“I can say with confidence that we finally have this at scale,” Raghu Kodige, founder and chief executive of LG Ads, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “That’s mainly because of the connected TV environment, where it is possible to place your ad on the big screen, but also make it addressable and targeted to individual households – and measure the outcome as well.”
Source: eMarketer Insider Intelligence
LG Electronics this year launched LG Ads as the consumer electronics giant rebranded its Alphonso adtech and analytics platform. The company this month introduced a smart TV operating system called River OS to support a more personalized viewing experience for consumers.
Audience Data Consolidation
The market for audience data is consolidating as the major original equipment makers (OEMs) including LG Electronics reduce the distribution of automatic content recognition (ACR) information about what appears on TV screens. Brands now can get the reach they want on traditional linear TV and over-the-top (OTT) platforms by working with a smaller group of OEM ad networks like LG Ads.
“It helps the market overall use the data better,” Kodige said. “Even for things like enforcing frequency across linear TV and OTT, if you’re working with a few large players who have the scale, you can achieve that.”
You are watching “Transformation: CTV and Data Are Changing the TV Advertising Marketplace,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by LG Ads. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>And now LG is levelling-up its own capabilities, by making an investment to take a majority stake in Alphonso.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Alphonso’s Raghu Kodige says the tie-up is not just about unlocking ad data.
Couldn't be happier to be kicking off 2021 in partnership with LG! @LGUS https://t.co/oZt20ogAqb#connectedtv #tvdata #tvadvertising #OTT #streamingtv
— Alphonso, Inc. (@AlphonsoInc) January 6, 2021
Improve the experience
“How do we benefit consumers?,” he asks. “Unless you provide consumers with benefits, you really can’t collect this kind of deep data about what consumers are watching and what they are looking for and things of that sort.
“For us it’s actually a sort of an onward journey of what we’ve been doing all along, which is building more and more consumer features powered by the data that we collect – whether it is recommendations of what content to watch, both on linear TV as well as OTT.
“That’s actually becoming more and more important. There’s so many streaming services available that it’s like TV used to be in the past, where you switch on TV that are hundreds of channels and you don’t know what exactly you should be watching.
“Solving that problem for consumers, making the availability of content much more easier (is important).”
Solving fragmentation
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on what they are watching on TV.
It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes, monitoring more than 200 cable networks.
Alphonso has also previously brought solutions like voice search to bear on a connected TV viewing experience that has become highly fragmented.
Kodige says that is the sort of tech LG wants to tap – but Alphonso will continue to serve other TV makers, too.
Wall Street Journal reports: “LG is investing almost $80 million for a nearly 60% stake in Alphonso, which had a pre-money valuation of about $125 million, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Accelerating 2021
He says Alphonso’s own roadmap will be “accelerated” by the LG investment.
The company added five European countries to its footprint last year and goes like in India this year.
The company started by using automated content recognition (ACR) to create data out of consumers’ viewing behavior.
]]>“We’re seeing a full circle here where digital used to influence TV,” says Raghu Kodige, Alphonso’s Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder.
Kodige was one of the speakers at this week’s RampUp 2018 conference by LiveRamp, which drew nearly 3,000 attendees. In this interview with Beet.TV, he details some of the work Alphonso has been doing with IRI, which has the largest database of shopper loyalty data.
To determine how television ads are working, Alphonso used the occasion of the 2018 Super Bowl to do some research based on data from a year earlier leading up to and including Super Bowl 2017. It involved a few different brands that were regular Super Bowl spenders.
For McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, Alphonso used location data to track post-ad store traffic. Working with IRI, it was able to attribute TV ad exposure to SKU movement, looking for lift before and after the big football game.
“We were trying to identify what kind of trends you see prior to the Super Bowl and after the Super Bowl. It was pretty exciting,” says Kodige.
One of the things that stood out was the amount of spending by Dunkin Donuts to influence Hispanic audiences on Spanish-language TV networks, particularly in the months ahead of the Super Bowl.
“We saw almost a twelve percent increase in foot traffic to Dunkin Donuts in the three weeks following the Super Bowl, which I thought was pretty significant considering that the Super Bowl reaches such a wide audience.”
Alphonso and IRI announced their data partnership in February 2018.
Alphonso’s research also uncovered insights into things like optimum TV frequency.
The 12 million households common to IRI and Alphonso produce data that facilitates TV tune-in attribution and sales attribution “down to the creative level,” says Kodige. If a brand is testing multiple creative iterations, “within a few weeks we start seeing this data flow into our dashboards with the IRI partnership” so that creative optimization can be done while the campaign is still in-flight, he adds.
The scale is such that it fills the gap in true, multi-touch attribution, according to Kodige. “The missing piece in most of these studies that have happened to date is the absence of large scale TV data.”
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.
]]>But that time is changing. Thanks to the infusion of a raft of new data points, TV ad planning, buying and insights are getting smarter.
At the Beet Retreat, comScore EVP Cathy Hetzel and chief product officer Raghu Kodige of Aplphonso, a TV data insights company, discussed the latest trends.
“I do think location data helps,” Hetzel said. “We have a point of attribution where we can start to see that these people responded to this ad and visited these stores more than they did before and guess what? It didn’t really play well in these other places.
Then you start to have to unpack that and figure out why didn’t it? What other mechanisms may have been in the way? Or why? Is it just a creative? Is it something else about what we’re doing?
Alphonso’s Kodige explained how a recently-launched new reporting product for TV advertisers is helping advertisers to see how data can transform their understanding of what works and how quickly.
“An agency out of Detroit saw that,” Kodige said. “They actually called us and said, ‘Hey, can you use this data to look at what types of creatives actually draw people into dealerships?’ We did a study across various different brands and we looked at what was in the creative, whether it said $700 cash-back or 2% APR increase, did it have music in it? What type of artists were being used?
“Each of those we were able to tie back to how many people actually saw that ad and went to a dealership? What we found was, even though the APR increase and $700 cash-back financially translated to the same thing, people more responded to the $700 cash-back rather than the APR decrease.
“Now (brands) see, ‘Oh, you can do all these kinds of things very quickly and now I can think of more use cases.'”
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on TV-viewing cues.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That future is now, as a new crop of TV ad data companies is rising up to offer not just TV ad tracking – but tracking of real-world viewer movements motivated by the ads.
One of those companies is Alphonso, which says it is finding the movie theater to be a key areana for the new technology.
“Movie studios spend a lot of money on television – they want to know who are the people who went and saw the movie,” says Alphonso chief product officer Raghu Kodige, in this video interview with Beet.TV”
Alphonso’s technology, which the company claims is on TV viewing devices in a third of US TV households as well as on smartphones, can see whether a TV viewer has seen a TV ad for a movie, then can see whether that viewer is sitting in her chair in the theater.
Does Alphonso know whether she also bought popcorn? In fact, it does, as the company also looks at consumers’ credit card records to find purchases and attribute them back to that original TV ad.
Isn’t there a consumer privacy concern in all of this? “If they are aware of it, they are happy to give consent,” Kodihge adds. “The holy grail of advertising is to figure out what is working.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
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