But software vendors, too, have learned to think on their feet and find new customer categories.
Case in point – Cisco’s WebEx has been supporting video calls and presentations for years. But recently it has also turned that toward powering TV programming.
CNN is amongst the broadcasters using WebEx to involve remote guests in shows.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ashley Marusak, Global Lead, Sports Marketing, at Cisco, explains how the company is responding.
“WebEx is not something that’s traditionally used for broadcast, but I think in the spirit of being nimble and being innovative we were able to pivot that way,” she says.
“Not only for CNN, not only for The Jimmy Kimmel Show, the Ellen DeGeneres show, but also for Turner.
“We were able to turn our solution into one that could be utilised for broadcast and we worked with them in the weeks leading up to the event to really instil a lot of trust that the programme would go flawlessly and it did.”
Cisco’s WebEx has been spreading beyond CNN. In May, the software facilitated a pre-tournament collaborative chat ahead of Capital One’s The Match: Champions for Charity, a golf match presented by WarnerMedia’s Turner Sports on TNT, TBS, truTV and HLN.
During the broadcast, a collection of contributors joined in to offer commentary and donations.
“It’s not every day that we get tasked with having Peyton Manning and Tom Brady and Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods on a WebEx together,” Marusak says.
“But in having them all together and sort of breaking this traditional model of what a press event or press release tends to look like and turning it into a virtual collaboration session it let, I think, them really shine.”
For many viewers, it was a much-needed return to sports broadcasting. For advertisers, it was the welcome re-appearance of programming their marketing budgets hve been missing during lockdown.
To Marusak, the technology it’s all part of a world that is helping people come together and get stuff done, from wherever they are.
“I’ve been a remote worker for eight years,” she says. “Being together is wonderful, but we can also be incredibly productive remotely. That can be a benefit to people’s personal lives, their professional lives. I don’t think that we’re really going to see that go away.
“So I think the trends that we’re seeing towards video technology highlights how important it is to see people, to see nonverbal communication.”
This video is part of a series titled “Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change” presented by WarnerMedia and Xandr. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.
NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.
“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”
Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.
In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”
Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.
Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”
NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”
Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.
“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>As he looks ahead to CES 2019, he talks about “redefining” television, outdated audience metrics and the need to preserve the traditional cable/satellite/telco distribution business as viewing fragments across devices.
“Television has to be redefined and has to be redefined in a few different places,” prominent among them the big screen that hangs on a wall, Levy says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Television programing is still a very, very popular thing that people watch.”
Also in need of reordering is Nielsen’s “outdated metric system that we’ve been using really since the 1960’s. Television isn’t about primetime only. It’s about all dayparts. “We need to think about not selling this in dayparts but selling it in audience segments.”
He expects that among the topics of conversation at CES will be addressable targeting and attribution of campaigns to business outcomes.
Asked about the effect of AT&T’s bringing Warner Media into its arsenal of advertising and media assets, Levy points to premium content. “On the AT&T side, they were looking for that quality, premium programming and I think that’s one of the reasons why they purchased us.”
For Turner, “why I think it’s so attractive from an AT&T perspective is the data they’re going to provide,” encompassing 170 million consumer touchpoints. “That data, coupled with our first-party data and mapping it together, is going to allow us to have better information around a few things.”
With viewers as the top priority, the data will help to inform program production, provide a better understanding of viewers and facilitate better targeting for clients. But there are more fundamental issues as well.
“First and foremost, we need to keep the ecosystem that we live in today very healthy,” Levy says. “We have a great relationship with our cable operators, with our satellite providers and with our telco companies and now the virtual MVPD’s. That is a very healthy business and is going to continue to be a very healthy business at our company.”
But as a modern media company, on top of that ecosystem “we also need to have a one-on-one relationship with the consumer. Personalize content for them if need be.”
He notes that truTV has reduced almost 50% of all the primetime inventory to half of what it was three years ago, while all of TNT programming originals are now produced with about 50% fewer ads. “We’re trying to give the consumer a better experience, which is very, very important.”
Using data to generate more contextually relevant advertising amid less commercial load “is going to be a better consumer experience also.”
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.
]]>The Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners will be one of some 250 industry leaders attending The Relevance Conference hosted by AT&T in Santa Barbara on Sept. 24-26. On the opening day he will join Otter Media’s Tony Goncalvez and others on a panel titled Putting A Price On Content that will explore the “happy medium” between paid subscription models and ad-supported media.
While AT&T has planted a very large flag in acquiring some of the biggest content and adtech assets, it all comes down to brands changing the ad experience for consumers who have lots of choices, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
“It will be very exciting to see a company with deep pockets, very, very capable, pursue the dream that is convergent television,” he says of AT&T in the wake of its bringing Warner Media and AppNexus under its communications, content and advertising umbrella. “It’s great for ad tech but forget that, it is great for media and marketing writ large. This is a company that demonstrates that it’s not afraid to put its money where its mouth is and get the very, very best.”
At base level, relevance can have meaning with respect to targeting, personalization and other tactics, but with today’s consumers there is a much higher level at which the term needs to be considered, according to Kawaja.
“Netflix has trained them that they can get premium content without interruption,” he says, and “with the training that these paid models have got us all used to, now it’s hard to go back, either once you have the skip button on an ad or just don’t see any ads at all. The ads have to have a different nature.”
Noting that the advertising industry is one “built on the premise of interruption,” he adds, “I think we have to get away from that.”
He cites as an admittedly “extreme” example paid search, where unlike other advertising, consumer intent means everyone involved can win.
“If I’m looking for a Thai restaurant in St. Louis and I enter that search result, I’m going to get back a bunch of media with ads in it. Turns out the ads are facilitative of my original intent of pursuing that media.”
More in the mainstream realm, he mentions ads in The Weather Channel app that don’t block the experience because they’re in the background, juxtaposed with current weather conditions. “The ad is, in fact, additive to the content. At the core we need less advertising, certainly less interruptive advertising and the notion of relevance I think gets to that acknowledgement that we need a better consumer experience.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“There is almost infinite information fighting and competing for finite human attention,” Kirk McDonald, CMO, says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’ve embraced this moment in time when we believe advertising needs to be reimagined. It needs to change.”
To help foster that change, AT&T will host The Relevance Conference on Sept. 24-26 in Santa Barbara, CA. McDonald describes the event as an aggregation of thought leaders across entertainment, media, marketing and content production, “to get together to talk about what are the best practices that they have put together around understanding how to engage with today’s consumer and creating moments of relevance for them.”
The invitation-only event will be limited to 300 attendees.
AT&T will share new research at The Relevance Conference about the attention economy. In addition to examining where consumers are spending their time and why and what’s relevant to them, attendees will contemplate how the industry is shaped “both in terms of its organizational structure” and its practices around speaking to people in more relevant ways.
“The reality is today, as we engage with consumers, it is an engagement,” says McDonald. “We no longer tell them what to watch when to watch or where to watch. We actually now engage in a dialogue as that consumer participates in embellishing the content in their own unique ways and they actually filter for the things that are most relevant to them.”
At The Relevancy Conference, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson will participate in an opening fireside chat to share his thoughts on how “AT&T really evolves into a modern media company” combining its technological prowess, some 170 million consumer engagement touch points and the content heft of Warner Media.
“I think the most rewarding thing for everyone is to arrive and realize that they’re sitting across form the people that they work with all the time, or work against all the time, in sort of competing for consumer attention,” McDonald says. “This is a gathering of the shareholders of consumer attention. That’s who’s there.”
He calls data and technology the tools to relevance.
“Data to create an understanding and awareness of the interests or the intentions of a consumer and then technology to enable us to actually find them in the right moment and time,” McDonald adds.
“I think the pendulum is swinging in the direction where we’ll make data and technology enable better storytelling. Better storytelling is the requirement of relevance and this is the right time to happen. I’m very excited about it.
Following The Relevance Conference, during Advertising Week in New York, AT&T will roll-out the new advertising enterprise. “We wanted to not just actually announce the name just because we wanted to give a name to this already nearly $2 billion business. We wanted to actually enter the industry with some substance,” McDonald explains.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series about The Relevance Conference and emerging media trends. The project is sponsored by AT&T Advertising and Analytics.
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