You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
That is Ivan Markman’s view. As chief business officer Ivan Markman at Verizon Media, Markman just signed a deal to launch a new Unified TV Report, using Nielsen and Vizio data to help advertisers understand both linear TV and digital campaign performance across Verizon’s own DSP.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Markman explains the rationale.
Verizon Media and Vizio already announced a partnership back in April which saw Verizon Media’s DSP gain access to viewing data on 18 million TVs from Vizio’s Inscape, giving new buying opportunities to its DSP customers.
In the latest, Unified TV Report will combine Verizon Media’s ConnectID people-based audience database with data from Vizio and Nielsen, totalling up to 148 million logged-in users.
“Now we’re bringing it to life to create a way for advertisers to connect the dots between, linear TV and connected TV,” Mark says, “and to connect the dots with, say, native advertising, more traditional video, advertising, display digital out of home.”
As linear audiences wane, ad buyers are getting excited about the opportunity to combine digital-style ad buying, targeting and measurement through internet-connected TV, despite persistent gripes about the complexity of doing so.
Those gripes include measuring across a proliferating range of media channels.
Markman acknowledges that consumer behavior is shifting from linear TV to connected TV (CTV).
He sees the ad world dividing up between “haves and have-nots” – those that have first-party identity data and those that do not.
He says Verizon Media is offering up ConnectID, with data from 152 million unique users in the US.
But combining that with new CTV data from Vizio and linear viewership from Nielsen begins to make the combined offering sound like a relative powerhouse.
“We can help connect the dots and provide views into incremental reach, the duplicated frequency, the kinds of planning that is typically the happening within the TV landscape, and be able to do that seamlessly across both mediums,” he says.
]]>Getting there has been a slog – and buyers still say the process is too complicated.
A survey of brands and ad agencies – commissioned by DISH Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, INVIDI Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia – shows the evidence.
The study, Era Of Addressable, carried out by Forrester found the buy side calling for change:
The complaints are a consequence of the way in which new viewing and advertising options have grown up in the US. The market is fortunate to have seen the launch of a plethora of services, many of which boasting their own unique way of booking ads.
But that is a far cry from the traditional cable TV days, which had relatively standardized ad operations by comparison.
Beau Ordemann sympathizes.
“Think about the, the plight of the TV marketer, there’s over 300 OTT apps,” says Verizon Media’s head of connected TV sales.
“There’s the networks and content owners. There’s distribution platforms. There’s device manufacturers. There’s the companies that amplify streaming content. And there’s multiple MVPDs out there, they’re all selling addressable TV advertising.
“So, how on earth am I, as a buyer, supposed to manage an efficient buying process in aggregate reporting, much less be able to control for reach and frequency across all the suppliers and systems? That’s why we’re building tools to pull together MVPD Set-Top Box addressable, and connected TV.”
The industry is now seeing a smorgasbord of initiatives aimed at stitching together the patchwork US addressable TV ecosystem, like Project OAR and OnAddressable.
Ordemann’s Verizon Media offers a demand-side buying platform (DSP) that offers access to 80 million households via DISH and FIOS, plus Sling TV, Hulu, Roku and traditional TV network streaming inventory like Viacom, CBS, and NBC.
That is part of a wider play to access more than 900 million visitors to Verizon Media’s overall portfolio.
You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
In an announcement, the company launched new features for publishers via its media platform:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Verizon Media chief business officer Iván Markman says consumers are demanding a new type of content experience.
“One of the areas that we’re seeing is the need and the focus on more interactivity,” he says.
Verizon recently acquired BlueJeans, the video conference software provider. Whilst that may look more like an arms race with Zoom and Skype for remote workforce hearts and minds, Markman also frames the idea of video-based interaction in a media context.
“Audiences are a lot more open to these kinds of experiences, and they are adopting it, and making it part of their habits,” he continues. “As much as we’ve seen this massive acceleration, we’ve only begun. Because there’s so much innovation to come into the future.”
Exciting news about @BlueJeansNet! Read more here: https://t.co/BuKuq4DO8M pic.twitter.com/I2MDvfHYPJ
— Tami Erwin (@TamiErwinVZ) April 16, 2020
Verizon Media is the product of several marriages.
Its publishing assets include the likes of Yahoo, Techcrunch, AOL, HuffPost, from what was briefly known as Oath.
Its advertising technologies roll up those historically acquired or operated by AOL and Yahoo, like BrightRoll, Flurry, One and Gemini.
Markman acknowledges: “We are both the demand-side platform, as well as the supply side.”
The group’s Media Platform has long operated a content delivery network and tools for encoding, syndication and advanced advertising.
But all of those assets now interconnect with a Verizon stable that includes telecoms and TV activities.
And the new Verizon Media has been doubling-down on video streaming.
“There’s significantly more consumption of connected TV type content,” Markman says.
After launching live “bell-to-bell” Wall Street video coverage in January 2019, Markman says “we’ve seen almost a doubling of those audiences” year-on-year. The group also streamed the Super Bowl in 4K.
EXCITING UPDATE!
Yahoo Finance expands to 8 hours of live programming today, including the new YFi PM, which I’ll be hosting daily from 1-2PM EST!
Tune in on Apple TV, Facebook Live, or https://t.co/yjPb7ccp2g and on the Yahoo Finance App! pic.twitter.com/hCbBPhPw4x— Zack Guzman (@zGuz) January 7, 2019
Markman says Verizon Media “is a streaming platform that powers the who’s who of broadcasting, the likes of ESPN and folks”.
He says he is trying to offer a service with three core tenets:
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:
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.”
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.”
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.
]]>The company, which owns media titles including Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Huffpost, TechCrunch and Engadget, has content at scale second only to Google and ahead of Facebook, according to Jeff Lucas, Verizon Media’s head of North American sales and global client solutions. That positions it between two content hubs that rely on user-generated content, making brand safety at scale one of Verizon Media’s top differentiators and value propositions.
“We have an extremely close relationship with our user, who leans in every day to consume professionally produced, premium content that’s totally brand safe,” says Lucas, speaking with Beet.TV at Advertising Week. “It puts them in an environment of trust. We would never betray that trust.”
First-party data, transparency around data practices and customer trust shapes Verizon Media’s work with advertisers – Lucas says he feels Verizon Media offers the best data in the business. He says the company has created a data ecosystem that includes customer data, customer safety and brand safety. That’s good for both customers and for marketers, because in the right environment, customers are more likely to convert from ads. “If you’re in an environment that’s not brand safe, and you’re seeing bad content, you’re not likely to trust the advertisers that are building around that.”
As a media company part of the broader Verizon umbrella, Verizon Media is also looking ahead to coming developments around the 5G network, which Lucas says is “limitless.”
“Really, what’s endless is – think about production,” says Lucas. “There’s so much to do where marketers can get right there in the middle of it and see how it’s going to affect their business. When it starts to get more widespread, you’ll see it’s a new revolution.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>But how do advertisers take advantage of that mega media platform, and what exactly is Verizon Media’s offering?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jeff Lucas, Verizon Media Head of North American Sales & Global Client Solutions, explains: “We’re second to Google in terms of total size, and we are stocked with premium, professionally produced content.
“What we do is, when we look at the first-party data of our users consuming content, we can see where they’re consuming content along the path to purchase. I think that that’s very unique that others don’t have.”
Lucas was speaking around Verizon Media’s NewFronts presentation, where the outfit was pitching its upcoming content slate to advertisers in a bid to secure upfront ad sales agreements.
That roster includes:
As a media proposition, what does a beast with such breadth add up to? Scale, says Verizon Media Head of North American Sales & Global Client Solutions Jeff Lucas
“We’re intending to bring content, data, and innovation with scale to the marketplace,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “When we aggregate all of our audience, we rank number two behind Google in terms of total audience.”
At CES, where Lucas was speaking, Verizon and Microsoft announced an expansion of an existing ad partnership, extending Verizon’s handling of Microsoft’s display, video and content marketing to also include native ads.
Powering native ads on the Microsoft properties extends the latter’s ad inventory by 20%, the pair said.
And, of course, Verizon Media Group will need to make good ad money. Having spent almost $10 billion to acquire AOL and Yahoo, Verizon in its 2018 Q4 wrote $4.6 billion off the value of its Oath assets after Oath ad sales under-performed.
Closer ties to Verizon could help, Lucas says. “When we came together with Verizon, we also came together with Verizon Wireless,” he adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
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