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.
]]>Along with Vizio and its data unit Inscape, the consortium’s members are AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, FreeWheel, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co. and Xandr, as Reuters reports.
In announcing the consortium, Vizio said that TV manufacturers use different technology and standards to enable addressable advertising. “It creates a level of complication for (TV networks), and scale is critical,” Reuters quotes Inscape SVP Jodie McAfee as saying.
While Vizio will create the new technology, it will be an open “industry standard” that competing TV makers can integrate into their products.
Last December, Beet.TV interviewed McAfee at Beet Retreat 2018 about Inscape’s experience in dealing with the Federal Trade Commission on issues involving consumer privacy and viewing data collection. In light of the news regarding Project OAR, Beet.TV is republishing that interview.
Being a pioneer has always carried risks and rewards. Smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO’s Inscape data unit found this out when the Federal Trade Commission a couple of years ago first started looking into what happens to viewer data collected with automatic content recognition, says Inscape SVP of Sales & Marketing Jodie McAfee.
Interacting with the FTC “was a little bit of a bad news, good news situation for us,” McAfee says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, where one panel discussion was devoted to data and privacy.
“The bad news was we were the first smart TV manufacturer to actually have such a discussion with the FTC. The FTC had never really taken a look at smart TV data collection and privacy regimes around it.”
The good news was “the fact that it put us in a position to actually sit down with the FTC and say, ‘okay, what do you want to see? What do you think a privacy regime should look like on a smart TV? So it became more of a collaboration as opposed to the FTC simply throwing down some ground rules and walking away.”
Nonetheless, the FTC fined Inscape for inappropriately collecting viewing data from 11 million TV sets.
“That back and forth generated really almost what our industry views as the VIZIO standard for smart TV data collection,” McAfee says. “And it also prepared us in advance for a little bit of what’s going on with GDPR because there were certain things around what the notification needs to look like, how it needs to read, that are now part of GDPR that we had already done coming out of that FTC negotiation.”
The FTC believed that many people are so intent on getting through the initial setup of a smart TV, they just scrolled through the terms of service so they could start watching something quickly, according to McAfee. “So they said what we’d like to see is a data collection notification that is separate and prominent from the rest of the terms of service.”
Thus was born VIZIO’s “completely separate screen” during the setup process titled “TV viewing data. And it walks through here’s how we do it, here’s what we’re doing, here’s who we give it to and here’s what they do with it.” People can either agree or decline, meaning data collection is off by default.
“So it is a true opt-in regime. We pushed that new regime to our entire footprint of TV’s in February of 2017 so we’ve been fully FTC compliant ever since,” says McAfee.
Changing its policy and communicating the new one to existing owners via a firmware update cost the company 2 million TV’s from its overall footprint because older ones “didn’t have enough processing power to actually support the user journey when we decided to make the opt out process easier.”
Have all other TV manufacturers taken note and now follow the FTC mandate? Not from what Inscape sees when the company checks them out, according to McAfee, most likely because they’re not in the data business like Inscape.
“The process for pushing a firmware update to a TV, it’s a pretty meaningful exercise. So I’m sure other manufacturers just did the math. Is it worth it or not. And I think some of them went, ‘not really.’”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
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