The Open Addressable Ready consortium announced in March is the result of Vizio having watched a number of companies try to bring more scale to addressable TV, McAfee says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“There are a lot of technical challenges with someone being in the middle of that conversation and then there are also a lot of business challenges. As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work.”

OAR membership includes both inventory owners and platforms, ranging from CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal to AT&T’s Xandr and Comcast’s FreeWheel.

By seeking an open standard, Vizio decided against “trying to force the entire market to jump into a single stack and adopt a single solution,” McAfee says. Given that “NBC’s going to want to use FreeWheel, WarnerMedia’s going to want to use Xandr, Disney has their deal with Google,” allowing flexibility “is the only way you’re going to get to scale.”

Vizio sees itself as stewards and OAR members as owners. “They’re the ones making the decisions and we’re just building everything to their requirements.”

McAfee notes that most addressable TV execution to date has been through MVPD’s. “We think there’s a complementary ability to generate more scale on live linear,” McAfee says, hence the inclusion of companies like Comcast and Xandr. “We bring incremental reach to all of those players and scale is absolutely critical to addressable. There needs to be more and there also needs to be more premium linear inventory in that bucket for addressable.”

McAfee says he’s old enough “to have watched multiple consortiums in our business not go very well. I think as a group we’re beneficiaries of good timing in that I think the television stakeholders in our business understand that they need to work together to succeed.

“And so far our meetings have been very collaborative, everybody’s leaned in pretty hard on the subject matter and everybody’s cooperating. So I’m really encouraged by that.”

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

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.

FreeWheel is teaming with Data Plus Math and other attribution solutions providers to deliver faster insights into campaign performance. “A lot of times, you get information about how your campaign’s doing, especially around attribution and it’s far too often six months or even longer after a campaign’s over. It doesn’t allow you to optimize a campaign or in any way shape or form improve the performance during the flight,” says Wallach, who is SVP/CRO, FreeWheel Media.

To further enlarge its audience viewing data beyond Comcast’s huge footprint, FreeWheel is adding Inscape’s data set for “even more robust reporting capability,” particularly in the streaming video space. Data from more than 10 million opt-in Vizio smart TVs will be available to better target specific demographic and audience segments in TV ad deals, as Advertising Age reports.

“Since Vizio does go outside of the Comcast footprint, we can now start to model incremental reach and other access to consumers outside of our footprint,” Wallach adds.

FreeWheel will work with Adobe to help overcome the complexities of programmatic transactions in premium video. Given that most demand-side platforms were built to handle display ads, “Now you bring them into the living room and it creates a different type of environment. We’re working closely with the DSPs to solve for this and we’re leveraging our Drive platform to be able to promote audiences to them through Deal IDs so they can transact programmatically,” Wallach says.

“The reality is most DSPs try to use data from their side. They have different data arrangements and then they try to find the audiences in that live movement when the bidder is working.”

FreeWheel will “package up that inventory on a pre-bid basis, based on our insight and our data set having access to the ad server and the information that’s coming from there,” thereby leveraging the capabilities of DSPs “to bid appropriately on that supply.”

The latest partnerships enhance FreeWheel’s ability to talk to customers holistically about video in all its forms, according to Wallach.

For buyers of linear TV who also need to find audiences on OTT and CTV, “we’re able to help guide them and put together the right solutions for them.” For digital pure-play buyers looking for more reach beyond FreeWheel’s digital supply, “we can start to package in TV if they’re looking for audiences and impressions in that environment as well.”

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.   

Along with Vizio and its data unit Inscape, the consortium’s members are AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, FreeWheel, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co. and Xandr, as Reuters reports.

In announcing the consortium, Vizio said that TV manufacturers use different technology and standards to enable addressable advertising. “It creates a level of complication for (TV networks), and scale is critical,” Reuters quotes Inscape SVP Jodie McAfee as saying.

While Vizio will create the new technology, it will be an open “industry standard” that competing TV makers can integrate into their products.

Last December, Beet.TV interviewed McAfee at Beet Retreat 2018 about Inscape’s experience in dealing with the Federal Trade Commission on issues involving consumer privacy and viewing data collection. In light of the news regarding Project OAR, Beet.TV is republishing that interview.

Being a pioneer has always carried risks and rewards. Smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO’s Inscape data unit found this out when the Federal Trade Commission a couple of years ago first started looking into what happens to viewer data collected with automatic content recognition, says Inscape SVP of Sales & Marketing Jodie McAfee.

Interacting with the FTC “was a little bit of a bad news, good news situation for us,” McAfee says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, where one panel discussion was devoted to data and privacy.

“The bad news was we were the first smart TV manufacturer to actually have such a discussion with the FTC. The FTC had never really taken a look at smart TV data collection and privacy regimes around it.”

The good news was “the fact that it put us in a position to actually sit down with the FTC and say, ‘okay, what do you want to see? What do you think a privacy regime should look like on a smart TV? So it became more of a collaboration as opposed to the FTC simply throwing down some ground rules and walking away.”

Nonetheless, the FTC fined Inscape for inappropriately collecting viewing data from 11 million TV sets.

“That back and forth generated really almost what our industry views as the VIZIO standard for smart TV data collection,” McAfee says. “And it also prepared us in advance for a little bit of what’s going on with GDPR because there were certain things around what the notification needs to look like, how it needs to read, that are now part of GDPR that we had already done coming out of that FTC negotiation.”

The FTC believed that many people are so intent on getting through the initial setup of a smart TV, they just scrolled through the terms of service so they could start watching something quickly, according to McAfee. “So they said what we’d like to see is a data collection notification that is separate and prominent from the rest of the terms of service.”

Thus was born VIZIO’s “completely separate screen” during the setup process titled “TV viewing data. And it walks through here’s how we do it, here’s what we’re doing, here’s who we give it to and here’s what they do with it.” People can either agree or decline, meaning data collection is off by default.

“So it is a true opt-in regime. We pushed that new regime to our entire footprint of TV’s in February of 2017 so we’ve been fully FTC compliant ever since,” says McAfee.

Changing its policy and communicating the new one to existing owners via a firmware update cost the company 2 million TV’s from its overall footprint because older ones “didn’t have enough processing power to actually support the user journey when we decided to make the opt out process easier.”

Have all other TV manufacturers taken note and now follow the FTC mandate? Not from what Inscape sees when the company checks them out, according to McAfee, most likely because they’re not in the data business like Inscape.

“The process for pushing a firmware update to a TV, it’s a pretty meaningful exercise. So I’m sure other manufacturers just did the math. Is it worth it or not. And I think some of them went, ‘not really.’”

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.

“It’s like de facto. And that’s pretty cool. Maybe iSpot should get our crown pretty soon, because we’re rapidly becoming a really trusted third-party analytics provider for TV advertising,” the SVP, Business Development, says in this interview.

iSpot.tv started as a measurement company that could track TV ads in real time, according to Bareuther. “We built a syndicated product that measured TV ads and it became really popular for brands.”

About four years ago, the company started a partnership with smart TV manufacturer VIZIO to get access to ad impressions as they appear, based on automatic content recognition.

“So we’ve taken all this raw data from what’s appearing on screens second by second and do a lot of data work and data science around that,” Bareuther says.

There’s a range of information gleaned, including whether the ads are being seen live, via DVR or OTT, plus the pods and the shows in which the ads appeared. A typical analysis will include the number of airings of a spot, the estimated advertiser spend, the number of impressions, attention and engagement scores and percentage of share of voice.

The next step was being able to show what happened after viewers had seen the ads, as happens with much of digital advertising.

“Brands are spending so much money on TV and they’re spending so much money on digital and they know what’s happening in digital immediately. They get long feedback loops from TV,” Bareuther says.

iSpot.tv set out to shrink that feedback loop. “So we figured out a way to understand household consumption of television ads” so that advertisers could blend it into their marketing stacks, through LiveRamp, Adobe, Oracle et cetera. And help them understand themselves how it’s being effective.”

Asked whether any of its clients have enough outcomes data to be able to use it not just for back-end measurement but for planning purposes, Bareuther says yes.

“In order to get to the bottom of the funnel the first step is always to have the top of the funnel. Once we can say that this NBC show is more effective for you X retailer than this ABC show or this Bravo show or vice versa, maybe could use it to optimize your planning.”

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.

Dentsu Aegis has gone full throttle on its custom platform, M1, the most recent data integration being with IRI. As announced early last month, M1 will now allow custom audience creation utilizing IRI Verified Audiences and/or IRI ProScores audiences linked to first- and/or third-party data.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Laurenzo explains why he is bullish on current and emerging data sources like automatic content recognition.

“Audience buying is definitely where we want to get to as an industry. Anybody you speak to on both sides of the desk would probably say our reliance on age and gender demographics for transactional purposes is really outdated,” Laurenzo says. “We have all this data that can tell us who’s watching what content, why can’t we transact on those more granular targets?”

Agencies are still “very much held accountable” to segments like adults 18-49 and the price at which they can transact for gross rating points. “It’s ‘as long as you get me this price on this demographic then you’re doing okay’ versus I want you to buy the audience that we need to hit and then if that audience then goes and makes some sort of action.”

Laurenzo says there’s no shortage of audience-based television advertising inventory in the marketplace. “Every network group has their own audience-based platforms that we can leverage and they’re making a lot of inventory available through those platforms.”

The question is what’s the right data to use and when would you use it, according to Laurenzo.

“There are a lot of partners now with ACR technology and I think that’s great,” he says, citing Vizio, Samsung, Samba and Alphonso. “It’s really changing the game in terms of measurement.”

He cautions that despite the plethora of data available, “It’s muddy. Not all the data’s perfect. You have to really go through the methodology of how they’re collecting everything. But I’m actually bullish on the data marketplace.”

This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.