For many on the buy side, the knee-jerk reaction to the news of the pandemic was to not want to spend at all in order to avoid any association with the virus. Amobee’s market intelligence analytics have aimed to determine what kinds of content consumers are engaging with, and among other valuable insights, has led to a greater understanding among buyers to approach Covid-19 as not a singular topic, but as many different topics.
“When you dive into it, what you find is that there’s actually a lot of opportunity in there from an advertising perspective and arguably, we’re going into a period of time here that could be the single biggest opportunity for market-share shift for brands that has happened in a generation,” Smolin says.
This alters the way that both the buy side and the sell side adjust their approaches at the core. On the buy side, this means being really data driven and keeping attune to shifts in trends on a weekly basis.
“It is a really real-time, dynamic environment that we’re living in right now. Patterns change, they change by region, they’re changing daily.”
An AdExchanger article by TransUnion’s David Dowhan reinforces this message, saying that brands are increasingly turning to first-party data in order to closely monitor consumer behavior.
“Seasoned marketers are taking more stock in tools and technologies that help leverage additional, complementary data holistically to make the most of their own audience insights,” Dowhan says.
Smolin added that the sell side also needs to respond to this change in media consumption by being increasingly interactive with brands and agencies in order to understand how to best serve these new opportunities.
The lives of consumers have changed so drastically. Interests, intents, amounts of disposable income—this is just a small sample of the ways that the audience has transformed in the past couple months. For advertisers, the knee-jerk reaction to avoid COVID has been flipped around as they have opened their eyes to greater opportunity.
“There’s nuance about how life in America is changing and how your relationship as a brand to consumers should change as well,” Smolin says.
Along with this shift in media consumption comes the need to reimagine how advertisers should change their messaging and where they find their audiences. Smolin uses sporting events as an example, but is confident that this attention to first-party data will help to track where the viewers are exploring.
“It’s a crazy time right now,” Smolin says. “But if people are staying on top of the market insights and the media planning data and they are measuring for media efficiency, there are actually tremendous opportunities for them in market right now on both the buy and sell side to really move the needle.”
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:
Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.
“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.
“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”
Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”
As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.
“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.
“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.
“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”
VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.
“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”
However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.
“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”
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, whilst technology has brought buyers to that point, institutional factors mean many ad buyers still plan their clients’ spending in separate lanes.
That is according to video ad-tech platform Amobee‘s chief strategy officer Philip Smolin.
“The bigger challenge right now is organisational and operational,” Smolin says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“For a lot of agencies, you still have a pretty big silo wall between what is the TV investment team and the digital trading team. And they’re planning differently, certainly, they’re executing differently, but oftentimes they’re measuring differently.
“If you don’t have a common measurement framework for both of them to look at, you cannot get those teams to work in a collaborative, orchestrated way.
“That requires a lot of change organizationally and operationally, and in this industry, I think we sometimes over focus on looking for technology to solve everything. And I would say the technology and the data at this point is really a couple of steps ahead of the state of the industry and now it’s about implementing.”
In December, Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.
4Screen works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.
Smolin was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>But, this time, things could look a little different. So says the strategy chief of an ad-tech firm aiming to help the industry buy and sell better across four screens.
“How both the buy and the sell side are looking at the TV upfronts within 2020, which are going to begin sooner than people realise, is very, very different,” says Amobee’s Philip Smolin.
“The ability to package and sell their media the way their customers want to buy it, on an audience basis, and to be able to do that as converged packaging across all devices is fundamentally the next step for the industry.”
Big day for @Amobee as we announce Amobee 4Screen, a first-to-market collaboration with Nielsen for advertisers and broadcasters to bridge linear TV, connected TV and digital data, further powering the convergence of TV and digital. Read more: https://t.co/Yg8pbVFqDW
— Nick Lashinsky (@nlashinsky18) December 13, 2019
Smolin was speaking with Beet.TV after Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.
4Screen, as the package is called, works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.
“The problem is all of those media platforms … become a highly fragmented media landscape that is very difficult to almost impossible to measure,” Smolin says.
“(It powers) planning, activation, optimization, measurement and analysis,” he adds.”
The recent 4Screen launch builds on Amobee’s earlier acquisition of Videology.
Smolin will be a speaker at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 5 to 7.
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.
]]>That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:
They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…
Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.
“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”
But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.
“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.
“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”
Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.
Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.
“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.
“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”
FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.
“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.
“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.
“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.
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 the view according to one executive who sits at the nexus of TV, ad-tech and agency professionals.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, paints an optimistic picture of evolution.
“The really good news is we’re seeing, I think, across the board in the last six months or so, pretty recently, almost all of them leaning in more than you would’ve expected, on being able to do several things,” he says:
Smolin was speaking with Jon Watts, partner at TV consulting firm MTM, for Beet.TV.
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.
It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
Smolin describes how advertisers are now striving to plan and buy TV ads across both traditional linear and new OTT channels in a seamless way, one that takes advantage of features like:
He recognizes that this evolution is not a zero-sum game in which OTT providers will simply win out over linear – at least, not for all audiences.
“Addressable (TV) is, I think projected, to go to about like 13 or 14%,” Smilin says. “CTV will be a full third of the industry. But the flip side of that is 50% or more is still going to be traditional linear.
“Younger audiences will skew more to CTV. But for most brands it’s about using a combination of them.”
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.
]]>“There’s also a lot of confusion around it because oftentimes people think, ‘Oh, connected TV, that’s ‘convergence’,” says Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer at Amobee, an ad-tech platform vendor.
“Convergence is really about how you bring data-driven audience strategies to all forms of TV – that’s connected TV, and it’s linear TV, and it’s addressable TV, and it’s online video, and it’s even social video.
“So solving for that is really a very different problem than what the industry originally solved when you used the term ‘programmatic’ back in the mid 2000s, around remnant display advertising.”
Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.
Smolin says his platform enables the fusion of panel planning data and measurement with digital planning data and measurement, and lets advertisers use their first-party audience data for not just programmatic or addressable TV ad buying but also linear TV ad targeting.
The aim is to get “one definition of an audience, and to be able to engage with that audience in a conversation very seamlessly across channels”, Smolin says.
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.
]]>GroupM’s North America CEO Tim Castree used Beet Retreat to call for the industry to develop common standards for measuring ads on an impression basis.
Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, in this video interview with Beet.TV, said agency in-fighting is stopping standardization.
Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory. It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
Smolin spoke at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” with Janet Balis, EY Global Advisory Services Leader for Media & Entertainment.
Smolin said technology is not holding back standardization – “operational” disagreements, between agencies’ distinct traditional TV-buying and programmatic trading desk teams, are.
“There’s kind of a fight in a lot of agencies over who gets control over that, on who’s going to lead in that going forward,” Smolin said. “On the sell side, you have a similar challenge in that, up until very recently, most of the broadcasters, programmers and MVPDs have generally been leaning back in regards to programmatic, as opposed to leaning forward.”
Asked by Balis if technology was “out-innovating the market readiness”, Smolin said he saw a three-step process through which agencies can prepare themselves to buy in this converged fashion…
Smolin said advanced TV ad buyers that are profiting from the opportunity don’t want to be named, seeing the technique as a “competitive advantage”.
“We are seeing some organizations that are pretty evolved with their traditional TV investment teams, very data-driven. They are doing data-driven (TV) upfronts, and then they are taking those and using digital KPIs measured against the linear TV upfronts in order to do monthly and, for some of their brands, weekly planning updates.”
The company spent $101 million on the TV and video ad-tech supplier in 2018. But what was the rationale?
“Amobee’s heritage as a technology platform was in programmatic,” Smolin said. “Programmatic evolved out of remnant display advertising; it’s demand-constrained.
“But when you look at TV, it’s supply constrained. It introduces the dimension of time, upfronts, reservations.
“It’s very different algorithms in order to solve those problems effectively. We realized it would take us years to build (this new kind of software).”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Fortunately, many ad agencies are now putting together the pieces involving audience data sets and software tools, according to Philip Smolin.
“We’re seeing a number of agencies that are on the leading edge of that evolution,” says Amobee’s chief strategy officer in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And I think generally we’re seeing it play out in three somewhat discreet phases:
Amobee is a media management software provider helping in the yse of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>There was no doubt that consumers had completely changed their viewing television venues, but that was just one component of the larger picture, Smolin related in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science.
“You have to have the broadcasters and programmers that are in a position where they really want to lean in for what is bringing data into advanced television,” Smolin said in response to a question from Jon Watts, who is managing partner of research and strategy consultancy MTM.
“But you also have to have on the buy side, you have to have the agency ecosystem be in a position where it’s really ready to start using that and converging maybe the TV investment team versus what had been the digital trading desk.”
Amobee made its wager after assessing a variety of technology providers and determining that Videology was unique compared to companies that had fashioned themselves to fit into the programmatic space “for a world that came out of remnant display advertising and frames every problem like that,” Smolin explained.
Given the difference between display and long-form, premium video, “Videology to their credit had designed from the ground up to solve the problems of how TV works. That was uniquely powerful, and we thought it was the right technology at the right time and it’s had a huge impact on our business.”
Now, with Videology’s assets and Amobee’s partnership with Nielsen “we are able to bring converged measurement to linear plus digital activation. When we use the term advanced TV, it’s very much about being able to take that digital-first audience, first-party data, and to use that within what is video, what is OTT, what is connected TV but also to linear.”
Noting that eMarketer predicts linear will be 50% or more of all TV budgets by 2022, Smolin said it’s important for many brands to think holistically and for Amobee to provide “true, converged media solutions.” Another thing Videology had in its favor was its sell-side presence, “and that’s also critical because if they’re not positioned with the right tools to be able to sell the way that the advertisers want to buy, then it doesn’t work on either side.”
He echoed the concerns of many in the industry that agency structure remains an impediment, as some still have siloed TV investment and digital trading teams. “They don’t have to be the same people, but getting them to look at the same measurement data and turning that same measurement data into integrated planning” needs to happen.
Asked how TV can win back ad dollars that have flowed to Facebook and Google, Smolin cites data, targetability, measurement and scale. Where TV has an edge is that premium, long-form content “is not the strength for Facebook and YouTube. If the broadcasters, the programmers, are now bringing the data that gives you the audience and the measurement at the scale they already have, they’re now in a position to compete very effectively with much higher value ad units than what Google and Facebook have been doing.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>That was the clarion call from an ad-tech exec enjoying the sunshine at the Cannes Lions advertising industry gathering.
“Everybody sees kind of this moment in time, where we can really embrace converged strategies,” says Philip Smolin, Amobee chief strategy officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“But, in order to do it, we have to have standards, we have to have scalability in those solutions.”
Smolin was speaking after a couple of years in which acquired two other major ad-tech suppliers – Turn and Videology – in a further sign of industry consolidation.
The Videology acquisition last summer meant Amobee became a major player in the TV and video ad ecosystem.
“It’s not about just creating competitive advantage, it’s about creating solutions at an industry level. It’s a complex industry, but we do have a path forward to really being able to simplify it and make it scalable, so that it works in both the buy and the sell side.”
Amobee is a software-as-a-service vendor which helps ad buyers plan, activate, optimize and analyze their media spending, and which helps programmers control how they package up their inventory for sale, including to work with buyers’ first-party data.
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
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