focus from audience fragmentation to broadcasters exercising a new muscle. “They need to think more like retailers, understanding who their audiences are,” says Helfand.
This involves having a business model that supports advertising not only of a digital nature but “converged advertising across both linear and digital,” he adds.
With the recent addition of video demand-side platform TubeMogul to its various cloud offerings, Adobe is looking to connect the buy and sell sides for “a common definition of audience to increase the value of advertising,” regardless of what screen it’s delivered to.
More recently, Adobe and video monetization technology and services provider Ooyala formed a partnership that will enable Ooyala to “leverage the playback and ad insertion capabilities of Adobe Primetime to help enhance their suite of products,” Helfand explains.
“Pairing our IVP solutions with Adobe gives even more insight into analytics and measurement, building common data sets across every function of video all with a single goal. To grow your business,” Ooyala Co-founder and SVP of Products and Solutions, Belsasar Lepe, said in a statement announcing the partnership.
Adobe’s latest report on digital video shows that “TV everywhere” has doubled in size over the last two years. “What’s really interesting is as we watch consumption of that content, TV is coming back into the living room,” Hefland says.
The highest concentration of daytime consumption is happening on mobile devices, but from 4-9 p.m. connected TV devices are dominant, according to the Adobe report.
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.
]]>This is easier said than done in a world marked by the proliferation of skinny programming bundles and rampant cannibalization. The capital demands of investing in infrastructure and platforms can be a dizzying maze for established broadcasters to navigate while trying to cling to their audiences and generate new ones.
Seeking to be the tour guide for this trip is Accenture, which just weighed in with its annual road map called Bringing TV To Life, which provides strategies for both traditional video content distributors such as TV networks and programmers, as well as content aggregators such as pay TV operators.
“The interesting thing about a broadcaster is that they are a B to B business generally but at the same time they have B to C capabilities,” Sef Tuma, who is MD & Global Lead at Accenture Digital Video and the author of Bringing TV To Life, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
“In their old world it was very broadcast capabilities. The fact is they don’t have any of the CRM, one-to-one or any sort of relationship-based capabilities in their operating model,” Tuma says.
The delicate balancing act is one of retaining and growing the value of each of household while investing in generating engagement and, most important, reach. “Because reach is really what their competitors care about, whether that’s Google or Facebook. They care reach that’s unbounded by infrastructure,” he adds.
Tuma cites as one example BBC, an Accenture client that “took power of all of their digital capabilities and put a personalization platform under it to be able to start creating new ways of having conversations with the audience.”
Broadcasters need to understand their audiences not solely for the traditional purposes of advertising, but to inform decisions about content investment and “be able to find their most valuable audience.”
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.
]]>Advertisers that use DoubleClick Bid Manager can now bid on both online and local linear TV inventory, the latter representing the top 50 DMA’s reaching some 106 million households, Ferreira explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 NAB Show.
Local TV stations use WideOrbit to book and invoice offers, make ad decisioning and manage creative, among other activity. “Since we’re the DFP, we do not require the stations to give us any inventory. We’re just a software layer,” says Ferreira.
So if a DoubleClick user has an interest in local TV spots they can submit an offer to a station and “your offer shows up in the same software that they would seen an offer from the Ford dealership that just called them,” he adds.
“Historically, TV and digital advertising have been bought and measured through different systems and currencies,” Google says in announcing the integration. “By adding traditional TV buying into DoubleClick Bid Manager, we are taking the first step towards allowing advertisers and agencies to manage their video campaigns across digital and linear TV, in a more efficient and effective way.”
While local TV has been attractive to marketers for many reasons, it’s had its currency drawbacks, according to Ferreira, and was complex to buy on a national basis.
“It was ripe for somebody to just come in and stitch it together and make it as easy to buy as buying a video on YouTube,” he says.
Ferreira is amused by the turn of events in a path that has seen a lot of ad tech innovation fueled by the expected “demise” of TV. “So it’s kind of ironic after 10 years of demise we have these companies now integrated with TV instead of waiting to replace it,” he says.
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.
]]>Exhibiting at NAB Show, Ooyala – whose offerings include media logistics, video platform and video advertising – announced two partnerships:
Speaking with Beet.TV at NAB Show, Ooyala founder and products and solutions SVP Belsasar Lepe explained the integrations.
“(Customers) are able to send their video content to the (Microsoft) Cognitive set of services they’re able to automatically mine that content for very useful bits of metadata,” he said.
“For instance, we can identify who is in a particular piece of content, we can leverage speech to text to create closed captioning …, we can drive better personalisation or better ad targeting.
“Given issues occurring today with brand safety, with advertising being shown alongside extremist content on YouTube, solutions like this help increase the knowledge around what’s happening in the content, making sure the ad strategy takes in to account what’s going on inside the content.”
Ahead of the show, Ooyala chairman Stephen Elop named Jonathan Huberman its CEO, formerly CEO of Syncplicity.
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 is according to a trio of ad-tech execs whose companies help bring some visibility to the problem, but who say the challenge is greater than that.
Almost three years after the Media Ratings Council set guidelines for what constitutes a viewable ad impression (50% of the video player in view for at least two seconds), Beet.TV convened a panel to discuss viewability at the Beet Retreat.
The discussion, viewable in our recorded session, showed a general appreciation for viewability – and a recognition that it should be used as just part of an overarching strategy.
Moat sales director Peter Kuhn:
“Viewability should be a baseline standard but it shouldn’t drive investment.
“We fundamentally need standards. If we’re all going to grade, as Mark Pritchard of P&G said, a yard the same way, it’s impossible to start asking questions around where investment should go, what effectiveness is, if we’re not all measuring things the same way.
“(But) the consumptive patterns of consumers is outpacing the ability for a marketers to … come up with the right standards for success.”
Ooyala advertising platforms GM Scott Braley:
“The idea of needing standards is categorically right. (But) the intimacy between buyers and sellers has, for a while now, been lost and needs to be regained.
“When you rely on those (companies) that are all too willing, ready and happy to be intermediaries – to rely on the platforms without understanding who you’re buying, what the inventory is or what you’re selling to – that’s when you start to over-rely on the idea of metrics as a universal truth for good and bad. That’s a subjective thing.
“They’re so myopically focused on the idea of this metric, and not what you’re buying.”
Eyeview Digital TV SVP and GM Boaz Cohen
“We need standards – but for us, our standard is sales. Instead of focusing on media metrics – viewability, completions and other stuff – we focus on sales. Give us $100k for video budgets, we’ll deliver you $300k in sales.
“We do need viewability … but that’s our problem, the supply problem, the ad-tech problem – not the marketer problem. Their standard should be sales; focused on offline and online sales.”
Cohen countered the suggestion that video outcomes are only for driving immediate actions, saying that marketer outcomes linked to video – including car dealership visitation and loyalty card-linked retail purchases – can be measured up to 30 days after an ad is watched.
The panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The combined entity, now also part of Australia telco Telstra’s family, has spent the time since merging its respective strengths, and is now ready to go at a new product area.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ooyala ad platforms GM Scott Braley explains: “One of the biggest areas of focus for us over the last couple of years, since the acquisition of the Videoplaza business by Ooayla, has been thinking of ways to bring together the direct-sold business that broadcasters have traditionally relied on as a monetisation channel with programmatic.
“We’ve just recently culminated two years of development with a holistic decisioning engine, giving broadcasters a centralised tool to consider inventory allocation across both of those channels dynamically, with lots of flexibility and configurability.
“The next big thing that we’re tackling is the integration of content analytics with advertising, really understanding … how to think about content and the different users you’ve got and how that translates to advertising on the revenue side.”
Braley describes it as a consulting service that helps broadcasters understand how to use new data, specifically the relationship that programming has on advertising offerings and effectiveness.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We are now announcing our roll-out of our new platform – we are piloting the holistic ad server for video – which comprises the integration of SSP-type capabilities natively within the video ad server.”
Why holistic? “We don’t believe, philosophically, in the standalone SSP. We see that as just a glorified network,” Braley adds.
He claims around 40% of European broadcasters are using his platform – so where will growth come from?
Braley aims to cross-sell the holistic platform to existing Ooyala as well as seeking out new customers.
“We expect there to be net new-prospect customers as well,” he adds. “Some premium, ex-LiveRail customers are now urgently looking for a new home.”
]]>As an official Media Solutions Partner for Facebook Live, Silicon Valley-based Ooyala has a ground-level view of the explosion of choices available to consumers to satisfy their needs for all things video. It comes amid the continued discussion about the need for video standards and, in the absence thereof, the ability to prove viewer engagement.
“There’s always a balance between standardization and people who want to have custom formats,” Jonathan Wilner, VP, Products and Strategy at Ooyala, tells Beet.TV during an interview at the 2016 NAB Show of the National Association of Broadcasters. “If we’re going to get more TV money in, that’s very used to trading against currency, then I think we need increasing amount of standardization to be in on the buy.”
This is particularly so when competing against the likes of Facebook and Google, with their huge audiences and data-gathering capabilities. Ooyala’s solutions for video providers include one of the world’s largest premium video platforms plus a leading ad serving and programmatic platform.
With Facebook Live, more choices also mean more confusion.
“What we’re seeing, interestingly, is inquiries from people that are running authenticated TV everywhere services that want to put clips onto Facebook,” Wilner says. “Their affiliate deals say they can’t run those clips on their authenticated services and they can’t offer them without authentication but they can put them on Facebook. That’s a sign of confusion in the market.”
In addition to its Facebook Live endeavor, Ooyala this month debuted an all-new HTML5 video player built for fast, consistent performance across desktop and mobile devices, plus Ooyala Flex, a media logistics solution modernizing video production workflows for broadcasters, studios, publishers, and brands.
]]>Amongst the biggest changes – not just being acquired, but also being owned by a corporate, following Australian telco Telstra’s earlier acquisition of Ooyala last summer.
“This, for us, has been a big change – coming from a VC-backed situation forces you to be careful about how you spend money,” says Videoplaza CEO Sorosh Tavakoli, now SVP of ad tech for Ooyala.
Tavakoli started Stockholm-based Videoplaza in 2007 but is now moving to New York. He says trepidation about the journey his company has taken quickly dissipated.
“It’s pretty scary for someone like me who used to be the founder and CEO of the business – there are so many things that can go wrong,” he says.
“It’s been so much better than I anticipated. Culture fit; we felt like one company straight away. We felt, ‘we’d hire these guys’. We are adding about 10 people in the coming six months.”
We interviewed Tavakoli at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The buying company says the deal “allows Ooyala to tap into the fast-growing video ad market”, “the first step in a multi-step strategy aimed at establishing global leadership in personalized cloud TV and video”. For Stockholm-based Videoplaza, it is an opportunity to improve its US footprint.
Speaking at IBC Show in Amsterdam recently, Videoplaza‘s director David Muehle told Beet.TV, in this video interview, that programmatic advertising for online video is catching up to the evolution of programmatic in display.
Whilst the pair will continue to operate under their own names for name, Ooyala will begin offering the combined service offering in due course.
]]>Ooyala’s answer to this problem is Hook, a capability that can playback and monetize mobile video on Android devices.
Hook also allows publishers to protect premium content and measure analytics.
Beet.TV spoke with Berry in a video interview at MIPTV.
– Katy Charles
]]>Hook is a new video app that brings premium video to Android devices. Hook relies on adaptive bitrate and live streaming using HLS and allows for standard ad insertion. “It’s been harder to build an Android experience, but the hope with Hook is that starts to change,” Knapp tells us. “It shouldn’t matter to the consumer which devices they want video on and the technical challenges. It is key and critical to remove those barriers to consumers. Consumers will always follow the path of least resistance.”
Hook enables the delivery of live and on-demand content and integrates analytics and content recommendations. Increasingly, consumers are watching online video as a replacement for TV, he adds. In its recent report, Ooyala found that in March 77 percent of the time spent watching mobile video was with content longer than ten minutes, such as movies and TV shows.
-Daisy Whitney
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