While he made early progress with product development and industry partnerships, funded from a few early stage angel investors, access to venture capital was nearly impossible. While he says the adtech industry was open to him, he was shut out by VC’s — unable to even to get preliminary pitch meetings. He blames racial bias.
With VC’s investing less than 1 % in Black-founded start-ups, Andre is committed to changing the equation both by his example, advocacy and now personal investing in promising companies.
This is one of the topics covered in a wide ranging podcast session moderated by guest host Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. They cover a number topics including the transformation of TV, the background and promise of the acquisition by Transunion.
Editor’s Note: This episode was published in January of the year. It is as compelling and important as ever, so we are republishing it this week.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.
The BeetCast is sponsored by Mediaocean.
]]>While he made early progress with product development and industry partnerships, funded from a few early stage angel investors, access to venture capital was nearly impossible. While he says the adtech industry was open to him, he was shut out by VC’s — unable to even to get preliminary pitch meetings. He blames racial bias.
With VC’s investing less than 1 % in Black-founded start-ups, Andre is committed to changing the equation both by his example, advocacy and now personal investing in promising companies.
This is one of the topics covered in a wide ranging podcast session moderated by guest host Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. They cover a number topics including the transformation of TV, the background and promise of the acquisition by Transunion.
Please subscribe to the #BeetCast on your favorite podcast service.
The #BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Optik, a Transunion company.
]]>The episode is guest hosted by Joanna O’Connell, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
The dramatic transformation in video investment is just part of deep dive into many transformative changes taking place in advertising including the resilience of digital media through the pandemic; outcome based modeling, omni-channel investments, the rise of DTC, privacy/identity and the maturing of creative optimization solutions.
This episode of the BeetCast is sponsored by Tru Opik, a Transunion company. Please visit this page to find more episodes of the BeetCast and to subscribe on your preferred podcast service.
]]>But the growth in streaming audio consumption, coupled with the capabilities it affords, is drawing new advertiser interest, reinvigorating an old format.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Wiesenfeld, Tru Optik Chief Strategist, explains how the audio boom is growing louder.
“Streaming audio is kind of returning radio to the living room,” he says. “It’s become kind of a central part of that new, connected home entertainment nexus that includes connected TV, in-home gaming.
“The number of hours a day people listen to this, now, is two to three hours a day, on average. You’re almost seeing like what we might’ve seen in the 1930s, when the big old radio is at the centre of the living room and everybody crowded around it.
“Audio is returning to the home, somewhat surprisingly. Almost ironically, it’s thanks to these new, advanced types of digital devices.
In the last few years, we have seen the audio ad opportunity emerge around:
Spotify, which operates both, made €185 million from advertising in Q3 2020 alone.
Listen Up: Kegelman’s Spotify Puts Multi-Platform User Data To Work For Advertisers
OTT is largely a replacement for television. People watch it on the same screen, in the same places, for the most part, and they watch similar kinds of content.
(But) streaming audio, it’s not just a digital make-over of audio, it’s more than that – it’s really taking an advantage of the portability of different connected devices … to allow consumers to be able to listen to audio in ways that sort of just complement whatever they’re doing.
Consumption is coming from a range of devices:
According to Edison Research’s latest Smart Audio report, 24% of US adults are now reached by smart speakers, with consumption reported up thanks to the pandemic.
Tru Optik is amongst the companies aiming to help advertisers and publishers profit from this growth. It has trained its audience graph, built in connected TV, toward streaming audio.
Wiesenfeld explains capabilities in streaming audio environments include advanced targeting beyond traditional daypart and contextual placements.
“You can actually target based on who the listeners are and attributes around them,” he says.
“Advertisers can target very specifically based on a particular user’s political interests… which we’ve seen has become very popular in the last couple of months… to things like what products they buy at the supermarket (and) are they in the market for a car or not?”
Want to learn more about digital audio & podcast growth & trends, & how to leverage Triton & @TruOptik powerful platforms to target audio ads across more than 80M US households? View the replay of the webinar here: https://t.co/fcxytMSGgz
— Triton Digital (@TritonDigital) November 20, 2020
But Wiesenfeld says streaming audio ads are still largely bought the way display and many video ads used to be, leaving plenty of room for efficiencies.
“Most audio content, audio inventory, is bought direct. it’s about 80% or so,” he says.
“So there’s just a huge opportunity where almost none of that is being sold on an audience addressable basis.
“The technology is there, the systems are there, the pipes are all built, and is just waiting for some of these audio publishers to grab at that. And just whoever gets there first, I think, is going to be really happy with the level of interest that they see from from buyers.”
You are watching “Advertisers: Turn Up the Volume on Streaming Audio,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Tru Optik. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Tru Optik is a data marketplace and management platform that includes the behavior of more than 80 million homes on connected TV, streaming audio and gaming. Deal terms were not immediately disclosed.
TransUnion already made an investment in Tru Optik in April 2019. At the time, in this video interview we are republishing today, Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston said data security issues had been at the forefront.
“TransUnion seemed to care more about than probably anybody that we’ve talked to in the industry,” Swanston said. “A lot of the diligence process was around privacy policies and data security.”
At the same time, TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel said: “What Tru Optik has built is an aggregator of that kind of data stack, that data marketplace, and we think has the best one that we’ve seen in the marketplace.
“We loved their approach to the market … being this kind of connective tissue between different source of inventory, different sources of data, to make the ability to transact in this OTT world much more simple and scalable.”
In its announcement today, TransUnion says: “Combining both companies’ collective data sets, analytic capabilities and market connectivity, TransUnion and Tru Optik will be able to more precisely — and with greater scale — match individuals and households across the physical and digital worlds.”
The deal is the latest example of M&A activity converging on the two trends of streaming media and audience identity resolution. Tru Optik was represented in the deal by Terry Kawaja CEO of LUMA Partners. The deal is expected to close this month.
TransUnion is commonly known as a provider of consumer credit reports. It claims to have a consumer credit database on one billion people in more than 30 countries.
In the last couple of years, TransUnion has also been building out a business focused on leveraging consumer profiles as targetable criteria for advertisers.
The identity products Tru Optik is working on don’t rely on cookies.
Third-party cookies are being deprecated by browser makers, limiting advertisers ability to target, and the industry is seeking out alternatives.
]]>But it seems not every platform has suffered from the virus’ effects.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, one ad-tech exec says streaming TV has actually seen positive COVID-19 growth.
“There was a lot of uncertainty and disruption, particularly in March and April, across the ecosystem with people pausing advertising and with COVID happening,” says Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston.
“And then (there was) all this social unrest as well as people pulling advertising from Facebook.”
“That had no negative impact for us. If anything, it was a positive impact where we saw people shifting dollars, kind of a flight to safety, to brand safety, people shifting dollars from social media into over-the-top (TV) and streaming audio.
“That helped propel a 40% increase in first-time users of our data across the various ad-tech platforms and publishers.”
Tru Optik is a data management platform which facilitates
identity resolution and data management for the streaming media ecosystem
The Stamford, CT-based company’s solutions include:
Last month, the company announced a self-service version of its data marketplace, which allows advertisers to buy across connected TV platforms and covers 80 million US homes.
Following connections with data providers like Kantar, Comscore, Transunion and IHS Markit, Tru Optik also struck a partnership with MediaMath.
Swanston says Tru Optik can plug brands’ first-party data into a demand-side ad-buying platform.
He says the company has been growing, and so has its customers’ appetite for data, as changing media behavior and the surrounding consumer climate drive advertiser interest.
“We’ve seen pretty astronomical growth over the last couple months, even post Q2 coming into Q3, across our data marketplace,” Swanston adds.
“We have several clients that had over 100% month-over-month increase, just from June to July or July to August, in terms of the amount of data that they’re using across connected TV or streaming audio.
“Part of the reason, in addition to this kind of flight to safety, the massive increase in time spent streaming video on connected TVs and streaming audio on smart speakers, we’re now also starting to see the real uptick in political dollars coming into the ecosystem.
“It’s just really been astronomical growth pretty much that we can track almost week over week across most of our partners in the US because of, I think, those three things all hitting at once.”
The growth is coming for Tru Optik itself, too. “Streaming audio and mostly to smart speakers has gone from 2% of our revenue to over 25% of our revenue the last eight quarters,” Swanston says.
It’s not all about TV. “Streaming audio and mostly to smart speakers has gone from 2% of our revenue to over 25% of our revenue the last eight quarters,” Swanston adds.
The company added audio to its capabilities more than a year ago and it has surprised the team. In 2019, it represented 12% of revenue.
But it’s not about seeing audio as a distinct platform. Swanston says ad buyers are combining channels. “Right in the same platform that they’ve always been used to buying their display or their connected TV, they’re able to continue to buy their OTT or their streaming audio inventory leveraging our data marketplace right in that same UI,” he adds.
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Like many young black men, Swanston has been subject to multiple random police stops and searches with guns drawn. He’s been handcuffed with no charges or arrests.
He is now sharing this with his industry colleagues to bring into focus, in a personal way, the reality of black Americans and the issues of racial injustice.
In the interview, he urges greater diversity and inclusion in the adtech world and calls for better STEM training and coding for young people of color to fill engineering roles.
Backed by venture capital, Tru Optik is part of the slim 1 percent of VC-funded companies that are headed by a black CEO. He says that disparity is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed.
Shocked and saddened by recent events, Swanston thinks we are going through a positive time where the notion of Black Lives Matter, which was marginalized by many when founded about five years ago, is now widely accepted. Finally, “the lives of certain people have value,” he says.
This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality.
]]>The company provides an identity resolution that powers the streaming media ecosystem. The company works closely with data giant Transunion in the identity “spine,” Swanston explains.
Transunion became an investor in Tru Optik last year.
This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tru Optik CEO and co-founder Andre Swanston says his company has branched out from just over-the-top TV, to also offer the same functionality for smart speakers.
“Even though all the sexiness is there across over-the-top and connected TV … we saw the same things happening with streaming audio, with the proliferation of smart speakers
“The same technological challenges that the industry was struggling with in terms of doing audience-based advertising across connected TV, they were also having with all these smart speakers.
“And so we saw it was an opportunity for us to go in to and tie that – that data was tied to our household graph. Streaming audio is something that we projected being maybe 1% or 2% of our revenue for 2019 and being more than 12%. so that’s how fast it grew.”
Tru Optik is a data management platform which facilitates
identity resolution and data management for the streaming media ecosystem
The Stamford, CT-based company’s solutions include:
Earlier, the company partnered with SpotX to create a connected TV ads marketplace and launched a suite to support the measurement of connected TV ad efficacy.
Many of its customers now even white-label the platform in to their own solutions.
A lot has been said over the last year about “identity resolution” – the practice of recognising a single consumer across all of her devices.
For Swanston: “It’s the ability for people to take audience intelligence around a consumer across omni-channel and multiple devices and platforms to have a consistent understanding of that audience.”
Swanston was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he 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.
]]>In January 2018, Tru Optik, a technology vendor that offers a data management platform for over-the-top (OTT) TV advertisers, launched OptOut.TV, giving consumers a one-click way to refuse audience-based targeting of over-the-top TV ads.
Next up, a reboot is coming.
“We launched our optout.tv more than two years ago,” says CEO Andre Swanston. “It’s been white-labelled by a lot of the largest ad tech platforms to power their ability for opt-outs across connected TV advertising.
“In the coming weeks, we’re branding that as privacy.tv and adding on an additional suite of transparency and privacy capabilities for publishers and consumers, very importantly as well.”
Centralized privacy dashboards allowing consumers to control or opt out of ad targeting from certain companies include YourOnlineChoices, the related AboutAds.info/WebChoices from the Digital Advertising Alliance, plus the National Advertising Initiative’s opt-out feature.
Consumers can also use individual services’ privacy controls to opt out.
Swanston thinks privacy control will be important in the connected TV era, because privacy informs brand safety.
“No-one wants to have their brand going in front of ISIS or Al Qaeda video,” he says. “When we think about a premium television, it’s less about the content and more about privacy compliance or how data is used, what data is used, and making sure that those are in line with how our brand portrays itself.”
He wants Tru Optik’s dashboard to get out ahead of ad privacy legislation on dockets in California and elsewhere.
“Now it’s not just California,” Swanston says. “There’s seven to 10 other states that have things either on the ballot or are pushing other initiatives that would change the way data can be used.
“Most of these laws are pretty poorly written or relatively ambiguous, I think, so there’s been a lot of uncertainty around the industry about how to prepare for them.
“We don’t really wait for whether it’s a legal regulation or if it’s something like the IAB to put out standards.”
Tru Optik’s technology helps marketers with targeting OTT viewers, measuring consumption and tracking attribution using first- and third-party data.
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
]]>So a little more than two years ago, Tru Optik launched OptOut.TV to make it possible for consumers to opt out of data capture and control how data about them is tracked across devices. “It’s a mandatory part of every contract and partnership deal we’ve done over the last two years,” Swanston says.
Later this year, Tru Optik plans to divulge details about consumer participation in OptOut.TV, in addition to doing “a lot more consumer-facing advertising for that, as well along with some of our partners.”
In the meantime, Swanston says that “a significant percentage” of those who avail themselves of OptOut.TV or other data-control opportunities associated with Tru Optik, “many people aren’t actually opting out at all. They’re going in and adjusting their data. They’re giving more information” because they don’t want see things that are inappropriate or irrelevant.
Swanston’s take is that people just want their data to be used with transparency in a privacy compliant manner, along with the ability to opt out in a way “that actually enhances their experience.”
Asked about the business of tracking consumer identities for advertising purposes, he points to three permutations, the first two being device graphs yielding probalistic models, and work done by such data onboarders as TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. Then there is Tru Optik, which goes beyond a sole focus on individuals as it relates to TV because anyone in a household can be watching it at a given time.
He says advertisers want to know if they’re reaching the right type of household based on such factors as age and gender and the propensity of someone in the household being in the market for a product or service.
“Who cares on television about frequency capping just to your Roku or just to your Samsung TV?” Swanston says. “I want to frequency cap in the household. And so I think when we talk about identity, it’s really important not to just talk about individual identity but also understanding the makeup of the household, which is where Tru Optik uniquely sits in the market right now.”
As the discussion turns to workplace diversity, Swanston says Tru Optik is ahead of that particular societal curve because it’s in the company’s DNA.
“We would never have or need a Chief Diversity Officer. We don’t have one VP or SVP in the company that’s not a female. Almost forty percent of our engineering team are minorities. Half of our employees are first-generation Americans or immigrants.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>While Spiegel isn’t ready to declare the death of cookies for tracking consumers, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference that they’re increasingly less relevant.
“One of the things we’re spending a lot of time on is where is new consumption happening and what’s the identity signals in that new world,” says Spiegel, who joined TransUnion last August from MediaLink. “And a lot of that has to do with certainly not only devices but IP-based content.”
TruSignal uses its custom audience-building platform to deliver predictive scoring powered by artificial intelligence, making data available and actionable in almost real time for one-to-one addressable marketing. The combination of its technologies and information will allow TransUnion’s inherent accuracy to operate at scale, according to a news release.
Spiegel sees TransUnion, the consumer credit reporting agency whose data holdings include 200 million files profiling nearly every credit-active consumer in the United States, as an enabler capable of straddling both privacy and technology.
“We are fortunate to be able to actually leverage and utilize PII in a safe, secure manner,” he says, because TransUnion is used to government regulations “and leaning into the new privacy regulations that will come. A lot of the players in the ecosystem are uncomfortable leveraging PII. They don’t have the infrastructure to do that.”
As opposed to distributing information, TransUnion helps to be a “validation source to turn a lot of unknown information into known information. Get beyond devices, get beyond a thin slice of information about consumers into a full picture.”
While the company has invested in Tru Optik and is helping it “continue to power their solutions,” TransUnion sees its data science and technology capabilities as helping marketers understand “what to show to consumers and what next best action to highlight, what offer to show, what’s the contextual as well as personal experience, how do you make that more relevant.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
]]>But that opportunity could be squandered if marketers don’t use technology which has full sight of the addressable market.
That is according to one exec who aims to help them get a better view.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, David Wiesenfeld, Tru Optik’s chief strategist, says OTT campaign measurement and attribution depends on two things: massive scale and cross-device capability.
“OTT is all about specific targeting,” he says. “And the ability to manage campaigns in a very specific level. Without a massive dataset to power that kind of measurement to be able to drive those insight, you can’t do that.
“Scale is hugely important in OTT. There’s tremendous fragmentation… lots of people on lots of different devices watching lots of content at the times of their choosing, and the ads run whenever they run.”
Stamford, CT-based Tru Optik’s solutions include:
Here is where scale’s rubber meets the road.
“We’ve got (technology that can see) 75 million households that represent about 90% of ad supported OTT viewing in the U.S.,” Wiesenfeld adds. “So we know, if we pixel the campaign, we know every single time that campaign was served to which household and to which device.
“(Attribution for) OTT is really going to be the thing that catalyzes TV to becoming a performance-based medium.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>“And also as we get into more interesting things like measuring unduplicated reach, we think it’s a really exciting product for the market,” Buckley adds in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
Discovery and Fox among the first media owner partners planning to leverage the new data-driven solution to enable cross-platform ad sales. MRI-Simmons will be a key data partner in helping to deliver a unified audience target across platforms, an essential aspect in the clypd/SpotX solution, according to a news release.
SpotX has bee working on three main categories of data enablement. The first is enabling media owners to bring their first-party data “into the fold in a protected capacity” to use it particularly for programmatic ad transactions. “We also enabled media owners to license that data to other media companies on the platform in a safe and secure manner,” says Buckley.
SpotX then worked to onboard the major third-party data marketplaces to ensure all of the major third-party data segments are available to any of its customers.
A major focus has been activating buy-side data so that brands and agencies synching their data with the SportX platform gain enhanced planning and forecasting capabilities.
This facilitates automated guaranteed and programmatic guaranteed transactions “in the way the industry wants to do it. In order to do that well, we have to refine the inventory down against exactly what the buyer is looking for, including perhaps data they may have housed on their side before we even send the ad requests out,” Buckley explains.
“So once we have the full picture, all the targeting attributes including the data the buyers are using on their end, we’re actually able to refine those ad requests down so when the buyer actually gets it they’re able to respond ninety-five, one hundred percent of the time with an ad.”
SpotX now has more than 600 employees in 26 offices around the world. In addition the merger of SpotX with sister company smartclip, SpotX parent RTL acquired dynamic ad insertion provider Yospace, as The Drum reports.
“It’s clearly a core integral technology that our customers need,” Buckley says of the Yospace contribution. “And we feel there’s huge potential between pairing that SSAI technology with the monetization platform in terms of what we can deliver for our customers.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>The funding round for the provider of over-the-top targeting, measurement and privacy management was led by Mithera Capital and also included Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund and Progress Ventures.
“We’ve been very deliberate and frugal in terms of how we raise capital,” Swanston says in this Beet.TV interview at the company’s fifth annual InFronts event. “We accomplished a lot with relatively a very small amount of money. To be able to have the success that we’ve had and then now have a much larger cash infusion is really substantial for us.”
Tru Optik has doubled in size “in just the last quarter and our revenue is pretty much skyrocketing,” Swanston adds. With regard to the relationship with TransUnion, he cites as main factors as scale and quality of data plus being “tight knit” on data security. As to the latter, “Those are things that TransUnion seemed to care more about than probably anybody that we’ve talked to in the industry. A lot of the diligence process was around privacy policies and data security.”
Where Swanston sees OTT/connected TV headed in the next couple of years is “we’re not even going to call it that anymore. It’s just going to be called TV because it will be the main opportunity to reach consumers across the biggest screen in the household.”
Tru Optik recently expanded its management ranks with the additions of Richard Kosinski as EVP of Sales and Jonathan Bokor in the role of Chief Privacy and Business Affairs Officer.
“We’ve always been blessed with some really talented, experienced people,” says Swanston. Really what we’re doing now is just being able to do that even more increasingly and fill gaps that we had” in such areas as sales and privacy.
Tru Optik kicked off this year’s InFronts by presenting a timeline of the company’s accomplishments and partnerships in an industry with non-stop announcements from companies announcing all manner of news. “The funny thing about it that we laugh about internally is everything that anybody has announced in the last six months, Tru Optik announced in 2018, or 2017 or even 2016.”
One of its more substantial undertakings is the recently announced integration with the Oracle Data Cloud, something that Tru Optik began working on in the summer of 2017, according to Swanston.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>Kosinksi’s digital background spans such media companies as Forbes, Yahoo!, Westwood One, Quantcast and Receptiv, while Bokor hails from Publicis Media, where he was SVP of Precision Video. The hires are a sign that Tru Optik is “listening to what the market needs and bringing on the right people,” Kosinksi explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
Tru Optik services content producers, broadcasters and publishers, and agencies and marketers with what it calls its “core asset,” the OTT Household Graph representing 75 million homes. “We today have mapped, via direct measurement over eighty percent of all connected TV households,” says Kosinski.
On the targeting side, Tru Optik helps agencies and marketers use precise targeting of segments “that they’re very familiar with” and can access via their DSP’s with inventory available through its partnership with SpotX.
For measurement, the company provides transparency in connected-TV households in real time, according to Kosinski. It can determine reach against an audience, frequency of those audiences and in-target reach against them.
Some 92 million U.S. households have a smart TV, which Tru Optik uses as the “anchor” of its graph. Given the proliferation of other viewing devices, the company is able to aggregate “all of these different and disparate signals” into one common, household number. It provides other solutions based on the individual devices as well.
Tru Optik is the first connected-TV DMP to utilize the Oracle Data Cloud in an integrated audience solution, as MediaPost reports.
Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.
]]>Now we are living in a world which is swimming – or, perhaps, drowning – in the sticky, digital substance.
For many in broadcasting, data is proving to be transformational to the way they sell advertising, reinventing a discipline that has long relied on manual operations and sketchy viewer targeting.
In this Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV, executives discussed the application of data to their businesses.
Panel leader Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by positing that “data is a product”…
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“100% data is a product. We just announced the fact that we’re launching our own Warner Media D2C (direct-to-consumer) product itself, which will be driven by deep insights on consumption, on behavioral insights, personalization, recommendation engines, dynamic ad insertion built into the overall interface, as well as dynamic content insertion, and dynamic framework of how the actual product itself gets built out. That’s all data driven.”
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“Typically. what we see is in a programmatic delivery or even in a direct sold model, we see anywhere from 15% to 20% lift on the value of media when that kind of data is applied to it.”
But speakers also said that data alone won’t be a game-changer…
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“I would say it’s not just the value of the data. It’s the value of the addressability itself. You’re also enabling this household-level dynamic insertion ability. It’s the combination of those two plus the media I think that gets you to that.”
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“They have to work together.”
Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:
“Where I see the convergence of these two is traditional linear and then you have this audience data. The challenge is, what is the value of that? Is it about outcomes? Is it about time spent? Is it about consumer lifetime value?
“I think we’re not getting to that. We’re not starting to understand the value of combining data and linear television in a way for brands and buyers to truly value it in a sophisticated way.”
Turner’s Redniss argued that this value actually is becoming clear. But Swartz asked panelists whether it can really be quantified…
Brian Kilmer, SVP Advanced TV Solutions, NinthDecimal:
“There is not a significant interest in proving the value from a buying standpoint at the moment, because they’re not incentivized to do so. They’re incentivized to efficiencies and reach.”
Frans Vermeulen, COO, TruOptik:
“I think we have the talent. I just think the costs of trying to understand the end ROI is still so high, and every marketer has their own metrics for success. It’s just hard to make it a universal standard.”
Swartz said she feared different companies, all hoping to burst the bubble of traditional TV measurement currencies, would simply pick their own solutions, leading to silos…
Jesse Redniss, EVP, Data Strategy & Product Innovation, Turner:
“We as an industry need to come together to identify some key data points that we can all trade on. That’s it. If we can all baseline around that – and it’s not just one currency, it’s probably going to be five or six – that’s when it really starts to come together.
“We all need to do a better job of educating … the end consumer. Right now we’re giving them a shit ton of opportunities and a shit ton of choice. How do we help teach them and educate them on what those things mean?”
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.
]]>The emerging online TV landscape is a little different. After all, television – at least, the one that persists in the corner or on the wall of a living room is a shared device.
“Connected TV is it’s all about the household, for both targeting and measurement,” says Tru Optik COO Frans Vermeulen in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Vermeulen’s Tru Optik is a data management platform which facilitates ads for connected TV platforms.
Earlier, the company partnered with SpotX to create a connected TV ads marketplace and launched a suite to support the measurement of connected TV ad efficacy.
Vermeulen had been VP of advanced strategy and operations at Comcast before he joined Tru Optik in April.
Now the company is connecting with Amobee, another ad-tech firm, to help the latter’s customers better target connected TV ads.
Describing the integration, Vermeulen says: “(It) is the ability to do targeting at the household level from our cross section of 3,000 – at this point and growing – syndicated (consumer data) segments.
“So, any client of Amobee can just log into the platform, select Tru Optik as a data partner, and then access those 3,000 segments from the classic syndicated segment providers – like IHS for auto, comScore for demo(graphics) and 3,000 other ones.”
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.
]]>That is the growth trajectory the industry is now seeing in the realm of advanced TV advertising, the practice of serving TV ads targeted to individual viewers.
“I think that the conversation has really shifted to advanced TV, whether that is even indexed linear, or it’s addressable linear through set-top box or satellite, and then of course connected TV and OTT,” says Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik, a data management platform which facilitates ads for connected TV platforms
“That’s what people are almost leading the conversation with now … and you’re seeing lots of dollars shift.”
Swanston was speaking with Beet.TV at Beet Retreat In The City. Tru Optik’s technology helps marketers with targeting OTT viewers, measuring consumption and tracking attribution using first- and third-party data.
The Stamford, CT-based outfit claims its technology has sight of what 500 million consumers in 150 countries are viewing or listening to, out of a library of 20 million titles.
Videology previously tapped Tru Optik, which sees clients of the former use the latter’s data about OTT viewing to better segment and target viewers.
“What we’ve seen, even anecdotally, is we’ve seen our existing clients and TV networks and publishers, even the ad tech platforms, we’ve seen like over 8X increase just in the last two quarters in terms of data used across connected TV and OTT,” Swanston adds.
“We don’t have quite as much visibility into like, the addressable TV, but I can imagine that it’s just kind of an industry-wide thing.”
Why the Beet Retreat Matters
Swanston also spoke about the Beet Retreat In The City event, saying he was pleasantly surprised to hear a panel discuss the potential benefits of blockchain in advertising.
“I don’t know how Andy and the team at Beet pull it off,” he said. “I mean, you don’t even have to ask for an intro to a big-name exec – just show up at a Beet event and you’ll eventually meet them. That’s why I think you’ll see people fly in from wherever. I’m happy that I keep getting an invite.”
The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City at the post event reception by Matt Prohaska, CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting.
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.
]]>This month, Tru Optik, a data management platform which facilitates ads for connected TV platforms, launched OptOut.TV, giving consumers a one-click way to refuse audience-based targeting of over-the-top TV ads.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston explains why his company launched the program.
“Everybody knows about all the advancements that have been made with with leveraging third party data, whether it’s demo data or auto intender, CBG, or advertisers wanting to leverage their first party data to advertise on Roku and Apple TV and Fire TV,” he says.
“But there’s something that wasn’t happening, and that was the same types of protections and controls that the consumer had across desktop and mobile for how data was used to reach them with target advertising was not really there at any sort of scalable or viable solution across connected TV.”
In the desktop and mobile world, AdChoices, formed by a collection of advertising bodies, allows consumers to change their ad targeting preferences, with logos and links often displayed on many visual ads.
Swanston hopes OptOut.TV accomplishes a similar goal in the emerging world of OTT. Apparently, “dozens” of ad-tech platforms including Videology have committed to comply with his new standard.
How is it accomplished? “Tru Optik has a household graph,” Swanston adds. “We have tens of millions of homes in the US that we have anonymously mapped back to a persistent Tru Optik ID, which then we can understand against that Tru Optik ID – what are the cookies, what are the device IDs, what are the IP addresses, what are the connected TV user agent strings?
“And so, if you’re in that household, and you’re tied back to that household ID and you decide to opt out, we understand what households had opted out to.”
But, though the program allows consumers to opt out entirely, it also allows them to customise the data they give such platforms, so as to enhance – not just reject – their targeted TV advertising.
This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.
They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:
“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”
Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”
Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”
Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”
More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.
Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”
Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“For every single one we actually underestimated how fast and how rapid the growth and adoption of OTT and connected TV would be,” says the company’s CEO, Andre Swanston. “Ad-supported, connected TV adoption is growing way faster than I think anybody predicted.”
In this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017, Swanston insists that the future is right now for OTT and connected-TV viewing and explains his company’s impending rollout to consumers of a data opt-out solution for advanced TV.
His future-is-now stance rests on the belief that it’s not lack of technology that’s holding back advanced consumer targeting via new and emerging venues. To Swanston, It’s “more of a speed of adoption across leading advertisers and networks and logistical and bureaucratic things that are kind of slowing momentum down.”
Want to use third-party data sources on indexed linear buy and then use that same data source for your addressable set-top buy? It can be done, along with using that same data source across desktop and mobile and connected TV. Attribution of commercial exposure to store visits and purchases? That, too, can be done.
“There’s just very little that an advertiser can want to do now across advanced TV that we can’t actually do,” Swanston says.
Despite the growth of OTT and connected-TV viewing, no industry association has thought to provide consumers with a way of opting out of the data collection associated with advanced targeting. So Tru Optik is leading the charge behind OptOut.TV, a one-stop solution.
“We just thought that it made more sense to be proactive in terms of trying to allow for consumers to have those type of privacy and opt-out controls as opposed to waiting for some issue, some lawsuit to happen or the government to put in place some sort restriction or barrier that really hampered the business,” Swanston says.
In January 2018, when OptOut.TV becomes available to consumers via the Web and through an array of OTT apps, Tru Optik will only support data providers, demand-side platforms and publishers that are compliant with OptOut.TV.
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.
]]>Swanston will be one of more than three dozen featured speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat Miami, where industry executives will gather to discuss the coming of age of targeted TV advertising. (See speaker list below.)
With the new partnership, connected TV buyers and sellers using AppNexus’ platform will be able to segment and target audiences based on data offered through the integration of Tru Optik’s OTT Marketing Cloud, according to a news release. AppNexus and Tru Optik will be able to facilitate audience delivery across 75 million OTT households in the U.S., on any connected TV device or publishers regardless of whether the publisher has registered user data.
“It’s going to be the first time in the industry that publishers can pre-segment their connected TV inventory, even outside of registered user data, against third-party segments, demos from comScore, their own first-party data, and then have private marketplace deal ID’s to control who has access to that inventory,” Swanston says.
The shift from linear to connected TV is growing faster than the shift from desktop video to mobile video, according to Swanston. “So that just gives people an idea of how tremendous the opportunity is that’s coming across connected TV.”
As he looks ahead to Beet Retreat Miami, Swanston hopes that the discussions will focus on the here and now of targeted TV.
“Everything people have been talking about over the last few years about what they hope they’ll eventually be able to do on connected TV you can do right now. Today,” he says.
In the next 90 days Tru Optik will be revealing more partnerships, in keeping with its original go-to-market strategy. Among other things, this strategy negates the need to build “a massive sales force” to ensure growth.
“Going into 2018, the majority of audience based programmatic advertising across connected TV, on both the buy side and the supply side in the U.S. for sure, will be powered by Tru Optik. And that’s really exciting for being still a relatively young and small company.”
Here are are the speakers at next week’s Beet Retreat:
Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen, Cadreon/IPG
Jonathan Bokor, Director of Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange
Kristin Dolan, CEO, 605
Scott Ferber, CEO, Videology
Nick Jezarian, Media Director, Target
Raghu Kodige, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder, Alphonso
Jakob Nielsen, CEO, Finecast, GroupM
Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group
Kelly Abcarian, SVP, Product Leadership, Nielsen
Dan Aversano, SVP, Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions, Turner
Anna Bager, SVP/GM Mobile & Video, IAB
Craig Berkley, VP. Television Partner Development, Acxiom
Mel Berning, President, Revenue, A+E Networks
Michael Bologna, President, one2one Media
Jason Brown, VP, National Sales, AT&T AdWorks
Lorne Brown, CEO, Sintec Media
Herve Brunet, GM, Markets, FreeWheel
Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
Peter Dolchin, Strategic Partner Lead, Google
Marco Forte, SVP, ABC Network Sales
Mark Gall, Chief Revenue Officer, Alphonso
Adam Gerber, SVP, Investment, North America, Essence
Michael Glantz, VP, Business Development, Simulmedia
Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights
Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions, Oracle Data Cloud
Jason Harrison, President, Team Arrow Partners (GroupM)
Cathy Hetzel, Executive Vice President, comScore
Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising, TiVo
Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Oath (Verizon)
Brian Katz, VP, Advanced TV Insights & Strategy, Eyeview
Rob Klippel, SVP, Advanced Products & Strategy, Spectrum Reach (Charter)
Jennifer Koester, Director, Global Partnerships, Google
Michael Kubin, EVP, Media, Invidi
Marcus Liassides, CEO, Sorenson Media
Noah Levine, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group
Adam Lowy, Director, Advanced TV & Digital, DISH & Sling TV
Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development, Inscape
Matthew O’Grady, CEO, Nielsen Catalina Solutions
Mike Rosen, EVP, Portfolio Sales, NBCUniversal
Neil Smith, SVP Markets, FreeWheel
Andre Swanston, CEO, Tru Optik
Ben Tatta, President & Co-Founder, 605
Tore Tellefsen, VP, TV Solutions at DataXu
Nick Troiano, CEO, Cross MediaWorks
Rob Weisbord, SVP, COO, Sinclair Digital Group
Tony Yi, GM, Strategic Commercial/Business Development, Videology
Moderators:
Steve Ellwanger, Contributing Editor, Beet.TV
Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Tracey Scheppach, CEO & Co-Founder, Matter More Media
Matt Spiegel, Managing Director, MediaLink
Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp.
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer & Founder, Beet.TV
This is one of the concepts behind comScore’s rollout of its new Activation suite, an offering that enables cross-platform targeting based on audience segments while drilling deeply into website content.
“One of the keys there is safety can have a different specific meaning depending upon whom you are as a brand,” says Aaron Fetters, SVP National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore.
“What our capability enables is for a brand to be very specific as to I’m okay showing up against this type of content but not this type of content,” Fetters adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
“Our data’s ability is to go down into the actual text level within a page and say this is what this page is about and it’s a place that I’m okay to be.”
comScore Activation incorporates both digital and television viewing data along with contextual and verification technology to account for brand safety, viewability and invalid traffic. It is currently available in more than 15 leading ad tech platforms, including Adobe, AppNexus, Centro, Salesforce, Tru Optik and Videology.
At the ANA confab, Fetters says he’s heartened to see that advertisers have not just embraced the pursuit of a cleaner digital media ecosystem but that they’re thinking beyond that goal to focus on campaign effectiveness. One of their priorities is the balance between digital reach and efficiency.
“It’s great to know I have a clean supply chain. But the next step is to say am I maximizing the reach of my message to an audience,” says Fetters. “Am I capping frequency at a level that I want to, or is this just a strategy that’s not working for me?”
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.
]]>“What we’re trying to do is effectively create that unified platform,” says Chairman & CEO Scott Ferber. In this interview with Beet.TV, Ferber explains the genesis of Videology’s position in the marketplace and how it’s “pushing hard against the convergence of linear and digital video.”
The state of advanced TV will be one of several stops that will be front and center at the annual DMEXCO advertising and media trade show on Sept. 13 and 14 in Cologne, Germany.
Videology made its initial impact on the demand side. “The simple reason is the demand side needed to move first on trying to go after audiences because of the business model challenges the agencies were facing earlier,” Ferber explains.
Given the impact of video consumption fragmentation on platforms and devices, “the media companies need to get involved and figure out how to sell their audiences in a way that the demand side wants to buy,” he adds.
Alternatively, says Ferber, “you could have someone like a Facebook or Google be a unified platform. But we think that the opportunity to offer a platform for everyone other than Facebook and Google is the big opportunity that Videology has.”
The company recently expanded its footprint in the connected-TV realm via its integration with Tru Optik, under which advertisers to use Videology’s platform to send targeted one-to-household messaging—based on hundreds of third-party data segments or their first-party data segments—to nearly 100 million households.
Digital and linear are not the easiest of bedfellows to try to unite, given issues like integration and commonality. “When you use something like in-market automotive intender, one data provider could have 50 different ways of describing that,” says Ferber. “So we need to figure out ways to make that a common term that people can buy, sell and measure against so that the industry can actually conduct business.”
Like the expansion of digital video alone, convergence occurs at a different pace around the world depending on the market. Ferber cites the U.K., Australia, Canada “to a certain degree” and the U.S. as the most advanced markets. “The top 10 TV markets is where the opportunity will be, but it will take three to five years for that to happen.”
This segment is part of The Road to DMEXCO, our lead-up series presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos, please visit this page.
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