That is the view of one software vendor aiming to bring simplicity to a local TV supply chain he says is too complex.
“The biggest problem with local (TV) is it’s historically been too hard to buy (ads),” says Eric Mathewson, CEO and co-founder of WideOrbit. “The (ad) agency has not made money buying local and hence it’s just not that exciting to recommend to your marketer client.
“You should buy more local. It’s very effective because it’s geo-targeted and you buy programmes, so on and so forth – but it’s not been effective to the bottom line of the agency.”
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
WideOrbit’s programmatic TV open marketplace lets ad buyers make automated, data-informed offers in more than 1,000 stations and networks.
“With our system, instead of taking 50 (agency) people to buy 70 markets over two weeks in local, four or five people can buy it in a couple of days,” Mathewson adds.
And WideOrbit has scale.
“We’re now live in 93% of TV stations in the US, about a third of cable nets, half of radio, 75% of sports nets,” Mathewson says.
“We’re processing $37 billion in ad spend from order entry through receipt of cash.”
Matthewson was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he 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.
]]>Having started 20 years ago, WideOrbit has attached approximately $20 billion into the marketplace by aggregating a comprehensive inventory from across the industry.
“If you are a buy-side advertiser, agency or direct-to-consumer marketer,” Mathewson said. “You can come onto our platform and buy directly TV and radio ad inventory.”
This library on their platform includes 93% of TV stations in the U.S., a third of cable networks, half of radio, 75% of sports networks, Univision and Telemundo which makes up almost all of U.S. Hispanic, five out of five owned and operated station groups, all equating to a vast collection of premium audio and video.
With all of this content, Mathewson also emphasizes the importance of making the transactional process a lot easier. WideOrbit has worked to make this even more efficient on their platform.
“We continue to grow share in our marketplace, and more advertisers are opting to work on our platform to more efficiently transact sell-side TV and radio ad inventory.”
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.
]]>“Stations historically have been more difficult to buy than they needed to be,” says Eric Mathewson, CEO of WideOrbit, a software company aiming to help them do that. “Agencies would spend roughly as much money buying local television stations as it costs them in labour to do so.
“Stations always had a great product to buy. It rang the cash register for the clients, but it was just challenging from a transactional basis.”
So, 20 years ago, WideOrbit set out to create a solution. San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
Today, it says its software runs ad revenue for 5,600 TV stations, about 93% of local television broadcast revenues, around half of radio, around a third of cable networks as well as digital platforms.
Next up, Mathewson thinks the local TV industry is ready for a big shake-up in the way it prices what it sells.
He is seeing a shift, from the historic method of measuring and selling TV eyeballs using rough “gross rating points” (GRPs) to selling on real viewership, by digital-style impression.
“It’s going to roll out very quickly,” he tells Janus Insights & Strategy’s Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV. “It’s very easy for a station account executive to issue a proposal in impressions versus cost per point and have it all the way go through order entry, scheduling, invoice generation, receipt of cash, the whole workflow.
“That’s going to happen in very short order. The buyers are on board. The planners obviously already plan to impressions.”
WideOrbit’s programmatic TV open marketplace lets ad buyers make automated, data-informed offers in more than 1,000 stations and networks.
WideOrbit is bringing workflow automation to spot TV advertising in a bid to stop money leaking out into other forms of media.
It wants to speed up the old manual system in which an ad buyer passes campaign requirements to a buying representative, on to stations and back to the buyer, which WideOrbit says takes three-and-a-half-days.
The interview took place at the at the TVB Forward conference in New York. It is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the conference. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Many broadcasters are contemplating a shift, from the historic method of measuring and selling TV eyeballs using rough “gross rating points” (GRPs) to selling on real viewership, by impression, in a manner more familiar to digital publishers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Will Offeman of WideOrbit, a software company helping broadcasters manage ad processes, explains why the shift will benefit them.
“Moving towards impressions sets a better playing field for local broadcasters,” he tells Janus Insights & Strategy’s Howard Shimmel for Beet.TV. “You’re going to see that reach is one of the core criteria for media spend. Everyone is looking towards targeted, customised audiences. It’s very, very hard to reach that in scale, (but) local broadcast has that capability and they are the perfect geo-fenced distribution.”
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
WideOrbit’s programmatic TV open marketplace lets ad buyers make automated, data-informed offers in more than 1,000 stations and networks.
The shift in local TV’s approach was underscored in September by news that NBC and Telemundo local TV stations will stop using traditional rating points to measure campaign effectiveness, moving instead to a cost-per-impression method.
Offeman says that will create several benefits for the companies.
“It allows them to do some things that they weren’t able to do before,” he explains. “They can actually enable pay-for-performance – they’re going to build based upon delivery and effectively wipe out the entire make-good process, which costs them roughly 1.4 times the cost to replace the pre-empted spot with that make-good.
“It also potentially lets them go into a liability stage, which is what the national cable nets do – they can provide what are called audience deficiency units until that liability is made up. That’s incredibly valuable because it allows them to rework the inventory as ratings ebb and flow, and they can utilise that even better.”
The interview took place at the at the TVB Forward conference in New York. It is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the conference. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them.
Commonly described as including Casper, Dollar Shave Club and Chubbies, they typically got their early lift by leveraging targeting online ads, but many have come to view TV advertising as the next stage in scaling their business.
An umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
In a panel interview at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”, led by EY media and entertainment practice lead Janet Balis, two executives were asked how they are reconfiguring to service D2Cs…
In October, NBCU partnered with the agency Giant Spoon, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, to start Direct To Scale, an advertiser offering specifically geared toward helping D2Cs.
Norris says it “is really designed to help brands that were typically born in social scale beyond social – they hit a ceiling and they need something a little bit bigger.
“What we ended up finding is that these brands spent so much time on segmenting their audience, coming up with a really sound strategy for growth,” Norris said. “They spend a lot of time, money, effort, consideration, and then when it’s time to execute, they go buy a DR (direct response) schedule.
“The brand will have to retrofit their strategy to fit the inventory that’s available. We kind of didn’t think that that was the right way to go about it.”
Norris and Lee agreed that, just because ad buyers can now laser-target ad campaigns at cohorts of individual households, that doesn’t mean they always should – at least, not in isolation.
WideOrbit’s Lee said: “We’re allowing you to buy by daypart, by specific market programme, and it really is getting a lot more granular and giving them the capabilities to really see how they want to carve up their campaign based on the results they’re seeing.”
Norris said: “There’s a place for both (precise targeting and mass reach). Especially with direct-to-consumer brands, it’s not just good enough to do one.”
Lee agreed: “We can get too granular with that data. I think we have to find that balance. The more precise we get, you’re shrinking that funnel and you’re missing that whole audience… You need to make sure that you’re not trying to get so precise that you’re missing out on the big picture.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>That is the view of a company that has long offered the infrastructure for local TV networks’ ad management around the US. But now WideOrbit wants to service ad buyers, too.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Zinsmeister, WideOrbit chief revenue officer, says the “spot” TV ad market in the US is “haemorrhaging” money, down from $18 billion to $16 billion [source unknown], “because it’s not super-accessible”.
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
Now WideOrbit is bringing workflow automation to spot TV advertising. It wants to speed up the old manual system in which an ad buyer passes campaign requirements to a buying representative, on to stations and back to the buyer.
WideOrbit’s Zinsmeister spoke with Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!”.
“If you really kind of look beneath the covers, when (ad buyers) say, ‘I don’t buy local (TV ads)’, it’s because it wasn’t accessible. Now I think we’re going to change that.
“We’ve spent 20 years putting everybody on a similar platform, now we’re really doing cool stuff to be able to leverage that. We’re working directly with Hudson MX and Mediaocean, the big buying systems that the buyers are utilizing.”
“The problem with local, at least in spot (ads) and to some degree local cable as well, is an agency is working at a 2% or less profit margin. It works really well, the brands want it. It’s a fantastic medium, but it costs so much to transact it.
“Data providers, buy-side systems, sell-side systems, we’re now working together to communicate information that reduces discrepancies, and more importantly, the time that it takes to transact. ”
“They don’t see the performance until way after the campaign, so you don’t get that level of attribution.
“By putting everybody on a similar footprint, by now working with the buy-side systems instead of competing with them, we’re providing really fast access, both for traditional buyers and also for folks like Google.”
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>But they should nevertheless be realistic about the kinds of super-powers they can find on the screen, says an executive whose company manages the movement of TV ad inventory across the country.
“We’re seeing the shift from digital coming towards the TV space,” says Frederick Lee, WideOrbit director of sales, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“That’s exciting because they’re looking at it from an (ad) impression standpoint; it makes perfect sense for them to have an easy way to access that inventory and marry it with their data on the backend.”
Advanced TV capabilities include targeting viewers at the household level and attribution which allows brands to track a viewer exposed to an ad, all the way to outcomes like website or store visitation and even sales.
Lee says traditional agencies and digital agencies are connecting to TV inventory through APIs in order to take advantage.
Amongst the digital-style brands embracing TV is the wave of direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce companies that are selling direct, without the need for intermediary retail platforms.
In January, eMarketer counted more than 400 D2C brands operating in the US. IAB analyzed 250 of them.
Meanwhile, an umbrella group, the VAB, in a new report, has observed how D2C companies it tracks hiked their TV spending by 60% last year, bringing the total up to $3.8 billion.
San Francisco-based WideOrbit offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
But Lee also cautions the new digital brands not to expect things to work the same on TV as they do online.
“I think we have to be careful because the difference between digital and TV is you are dealing with a finite amount of inventory on the TV and an infinite amount of inventory on the digital,” he says.
“There’s a way to manage those expectations. It’s just something that we constantly have to be aware of. What works for digital might not necessarily be the same as how it is executed on the linear side.”
Lee says a consultative approach is needed by brands as they make the transition.
He was speaking with Janet Balis, global leader of EY’s media and entertainment practice.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>The San Francisco-based company offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads.
“It really is the infrastructure of the supply side,” says Mike Zinsmeister, WideOrbit chief revenue officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Now that we’ve done that, we’re working with buy-side systems, and indirectly buyers, to try to make that available.”
Zinsmeister says servicing the buy side will begin in the next month or two, though WideOrbit will begin by “walking” slowly in to the new arena. He acknowledges making the flip will be challenging.
“Disrupting incumbents is a tricky thing,” he adds. “It makes people nervous when there are new folks that are coming in,when we change our position from just being a supply-side system of record to one that’s helping them to transact against their inventory. Those things makes folks nervous.”
“But there’s also a healthy dose of appreciation for it, and a lot of energy and enthusiasm. We don’t sell it, we don’t buy it and then package it up and sell it. We really just try to make it accessible as an option to sell.”
WideOrbit is bringing workflow automation to spot TV advertising in a bid to stop money leaking out into other forms of media.
It wants to speed up the old manual system in which an ad buyer passes campaign requirements to a buying representative, on to stations and back to the buyer, which Zinsmeister takes three-and-a-half-days.
Instead, he says, his system aims to make TV ad buying more like travel planning on Kayak or Orbitz. “They’ve actually gotten the buy- and sell-side systems to talk, and that’s what we’re doing,” he adds.
This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“The bulk of linear is still bought at a corporate level, so until those buying habits change we’re not going to see too much movement there,” Khan adds in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
WideOrbit has long provided the foundational piping for local TV broadcast transactions. After several acquisitions of digital assets, its programmatic solution now consists of four “flavors,” according to Khan. They are programmatic direct and private marketplace, which are “more akin to your traditional buying RFP’s” for guaranteed inventory that can be bought one year out.
“Then we have open marketplace and direct response, more akin to your open RTB protocol” in which spots can be purchased in real time anywhere from two to seven days out.
Meanwhile, on the demand side, WideOrbit engages with brands directly, “we do work with the DSPs, and we service our core SSP client needs in that we provide the channel for direct sold.”
Khan mentions WideOrbit’s 2017 partnership with Google, in which WideOrbit integrated with DoubleClick to allow ad buyers to buy broadcast TV spots from the same interface they use to secure digital display and video campaigns.
“We continue to see increased volume through that channel. We work with a number of DSP’s as well, and again we continue to see increased volumes coming through those demand channels,” says Khan.
To advance the convergence of digital and linear media, WideOrbit has developed different tool sets. “We are helping with the data and the targeting through our programmatic platforms. “Brands don’t necessarily always want to target a specific audience. They like the shotgun approach of linear. It helps with their brand building, and obviously it’s the safety that goes along with that as well.”
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.
]]>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.
]]>For advanced targeting of TV audiences, “Live linear programming is a big part of it. We are optimizing our television buys today for clients that have a desire to do so,” the network’s VP of Programmatic Sales says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference.
Meanwhile, on the digital side, whether it’s full-episode, OTT, connected-TV devices or set-top video-on-demand, “we are looking to bring this cross-screen, trying to find an auto intender regardless of the modality that they’re consuming our content and serving the person that is in market for that product that ad at the right time,” Callahan adds.
Finding the right ad length and load is easier with on-demand content like movies where it’s scripted and ad breaks are planned. “I think you can do things with the break. You can shorten the break, adjust the break.”
Callahan sees Hulu’s approach “with different flavors of subscriptions” as offering a tradeoff with viewers in terms of ad choices and data sharing, while the “holy grail of serving right ad to right person with right format creates a less clustered more meaningful ad experience.”
Linear commercial breaks remain “baked in, sports isn’t scripted, you don’t know when somebody’s going to score a touchdown or hit a home run. You don’t know when that commercial break is going to happen,” Callahan says.
“You can probably load some up to be a certain way, but I think more in the archived, on-demand digital video library today you can get creative do things unique and interesting and create more value for the interruptions in a shorter capacity in those environments.”
Like other networks, Fox is seeing continued growth in connected-TV viewing year over year. “The idea of cord nevers versus cord cutters, that pendulum swing has happened.”
He sees a call for greater transparency in reporting and proving out de-duplication of connected-TV viewing audiences. “How does CTV really operate as the standalone from a tracking, delivery, audience perspective” is one question. “As far as the CTV environment, there is a greater level of transparency on who’s watching it, what are they watching, when are they watching and certainly the ability to tie it back to greater outcome attributed data sets as well,” says Callahan.
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.
]]>“What we’re doing with OpenAP is integrating it into our products so you can actually build a rate card against an OpenAP target,” says Ashley Barretto, GM, WO Network, WideOrbit.
“You can build deals against it, you can air the deals, you can steward against it and you can produce and report results,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference. “We started out working with Vantage, Viacom’s offering, and that led to OpenAP.”
Calling television a “fractured marketplace” with shrinking linear audiences, both buyers and sellers are seeking more value from advertising inventory, according to Barretto. Because Nielsen’s age and gender metrics are still the transactional currency, the desire for added value is in advanced audience targeting that can be attributed to business outcomes.
“This is taking them a step forward in terms of targeting the commercials beyond the age and gender into more specific targets that can produce results,” Barretto says.
One of WideOrbit’s priorities getting ad impressions to flow across platforms. With its roots in linear TV and having added digital to its toolkit, it’s working to provide clients with “fluidity solutions, where you can actually build a linear deal and if you’re under-delivering on that, you can move impressions across to the digital platform, bring those delivered impressions back and provide a holistic delivery across multiple platforms.”
The company’s efforts on OpenAP is reflective of what Barretto says is the way it does business. “What we’ve always done is partner with our clients. We don’t build it in a vacuum and then go out to market with it.”
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.
]]>Approaching 2019, WideOrbit is working on three initiatives, Offeman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the company’s recent WideOrbit Connect User Conference. Those are providing open solutions, bringing digital and linear together and harnessing data science by “using machine learning and analytics to actually get predictive results out.”
Most of its customers at the conference are asking WideOrbit “how can you help us as this landscape changes, as consumers are consuming content in different ways, what’s our role and our strategy,” says Offeman. “We can’t do everything, so we’re starting with open, making sure as third parties come along they can interface with our solution sets,” he adds.
“We’re building out tool sets to help merge the sales front end so we can put linear and digital plans together. And we’re using advanced analytics both through partners like Revenue Analytics and tool sets within WideOrbit.”
Customers are typically looking for WideOrbit to help them make money, save money or reduce pain, according to Offeman.
“On the optimization piece, it’s really highly focused on either saving them money or making them money. It’s kind of a multi legged stool for optimization. One piece we’ve already built is doing schedule optimization. After the orders come through, how do we optimally put the spots into the slots to reach the greatest audience for what they’re buying.”
The second piece involves improving plan optimization. “How are we selling them the right thing to execute their goals and, finally, for our customers as well how are we maximizing rate. How are we getting paid the optimal amount for what that customer is trying to execute against?”
Having made several acquisition gambits in the last several years with an eye toward digital-linear convergence, Offeman says he’s excited to see that convergence actually happening. They include Fivia (front-end digital ad solution), Castfire and Abacast (streaming tool stacks for live and on-demand streaming) and AdMeta, which was “arguably an RTB exchange platform that allowed SSP’s and DSP’s to plug in together and provided dynamic floor pricing for the SSP’s.
“Part of what I’m working on right now is gluing all of that digital adtech together and marrying it up with the linear side,” says Offeman.
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.
]]>WideOrbit was founded 18 years ago to rebuild the systems that supported local media, Founder & CEO Matthewson explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. Now the company is the backbone for more than 90% of local TV stations and about half of local radio stations.
On the national side—which is pretty much another world from local TV and radio—WideOrbit is the pipeline for about 30% of national cable TV networks. “We run their backbone ad systems from order entry to receipt of cash,” Mathewson says of WideOrbit’s clients.
While there are many reasons to increase transactional automation, an elemental one stems from the way local advertisers compensate their agencies to plan and buy local TV and radio inventory, according to Mathewson. The rates are so low, “they really don’t make money on local broadcast compared to the more efficient buying processes in digital and national.”
Asked about the term programmatic and its utility in local media, Mathewson draws a distinction between digital and its real-time bidding for advertising inventory, along with audience targeting. In linear media, with traditional TV or radio buying schedules, “there’s not a real-time nature to it and there’s not typically a one to-one-targeting.”
This will change with the impending rollout of the broadcast standard known as ATSC 3.0, according to Mathewson.
In the meantime, he believes the best way to define programmatic is “improving automation and adding data to local broadcast television and radio buying.”
He also draws a distinction between traditional arbitrage in local TV and radio and true programmatic transactions.
“Some of our competition has kind of put lipstick on that and called it programmatic,” Mathewson says of arbitrage. “I would argue it’s really not automation. It’s really changing their marketing description and adopting the programmatic title.”
In making the local buying process more efficient, WideOrbit seeks to provide both buyers and sellers with better pricing information and targeting information for aggregating audiences as opposed to dayparts and age/gender demographics.
While the backbone of local media has long been smaller advertisers like local car dealers and quick-serve restaurants, others have discovered the space to their advantage.
“We’re though also finding direct-to-consumer models, venture-backed models, that are not geographically dependent are using local television and being very, very successful at it.”
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.
]]>Advertisers that use DoubleClick Bid Manager can now bid on both online and local linear TV inventory, the latter representing the top 50 DMA’s reaching some 106 million households, Ferreira explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 NAB Show.
Local TV stations use WideOrbit to book and invoice offers, make ad decisioning and manage creative, among other activity. “Since we’re the DFP, we do not require the stations to give us any inventory. We’re just a software layer,” says Ferreira.
So if a DoubleClick user has an interest in local TV spots they can submit an offer to a station and “your offer shows up in the same software that they would seen an offer from the Ford dealership that just called them,” he adds.
“Historically, TV and digital advertising have been bought and measured through different systems and currencies,” Google says in announcing the integration. “By adding traditional TV buying into DoubleClick Bid Manager, we are taking the first step towards allowing advertisers and agencies to manage their video campaigns across digital and linear TV, in a more efficient and effective way.”
While local TV has been attractive to marketers for many reasons, it’s had its currency drawbacks, according to Ferreira, and was complex to buy on a national basis.
“It was ripe for somebody to just come in and stitch it together and make it as easy to buy as buying a video on YouTube,” he says.
Ferreira is amused by the turn of events in a path that has seen a lot of ad tech innovation fueled by the expected “demise” of TV. “So it’s kind of ironic after 10 years of demise we have these companies now integrated with TV instead of waiting to replace it,” he says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>The San Francisco-based company offers a software platform that handles scheduling, billing, content management and invoicing for mostly local TV ads around the US. In this video interview with Beet.TV, WideOrbit CEO and founder Eric Mathewson talks about the company’s footprint:
Buyers plug in to WideOrbit using systems including TubeMogul, TradeDesk, Wywy, iViewDigital plus 18 other signs providers, direct placements and agency trading desks.
But Mathewson is hot on programmatic authenticity. “We don’t use segmented inventory,” he says. “Most companies holding themselves out to be a programatic seller have only a segmented inventory, doing it where they’re more or less putting a technology front-end on a manual process.
“I call that fauxgrammatic, it’s a faux process, not a true programmatic process.”
]]>PTV, launched last week, works by aggregating relationships with several providers that already offer this functionality, including AudienceXpress, clypd, placemedia and WideOrbit’s WO Programmatic-TV marketplace, from which many local TV stations take their advertising on an automated basis.
For ad buyers, that means “much easier access to television inventory and the ability to automate things”, whilst, for broadcasters, it means “new revenue streams in to local broadcast markets with national brands”, says WideOrbit’s digital EVP Brian Burdick.
He was interviewed by Beet.TV in Manhattan at TubeMogul’s event to launch its new programmatic TV advertising suite.
]]>“We’re focused on building programmatic in to all of our television to make it a lot easier to transact, particularly with local broadcasters,” the company’s digital EVP Brian Burdick tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“There is a huge amount of reach, particularly in the small- to mid-sized market, that it’s really hard for national advertisers to get to. Our intent is to make that accessible to buy across all of that footprint.”
We spoke with him recently at the TubeMogul partner meeting. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
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