But that is only because, without access to return-path data, TV has never been able to boast the kinds of user attribution that new digital media do.
Now that TVs have got connected, however, all that is changing – and a growing number of brands are recognizing that they can use TV for the same kind of precision, performance goals they have used search and social media.
TV advertising isn’t just for the Coca-Colas of the world anymore. Check out our new interactive story with @TatariTV to learn how four top DTC disruptors used a data-driven approach to drive performance with TV campaigns.https://t.co/k1X7aU4n40
— Adweek (@Adweek) January 11, 2021
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Todd Gordon, VP client development at Tatari, says that “challenger brands”, used to attributing outcomes back to exposures in digital media, are reallocating spending to TV with the same goal.
Gordon is a veteran in the industry, having pioneered programmatic TV buying at Magna Global and later at TubeMogul/Adobe.
“They care less about the traditional TV metrics, about reach and frequency,” Gordon says. “What they care about is growing their business at an efficient customer acquisition cost.
“Over time is, as these brands scale, traditional growth channels like search, like social start to lose effectiveness. What starts out as a really efficient customer acquisition cost starts to drift, especially at the margin when you look at the cost to acquire the next brand new customer.
“At that point, they have a business problem, because they have aggressive growth goals and they’ve exhausted the channels that they know. And a lot of times they don’t really believe that TV or streaming can help them. They think that it costs too much money to do, too expensive to test, is not for a brand like them.”
But that is changing. Tatari is one of the companies helping to bring data-driven buying and outcomes measurement to streaming and linear TV.
Founded in 2016 and run by a team including the co-founder of Shazam, it offers tools that that isolate performance for brands.
But that measurement also finds its way to the front end, answering buyers’ upfront questions about which inventory to buy, at which price and what results to expect from customer acquisition.
It is an approach likely to become more popular – not only as challenger brands like direct-to-consumer retailers take off, but also as established brands, familiar with traditional TV, look to wring more certainty out of their spend.
Tatari sat down with Chad Siovaila, Director of Performance Marketing at @oneclick, to learn more about his journey with TV advertising and how it led to https://t.co/B51IuafPXp's acquisition in 2018. https://t.co/xBYVOzW47E pic.twitter.com/uHu1CdhB4u
— Tatari (@TatariTV) January 27, 2021
“One thing that I really like about the performance approach is that, while audiences are important, ultimately performance is what brands are looking for,” adds Gordon.
His company’s clients include meditation app Calm, service marketplace Fiverr and e-tailer Rothy’s.
“We’re able to test and probe different types of inventory and almost put audience on the back burner, and test and see if a different approach works in terms of performance,” he says.
]]>That is the view of one exec who spent two decades in ad agencies and who now helps run programmatic TV operations at one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adobe director of programmatic TV Todd Gordon talks about how even more traditional TV can help satisfy ad buyers with a thirst to do more.
“Clients know a lot more about who their customers are,” Gordon says. “They have much more granular sources of data.
“If you want to apply that data at scale into TV, traditional panel based measurement breaks down. When you want to know how a very precise audience is behaving, you need more granular viewing data.”
But Gordon says that data has come on-stream. Adobe has this year announced a API partnership with NBC Universal to aggregate inventory in its own demand platform.
“You can actually log into our platform right now, see what NBCU has available for sale across all their linear networks,” he says. “You can optimize in platform, pass the order in platform. NBC on their side can approve or reject that order in platform.
“It’s actually getting a lot more automated, and a lot more programmatic.”
All of which can make for faster delivery and performance metrics tracking,” Gordon adds.
He also says that, despite ongoing chatter about distintermediation of ad agencies, as more brands use tech to take on more duties for themselves, TV is still largely transacted through agencies.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
]]>“What we hear consistently from clients is that they still believe that TV is extremely effective in driving brand preference, driving store traffic, driving sales,” Gordon, who is Director of Programmatic TV, says in this interview with Beet. TV. “But it’s a much more complicated TV world to navigate” given the multiplicity of inventory sources, erosion of linear ratings and a diversity of suppliers.
Moreover, traditional linear TV needs more automation to establish a connection between audience targets and inventory, according to Gordon.
Referring to virtual MVPD’s as “truly the best of what is TV,” Gordon notes that it provides great access to content and the linear ad feed and can be supplemented with on-demand content. “All of which can be delivered, whether it’s on demand or in the linear feed, through IP pipes and the advertising can be delivered on a one to one basis instead of one to many.”
As a demand-side video ad platform from its acquisition of TubeMogul about two years ago, Adobe Advertising Cloud is using addressable opportunities that make the most sense given an advertiser’s objectives.
“One of the clearest is when you want to reach your target because of the effectiveness of a TV-like environment to influence, but your target is narrow so that traditional ways of buying TV are not efficient enough,” says Gordon. “If you buy a million adult eighteen to forty-nine impressions and only a few percent of them are your true customer, the traditional way of buying TV doesn’t match up to that.”
Addressable also offers incremental audience reach for traditional linear buys.
“Even with broad brand target, some of those consumers are going to be heavy viewers of TV and are going to be quite well reached in a traditional linear approach,” Gordon says. “Others may watch some TV but less than other people in the target.”
Using addressable to reach the hardest targets is a way of “evening out the frequency count among different groups and making sure that you’re extending the reach of that campaign to more qualified customers.”
A main focus of Adobe is providing more automation to linear TV to counter what Gordon describes as the “loss of fidelity” between a strategic target that’s developed in planning and a post-campaign buyer with a GRP goal.
“And so the view of the target that is created early in the process falls apart, really because the transaction is manual.”
There needs to be a more direction connection between linear inventory and tools used to optimize it, according to Gordon.
“So that instead of theoretically creating a target and then manually trying to find inventory that matches that target, you’re actually in platform decisioning against real, live inventory.”
Like others in the space, Adobe is seeing automotive as a category that’s widely embraced addressable owing to its advanced targeting and the high value of transactions. But packaged-goods are also coming on board “because in a lot of cases, a retailer sits in between the producer of the product and the transaction.
“It’s an area where data has been lacking, but there’s a lot of hunger in understanding that transaction better,” Gordon says.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“What’s remarkable about what NBC is doing in partnership with us is they’re literally letting you buy what you want,” Gordon adds in this interview with Beet.TV. “If you only want late night on Bravo, you can buy that. And that’s never been enabled before in TV.”
Gordon, whose background includes stints at Lowe, Mediacom, Initiative and Magna Global, was referring to the recent integration of Adobe Advertising Cloud TV and NBCUniversal’s entire portfolio of broadcast and cable television.
The concept behind the integration is that data about TV viewers “is just data if it doesn’t have inventory to decision against,” says Gordon, who left Magna for TubeMogul in 2015 before its acquisition by Adobe, as Advertising Age reports. “The more accurate depiction of the inventory that’s out there that’s loaded into the tool, the better plan that is going to be built.”
While it’s not programmatic in the sense of real-time bidding for inventory, “we are taking major steps forward to make the process a lot more automated.”
Using a host of data, “We can identify very specific things, visitors to your site that took a particular action. We can match that to TV viewership and tell you how a very narrow audience behaves in TV,” Gordon explains.
Buyers using Adobe’s platform “get a live look” into all inventory on NBC’s networks and can propose a purchase order for what best matches their clients’ TV audience targets.
Until now, buyers worked with “a ranker in one hand and a phone in the other. You bought big portfolios of inventory across multiple networks. You bought broad rotations.”
Gordon spent most of his career in TV and “loves” the medium. But he’s very sensitive to the chasm that has existed between the viewing experiences available to consumers and the way the industry does business.
“The TV viewing experience is as good as it’s ever been. But the way TV is planned and bought and sold hasn’t transformed in the same way that the viewing experience has transformed.”
He praises collaborative efforts like the OpenAP audience targeting consortium launched by Fox, Turner and Viacom, of which NBCU is a recent participant. “TV inventory is a very precious resource and the attention of consumers is extremely precious. In TV we’ve spent those resources poorly.”
]]>So says one veteran media buyer who now helps enable the opportunity for peers through one of the major digital platforms.
“As someone who worked at media agencies for my whole career, primarily as a TV buyer,
what’s been remarkable and transformative is how the way TV is planned and bought and sold is really changing,” says Adobe Advertising Cloud GM Todd Gordon in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Right now, we’re at a tipping point when it comes to data-driven TV. You see major players increasingly making investment … NBCU’s announcement leading up to the upfront that they were going to do $1 billion sales …”
The last few years has been marked by a lot of talk about the opportunity – specifically, for brands and their buyers to bring either their own customer datasets or third-party datasets to the table when constructing TV ad buys.
But, in the last year in particular, the talking has stopped. Turner, Viacom and Fox announced OpenAP, their gateway to help buyers do just that. And NBUx launched NBCUx to do the same.
“The last few months, we’re really starting to see that come to fruition,” adds Gordon, who held positions at MediaCom and Magna Global before joining TubeMogul and then Adobe, via its acquisition of the video platform.
But Gordon also recognizes advertisers have a growing demand for clearer understanding on how their budgets are spent in complex digital systems.
“We think it’s critical to enable third-party auditing,” he says. “For everyone involved in the ecosystem … the greater transparency that is offered, the greater opportunity for us to move the business forward.”
]]>This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of International CES 2016 presented by Adobe.
]]>
This follows a natural trend in programmatic buying to migrate the buying method from online to TV, which still commands the most money. Only 8% of TV ad executives are currently buying TV ads programmatically, but about 12% plan to increase their spending this year, according to a survey by AOL Platforms reported on by eMarketer.
Programmatic TV buying won’t be identical to online buying, however, Gordon cautions. “There isn’t real-time access to data or ad serving in the same way, but the basic principles of using client’s data and more specific data to be more targeted, using technology to help facilitate the translation of that data into what inventory to buy, and buying inventory in a more granular way to reach the audience is there.”
This is part of a series title the State of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series.
]]>Video is starting to lure a larger share of budgets, but the price is tracking at a premium in between prime-time ad cable prices. “There is some video that competes with primetime, but the ability of digital video to fully compete is dependent on its ability to compete on price with cable,” he explains. “It’s mostly at a premium to cable now, but to source dollars from prime is limited, but sourcing from cable and the diverse audience there is doable.” In general, the supply of ad inventory has risen since there are so many digital outlets now.
As more marketers book full-episode video, he expects more money to come from cable budgets.
]]>
Next up for digital video is a better understanding of how to allocate media spend. For now when determining allocations, Gordon says media planners look at usage across screens and other tools to assess reach and frequency. Social media also plays a role in helping to understand effectiveness of digital marketing. “Social media is another measure of performance to see how attentive the user is and are they taking action..Broad strokes, it is an indication of commitment and passion,” he says.
Gordon also delved into real-time bidding and Magna Global’s three-year plan to automate about 50% of media transactions. For more insight, please check out this video interview.
Magna is the media holding unit of IPG Mediabrands.
Gordon was a panelist at the Beet.TV Video Ad Effectiveness summit presented by Nielsen.
]]>“The technology to do that in digital display is a lot further along than in linear TV – but we believe that, over time, a portion of linear TV will be sold that way as well,” EVP of Interpublic Magna Global strategy unit Todd Gordon tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“By using data to identify the right advertiser for a spot at a given time, the networks will be able to achieve higher yield for their inventory than the current methods of packaging that inventory.
“Most of their business will stay the same – but we think a significant portion of their business will shift to a model where audience quality is going to define the price more so than environment.”
Gordon was a panelist at the Beet.TV Video Ad Effectiveness summit presented by Nielsen.
Mediapost’s MediaDailyNews has a full write-up by David Goetzl.
What do you think? Could the TV industry, which often sells ads using broad demographics, adopt online sales technologies to address individual consumers?
Magna is the media buying agency umbrella of IPG Mediabrands.
]]>