Hamid Qayyum, Head of Strategic Partnerships at a4, is a
data and media veteran, starting his career at ratings upstart, erinMedia back
in the 1990s. He is currently charged with taking all the data and media that
is gathered from Altice and other data partnerships and acquisitions and use it
to supercharge a4’s local and national sales efforts.
Qayyum works with brands,
agencies and supply partners “to facilitate our ability to deliver advertising
effectively across all devices that consume media,” for the a4 universe of 92
million optimized linear TV households and 65 million IP addressable households.
Charlene Weisler: You
have worked for companies who very early on were working with data in very
creative ways. How has the data landscape changed since the 1990s?
Hamid Qayyum: Data collection is far easier now. As the
world becomes more digital, there is better data and as the TV world becomes
more IP, we have access to more data. But on the flip side, we have to be more
careful with how we treat that data – with more privacy and making sure that we
are good caretakers of people’s profiles and habits. We have access to data
that is very personal so we have to make sure that we guard that data very
carefully. The more data we get the better products we can provide. From the
media advertising perspective, we can do a better job of understanding what a
consumer wants and delivering it to the consumer who wants it.
Weisler: Talking
about privacy and GDPR, how do you see this impacting the U.S.?
Qayyum: It’s very relevant for us. Altice, being a cable
company and a4 being a division of Altice we take privacy very seriously. We
have a lot of safeguards, such as a firewall between us and the data, to be
sure that we got things right. How we use data, the ways we use data, we make
sure that it complies with the latest privacy rules. Some industries will be
greatly impacted by GDPR more than it will impact us because have already taken
steps to be ahead of the curve and be GDPR compliant … or better. We don’t
scrape data. There are a lot of companies that will scrape the bid stream and
say ‘We have an IP address that we can target’ but we don’t do anything like
that. That data is not really authenticated.
We authenticate everything in a privacy compliant manner.
Weisler: What are the
different datasets that you use?
Qayyum: One of the advantages we have is that we are part of
Altice USA which is a very large marketer. We work very closely with the Altice
marketing team to facilitate their marketing efforts. We also use the data that
is used for marketing Altice’s products to better serve our strategic marketing
partners from demographics to lifestyle to purchase habits to all of the
viewership statistics – some of it is proprietary and some is acquired –as well
as IP data. We have created a data warehouse that we can use for our national
partners, brands and agencies. We also have a lot of political data, unique viewership
data sets and have created a range of proprietary segments.
Data is at the core of what we do. But we don’t sell data.
We are a media company. When you come to us you can buy local media, national
media, TV, Digital and we will use all of this data that we have to find your
audience.
Weisler: Altice was
Cablevision. So this is Cablevision data?
Qayyum: We also have Suddenlink in addition to Cablevision
plus data we acquire and data we receive through partnerships.
Weisler: What about
the impact of the new technology – ATSC 3.0 and 5G?
Qayyum: The way we look at it from our side of the business,
the more bandwidth you have, the more you will consume that bandwidth on more
devices in the home. That is why we like the IP targeting aspect of our
business, because consumers will consume more outside of just watching the television,
whether through OTT or some other mechanism of content delivery.
That bandwidth has a couple of uses. One is driving the
streaming part of the business and the other is driving the gaming part of the
business. Everyone wants low latency in gaming. We are making huge headway in
CTV and OTT with new offerings that leverage our IP targeting technology to deliver
the next generation of addressable television. We have partnered with AT&T
to cover the linear part of the addressable business to make a national
footprint but also have the future of addressable through OTT and CTV where we leverage
the IP targeting technology incorporated in our system to create a true
multiscreen addressable solution.
Weisler: Can you de-duplicate
your data?
Qayyum: Yes. We partner with various companies such as
LiveRamp and Experian for data matching, etc. and we have a superb data team
here internally that warehouses it and does the deduping. We then make it
available to our customers for media buying through our platform, Athena.
Weisler: What are
some of the critical issues that the media industry faces now?
Qayyum: First, there is a lot of noise out there – what companies
say they can do vs. what they can actually do. There are privacy regulations
but data is still in the ‘wild west’ phase of evolution. It would be great to have something that
assigns a value to the data you have. People say, ‘here is the value of my data’
and that data may be wrong or improperly collected and there is no real way to
say that this data is pure, authentic or good.
The other issue is value of media. There are a lot of media
choices as media consumption fragments. You no longer have families gathering
in front of the TV on a Thursday night at 8 pm to watch Seinfeld. So while the
audience and devices fragment, the business still works in silos. There are TV
buyers and digital buyers. We need to get those walls broken so an advertiser can
get the best value for their money. We broke down that barrier for Altice with
a comprehensive media approach and are doing the same for other progressive
marketers.
This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com
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