“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”
At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.
“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.
Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.
“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.
“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”
To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”
At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Earlier this year, after Fox, Turner and Viacom announced the formation of OpenAP, details emerged about how comScore’s advanced audiences would be one of the first data sources integrated into the new system. And while OpenAP is just up and running, comScore’s Cathy Hetzel believes it’s a tipping point.
That’s because definitions of audience targets—say, automobile intenders—tend to vary. “What you find is that targets are defined differently” Hetzel, who is EVP of Commercial at comScore, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
One of the best things about OpenAP, according to Hetzel, is that the networks involved are using common definitions of audience targets as supplied by comScore. It can then “measure the effectiveness of that target on the back end and it’s exactly the same target. The advertiser is not having a slightly different definition of a specific target that they’re in the market to find.”
With everyone within OpenAP doing business off of a unified target, its “a true tipping where we have the opportunity as a measurement company to really see the power of big data sets working together,” Hetzel says.
She would like to see the concept expand to other media sellers, regardless of whether it’s under the auspices of OpenAP. Given the possibility of competing audience-targeting consortiums, “we’re happy to oblige, obviously.”
It’s also a good sign that the industry is thinking about ways in which it can reach scale because “We’ve always been about scale.”
OpenAP isn’t the only partnership in the advanced TV landscape, along with acquisitions and mergers and the vertical integration of networks and operators. Meanwhile, some newer startups are maturing and converging with one another.
“I think that’s good for the industry. There’s been a lot of noise the last several years and I think some of that noise is starting to settle down,” says Hetzel.
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.
]]>So it was when Charter scooped up Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) just over a year ago. Since then, renegotiation of comScore’s agreement with Charter brought comScore from 22 million measured households to more than 35 million, according to Jeff Boehme, SVP, Television Research at comScore.
The bottom line: comScore ended up with about 75 million reportable television sets in use, giving the company greater insight into tuning behavior, Boehme explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“The importance is not just the tuning data. It’s the ability to match that tuning data with relevant audience consumer datasets so that not only can we track tuning we can track tuning we can track advertising and we can track consumption,” Boehme says.
Between its own data warehousing and relationships with companies like Experian, comScore can identify programs with high propensity of certain advertiser audience segments and match it to advertising campaigns in those programs.
“Now we can provide much more detail on the accountability of advertising, both in television as well as digital,” Boehme says.
comScore also has been on the ground floor of addressable TV advertising, given its own roots as well as those of Rentrak, with which it merged in early 2016. Early addressable players like DIRECTV and DISH relied on comScore and Rentrak to provide measurement capabilities.
One casualty of advanced audience measurement and correlation with consumer purchasers is waste, which has been a given throughout the history of TV advertising.
“Television now becomes more accountable because now what they can do is plan more effectively and deliver their segments with higher efficiencies,” Boehme says. “So no longer do we have waste factors that are standard among media buys.”
For programmers, the gains are mainly in the ability to better manage their portfolios “so the programmer understands what audiences now identified as consumers they need to attract and how.”
We interviewed Boehme at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.
]]>According to comScore, the new entity can now see
Brands are pushing for holistic media measurement to take account of multi-modal consumer viewing in the digital age. Whilst comScore’s heritage is in online measurement, Rentrak majors in set-top box and movie measurement.
Rentrak CEO Bill Livek tells Beet.TV, in this video interview: “We’re creating nothing short of a new model for the dynamic, cross-platform consumer.
“Cross-platform measurement is just in its infancy. But … when you add all the over-the-top digital platforms, there are a lot more consumers watching great TV shows. That’s great for the brand owners – they can use time and device as targets like never before.”
In the merger statement, Livek says: “The media industry can no longer be measured with samples in the thousands of households or individuals. The solutions our customers need must be based on unifying and making actionable massive amounts of information they can use as both a currency and to better manage their businesses.”
]]>The pair plan to combine to pool comScore’s online analytics nous with Rentrak’s historic strength in measuring TV and movie audiences.
“We’re going to take the best of breed with their digital and the best of what we do in movies and TV Everywhere and bring them together for better multi-platform products for our customers,” Rentrak CEO Bill Livek tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Ad execs like Group M’s Irwin Gottlieb have previously criticized media measurement agencies for being broken, failing to account properly for viewers’ modern video consumption. He backs the merger as an alternative to Nielsen.
So what does Livek see at the most exciting opportunity, after the deal’s closure?
“God, advanced TV is probably the most unbelievable thing I’ve seen in my career – the potential of commercials being addressed to the individual at the household basis,” he says.
“There can be commercials stored on the device in the home that can get triggered based on certain demographics. For example, if I’m at the end of my lease on my car, I can start seeing commercials for similar makes and models – all done in a privacy-compliant way, with the mass appeal of television and the efficiency of digital.”
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.
]]>Does any of this matter? Some marketers are becoming excited about the prospect of unifying ad measurements in to a single, holistic metric. But is that feasible? An entertaining panel convened at Beet.TV’s recent executive retreat debated…
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 Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz.
You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.
]]>“Addressable TV is here,” says Rentrak CEO Bill Livek. “You have two national platforms at scale, with DISH and DirectTV. Then you have the cable operators moving very quickly in to that.”
So, why would addressable be a good thing?
“The advertiser in a low-GDP-growth economy wakes up every morning and says, how do they increase market share without spending anything more than they did last year?
“Addressable allows that to happen. We will see more addressable in the future. We’re measuring the precision of those commercials for the operator.”
Rentrak just decided to merge with comScore to make a bigger media measurement agency.
The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>Algranti’s firm licenses return-path viewing data from US cable, satellite and telco operators, giving it numbers on 12 million households, which it uses to help its clients target advertising: “Now you can identify relatively small audiences (like) people who bought a Buick Lacrosse in the last months, which is maybe 40,000 households in the US, and identify: what are they watching on TV?”
For him, “small” is key. Lesser-viewed TV networks are crucial and “the long tail is important”, Algranti says.
He were interviewed by Ashley J. Swartz, founder and CEO of Furious Minds, for Beet.TV. Please find additional segments from the event here.
]]>“For the major networks, it’s going to take a long time to eventually go over to this stock exchange process of being able to use data and being able to select exactly what I want,” says ad tech firm Mediaocean‘s business development VP Fraser Woollard, who says advertising is still about “relationships” and “steak dinners”.
But Adap.tv‘s programmatic TV SVP Dan Ackerman responds: “The buy process doesn’t necessarily have to change for a programmatic toolset be active in it.”
At Beet.TV’s leadership summit on programmatic TV advertising presented with Adap.tv, Nielsen’s global products EVP Amit Seth reckoned: “On TV, it (programmatic) has already begun to seep in.” But he cautioned and clarified: “Linear can never be programmatic, and programmatic will never be linear.”
Video measurer Rentrak‘s product innovation SVP David Algranti said: There’s a lot of discussion to be had about what’s the right way to make assessment and attribution.”
They were interviewed by Ashley J. Swartz, founder and CEO of Furious Minds, for Beet.TV. Please find additional segments from the event here.
]]>TV has finite inventory, which works well in the TV buying world, but is more challenging in programmatic. “The big benefit of programmatic buying for marketers is they can leverage intelligence and decisioning systems that didn’t exist before with TV consumption and the ability to place TV ads in a more systematic manner,” he says. The net effect of weaving programmatic buying into TV should be more efficiencies for the same cost. “Ten years ago neither the information nor the decisioning systems existed to do something like programmatic TV. It’s the simultaneous convergence of the information and the ability to deliver the ads, which is aided by the fragmentation of TV, that provides an opportunity for the brand owners to have more efficient TV than in the past.”
We interviewed Algranti at the Beet.TV leadership summit on programmatic TV advertising presented with Adap.TV. You can find more clips from the event here.
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