Still, one ad group man says the prospects for that tipping point are now looking a lot healthier, five years after it began.
“We seem to be turning a corner regarding broadcasts and their engagement in the programmatic space,” SMG’s performance marketing CEO Marco Bertozzi tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We are seeing broadcasters have realised they need to find a way to understand their own audience better, and help advertisers deliver more specifically.”
Recently, UK satellite operate Sky invested in the brand data and analytics platform DataXu, while Videology has also struck a number of broadcaster partnerships.
“All of of the mainstream broadcasters are doing something now in this space,” Bertozzi says. “After quite a few years of resistance, it’s a positive shift, and a demonstration of the last hurdle toward programmatic being part of every channel that we operate in.”
But, so far, broadcasters’ programmatic foray has been limited to their digitally-delivered video-on-demand inventory. The next five years will see the shift of linear TV, too, Bertozzi reckons.
]]>Matt Greenberg describes Rubicon’s expanded involvement with Cadreon as the latest step in a relationship spanning about three years. Cadreon has been using Rubicon’s non-guaranteed orders marketplace along with its open auction exchange.
Now Cadreon will be accessing “the entire spectrum of the programmatic waterfall, from the unreserved open market to the reserved automated guaranteed space” via Rubicon, according to Greenberg.
Rubicon’s new partnership with Mediaocean aims to help scale automation efforts for the direct buying sector—the largest component of the digital advertising market—through the integration of Rubicon’s Guaranteed Orders product with Mediaocean’s Prisma platform.
“This allows us to access a lot more agencies that are looking for great supply, great partnerships, great publishers for every brand and agency that connects with the Mediaocean platform,” says Greenberg.
The new deals are a far cry from the early days of programmatic buying when it mainly involved remnant inventory.
“As the years have gone along we’ve found publishers and buyers are looking for places to buy premium inventory in well-lit environments,” says Greenberg.
]]>Announced last week, the deal will see AT&T allow a group of advertisers in a private marketplace to use data and automation to buy custom-targeted ads reaching U-Verse and, soon, DirecTV viewers.
“AT&T wants to make buying television with data easier – we automated the planning and parts of the buying process,” Videology CEO Scott Ferber tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Software vendors like Videology have made in-roads in to programmatic trading of online video ads. Now the attention is turning to TV, a much larger pot of ad money. But getting there will be hard, until most TV sets are somehow connected up to digital networks.
Still, Ferber knows that, when that happens, what is a big market now could become a huge one.
“Historically, everyone looked at data-driven and automation to represent the real-time biddable moment,” he adds. “But, when you look at TV and digital video, less than 1% of the United States spend, $70+ billion dollars in 2015, was on real-time biddable inventory.
“If you really want to make an impact on data-driven and automation, you’ve got to bring it to the the other 99%…. premium inventory, reserved guaranteed television commitments.”
As Wall Street Journal reports, whilst the AT&T deal means automation, manual touches like advance buying will still be required. The Videology technology will also be applied to other video screens in AT&T’s portfolio.
We also spoke with AT&T AdWork’s VP for national sales Jason Brown on the news. Please find that report here.
We interviewed him at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York. Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here.
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Advertisers will be able to bring their own data to a self-service, “private marketplace.” They will be able to see results in a fully transparent manner, explains Jason Brown, VP for National Advertising Sales at AT&T AdWorks.
The new programmatic marketplace is powered by Videology. Details of the AT&T plan was discussed on Thursday at an industry event on advanced TV presented by Videology in Manhattan. We interviewed Brown there.
News of the plans at AT&T was reported earlier today by the Wall Street Journal.
We interviewed him at the Videology Full Frontal Conference in New York. Please watch other videos from Beet’s coverage here.
]]>But, as the technology has matured, it has also begun to allow for old-fashioned-style upfront buys – with all the added efficiency of programmatic. A panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the topic:
“You can merge programmatic and guaranteed,” MediaMath’s Cox said. “Programmatic is neither real-time nor bidded. You can make a forward commitment on a guarantee on a specific volume, specific value and flight date and hit it.”
Videology’s Castree agreed, saying: “In the US last year, 99% of video sold last year was on a guaranteed, futures basis. Fifty-eight percent of inventory through our platform last year was clients bringing their own upfront deals.”
But the arrival of upfront ad deals also makes some wonder if they are losing the unique advantage programmatic brings.
What was a great decision 24 hours ago might be a poor decision now,” said Target’s Reiter, calling for flexibility. “When I hear ‘guaranteed’, somewhere in there must be some loss of agility.” GroupM’s Kowan said: Maintaining that agility is absolutely critical.”
MediaMath’s Cox said his company strikes the balance by having embraced header tags, allowing real-time data to support guaranteed transactions by having eliminated exchanges.
Separately, GroupM’s Kowan said programmatic is merely a toolset, not a strategy, and does little to change the role that agencies play for brands overall.
And the panel discussed how, with the basics of programmatic now in place, advertisers will soon get to benefit from more – developments Kowan said include “attribution based on in-store sales, and exposure time and session depth, personalisation”.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was chaired by MediaLink data and technology SVP Matt Spiegel.
]]>Now Trade Desk advanced TV sales director Matt Mitchell tells Beet.TV in this video interview: “We are very close to releasing a self-service UI for executing programmatic TV buys.
“We’re using a number of data sources to power that … to buy through the guys like WideOrbit, Placemedia, and other inventory sources that are coming down the pike.”
Although the promise of ad tech and, in particular, programmatic trading is all about software automation, some vendors still need to engage potential customers in sales chat and to hold their hand through usage and buying. TV is a particularly thorny medium to turn self-service.
The Trade Desk’s revision means its customers will get to do more for themselves on the platform. Beet.TV has covered other platforms that have gone self-service.
About 400 agencies and brands already license The Trade Desk’s software to make programmatic digital ad buys.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>Ad agency SMG has already reported a tripling in client addressable TV business last year
And SMG’s director Steve Murtos says lots of clients finally “leaned in” after years of evangelizing.
“There’s more scale coming,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Primarily, it’s been MVPD-led inventory but we’re starting to see some other sources come online.
“As you see more inventory, you’re gonna see more of everything else. It allows us to be able to secure more budgets, there’s going to be more data available for us to continue to measure. so I think 2016 is going to be a big year.”
Last year, SMG launched SMG Maps TV, an addressable TV measurement product that it says links addressable TV ad exposure to brand location visits,in partnership with PlaceIQ and Acxiom.
But Murtos thinks the industry isn’t changing overnight. “I think we’re still maybe two, three years out before we’re, before it’s at scale,” he says. “There’s still a lot of confusion in the marketplace, too many players all trying to do the same thing. I think that’s going take a good two years to shake out.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.2
]]>Then, in October, the company bowed AdVance, a suite knitting together data from across its many screens to better target consumers. So what is AdVance all about?
“If AdSmart is all about taking the very best and only the very best of digital targeting and bringing it to TV, what Sky AdVance does is take how really unique TV consumption understanding and brings it into digital,” according to Sky Media’s deputy MD Jamie West.
“Knowing which sites subscribers are browsing and which channels they are watching lets Sky Media serve ads back through internet or TV, respectively, that learn from consumers’ holistic behavior.
“We enable our three million-home viewing panel,” West says. “When you think about all those multiple touch-points that we have with our customers … you have a really rich understanding of customer journeys across those multiple platforms. That will enable us both to serve ads both on the Sky platform or via our DSP partners.
“Once you’ve seen the ad four times on TV, we can now frequency cap … Or we can use that platform to tell … different stories … in the app environment, the mobile environment, or the browser environment.”
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>SMG’s use of addressable TV is taking off in the States. But that’s not the same in every market.
“The UK market is … off to a very slow start,” Glucklich tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“The future of of marketing is in real-time addressable content and I think TV has an enormous role to play in that. But, from a UK perspective, really only Sky AdSmart is the one that’s offering that at the moment. I think 2016 will really see some big advancements and we’ve already heard that in the UK from the likes of ITV and Sky in particular.”
Glucklich wants this advancement because the pace of the world of content is quickening up immensely.
“Real-time is a huge challenge to marketers in particular … real, cultural, and pivotal moments are gone in a matter of minutes or hours,” she says. “For us, having a kind of fully data-enabled programmatic solution is absolutely critical to be able to make that work effectively, and television is only really starting to get there. ”
Separately, Thaer Namruti, the European strategy director at Acxiom, has been appointed to the new role of senior vice president for precision marketing strategy at SMG, rejoining the company after leaving in 2014.
Glucklich and co-CEO Steve Parker gave this guided tour of SMG’s new London office to Campaign magazine…
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of International CES 2016 presented by Adobe.
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“Every marketer, especially every B2C marketer, is going to make decision in the next five years about their first-party data,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
How brands choose to use consumer data – both their own and from other sources – to target ads became a hot topic in 2015.
Rocket Fuel, which began by applying artificial intelligence to rate ad inventory, partnered with DISH in October to allow its advertisers to use “moment scoring” to target ads programmatically. The technology has been used by whisky brand Glenfiddich.
Wootton explains: “There is computational power you need to score that impression. (Rocket Fuel) is the machine learning-powered optimisation engine, DISH is the marketplace that creates the supply in their hub.
With moment scoring up and running, what does Wootton’s first full year in the job look like?
“Last year was mostly about the integration (of X+1),” he says. “We’re doing a couple of bets as we go forward:
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2016 sponsored by Adobe.
]]>We spoke with Straight at the CES show about partnerships for SpotX and prospects for the growth of the automated video marketplace.
This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.
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In July 2014, the big European broadcaster RTL Group acquired a controlling interest in the company. Then, last year, the outfit rebranded from its former name, SpotXchange, as it gained traction in Europe thanks to the RTL deal. At the end of 2015, SpotX also partnered with RTL Digital Hub stablemate Clypd to support optimized targeting of ads on TiVo set-top boxes in the US.
After a year of “thought leadership”, CEO and founder Mike Shehan says the company is now embarking on a 2016 that will be “the year of execution”, with some company announcements coming soon.
First, Shehan says SpotX will be revealing which broadcasters are using its Clypd relationship to buy TV ads programmatically
1. Programmatic TV
“We’ll be announcing our first clients”, he says. “Those will be broadcasters, media owners who will be managing media with a link solution that’s both digital and linear.”
“You’ll also see some announcements from us in Europe, with set-top box activity – advertising on TV through the set-top box.”
2. Asia launch
In addition to its UK office, SpotX also opened in Amsterdam and a German joint venture last year. Now another continent is on the roadmap, and soon.
“The same announcements you saw in Europe we’re going to be making in Asia … next week,” Shehan says.
Connected TV
Shehan says advertisers are getting excited about over-the-top TV devices: “We saw, just over the holidays, traffic triple from Apple TV. A lot more people are buying them. That inventory is really desired by the advertiser side.”
After the sale
Despite selling up to a big company, entrepreneur Shehan says he is not moving on from the mothership any time soon: “RTL allow me to run the business. Our executive team is still in place, we’re still motivated and we still have pretty big goals to achieve.
Our coverage of CES is presented by SpotX.
]]>Now the Hub is on the hunt for more ad-tech acquisitions.
“We will also look for further investment opportunities that add on, that complement, that strengthen the existing portfolio,” RTL Digital Hub EVP Marcel Reichart tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
So far, RTL Group has made the following moves:
“If you look at the portfolio, those are all strong companies, leaders in their markets,” Reichart adds.
“The 2016 mandate is to ensure these companies and CEOs can grow these companies in the best way forward. 2015 showed very good growth and maturing – we believe 2016 could give that opportunity as well.”
Our coverage of CES is presented by SpotX.
]]>There is a chance that targeting could lead marketers to “invisibility” warns Rob Norman, Global Chief Digital Officer of GroupM, in this interview with Beet.TV
We spoke with him at his office in New York for this lead-up to CES. You can find more videos from the series here. This series is sponsored by YuMe.
]]>“In the past, you used Nielsen data for TV, print data for print, econometric data to look for correlations in regression analytics… everybody spoke different languages,” Group M global chairman Irwin Gotlieb tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
These days, maybe marketing professionals bemoan remark that media channels have, historically, appeared “siloed”, while new technology allows for holistic planning.
But Gotlieb warns: “You don’t break down silos by forcing integration on people. That is the absolute, fastest way to lose all specialisms. Every time I’ve seen organisations try to integrate … they throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Thankfully, no-one needs to lose any babies, Gotlieb says: “The good news is … for the first time, you can see a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re moving very rapidly to a world where the data silos get conjoined. That conjoining creates real opportunities for integration in work process without losing any of the specialisms.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
The panel was moderated by Videology CEO Scott Ferber.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>Powered by IPON WEB and plugged in to programmatic marketplace vendors DataXu, RocketFuel and TubeMogul, the system was billed as an industry first.
When programmatic and auction-based ad technology first took hold in the online display world, it was met with publisher skepticism – would the set-up devalue their ad slots?
DISH Media Sales addressable and programmatic GM James Shears denies the suggestion.
“Auctions are an opportunity for the market to set their price,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We have the floor set. We would never go below what we believe an appropriate value.
“From our experience in the addressable space, which is offline and not programmatically-driven, we’ve already established pricing parameters. We price things on an effective CPM basis.
“Given that there’s a targeting element (with the new system), as you get more refined in what you’re trying to target, your pricing reflects what you’re doing. It doesn’t deflate the value of your inventory – in fact, I’d argue it probably makes it more valuable.”
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
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Havas is working with an audio exchange and other partners to deliver programmatic audio advertising in France and the Netherlands.
“Audio is an inventory source,” Havas Media Group programmatic solutions head Hossein Houssaini tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Nobody was looking at it because everybody went in to the visual space from a programmatic perspective. But, from a touchpoint perceptive, … audio plays a major role.
“If you can spot the consumer … with an audio ad … and then retarget later with a digital out-of-home (ad) … you can do a lot of interesting advertising.
“It opens up a new field of data, which is emotional data. Based on a playlist, you can say what emotion that person is in right now. It may be the same message with different colour… you’re happy, angry, sad. That changes the varieties or how you advertise.”
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>That’s what Edinburgh-based TVSquared is pushing toward. One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.
But TVSquared chief analytics officer Blair Robertson tells Beet.TV things are changing: “At the moment, we have a platform that runs in 45 countries We’re having huge traction amongst brand advertisers.
“But we see it moving from looking at a historical view of campaign performance to a predicative capability, to say, ‘Here are you top five opportunities to improve your buy over the next week or month, you will see an uplift in sales, lifetime value or increased market share’.”
The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.
“We see many advertisers who start off with very small budgets for TV who end up spending tens of hundreds of millions of dollars because they have accountability on TV now in the same way they’re used to having for digital,” Robertson adds.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>The tool “will ultimately be self-service”, the company’s TV strategy senior director Oscar Rondon tells this Beet.TV panel discussion.
“If you start with a TV plan, we’re trying to find what’s the incremental reach if you come to TubeMogul and you execute the buy,” Rondon says. “And, if you start with a digital plan where you have an audience, where can you find that audience across television networks?”
TubeMogul is partnering with measurement services like Nielsen and Rentrak plus Experian but also letting customers use their CRM data, to find audiences on addressable TV services.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
The panel was moderated by Xaxis SVP Christine Beaumier.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>But is the industry too busy debating the potential, complex future measurement systems to notice that they are already here?
“I have to smile a little bit about that,” says Rhys Nölke, SVP for European broadcast group RTL, which has invested in ad tech platforms SpotX and Clypd.
He suggests people are getting bogged down by potential and complication: “A lot of the uncertainty and confusion is among the agencies and their clients themselves. They’re trying to have discussions on things we can actually already see and have done, in terms of ‘what is a viewable ad impression?’. It’s already written down, the IAB definitions.”
While some marketers imagine a holy grail of ultimate cross-screen measurability with 100% viewability, Nölke says today’s reality shouldn’t hold them back: “We have to take the small things as already proved and move on.”
And he says ad tech vendors’ pronouncements shouldn’t drive so many advertiser preoccupations, despite their promise of efficiency: “It’s a very biased role. We’re not going to be winning this game by just using solutions from interested parties.” He favors industry joint committees ruling the roost on which metrics are best to use.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>Announced in November following a year-long pilot on Freewheel’s Fourfronts technology for upfront programmatic ad sales, Channel 4 had used DSPs from Freewheel, TubeMogul, Adap.tv (AOL) and Videology. PVX (programmatic video exchange) will be deployed not on Channel 4’s live linear broadcast TV but in video ads served up in views of its All4 catch-up service, available across multiple devices.
“It represented around 15% of our total video-on-demand revenue so far this year,” Channel 4 digital and partnership innovation head Jonathan Lewis tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We see that growing to around 30% next year.”
Channel 4 won’t get there just because programmatic video advertising interest is growing amongst its own customers, even though research shows the PVX-delivered All4 ads are 72% more efficiently targeted and delivered 24% more effective ad recognition than a standard Run of Site (ROS) campaign.
In addition, Lewis wants more companies than just Channel 4 to use PVX. “PVX we see an an opportunity, potentially, to encourage other premium publishers to join,” he adds. “Our long-term ambition is whether or not we can grow our publisher base within our platform and sell that inventory on their behalf.”
There is something of a UK TV programmatic arms race kicking off. ITV recently opened up programmatic video capability with RadiumOne, satellite network and channel owner Sky has tapped Videology to run its programmatic capability.
“We fully expect our competitors to be in the mix in the next 12 to 18 months time,” Lewis adds.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>Moderating this session is Christina Beaumier, SVP at Xaxis.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>Earlier this year, The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters together formed the Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to pool first-party ad data for ad buyers to target their combined 110 million users in an automated fashion.
French conglomerate La Place is another cooperative powered by Rubicon Project, and several have cropped up in Latin America. What’s behind this new coming-together?
“In some European markets, we’ve seen major broadcasters responding to the threat of American technology companies who have achieved massive amounts of scale,” says video advertising technology platform vendor SpotX‘s programmatic demand VP Alex Merwin. “For example, in Germany, the online video views of IP Deutschland, Axel Springer and ProSieben combined pale in comparison to the uniques that a Facebook or Google-YouTube bring to the table.
“The agencies want local-language content. But the disparity in scale is getting to a point where significant portions of ad spend are shifting to non-local publishers. You really need to band together and have a unified offering. That’s why we’ve seen publisher coalitions take off.”
SpotX is launching a new tool, dubbed “curated marketplaces”, to give its customers even more control over how they access advertising inventory programmatically. Whilst so-called “private marketplaces” allow buyers to gate off the inventory pools they use, they nevertheless involve much effort on the ground, Merwin says. So SpotX’s “curated marketplaces” aim to allow them more control.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum. Beet.TV’s coverage is sponsored by Xaxis. You can find more Beet videos from the conference on this page.
]]>Already this year, the pair told Beet.TV they would team up, after RTL’s $144m investment in to SpotX in 2014 and $19.4m in Clypd this April.
Clypd CEO Joshua Summers says the hook-up is enabling advertisers to buy unduplicated audiences across both digital and linear video inventory, including retargeting from one medium to the other.
Although this works on an individual-advertiser basis, Summer tells Beet.TV the pair will bring it to “open market” in 2016.
Clypd already works to help US cable networks and channels like Discovery better target viewers. Summers says the RTL investment is helping Clypd understand the disparate multi-market of Europe.
This video was produced at the Future Of TV Advertising Forum presented by Xaxis. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
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