An ‘identity’ graph is the collection of data points from disparate devices that, when pieced together, add up to indicate a single person’s holistic media behavior.
For a while, identity graphs were part of the ad-tech arms race, a competitive differentiator for whomever had the best identity databases and the means to connect them. But that is changing.
“It used to be more associated within a particular walled garden,” says Ed Davis, chief product officer of OpenAP, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“(People said:) ‘We have the best mouse trap. So come in and in for a penny in for a pound.’
“What I like is this new dynamic that’s emerging, where the actual ID graphs, or the identity that people are building up within their companies, becomes an opportunity to collaborate with other companies.”
Launched three years ago, OpenAP first aimed to harmonize the meta data descriptions used by a variety of TV broadcasters in order to make selling more scaleable.
Then it made a step-change by launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns, and a later cross-platform initiative mark OpenAP’s own foray in to a space that is consuming everyone in advertising – multi-channel identity graphs.
Davis thinks the new interconnection of identity graphs is the game-changer.
“What I get excited about is that people are trying to figure out ways to use their various notions of identity to work together instead of a differentiator to try to amass all of the market share around a whole part of our space,” he says.
“It’s really become a way to connect easily, which I think is very productive.
“Having everything start with the audience is important to us because, if all of your downstream audience expressions for targeting a campaign are based off of a single initial activation that the buyer is comfortable with, that unlocks the ability to do cross-platform planning.”
You are watching “Optimizing a Rapidly Converging TV & Video Marketplace: What’s Next,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Amobee. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Now the JV that is OpenAP wants to start piecing together viewers themselves.
OpenAP’s first act was all about semantics – unifying how the networks described attributes they make available for data-driven buying.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ed Davis, OpenAP Chief Product Officer, says OpenAp’s next act is to focus on identity.
“Over the next 12 months, our goal is to unlock a cross-platform evolution on our core use cases,” he says.
“Our goal is to evolve the three primary use cases we have in planning, optimization, and measurement, to include cross-platform capabilities.
“Underneath any cross-platform pursuit really is this notion of having an identity for your consumer, for the viewer – identity and data describing the viewer data, describing what the viewer is consuming.
“That’s really important to OpenAP as we pursue any cross-platform extensions to what we’re doing.”
OpenAP is hiring! We're looking for a Director/VP of Product to join our team. This is a rare opportunity to join a company early and be part of building solutions that will shape the future of advanced TV. Learn more here: https://t.co/ur5eGpJOX5 pic.twitter.com/UE95cApBOv
— OpenAP (@OpenAPTV) November 19, 2020
Launched three years ago, OpenAP last year made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns.
The latest initiative would mark OpenAP’s own foray in to a space that is consuming everyone in advertising – identity graphs.
Specifically, though, Davis says OpenAP would want to make such a graph out of existing data points.
“When we think about an identity graph, when we think about the existing solutions out there,” Davis says.
“There’s been a lot of data environments that have been created that are now supporting this co-mingling of data in safer ways – being able to take identity data from one data vendor collector and put it into a safe environment where it can be combined with data from another data provider.
“For us, our goal at OpenAP is to be able to accept data from an agency or brand and match that up with a measurement data or audience activation data set, and then be able to share the result, be able to share the audience segment with any publisher that the agency or brand would like to explore campaigns with.”
You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But Ed Davis isn’t stopping there. In this video interview with Beet.TV at Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the consortium’s chief product officer Ed Davis explains why he wants to see more names on that list.
“We’re pretty focused on more publishers that offer premium programming,” Davis says. “There are a number of publishers that aren’t under our umbrella.
“Some of them of course might not be within the next year, but many of them, I think, have been taking a step back and let’s just see how these things unfold.”
“Those are the conversations that we’re having right now,” Davis adds. “We have a number of active conversations with other networks and I think we’ve sort of shifted the way you integrate with us and made it a lot more straightforward. Even here at CES, we’ve been having a few of those conversations and we can see that, just (by) reducing a little bit of the friction to activate with OpenAP, the response has been very, very positive.
“So I think you’ll see not a lot of surprises in membership over the next year. It will be people you’ll say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense. They’re in good company if they join OpenAP’.”
Big Five US broadcast networks not on OpenAP’s list include ABC and The CW, though, of course, considering the wider world of premium non-broadcast video, the universe is much larger.
We are proud to announce the official launch of the OpenAP Market, which brings simplicity and scale to audience-based campaigns in TV advertising across both linear and digital. Learn more: https://t.co/DGScM2vuBb @FOXTV @NBCUniversal @Viacom @Univision pic.twitter.com/8O8lnFbKbA
— OpenAP (@OpenAPTV) October 9, 2019
OpenAP launched three years ago as the means through which the TV networks harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.
Recently, OpenAP made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns.
Great crew last night at the Beet – @OpenAPTV party with Krishan Bhatia @GKBhatia2 @NBCUTogether @DonnaSpeciale David Levy CEO of @openAP and Irwin Gotlieb @WPP @GroupMWorldwide great party at @michaelsnyc #HappyHolidays pic.twitter.com/P2TYuPh2qL
— Andy Plesser (@Beet_TV) December 3, 2019
“The initial phases of OpenAP were very focused on clients who wanted to come and build an audience with OpenAP,” Davis adds. “And what we’ve realised through a lot of conversations with clients is, a lot of them don’t really need or want help defining audiences.
“What they really want to do is take all of the investment they’ve made in their own very sophisticated data solutions and have an easy path to activate all of those audiences so that they can be used for targeting. So we sort of reframed what we do on the audience side.”
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.
]]>But, in 2019, David Levy found the door relatively easy to push on.
The CEO of OpenAP, a consortium through which several broadcast companies are teaming to make it easier for advertisers to buy across their channels, was speaking with Beet.TV about a new initiative to enable direct campaign buying.
Under its first iteration, the two-year-old consortium is the means through which Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision have harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.
Recently, OpenAP made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
Speaking with Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM, for Beet.TV, Levy describes the challenge of unifying the partners.
“It was a lot easier than most people think,” he says. “I think there is a common need now with Facebook and Google out there – I think most people feel like that is the real competitor.
“There’s actually been an incredible amount of collaboration, camaraderie amongst the table, so that actually has not been as bad as most people think.”
Earlier in October, OpenAP unveiled its marketplace plan, after two years in which its primary focus was creating a common taxonomy of characteristics used to buy advanced TV ads across the different partners’ properties.
“You can come in and say, ‘I want auto intenders and I have a million dollar budget, and here’s the campaign flights that I want’,” Levy adds. “And you can actually get one plan back across close to 50% of all the TV inventory, across linear and digital, in one plan.
“All you’re doing is going in and setting your audience and you’re getting back one campaign, instead of having to work with multiple networks. Instead of having to define your audience and onboard it across multiple networks, you just go into OpenAP, define it once and you can get your plan back.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That is why we have begun to see a range of collaborations, consortia and industry associations all come together, in pursuit of scale. It is the ultimate test of the “all boats will rise” idea.
In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat In The City, two such executives discussed how they are embarking on just such initiatives:
They were interviewed by Janus Insights & Strategy president Howard Shimmel…
Led by Inscape, which uses automated content recognition (ACR) in internet-connected Vizio TVs to understand what viewers are watching, Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.
The founding members include Disney Media Networks (which includes ABC, ESPN and Freeform), Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBCUniversal, Discovery, CBS, AT&T’s Xandr and WarnerMedia’s Turner, Hearst Television and AMC Networks.
“The media landscape is littered with the dead carcasses of consortiums that have failed,” McAfee told Shimmel for Beet.TV. “We had seen previous attempts at trying to get to scale that really were, in our mind, rigid in that it was trying to force an entire industry into a single solution.
“The way to scale is flexibility and interoperability and the idea of building sort of a core building block.”
“Every one (of our members), over the course of the last … year and a half, has leaned in very hard. We get at least 25 to 30 participants in all of our meetings,” McAfee said.
“There are four big OEMs, we’re one, there are three others that shall remain nameless. We will probably be rolling out some trials at the first of the year. We think the next tipping point in terms of getting the other OEMs to join is when it’s real and so we’re sort of sitting back and not really pushing very hard on them.
“We will have a workable, a working product by the first of the year and when our members start pushing inventory through that product, the proof will be in that pudding.”
back when Canoe 1.0 launched, there wasn’t the existential threat of Facebook and Amazon and Netflix and Google. And so I think our members know that they have to work together in order to combat that.
Such joined-up thinking is music to the ears of David Levy. The former Fox executive is now CEO of OpenAP, the two-year-old consortium involving Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision which harmonizes how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.
Speaking on the panel, he recanted tales where going it alone didn’t pan out.
“Whether it was true[X] or Fox, every new thing that we did, regardless if it worked, if we were trying to just go up that hill on our own, it was difficult for agencies to invest a big amount to do something new, with just one of us,” he said.
“We’re now all compromising, small compromises, that basically mean we’re all pushing the same ball up the hill, we’re going to have success.
After its first phase of two years, now OpenAP recently launched its own marketplace from which to buy ads across the TV providers.
“A buyer can come define an audience once and actually get back a optimized plan across close to 20 networks, across linear and digital, all in one place,” Levy said.
Next up, Levy aims to get close to agency buyers.
“What we’re planning on rolling out this year is an agency council,” he said. “So we want to get a lot more feedback. A lot of the stuff we’re going to be focusing on is more on the measurement side of this year. So as we start to develop more standards, we’re going to really lean into our agency relationships.”
“The bigger threat by far is the fact that you are going to have three new direct to consumer offerings, all ad free, coming into the market, all competing for consumers’ time and attention and for the ad supported television industry,” OpenAP’s Levy said.
“We better be ready to have a better consumer experience that will make sure we actually retain users.
“We’re all now investing in new ways to transact better, ways to reduce waste so we can get more relevant advertising in front of people. But that has to also result in a better consumer experience and likely reducing ads.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Under its first iteration, the two-year-old consortium is the means through which Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision have harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets. Now OpenAP is making a step forward.
“The first step was just standardising how we talk about audiences and how we define those,” says OpenAP CEO David Levy, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But, to really bring skills to the marketplace, we needed to actually build a marketplace.”
Levy was speaking as the organization launched just that – a new way for buying TV ads using data across the organizations.
“An advertiser can come define any audience segment that they want, build their own campaign across linear and digital and get one consolidated proposal back where they can actually see unduplicated reach for that target segment across all the publishers in our marketplace. Which is close to 50% of the overall TV marketplace. So really excited about that.”
Buyers can either buy direct from OpenAP or go through dedicating buying platforms via integrations with the new marketplace.
The new marketplace does not undo the significant direct buying efforts the individual TV groups already have. Advertisers can still buy from individual operators.
OpenAP’s launch announcement claims the tag team can reach “more than
90% of all U.S. television audiences through its combined member footprint of 20 cable networks, three broadcast networks and a vast array of digital video”.
It’s all about using audience segments that can find people across broadcaster properties, in pursuit of a single advertiser goal, and with cross-network forecast insights.
Levy became full-time CEO of the group in May after a stint at Fox after consortium members decided it should be a dedicated effort.
“Previously, all of us were spending about 25% of our time trying to push things forward,” Levy says. “If we could create a marketplace, that could truly bring scale to the advanced ad formats. But to do that we needed a company and we needed actually dedicated team who has focused a 100% of their time on building this vision”
Levy also gave a recent interview to Variety on the evolution of OpenAP.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.
NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.
“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”
Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.
In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”
Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.
Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”
NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”
Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.
“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”
In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.
Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.
To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”
It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.
He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.
“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”
Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.
“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“What we’re doing with OpenAP is integrating it into our products so you can actually build a rate card against an OpenAP target,” says Ashley Barretto, GM, WO Network, WideOrbit.
“You can build deals against it, you can air the deals, you can steward against it and you can produce and report results,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference. “We started out working with Vantage, Viacom’s offering, and that led to OpenAP.”
Calling television a “fractured marketplace” with shrinking linear audiences, both buyers and sellers are seeking more value from advertising inventory, according to Barretto. Because Nielsen’s age and gender metrics are still the transactional currency, the desire for added value is in advanced audience targeting that can be attributed to business outcomes.
“This is taking them a step forward in terms of targeting the commercials beyond the age and gender into more specific targets that can produce results,” Barretto says.
One of WideOrbit’s priorities getting ad impressions to flow across platforms. With its roots in linear TV and having added digital to its toolkit, it’s working to provide clients with “fluidity solutions, where you can actually build a linear deal and if you’re under-delivering on that, you can move impressions across to the digital platform, bring those delivered impressions back and provide a holistic delivery across multiple platforms.”
The company’s efforts on OpenAP is reflective of what Barretto says is the way it does business. “What we’ve always done is partner with our clients. We don’t build it in a vacuum and then go out to market with it.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”
NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.
“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”
In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>Now with the convergence of linear TV and digital, WideOrbit finds itself at the nexus of change that media buyers and sellers are grappling with in one fashion or other, Offeman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual WideOrbit Connect conference.
“Our entire programmatic effort is designed to make the buying and selling of local media easier,” Offeman says of WO Traffic. “We’re extending that local traffic system not just to be the outlet for their broadcast signal but also for all of their different digital outlets as well.”
The resulting solution is designed for WideOrbit’s clients to aggregate their content “both the linear reach as well as the digital reach so that the buy side can get an unduplicated reach number across the two. I think that’s going to add quite a bit of value to the local market.”
While local TV broadcasters tend to garner far fewer headlines than does the battle of the legacy network giants and digital upstarts, they’re not out of the ballgame, according to Offeman.
“For them to remain relevant, they’ve got to use the power that they have, which is that they can reach a very large local audience within, in digital terms, a geo fence or DMA, and hit them with messages on a really consistent, historically reach/frequency goal.”
Providing unduplicated reach means “basically giving them a message, not more than seven times, not burning them out, not giving it to them in the same pod each and every time. That’s some of things that local can do that digital’s really struggling with,” Offeman adds.
Aside from linear and digital convergence, big differences remain in the way that local TV and national networks ply their trade, according to Offeman. Local is still done by rate, cost per point and gross rating point goals, as opposed to national with its Upfront process, guarantees and CPM targets, among other dissimilarities.
“On the national cable net side, we are doing so many different things,” says Offeman, including working with the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to get custom audience segments into rate cards, developing direct response automation to reduce paper handling and making improvements to electronic copy instruction.
Like many others, Offeman would like to see more uniformity across the different types of TV buyers, including large brands, direct response, hybrid direct response and others.
“It’s not like it’s one clean buying strategy. Our customers need to be very flexible for where the money is coming in, what channel it’s coming in, and then how do they maximize their content.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“What we’re hearing from buyers and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says in this interview with Beet.TV in which he also discusses the early impact of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
Another hot topic at Cannes was “what we politely call next Nielsen, and next Nielsen could involve Nielsen obviously, but sort of what’s next beyond age and demos,” he adds.
OpenAP is not yet one year old, having been announced by Fox, Turner and Viacom in March 2017 and activated that fall, so the current Upfront is its first. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal joined in, as did Univision.
“What we’re hearing from buyers, and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says.
He cites comments by, among others, OMD’s Chris Geraci—who was Prohaska’s boss at BBDO back in the day—to the effect that “there’s some usage there. But the real upside of being able to have proprietary data sets that you keep as a buyer or seller but be able to dip into this great pool and leverage these standards that have been worked on for awhile hasn’t fully been realized yet. I think there’s a lot of energy and excitement about trying to do that more while the legacy television and advanced television buyers and sellers sink their teeth into this marketplace.”
At the outset of Cannes, Prohaska heard of “a couple other” media that should be joining OpenAP in next couple of months, “and that’s all great. But not as much transactional, put to use on a campaign-by-campaign, brand-by-brand basis yet.
“We think we’re sort at that start of the hockey stick and hopefully next year this will become just become the way everyone does business in advanced television and we hope to be helping with a couple of our buyer clients and then one or two sellers maybe, we’ll see.”
GDPR has impacted the EU temporarily, but while many people still think of programmatic in traditional display mobile as sold by open auction, Prohaska says that’s not the case.
“Fortunately, what we’re seeing is a strong move to PMP’s in digital, strong move to deterministic versus probabilistic data strategy. As we’ve been saying for about a year, classic short-term pain for sure with a lot of organizations but long-term upside.”
Prohaska Consulting recently signed its 260th client in the company’s 230th week of business as it expands globally, with its publisher practice representing one-third, tech-one third, the buy-side 20% and the rest investors and trade groups. “Fortunately, that idea of kind of helping everyone move forward under the prism of client first and if we’re there to receive some thanks and compensation, great. It’s been paying off,” said Prohaska.
]]>“What’s remarkable about what NBC is doing in partnership with us is they’re literally letting you buy what you want,” Gordon adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you only want late night on Bravo, you can buy that. And that’s never been enabled before in TV.”
Gordon, whose background includes stints at Lowe, Mediacom, Initiative and Magna Global, was referring to the recent integration of Adobe Advertising Cloud TV and NBCUniversal’s entire portfolio of broadcast and cable television.
The concept behind the integration is that data about TV viewers “is just data if it doesn’t have inventory to decision against,” says Gordon, who left Magna for TubeMogul in 2015 before its acquisition by Adobe, as Advertising Age reports. “The more accurate depiction of the inventory that’s out there that’s loaded into the tool, the better plan that is going to be built.”
While it’s not programmatic in the sense of real-time bidding for inventory, “we are taking major steps forward to make the process a lot more automated.”
Using a host of data, “We can identify very specific things, visitors to your site that took a particular action. We can match that to TV viewership and tell you how a very narrow audience behaves in TV,” Gordon explains.
Buyers using Adobe’s platform “get a live look” into all inventory on NBC’s networks and can propose a purchase order for what best matches their clients’ TV audience targets.
Until now, buyers worked with “a ranker in one hand and a phone in the other. You bought big portfolios of inventory across multiple networks. You bought broad rotations.”
Gordon spent most of his career in TV and “loves” the medium. But he’s very sensitive to the chasm that has existed between the viewing experiences available to consumers and the way the industry does business.
“The TV viewing experience is as good as it’s ever been. But the way TV is planned and bought and sold hasn’t transformed in the same way that the viewing experience has transformed.”
He praises collaborative efforts like the OpenAP audience targeting consortium launched by Fox, Turner and Viacom, of which NBCU is a recent participant. “TV inventory is a very precious resource and the attention of consumers is extremely precious. In TV we’ve spent those resources poorly.”
]]>Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”
Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.
“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.
As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.
“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?
“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”
At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.
“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”
OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”
When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”
That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>“Certainly the more partners that join OpenAP the more it allows us to really have that standardization across a greater amount of networks within the portfolio,” Bosetti says in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
When Fox, Viacom and Turner announced OpenAP in March of 2017, Bosetti says Initiative was excited by the opportunity “because one of the challenges that we’ve had with audience buying is the limitations to optimize within different walled gardens versus trying to optimize across the entire cable or broadcast landscape.”
On April 19, NBCU disclosed that it has decided not only to participate in OpenAP but will bring its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation.” the sales chiefs at Fox, Viacom and Turner said in a joint statement.
Bosetti sees advanced audience targeting as a complement to the traditional way of buying primetime shows and daypart mixes, something that isn’t about to change.
“But layering on an audience-based approach allows us to extend that reach across other channels or other platforms that we not be reaching them through those more traditional, fixed-TV buys,” she explains.
OpenAP also offers transparency into buys instead of a “black box” approach to reaching audiences. This gives advertisers increasing confidence to continue investing in advanced TV targeting.
“Clients more and more obviously want to make sure that every dollar that they’re putting their investments into places that are driving the most effectiveness to drive their business,” Bosetti says.
In an interview with Beet.TV one year ago this month, NBCU’s EVP of Business Operations & Strategy, Krishan Bhatia, expressed support for OpenAP while underscoring his company’s efforts to help advertisers target audiences beyond traditional Nielsen demographics.
Bhatia said NBCU was “generally supportive of any efforts that help the TV ecosystem go above and beyond the traditional age/gender based way of measuring and transacting on audiences, including this one,” a reference to OpenAP.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>Within OpenAP, Nielsen and comScore are “locked in,” Ruby says in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “We’ve got their MRI fusion datasets, Catalina datasets, the MBI datasets all coming through. With comScore, we’ve got all of their syndicated datasets. So we feel like we’ve kind of got the right breadth of what is an industry standard could be within OpenAP today.”
What gets “really exciting,” according to Ruby, is being able to move beyond the traditional measurement providers. Options include set-top VOD data, “into more of the MVPD data that we can actually be leveraging, more specifically the IP connected data” along with data from smart TV’s.
“Really what it comes down to is we want to enable as many of these datasets as we can so that we can bring them all to an open playing field and then let brands and agencies determine where they’re going to see the most value,” Ruby says.
And then there is the promise of linear addressable, a key piece of the cross-platform puzzle. “We’ve managed to be able to really corner it with Hulu, we’re looking at Comcast set-top box VOD and really making inroads there. But more importantly, we’re starting to think about what we can do in the live, linear space and how we can actually start looking at ad versioning and addressable copy splitting in live linear.”
IP-delivered streaming content poses the potential for one-to-one relationships between brands and viewers. But it gets pretty complex with broadcast TV and in a primetime broadcast environment, according to Ruby.
“And I don’t think that’s a future that we’re going to see immediately, but it is one that we’re starting to really understand how the technology comes together.”
Audience targeting tends to be “bespoke” on a vertical-by-vertical category basis, with automotive in particular having a longer “tail to purchase” than others. “People aren’t necessarily going to see a couple of ads for a new SUV on TV and then immediately go and buy one,” says Ruby. “They actually need to be identified as in market and not just in market but likely to convert in market and even within that, there’s a much longer tail that you want to look at for performance.”
Fox is working with auto brands to figure out how to construct campaigns over time while monitoring both the performance of an individual campaign for a awareness of a new sedan model “as well as any particular behaviors of driving greater traffic into dealerships, all the way through to eventually a new lease or a new purchase.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We have a roadmap that takes us through essentially a 1.5 release and it’s going to go even beyond that,” Dan Aversano, SVP, Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions at Turner, says of OpenAP in this interview with Beet.TV. “We have some very big, progressive and we think exciting ideas that we look forward to telling the marketplace about as we move through 2018.”
OpenAP, whose founding partners are Turner, Fox and Viacom, was designed to bring consistency to audience targeting in terms of how segments are defined and the data being used. Right now, Nielsen and comScore data are the options.
“But in the future, we firmly see that expanding based on marketplace demand,” says Aversano.
OpenAP users can on-board first-party data, “Which is actually I would say the biggest trend we’re seeing. The most sophisticated advertisers and agencies are moving that way.”
One challenge in particular that OpenAP users face—the process of matching first-party data in the platform—is something that will improve with time, according to Aversano.
“We want to make that process easier, faster, more cost efficient. Right now matching first party data can take a little bit of time. It can also cost a little bit of money,” he says.
OpenAP is strictly for planning purposes, not for buying inventory. “That’s today. Who knows what tomorrow holds.”
Once OpenAP users create audience segments they wish to target, they can use the platform to share those segments with Fox, Turner or Viacom. Buying negotiations take place in the traditional fashion. Information about campaign impression delivery then shows up in the OpenAP platform.
Turner is working with beta products “a little bit outside OpenAP” to map audience segments across digital delivery venues, “an FEP, potentially OTT and potentially even VOD when and where we’re addressable,” says Aversano.
Noting that TV audience fragmentation is being driven by media sellers, he believes the onus is on them “to build an advertising ecosystem and advertising products that enable us to consistently re-aggregate that audience and use data to drive value.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>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.
]]>But it’s also nice to stay ahead of the audience targeting curve by using data science to analyze viewing behavior and enable more targeted advertising buys, Shimmel, who is Chief Research Officer, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
For the most part, professional sports still lives on broadcast and cable. “It seems to have been more resilient in terms of ratings over the last couple of years than other genres have been,” Shimmel says. “We’re really happy with the way that post-season baseball is performing for us, both on linear and we’re seeing amazing growth on digital.”
Earlier this year, Fox, Turner and Viacom announced they would collaborate on a linear TV audience targeting solution called OpenAP. It launched the first week in October and Shimmel says acceptance in the advertiser and agency community has been “great.”
He references a paper that was just released of an analysis of a $1 million TV spend and the resulting ROI depending on whether age-sex demos or audience optimization was the basis for the buy. “It turns out that the ROI for audience is about 30% more than buying age-sex” at the same budget, Shimmel explains.
Simply stated, the goal of OpenAP is “to facilitate that.”
As for the future roadmap of OpenAP, Shimmel lays out the vision thusly: “ Obviously we want to migrate beyond linear TV. We want it to buy cross-platform. We also want it to include cable set-top box inventory.”
Shimmel references an exercise that Turner did within the past couple of years when it first started measuring homes that had streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) services. Data showed that those homes watched about one-third less traditional TV, so the exercise involved creating a group of non-SVOD homes with similar demographics to SVOD homes.
“Of the 33 percent difference, about two thirds of it was explained by demographics. Only a third of it was due to the fact that the technology, SVOD, was in the home,” Shimmel says.
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.
]]>The President of Investment for GroupM North America acknowledges that advertisers know more about TV households than ever before. “The plethora of data out there is tremendous,” Schwartz says.
The limiting factor to addressable TV advertising, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV, is not how many houses but “the amount of available inventory that we can use to reach those people. But I do believe that as the industry grows, more and more money will follow that.”
Targeted TV is different in that there are various ways to reach particular audiences and apply various data “to really hone in and value the inventory based on what your marketing clients are trying to achieve.”
Asked for his thoughts on the audience targeting consortium OpenAP, which Fox, Turner and Viacom began to roll out this month, Schwartz says the good thing is “is that the media companies are working together, which is something that’s positive. But I need to have more visibility on my side and be able to do stuff behind the curtains, you might say.”
Using household-level data from Rentrak is one tactic for advanced targeting in which price negotiation is still done based on demographics. Schwartz cites a “value differential” he can return to clients based on being able buy more of the impressions his clients actually want.
“I may have 10,000 customers but 3,000 drive 40 percent of my business, and I can now look into things like that,” he says.
A veteran of innumerable Upfront negotiating seasons, Schwartz says this year’s was better for sellers than some people had anticipated. “I think coming out of the marketplace, demand was a little bit higher than most pundits on Wall Street thought.”
A major challenge isn’t people shunning TV but not getting good measurement of how and where they are doing so. “We’re measuring too many times the device and not the content,” Schwartz says. “We have to move to the content and the ads that are in the content.”
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.
]]>Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
To many, these new techniques may seem to supercede the traditional TV measurement system operated by Nielsen.
But not only does Nielsen nowadays have its own set of products aiming to measure TV and video across multiple platforms for publishers and advertisers – OpenAP is also part-powered by the company.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen global president Steve Hasker says: “From a Nielsen perspective, this is good news, because our data can and will feed in to those platforms pretty seamlessly. We’ve built it so it provides a true cross-platform comparability in terms of its audience measurement.
“No matter how a marketer wants to use those platforms (or) wants to use that data), we’re able to provide it seamlessly.”
Nielsen is making its audience segments, household, personal and buyergraphic TV ratings data available through OpenAP, the company announced in April. The system also leverages Accenture and comScore know-how.
To Hasker, cross-platform media measurement has now reached an inflection point.
“We’ve been talking about measurement for years,” he says. “This year, this upfront, this conference, we’ve really made some progress as an industry.
“I think we’ve seen more progress in the measurement ecosystem … in the last 12 months than we have in the previous 12 years.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So while “we’re taking a lot of first steps in lots of different directions,” sometimes there’s progress in the TV space and sometimes not, says the EVP, Director of Strategic Investments, for Havas Media.
“The data conversation is I think somewhat overblown right now,” he says by way of preamble. “We have been buying using data for years. It’s not something new to us.”
What’s interesting to Kanefsky is the fact that TV networks “are trying to infiltrate that space,” and “they’re charging to infiltrate that space.” He notes that the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom designed to unify audience targeting for advertisers is seeking “a 10 percent up-charge on your media cost.”
He’s not disputing the need for a more unified currency across multiple networks. “With that said, we have a long, long way to go to solve the data issue.”
Kanefsky believes the best way to make TV buying more efficient is to actually have more ratings points available to buyers and that using data to optimize media is not a new concept.
“What we need the networks to do is find more ways to put more rating points back in the market, not necessarily from C3 to C7 but to actually perform better,” he says. “We’re in a marketplace that’s driven by supply right now. But what’s driving marketplace inefficiencies is the fact that supply is down so much.”
Advertisers still expect big ratings impact great content but would like to be able to obtain both while reaching audiences in difficult time frames like 8-11, according to Kanefsky.
Asked what he’d like to see most from the networks, Kanefsky says “a strategy” that would provide a vision of “how are we going to get from point A to point B.”
To his mind, ABC is the closest to having such a strategy, NBC is “all over the place” and CBS “has their model built out kind of perfectly.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Fans are at the heart of everything we do at Viacom,” says Gabe Bevilacqua, SVP, Product Management, Viacom Vantage. “And that gets expressed a lot of ways.”
Fan insights are key to matching Viacom’s brands with marketers seeking to ride the coattails of viewer enthusiasm. “What we try to do is take some data and apply it and understand a little more deeply what makes a fan. To make that real for the marketer,” Bevilacqua says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Studying TV ad engagement, Viacom analyzes second-by-second viewing data, differences in context and differences across audiences. “To the other end of the spectrum, we also think about how fans engage with specific brands,” he says.
It’s not about making gut decisions to decide which brands are best aligned with which viewers but studying affinity maps and audience models to find “a great fit for this show or this star.”
Asked about conversations during this year’s TV Upfront regarding more advanced targeting of linear audiences, Bevilacqua says the launch of the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom is not a beta test or a pilot program.
“We’ve done this a lot of times. We are in full-scale product mode,” he says.
OpenAP goes beyond simply targeting specific audiences just to find higher concentrations of them.
“There’s other marketing objectives and goals, everything from the integrated marketing elements to let’s think about reach and how we’re using data to manage reach against a target. Let’s think about how we’re managing frequency,” Bevilacqua says.
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, 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.
]]>An audience target for a client “that is actually going to move their business is a very different animal anyway,” says Jon Stimmel, EVP, Chief Investment Officer, UM.
Progress on the targeting front has been slowed in part by inventory constraints, Stimmel explains in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he refers to the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom as “the Hulu of data.”
“It’s been a really small portion against each one of those media owners that have undertaken this endeavor and I don’t see that changing in the near future,” Stimmel says of advanced audience targeting. “But I do see more and more of them being able to execute in a way that matches up with how we build our plans.”
Asked for his assessment of OpenAP, Stimmel says it’s a step in the right direction but too early to judge completely as some details have yet to surface.
“I was surprised, not that I’m not an optimist. It’s just you don’t see a lot of media owner collaboration all the time,” he says.
Stimmel likens this cooperation to the advent of Hulu just over a decade ago. “Hulu was a big endeavor when Fox and NBC came together to sell their digital inventory. This is like the Hulu of data,” he adds.
UM research experts will be going under the hood of OpenAP to determine things like how the networks are defining the audience segments they’re offering for advanced targeting and whether they’re in sync with the way advertisers define them.
“That collection of the data is probably the most important in our desire to move from this respondent level data to more behavioral. It’s really the path we’ve been trying to instill,” he says.
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being best, Stimmel rates the current state of cross-screen measurement at “a patchwork five.”
This segment is part of a series leading up to the 2017 TV Upfront. It is presented by FreeWheel. To find more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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