One of Nielsen’s most recent acquisitions was of Sorenson Media. The company now has technical underpinnings of a platform for targeted TV ads that encompasses delivery, data-driven targeting, unified campaign management, and measurement, as Variety reports.
“All media is going to go addressable,” Kelly Abcarian, the GM of Nielsen’s new Advanced Video Advertising unit, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
She says some $4.7 billion worth of addressable ads will be bought next year. “That’s made up of OTT, advanced linear-driven audiences, as well as the cable two minutes of addressability that they’ve built a sizeable business against as well.”
In addition to Sorenson, Nielsen acquired Qterics, a smart-TV software and privacy management vendor, and Gracenote, which does automatic content recognition.
“First and foremost, measurement is the bedrock of what Nielsen provides to the marketplace and what we’ll continue to do,” Abcarian says. “We’re really trying to focus on how we unlock addressable in a way that brings standardization across all those impressions.”
She envisions an open platform. “As we look to do ad replacement on a television screen, we’re also creating unique capabilities in the ad decisioning space to enable buyers and sellers to execute against that efficiency alongside of other ad decisioning engines and algorithms and capabilities in the marketplace.”
Going beyond the traditional two minutes per hour of addressable TV ad inventory that goes to distributors, “We’re really unlocking the full sixteen minutes of inventory so that programmers, both broadcasters cable networks, can truly execute in a one to one addressable way.
“It’s a matter of setting up campaigns and getting those instructions across the buyers and sellers around what ads are eligible across linear television for replacement. We’re really sitting in the middle providing the measurement and the simplicity around understanding what was reached, how often were they reached across what platforms. Then providing mechanics to actually do the true ad replacement on the glass screen itself.”
In addition to Sorenson’s smart-TV data from Samsung, Nielsen is working with LG and chip maker MediaTek, according to Abcarian.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, the WPP agency’s Director, Addressable Lead talks about the complexity of executing addressable TV campaigns for GroupM agencies across various MVPD’s from clients, ranging from adult diapers to luxury cars.
“They’re not necessarily one provider,” Cestaro says. “When you think of adding the satellite guys and the cable guys together, that’s all incremental reach. But where Sorenson is unique is they sit on top of that. So they can extend reach and they have access to different inventory that we haven’t really tapped into yet.”
MODI has seen good results for clients using addressable but it’s a fluid playing field. “There’s a lot of learning curves, there’s a lot of new growth in the space and with that comes new clients and new opportunities,” he says.
“The providers don’t necessarily work together. Everybody has their own data, their own buys, there’s no magic solution that goes across everyone so it’s a manual process.”
Cestaro likens Sorenson’s positioning in the market to that of Apple Pay.
“Meaning they’re not Visa, they’re not Mastercard they’re not Discover. Those companies kind of sit there. But they’re kind of sitting on top of that and they’re helping direct or being the pipes behind a more aggregated approach and a more wide-scale approach,” he says of Sorenson.
From an inventory standpoint, Cestaro doesn’t think there’s limited supply of addressable TV inventory. “Can there always be more? Absolutely. The demand is high.”
With about two-thirds of U.S. households able to be targeted with addressable ads, some marketers are testing addressable while others keep returning to it, having navigated the learning curve.
“You’re going from GRP’s to impressions,” says Cestaro. “The way we buy it is different. The way we target is very different. Even the back end piece is all different.”
As addressable continues to scale, “What Sorenson is doing is taking what was there and really just doing it a different way that hasn’t quite been done yet and it’s really allowing for more of a top level approach.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>What started with “very humble web ads” about a decade ago has progressed to the point where “where we can show ads on TV that are fully addressed, and one by one, and you can sequence the story,” Catanzaro says in this interview with Beet.TV. “And you can link those exposures to consumer conversions.
“Now you start get to fully leverage the power of that capability. If you think of the next step, now agencies can use this technology to follow the consumer as they journey and tailor their message to the different stage that the consumer goes.”
Although it may sound odd given his tech background at dataxu, Catanzaro talks about the prospect of technology becoming invisible.
“Technology, if anything, we hope will start disappearing. It will enable people who actually want to think about strategy to execute as they wish to actually execute. If technology disappears, your execution, your ability to touch consumers in different stages and different messages will become much more relevant and important.”
He also sees creative becoming more important and creative working with media planning and media strategy becoming central.
“It’s kind of back to the old days, but we couldn’t do it, there was no tools to do it. Now you can tailor ads and target specific populations and segments and you can have a much clearer separation of messaging.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It can typically take several weeks for addressable linear TV campaigns to be created and activated, Catanzaro notes in this interview with Beet.TV. “The integration enables us to do an immediate activation. You can be live in half an hour. That’s really amazing.”
It’s all about reducing the barriers to entry for addressable so that more advertisers take advantage of its targeting and attribution aspects.
“These addressable TV campaigns used to be very manual. You have to use a significant budget to actually justify the amount of work,” says Catanzaro. “These days you can create a campaign for as little as you want, the campaign will go live and there is basically no humans in the loop.”
Embedded in TV sets, Sorenson’s technology can detect whatever is happening on the screen via automatic content recognition. From an advertising standpoint, everything happens in real-time, meaning buyers can start, stop or pause campaigns, or change target audiences, in seconds, as Sorenson’s Stefan Maris explains in this Beet.TV interview.
As it rolls out the Sorenson integration with agency partners, “We think this is going to help them activate much faster and be much more flexible. It also brings them control” in that campaign reporting doesn’t have to wait until the campaign ends. “Now you can actually start working on pacing, you can change pacing on the platform. You can also control frequency.”
Using dataxu’s cross-device targeting solutions, advertisers can allocate frequency by device and now include TV sets that have Sorenson’s technology. The company’s OneView identity and data management platform links consumers across all the devices they own while linking them to households.
“You’re linking that exposure to a commercial that may happen on a desktop or on a mobile device. Or actually somebody may walk by a store and can also connect those. And that happens organically.”
As the Wall Street Journal reports, AMC Networks signed on with Sorenson for targeted ads. Discovery Networks has been in pilot mode as well.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Sorenson’s solution is an addressable platform for linear TV which uses smart TVs to swap out ads otherwise broadcast in conventional transmissions.
The so-called Soreneson Addressable product sees Sorenson partner with programmmers to swap out those ads, rather than the cable or satellite operator, as is often the case.
Could such an approach boost the numbers of viewers ad buyers could reach gthrough granular targeting, beyond simply demographic targeting?
“Today our guesstimate is that around 3% of all TV impressions, because of the two minutes per hour (of US national cable ads), are addressable,” Sorenson’s Stefan Maris says, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“With our solution, we can address the other 97%, which is a pretty interesting proposition to the industry.”
Maris knows a thing or two about advanced TV ad targeting. It was a decade ago that Maris, then at Philips Electronics, managed product at Philips Content Identification, having absorbed the pioneering TV watermarking firm Teletrax.
After a leadership position in Civolution, the company spun out from Philips, Maris is now at Sorenson Media, where he finds himself imagining a day when total addressable ad targeting is commonplace.
The Sorenson Addressable offering operates in real-time, meaning buyers can start, stop or pause campaigns, or change target audiences, in seconds.
AMC Networks just became the first to sign on to the product, planning to use it to power ad replacement for buyers in live linear shows over AMC, WE tv, SundanceTV and IFC, with BBC America.
Discovery is also piloting the system. Maris expects another 10 to 15 networks will be piloting or deployed by year’s end.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series,please visit this page.
]]>That’s how Mike Bologna sizes up Sorenson’s “somewhat unique” position in the addressable marketplace in this interview with Beet.TV, in which he discusses the lack of consistency in executing and measuring campaigns and the financial hurdle of producing multiple creative iterations.
Sorenson uses automatic content recognition to discern what’s happening on smart-TV screens, paving the way for advanced audience targeting and measurement.
“Sorenson’s product introduces a little bit of a new proposition to where the gatekeeper is really the smart TV and the inventory could be either cable or broadcast, national or local,” says Bologna, who is President, one2one Addressable, Cadent. “That’s a little bit of a different spin on it and I think it introduces some addressable diversity to the marketplace, which is a good thing.”
Meanwhile, “business is booming” at one2one Addressable (formerly one2one Media), according to Bologna owing to the company’s efforts to simplify a marketplace that is totally lacking in consistency, from data to tech pipes.
“There is no standardization when it comes to addressability. There’s no standardization, there’s no automation, but what there is is a very high valuation proposition and a very high return on investment,” Bologna says.
“The lack of standards generally translates into complexity. What we do is we simplify the addressable business in the absence of agreed upon industry standards.”
What has changed recently is that advertisers and agencies are spending less time “picking apart all the different data sources” that can be used for advanced TV targeting and “refining how that data can be used to fill a strategic objective of a particular brand.”
For the most part, “The creative remains as is,” meaning addressable campaigns are still largely the domain of campaigns created for traditional, broad TV audiences, according to Bologna.
“We love to send different pieces of creative with different messages to the appropriate audiences and then tie that back to sales analyze accordingly. But in many cases, the cost to produce the creative outweighs the value of that small segment.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We’re very excited to take this step into addressable television,” says Adam Gaynor, who joined AMC from DISH earlier this year in the newly created position of VP, AMCN Agility.
“For us, addressable television allows us to have new conversations with our existing clients and frankly new conversations with new clients. It’s really all about adding an enhanced layer to media mixes that allow our brands to reach their consumers,” Gaynor adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
Sorenson’s technology, when embedded in Samsung TV sets, can detect and analyze everything that appears on the screen. The company works with publishers to help optimize advertising and shares some of the revenue with Samsung.
“Marketers have been embracing addressability for quite some time,” says Gaynor. “Addressability has just been growing in popularity. Our ability to add addressability technology into the national cable arena is an extra enhancement to an already growing addressable market.”
On July 26, Sorenson activated Sorenson Addressable and announced that AMC would be the first to use the new platform’s real-time ad replacement technology. Sorenson Addressable can be seen as a sort of over-the-top version of traditional addressable delivery controlled by MVPD’s because it enables households to receive targeted ads regardless of their choice of cable, satellite or telco TV provider.
“When we set out to try to add addressability to our tool kit, we took a look at what Sorenson had to offer. We make great content. And what we see is that they make great ad tech,” Gaynor says.
Working with Sorenson, an automaker that purchases a 30-second ad unit during the “Walking Dead” will be able to send a truck ad to the Samsung TV screen of a farmer in Illinois, and a sports car ad to the screen of a 20-something car enthusiast or in Los Angeles. The rest of the people watching the show at that time might see an ad for a standard four-door car or minivan, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Brands look at addressability as a part of their overall media mix. At AMC networks we now have the ability from start to finish to be able to really help advertisers from a broad demo reach to a more targeted reach and now to an addressable reach,” says Gaynor.
AMCN Agility was formed in early 2018, about a year after the company unveiled its Aurora Video Targeting Solutions platform. After testing it with a select group of advertisers, AMC decided to form a dedicated data sales team led by Gaynor.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Many clients now are using first-party data to apply to their linear TV buys. It is the full national scale in that entire break, but we’re able to find the highest concentration of that target audience and deliver that spot to those households in a much more effective and measurable way,” says Kazerman. “Really, every major advertiser group has leaned in at this point.”
Asked about Discovery’s work with Sorenson in this interview with Beet.TV, Kazerman says it’s aimed at filling a gap in what Discovery’s national portfolio can deliver to advertisers. He notes that cable has always been good at top-of-funnel reach at scale.
“Now with Engage, we can reach consumers in a consideration set, middle of sales funnel. The one piece that hasn’t really been answered at scale yet has been addressable or dynamic ad insertion on live linear feeds.”
This is why Discovery is teaming with Sorenson to figure out “how we can look to solve that problem and really have a complete media plan through all cycles of that sales funnel for an advertiser. And addressable is I think is that last missing piece that national TV is lacking.”
Sorenson’s technology, when embedded in Samsung TV sets, can detect and analyze everything that appears on the screen. The company works with publishers to help optimize advertising and shares some of the revenue with Samsung.
Advertiser adoption of data for TV targeting “continues to build momentum and very quickly,” Kazerman says. “We’re seeing now a handful of clients that are moving their dollars entirely in the Upfront through Discovery Engage. Which I think is indicative of the marketplace and the power of the data that clients have at their disposal and how they want to apply it to TV.”
Like other TV providers, Discovery is experimenting with new ad formats to improve the viewer experience. Kazerman believes there will need to be some level of industry standardization for such formats down the road.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Addressable TV Evolves sponsored by Sorenson Media. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.
“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”
These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.
Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.
“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”
TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.
“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”
This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”
Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.
“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”
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.
]]>Two of the company’s newest products are a measurement solution for local broadcasters and addressability for linear TV, according to VP of Advertising James Shears.
Using automatic content recognition, “We understand what’s on the screen and we can actually measure what people are doing on the TV,” Shears says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “It’s not panel based, it’s not leveraging set-top box data. It’s just doing something that’s not been done in market before.”
Use cases for local broadcasters include informing their promotional activity and bringing insights to newscasts, both based on the entire life cycle of viewers. “During the newscast or local broadcast, did they leave the channel when a particular story was coming on or did they come back and stay and were heavily engaged? Maybe they need to push happier stories or do something they hadn’t really thought about.”
This represents a more holistic approach “where there has been a hunger for measurement that’s a little more informed and a little more second by second,” Shears says.
With addressable, Sorenson Media “takes out the traditional and starts understanding how you can leverage the digital ecosystem to do something that has been done in the linear TV side, but maybe not at the speed with which we can perform. The key for our platform is that we’re essentially creating an ecosystem.”
Because of everything it sees on TV screens, the company says it’s in a good position to “think about the stream itself” and improve viewers’ experiences. That could involve shrinking the 18 minutes of commercial time per hour and other ways “we can think about breaking the paradigm.”
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.
]]>For Sorenson Media, which uses data from smart television sets from partners that include Samsung, the main focus is that first screen. “That said, especially when you take an addressable approach, it kind of makes a lot of sense when you serve something on the first screen to follow up on the second screen,” says Stefan Maris, the company’s VP of Product Marketing & Partnerships.
Because Samsung has a device graph, it knows exactly what kind of devices are connected to the television and all the devices in the same household. So it knows the impression level data of exposure in the households and can use it to retarget those same devices.
“Those two worlds are definitely coming together,” Maris says in response to a question from moderator Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Corp. “In our view and our vision, TV is always leading. And then the second screen activation or extension if you like is always on top of that.”
Simulmedia has made big strides in measuring cross-platform exposure through its work with Facebook, showing reach across the social network and TV, according to Jeff Storan. Advertisers get a unified view of the audience they’re targeting on Facebook and how they’re reaching it with TV ads.
“For TV networks, they also get to see how those two mediums are working together to convert audiences to tune into their programming,” says Storan, who is Simulmedia’s VP of Marketing.
Device graphs and various data sets are fine for Joan Fitzgerald, VP of Product Management & Business Development at TiVo. “But then you have to build in a lot of custom targets and first-party targets, and I think that’s where things just slow down a little bit,” she says.
Noting that an unduplicated reach curve isn’t about to happen, Swartz asks about the limits of set-top box data in cross-platform planning. Does one just keep overlapping data sets “until you go from approachable audience with a net of two million to five moms in Duluth?” she says.
“I think creating more and larger single-source panels for the purpose of cross-media measurement is the path we have to take,” says Storen.
The reality is that advertisers are tracking against both age/gender targets and other targets defined by external data, according to Fitzgerald.
“We’re in this transition period,” she says. “You’re looking at the performance of that audience target over time and you’re experiencing the benefits of doing this kind of media planning optimization,” adds Fitzgerald. “But you’re delivering on both of these targets.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>But, by and large, just like connected TV itself, they depend on boxes, dongles, consoles or widgets connected to a television set.
What if you could do dynamic ad replacement in the TV itself?
That’s what Sorenson Media, a broadcast technology support vendor with a range of services, is aiming to help TV manufacturers do.
Product marketing VP Stefan Maris explains: We engage with companies like Samsung, LG, and Vizio. At this point, we are in integration mode with Samsung.
“Next year in Q2, we’re going to start field tests on the dynamic ad replacement, and we target to have a full commercial at least in Q3 next year.
“So if you looked at the overall footprint of Samsung, by the end of 2017, we’ll be looking at 50 million internet-connected smart TVs of which 28 million are in the US and 22 million are in Europe. Of the 28 million in the US, roughly 50% will be available upon launch.”
Sorenson was founded by Utah businessman Jim Sorenson, is led by CEO Marcus Liassides and numbers execs from Cardiff’s former on-demand pioneer Yes TV. Maris was previously with Philips and its Civolution unit, which performs broadcast tracking and automated content recognition.
He says Sorenson boasts partnerships with the US’ Hearst and Sinclair TV groups to replace ads ad certain times of day, targeted using data held about viewers, including via Neustar and Experian. He hopes SMG and Modi Media will show interest in buying the inventory.
Sorenson also offers real-time analytics of viewing behavior inside connected TVs, including analyzing which show promos yielded viewing uplift.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
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