But driving widespread adoption is going to take a culture shift.

So says Kim Norris, VP at Charter’s Spectrum Reach ad sales division.

“First, you have to change culture. And one thing I’ve learned – being a change agent, and a very large company, we have 3,000 employees – just in the advertising group, is (the importance of) changing culture.

“If it’s between culture and change, culture always wins. So I think education is key.

“We embed digital sellers into our local markets. They all come from digital, they help our TV people learn how to speak the language of data.”

Spectrum Reach’s offering includes an app for better campaign planning, a portal for uploading and targeting TV ads and ad inventory across Spectrum News, the news service operating across New York areas.

Whilst Spectrum operates in local markets, Norris thinks its developing expertise in advanced TV capabilities could spread up to larger markets.

“Some of the stuff that we and other companies are doing in local markets could actually help us with how we want to push the national footprint forward,” she adds.

Norris was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Now it might also be applied to TV advertisers, whose ability to measure the efficacy of their spend is undergoing a revolution.

Charter’s Spectrum Reach ad sales division is one of the advocates of that revolution.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, its VP Kim Norris discusses new tricks the company is applying to tv measurement.

“We have been developing some self-provisioning platforms that actually allow our advertisers to log on and see the results of a multi-platform campaign,” she says. “Which is pretty impressive, to be able to get to a point where you can actually show a client, ‘Okay, this is what you bought and here’s the reporting against it cross-platform’.”

But now Norris is chasing more.

She tells Beet.TV her team will soon offer new numbers to data-hungry ad buyers.

“We’re sort of expanding that … we’re developing some reach and frequency reporting that will also run across the products that we’re currently selling in the local market,” Norris adds.

Norris was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But now connected TV platforms mean digital-style ad buying can come to the living room, whilst even linear, old ad buys can benefit from digitally-infused planning.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kim Norris, VP at Charter’s Spectrum Reach ad sales division, talks about the importance of marrying digital and TV ad operations at the institutional level.

“Probably about 95% of my employees actually come from digital,” Norris says.

“We’ve actually been pretty successful at combining a conversation between digital media and TV media. We’re able to leverage a lot of the data that we have to, say, run a television campaign and then target unreached, underexposed audiences that we didn’t reach in TV and actually reach them through different digital media.”

Norris says Spectrum Reach is able to take its viewership data and combine it with different types of datasets, like psychographic or automotive, to develop insights like, “People who shop at Zappos tend to watch these types of programmes.”

That can inform even linear TV media buys, Norris says.

“So pretty much I would say maybe 60% of our linear TV buys are actually influenced in the local markets by data,” she adds. “We’re actually able to build more intelligent schedules even before we get into products like addressability where you’re actually delivering directly to an audience.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

At the Beet Retreat in New York City in November, hosted by Horizon Media, Furious Corp CEO Ashley Swartz spoke to a panel of women currently navigating advertising’s continuing changes: Kim Norris, gvp of digital and advanced advertising sales at Spectrum Reach; Caroline Horner, svp of product management at 605; and Samantha Rose, svp of video at Horizon Media all discussed how data has changed the advertising industry, the challenges it’s raised, and what’s still to come.

“We’ll see evolution across all verticals”
Norris says that right now, “demand outstrips supply” when it comes to advanced advertising, but that the marketplace is catching up through experimentation and learning. As first-party data for tune-in viewership data has changed how tune-in marketing operates, “we’ll see evolution across all the verticals,” Norris says.

Horner, who saw through early digital advertising models during the dot com boom before moving on to positions on both sides of the market. Most significantly so far, Horner says, data and attribution marketing has changed the role of the marketer.

“It was incredible to see how fast real, deterministic data affected the marketer. We had to re-up relationships and sales processes because they saw real data,” says Horner. “That delight and experience – you know you’ve made a difference and that’s what data has done. We’ve been riding that over the last 15 years.”

Growing pains
While data has infiltrated advertising strategies, Horner’s observed that the sell side has been slower to adapt to new capabilities and approaches influenced by data. While marketers on the buy side quickly realized how data was making advertising work better for them – and how the money would follow – Horner says the sell side had to be “dragged into it,” but are now used to “heavier and heavier analytics.”

But when the agency’s jobs depend on convincing networks, platforms and marketers that the data will help, the stakes are high, says Rose. “What we don’t want to do is have something not work and then deter someone from moving forward. In this more addressable [market], whether it’s MVPD or digital, a wasted impression is wasted. In this area where we’re growing we want to get it right.”

Data-specializing partners, like Ampersand and 605, can help add a support network with the goal of getting advertising from operating like one-to-many fishnet to a one-to-one fishing line, says Swartz.

Where it’s headed
Rose adds that while one-to-one remains a goal to reach, addressable is still in its infancy, and some brands are looking for the mass reach that linear TV provides. “I hate to say it cause it’s a term we always use, but it’s not one size fits all,” she says.

As the space does mature, Horner notes that trust is going to be one of the most important factors when it comes to data sharing and making sure customers aren’t concerned about privacy. That will entail working with the right partners and legitimizing the industry and, as Norris adds, setting standards.

“We have to get standards,” she says. “We need to make sure we have clear definitions, that it’s as standard as possible.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“My analogy always was what if Mars attacked?” Kline says. “There’s all of these country conflicts, but if our asses were all on the line, just like a good sci-fi movie, we’d have to pull together and make it through. Mars did attack, in the form of Facebook and Amazon and Google. They attacked a few years back, so we’re pulling together now to try and give scale to all this advanced advertising that the ad tech players have been able to do.”

While MVPDs and networks continue to battle each other at times over things like affiliation agreements, they recognize that they need each other for scale in advertising. The resulting data has been enormously helpful in leading smaller businesses to television. Kline cites success stories like Peloton and Wayfair, who have used TV as a leveraging point for growing their brands. Spectrum Reach’s partner strategy also helps bolster its data strategy: Spectrum Reach works with Ampersand to catch up on advertising data collection, while 605 worked with the company to build out an audience app that lets users customize their own schedules.

This has also led MVPDs to explore the use of new products and advanced advertising technology. The launch of an ad portal has been a gateway for businesses of all budgets to get a more advanced look at data and customize advertising that suits them. Kline also mentions an audience app that their partner 605 designed for them that sifts through set-box top data to optimize a schedule.

“That’s been a game changer for us,” Kline says. “That’s taken the conversation away from ‘Just give me ESPN and USA Network’ to 50 networks deep.”

The redefining role of MVPDs as linear and digital continue to evolve has led to more precise data as well as more advanced forms of advertising. Kline says that this creates an environment ripe for opportunity for all stakeholders involved.

“I think from the local perspective to the national perspective, we’re going to make the ecosystem work much better,” says Kline.

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“I’ll tell you why,” Kline told Sean Cunningham, CEO of VAB, in conversation with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media in November. “We have census data, it’s pristine. We know it’s attached to a household. Everything we do is aggregated, anonymized and privacy compliant. It’s the best tool for an advertiser to use.”

Spectrum Reach’s data, aggregated with partners including Ampersand Media and Canoe, enables the company to make network inventory addressable. That means a cable company can go to a potential ad client, like BMW, and help them target specific audiences based on the data that Spectrum Reach sets the company up with. According to Kline, roughly $65-70 billion is spent in network advertising annually, so the goal isn’t to necessarily win over more ad dollars – even as performance marketing brands like DTC companies are exploring the arena to diversify from Facebook and Google. Kline wants to attract more dollars, but also make the existing dollars spent smarter.

“I wouldn’t say we’re breaking new ground with this, I’d say we’re catching up because the ad tech players have been able to do this,” says Kline. “But we are now in the position to compete heavily with them, with the best data and highest quality content.”

While Kline acknowledges Spectrum isn’t reinventing the industry, he says that it’s most critical asset is being able to make TV addressable at scale. As the definition of TV has changed, Kline says, marketers just want to be able to decipher who their audience is and how to reach them. Now, Spectrum can offer that – it’s no longer just talking about offering it.

“It’s a work in progress,” says Kline. “We didn’t do ourselves any good by talking about it too early, but now we’re there and we need to just shut up and make it happen.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“We are aggregating all our addressability, not just for the two minutes an hour we sell to our local national spot buyers but soon national networks like AMC or USA Network, or pick any network, will be able to come to NCC and be able to make their national time addressable on our platforms,” Kline says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.”

NCC is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Three months ago it expanded into digital ad buying so as to be able to deliver cross-screen campaigns across linear, VOD, addressable TV, digital video, display, social media, out-of-home and mobile, as Multichannel News reports.

“We’re going to make it very easy for networks to be able to make their inventory, the fourteen or twelve minutes an hour, addressable using our two-way interactive platform,” Kline says.

“Right now they can all do it on our digital feeds and on our set-top box dynamic ad insertion, our Spectrum TV app where they can do streaming on linear addressability or even VOD on our streaming apps addressably.”

With the bulk of ad impressions being on linear TV, “Coming soon you’ll be able to buy literally our full footprint, which could be up to fifty, sixty million households addressably on linear as well as on demand as well as on demand as well as on streaming.”

Kline says the local TV marketplace has changed dramatically in the last few years because of viewing data and infrastructure.

“Part of what we’re trying to do with the VAB is to take some of those wonderful things that we do locally and apply them nationally to our national network partners. And we’re working fast and furious on that. NCC is going to be the hub of that. More on that in the coming months.

“It’s really a great time to be in local advertising.”

This video is from a Beet.TV’s coverage of the VAB’s Direct to Success summit held on June 12 at Viacom in New York City. Please visit this page for more segments.

“National advertisers don’t want 40 million. It’s a good start, but I think we’ve got some catch-up to play,” Kline says in this one-on-one discussion with Tatta at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.

Upon the sale of Cablevision to Altice, Tatta joined the startup 605, on whose board Kline now sits while also holding the roles of President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. Tatta is President of 605.

Asked by Tatta to define the state of addressable TV, Kline points to the traditional business model of the cable providers whose participation is needed to expand the national footprint by using their two minutes of local ad time.

“I think a big reason for that is many operators, many distributors are in the subsection television business. They’re not in per se the advertising business, and I think that perception is starting to change,” Kline says.

“They’re always going to be in the subscription business, selling video products and high-speed data and telephony and soon mobile phone service for some of us,” Kline adds. “Advertising has always sort of been, ‘hey we’ll take that money, it’s great high margin, but we’re not going to invest that much in it.’”

Having just launched linear addressable in Los Angeles, Charter’s “footprint in New York will be months away. I think it’s not moved fast. Maybe it’s moved fast in cable years, but it hasn’t moved fast in anything else,” Kline says.

On the way to additional scale, addressable is providing a foundation upon which TV networks can enhance the value of their national inventory, according to Kline.

“If they really want to make their network inventory more valuable, they need to get it better targeted. More relevant. And we have the platforms that can do that.”

In the meantime, he sees the model for networks as acquiring the widest possible amount of distribution and collecting license fees from distributors. “But I’m not naïve. We know that things will evolve and viewership will move to other places. But there is still a ton of viewership on what we would call traditional platforms, and I think that’s going to continue for quite some time,” Kline says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, Kline talks about bringing scale to addressable linear television and testing a self-serve platform for small advertisers to complement direct-sales efforts at the local level.

Charter this month launched household addressable TV in the Los Angeles market, to be followed by New York “and then rolling out throughout the rest of the country in our footprint over the next, I would say, twelve to eighteen months,” Kline says.

He thinks cable companies are “really, really well positioned to help not only their customers, but I think that same infrastructure that we’re building we’re going to be able to help some of our network affiliates as well.”

Noting that that the traditional linear business “is still several billion dollars for us and we’ve got to make sure that we bring that in and secure that,” Kline discusses the quest for scalable addressability and automated reporting.

“Ultimately, what we want have happen for our customers is they go on a secured website and they can see television, they can see online, they can see on demand, they can see on our IP streaming services how many impressions they got on each platform.

“That sounds lovely and it sounds easy, but it takes an awful lot of the organization’s attention and time to start to start to build those systems,” Kline says in response to interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, who is a Beet.TV contributor and CEO of Furious Corp.

Asked by Swartz to look out a few years, Kline says “we’re going to be selling impressions, we’re going to be selling them highly targeted, highly data infused. I think you’ll see not only us but other MVPD’s doing similar things to make advertising much more front and center than it is today as a revenue stream for their companies.”

While agencies are big users of cable interconnects for their clients, many local businesses have direct client relationships with Charter, “which is still for many of us billions of dollars worth of revenue.”

He mentions a test being done in Raleigh, NC, involving a self-provisioning platform “for very small customers that can go on, pick the schedule they want, pick the creative that they want and put in their credit card and be right on our air.

“Five years ago I would have said never. But with Facebook and Google and all these other self-provisioning platforms, small advertisers are used to this. And we think we can quadruple the number of customers we have at any given time.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2018, Klippel scopes out the company’s growing cross-screen audience targeting and campaign attribution capabilities and talks about its collaboration with TV data specialty firm 605 in developing the new AudienceApp product.

Klippel believes there’s a misconception that only addressable TV campaigns can generate detailed data on linear-viewing audiences along with ad exposure data. Whether it’s a traditional spot schedule, an audience-optimized schedule for an actual addressable campaign, “We’re able to pull back the same level of audience, ad exposure and impression data to run detailed reach/frequency analysis, ROI and lift and attribution studies to get a comprehensive view of how a cross-platform campaign has performed,” Klippel explains.

Addressable linear TV is the latest complement to Spectrum Reach offerings spanning set-top box video-on-demand and other digital products. Buyers can buy linear schedules the way they’ve always done and deliver unique creative to different households.

“We’ll also be launching the ability to sell different audiences to different advertisers within the same break and deliver only the specific households that a particular brand is trying to reach,” Klippel adds.

Surveying the addressable linear landscape, which has been constrained by the walled operations of multiple operators and content owners, he likens addressable to the advent of interconnects that have helped to make buying local cable inventory easier.

“We’re going to start seeing a lot more collaboration and a cohesive approach around addressable TV, not only among operators like in the case of interconnects but even across operators and national programmers,” Klippel says.

The past 18 months have seen the melding of three companies—Time Warner Cable Media, Bright House Media Strategies and Spectrum Reach, which is the advertising sales division of Charter Communications—while unifying their product portfolios. While all of that was occurring, Spectrum Reach “managed to build and start deploying an audience-based platform that’s fundamentally changing the way we’re selling television,” Klippel says.

That platform is called AudienceApp and it was first activated in Austin, TX. With AudienceApp, buyers can can look at audiences and other key audience attributes to identify and target messages on TV in specific markets based on virtual, real-time access to household viewing data.

“One of the major reasons we were able to have the focus and deliver that in such a quick turnaround was our partnership with 605, who helped us develop the platform and has a management team of executives that are familiar with and have worked with set-top box data and linear optimization,” says Klippel.

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.