Benjamin Masse’s background is in anthropology which
is not as far afield from digital media as one might think. He is an
entrepreneur whose canny assessment of consumer behavior has helped him in the
music recommendation system sector, then at Google, and now at Triton Digital,
a local radio advertising and branding platform. He says that his Masters degree in
anthropology “opens our minds up to track anything that interacts with the
consumer including software. When you build software you should not think of
only building software for a specific culture. You need to broaden your scope.”
In this fascinating
interview, Masse talks about his company, the concept of addressable radio and its application to television, the
use of GPS, segments and the metrics that result and the future of sales in the
changing marketplace. He also looks ahead and offers some predictions on the
media landscape for the next five years.
There are five videos in the interview:
Subject Length
(in minutes)
Background and Triton (4:47)
Addressable Radio (6:44)
GPS, Metrics, Segments (9:42)
Predictions (6:17)
Future Sales and International (7:21)
CW: Tell me
about Triton Digital.
BM:
Triton Digital was created about eight years ago. It is a company that focuses
on digital audio. We have four lines of business. One is streaming. So when you
listen to radio on digital signals on the web player or mobile player, the
streaming of that FM station is actually done by Triton. The second line of
service is measurement. When you want to measure the time spent listening to
digital audio it can be from a radio broadcaster, an online music service like
Pandora, you don’t measure by page views like a lot of measurement systems are
doing out there. You need to take the time spent listening and make sure that
there is not a robot listening but a real human. The third line of business is
advertising, which I head up. I am responsible for how we inject the ad to make
it relevant to the listener and so that includes everything around ad serving
and digital audio advertising. The fourth line of business is all of the
loyalty and engagement programs such as the radio fan club – making sure that
the mailing list is curated and even the website of the radio station.
CW: Can this type of audio addressability be used to help
target ads in local television? If so how?
BM: We’re obsessively focused on all things audio. That said,
similar technologies can be used for local targeting of streaming TV ads. The
local market opportunity is huge, and there are a number of companies working
to capitalize on it across all types of media.
CW: Is there a cross platform opportunity here for an
advertising who wants to buy both local radio and television?
BM: There is certainly an opportunity here for advertisers
looking to augment the power of their existing media buys – a number of recent
studies have shown that audio has the power to boost the effectiveness of
advertising on other channels. In fact, many advertisers currently use
streaming audio to complement online and offline buys across channels. Audio –
and particularly local audio – has grown dramatically in the last couple of
years and has become a very attractive platform. We’ve seen a ton of interest
from advertisers who would like to buy audio spots in the same way they buy
other media spots in order to enhance their overall mix.
Charlene Weisler interviews Benjamin Masse about his background and his company Triton Digital in this 4:47 minute video:
CW: It sounds to me that one of your businesses is
addressable advertising for radio. How do you do that?
BM: Yes. For traditional radio we take the FM signal and we
are replacing in real time the advertising that was broadcasted. So if you tune
into a real FM receiver from like a CBS or Cumulus owned station and you open a
web player or a mobile player, you have the same live signal when the music is
playing or the voice is speaking but at the ad break we are replacing in real
time all of the ads. So you could be listening to an LA based station or
Montreal based station in New York City and you will get New York City based
advertising. That is one way that we make it addressable. And then because of
all of the technology behind programmatic advertising like cookies and device
IDs from mobile phones, we can also personalize that advertisement. So if you
have just booked a ticket to fly from New York to Europe, we can broadcast ads
for travel insurance, for example. We are aware of this purchase because of a
cookie that was dropped by the airline. So it is based on the one to one
broadcast.
Is Addressable Radio possible? Benjamin Masse explains how it works to Charlene Weisler in this 6:44 minute video:
Charlene Weisler interviews Benjamin Masse about all aspects of his business scuh as GPS usage, metrics and segmentation in this 9:42 minute video.
Benjamin Massee shares some of his predictions of the media landscape with Charlene Weisler in this 6:17 minute video:
CW: What do you see as the benefit of programmatic in radio?
BM: Programmatic means a lot of things. The main thing it
means is automation. We see that there are more and more requests for
automation because it saves costs on both the agency and publishers side. By
automation I mean that there is a brand that wants to advertise. They will hire
an agency and they will ask that agency to figure out the best way to spend
their advertising dollars to have brand exposure. In the old days of the Mad
Men era they were having lunch and talking to publishers, signing paper
agreements, sending creative to the publisher and hoping that the publisher
would traffic that ad the right way. We see that many things involved in
automation are to simplify that process and save costs. You don’t need a lot of
hires on either side to be sure that the buy is tracked correctly.
CW: So it sounds to me that you are saying that media sales
may not be the best career track for someone starting out today.
BM: Doing sales today is different but you are still need to
have sales people. Like when you trade stock you can log into your bank account
and start trading but you still need to have advisers. Investing in stocks used
to require a trade to be done by a trader. Nowadays it is all automated and the
prices are fully transparent. But you still need to talk to advisers. So I
think that the sales people both on the publishers side and the buyers on the
agency or brand side will still need to exist but they won’t be exchanging
paper or even electronic agreements. They will be there to advise their
clients.
Charlene Weisler interviews Benjamin Masse about the future of sales in a world of programmatic in this provocative 7:21 minute video:
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