Sky was the incumbent satellite provider in the UK, Germany, Italy and Ireland when it was acquired in 2018, in what had been a surprised exit to NBCUniversal given its historic part-ownership by News Corp.
Since then, the pair announced the merger of NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, a pioneering addressable TV advertising system.
Then they announced that Sky Media Sales, Sky’s ad sales house, would begin using NBCU’s CFlight unified advertising metric.
In this video interview with Jon Watts for Beet.TV, Sky Media Sales MD John Litster talks about progress.
“In the UK (thanks to CFlight), we now can demonstrate to advertisers and agencies de-duplicated reach and frequency across all BARB target audiences, across both the linear transmissions and the video-on-demand transmissions,” he says. “So we’ve basically made it a lot easier for agencies and advertisers to assess the reach capability of linear and VOD in the UK.
“We’ve been so successful in doing it, and it’s really pleasing to say that both ITV and Channel 4, our competition, are heavily involved in CFlight as well.
“As of June of next year, across the UK you will be able to see de-duplicated reach and frequency across linear and VOD for ITV channels, for Sky channels and the Channel 4 channels. I think that’s testament to the fact that TV as an industry in the UK is determined to make sure that advertisers can see what value they’re getting for their advertising pound spent.”
Next up, Sky wants to introduce CFlight into Germany and Italy.
Sky launched AdSmart back in 2014, using its own customer data to analyze viewers on advertisers’ behalf and sending household-specific linear TV ads to their set-top boxes – one of the first and widest-scale addressable TV deployments anywhere.
In its home UK, AdSmart benefitted early by being deployed on the largest pay-TV platform, Sky’s own. It has since struck partnerships with Virgin Media and Channel 4. It is hoping ITV may yet join in.
“We should have Channel 4 up and running on the AdSmart platform at some point next year and we’re still in ongoing conversation with ITV,” Litster says. “The idea behind that is the broader reach that we have for addressability in the UK, the more attractive AdSmart becomes to more advertisers.
“Likewise in the US, they’re making great strides in terms of delivering addressability in that space.”
But the Comcast-Sky convergence is now going beyond ad platforms. Litster says the companies are looking at attracting global brand marketers to content for which they hold rights in multiple territories.
“We have a load of content that is common across the territories, across both the US the UK, Germany, and Italy,” he says.
“We’re active in the market at the moment at an advertiser level, trying to get advertisers to do business with us and to do partnerships with us across the territories, using a common property – be that Premier League, or potentially Formula One.
“We like to think that we’re delivering for advertisers a unique club-type environment, where they can do pretty similar things across all the territories in which both NBCU and Sky now operate.”
Litster acknowledges such global TV ad buys may not make up the majority of his business. Indeed, one of AdSmart’s trump cards until now has been that targetability by geography and viewer attributes has allowed a new wave of smaller brand to buy TV ads for the first time.
But he is speaking to what is a growing need on the part of some multinationals to simplify their global ad buying.
“There are global players out there that are interested in having a dialogue about a standard message that they have across the territories and we’re engaging with those people.
Now, they take a long time in happening. These are not things that happen overnight. These are not things that we talk about one day and happen the next, but there’s a surprising variety of brands that are having conversations either directly with us or with their agencies, that are trying to procure something across the various territories.”
]]>“There is a return to premium media from an advertiser perspective, an appreciation and a willingness to pay actually a premium price,” says Sandro Catanzaro, Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer of dataxu.
It’s not uncommon to see cost-per-thousand impressions ranging from $10 to $60. “And those are really healthy prices for quality programming,” Catanzaro says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“This is pretty much in contrast with the trends that used to happen like probably ten years ago when it was a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and not necessarily with the quality.”
The amount of TV inventory that can be targeted is growing exponentially. “In the last month, we have seen four-point-seven billion impressions on a TV set” measuring at least 40 inches. “This has been growing very, very significantly in the last three months.”
The last three years have seen dataxu receive an infusion of some $10 million from Sky Media, helping to fuel the company’s investment in software that facilitates people-centric messaging by connecting the dots of device ownership. If the target is potential luxury car buyers, “I can understand all the other devices they own and I can show them ads and target ads on all these other devices,” says Catanzaro.
On the analytics side, exposure can be linked to conversion, for example being exposed to an ad on connected-TV and then logging into a computer and taking an action prompted by the ad.
“So we can create a closed loop from that computer to the exposure on the TV and create attribution in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
Eroding linear TV ratings have made content owners “much more open to have conversations about technology,” Catanzaro says.
One end result for consumers from better targeting will be a reduction in ad loads in programming over the next several years, he adds.
“With the ability to target advanced audiences and only show ads to those individuals you as an advertiser care about, they’re going to pay a premium price but you don’t need to show that many ads to create the same revenue from the media seller side.”
Today’s ad load of 12 to 13 minutes per hour could “drop to probably half, maybe a quarter. While at the same time the cost per unit will rise and probably create incremental revenue for the media seller.”
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Investments have included $5m in to native ad tech company Sharethrough in 2014, and, recently, a $10 million round in to DataXu. Now the company is seeing some of the first synergies from its Sharethrough commitment.
“Sharethrough will have been integrated, by the end of this month (May), across all of our app estates, so we’ve got really sympathetic and empathetic ad experiences across our Sky News app, Sky Sports all, all of those sorts of things,” Jamie West, the deputy MD of Sky’s Sky Media ad sales division, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Sharethrough’s technology helps advertisers present messages in mobile apps that resemble the content users are already browsing.
That leaves DataXu, the Boston-headquartered, data-driven marketing analytics company. How will Sky harness the outfit run by CEO Mike Baker?
“DatXu is really about being a key enabler for our product Sky AdVance (which) takes our unique understanding of TV consumption and applies that in to the digital estate, allowing us to serve sequential and frequency-capped campaigns across multiple platforms,” West adds. “DataXu’s part in that is to act as our demand-side platform to enable us to buy inventory off Sky’s platform.”
West says Sky realized a few years ago it couldn’t build everything itself, so set up a San Francisco outpost to spot opportunities to work with startups. Now West says the company is looking globally for best-in-class vendors in which to take strategic stakes, to go on giving it an ad advantage.
This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi. Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.
]]>He noted the new architecture assures that video serving happens within the “compliance” parameters.
West runs the company’s AdSmart unit which serves addressable, or specific ads via IP and on linear television to specific households. He says that a recent study reflects consumer enthusiasm for addressable ads. He says that channels switching during addressable ads is down 32 percent versus watching generally served ads.
The collaboration between Sky and Videology was announced last month.
We spoke with West earlier this week in London at the Future of TV Advertising Forum where he was a speaker. For more videos leading up the Forum and subsequent coverage, please visit this page. Our coverage of the Forum was sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>
AdVance is the name given to a new suite from the company’s Sky Media ad sales division, threading together data from TV and internet to give advertisers new possibilities.
“We are trying to break down the barriers between TV and digital to enable linear TV viewing data to power digital ad serving,” Sky Media deputy MD Jamie West tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Sky’s in a position to do that because we have … a three-million-household, second-by-second viewing panel.
“When you overlay that with IP address, device ID or cookie ID, you have an opportunity to serve sequential stories across platforms.”
For Sky Media, which has long sold ads on the web as well as on TV, it is part of a multi-platform initiative.
“The next challenge for Sky is to think about how we can evolve in other media – not just thinking about addressable TV,” West says.
“Advertisers are asking us to work much more closely with them across all media, not just TV. A campaign is planned holistically across all media – but, when it comes to execution, that campaign is served in silos – TV is bought separately to press and radio.”
This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>