Those were some of the questions being asked at the recent Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, when Julian Zilberbrand stepped up.
Zilberbrand, EVP of audience science at Viacom, was asked by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz about marketplaces.
“Marketplace is very important,” he said. “We were a founding member of OpenAP. We probably do more advanced TV than most because we believe in what it is and we believe in and how to make that work, and we believe that that’s a value for the market.
“Within the structure of that, we think that it makes sense to kind of create multiple opportunities for different ways to kind of invest with us. If you want to invest with us traditionally, we’re more than happy to do that. If you want to invest with us in advanced way with data at the centre, we’re more than happy to do that as well.”
Zilberbrand went on to describe multiple “variations” of marketplace.
The conversation was led by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Shwartz.
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.
]]>But that is all set to change. US addressable TV is going national.
In a session dubbed Addressable for National & Linear: Solving the Problems, panelists at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 discussed that prospect:
It was kicked off by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media and a veteran of early addressable TV infrastructure initiatives.
“I literally have goosebumps at this idea,” she said. “Sixty million households have addressable capabilities, some through DirecTV and DISH and Comcast and so on.
“But it still only amounts to 3% of the inventory because it’s sitting on the two minutes (per hour of ad inventory that TV networks allow cable and satellite operators to sell in their live feeds).
“So, one of the things that we’re going to see in 2020 … is lighting up the smart TVs, which could take us from 3% to my estimation of 21%.”
The expansion, she said, is being driven by initiatives like Inscape’s Project OAR and Nielsen’s acquisition of Sorenson Media, plus the application of software from vendors like INVIDI and FreeWheel to a wider, national set of inventory – something which could make as much as 35% of inventory addressable, she said.
WarnerMedia’s David Porter said he won’t be putting WarnerMedia’s best content in to addressable bucket just yet, and not in the upcoming 2020 upfront ad sales season.
“While the technology … is getting better, it’s still not perfect and we want to make sure it is perfect,” he said.
“When we begin our technology pilots this summer, it will not be on a primetime inventory, it will not be on our sports inventory.
“We are going to find some lower-viewed inventory. We’re going to take one unit and we’re going to convert it on one network, and we’re going to test that.
“And then we’re going to test it on another network and another network, and then we’re going to start converting multiple networks per day and then multiple units per day, multiple units per hour. So we’re going to grow it very, very slowly.
Nielsen’s Abcarian said future TV measurement will need to combine specific data straight from connected devices with audience panels.
Scheppach said “measurement” would come to include attributes about a person and a home, augmented with automatic content recognition (ACR) like that from Nielsen’s Gracenote, which can identify real viewing behavior from digital fingerprints. Abcarian replied: “And set-top box data.”
Abcarian agreed that panels and big data would go hand-in-hand.
Nielsen is working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year, following its acquisitions of Sorenson Media and Gracenote, and spent “gruelling 11 months of integrating different companies, different cultures, different technology”, according to Abcarian.
But, the pathway for scale is being laid, panelists didn’t believe it would be in place during 2020.
“It’s progression (this year), because I don’t think we’re going to reach critical mass,” said WarnerMedia’s Porter. “I don’t see critical mass in 2020. I see it in 2021.
“But I want to get to 50 million, and I believe that we can aggregate all of these different distribution endpoints to get to 50 to 60 million by 2021.
“I do think we’re going to have some buyer education. We’re going to have to talk to a lot of agencies to understand how they want to leverage it.”
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.
]]>But the plethora of viewing options threatens to make audiences’ lives more complex, not less.
That is according to research commissioned by Viacom. The owner of MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Channel 5 recently published Today’s TV, an insight report in which it surveyed 10,000 people in 10 countries and conducted interviews plus video monitoring. Amongst the findings:
But the responses revealed a growing feeling that abundant viewing options may also work against the de-stressing motivation:
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Viacom’s SVP for global consumer insights Christian Kurz explains the joy of TV revealed in Today’s TV.
For him, it comes down to thee behaviors:
“When (viewers) talk about their favourite shows, the way their faces light up, the true energy is just amazing when it comes through,” Kurz says.
“We have a really special place in people’s hearts and we just need to live up to that.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is why we are seeing so much discussion on whether advertisers will change their use of TV, which, traditionally – in absence of such metrics – has been to use a mass audience for brand building, toward using it for “performance” outcomes.
But how far will the pendulum really swing in this direction? At Beet Retreat In The City, a panel, “TV In Transformation as Addressable Lights Up”, heard executives discuss that question…
Their discussion was led by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel.
Ampersand is the former NCC Media, a group owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications to ease the path to ad sales on cable and now new-wave TV platforms.
Ampersand’s Ward said:”How can we use deterministic data in defining audiences more narrowly and more robustly just to look at traditional media measures – reach, frequency on duplicated reach, not in isolation, but in addition to attribution work and brand outcome measurement?
“I think a lot of attention is paid to bottom-of-the-funnel performance measurement. I think a tremendous amount of progress can be made in the industry as we begin to think about deterministic data driving traditional media measures.”
That amounts to: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” In other words, TV will be able to support performance-driven ad attribution at the bottom of the funnel as well as top-of-funnel brand-building.
Charter’s Klippel said: “When you look at what TV does well, (it) scale, it’s reach, it’s high-quality produced video and brand-safe environments.
“Also, the engagement of TV and the emotional engagement (beats digital). I’ve never heard anyone run around quoting taglines or saying dillydally after watching it in a digital campaign.
“We’re still getting our arms around that to kind of bring the best of the two together. When you look at what’s happening with viewership trends, there’s no doubt that there is a shift, but there’s also absolutely no doubt that there’s still a lot of eyeballs on ad-supported TV.”
The event was notable for industry executives discussing a new buzzphrase – “deterministic” TV advertising. Other panelists have already attempted to define that.
Ampersand’s Ward offered his definition: “Data that is held to be true versus probabilistic data, which I think is oftentimes inferred or based on panel survey modelled data.
“Probably 10% of our business, thereabouts, is transacted on a deterministic audience-based data and the vast majority still on an age (and) gender panel survey-based.
“We don’t think that deterministic data replaces, overnight, survey-based probabilistic data. We think they will both live in harmony and serve different purposes in concert with one another.”
It isn’t just a single set of known data that creates the biggest opportunity, Ampersand’s Ward said. The real power lays in combining such data sets from different parties.
“It begins … with the name and address of the subscriber,” Ward said. “We know that to be true because the cable companies are sending a bill. Then you start to pivot off of that with other known sets of data – set-top box, ad exposure, commercial viewership, programme viewership data.
“The value that is available in the marketplace is the ability to unlock that data in concert with other deterministic data sets in the marketplace. (For example), Geico happen(s) to know the name and address of their policy holders and whether they’re a homeowner or a renter, if they own a motorcycle or an RV or a boat.
“So it’s that Venn diagram of being able to link deterministic data that we think begins to unlock value opportunity in the marketplace.”
Viacom’s Zilberbrand said infrastructure issues pose a problem to any large-scale shift in the use of TV from brand-building to performance. Namely, forecasting data is too fragmented amongst the variety of operators.
“There are technology gaps with a lot of traditional TV companies that make it very, very complex to forecast,” he said.
“It’s variable depending on, ultimately, the operator that you’re working with.
“There are obviously, I know, efforts to kind of shift that and work towards that and provide solutions there.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>So says one executive working on understanding audience behaviors for a media owner with dozens of channels.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Julian Zilberbrand, EVP of audience science at Viacom, explains the challenges and opportunities of data-driven TV ad sales.
“There’s a lot of different companies that kind of help the ecosystem but, in reality, it is somewhat of a fragmented process, which requires a lot of work on our end to kind of cobble it all together,” Zilberbrand says.
His employer uses partnerships with the likes of FreeWheel for ad serving, with MVPDs for addressability as well as others , though even Viacom’s own diverse business units have to work hard on overcoming in-house fragmentation.
Viacom Media Networks’ e includes BET Networks, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, MTV and Nickelodeon.
It uses data to enable true “one-to-one” ad targeting in IP-enabled TV platforms, but even uses predictive models to better understand how linear TV viewers’ behavior is changing.
Underpinning all of this? Zilberbrand advises marketers that want to benefit from TV’s new tricks – get your data house in order.
“How much do you understand about what’s available in the marketplace and how you would use that data?,” he asks. “Making sure that you have the right discussions with your vendors, specifically about how that data can be used.
“Even the best marketer is going to have a subset of data that more than likely has to be modelled to reach to scale. So what does that process look like? How are you ultimately making connections with your vendors that allow you to leverage your data?
“And then how are you organising and open with them about getting information back, and sharing information, in a way that allows for us as sellers to be able to optimise for your success? And at the same time ensure that you have confidence in what’s being delivered on your behalf.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>But that isn’t stopping the remaining members of OpenAP from launching in to a new phase with the project.
Whereas the initial incarnation of the group – founded by Fox, Viacom and what is now called WarnerMedia – was focused on harmonizing different providers’ descriptions of audience segments available for targeting, “OpenAP 2.0”, announced on Thursday, is “expanding the advanced audience platform into a centralized premium video marketplace with workflow automation for national linear and long-form digital video”, according to the announcement.
And it is doing so after developing the new platform with Accenture and FreeWheel, the Comcast-owned video ad-tech platform that is a sibling to NBCUniversal, which joined OpenAP alongside Univision in 2018.
How does this make OpenAP any different? Put simply, it extends the platform from just the targeting function in to buying execution, both at its own OpenAP.tv and through other demand-side platforms and APIs. Says the announcement:
“With OpenAP 2.0, buyers will now be able to build consistent, cross-publisher audience segments for both national linear and long-form digital video, and submit orders to activate these segments through a centralized cross-publisher marketplace.”
It will include analytics making clear pre-campaign performance projections and post-campaign delivery metrics, including total unduplicated reach, overall tCPM and total audience impressions.
Speaking to Beet.TV for this video interview in November 2018, John Halley, Viacom COO ad sales, said OpenAP at the time was at “phase one“.
“I think it’s very important that others join,” he said. “We’re going to be taking on other problems. We have a product roadmap that we’re developing internally, and we think within the next year or so, it should be out with some pretty exciting announcements and releases.”
]]>The squabbling is prominent in the addressable television advertising space, Gotlieb noted in his keynote speech at this week’s Advanced Advertising Forum in Manhattan. In this interview with Beet.TV, the advertising veteran says that while there have been some breakthroughs, there have been more frustrations.
“And the frustrations come from the fact that we operate in a context where the constraints are no longer technology based” given that the enabling technology for addressable TV has existed for nearly a dozen years.
What have gotten in the way are the various components of the industry, according to Gotlieb. “The MVPD’s have to execute the addressable ads. The content owners have to agree with it. The net problem here is that each have their own interests.”
One longstanding reality is that for decades, the relationship between TV distribution and content ownership has been, and continues to be, fundamentally adversarial. To prove his point, Gotlieb alludes to current headlines about carriage-renewal conflict between DirecTV and Viacom. “Those relationships are so adversarial that there isn’t the trust required to move things forward.”
Even with vertical integration, as evidenced by Comcast and AT&T, the ownership is the same “but the business interests remain somewhat siloed in that they operate their own independent P&L’s and are rewarded based on the performance of their P&L’s. And so these things get in the way,” says Gotlieb.
As a consequence, it is still “remarkably difficult to plan, to execute and to steward addressability or advanced advertising, far more so than it should be.”
Then there is the limitation on addressable advertising inventory, which predominantly consists of the two minutes per hour that the MVPD’s control. “And even there has been some internal squabbling between those people who feel that addressability is replacing geo targeting, and geo targeting usually accrues to the benefit of businesses like Spotlight, and everybody protects their turf,” Gotlieb says.
Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.
]]>Back in 2015, Viacom was one of the first broadcast owners to sell ads based on data about advertisers’ audiences.
The product it launched to do that was called Vantage, and is now also used by rivals like Fox
In this recorded discussion at Beet.TV’s Identity in Focus forum, Gabe Bevilacqua, SVP for product management for advanced advertising at Viacom, identifies “three things we are going to need”…
1. How to identify audiences in places
“Progress has been made. Whether it’s through all of us creating crosswalks, working with matching partners, … OpenAP. There’s a pretty clear path to being able to say, ‘Okay, this intender … we can find them everywhere’.”
2. We need to plan and deliver the media
“Much harder – there is no one ad server to rule them all. So we just need to be really, really smart about deciding who we are trying to reach, where we are trying to reach them, and have that informed by some planning and measurement. We can make more progress here. And I think we’re getting there.”
3. Some kind of measurement
“At least measure and say, ‘We know where incremental reach lives across all these places’. We are doing okay there, but that’s a place where there’s a lot of partners we need to get involved with. The difference between measurement and currency – (there is a) big gap, there.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this event recap, Prohaska, CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting, talks about identity as it currently stands, the rise of companies seeking to help track it and the industry’s progress to date.
On identity: “It was impressive to see that in an industry where there are, let’s say some headwinds around data privacy, and if you read broad business and consumer press there are a lot of landmines and a lot of places where people would think ‘oh my god I can’t do this, I can’t do that. I don’t want even think about targeting in anyway possible.’”
Players in the space: “There were at least fifty companies represented today in this room that are on offense and recognizing there is a proper path to do it, if you have proper transparency, if you have consumer opt out, if you have consumer opt in before the entire engagement begins, whether it’s through hardware or software. To be able to identify folks not just even at the household level but to the unique individual. We all know the pitfalls that can happen when creative goes to the wrong place.”
On determining identity: “It was encouraging to see that processes are getting a little more cleaned up. I heard people talk positively about second-party data for the first time in six months, that was a great sign to see. And the individual buying leaders that are either taking over entirely new organizations and coming from a data practice where they’ve run it, creative and media. To be able to tie that all together.”
Where the industry stands: “We now are getting closer. Most folks talked about maybe three of four on scale of one to ten and getting there. Optimistic for sure because we were in the ones and twos maybe even six months ago. Whole lot of promise and a lot of upside for the industry.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The product it launched to do that was called Vantage, and is now also used by rivals like Fox. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the man who runs it explains the undertaking.
“How do we plan the campaign?,” asks Gabe Bevilacqua, the SVP for product management for advanced advertising at Viacom. “For us, this has been a major product investment in first, our linear optimization platform, which is Vantage.
“With Vantage, what we need to do is get really, really smart about how very specific target audiences are watching television, both in linear as well as in other environments.
“That’s a big investments for us in data science, to understand not just how many target impressions can we expect in each unit on our portfolio’s weekly schedule, but also getting into things like how do we start to predict reach?”
Other programmers have since launched in to offering ad buyers the ability to use data sets in targeting TV viewers, even in linear.
Bevilacqua’s Viacom is a member of OpenAP – the consortium also comprising NBCU, Turner and Fox – through which the groups strive to impose commonality on audience data sets, easing the path for advertisers to buy targeted campaigns across the networks.
Fox tok on Viacom’s Vantage in mid-2018.
“This is a huge investment for us,” Bevilacqua says. “We are on year five of developing Vantage. We feel really good about the product and the outcomes that we can deliver, but (it’s a) ton of work for us.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>To help shed more light on the subject, Beet.TV will conduct a half-day forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World on March 5. It will be hosted by Viacom at the company’s offices at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan and sponsored by 4INFO, a provider of identity graph technology. Swartz will be one of the event’s moderators.
In this video, Swartz explains the complexity of determining who is watching what content on what device and when they are doing so. It starts with the myriad ways that individual TV viewers can be tracked—including mobile apps that can hear what’s being watched, digital IP-enabled devices, mobile device ID’s, automatic content recognition and watermarking.
Then there are companies like Nielsen and Comscore that are “trying to develop currencies that leverage all these technologies to actually track what is real reach for a specific piece of content delivered to an audience across an ecosystem and broad reaching selection of devices and platforms,” Swartz says.
So how does it all become real? For Swartz, it boils down to being confident about the data involved and data providers working together, because no one media company has an audience with the “order of magnitude of the breadth of an audience and the reach of an audience that television provides.”
Ultimately, “multiple data providers and platforms and content recognition providers are going to have to come together to marry their data sets to maximize the total audience within an identity graph they make available,” she says.
“The data I get has to be reliable, easy to use and integrated into ad delivery systems to plan against and has to be easy to buy. Not just easy to buy from the perspective of understanding the value of the inventory and what you’re getting for your dollar or what the effective CPM or effective rate is. That’s complex.”
At the Beet.TV event on March 5, Swartz will be joined by moderators Howard Shimmel, formerly of Turner Broadcasting and now a consultant, and Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting. The entire program will be taped before a studio audience for publication on Beet.TV.
]]>“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”
In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.
Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.
To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”
It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.
He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.
“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”
Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.
“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That would move the world beyond the old system of selling ads against shows, to one in which advertisers buy actual audience members.
But getting there globally may not be straightforward – not only do TV ad sales systems around the world already differ, so do the technology platforms for lighting up addressability.
“Addressable advertising, that’s going to really have to vary by market,” says Viacom SVP global consumer insights Christian Kurz in this video interview with Ashley Swartz for Beet.TV.
“As one of our colleagues from Sweden was saying, ‘If I invest that amount of money in addressable advertising in Sweden, it’ll be cheaper to go and knock on everybody’s door in a country that has ten million people’.”
Kurz was hosting a meeting of EGTA, a trade body representing European broadcasters’ advertising sales units, as it took its members on a study trip to meet US peers in New York.
As a board member of the group, Kurz is exploring ways in which Viacom, which operates many channels in Europe, can benefit from and rationalise its addressability opportunity.
In the UK, for instance, satellite TV and telco operator Sky’s ad sales house sells ads for Viacom channels and is now facilitating addressable ad sales for Viacom, too.
Sky is aiming to introduce its addressable platform to its other European territories – principally, Germany, Italy and Ireland – but even this heavyweight doesn’t have total European footprint.
On one thing, though, Kurz says European and US practitioners agree: “TV is much more than linear.”
This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom. EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference, Viacom’s COO of Ad Sales recaps the progress of OpenAP, which began as an initiative of Fox, Viacom and Turner and offers observations on future growth based on current use by advertisers in several categories. Newer members include NBCUniversal and Univision.
A big impetus behind OpenAP was the fact that publishers had their own advanced-advertising products but the way they defined audiences differed.
“We were all using our own fusion methodologies to, say, come up with an in-target segment list for movie enthusiasts. It was defined differently. The response from buyers was “I’m not buying the same thing.” By providing the “element of currency” that had been missing, OpenAP unified audience target definitions, according to Halley.
The platform has a tool that allows advertisers or agencies to define their target segments using “a wide variety of data sets, and then share that segment across multiple publishes who will then guarantee the buy against that common audience definition,” Halley says.
“This allows buyers the opportunity to look at publishers on a relative basis so they can evaluate share and how much they’re willing to pay for advanced segments. It has done a great deal to provide momentum around the volume of investment in advanced advertising.”
Still, these are still the “very early stages,” says Halley, noting that for some advertisers, advanced buying “is exactly where they should be.” Examples are response-based advertisers and categories like studios, automotive and quick-serve restaurants. One thing they have in common is “they tend to work a lot with data in the first place. They tend to be predisposed to buy it because they have the capabilities in-house to activate in that fashion.”
Over time, as other kinds of consumer products become more data-centric, “you’re going to see an increase in the buying against advanced segments. I would also say that this is really prep for an addressable marketplace, where we’re going to be matching advanced audience segments on a one-to-one basis more broadly.”
Halley places OpenAP’s combined member footprint at 50% of the domestic television impression supply, “so we do think feel like we’re at a critical mass as it is. But I would expect there to be additional key publishers joining the consortium in the near term. We’re going to be taking on other problems. I would look for other kinds of ease of buying type solutions coming up in the near term.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
]]>“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”
NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.
“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”
In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>Not that the advertising industry knew this instinctively. In fact, it’s been looking in the wrong direction for awhile, according to Christian Kurz, SVP, Global Consumer Insights, Viacom. Kurz believes the future will bring more live programming and events to get people to watch programming at a specific time.
“As a media industry, as media executives, we have a very warped view of the world, particularly when it comes to media consumption. We are just not normal,” Kurz says in this interview conducted by Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Future of TV Advertising Forum. “And we completely misrepresent what the rest of the population does,” Kurz adds.
“We overestimate their use of mobile their use of online for big TV viewing, we completely underestimate the importance of TV sets. We are more urban, we are more male, we are younger. So there’s a really big discrepancy.”
Those are among the reasons why organizations like thinkTV set out to ask viewers what they really think, beginning with their definition of television. It is anything that is professionally produced video content between seven and 90 minutes—which leaves out short-form video and movies.
“That really means that when they talk about television, they have a slightly different conversation than we have in the industry ourselves. So we kind of need to recalibrate with that,” says Kurz.
In recent thinkTV research, survey respondents in Canada had to give up watching television for 10 days. “People completely underestimated how television brings people together” both in the home and “also in the wider world, the cultural connection,” he says.
Some survey respondents indicated they had given up social media “because they didn’t want to spoil the stuff they’re not watching on TV. So then the connection to the outside world is completely gone.”
Among linear TV’s attributes are flexibility and versatility because it “can be active and lean-forward when you really want it to, but it also is the easiest thing when you come back from school or work or whatever and just press a button.”
“Would you call it escapist?” Swartz asks.
“It’s incredibly escapist. That’s essentially what it is. It’s escaping reality,” with the exception of news programming.
Asked to speculate on the state of television three years hence, Kurz demurs but offers some predictions:
• There will be much more on-demand consumption, but “I don’t necessarily believe that dumping all of a series at one point is going to be the norm because people actually like the idea of watching something occasionally. It gives you something to talk about.”
• More linear TV programming will become dependent on “live-ness,” and not just traditional awards, news and sports. It could be “cameras following police cars around the world.”
• The “event-ization” of everything. “The shiny floor entertainment shows, they’ve been big, they’re going to continue to be big, because there’s a reason for you to watch it at the time. You can vote, you can participate.”
This video was recorded in Toronto at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from Toronto, please visit this page.
]]>Now, it seems, they want to kick it up in to the next gear.
Last year, Fox, Turner and Viacom teamed to co-found OpenAP, a new consortium to agree on commonality in the way granular audience-describing datasets are described and made available.
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes the next phase.
‘Not waiting’
“We’ve been in market seven, eight months with a platform that essentially does very little … but that is not where it’s ending,” he says.
“What more can we do around planning? What more can we do around, ‘Well, I have an advanced audience; what if I want to plan against that, what if I want to buy against that?’ It’s really about ‘What do we do next?’, not ‘Where do we stop?’
“This is why we have developers. We were waiting and we were waiting for companies or ad tech to try and solve this for us, and I think what happened is when we got together and we looked at the problem, we said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna go develop a bespoke solution that is going to solve some of the foundational elements.'”
Brands ‘thirsty’ for more
That was something welcomed by a brand marketer on the panel. L’Oreal SVP Nadine McHugh said “working together is a step in the right direction”.
“We need scale,” McHugh said. “I don’t think TV any time soon is ever going to go away. We need you guys to evolve into the future in a meaningful way. We definitely want more targetability.”
Like Gordon, McHugh said L’Oreal hadn’t been sitting on its hands, waiting for technology to be invented to serve its goals.
“We’ve been trying to push ourselves forward while we waited for the industry,” she said, telling Gordon: “So, you should get some of us involved to … during the plumbing stage, so that we can move faster when you’re ready to launch some of these new things because we’ve been thirsty, and we’ll drink faster if we’re in it with you.”
Tech ‘not ready’
Another TV company, NBCUniversal, said the technology “is not there yet” and would take a couple more years.
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said: “We have the ability now to create incredible segments in OpenAP. It’s come a long way but it’s not quite there yet.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>Several initiatives and companies are now trying to tackle that problem. But what will it really take for TV to become a “platform”?
In this panel discussion moderating by MediaLink’s Matt Spiegel for Beet.TV, Viacom Executive Vice President of advanced advertising Bryson Gordon describes his vision.
“If you think traditionally of Facebook, Google, even Amazon as the three large advertising platforms, advertising ecosystems, then what is it about television, this thing that’s been around for 50-plus years?,” he asks, before laying out the template: “I think it really comes down to three things…
Other executives on the panel responses to the idea.
Consumers See TV and Digital as Joined
NBCUniversal SVP Denise Colella said right now we can’t really start thinking about it as ‘TV is a separate entity from digital from addressable’, because the consumer doesn’t care.”
She said consumers don’t see TV as a single environment, because these days they consume TV content anywhere, seamlessly.
Accept inconsistency
But the panel’s brand marketer, L’Oreal’s Nadine McHugh, was skeptical. Responding to Gordon’s wish that the TV makes it easy for brands to buy in a “consistent way”, she said: “When I hear ‘consistency’, I think it’s going to take 10 years to get it to where we need to go.
“It’s about where consumers want to consume video content. And they don’t care. We have to maybe be comfortable with being inconsistent within a consistency.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.,This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>“What we’re hearing from buyers and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says in this interview with Beet.TV in which he also discusses the early impact of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
Another hot topic at Cannes was “what we politely call next Nielsen, and next Nielsen could involve Nielsen obviously, but sort of what’s next beyond age and demos,” he adds.
OpenAP is not yet one year old, having been announced by Fox, Turner and Viacom in March 2017 and activated that fall, so the current Upfront is its first. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal joined in, as did Univision.
“What we’re hearing from buyers, and even from a couple of the sellers is that there hasn’t been a lot of momentum in transaction as folks would have hoped in this season,” Prohaska says.
He cites comments by, among others, OMD’s Chris Geraci—who was Prohaska’s boss at BBDO back in the day—to the effect that “there’s some usage there. But the real upside of being able to have proprietary data sets that you keep as a buyer or seller but be able to dip into this great pool and leverage these standards that have been worked on for awhile hasn’t fully been realized yet. I think there’s a lot of energy and excitement about trying to do that more while the legacy television and advanced television buyers and sellers sink their teeth into this marketplace.”
At the outset of Cannes, Prohaska heard of “a couple other” media that should be joining OpenAP in next couple of months, “and that’s all great. But not as much transactional, put to use on a campaign-by-campaign, brand-by-brand basis yet.
“We think we’re sort at that start of the hockey stick and hopefully next year this will become just become the way everyone does business in advanced television and we hope to be helping with a couple of our buyer clients and then one or two sellers maybe, we’ll see.”
GDPR has impacted the EU temporarily, but while many people still think of programmatic in traditional display mobile as sold by open auction, Prohaska says that’s not the case.
“Fortunately, what we’re seeing is a strong move to PMP’s in digital, strong move to deterministic versus probabilistic data strategy. As we’ve been saying for about a year, classic short-term pain for sure with a lot of organizations but long-term upside.”
Prohaska Consulting recently signed its 260th client in the company’s 230th week of business as it expands globally, with its publisher practice representing one-third, tech-one third, the buy-side 20% and the rest investors and trade groups. “Fortunately, that idea of kind of helping everyone move forward under the prism of client first and if we’re there to receive some thanks and compensation, great. It’s been paying off,” said Prohaska.
]]>“We understand that brands are going to demand their own special measurement. It’s not our place to determine exactly who they should use,” says Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, NBCU. “So we’re allowing them to use a suite of attribution partners that we partner with to make sure they can measure anything they do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Colella expresses enthusiasm for NBCU participating in the OpenAP audience targeting consortium and the need for added speed in moving the TV industry forward.
When NBCU looks at cross-platform viewing, it tries to deliver a “premium experience” regardless of where its content is being consumed by using a device graph that reflects that consumption, according to Colella.
“We’re able to use OpenAP to make sure that our planners can plan and the brands can plan across publishers” and then use a suite of offerings that are “great towards being able to measure these campaigns across platforms.”
Having recently joined OpenAP, “We’re very excited to work with Fox, Viacom, Turner to make sure that the industry is really moving ahead at the breakneck speed that we need to be going at. They’re our first partners that we’re so excited about.”
For attribution, NBCU is working with iSpot and is testing with Data + Math, among others. With iSpot, the company works with advertisers to define the outcome they want to measure and then tracks the success of the campaign, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Not every partner is going to be the best at every vertical, so we make sure we have a good host of those,” says Colella. “So we have an entire group that’s dedicated to just managing our data and partnerships.
“The overwhelming effect is that everybody wants the same thing. They all want to be across platforms, they all want to be able to plan that way and they all want to be able to measure that way.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Midha—whose background includes ABC, Viacom and Dow Jones—was one of the featured speakers along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this one-on-one interview, Swartz asks about the utility of voice assistants in what she terms the “straddling of platforms and experiences.”
To Midha, it comes down to “breaking down that third wall. You want to bring someone into your ad creative. That’s when you really get to create that emotional connection that makes the difference between a product and a brand.”
Given the rise of in-home, voice-activated assistants and other ways consumers can talk to digital devices like laptops and mobile phones, Midha explains how the technology can induce viewer participation.
“So you can say, ‘turn off the lights.’ And the lights are going to turn off in the scene that you’re watching. You could say, ‘turn on the TV,’ and the TV inside the scene you’re watching of a living room is going to turn on and play your show.”
Asked by Swartz whether engagement with interactive ads is a generational thing, Midha says it’s all about the most appropriate creative. Her view is supported by the more than 10,000 engagement ads true[X] has executed in virtually every category “and pretty much every advertiser KPI we can think of.”
true[X] will be rolling out a new set of what Midha terms “engagement blueprints” based on “really strong database insights and learnings. So that’s how we see ourselves scaling.”
With the company having proven the efficacy of engagement ads in on-demand programming, she sees a huge opportunity in live programs like sports events and awards shows.
“Nothing captures people like live. What hasn’t evolved is the fact that we are streaming so many of these events and great moments on digital platforms and taking advantage of none of the capabilities that these digital platforms offer.”
One aspect of human behavior while watching live events is to pause the content. “When they come back, we give them the opportunity, if they’ve been gone long enough, we say ‘would you like to engage for thirty seconds or do you want to just pick up where you were?’”
If a viewer decides to engage for 30 seconds, they can skip the next commercial break and catch up in real time to where other viewers are with the game or program. “We have done a little bit of testing in terms of focus grouping the concept, we’ve built a live demo, we got really strong feedback,” says Midha, adding, “I just love the idea of not accepting live for what it is and saying, ‘this is already an amazing experience, let’s make it better.’”
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.
]]>“Today we are on most of the connected TV platforms and in the next month or two we will be pretty much virtually everywhere,” Midha adds in this interview with Beet.TV, dubbing the connected living room “a super rich environment.”
Prior to taking over daily operations and long-term strategy at true[X], Midha spent five years at Disney ABC Television Group, where she rose to SVP, Digital Ad Sales & Operations, as ADWEEK reports. She also spent a decade at various Viacom properties.
Midha will be a keynote speaker at Beet Retreat in the City, scheduled for June 6 in Manhattan.
The company’s core product, its engagement ad format, is now used “across pretty much every broadcast and major cable network.” In addition, “We also work with some of the MVPD’s on their digital inventory and we work with some select gaming partners,” says Midha.
Since its founding in 2007, light years before anyone thought of living rooms as being “connected,” true[X] had a simple proposition: give consumers some say in which television ads they’d prefer to endure and, potentially, interact with. In its most basic form, the true[X] offering in full-episode video content gives viewers a “choice card” with the options of interacting with a 30-second ad or just viewing a “regular” ad experience
“And what we see time and time again is that most people would choose to interact than have the regular ad experience,” says Pooja. “What’s interesting is that the first time they take it, they adopt it, the rate is nearly sixty percent. The second time they see it, it goes up and it keeps going up.”
Full-screen interactivity provides for a broad pallet of advertiser and publisher storytelling and e-commerce. “There’s a lot of potential to really drive very different advertiser KPI’s.”
Advertisers are not charged if viewers leave the interactive format before its full 30-second run and default to the regular ad experience. “The idea is that at any time, we are guaranteeing that you will have someone’s full attention for thirty seconds, that they will interact at least once, and that you will be in a high-quality, full-screen environment,” says Pooja.
While the true[X] studio team last year eclipsed the 10,000 interactive ad mark, the company typically works with advertisers’ existing creative assets. Pooja says there’s lots of potential beyond simple engagement—particularly in the living room.
“We’re actually trying to see what else we can do in that environment and we’re standing up an entire CT innovation lab around that concept,” she says.
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
]]>“We always wanted to be able to participate with our services alongside the power of a television Upfront and the distribution that a major media company can offer. And we get to do that this year,” says WHOSAY Founder & CEO Steve Ellis.
In this interview with Beet.TV at Viacom’s Digital Content NewFronts 2018 event, Ellis talks about the steps needed to transcend clutter and reach people who spend so much of their time “on a six-inch screen.”
In January of 2018, Viacom disclosed that it had acquired WHOSAY, whose brand clients include McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Macy’s. Viacom will use WHOSAY to help brands create campaigns that are consistent across digital platforms as well as TV, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
“We’ve worked with a lot of the same customers,” Ellis says of Viacom. “Now we get to combine that with the inventory that comes with a linear cable company and a digital company that provides so much content, so many views. Those two together we think is the combination that we did this deal for.”
These days, content providers not only need to cut through content clutter. So does their marketing, according to Ellis.
“Average marketing, uncreative marketing, is not good enough anymore. Nobody has to pay attention to what you have to say unless you do something different.”
WHOSAY works with “any kind of talent,” from Hollywood stars to “mommy bloggers and everything in between. You can’t get away with just hammering people with marketing messages that are not effective,” Ellis adds.
Over the past eight years, WHOSAY has “built up an enormous expertise of executing campaigns from scratch, for brand advertisers, where we would create the whole shoot, the content, video and imagery, and we would distribute that content to whoever the brand advertiser wanted us to reach.
“So it’s sort of like a campaign in a box, but always involving talent to help cut through the clutter and add creativity. Now we’re putting that same creative skills alongside the existing ones of Viacom, through Velocity, and combining that with the inventory we have and maximum flexibility for the client.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>As advertisers increasingly seek better audience targeting and efficiency, “The marketplace has kind of come our way,” says the company’s President of Advertising Sales, Jim Tricarico.
Less than five years ago, Cadent was “a DR product,” Tricarico explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event in Manhattan. “It was a way for people to get inexpensive GRP’s. But we knew that in order to evolve, we had to create a network-like solution.”
That solution is used by a host of premium brands, including Amazon, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal and Procter & Gamble.
Tricarico says Cadent can access network inventory for advertisers at a 30% to 50% discount from direct-network buys. “We’re never out there saying we’re better than network, we’re instead of network. We really just want to be a complement to network and solve some of those problems that are going on in the marketplace.”
Cadent has access to inventory on all networks and such major sporting events as the Olympics and NCAA tournaments.
A TV veteran whose background includes stints at MTV Networks, Viacom and Screenvision, Tricarico smiles while noting that some people talk about data as though it never existed before. “Every plan has data behind it. The question now is how deep is that data that they’re using,” he says.
Noting that Cadent eschews “walled gardens,” Tricarico says the company does what data tells it to do.
“Whereas when you go to a network group, they actually optimize to their portfolio because they don’t have access to every network. We buy directly against the data and optimize to the data and not to the portfolio.”
In addition to its own data, Cadent has partnerships with companies like 605, which has access to Charter Communications’ 10 million set-top boxes, and with Adobe and Videology. Cadent can cross-reference advertisers’ data with that of 605, “or we become more of an execution arm where we work with the Adobes and the Videologys of the world to execute on the fact that they’ve already put data over their plans and they use us as the inventory source.”
To broaden its footprint on the local broadcast side, Cadent has spent the past year hiring an internal buying group and now has relationships with more than 600 local TV stations, according to Tricarico.
“People are so desperate to find efficient GRP’s that even in cable there’s not enough reach to find them all. What’s growing so much right now is both news and syndication on the broadcast side.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
]]>Currently on the sell-side, there’s too much fragmentation “and a lot of suppliers borrowing from other suppliers in the traditional aggregator space and the DSP space specifically,” Anson adds in this video interview with Beet.TV taped last week at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront event.
“I hope things like the consortiums and the announcement NCC brought to the table kind of starts pooling the inventory together so advertisers can have more access to one source of inventory and that scale.”
Anson was referring to last month’s news that the owners of NCC Media—Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications—are creating a new division within NCC. Slated to launch later this year, the new division will design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across NCC’s participants’ national footprint.
“The group will use non-personally identifiable data and targeting capabilities to create advanced video advertising products that deliver greater scale, audiences and measurement to meet current and future demands of advertisers,” NCC said in a news release.
As the industry moves into the 2018 TV Upfronts, Anson expresses concern about the impact of demand outstripping supply amid linear TV ratings declines.
“If so many people are tapping into one inventory source, how do priorities kind of waterfall down from the top and how does the supply get allocated?” she asks. “If I have two advertisers buying the same source, which advertiser kind of gets under-delivered because of that fact?
“I think there’s a lot of partners in the space that are helping combat that challenge, but it definitely is a concern.”
At the outset, Anson felt that the OpenAP audience targeting consortium formed by Fox, Viacom and Turner “had a ton of potential.” One of its biggest challenges was luring more partners into the consortium to increase its scale and appeal.
“In a transaction and execution sense, I think now that NBC has joined the ranks it’s definitely more likely that OpenAP will more quickly turn into something that everyone can use in a really effective way.”
OpenAP turned out to be a launch pad of sorts when it came to advertisers building audience target segments, according to Anson. “I think a lot of advertisers kind of leapfrogged over the need and built their own segments and licensed their own data from NCS and Polk and the IRI’s of the world.”
When the 2019 Upfronts roll around, Anson hopes the industry has advanced from the test-and-learn phase “into greater volume and demand for the advanced advertising products.”
That will mean “clients letting go of traditional GRP guarantees and moving into finding their audiences where they’re consuming media today at a larger scale.”
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
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