In the latest example, VideoAmp has extended a deal through which it uses data from 18 million VIZIO smart TVs for planning, measurement and TV ad sales.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp chief strategy officer Nick Chakalos explains why this kind of collaboration is the way forward.

We are thrilled to announce our renewed partnership with @VIZIO, where we will maintain access to their Inscape ACR data for planning, measurement and TV ad sales use cases. Check out the full story here: https://t.co/DXY9O0zVvX pic.twitter.com/7VjajdABOP

— VideoAmp (@Video_Amp) October 6, 2021

Actual viewing behavior

“We gain access to a world-class data set that really helps us bring to market a new currency and a new data set that can be utilized by buyers and sellers to transact in whatever means they want to and whatever KPI or performance indicator that they want to – whether that’s on a basic demo(graphic), an advanced audience, or on something more sophisticated like attribution,” Chakalos says.

The deal, announced this month, is an extension of VideoAmp’s existing use of VIZIO’s Inscape automatic content recognition (ACR) data, which takes viewing behavior from VIZIO smart TV owners, which had been due to expire at the end of 2021.

Now the deal runs to the end of 2025, with an option for VideoAmp to extend.

VideoAmp’s platform enables audience data, ad insight reports and investment activation for new TV ad buyers.

ViacomCBS Teams With VideoAmp To Explore Alternative TV Ad Currency – Deadline https://t.co/xZKLEUPa9i

— Nick Chakalos (@NickChakalos) October 5, 2021

Join the dots

For Chakalos, it is all about collaboration the industry needs to connect up disparate systems.

“We certainly are looking at this from the standpoint of having a data set that can enable measurement that’s required across OTT, across linear TV, across social and other forms of media consumption,” he explains.

“We’re headed towards a place that’s fairly exciting. It’s about ensuring that TV ad spend is accurately measured and that publishers can understand their yield a bit better and gain credit for the audiences that they have.

“We are proceeding collaboratively towards that.”

VideoAmp will work with Snowflake, a cloud data storage company, to offer “multi-party cloud environments” for data collaboration – effectively, a way of pooling audience data with rules and privacy baked in.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp CEO and co-founder Ross McCray explains how it works, and why.

The trouble with agreements

“In today’s best practice and approach, what we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of contractual commitments in trust-based systems, where you sign a DocuSign, you’re saying, ‘I won’t do this. I won’t do that with your data’,” McCray says.

“(You) send it to some third-party identity partner who is a trusted source to get all the raw data to create these anonymous based systems and send it back across the wire.

“We don’t believe that’s putting the consumer first. There’s a lot of holes with that approach.”

Holistic, safe data view

VideoAmp has already been using multi-national Snowflake for more than three years to run analysis.

Now it is joining Powered by Snowflake, a partner program, which will see it use the cloud computing resources to change the way data expectations are forged,

“A lot of the legacy measurement systems haven’t been able to really accurately count in those more modern ways of digital and streaming,” McCray says, “and to look at it in a more holistic view, which should increase their yield and opportunity for where their audiences are going.”

He adds: “The way that we’ve architected this system with Snowflake is that we’re able to do a multi-party computing join – there’s never a circumstance where the data that’s owned by the publishers has to be shared with someone else.

“We’re unable to ever process the individual-level data, but we’re able to get much more accurate in terms of how we’re doing the identity resolution.

“(That) allows for advertisers and agencies and media owners to process secure data in a way that allows us to get access to things that you wouldn’t have in more of a trust-based system.”

‘No quick bucks’

Seven-year-old VideoAmp’s platform offers software and more for linear TV, over-the-top and digital video, including TV viewership data, campaign performance insights and buy optimization.

This year, the company raised up to $75 million from Capital IP, comprised of $50 milli0n in debt with an option on a further $25 million.

Although its valuation is now increasing, McCray says he has no intention to join the latest wave of ad-tech sales.

“We’ve seen a lot of companies sell early and cut themselves too short,” he says. “We really want to be able to create a long-term vision of creating a new system and alternative currency of how media is bought, sold and valued.

“We’ve been approached over the years, many times for acquisitions, but it just doesn’t make any sense. We really want to win, and we want others to be able to count on us for that long-term vision.”

But the partnerships won’t stop there.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp president Michael Parkes explains the company is non-monogamous with agencies, and has big growth plans.

DELTA’s curve

As we look to the future of how media investments are made, we couldn't be happier to have partnered with @dentsuUSA on their launch of DELTA. The new team will use VideoAmp's data as a currency to make advanced audience guarantees https://t.co/UPm3G4iKFk pic.twitter.com/vMJlNNcXBv

— VideoAmp (@Video_Amp) April 13, 2021

In April, Dentsu Media announced the creation of Data-Enabled Linear TV Activation (DELTA).

The suite will supposedly “reimagine” the way it has been programmatically buying data-driven, people-based TV ads for clients.

It integrates audience and viewership data for planning, buying and measurement reporting into a single source, supposedly reducing reliance on third parties.

But DELTA relies on VideoAmp.

Unlock value

To address lack of standardization in audience based buying, Dentsu developed DELTA (data-enabled linear TV activation). Consolidates audience-based buys across all TV nets using VideoAmp's single source of viewership (Frontier, Dish, and TiVo’s STBs). https://t.co/qJS1NUjGDg

— ashfollenweider (@ashfollenweider) April 20, 2021

“We’ve been working with Dentsu for a while, and this is really indicative of a broader trend that we’re seeing with clients looking to adopt VideoAmp as an alternative currency for advanced audience guarantees within the linear TV, as well as extending into OTT and digital marketplaces,” Parkes tells Beet.TV.

“Dentsu has a very advanced capability with (people-based agency platform) M1, and their ability to create custom audience definitions for their clients is a big part of their differentiation as a holding company. So we’re enabling them to leverage that and be able to guarantee audience delivery with the networks and the supply side, so they can unlock more value within the marketplace.

“I think the industry has been unhappy with the status quo and the legacy measurement and currency solutions in the market. And we’re seeing a lot of demand for VideoAmp solutions to transition from the traditional measurement capability into currency, and being able to do audience guarantees based on the custom definitions that any client brings.”

Currency quest

VideoAmp says its platform offers walled garden, linear TV, OTT and digital data within a single platform, and that its software transforms how advertising is valued, transacted and measured across all channels and devices.

And it has been evolving after its launch back in 2014.

Parkes recalls: “Our strategy was always to start with the buy side and change the measurement behaviour, get clients used to planning and measuring against audiences that are beyond traditional age and gender, allow them to use their own first party data, bring in third party data that they may want to use for audience definitions.

“And then now we’re moving to work with the media owners to establish a trading currency that can be used for traditional television, as well as OTT and the more emerging spaces.”

But some executives think bold spending at a time when rivals are cutting back could help some brands emerge out of this period in the lead.

“Right now, what is really, really necessary is to understand how your competitors are approaching the same challenge, how they’re executing in linear, so that you can make better decisions about what you’re going to do,” says Kelly Metz, VP Product Marketing at VideoAmp.

“Everyone in this industry knows that those who advertise in downturns come out of the downturn in a much better place with much higher market share.”

Optimize investment

That is why VideoAmp just launched Competitive Insights, a platform which lets ad buyers see the effectiveness of their own TV ad spend, as well as that of their rivals.

In Competitive Insights, ad buyers can see the household reach and frequency of linear TV ads by target audience, plotted against selected competitors. They can compare their spend against rivals and use those insights to further optimize their linear TV investment.

For Metz, understanding your share of voice, and acting on it, is about getting smarter.

“In the time of COVID … you’ve got your advertisers sitting on the fence… do they buy? Do they not buy?,” she says.

“So I think now, more than ever, you inside the agency need to be using this type of data to advise your clients when to be in market and when to be out of market. You need to understand what’s happening vis-a-vis the entire competitive set.”

Linear smarts

VideoAmp’s offer is one way in which software and data these days is bringing smarts to even linear TV ad buying and measurement.

Metz hopes the system will include digital ad buying. But that’s a “future goal”. For now, it leverages set-top box and other TV viewing data that VideoAmp says it “commingles”. That includes linear TV datasets plus spot schedule and spend data from Kantar.

Such tools can help ad buyers understand details including audience by show, day part and network.

“Instead of women (aged) 18 to 49, they are able to actually understand women who own dogs, as an example, and target them very specifically and understand how their campaign’s performing specifically against that target,” Metz says.

Finding spend

If such efforts can increase effectiveness, they may encourage sustained spending in the marketplace. After all, linear ad channels are reckoned to fare worse than digital channels through the pandemic.

EMarketer forecasts buyers’ new reluctant and lack of long-term planning ability will wipe 27% of the this year’s US TV ad sales upfront season, some $5.5 billion.

“In H2, brands will cut a significant share of TV upfront ad spending due to difficult economic conditions,” according to the company.

“Without clarity into whether business operations will be stable later in the year, brands are planning less of their TV buying in advance, which normally gives advertisers about half a year to plan a campaign, and will likely rely on inventory purchased within much shorter time horizons (scatter and digital).”

But now advertisers are demanding more.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Josh Chasin, who recently left as Comscore’s chief research officer to become VideoAmp’s chief measurability officer, explains how brands are getting more demanding about measuring effectiveness.

“I’ve thought about this as a migration in our industry from measurements to measurability,” Chasin says.

Having recently chaired a recent Market Research Council panel, Chasin became convinced that traditional media research and audience measurement are changing.

Times are changing

“Originally, we (in the industry) thought … that cross-platform measurement meant you take the TV ratings and the digital ratings and you push them together,” he says.

“Time passed and I think that we’ve started thinking about cross-platform measurement as following television (and) video wherever it goes. While this was going on, I think that the goalposts moved.”

Instead, marketers are now unpicking measurement and asking for more granular detail for each ad impression:

• the device it appeared on
• the household in which the device sits
• which people were in front of the screen
• what other impressions made it to that household, in order to understand unduplicated cross-platform reach
• targeting characteristics that can be appended to devices, people and households
• the effect of the impression on the campaign

Amping up

Chasin recently left Comscore for VideoAmp after 13 years as chief research officer.

In the move, Chasin says the trends he is discussing even affected his choice of job title, with the emphasis on “measurability” over “measurement”.

VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.

The LA-based company recently built a platform that unites smart TV audience behavior data from ACR with set-top box viewing data from 38 MVPDs.

Chasin was interviewed remotely. 

So companies like VideoAmp are aiming to build a more reliable way to gain a single, cross-device, cross-service profile of a viewer.

In its latest such effort, the LA-based company has built a platform that unites two key types of disparate viewing-platform data:

• Smart TV audience behavior, as revealed by automated content recognition (ACR) tracking of viewers’ actual device behaviour, from two smart TV makers.
• Set-top box viewing data from 38 MVPDs.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Michael Parkes, VideoAmp’s chief revenue officer, explains why such a system is necessary for planning, buying and measuring ads.

“OTT (over-the-top TV) has been a huge challenge to measure,” Parkes says. “Not all of the devices within the OTT landscape pass IDs that can be used for advertising.

“IP address is an identifier used within OTT which can be reliable (or) unreliable. So OTT and the ability to match that to traditional digital mobile IDs and cookies is a big challenge, and something that we’ve been working to solve.”

Commingling and deduplicating

VideoAmp’s solution is one of several that aims to “commingle” viewing data from OTT devices and more conventional set-top boxes, both of which may be used alternately by a household, and to assign ownership of those devices to a given, anonymized household, in order to help advertisers avoid repeatedly exposing viewers to the same ads.

VideoAmp’s covers 26 million households and 37 million devices.

“We can see full TV viewership as well as ad exposure data across all of those households,” Parkes says. “We can measure almost any audience across that, whether it’s an in-market auto buyer, or whether it’s someone that purchased (a) particular product. Clients  can overlay that understanding against their traditional Nielsen age, gender, GRP planning and measurement capabilities.”

VideoAmp’s dataset doesn’t just splice the two major platform sources together. It also includes using demographic weights to correct for demographic skews, as well as modeling audiences to match the size and composition of the US census.

And it purports to mitigate the effects of “phantom viewing” sessions, where cable TV boxes are often left on even when the TV is turned off.

Omnicom Media Group is using it within its own Omni TV planning and measurement tool, and it hopes the suite could be the foundation for an industry-wide measurement dataset, according to chief research officer Jonathan Steuer, quoted in VideoAmp’s announcement.

At Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, a panel dubbed Investment and Innovation – Where Next? chewed over that topic:

• Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder, Innovid
• Michael Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp
• Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee

Chicken or egg?

Moderator Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, kicked off by asking what was to blame for lack of forward momentum in advanced TV targeting.

“We don’t have technology problems, we don’t have ad problems, we don’t have media problems. We have business problems,” she said. “I think that’s the reality.

“We find ourselves at this point right now where the business problems have the signal to noise ratio. The business problems I think are louder than the technological problems.”

Innovid’s Chalozin said he sees a “chicken-and-egg” problem: “The tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

Agencies not on the same page

As if to illustrate the problem, Amobee’s Smolin described a recent discovery he was able to make for a brand client for which it has recently conducted cross-channel measurement.

“Seventy-three percent of their impressions within a single campaign were going to 12% of the household,” he said. “It’s shocking to look at. These are smart people and they’re working with good agencies.

“You have a national agency which has a siloed wall between TV investment and digital trading. You then have an ecosystem of tier-two agencies which are not using the same measurement as the tier-one agency. Many brands have higher-order efficiency issues that we’re already skipping over in these discussions.

“Based on what we’ve seen with other brands using tools and data available today that can probably drive about a 15% to 20% improvement in efficient use of their overall TV budget holistically.”

Is measurement to blame?

VideoAmp’s Parkes said, actually, technology is not yet advanced enough.

“There has been a organisational shift within the agencies, within the brands to be able to plan and execute against (new platforms),” he said. “But there is still a big shift that needs to happen on the technology side. I don’t think it’s anywhere near done in terms of the technology innovation that has to happen. Tools have to exist before the buyers can actually execute against a holistic plan against linear and OTT.”

However, Innovid’s Chalozin disagreed.

“I must say I don’t think that this is accurate to blame that and say that this is the reason for a problem,” he said. “(Fragmentation) is the current state of connected television. There’s many ways to buy content. This problem is not going to go away. No one owns the connected television world.”

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. 

GDPR, CCPA and other new privacy regulations challenge seek to limit companies’ use of consumers’ data.

But Michael Parkes doesn’t see speed humps, he sees a ramp.

“I actually think privacy is going to be a good thing for us in terms of increasing access to data and sharing of data,” says Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp, in this interview with Beet.TV.

“The privacy debate, I think, is actually a good thing because it’s forcing the creation of data clean rooms, new privacy-enabled APIs where people don’t have to send their data to make it available for measurement. They can actually create an environment where data can be queried, but it never actually leaves their wall.”

VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.

Earlier, the output acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data for eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data, to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes.

Parkes wants to guard against the emergence of a “future being owned by eight to 10 big walled garden” platforms.

“If they have ways where they can share that data, which will enable better planning, better measurement, and ultimately move more media dollars onto their platform, then it’s in their interest to be sharing that data in the right way,” he says.

“It’s in the interest of big platforms to share data in a way that’s going to enable them to get more spend.”

The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

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 trend in TV today or video overall is heavily fragmented across channels<” says Jessica Levine, VP of enterprise solutions, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s becoming more and more important to provide marketers a holistic view of their video investment, which is the largest portion of their overall media investment.

“We’ve also seen a shift in the idea of applying audience targeting beyond age and gender within this new currency and being able to measure it against all of their media, which is inherently more indicative of their customer than just someone based on age and gender.”

Levine says VideoAmp’s software helps advertisers “commingle data sets both on the TV side as well as the digital side”.

VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.

Earlier, the output acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data for eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data, to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes.

Levine was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she 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. 

At the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan, Steuer, who is Chief Research Officer, welcomed the “consistent effort across almost all of the networks and network groups to try to make advanced TV solutions work,” he explains in this Beet.TV interview.

This is in contrast to just a few years ago, when individual TV networks began to roll out their own advanced-targeting arrangements.

“Then we had OpenAP, which does not appear to be a force in the marketplace for this year’s UpFront,” Steuer says. “But every conversation we’re having with network groups involves some notion of trying to move or investment toward more advanced TV and other kinds of targeting and measurement, and we think that’s great.”

Omnicom has been using data from Vizio-owned Inscape “pretty deeply” for the past nine months and is currently working with VideoAmp to conjoin set-top box and ACR data. “I was pleased to see this morning that FreeWheel announced they’re doing the same thing with Comcast and Vizio Inscape ACR data.”

This is because set-top box and ACR data do different things very well, according to Steuer.

“ACR lets us get some read of both content and commercial exposure across sources so we can see both OTT and linear delivery in that data set. Set-top box data gets you every TV in the household, typically when people are pay-TV subscribers, but only gets you pay-TV subscribers.”

What still needs to happen is for MVPD’s and ACR providers to make their data available in a more “democratized” fashion. “But at least now we see steps in that direction, which is great,” Steuer adds.

Asked about a unified data platform that would serve much if not all of the TV industry, Steuer cites a “trust problem” with having any single vendor be the data aggregator.

“So what I think is going to have to happen is each of the data aggregators to find a way to make their data available in a linkable but segregated format.”

The end goal is the formation of a common set of data formats, pre-processing rules and linkage mechanisms.

“That’s the only way to evolve the TV business to compete in the world of walled gardens,” Steuer says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

Brands would buy ads and, with little insight in to who really watched what, would need to unleash a slew of media mix modelling tools to understand what exposures may have led to which purchases.

That imprecision has led the industry to focus on the half-full glass – TV is an amazing medium for building mass initial awareness, if not for closing a deal with a customer.

Now that over-the-top TV services and addressable TV advertising technologies, which allow for precision targeting, are coming on stream, the industry is contemplating changing the way it trades ads, like offering guarantees on business outcomes, measurable with digital attribution.

For an industry that is worth north of $70 billion in the US alone, the change could be profound. But how quick is it happening? What will the real nature of ROI look like? And who stands to gain?

At Beet Retreat, a panel representing all sides of the value chain – brand, agency, programmer, and technology supplier – was convened to thrash out the issues, concluding three days of debate in Puerto Rico. Here is what they said…

TV is not direct mail

The panel was cautioned against comparing the emerging technology of addressable TV to forebear marketing channels, just because it exhibits similar one-to-one qualities…

Vijay Konduru, VP Brand Sponsorships and Media, Discover

“There’s going to be this inherent reaction to treat addressable TV like it’s direct marketing or direct mail. But, if you benchmark the performance of, let’s say, addressable TV from an ROI perspective, from an effectiveness perspective, it’s never going to perform similarly to direct mail.”

Top of funnel still matters

Addressable and OTT TV ads can laser-guide creative to individual households or even individual viewers, just like digital – very different from conventional mass broadcast. But reaching that mass is still important…

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group:

“Awareness matters. The high-funnel stuff, brand-level marketing, actually really matters. In a rush to try to make everything accountable in a direct markety, outcome-based way, you end up minimizing the value of all that high-funnel stuff. We’ve done that largely because we never thought of making TV accountable at all. ”

ROI is a team sport

With so many technological possibilities at play, and the emerging possibility of selling ads only when an attribution can prove they have led to a purchase or other action, the whole notion of return on investment (ROI) is up in the air. But all sides of the value chain are playing the game…

John Hoctor, CEO & C0-Founder, Data Plus Math:

“Agencies, marketers, media folks (are now) partnering on (defining) ROI, which is kind of interesting. We’ll go on a lot of sales calls as the tech provider, as the glue that’s kind of holding it all together, to talk about what sort of outcomes can we measure for this particular advertiser. There’s some advertisers where the outcome is pretty clear, and you can measure it. There’s real budgets going against it. But it has not displaced the GRPs that are out there. But everyone is leaning into it. We’re in tons of these meetings with all of these folks. It’s a super hot topic.”

Turning around the TV ship

New technologies offer advertisers the ability to buy ads on TV in a manner consistent with digital – transacting not just for precise targeting but also buying specific business outcomes. But that is going to need the TV industry to change decades of habit…

Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal:

“TV has been transacted in a very similar way for the last 50 years or more. We’ve been really vocal about transitioning away from legacy measurement. Marketers by the way, are interested in that, and they’re leaned into it … (moving) into some sort of impact-, outcome-based measurement.”

Ashley Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp:

“But, still, 90% of your business is transacted against the Nielsen guarantee. $10 billion top line … moved against a currency that you and Linda (Yaccarino, Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships at NBCUniversal) and everybody openly express you feel needs to be refreshed. I guess maybe it’s also. ‘Guys, when is it worth the effort?'”

Jump right in

Beet Retreat heard frustration from attendees that many parts of the media-buying landscape still treat addressable TV advertising as a test-and-learn opportunity, with many holding back from significant investment. When could that change… ?

Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer, VideoAmp:

“In 2018, a lot of it was research, so that you can prepare for how you want to start transacting moving forward. So by 2020, I’m hoping a lot of that volume, which is already pretty significant, is now moving into actual delivery, with measurement that is making buyers and sellers, both more effective in what they’re trying to do.”

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.

CFlight was launched in the spring of 2017 to enable holistic video planning across platforms by measuring all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions. It initially was available for solely for NBC’s primetime and sports programming, Vazirani, who is EVP, Insights & Measurement for NBCU, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Going into next year we will expand it across the portfolio, and we’re working through how do we make it less friction with the systems and what are the investments we need to make from an operations perspective to make this easier across the portfolio,” says Vazirani.

In addition to facilitating cross-platform planning, CFlight also was intended to “raise the bar on digital and provide guarantees on completed views” while providing a new way for NBCU to maximize ad inventory and yield portfolio-wide. “It was really a mechanism to deliver on our vision to measure across all screens, all platforms and have a unified impression measurement approach.”

She stresses the open source, transparent nature of CFlight’s methodology. After considering “many different partners,” including Comscore, Adobe and VideoAmp, NBCU chose Nielsen’s C3 and C7 TV ratings and its Digital Advertising Ratings for digital media.

“We know we’ll evolve it in the future, but the key was that this is open source and we are very transparent with our methodology.

According to Vazirani, marketers thought CFlight was “conceptually fantastic” at the outset and that agencies were also excited. She cites Simulmedia’s adoption of CFlight two months ago as it added OTT inventory to its campaigns as additional validation. But systems remain a challenge.

“We’re still on some of our older billing systems. How do we transform from an operations perspective to now report on it holistically and how does an agency ecosystem transform from that?”

In the meantime, NBCU is building “a continuum of measurement” from unifying impressions with CFlight being able to assign credit to television and providing marketers with a closed-loop evaluation of their campaign and, eventually, a series of campaigns.

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.

This is why Prasad reflects on this year’s Retreat in this interview as “a small and purposely put together group like this where there’s a lot of people who are working together or thinking about working together and able to share ideas.” He says he prefers learning from “power panel sessions” than typical one-hour conference sessions “with everyone repeating themselves on a panel. It doesn’t happen here.”

Aside from Puerto Rico’s natural beauty, Prasad notes the Retreat location in the context of the devastation that Hurricane Maria caused in the fall of 2017 and the ongoing rebuilding. One element of the Retreat was dedicated to raising awareness of the short- and long-term impacts on residents and the marketing world.

“It definitely seemed like Andy and the team here really wanted to make sure that we understood that and there was a connection to it,” he says. “When you put that all together, I thought it was a really special few days.”

The time was shared with “so many partners across the ecosystem and clients that we’re working with. Maybe two years ago I would have looked across the room and said it would be great to be doing this with that company, trying to connect this supply source with this data so that this advertiser can execute. And now it’s actually kind of happening.”

Prasad describes “a really busy last two years” in which VideoAmp has been assembling its marketing investment platform, which encompasses data-driven, cross-screen planning and measurement, activation and programmatic. This year, the company acquired TV-data processing provider IronGrid Data Services, which when combined with a partnership with Inscape formed the basis for the new Data & Emerging Products Division, as Variety reports.

“So next is going to be taking all of these pieces of technology and solutions and making sure they’re optimizing to work together so that one piece of our system, like the measurement system, is actually informing how you should be planning,” says Prasad.

He clarifies that it’s not planning to determine a particular dollar spend for a particular medium “but actually event-level forecasting. Which means that we’re also going to be more tightly working with big media companies and suppliers and supply side technology to make that happen.”

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.

But could the same happen on the sell side, and why?

VideoAmp chief strategy officer Jay Prasad thinks it could, prompted by the looming demands of new privacy legislation.

“We’re seeing media companies want to have a lot more ownership of how that content is accessed, and what kind of targeting and contextual capabilities they enable around that content,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Being GDPR compliant and soon ePrivacy compliant is pretty obviously more than important. It’s a requirement.

“And one of the only ways that they’re going to be able to really execute at scale with both those regulatory frameworks in mind, as well as to create this premium TV environment, means that they have to bring some of these platforms in-house and run them as an agency might do so.”

GDPR came in to force in May, bringing new requirements on how companies should collect and process European consumers’ personal data. The ePrivacy Directive will come with additional compliances.

Prasad thinks that will change things for broadcasters.

“They will still do commercial deals and trade with the agencies,” he says. “They may give agencies self service access to these platforms, but it’s becoming a part of a media company’s operation, and that’s a pretty new phenomenon.”

Founded four years ago, Prasad’s VideoAmp aims to help advertisers and media owners plan, package, execute and measure the success of de-duplicated and precisely targeted campaigns that reach linear TV, VOD, OTT and digital consumers.

Earlier this year, the output has acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data for eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data, to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes.

It is creating a custom buying platform for RTL in the Netherlands so it can start to create its own packaging of very premium, on demand content.

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.

Now it is taking a step up by acquiring one company and partnering with another.

The outfit has acquired IronGrid Data Services, a provider of household level, anonymized television viewership data fr eight million US households, to help build out its household TV data – as AdExchanger puts it, “to process the unstructured data that comes from set-top boxes”.

At the same time, VideoAmp is partnering with InScape, the unit of TV maker Vizio that deals with automated content recognition (ACR).

That will give it access to anonymized viewing data from nine million TV sets in the US.

VideoAmp has witnessed the evolution of early notions of “programmatic TV” – from packaging up remnant inventory at a mark-up, to something with far more potential.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp chief strategy officer Jay Prasad says more is coming.

“Our DSP platform, we still have some business that we run on behalf of clients,” he says. There is some very kind of, tricky KPIs sometimes, when it comes to hitting video metrics. It’s just different then other programmatic.

“So, our platform is used when we offer that white glove service to clients. And then, we are working with one of our investors RTL, in a version of the DSP that will be specifically designed for GDPR compliancy. And will be used in Europe by RTL themselves.”

“If all we do as an industry is make television look like digital programmatic today and the mess of the supply chain that exists out there, then we will fail,” says Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise. “We need to keep the economics of TV today and leverage the targeting and the data available for digital but we need to do it efficiently.”

Wise sees convergence “as not necessarily a buying problem but a planning and measurement problem” that it has sought to help remedy with internal solutions and partnerships with 4C Insights, VideoAmp and TubeMogul, among others, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Since Mediaocean’s sale in August 2015 to a private equity company, it has made six acquisitions, expanded globally and expanded its customer base, 90% of which had been agencies. It now deals directly with CMO’s on a planning workflow solution called Lumina and with TV broadcasters and publishers through Prisma for Sellers.

“Planning and buying need to come together and buying and selling need to come together,” says Wise.

He notes that 4C has done “an amazing job of creating platforms” to plan, buy, measure and optimize all in one system, through advanced data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“The tricky part is being able to respect what makes TV the most efficient media marketplace in the world today and it continues to be. While moving it into the digital future.” Wise thinks the next few years are going to be “very interesting to watch” in the measurement space.

“I think Nielsen has done a really, really good job of expanding their datasets to be more relevant in the digital age,” Wise says, adding that comScore “has actually created a nice, viable alternative.”

Others will follow as MVPD’s “are leaning into platforms like 4C and VideoAmp and potentially TubeMogul” to leverage set-top box viewing data “and what we’re seeing is the market is almost open to there being another player in that space.”

Then there is Oracle with its acquisitions of Datalogix and Moat. “We will evolve as the industry evolves,” Wise says.

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

At least, it may look like that from the outside. The Santa Monica-based outfit spent plenty of time perfecting its platform before taking on a $15m first venture round in November, the latest in German broadcaster RTL Group’s ad-tech roll-up.

Now VideoAmp CEO Ross McCray says 2016 is primed to be “the year of execution” for the company he co-founded. So what does VideoAmp bring to the party?

A “cross-device graph”, McCray says: “We associate multiple device IDs to a user, we append intelligence to those devices. We’ll say, ‘here’s everything those devices have consumed’; it watches these ads or shows on TV.

“Today, we over 150m unique users in the United States and over a billion devices associated underneath those users, and consumption data across all of them.”

That means advertisers will get to more smartly target ads based on a holistic understanding of who exactly is behind the many devices that are now used throughout households.

McCray says an earlier seed round had funded the engineering build-out, but the effort in 2016 will be about sales.

This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.