I call her the “mother of addressable TV”. Well, she didn’t exactly invent addressable TV but she was by all accounts the first buyer of the medium.

She was deeply involved with pilot projects in Colorado and Alabama in some twenty years ago.   In our chat, she recalls those early days and her move to Starcom in 2005 to head the agency’s advance TV practice.

In 2016, she left Starcom to start her own company which is a boutique addressable TV buying agency and an industry consultancy.   It is called Matter More Media.

In our conversation, Tracey talks about the evolution of addressable TV over the past 20 years. She speaks of her disappointment that its scope has been limited, increasingly  by new “walled gardens of data” now in control of TV manufacturers.  She shares her mantra: DATA MUST BE FREE.

We also talks about measurement and the importance of understanding the impact of creative.

A Personal Fight Against Cancer 

As many of you know, Tracey has been a brave advocate in the fight against pediatric cancer.  Her older son Ryan went  through several years of treatment from leukemia.  Now sixteen, he is five years out from his treatment and living life as healthy 16-year old. So happy to hear!

Tracy galvanized the media industry around non-profit she founded called TeamBrightSide.  Mostly funded by charity triathlon in Chicago, the organization has raised $1.5 million in research money.   A substantial amount has gone to the University of Chicago to research and track pediatric cancer.

Please join Tracey and TeamBrightSide team by joining the triathlon or by making a donation to:  teambrightside.com

Thanks Tracey for your leadership and inspiring bravery.

Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service. The BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a TransUnion company.

But how are advertisers adapting to the palette of options presented by OTT (over-the-top) and connected TV delivery?

In a panel called “Buy-Side Perspectives – The Big Asks” at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, four industry executives described how they see ad buyers adjusting:

• Julie Anson, Director of Strategic Investment, Advanced TV, MAGNA Global
• Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C
• Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Verizon Media
• Sean Robertson, head of partnerships, DISH Media

Advertisers don’t know what they’re asking

Magna Global’s Anson said, when ad buyers make requests, “they don’t actually, they don’t know they’re asking for advanced TV”.

“First thing is, ‘I know I can get audiences, but I don’t really know how or why’,” she said.

“Second is OTT – they just know that there is a thing called OTT, they know they need to start spending there. And the number one thing that I get asked is, ‘What is the actual de-duplication between the offerings, between the Tubi, the Xumo, the Pluto? They may each have 20 million uniques per month, but how much of that is a crossover?’

“The third thing is probably putting it all together and that’s incremental reach. That is a big focus these days.”

Making OTT clear

DISH Media’s Sean Robertson said his company tries to clearly explain to ad buyers the over-the-top TV opportunity.

“The first thing is education and clarity in the marketplace about what offering should be utilised to solve what problems,” he said.

“When we enter the marketplace, we take a stance of ‘Let’s be very clear about what addressable is’.

“We talk about what OTT is and what our offering does and the skinny bundle versus the other competitors. We think that education in the marketplace helps us all. It truly is trying to raise all boats with the tide.”

Help advertisers target

Verizon Media’s Brett Hurwitz said ad buyers often “have a confused perception of what target they should really be using”.

“Fortunately, addressable television lets them kind of learn from their mistakes,” he said.

“For those that are really embracing it most fully, I think they’re looking to remove friction. They’re looking to bring down the walls and be able to have simplicity in the way that they’re achieving total reach.

“The process for (buying) a linear addressable (ad) is a lot more complicated than an ad in the traditional linear piece. And so I think we as an industry need to look toward simplification.”

The panel was led by Matter More Media’s Tracey Scheppach.

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. 

Scheppach was a pioneering advance TV senior executive, at Starcom then Publicis Media, before starting her own firm.

Despite all of the scale that seen from the MVPDs, only about 3% of linear television inventory has been made addressable. According to Scheppach, everyone is leaning in to light up the national inventory, giving MVPDs the opportunity to increase scale from 3% to between 25 and 30%. A lot of work is being done on the Smart TV side, too. This lights up basically anything that hits the glass, both broadcast and cable, and could add another 21% of addressable inventory.

“I think even with a conservative estimate, we could see 35% of linear television inventory be in addressable,” Scheppach says. “And I would argue all of OTT is, or should be, addressable. It’s addressable-capable so if buyers are not demanding it and requiring it to be addressable, that’s their fault.”

Much of the hard work around addressable has already been done. Now the focus has shifted to scale, specifically unification and simplicity.

“How are we going to make this easier to buy, and unified so we don’t have to buy in pockets and I could transact on several technological solutions easily?” Scheppach says.

A lot of confusion also comes down to measurement. As Scheppach points out, knowing what to buy becomes more difficult if you do not know where all of the viewing is happening. This makes unification all the more important.

“We’re starting to see a lot of competition in that space,” Scheppach said. “A lot of people are saying that they provide a full look at video consumption from a consumer. You’ve got to ask a lot of questions like how was it built? What’s the validity of that data? Does it represent real people? Is it just households? Is it IP-based?”

This could lead to some growing pains, but will also lead to unification in common measurement across all viewing. Scheppach says that this measurement needs to come from a combination of several different things including set-top box and Smart TV data, and she also points out the value of having a panel to make corrections to.

“You need to have a truth set to always go back to, like who is in the house?” Scheppach says. “We don’t want to just know household viewing, we need to get to people. And I think the only way you’re really going to get to people is to have a truth set.”

Along with changes in measurement have been changes in streaming. While some services have decided to go ad-free, Scheppach pointed to data that shows that when given the choice, viewers are still choosing to have ads. Still, these ads will likely continue to decrease, so it’s up to advertisers to now get more value out of their spots by becoming more targeted.

“Now we have to move to a place where you can actually be willing to pay more for every ad that is seen by a viewer,” Scheppach said. “And the only way you’re going to do that is if it’s targeted and measurable.”

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. 

This theoretical game isn’t going to be won by the emergence of one overriding supply side platform, Pangis predicted in this segment, which was recorded at the Beet.TV advanced TV summit, presented by Amobee and hosted by Hearts & Science at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Moderator Tracey Sheppach asked what it is that buyers can ultimately expect to see. “Once we move through this innovation, do I have two logins to two different systems Xandr and NCC? Is that what it looks like?” said Scheppach, the CEO & Founder of Matter More Media.

“I think the future of collaboration in television is a much different discussion than what a lot of people are having, which is like ‘come on my platform and then you can use my demand-side’…that is not the way we’re going to get far fast,” responded Pangis. “It’s how do we connect with one another and sort of bring each of our super powers together, and the demand side is always going to want to do something a little different.”

Allison Metcalfe, GM of LiveRamp TV, explained that about two years ago, LiveRamp began to focus on automation to better serve the sell-side. Last fall, the company sold Axciom, the data provider that had itself acquired LiveRamp in 2014. “Life has changed pretty dramatically since then,” said Metcalfe.

Along the way, LiveRamp figured out that it needed to pay more attention to the buy-side. “The reality is that LiveRamp sits on the CRM’s of close to four hundred of the largest brands in the US and internationally. Those brands rely on us for people-based marketing strategies. It’s very natural that they would look to us to help them understand what’s possible in TV,” said Metcalfe.

Easier said than done, she went on to explain. Her team of four full-time people whose daily mission is to evangelize advanced TV to brands typically come away from meetings with “a list of twelve questions” regarding how to reach those brands’ audiences across platforms “and it takes us months to answer those questions.”

Even when such discussions lead to a purchase order, the entire process can take six months. “If we could get that to maybe two or three months, that would be a win for both Nicolle and I.”

One advantage of distancing itself from Axciom is that it dispels doubts about perceptions of LiveRamp’s neutrality, according to Metcalfe. “We are a technology platform with a data marketplace.”

Under the leadership of Grant Ries, LiveRamp is helping companies that have data assets but never considered themselves to be data suppliers. Metcalfe cited the example of travel data co-op Adara, which came to LiveRamp because it wanted to get into TV.

“So now we’re able to offer some really unique targeting capabilities to the travel industry, which historically wasn’t a really big buyer of advanced TV strategies,” Metcalf said. “We’re seeing a lot of trends like that.”

This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.

Former Starcom MediaVest Group advanced television specialist Tracey Scheppach has a foot in both of those spheres as CEO & Co-Founder of her agency, Matter More Media. Scheppach helps new advanced-TV technology providers while doing direct brand activation based on CRM and other data.

In this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018 conference, Scheppach refers to research presented by Forrester analyst Jim Nail showing that 15% of brand-side executives have executed addressable TV campaigns. “If you look at the law of adoption, we’re at the tipping point,” Scheppach says, echoing Nail’s conclusion.

However, the addressable TV work that’s been done so far has been derived from household address files. “Being at a digital conference with LiveRamp, the question is how can you bring digital data to household level addressable television. Which is hard because so far it’s built off a street address file versus an IP or cookie file or a device ID,” she says.

Scheppach points to emerging IP-based technology, noting that companies like Sinclair and Sorenson are pursuing dynamic ad insertion to smart TV sets. Then there is the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard for over-the-air broadcast TV.

With ATSC 3.0, transmission will be “IP-based, completely mobile, always on, census-level data, full addressability, which is going to open up more and more inventory to be addressable,” Scheppach says.

Since starting Matter More Media and being on the “front lines” with clients, Scheppach has a closer view of the impact of agency holding companies having separated their creative assets from their media operations. This can be a stumbling block to perfecting, executing and tracking the four elements of successful addressable TV campaigns: the idea, its production values, media channel selection and analytics, according to Scheppach.

“All four pieces work together, all four pieces should be at the table together, not in separate siloes not ever to meet. You just can’t throw the creative over the wall to the media people and just have them execute,” she says.

In its sell-side consulting work, the agency helps people “trying to bring product to market, like a Sinclair, like programmers. They have to figure out how to structure the technology and pitch it to clients.”

In the agency’s direct activation for clients, Scheppach is pursuing “anyone that has a CRM file. I think catalogers are just a natural fit.”

She thinks addressable can help marketers for whom the expense of traditional TV has been a barrier. Some brands with catalogs or direct-mail campaigns are trying to figure out “how do I make it more accountable? How do I make it more storytelling? How do I build my brand out of it? And sight sound and motion is going to do that better than paper.”

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.

Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:

“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:

“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”

Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:

“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”

Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.

To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”

Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”

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.

Thus says Tracey Scheppach, the former Publicis executive who spent upward of 15 years charting the future of more one-to-one targeted TV before forming Matter More Media. “At this event, what I have heard over the last three days is lots of talk about collaboration. And that is really encouraging because the infrastructure is getting there,” Scheppach says during a break at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “We have the tools to make media more efficient, more precise and now it takes the ecosystem to work together.”

One of her business goals is to bring more money to the TV space. She suggests catalogers take a page from marketers that have long known the power of the medium.

“They’re taking a list, they’re sending an asset which happens to be paper and putting it in a mailbox. Here we’re taking a list, we’re taking an asset that happens to be video and putting it into a set-top box or over the top in some IP-delivered way,” Scheppach says.

The 2018 TV Upfront “is going to be I think a watershed moment because the data is available and the programmers are starting to cooperate,” she adds. “We all know that TV works but they’re going to be able to prove it in a way that the Facebooks and Googles have been able to prove it to clients. Now TV is at that place.”

Looking back at the naming of her company just over a year ago, Scheppach recalls a meeting with Maurice Levy and other Publicis executives in which she presented “the future of addressable and data-driven television and what creatively Publicis needed to do.” When she made “waste less” one of her talking points, Levy chided her by advising “don’t ever say waste. That makes our clients feel like we were wasting their investment before.”

So she tried to make a positive out of it with Matter More. “We’re moving to a more precise one-to-one conversation that’s a progression. That’s the more part. You can’t just matter now. The world didn’t just change over night. It’s a progression to be able to matter more,” says Scheppach.

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 July, the pair announced 605’s methodology and technology would be used by Charter to fuel census-based TV measurement and analytics.

In this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat, Charter ad products and strategy SVP Rob Klippel and 605 president Ben Tatta discussed the partnership, and what comes next.

“While we’ve deployed this application that now allows us to sell TV in terms of audiences and impressions, we realized the larger value really, of being able to bring insights and value to the programmers, to the national advertisers and agencies,” Klippel said.

“And, while I think we have great data assets and a census level data to us, really the value of 605 is to be able to take our data, to pull it together with other data sources and to better serve the national marketplace.

So what has the partnership yielded? Specifically, a software platform that allows Charter to develop custom audiences for ad buyers, helping along the migration of TV ad sales from an old, demographic-based world to one which is based on targeting audiences more accurately.

The biggest hurdle, with both Charter and for all operators making the switch, Tatta said, is in adapting to the collect data from the fragmented cable TV ecosystem.

“In the case of Charter is you’re talking about over 80 plus markets, over 1000 ad zones each of which have their own inventory and rates information,” he said. “It’s a lot of data ingestion, a lot of the work was processing the data, getting it to a state that it could be acted upon very quickly with low latency.”

But Tatta and Klippel opened up on examples in which the ensuring product can help advertisers understand audience preferences at the local level.

“Austin South indexed 2x against BMW and then the adjacent market was like 1 1/2 times for Kia,” Tatta said, citing an automotive advertising example. “It’s things like that the local sales people have never been able to see before. What’s interesting is just to see how this kind of rolls out on a really local level and then obviously, our broader ambition is to nationalize this so we can do this on a much broader basis.”

Klippel says the new platform “has fundamentally changed the conversation that we’re having with our customers”.

“They can sit down real-time and create custom schedules that are tailored to a specific audience and the output is very transparent,” he added. Under the old model, if you need to make changes you kinda go back to your research and planning team and you start that multi day process all over again.”

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.

Scheppach is particularly excited about new addressable TV operators and the potential groundswell of interest she’s noting among national TV programmers to participate in the addressable marketplace. While the inventory for addressable TV is still small, the base is growing with companies like Comcast and Verizon having stepped in.

“But what’s really interesting is quietly I’m starting to hear national programmers starting to be interested in how do I actually bring addressable opportunities to market,” Scheppach says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.

So while just one to two percent of TV inventory is addressable via a TV set, “there are a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes that I can feel happening that are going to explode that marketplace,” she adds.

Having worked with Murtos at Publicis for 10 years, the duo represents almost 50 years of experience in TV buying and advanced TV.

Among other things, Matter More’s engagement with Tapad includes the use of Tapad’s Device Graph to measure the actual performance of media across channels. In a release announcing the partnership, Scheppach said that achieving “unduplicated reach and frequency across all channels with true addressability, and the ability to measure outcomes, is marketing nirvana.”

Asked about creative versioning of TV ads, she says she’s “yet to really crack the code” but is impressed by companies doing 5,000 or more versions of an ad for online video. “When television becomes more real time and sophisticated, I think we’re going to see more of that coming. It hasn’t happened yet and I think that’s a big opportunity,” Scheppach says.

Her company is focusing much of its efforts on bringing to TV direct mail marketers and mid-market brands—described as having smaller budgets and including “savvy digital marketers”—that have never before embraced the medium.

“We think we can show them the way using these sophisticated tools, whether it be Device Graphs or Identity Graphs or addressable television,” Scheppach says.

This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.

“Over the last three years, (I’ve done) … 250 campaigns, addressable to the household,” recalls Tracey Scheppach, the former long-time SMG advanced TV exec who recently left to form her own Matter More Media.

“Over $100 million we’ve spent in the market. A lot of campaigns. So this is not a test and learn thing anymore.”

Scheppach was speaking on a panel convened by Beet.TV to discuss the emerging strengths and weaknesses inside the opportunity.

Success inside failure

Scheppach and Jamie Power, managing partner at GroupM’s advanced TV unit MODI Media, had seemingly different takes on what happens what addressable TV ad campaigns fail.

“The value that’s brought is not only when a campaign works, but it’s also when a campaign doesn’t work,” Power said. “At the end of the campaign, if the campaign doesn’t work, I know why the campaign didn’t work.

“The retention rate is 85%, but, you know, there are a lot of times that it doesn’t work and we’re able to use that data and it’s really powerful to bring the advertiser back and do it bigger and better next time.”

But Scheppach commented: “I’ve used 29 different data providers to deliver those 250 campaigns. I see that addressable works for every single client. I have not had a failed campaign yet.”

The real question, Scheppach said is, “Does addressable work for everyone?” But that is just a function of the price put on the campaign, she said.

So, if the technology and the strategy is in place, what is left to do as addressable grows up? Both execs have a wishlist.

Addressable wishlist:  Jamie Power

“In order to scale it, you actually do need some standards. Right now, the product is great, but everyone’s still doing it differently. A simple thing like media delivery … the impressions that ran, not only are we getting in a different format from each of the MVPDs, they have different methodologies.

“How do you scale this into a marketplace, especially when you want national broadcast buyers who are used to accountability and scale and standards when we still don’t have standards? The easiest thing to fix would be a standard media delivery report.”

Addressable wishlist:  Tracey Scheppach

“I would love more inventory in the marketplace. We’re very fortunate that two satellite providers kind of got the real party started, so we had national scale. But, even when we’re stretching the number, 52 million households, it’s still 1% of the inventory.

“I would love to see Charter to deploy, I would love to see over-the-top be addressable. I would love to see the national programmers start to have a real conversation with operators about enabling their inventory. The one thing that we need, that would make me happy, would be to grow the inventory source from 1% to 25% by the end of the decade.”

This panel was moderated by The Vertere Group CEO Tim Hanlon.

This panel 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.

It makes consumers schizophrenic. In other words, they have multiple identities, scattered across services. And that is a targeting nightmare.

But many advertising technology vendors are now promising to solve the problem, and Experian sees the pain easing in the new year.

“Linkage is the connection of customer data and partner data in order to identify a segment for use in targeted media – whether that is using name and address data, IP address data, cookie data, email addresses, mobile data, we can take all of those things and resolve them to an ID,” says Experian TV partnerships director Brad Danaher, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“It is a key cog in the wheel that makes all of this go. It’s getting more advanced all the time. Marketers are getting much more savvy about the measurement they want around targeted TV.”

Experian began helping advertisers perform advanced TV targeting with Comcast back in 2007.

“A lot of people don’t know all that can be done,” Danager adds. “The word is getting out – they say], ‘Oh, I can link that to geolocation data so I can see that TV drove someone to a retail location’, which helps prove the value of TV, even if the sale didn’t occur. That’s something we can tell people now.”

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.

But “addressable TV” is about to go large, and it’s time to start spending to meet the opportunity, according to one man whose company is helping brands come aboard.

“Through this year, maybe a third of US households are addressable,” according to Neustar’s business development director Lock Dethero. “Next year, we could be to 60% of US households, given some new TV providers that are becoming available and some other smart TV sources.

“Now’s the time to do tests. If an advertiser has not applied their CRM data or tried addressable TV to figure out where it fits in to their overall mix, they should do a test, with at least one of these TV providers, with some reasonable spend.

“If they’ve been doing it for a while, it’s time to double down, to work with greater scale next year.

Recent estimates of the number of addressable US TV households count about 45m properties. We have heard from plenty of ad industry folk who appreciate the long, slow progress – but who now say the technology needs to gain a wider footprint.

Dethero’s Neustar is an ad-tech company offering data management platform, customer data intelligence, marketing analytics, activation, compliance solutions and fraud detection. “The point is scale,” he says.

But Dethero cautions against conflating addressable and programmatic TV. “A lot of people who are focused on digital advertising hear the word ‘programmatic’… we talk about it in television… we use it too much,” he says.

“People think, ‘I’ll start doing addressable TV when I know it’’s fully automated’. Well, it’s not going to be fully automated any time soon. But the people know what they’re doing.”

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.

Sure, you can – but doing so takes a bit of work, according to the marketing technology company Acxiom.

“If you have the onboarding and the cookie pool to move it over deterministically and you’ve got the best identity graph in the business, it works really well,” says Eric Schmitt, Acxiom’s advanced TV advertising VP.

“An advertiser will come in with customers who visited their website and they want to bring that to television. In that case we have to do some extra work—some modelling, some analytics. ”

Acxiom expanded its addressable TV ad offering back this January, allowing advertisers to bring first- and third-party datasets to the targeting table.

“We’re able to start with either the PII base, the personal information, the name and address that we would start with in TV and match that off against our national reference file,” Schmitt adds. “And then onboard that onto cookies through our LiveRamp division, or we can start the other way with cookies, which is an emerging use case we see. ”

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.

As she describes the aspirations of 605, a data and analytics firm with roots in targeted political advertising, Dolan’s enthusiasm for mining insights from set-top boxes and other data sources is palpable. In an interview with Matter More Media CEO & Founder Tracey Scheppach at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016, Dolan traces the origins of 605 and explains why she’s “excited on a bunch of levels.”

Having sold Cablevision to French telecom firm Altice earlier in 2016, Dolan and her husband James, who had been CEO of Cablevision, recently announced that their Dolan Family Ventures acquired Analytics Media Group, a pioneer in the use of set-top box data. AMG now stands to gain from the confluence of its own “young and bright” minds and the Dolans’ several decades worth of advertising and media savvy, plus the leadership of 605 Co-Founder Ben Tatta, who was President of Cablevision Media Sales.

“It was such a perfect time for us,” Dolan says of the opportunity to invest in AMG, adding that the firm has “a level of experience that doesn’t really exist in a lot of places today, some IP and just a great team of folks.”

AMG’s credentials include work for Walmart and Uber plus “a really nice stable of clients that we’re going to continue to build on,” says Dolan, adding that 605 also will continue to service political advertisers.

Cablevision got into addressable TV in 2008 and now has more than seven million set-top boxes, with addressable available on more than 100 channels. Along the way, it developed its own tools to measure real-time performance for advertisers. “It was fun,” Dolan says of her 27 years in the business.

Now, she explains, “Our goal is to take set-top box data from a wide variety of sources, couple that with a lot of segmentation work that was already done by AMG and then continue to advance that to the benefit of people in the entertainment and media segment.”

605’s short-term focus will be on helping MVPD’s digest massive amounts of data and working with programmers large and small. “For the small networks that aren’t measured, utilization of set-top box and other data can allow them to have a sense of what their advertising and viewership is worth,” Dolan says.

Asked by Scheppach about addressable TV advertising going forward, Dolan cites a report in ADWEEK based on a study showing that 42% of U.S. households now can be reached via addressable TV ads.

“We firmly believe that relevant advertising, everybody wins. Why watch an ad that’s completely irrelevant to you when you can actually be getting something that might be of use,” Dolan notes.

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.

That’s because the CEO & Founder of the agency Matter More Media intends to “push myself to do everything different than a normal agency would do,” Scheppach explains during an interview at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016. “Right now, a lot of digital players are building digital back to the couch. I like to think of TV as the first thought, not an afterthought.”

Interviewed by Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, Scheppach traces the genesis of her fledgling business effort to a personal desire to make media matter more for advertisers, consumers and programmers. “I do believe in the long term, all television is digital, all digital is addressable and all addressable is programmatic,” is how she sees the future.

Even though just about one percent of TV spending is done on an addressable basis, “I do believe that’s a great place to start,” she notes, adding “There’s a huge mid market” of advertisers that are great candidates for addressable.

One of her favorite examples is the $2,000 Peloton spin bike, which Scheppach thinks “is perfect for addressable” because of its price point and niche audience. To her chagrin, Peloton ran direct response ads during the recent World Series, “which I don’t think is right for their brand.”

As she seeks her first clients for Matter More Media, Scheppach has a good idea of her better prospects: marketers with between $10 million and $20 million to spend and an incidence size of between five and 15 percent.

Asked by Hanlon to place addressable TV ads on the spectrum of pricing—from premium to direct response—Scheppach says “I think of addressable as premium” but notes that it’s still early in the pricing game.

“Some categories are starting to get priced out of the marketplace,” says Scheppach, citing the example of consumer packaged-goods. “It’s very hard if you’re selling bleach and you make five dollars a year on a loyal customer to justify addressable CPM’s.”

It will be up to individual media sellers to understand where to price the marketplace. “It’s really early to make any kind of bets on where addressable should end. But I believe it’s a premium product,” Scheppach says.

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.

TV ad technology provider INVIDI, which enables household-level TV ad targeting for broadcast companies more used to beaming out a single message en masse, is getting excited about a technology “satellite switching”.

How could satellites enable addressability? INVIDI CEO Dave Downey explains, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Until recently, the bandwidth on those satellites was in very high demand, they were very expensive,” he says. “With the advent of low-orbit satellites … there’s an abundance of geo-stationery transponder space.

“INIVIDI came up with the idea of switching the ads on some of these transponders, that are now not being used at all, to broadcast TV feeds.”

That means satellite TV operators wouldn’t just have to pre-load a selection of ads to subscribers’ DVRs, for targeting at the client end – they could also light up their entire footprint with addressability.

“If it was able to be launched in North America, it would be a great caveat to introducing national addressability,” Downey adds. “If you were to target the four or five broadcast networks, this may be an ability to get to another 25 to 30 million homes.”

For now, New Jersey-based INVIDI, which has a growing business of its own overseas, is targeting international operators with the technology.

In South America, Downey aims to help operators launch background channels carrying ads, which would be switched to during addressable moments.

This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach for Beet.TV.

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.

Before starting her own agency, Matter More Media, Scheppach spent 15 years in the advanced TV space. Over the last three years she was involved with more than 250 campaigns and executed about $100 million of media.

“I’m a firm believer in addressable advertising, taking really advanced datasets and being able to finally deliver it to individual households,” says Scheppach.

Asked by interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, to cite examples of potential clients suited to addressable TV, Scheppach says, “I do believe that addressable television works for all advertisers.”

This is because all advertisers have a “true target” and Scheppach believes that target constitutes less than the 30% of U.S. households that can be reached via addressable ads. Her professional background also includes direct mail campaigns, which like addressable TV targets households by name and address.

“Direct mail is another place that I’m interested to see if I can convert some direct mail budgets to sight, sound and motion of television, because it’s the exact same principles,” she says.

Scheppach points to the Peloton indoor exercise bike as an example of a product well suited to very targeted messaging. The $2,000 spin bike is sold with a $30 monthly subscription to workout videos that can be viewed on its built-in screen.

“It’s a high-priced item with a fairly defined target set that’s below 30% of the U.S. population,” Scheppach says. “I think there is a key place for advertisers like that, the blue aprons of the world.”

Asked by Hanlon what drove her decision to leave the mega agency world for a startup of her own, Scheppach says she asked herself what it is she truly enjoys about the business. “It stemmed from a love of television and concern over the fact it wasn’t being properly monetized,” she says. Hence the name Matter More Media.

Direct-response TV advertisers also have much to gain from addressable ads, according to Scheppach. “It’s a really interesting category because they are incredibly data driven,” she says of DRTV. “That too is a potentially ripe category for matter more.”

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 life forced Tracey Scheppach to do just that, when her son Ryan, then aged just seven, was diagnosed with leukemia.

The next three years were rough, as Ryan endured more than 1,722 admissions of 14 different types of chemotherapy, culminating – thankfully – in him being declared free of the disease.

During that time, Tracey – a friend of Beet.TV’s who spearheaded Starcom MediaVest Group’s advanced TV advertising operations until beginning her own consultancy last month – decided to fight, too.

Inspired by Ryan’s own determination, she formed a team to tackle the Chicago triathalon, raising money to help the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) to fund research to find kinder forms of treatment.

By now, Team Brightside – named after Ryan’s up-beat disposition through those dark times – has raised a total of $600,000, mom Tracey says, after she tapped up her SMG colleagues and a growing network of contacts in the advertising industry to run alongside her.

Scheppach, now heading up her own company Matter More Media, will be a keynote speaker at the Beet Retreat in Miami, November 16 to 18. And, on Friday, those around town can join for a 5k walk/run in support of Team Brightside.

More importantly, anyone can also make donations – right now – via Tracey’s Team In Training page.

We are grateful for Tracey coming to share her insights again, and hope that you can support her cause.

We interviewed Tracey and Ryan in their hometown Chicago last month.

“What we have found over and over and over again is that TV works and addressable TV works harder,” Scheppach says in an interview with Beet.TV at the Chicago offices of Publicis Media Exchange, where she is EVP of Precision Video.

It’s not often that someone mentions addressable TV and old-fashioned direct mail in the same sentence, much less in a cost comparison scenario. Scheppach does so to provide both contrast and similarity.

“Direct mail advertisers, their average cost of a mail piece is about a dollar. In TV speak that’s a thousand dollar CPM,” Scheppach says of the expense to reach one thousand prospects. “The CPM’s of addressable advertising are significantly less than a thousand and they combine the ability of sight sound and motion with essentially the same delivery mechanism.”

What is that common delivery venue? “Sending a message to an individual street address, whether it be a mailbox or a set-top box,” Scheppach says.

The industry is only beginning to see the potential of addressable TV because the focus has mainly been on national advertisers. “It ushers in the opportunity for smaller marketers with a smaller budget to get on TV for the very first time,” she explains.

Two examples are Allstate promoting renters insurance and online prescription eyeglass and sunglass marketer Warby Parker. Not long ago, the rule of thumb was that having a presence on TV meant committing at least $20 million. “If you didn’t have $20 million, don’t bother getting on television,” was the thinking, according to Scheppach. “Allstate represents a very large advertiser, but they would never be able to advertise renters insurance because renters are a smaller population and therefore not a mass game, which is what television used to be.”

She believes that addressable TV “is being niched” and that it’s actually “a much bigger idea.” That’s because in the end, all media will be addressable in the end and eventually all media will be programmatic.

“That is the future state that we’re moving to,” Scheppach says. “The opportunity to do addressable television will teach marketers how to do the future of television and how it will be combined with other cross media as all media becomes digital.”

This video is part of a series presented by DISH Media Sales. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

To learn more about addressable advertising and its benefits, download the Addressable Viewpoint Report:

We spoke with Schappach at CES last week.  This video is part of our coverage of CES sponsored by Adobe.

“Content is like Humpty Dumpty,” Tracey Scheppach, EVP and Innovations Director at Starcom MediaVest Group, told a Beet Retreat panel. “It has fallen and it has fractured and it has gone VOD, over the top, it’s gone in every direction. Video content is everywhere.

“I was trying to encourage everyone not to put Humpty Dumpty back together the same way, meaning using Nielsen and buying age and gender. I think that those pieces need to be picked up in a different way.”

Scheppach is urging the business not to use new tools to do old advertising the same way as ever – that is, to super-target viewers by individual characteristics, not by the kinds of things suggested by the shows they watch.

Magna Global’s advanced TV SVP Matt Bayer said the new powers of TV ad targeting will speed up the whole advertising process, compared with old ways of working.

“It was a long lead time between we saw this that it worked or didn’t work and now I have to wait to make my next buying decision in six months or when I took options next quarter,,” he said. “That’s where technology and data help that feedback loop.”

GroupM Global chairman Irwin Gotlieb also appeared on the panel.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

The panel was moderated by comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

Once advertisers know enough about viewers to precisely target ads, will they also deconstruct their 30-second spots in to a million different permutations, for the many different consumers out there? Today, that’s not happening at significant scale. But a Beet Retreat panel discussed the prospect…

But “we will”, says SMG precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach. “The reason we don’t see more activity around versioning is because there’s significant amount of waste. We are in the process of wringing out the value that is created by better targeting. Once you get through that value, the client will want to continue to wring out value. You’re going to see creative come to play.”

An ad group veteran is excited about the prospect. “What’s the point of being able to slice and dice your audience if everybody’s going to see the same message?,” according to GroupM global chairman Irwin Gotlieb. “The new holy grail is likely to be relevance to a specific need state that the segmentation takes you to.”

Before we get there, how does the industry want to measure the effect of these new-wave ads?

“We measure success on whatever the results were that the client wanted,” saysDish media sales VP Adam Gaynor. “We’ve seen sales lift of 2%, 3%, I’ve seen sales lift in a category of 160%.”

But others caution against expecting significant uplift at the start.

“If you don’t see lift, that’s okay, too,” according to AT&T AdWorks national sales VP Jason Brown. “The product works. Clients sometimes don’t have their target right.”

Magna Global advanced TV VP Matt Bayner agrees: “Don’t expect a sales lift at first. We’ll be able to get some good insights to do it better next time. I can’t promise lift the first time. But we do promise a journey to get there.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“When you look at innovation, you always swing the pendulum way too far, and then it comes back,” says SMG precision video EVP Tracey Scheppach.

“Right now, we’re buying audience all the way; (the perception is there is) no value to context. (Truth is,) we don’t have enough data to value the context. So we’ve swung all the way to audience. I think that’s going to come back. Only the data will set us free.”

The video is part of preview series leading up to the Future of  TV Advertising Forum in London  You can find videos from the series here. The series is sponsored by Xaxis.

“This has been an amazing year for addressable television,” according to SMG precision video SVP Tracey Scheppach. “We’ve tripled our business. We’ve had 50 advertisers, hundreds of campaigns, billions of impressions. We have a real business on our hands now so I feel like a lot of the fundamentals have been worked out.”

Much of that work has been done by using available data sets and technology. So what’s next in 2016?

“We’re going to apply the principles of audience-based buying and using better data to apply that to linear – something that I would call addressable light,” Scheppach says. “I think there’s so much value that is created by ushering in a better data set, getting us off of Nielsen, and onto more granular data.”

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.