The SVP of North America Sales talks about reconfigured media sales teams and the desire for a unified system serving both digital media and broadcast TV in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.

“Where it really gets complex is where you have different media types and you have to go through the execution process, through delivery, invoicing, attribution, back into the system and collection. That full process, the more complex the sale the more complex the buy, the harder it gets,” Hedrick says.

She describes the rise of sales organizations that are matrixed, “so you have a team that may go across many different products and then you have specialists that come in and go deep within those products. But the expectation isn’t that the sales team can go wide and deep.”

Her take on data is that there’s “a ton” of it, but “we haven’t quite figured out how to use that data in the day-to-day sales effort and adding value to the products that we’re trying to sell. It’s there, we can present it. But we haven’t automated that through software.”

While there’s plenty of technology available to make selling easier and more efficient, automating that process is a big driver at WideOrbit. “Because if we can solve that, we can create an environment where salespeople are able to use their time doing more revenue generating activity and more strategic activity.

“What we don’t want is to promote an industry where we’re doing a bunch of busy work, or we’re swivel chairing between systems because we can’t enter something in one system and have it go out to digital and traditional broadcast,” Hedrick says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

Representing more than 90% of the country’s top advertisers, ECN has been the behind-the-scenes connector of people process and technology for 27 years, Tietze explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.

The biggest challenge is to take data from disparate sources and “get it all flowing in one uniform way so that it can be ingested into receiving systems,” Tietze says.

“What seems automated even in the digital environment is ultimately still going in Excel spreadsheets to publishers around the country. Our goal is to try to not just have the digital asset be distributed or the broadcast asset delivered but to automate the scheduling behind that.”

One of ECN’s efforts was to create a standard that piggybacks on the BXF standard from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. “But that was just the beginning of it. Ultimately, it comes down to the people who have built the systems to adopt those standards in order to make it easy for people to do business. It’s still about people getting it done.”

With so many touch points between advertisers, agencies and tech providers, Tietze says a common mistake is that companies “will go build something before truly understanding the workflow and what someone just has to do in order to get their job done.”

The better course is to “go back to the source and find out what systems are being used, how they’re being used by people and what’s missing. And then be able to develop solutions that bridge that gap by enrolling the people who actually have to use them every day.”

Calling ECN’s business “the last mile,” Tietze says technology enabling more granular audience targeting “is running at light speed. What we now have to do is take these other systems and find ways to bridge that gap in order to utilize and adopt these other technologies.

“We have to make it easy for buyers to basically purchase time on in any medium for that same kind of spot and be able to transact business through the same workflows that exist today.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

Where advanced TV goes in the next five years is one of the topics of conversation in this Beet.TV interview with Scoles at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.

At its core, advanced TV connects advertisers’ marketing goals to the way they buy media on television, according to Scoles. Regardless of their target audience and beyond being “hyper focused” on the ideal consumer, “it really has to dovetail on their overall sales strategy.

“You can take what you’re trying to do from your corporate marketing strategy writ large and have it reflect in the way that you buy media.”

Identifying consumers of interest cherry picking media by viewership patterns drives efficiency. “And that’s probably the most similar concept to how digital targeting is thought about,” Scoles says.

But with the way that linear TV schedules are made, audiences can be measured across long periods of time, for example a three-month campaign. “You also have a lot more flexibility to change the definition of targeting to go beyond touching as many of these important consumers as possible to a multifaceted strategy.”

One campaign phase could focus on reach, another on driving frequency, “and at the end of it we want to see how it all compiles back together to fit overall brand strategy,” says Scoles.

Using data and consumer targeting is hardly new to marketing, so what might seem like new conversations aren’t. “You’re tapping the conversations that are already happening. These are part of the marketing departments. In the past, they could do a bunch of great work to understand who our ideal consumer segment is, and then there was not a ton you could do about it, especially on linear TV.

“The way the conversation has shifted is now you can bring those people into a meeting that involves talking about a media buy and say, ‘all the work that you’ve been doing, we can talk about that with you now as well and we can help you activate against that.’”

Over next five years, trends and conversations will center on being more transparent marketing strategy from the advertiser’s perspective, according to Scoles. “Be more adaptable to snapping towards those strategies on a publisher and agency side. That’s where I think we’re going to continue to see a lot of growth. The more transparent you are, the more people can partner with you and help drive your end goals.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

“We’re actually going through a huge change right now on the technology side,” says Robyn Goldman, Relationship Manager, AMC Networks. “We are looking for ways to consolidate our delivery process for our assets to make things more efficient, more streamlined.”

In addition to implementing Wide Orbit Program, AMC is working on a work order management system and a new automation system “that play very well together and are going to be highly integrated, so that our processes are more standardized, more automated, less risk and then we can get to the consumer faster,” Goldman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect Conference.

To achieve more fluidity on the sales side, AMC is using multiple WideOrbit products so as to combine linear and non-linear deals into one, according to Goldman.

“There are still some challenges with that because of the ability to track delivery for those deals and invoice those deals in a singular manager. But I think we’re moving toward that area where we can do things across the linear and non-linear platforms in a singular way.”

She recognizes the desire of buyers to execute a single buy across multiple platforms, but there need to be changes as well on the sell-side. That involves “being able to go to one person for a linear and non-linear deal and getting that done in one place as opposed to fracturing it.”

Asked about inventory offerings, on the linear side “things are pretty much status quo” with 15-, 30- and 60-second ads. “But being able to add in the digital platforms and being able to offer additional impressions on that level I think broadens the scope of what the buyers can achieve with their plans with AMC Networks,” Goldman says.

With media companies increasingly adding to the number of over-the-top platforms, and thereby consumer options, “To me it’s how are you providing content to the viewer that’s going to keep them tuning in to your content as opposed to somebody else’s.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference, Viacom’s COO of Ad Sales recaps the progress of OpenAP, which began as an initiative of Fox, Viacom and Turner and offers observations on future growth based on current use by advertisers in several categories. Newer members include NBCUniversal and Univision.

A big impetus behind OpenAP was the fact that publishers had their own advanced-advertising products but the way they defined audiences differed.

“We were all using our own fusion methodologies to, say, come up with an in-target segment list for movie enthusiasts. It was defined differently. The response from buyers was “I’m not buying the same thing.” By providing the “element of currency” that had been missing, OpenAP unified audience target definitions, according to Halley.

The platform has a tool that allows advertisers or agencies to define their target segments using “a wide variety of data sets, and then share that segment across multiple publishes who will then guarantee the buy against that common audience definition,” Halley says.

“This allows buyers the opportunity to look at publishers on a relative basis so they can evaluate share and how much they’re willing to pay for advanced segments. It has done a great deal to provide momentum around the volume of investment in advanced advertising.”

Still, these are still the “very early stages,” says Halley, noting that for some advertisers, advanced buying “is exactly where they should be.” Examples are response-based advertisers and categories like studios, automotive and quick-serve restaurants. One thing they have in common is “they tend to work a lot with data in the first place. They tend to be predisposed to buy it because they have the capabilities in-house to activate in that fashion.”

Over time, as other kinds of consumer products become more data-centric, “you’re going to see an increase in the buying against advanced segments. I would also say that this is really prep for an addressable marketplace, where we’re going to be matching advanced audience segments on a one-to-one basis more broadly.”

Halley places OpenAP’s combined member footprint at 50% of the domestic television impression supply, “so we do think feel like we’re at a critical mass as it is. But I would expect there to be additional key publishers joining the consortium in the near term. We’re going to be taking on other problems. I would look for other kinds of ease of buying type solutions coming up in the near term.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

So although WideOrbit provides the “system of record” for much of local broadcast media, it too needs to maintain flexibility and be willing to integrate its solutions with others, Swift explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual WideOrbit Connect conference.

“There’s a lot of competition that’s going on, especially as it relates to local TV, local radio,” Swift says. “And as you’ve got new players that are coming in, they’re looking for solutions to be able to compete up against them as well as some of the big fish” like Facebook and Google. “What we can certainly see that as the marketplace is actually getting, let’s call it fragmented, more complicated, there’s always going to be different solutions that need to exist to address whatever challenge they’re facing.”

While WideOrbit has a variety of proprietary solutions that are fully integrated with each other, “At the same time, recognizing that companies will often have already in place certain systems or solutions that they’re comfortable with” it’s open to collaborative integration. “We need to be able to play with these other providers to make it easier for companies to affect their business,” Swift adds.

A case in point is the company’s establishment earlier this year of WideOrbit Platform Services, which enables clients to adopt their choice of third-party software for any business function and export their traffic, sales and billing data to external systems. When launched, the new group had integration and API support in place for more than 100 industry standards and third-party software packages.

Prior to joining WideOrbit this summer, Swift was Financial Controller for KSL 5 TV in the greater Salt Lake City area, so he knows the everyday challenges of local broadcasters at the ground level.

“I think to take the contrarian view and look at it from a positive standpoint, local stations have an amazing opportunity to be able to meet the needs of their local clients,” he says.

Citing impending advances like the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard that should usher in more digital addressability, he foresees a future wherein things like better attribution finally come to the local TV world rather than “simply a ratings-type system.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

Now with the convergence of linear TV and digital, WideOrbit finds itself at the nexus of change that media buyers and sellers are grappling with in one fashion or other, Offeman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual WideOrbit Connect conference.

“Our entire programmatic effort is designed to make the buying and selling of local media easier,” Offeman says of WO Traffic. “We’re extending that local traffic system not just to be the outlet for their broadcast signal but also for all of their different digital outlets as well.”

The resulting solution is designed for WideOrbit’s clients to aggregate their content “both the linear reach as well as the digital reach so that the buy side can get an unduplicated reach number across the two. I think that’s going to add quite a bit of value to the local market.”

While local TV broadcasters tend to garner far fewer headlines than does the battle of the legacy network giants and digital upstarts, they’re not out of the ballgame, according to Offeman.

“For them to remain relevant, they’ve got to use the power that they have, which is that they can reach a very large local audience within, in digital terms, a geo fence or DMA, and hit them with messages on a really consistent, historically reach/frequency goal.”

Providing unduplicated reach means “basically giving them a message, not more than seven times, not burning them out, not giving it to them in the same pod each and every time. That’s some of things that local can do that digital’s really struggling with,” Offeman adds.

Aside from linear and digital convergence, big differences remain in the way that local TV and national networks ply their trade, according to Offeman. Local is still done by rate, cost per point and gross rating point goals, as opposed to national with its Upfront process, guarantees and CPM targets, among other dissimilarities.

“On the national cable net side, we are doing so many different things,” says Offeman, including working with the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to get custom audience segments into rate cards, developing direct response automation to reduce paper handling and making improvements to electronic copy instruction.

Like many others, Offeman would like to see more uniformity across the different types of TV buyers, including large brands, direct response, hybrid direct response and others.

“It’s not like it’s one clean buying strategy. Our customers need to be very flexible for where the money is coming in, what channel it’s coming in, and then how do they maximize their content.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.

“Think of this new platform like the Apple iOS platform where developers can come and develop new applications and services that can ride on top of our broadcast platform,” says Anne Schelle, Managing Director of Pearl TV.

We spoke to her after her keynote speech to hundreds of local TV and radio executives at the  the WideOrbit Connect conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Washington-based Pearl TV was created by broadcasters to bring ATSC 3.0 to fruition, Schelle explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. Its members—Cox Media Group, the E.W. Scripps Company, Graham Media Group, Hearst Television Inc., Meredith Local Media Group, Nexstar Media Group, Raycom Media and TEGNA, Inc.—operate more than 220 network-affiliated TV stations.

Finalized by the Federal Communications Commission in January of 2018, ATSC 3.0 will be dependent on spectrum allocated by individual broadcasters for a consumer rollout set for late 2020. Now its various stakeholders need to agree not only on its infrastructure but also how to explain its attributes to consumers.

“We need to commercialize it,” says Schelle.

Pearl TV chose Phoenix as its test market, setting up one lighthouse station to emit signals under the new standard to kick off the transition from ATSC 1.0. “The trick will be to do that, we have to also maintain our 1.0 services. And we want to. That’s our bread and butter business as well as our multicast.”

Fox, NBC, Univision and PBS are collaborating on the test platform in Phoenix.

With a modernized user interface, ATSC 3.0 will provide free, live linear programing and a host of over-the-top streaming content.

One of the big payoffs for broadcasters is the viewership data they will be able to collect, fueling interactive TV and addressable advertising. “Broadcasters have never had access to their own data on their own channels,” notes Schelle.

The FCC made ATSC 3.0 voluntary as opposed to mandatory for broadcasters at the industry’s request, as CNET reports. It will be segmented into Designated Market Areas like current broadcast TV.

Initially, monetization ROI will come from viewer retention, data and advanced advertising. “It also will enable us to do data-informed sales,” Schelle adds.

The capabilities of ATSC 3.0 extend to the Internet of things, particularly smart vehicles. “This is a really economical pipe,” a one-to-many system with which “we can deliver at a fraction of the cost large data files, information, navigation, maps to connected cars and autonomous vehicles. That brings a whole new world to broadcasters.”

In the meantime, Pearl TV will be setting up consumer labs to explain the new technology, “what to call it” and how best to market the TV sets and other technology needed to make it happen.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference.  WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series.  Please find more videos here.