That means spending on addressable TV – with which buyers can use advanced data and return path to more precisely target viewers and households – would represent only around 1.1% of total US TV ad spend.
What could draw more spending? For one, we know that US OTT device penetration is high – but also that much consumption through those is devices is of ad-free, subscription VOD.
Furthermore, the Beet Retreat heard many views about the importance of scale, with claims that ” about 15% of advertisers are using advanced TV, (but) 50% are sitting on the sidelines“, worries that many advertisers are still just experimenting and a call for more inventory to be given to addressable TV.
In this panel, several executives further debated how addressable can hit scale.
Even the largest of media companies is grappling with how to transform their ad sales initiatives…
Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:
“The whole reason that you’re seeing all this consolidation in the media industry is to get scale, and to get reach. Other companies have already done it. We’re doing it at our point.
“We had all these individual businesses that had different types of scale. In the linear side, it worked – but now we have to spend millions of dollars … to find the right partners to be able to activate the inventory and look at it holistically.
Years ago, few may have predicted that paid video over the internet would be as big as it has become. But the rise of Netflix and Amazon now presents a challenge to media companies. Panelists discussed whether those players would emerge in to TV ad sales, and how TV companies must team to compete…
Laura Nelson, SVP, Audience Solutions, Disney Advertising Sales:
“If you think of our competitors particularly in the space like Netflix and Amazon. Netflix has scale, but are they going to be able to sustain what they’re doing with one revenue stream (subscription)?
“Amazon, on the other hand, is a whole other thing. Right? They have this whole base. They have multiple revenue streams coming in, and then they’re going to invest in content. To me, they feel like our biggest competitor from a scale and a reach perspective.”
Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:
“They’re going to invest, between Netflix and Amazon, over $20 billion next year, which is larger than most of the TV ad revenues of any single companies in this room. They own the entire consumer funnel.
“We in the TV industry … need better consortiums, better marketplaces, better easier ways for the buy side to buy in a more frictionless manner. I think we’re seeing that right now with EGTA, with EVX, with RTLs, TV Marketplace, with OpenAP. We see a lot of starts to that solution.”
The internal structure of the relationship between advertiser brands and their buying agencies influences the kind of ad inventory being chased, which may ultimately impact outcomes…
David Hohman, EVP & Managing Director, Nielsen:
“Right now, most of the media agencies are winning business on a savings guarantee, which means that they have to show the advertiser that they’re spending less money. They want reductions every single year.
“So, there’s this pressure on agencies who are trying to innovate, who are trying to do the right things for their clients, and in the end of the day, they’re chasing low CPMs.”
The entire media universe is growing – but consumers still only have 24 hours in a given day. Panel host Ashley J. Swartz of Furious Corp cited eMarketer research showing 2018 consumer media time went from 12 hours and 7 minutes to 12 hours and 8 minutes a day. She asked if consumers’ capacity to consume content naturally limits scale…
Tony Yi, GM, Business Development, Amobee:
“The latest stats on Facebook are that less than 20% of their audience will view a video ad for more than three seconds. That’s not going to move the needle.
“I definitely think there’s a capacity issue – the human conscience capacity issue.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page.
The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>To hear panelists at the recent Beet Retreat Miami explain it, lunar landings might be easier to achieve than getting TV broadcasters en masse to quickly embrace the future.
Asked by moderator Ashley J. Swartz to explain the implications of ATSC3.0, Rob Weisbord, who was recently named Chief Revenue Officer of Sinclair Digital Group, stepped up to the dais from the audience and said, “It’s taking IP technology, layering it over the linear transmitter so it gives you a hybrid approach. It puts broadcasters into a bit business.”
While that sounds exciting, reality quickly set in. Mike Kubin, EVP, Media at Invidi, explained how his company began working in 2003 with distributors to get its software into digital set-top boxes.
“It took us forever to make that happen,” Kubin said. “Right now we are in five terrific distributors in the United States. Our goals are to go international, but there’s only so much we can do. At the end of the day, they tell us what we can do or what we can’t do.”
SintecMedia CEO Lorne Brown cited a “future of TV survey” his company did in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters in which just 30% of respondents said they were ready for advanced TV. “Of those 30 percent, 60 percent said they were going to rely on legacy, in-house, home-grown technology to deliver advanced TV,” said Brown. “So only 30 percent are ready and 60 percent believe they can pull it off with the stuff that they have in house. I think that’s a major problem.”
Said Swartz: “All I’m hearing is more increased complexity.”
Jennifer Koester, Director of Global Partnerships for Google, took a positive approach. “I think the dichotomy that we keep talking about between linear and digital, it’s going away. I think we need to kind of step back from that and talk about solutions and technology that bridges the gap.”
She listed among the industry’s needs simplifying the ecosystem, making cross-screen reach and frequency easier, plus driving more value and being able to show it with regard to premium video inventory. That led to this exchange:
Koester: “The shift is going to happen and when it does, I think it’s going to happen very quickly.”
Brown: “I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a slow, painful…”
Koester: “I think we’re in the slow painful part right now.”
Brown: “I think even ATSC3.0…”
Koester: “That’s going to be slow.”
Brown: “And so how fast can Comcast roll out addressable boxes? All of this is really, really slow.”
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development for Videology, explained the complexity involved in trying to “be nimble” when dealing with integrations with systems for order entry, decisioning, trafficking, billing and CRM systems. While noting that media companies leverage Videology’s software to optimize the planning of data against media, it’s not always used for programmatic transactions.
“As an example, we just landed the press about Fox, a great partner client of ours, they use it for direct sales. They’re not using it in a programmatic fashion,” said Yi.
Swartz related a recent visit to a broadcaster to discuss a solution from her Furious Corp., only to experience a “not made here mentality.” She concluded that the meeting was a waste of time.
Brown summed up the differences between programmers and operators. “If I’m a national programmer, my strategy has to come from legacy linear outward. Versus if I’m an operator I can lean much more into advanced TV and impressions because I control the pipes and I have the data. Legacy linear for a national programmer is foundational and that’s really, really hard.”
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.
]]>In advertising, buyers are getting excited about a world in which planning moves beyond the broad demographic audience targeting of yore, to a world of advanced TV, where granular characteristics and data can help target specific audiences viewing specific content.
But this emerging world is, itself, more granular than simply “advanced TV”. So, how do companies at the vanguard of the revolution make sense of the wealth of different tactics coming in to view?
A panel convened at Beet Retreat debated that question. Here is a flavor of what they said…
Simulmedia VP, Partner Relations, Marc Goldstein:
“There’s just so much out there, and there’s so much happening. What we’re able to do in the national TV space, to be able to find a custom audience to be able to guarantee that audience to be able to guarantee on a conversion to be able guarantee on ROAS (return on ad spend). These are things that we’ve been talking about for a long time and marketers have been talking about but we’re actually seeing them in action.
“The power of the traditional GRP still exists as the power of your television. I think in most cases we’re seeing marketers though realize that we can take portions of their budgets and put it towards these new opportunities.”
IAB mobile and video SVP and GM Anna Bager:
“(Advertisers) need proof points.”
“Where we as the IAB really are going to double down and do research and try and understand better… there’s a lot of questions around six second ads… ‘What does that mean for ad load, and what and in the long run does that mean for us and our profitability, and how are we going to make money here?’
DISH Advanced TV & Digital director Adam Lowy:
“The digital tech stack is opening up a whole new ballgame. You’re just finding an audience and I don’t care if it’s on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Roku… you know, the DISH set top box doesn’t matter anymore.
“We’re going cross platform pretty soon… (There are) tremendous opportunities within live TV back to the big screen. We see a lot of sessions on mobile devices and we’re seeing a lot of people watching content like this.
“Six-second ads, we will see that. Will we see a collapse of ads and, you know, shorter pods? Yes, I think that works. In live TV, we probably won’t see that.”
Videology GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development Tony Yi
“There’s certainly service providers that have capabilities technologically to do some of it right now. I think from a mass national level, though, you really need to have respondent level matching with your dataset to truly understand who you’re reaching if you can get device level even better.”
Google Strategic Partner Lead Peter Dolchin:
“Publishers just want optionality at this point. There’s still a very distinct way and legacy way of selling this inventory through upfront and so forth. But there are specific advertisers who are looking for new experiences.
“If you analyzed all your first party data in one place, and Google Cloud can help you do that, it starts to take down all of these silos that exist that have been really difficult for the entire industry. Once you have the ability to have all of your data in one place, you’re able to analyze it in a much faster way.”
The panel was moderated by MediaLink managing director Matt Spiegel.
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.
]]>“I think the time is now,” says Videology’s Tony Yi. “Facebook video impressions are growing exponentially. Amazon is out there in full force.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Yi explains the need to counter things like last-click attribution and suggests that when it comes to TV audience targeting, the OpenAP consortium of Fox, Turner and Viacom won’t be the only option.
Yi’s message is simple: Traditional TV players need to move fast to adjust to changing viewing behavior lest they fall victim to what has happened in the digital publishing world, where giants like Facebook and Google rule the revenue roost. “What we can’t do is wait for the perfect system to meld itself together across different silos, linear, VOD, addressable, or everything going to IP.”
Videology has been investing in its “data spine” because it understood early on that “we’ve got to get down to the respondent level. Even to the device level.”
Seeing about six billion ad requests daily, “We amplify the signal that we’re getting at the respondent level to the currencies so we can help our clients better forecast and plan media against the currencies,” says Yi, who is GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development.
Complementing the data spine is developing an understanding of clients’ data needs in order to drive outcomes.
“Only then can we actually measure how is that attributable to traditional television,” Yi says. “Because if leave that up to the digital giants, the barbarians at the gate, they will define things in terms of search and last click, things that don’t behoove the traditional media companies.”
He’s seeing more impetus for media sellers to move past early “protectionism” of their inventory and cooperate with competitors, along with “reaching across the aisle to the buy-side and create platforms where they can agree upon and share the right data sets, the right outcomes and attribution methods.”
Yi calls OpenAP “a great step,” one that Videology supports “both from a client standpoint as well as from a market messaging standpoint. We know there are a number of great initiatives under way, some that are more public like OpenAP and others that have yet to be disclosed.”
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.
]]>But a new rationalism has recently dawned on the vendor community, and ad-tech suppliers, aware they won’t change the TV industry overnight, now realise they must work with existing TV industry structures and business models.
At a Beet Retreat panel, a variety of executives debated how so-called “programmatic” technology might gain a foothold in traditional TV.
And Jamie West, advanced ad director of leading UK pay-TV platform Sky, which has trialled DataXu and a combination of FreeWheel and Videology as ad-tech suppliers, told the panel of suppliers what a broadcast operator is looking for.
“The ad-tech industry consistently and regularly over-promises and under-delivers,” West said. “Claiming that you can create world peace, make millions for the business, just doesn’t wash anymore.
“We need to take in to account regulatory compliance, customer experience, advertiser experience. You need to ensure we can deliver out against every single element, before we start thinking about how we’re going to move to a biddable platform or process.
“I don’t see that we’re going to have a huge amount of RTB in TV, but we will have inventory traded via full system-to-system integration between agency/advertiser and platform publisher.”
FreeWheel markets SVP Neil Smith conceded: “Nobody’s going to rip out existing (TV industry) systems, they work really well and serve their purpose.” So he feels the question becomes: “How can we build out an evolution for enabling those systems to talk better with each other, to ultimately where we move to a state where the technology converges?”
Google global partnerships top partner lead Amy Young explained why she had been hired from CBS: “One of the impetuses was, they realised, we need to understand a bit more about how the broadcast business works. Direct sales is not going away.”
DataXu co-founder Sandro Catanzaro explained: “We believe (TV ad) spots are here for quite a while. Technology that works today should enable to traffic in spots as well as an impression-by-impression level.”
Videology partnerships SVP Tony Yi acknowledged that “there’s a lot of legacy systems” in the TV industry, but his company has found a way to work with broadcasters’ ongoing inclination to use them for the time being.
This panel was moderated by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Over the last year, Videology, a company providing software for addressable advertising across TV and video, saw a 840% increase in the number of linear TV impressions available to be bought and sold programmatically.
The figures are found in Videology’s latest At-A-Glance report on the US TV and video market.
And Videology strategic partnerships GM Tony Yi says a collaborative approach between suppliers and clients in the industry is vital if the segment is to continue growing.
“Because each type of client comes with challenges, we’ve had to learn with them,” Yi tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Collaboration is really critical to that.
“We’re very concerned about integrating with the right players. Collaboration is extremely important – not only between players in the ecosystem, but also ad-tech players within the ecosystem.”
Videology data saw that a quarter of TV ad campaigns used brands’ own, first-party data to better target where their buys should be made.
This interview was conducted by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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