That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:
They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…
Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.
“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”
But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.
“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.
“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”
Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.
Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.
“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.
“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”
FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.
“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.
“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.
“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>At this year’s festival, Twitter will spend a lot of time talking about the value of experiences, how it’s doubled down on live streaming and what it takes for brands to create a value exchange with the platform’s users, the company’s Director of Brand Strategy, Stacy Minero, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“We talk a lot about how you can creative feed-first content,” says Minero, who joined Twitter three years ago following stints on the buy-side at Mindshare and ZenithOptimedia. “Everybody’s talking about mobile-first and we’re focused on feed-first.”
Some of the best work done on the social platform by brands involves designing memorable experiences. “We know that consumers skip ads but they don’t skip experiences,” Minero says.
Foremost among these are brands becoming live broadcasters, the increased use of 360 video and harnessing the power of bots. One example she cites is when fast-feeder Wendy’s teamed up with Twitter during the NCAA final four playoffs, which enabled fans to create their own team brackets on the rails of Twitter, as ADWEEK reports. “It was a really interesting way to capitalize on that heat moment but to bring consumers into an experience that was more immersive,” Minero says.
The company’s feed-first approach is based on the knowledge that “people are more likely to scroll or to swipe than they are to stop on content.” Among its suggested best practices for brands are “having a bias to short form,” engineering the front end to create stopping power and adding captions to content.
To create a value exchange with users, brands need to understand their mindsets and motivations, but also their need states “so that you can either deliver entertainment or some type of utility.”
Twitter has “doubled down” on live streaming because while people are attracted by content, being part of the conversation keeps them engaged. It’s the result of the “first screen” and “second screen” melding together for shared experiences.
“There’s a lot of opportunities for brands to not only draft off of live streaming and be a part of it but to actually create their own live stream content,” says Minero.
This segment is part of the Beet.TV lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. 2017. The series is presented by Storyful. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“TV consumption is on the decline … by about 2% a year,” Barnard adds. “Online video is compensating for this – consumption is rising by about 22% a year. (So), overall consumption of audiovisual advertising is slightly on the increase.”
ZenithOptimedia says television remains the best brand-building medium. The forecast also expects:
Interpublic Group’s Magna Global made as similar prediction on the growth of digital. Here is the report in The New York Times.
We interviewed Barnard in London earlier this week for our series “The Road to CES” — our preview of trends and topics to be discussed in January in Las Vegas. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. The series is sponsored by YuMe.
]]>“We are thinking not just data-centric but data-centric as it involves your entire media investment,” ZenithOptimedia activation standards, insights and technology EVP Julian Zilberbrand tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That means taking insights that you learn in one channel and applying them effectively in another.
“The more information you know about (consumers), the better you can communicate and give them messaging that is relevant for them. Data allows us to do that, but the opportunity to do that in a way that scales across multiple media types is an opportunity that’s still evolving.”
Zilberbrand is heading to Cannes Lions hoping the discussion about so-called “programmatic” ad buying, which he says has long happened in the US, is becoming more global.
We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>The agency has a division, Newcast, dedicated to creating TV and online video content opportunities for its clients.
“It’s become much richer than ‘just place your TV ad in pre-roll’,” Newcast global MD Mark Waugh tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Newcast recently used the playbook for a campaign to illustrate the switch-on of UK mobile telco O2’s 4G network.
“We accessed Caspar Lee, who’s just gone through three million subs, in a video where we talk about 4G in the UK,” Waugh says. “We handed him creative control to talk about ‘How does 4G help him reach his audience better?’ That short video has now reached 1.4 million views – and it keeps on going, so the ROI is increasing all the time. That’s what brands are waking up to.”
This video is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series. This session was recorded in London.
]]>“The demand is obviously there,” ZenithOptimeda Group strategy director Chris de Cruz tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The ways in which consumers are starting to behave is obviously moving in that direction is obviously moving in that direction.
“It’s going to be expedited by the increased form factor of the new iPhone. Then the predilection for short form content will become cemented.”
But de Cruz says simply shovelling TV shows on to mobile won’t succeed: “We are seeing an attempt to transmogrify traditional TV programmes to a mobile device. It doesn’t necessarily work. What we need to do is find a way to create a method of delivery that’s much more appropriate for people’s consumption.”
This is part of a series title the State of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series.
]]>“I can’t just rely on a publisher or a verification vendor – it has to be a blended approach in order to go to market,” says ZenithOptimedia operations director and SVP Allen Singer.
“It’s not going to be ‘flip a switch and then that problem goes way’. Not any (single one) of these technology vendors are going to pick off everything – that’s always going to be an issue that impacts our workflow.”
We spoke with him at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Leadership Summit where he was a panelist, interviewed by Ashley J. Swartz, founder and CEO of Furious Minds.
]]>“Addressability, to date, has been segmented in to private ecosystems,” says media agency ZenithOptimedia’s activation president John Nitti. “We’re still at the beginning pt of the continuum as far as being able to inform our full buy with data. We haven’t had something that cuts across the majority of our buys.”
That’s why ZenithOptimedia partnered with Collective last year began testing a new program to leverage consumers’ online activity to target linear TV ads.
“We can optimize TV programming and get smarter about how we purchase media on our clients’ behalf,” Nitti says. “It’s an incremental step in the evolution of the business… (that will) get away from the pure demographics and get in to much deeper metrics that will drive overall ROI.”
Collective chief strategy officer Justin Evans gives more detail on the project here.
“We can find out what users are watching in a privacy-friendly way, and then figure out what they’re watching on other devices,” he explains. Advertisers then use that insight to better target users digitally and on TV. Collective’s tools can shed light on which channels viewers are and aren’t watching to help reach consumers that aren’t reached on TV and vice versa. “We want to be the toolset for any brand advertiser that wants to benefit from what direct response has done,” he says. “We want to send digital dollars back into addressable TV, connected TV.”
Earlier this summer, Collective inked a deal with Zenith Optimedia to use this data to plan TV buys based on users’s online behavior. Collective also launched a branding campaign this summer to promote its services. For more insight into how Collective plans cross-screen buys, check out this video interview.
]]>“When you’re talking about the digital landscape, there are four dominant players that everyone knows – Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft,” ZenithOptimedia global CEO Steve King told Beet.TV in this interview during Cannes Lions.
“Those four companies represent about $49 billion out of the $77 billion of ad spend that’s generated. In fifth place would be Twitter, but still some way behind those companies.”
Twitter has spent the last couple of years implementing its ad propositions including Promoted Tweets. Now, with recent big tie-ups announced with WPP and ZenithOptimedia owner Publicis, Cannes Lions 2013 – and ZenithOptimedia’s data – show Twitter emerging as a major vendor in the space.
“It’s rate of growth is much higher than the other companies – they’re a much more nascent player,” King added.
ZenithOptimedia’s latest advertising forecast again credits growth in social media and online video ad spend as the driver of a 20 percent jump in internet display expenditure. Those two categories are forecast to pull 30 percent more money this year. Press release and executive summary here.
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