You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
But new services have expanded the addressable ad opportunity. As a result, addressable TV is coming out of the shadows.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, WarnerMedia Ad Sales VP of product marketing and market research Elsa Blumberg explains how the opportunity is evolving.
“The marketplace used to see addressable TV as more of a lower-funnel (marketing) tactic while linear gave them the ability to achieve their overall brand goals,” Blumberg says.
“But now what we’re seeing is this evolution – addressable is becoming more of a mid- and upper-funnel tactic. Brands and agencies are using it to improve their reach and frequency and their linear ad buys as well.
“But they also want to attribute their ad spend to business outcomes, and they want to deliver more relevant, personalized advertising. So addressable TV still extends to lower funnel tactics as well.”
Blumberg says the results of a new research survey prove it.
The Era Of Addressable survey of 522 ad-buying decision makers – commissioned from Forrester by DISH Media, Cadent, Canoe, Comscore, INVIDI Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia – shows advertiers are “applying addressable TV across the full customer lifecycle”:
“Brands and agencies see addressable TV as valuable for driving outcomes across the customer lifecycle — from discovery and engagement to purchase to post-purchase support and relationship-building.”
Blumberg is heartened that advertisers are “really leaning into addressable TV”:
But she, like many connected with the opportunity, acknowledges some of its inherent complexities.
Blumberg says buyers are calling for standardized measurement solutions, across a segment that is plagued by a proliferating number of viewing services, buying methods and measurement options.
The survey found ad buyers calling for:
You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.
“Our strategy has been: How do we engage with sports fans in different ways? How do we work with our league partners on safety protocols, and how do we make sure we’re adapting our broadcasts in a way that’s been safe?” Tina Shah, executive vice president and general manager of Turner Sports, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
Turner was one of the broadcasters that televised games from inside “the bubble” the National Basketball Association set up to isolate teams and countless support crew as they restarted the regular season.
“We had probably the most unprecedented level of collaboration with the league that I’ve ever seen,” Shad said. “We were essentially lockstep, trying to figure out how to create an engaging end to the season while still keeping all of our personnel, athletes and our broadcast personnel safe.”
Turner worked with sponsors to develop innovative campaigns that could be activated within the confines of the arenas that were mostly empty. That included the courtside experience for Anheuser-Busch’s low-carb beer brand Michelob Ultra, which gave fans a way to virtually “attend” games.
Providing a way for fans to remain engaged has been a key strategy, especially as athletes take a more active role in managing their personal brands. Concurrently, fans also want the power to control the experiences of accessing sports-related content.
“Real-time access has enabled fan relationships to continue to be really strong even in the absence of gameplay,” Shah said. “Fans want to watch, when they want to watch, on their own terms.”
Advertisers can find ways to parlay that engagement with the “opportunity for an ‘always-on’ investment, whether the games are on or not,” Shah said. “We’ve historically had large-scale media partnerships that are multifaceted with advertisers that really let us establish a lot of trust with the advertiser, and get a deep understanding of their goals, and really tailor solutions that meet their needs.”
Developing branded content and providing data insights gleaned from AT&T, which has a massive database of consumer information, were two ways that Turner Sports distinguished its platforms for advertisers, Shah said.
Its advertiser toolbox includes Playmaker, the in-house agency for Bleacher Report, to develop marketing programs aimed at Generation Z and millennial consumers.
Turner Sports also hosted two rounds of “The Match,” a charity golf event sponsored by Capital One, that was the most-watched golf telecast in the history of cable television. An average of 5.8 million viewers tuned into to see star athletes Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning, Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady face off in May. Mickelson and Manning returned in November in a match featuring Charles Barkley and Stephen Curry.
“We configured them to support the times we were living in: raising funds for COVID-19 relief, highlighting historically black colleges and universities and also raising money for their golf and sports journalism programs,” Shah said. Turner Sports also contributed “millions of meals to Feeding America to help those struggling with food insecurity…proving the point that doing well and doing good don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”
Turner Sports developed programming to address racial inequality after the killing of George Floyd during an arrest led to global protests. Those programs include “The Arena” and “Take It There” to provide in-depth discussion with Black athletes about weighty social issues. TNT experienced double-digit gains for its NBA broadcast on Martin Luther King Day on Jan. 19, according to Nielsen data cited by SportsMediaWatch.
“Sports always has been at the forefront of social activism,” Shah said. “With all the challenges and continuing the conversations around race and inequality, we want to continue to create content that fans are really passionate about.”
You are watching “Live Sports 2021: What’s Next on TV,” a Beet.TV + VAB leadership video series presented by Effectv, a Comcast company. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Until then, broadcast groups are thinking creatively to give them the next best delivery opportunities – and ensure ad budgets can keep flowing.
In this video interview, Amit Chaturvedi, EVP, Product & Revenue Operations at WarnerMedia, explains how the group is responding.
“As a result of COVID, when sports marketing or sports programming essentially shut down across the globe, there’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines ready to be activated that historically has been activated across events like March Madness and NBA playoffs, Major League Baseball etc,” he says.
“Studios have gone dark across the globe. So, other than news organisations filming live, generally studios and creative shops have shut down.
“We’ve heard from marketers that they need our help with creating new messages that get broadcast on television and via digital. We’ve tried to use our muscle in the creative production space to really help our advertising clients.
“Sports money was sitting on the sideline and we’ve been trying to help marketers find places to place that money. So even though sports programming or the context of sports is out of the picture … we’ve been successfully finding appropriate audiences for those clients so that money doesn’t sit idle by the wayside.”
WarnerMedia’s ad operations span branded content, audience targeting, programmatic.
Whilst the traditional setup was to offer programming for sale of contextual ad placements, WarnerMedia is one of the companies that is now rolling out a digital tactic to TV – the ability to target an individual household or viewer, regardless of the content they are watching.
It is doing so in part with its AT&T stablemate Xandr, which is now being folded into WarnerMedia itself.
Broadcasters that are technologically enabled to do so have been endeavoring to find sports fans even though no sports programming has been broadcast, for example.
It is one way that Chaturvedi hopes to be an “empathetic, understanding, helpful” partner to advertisers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whilst the promise of TV ad targeting is clear, Chaturvedi acknowledges the difficulties, which focus on effective delivery and measurement when there are so many channels, pieces of software and viewing devices.
“You’re talking about close to 70 different end points just for CNN,” he says. “You’re talking about probably a half dozen ways just on Roku alone. It leads to a very high degree of fragmentation.”
So Chaturvedi is hoping a growing consensus approach within the industry can help. He says Xandr’s linear addressable effort, comprising inventory from Altice, Frontier AT&T’s own DirecTV, and Ampersand’s own, comprising 85 million households, can smooth the path to purchase.
And he says Vizio-backed Project OAR, in which WarnerMedia was a founding member, will standardize transacting in addressable TV.
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>What resulted was an ad that featured front-line workers and how AT&T was helping them solve business and technology problems on the fly. According to SVP of news content partnerships for WarnerMedia Ad Sales and head of Courageous Studios Michal Shapira, speaking to Beet.TV, the storytelling was “relevant and passionate,”
More brands are turning to Courageous for help navigating their communications and marketing strategies during Covid-19. The branded content studio, with its ties to CNN, has journalism at its DNA, says Shapira, and it uses those instincts and tactics to develop cultural stories on behalf of brands. In any environment, brands are looking to relay interesting, purpose-driven and relevant stories to customers. Now, the stakes are higher, customers are in a rapidly evolving and uncertain time and the risk of coming off as tone deaf or insensitive is a one weighing heavily on brands.
“We’ve helped our clients develop purpose-driven campaigns that are authentic. It’s natural to us at a time when a lot of brands are looking to do that type of campaign or creative, and want to tell their own purpose-driven stories as they relate to the health crisis,” says Shapira. The biggest challenge, for Courageous as well as the brands, is being nimble enough to respond when the situation changes. “What might work today may not work two weeks from now,” she says.
Finding and sending the right message is part of the battle. Data analytics still need to inform purpose-driven marketing. Courageous works with Xandr to deliver branded content to the right audiences. In addition to targeting, Xandr provides data on audiences that can help brands inform their creative campaigns ensuring that content isn’t uniform.
Shapira says that this approach helps brands maintain a presence during an undeniably difficult time for advertising.
“A lot of [brands] feel strongly about having a presence right now, and not going dark,” she says. “Their customers want to hear from them; they want to be there for them and we want to help them do that.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Case in point – to find viewers who would otherwise have watched sports events that have been cancelled, some brands are turning to audience targeting, which helps them find the same audiences though they may now be watching other content.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, WarnerMedia SVP of ad innovation and programmatic solutions, Dan Aversano, says explains what is happening.
“We represent a lot of sports properties and we’re not running any of those sports right now,” he says.
“We had a lot of marketing partners who were banking on being able to connect with those fans in those highly engaging environments. So we’ve pivoted and started to leverage a lot of our advanced solutions… whether it was things like audience targeting… so that we could help people find those highly, highly engaged sports fans, but in other forums, in other venues.
“(That is) so we can build segments based on previous viewership of things like the NCAA tournament or NBA games, and now find those consumers for our marketing partners in other areas and in other content or context.”
In other words, WarnerMedia is finding the needle even though there is no haystack.
Key takeaways today from our first ever Xandr-hosted webinar in the US include the importance of building trust by staying relevant with brands/customers now more than ever, to take an Audience-first mindset and approach today, and that day parts are being rewritten. pic.twitter.com/2heRR8d0iG
— Xandr (@xandr) April 28, 2020
Sports is one area of content that looks challenged for the foreseeable future, as many competitions wrestle with competing imperatives – the need to resume play, and the likelihood that spectators will either be forbidden from attending or will be reluctant to.
For Aversano, COVID-19 has made clear the need to quickly adapt the changing circumstances.
“This industry is learning a lesson right now about speed and agility that’s really important,” he says.
“The legacy media business has historically not been known for being a massive embracer of change, not been known for being extremely dynamic in how we adapt. I think what you’re seeing right now is a lot of pain in organisations that have not been able to adapt quickly.
“And my hope is that you’re going to see companies who embrace the need for agility and the need to be adaptable in times.”
Over the last year, as new privacy regulation and the looming death of cookies have put the brakes on the high points of advanced audience targeting, we have seen the re-emergence of contextual ad targeting, which seeks to buy ads against particular kinds of topics or emotional responses.
The two – audience and context – are thus being seen by many as operating at two distinct ends of the marketing spectrum.
Indeed, WarnerMedia is showing how brands can substitute the context of sports for the precision of audience targeting.
But Aversano doesn’t think one technique necessarily trumps the other.
“It really shouldn’t be a debate,” he says. “It’s really not ‘one or the other?’ You functionally need both.
“Who you talk to, what you say to them, your creative message, how many times you say it, the content or context with which you say it… these are all important levers that a marketer can pull.
“It’s not any one of them individually that works in isolation. They all actually have to work together.”
WarnerMedia’s COVID-19 response has also included CNN match-funding purpose-driven digital ad buys and committing further TV inventory to public health campaigns, a basketball Twitter talk show from Turner’s involvement in Sports and free content for HBO Go, HBO Now and international channels.
As part of its Tech for Good program, @xandr is partnering with organizations including the @CDCgov and @AdCouncil to educate the public about ways to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. Read more @iab members’ Good Works: https://t.co/WlIZZdKB0C pic.twitter.com/pFVdsm3ejc
— IAB (@iab) April 15, 2020
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this 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.
]]>They have worked both across the company and across the industry to take steps to overcome technical complexities like ad serving and ad replacement.
“What’s most exciting is that they’re collaborating,” Porter says. “This is important because we need to get to standards, things like triggering and signaling, so that we can scale and get to efficiencies.”
WarnerMedia is also in conversation with partners across the supply chain to see how they can enable this technology. When it comes to these specific technical elements, they’re currently piloting a few different parts of the technology. First, they’re testing consumer experience.
“We have premium video content that deserves premium video ads,” says Porter. “So it has to be seamless for the consumer—no slates, no chunks, no bumpiness.”
Secondly, they have to ensure that they can get the right ad to the right household as advertised. Lastly, they’re taking a look at measurement.
“We have to make sure that we can measure the households that get the targeted ad,” Porter said. “But at the same time, there’s what’s called ‘underaddressable’ which are the households that did not see the targeted ad. That’s C3 measurement, so we now have to have a new hybrid measurement of addressable and C3.”
During these pilots, they’ll be working with their agency partners to see what they want out of national addressable capability.
“As the technology building blocks come together, we’ll make sure that we’re delivering value back to our agency partners.” Porter says.
The marketplace has been asking for addressable inventory for a long time. Because of this, Porter said they’re aiming to ramp up their national inventory and make it addressable.
“We’ll have to basically aggregate together multiple different distributors to create this fully national addressable capability.”
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.
]]>That’s something Jeremy Toeman can help with. HBO parent WarnerMedia in November hired Toeman as chief product innovation officer in its Innovation Lab, which launched in January.
There, Toeman’s job will be about a lot more than just HBO Max. But he is already finding that defining the future of attractive VOD products is high on the agenda.
“We started where third parties, Netflix and Hulu, et cetera, came into the market (and) built great products that consumers love to use,” he says.
“Now we’re seeing the media industries with us, Peacock, Disney Plus and others all bringing their own products to market.
“What’s really going to be fun to watch over the next couple of years is, how do we all innovate? We’re trying to approach this like any tech startup would. We’re trying to do is use what’s called design thinking to get to the best possible product.
“That means stripping away all of our preconceived notions (whilst) keeping our kind of expertise around.”
Toeman explains that he is exploring finding the optimum user experience for content discovery and personalization.
“For example, how might we make scrolling through lists of content fun? Also, personalization – we have decades and decades of content to bring to consumers, so how are we going to help you find the right thing at the right time?
“It’s a huge challenge, not just browsing through lists, but how do we get to know you? How do we understand that, after watching all of Westworld, the thing you’re in the mood for now is an uplifting comedy (whilst) someone else might be in the mood for some dark broody drama?
“Those kinds of algorithms and really getting AI and machine learning into that process is going to be a huge part of the next steps.”
Toeman says OTT TV services are going to have to do a better job than internet display has done at presenting targeted ads and giving users control.
This video is part of the Beet.TV series title the Road to CES 2020, a preview of the topics expected to be explored in Las Vegas in January. The series is presented by Samsung Ads. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>During “Data Activation, the New Tool for Programmers”, a panel convened at Beet Retreat In The City, executives held a refreshingly frank discussion on the true state of two of the most talked-about tech…
They were questioned by Howard Shimmel of Janus Strategy & Insights.
This year, executives like Levine have started describing the ability of advertisers to truly know who they are targeting with connected TV as “deterministic TV“, a proposed label that is in its infancy.
For Discovery’s Garfield: “I think about it as known versus inferred (audience profiles). As a national programmer at Discovery for 30 years, what we really knew about our audience was on an anonymized basis … age, gender…. inferred from a panel.
“Today, through our affiliate agreements, we actually have access to known (ad) exposures on set-top boxes where they know that person, they know what they’ve watched.”
WarnerMedia’s Aversano cautioned against expecting that the capabilities enabled by “deterministic” will grow to account for all TV targeting tactics.
“As an industry there’s been a ton of lip service given to this idea of a pure deterministic world,” he said. “It just will never happen. You’re never going to have perfect census-level measurement of everything. I don’t think you will. We need to accept the fact it will never be perfect – (instead), just make it a little bit better.”
Levine, deterministic’s champion, agreed. “Deterministic data today, unless you have a hundred percent of the U.S population, it’s not going to work, which is why you have to apply the projection methodologies,” he said. “But deterministic data activation allows us to do things on television that historically have been very hard to do.”
Which brought the panel to the second much-lauded technology – the new ability to attributed advertisers’ intended brand outcomes (be it a purchase or a click) directly back to a viewer’s exposure to a TV ad.
New services allow a line to be drawn between those things. But WarnerMedia’s Aversano says the cost of real attribution is prohibitive.
He explained: “The attribution marketplace today… you have a handful of vendors who I think have really good solutions, but they are cobbled together from lots of different third-party datasets that they have to pay for in licence that they in turn then charge advertisers, agencies and media companies for. A typical attribution study that we run for a specific campaign costs $30,000 to $120,000 for one campaign.
“That’s a million-dollar campaign and we have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to measure it. That will never scale.”
Aversano said the reality of this kind of attribution measurement is, it isn’t effective enough.
“The state of the industry today and this ecosystem of vendors is … none of it is at scale and none of it is always-on, (it) almost makes that impossible,” he said.
Discovery’s Garfield urged publishers not to dive farther in to offering guaranteed outcomes against ad purchases.
“We just don’t have enough of that understanding or benchmarks around what’s driving these numbers to really start guaranteeing on that,” he said. “And I think we all have to take a step back and understand one step deeper around what’s driving some of these outcomes.
“If the same audience is seeing the same creative across a bunch of networks, then what really is the differentiator in that outcome? And that’s what we’re trying to understand and we’re working with vendors and talking obviously to agencies about helping us together to understand that.”
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>Now WarnerMedia is gearing up to make announcements on how it wants to unlock that opportunity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dan Aversano, WarnerMedia’s ad innovation and programmatic solutions SVP, explains the rationale.
“We operate eight fully distributed linear networks,” Aversano says. “They are national networks, but they’re not addressable. We put the ad in the spot, everybody in the country and our distribution footprint sees the same ad.
“AT&T owns one of the most integral pieces of technology in that space in a company called INVIDI, which is actually the ad serving technology that makes addressable possible in certain footprints – within DirecTV, within DISH, Altice, Frontier and a few others that they’re starting to work with.
“That’s really, really exciting. So we are pushing full-steam ahead around national addressability, we have a ton of work that we’re hopefully going to be announcing as we move into next year, but we think that’s one of the most exciting things that we can push from a technology standpoint by far.”
Addressable TV, which gives brands the ability to buy ads targeted at the household level, has made particular in-roads in certain local cable operators and in particular OTT services or TV devices.
But, whilst OTT devices now have considerable scale, there is also growing concern at the size of the footprint available to TV networks.
Back in the summer, Mike Bologna, president of addressable at Cadent told Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”: “National networks have to create some type of arrangement, relationship or deal with a MVPD or a smart TV because, for the foreseeable future, ads that are dynamically inserted into live linear programming are going to happen through either the set top box or through the smart TV.”
Aversano is clear why he wants to enable addressable. And it is not just about targeting.
“Addressable technology gives us a tonne of precision, so now we can put different ads in front of different people, at different times,” he says. “There’s a lot that we can do with that precision:
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to one man whose primary medium has not always been considered adept at measuring through to actual consumer purchase – but, for Dan Riess, TV is learning new tricks.
“(Marketers’) job is now a lot more focused as a marketer on the end business result … as well as the actual campaign brand lift performance that we’re used to,” says Dan Riess, WarnerMedia EVP, Turner Ignite, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“A lot more of the work we do with our partners is around measuring the end business outcome. There’s a small handful of deals and partnerships that we do which are actually where we’re guaranteeing that business outcome.”
Many publishers these days are beginning to price ads based on outcomes – say, purchase or store visitation – that they know for sure are discoverable.
That is because, in the world of multi-channel digital signals, consumers are leaving breadcrumb trails across everything they do. Smart technology can link those breadcrumbs through to their end point – and trace back to an originator that may have led the cause to some effect.
For Riess, the secret sauce is AT&T. The former telco infrastructure company, after acquiring WarnerMedia incorporating Turner, is now a media power house with several TV networks, a mobile network and, in AppNexus, ad-tech infrastructure under its belt.
Furthermore, AT&T’s Xandr unit, dedicated to facilitating advanced TV ads, is driving offerings across the group.
“The way we do that is increasingly through the data we have with AT&T,” Riess adds. “Obviously our corporate owner who can measure a lot of things about audience behavior and purchase. They are the ones who collect the AT&T data set for advertising use and help us access it.
“We also use third parties in certain cases depending on the category and what the client is trying to learn.”
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.
]]>WarnerMedia planned to show how its union with AT&T’s Xandr helped to a produce a first-quarter, double-digit lift in in-store visits for McDonald’s and a 6.5% increase in dealership visits for Volkswagen during the same period.
Besides the retirement of the Turner name, “We have not changed anything for the past four or five years, but now with AT&T powering us we’re going to be that much smarter, that much stronger,” Speciale said. In the walkup to its UpFront presentation, WarnerMedia has been “talking to individual holding companies and their clients who want to partner with both of us with their addressable product.”
While AT&T offers addressable advertising, WarnerMedia has been building out its audience-targeting solutions. Underlying both is AT&T data insights from its 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships. “Now buyers are going to get much more broader reach and expanded reach with both of our products,” Speciale adds.
Xandr, which is AT&T’s advanced advertising and analytics company, used the occasion of the UpFront period to announce the formation of Community. It’s described in a news release as “a curated marketplace of publishers that enables advertisers to reach their audiences at scale in a brand-safe, privacy-protected, premium video environment.” Xandr describes the Community marketplace as “the first-step towards the future convergence of linear TV and digital.”
Discussing WarnerMedia’s plans for a direct-to-consumer streaming offering, Speciale said the new SVOD service would be in beta test at the end of 2019, with a full product set to debut in 2020.
“There is a goal a year from now that there will be an AVOD service. I am working very closely with the team in LA to talk about what that AVOD service looks like,” she said.
Right now, the AVOD offering is “a clean slate” as WarnerMedia continues to research the desires of consumers and advertisers. Possible ad loads are completely open to consideration. “It’s not a one size fits all. I don’t want it to be pre-dispositioned.”
According to Speciale, advertisers have been waiting for linear TV to be more accountable for business outcomes along the lines of digital media, but lack of data has been a problem.
“Now with AT&T data, we can make that happen. We’re optimizing a lot quicker. We’re going to be guaranteeing on business outcomes. That’s what you’re going to see at this UpFront. We’re going to have proof points that television actually now works and can drive business outcomes.”
]]>Roughly four months after AT&T unveiled Xandr, the company announced in early January an integration with WarnerMedia’s Turner to improve the relevancy of advertising, fueled by data and content connections.
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Welday talks about the new collaboration with Turner along with the high-level aspiration of Xander to make advertising more relevant while leveraging nearly 200 million consumer billing relationships that yield fertile data for both buyers and sellers.
And then there are viewers of premium video content, whose needs are a high priority. “Consumers should not have to tolerate sixteen minutes of un-targeted advertising for every hour of programming,” Welday says. “That’s a widely agreed upon problem. We think we can help with that.”
The Turner and Xandr ad sales teams have been working on the following four initiatives, with several enhanced products now available from Turner:
• More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data
• Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties
• Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV
• Proving the impact of advertising through attribution
Elsewhere within the AT&T fold, Xander is using some of its audience targeting segment capabilities to inform both CNN digital and Bleacher Report across linear and digital. Meanwhile, it’s assisting the LaunchPad branded content solution extend into addressable. “So we can take the same audience they’re targeting with the branded content and find them on our addressable footprint,” Welday says.
Asked about Xandr’s desire to be a supply-side platform for competitors, Welday says it’s “very, very grateful” to be representing both Altice USA and Frontier Communications, with which it has agreements to aggregate and sell national addressable TV advertising inventory.
“Our intention is to build a marketplace where we can provide premium content in a brand-safe environment with visibility and transparency into how the campaign is being delivered across platforms. That by definition is open. We want all comers to be able to access that marketplace,” says Welday.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>