Rewarding the Best in Advanced TV and Audience Buying. The ABBI Awards.

What makes an Advanced TV company great? According to Gabe Greenberg, CEO and Founder, GABBCON, it might be winning an ABBI Award. “The ABBI Awards (Audience Based Buying Innovation) awards are presented to companies who are leading innovation and success in advanced TV audience based buying,” noted Greenberg. 

This year his organization received over 100 entries and winners are selected by judges – not affiliated with GABBCON management.  This year the judges hailed from such companies as Nestle, L’Oréal, Hershey’s, Columbia Sportswear and agency leaders from OMD, Ocean Media, RPA and Assembly.

“We think the awards are quite important because there are no other awards series that recognize the very best in advanced TV and audience buying,” he stated and then added, “At a time when audience based buying is critical in the TV and Video market, we think it is critical to recognize and award those who are leading the market with success and innovation.”

I sat down with Greenberg and asked him the following questions:

Weisler: What makes a company the best in advanced TV and audience buying?

Greenberg: The judging for all our awards was done by brand and agency leaders so I cannot speak for them and what they were looking for. For GABBCON this is also a hard question to answer because it will vary from local to national from broadcaster to adtech provider. In my mind, what separates the wheat from the chaff is the sophistication of the data they apply, the level of automation they deliver and the inventory quality they offer – but that is my opinion, not that of the judges.  

Weisler: Have the criteria for the best changed over the past 2 years?

Greenberg: Yes, they certainly have. During last year’s awards, we judged on a combination of crowd sourced industry voting with GABBCON voting. This year 100% of all voting was done by executives from brands like Hershey’s, Nestlé, RPA and OMD with a total of 12 judges.

Weisler: Where do you see advanced advertising right now in the marketplace?     

Greenberg: Advanced advertising is at a very exciting tipping point where more and more companies are taking advantage of advanced data, technology and AI. TV itself is probably the best it has ever been and with the complement of Advanced advertising may finally begin to see dollars move back from digital to TV. This is an important area of focus for GABBCON events and clearly one hundreds of executives from big brands and agencies are all trying to leverage and figure out. As the ANA and others put digital under the microscope, advanced advertising lends a nice alternative in a medium that has proven to deliver and is fraud free and brand safe. Our consulting practice is seeing tremendous growth from brands, broadcasters, station groups and agencies who are trying to ride the wave of success and change.

Weisler: Where do you see it in 5 years?

Greenberg: In 5 years, I think we will no longer be calling it advanced. We will just be talking about TV and Video.

Weisler: How can advanced TV buying improve and who needs to be the change agent?

Greenberg: Just like brands and agencies lead the wave to digital, they need to lead again. Fortunately, many are. The move to advanced advertising has not been entirely because of its value and quality. Initially much of the interest and change was driven by necessity because of walled gardens who were improperly scoring their own homework, digital properties delivering non-human traffic and fraud or large players publishers delivering non-brand safe impressions.

The market is improving every day and there are any number of leaders paving the way with the intent to harmonize data and technology. We still have a lot of work to do together. However, some examples of progress, although early, are OpenAP, new addressable players like Spectrum Reach or expanded efforts from Comcast NBCUniversal and live solutions that allow for DAI from Hulu and Sony. Every month we have more scale and better solutions. It is a very exciting time for TV and Video.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Politics is the Biggest Challenge to Audience Based Buying. An Interview with GABBCON’s Gabe Greenberg.

Gabe Greenberg, CEO and co-founder of GABBCON (Global Audience Based Buying Conference and Consultancy), has an extensive media background working on both the client side (ADT Dealer and Microsoft) and the sales/marketing sides of the advertising marketplace (The Trade Desk, Delivery Agent, Autobytel, Bigfoot Interactive, Vibrant Media). 

But a standard corporate job was not in the cards for Greenberg. “I have had an entrepreneurial spirit since I was quite young, I get it from my father/family,” he confessed. “I have always wanted to help shape the market and be part of something bigger which led to Tina and I starting GABBCON. We saw a gap in the market that we seized and we have not looked back,” he added.  

Charlene Weisler: What are the challenges to audience based buying and selling? And how to overcome?

Gabe Greenberg: The biggest challenges today are political. Technology is no longer an issue. The politics within different sales organizations and the potential for some of them to try to setup additional walled gardens due to unwarranted fears about the threat to price is our biggest obstacle today. Our warning to these companies is to be careful for what you wish for. Don’t make the same mistakes digital did. We have an opportunity to really change the market with new channels like TV, Audio and DOOH – we need to be sure we do the right thing. I think we will (especially with Open AP and other endeavors that have popped up on the periphery.

Standardization is also quite important and GABBCON along with other groups are trying to lead the charge here.  

Weisler: Where do you see audience based buying and selling headed in the next three years? How much of the market will it command? 

Greenberg: As ATSC and BlockChain take hold, video and TV will be a more dominant force in audience buying. NBC betting $1Bn this year on audience is just a tip of the iceberg. I expect that as much as 25% of the TV/Video market will be planned, bought and optimized on audience using some level of sophisticated buying in the next three years. That is quite a significant number (it is larger than the entire programmatic pie today). New channels like audio and DOOH are also taking off and will accelerate the growth of audience based buying (truly cross device)

Weisler: Is Linear TV dead? 

Greenberg: HA No – nor will it be for some time (if ever). TV is the strongest it has ever been and with ATSC 3.0 I expect that TV will begin to take dollars back away from digital.

Weisler: How will the IoT impact audience based buying and selling if at all? 

Greenberg: I do not expect that it will have a negative impact – it will create new device ID’s and targeting opportunities that can be quite exciting.

Weisler: Tell me about the Abbi awards. When did it first launch? Why was it created? What do you hope to achieve from it? Who participated? 

Greenberg: The ABBI awards (Audience Based Buying Innovation Awards) launched last year for the first time – the second annual ABBI’s are open for entries now. We created them because we did not see enough celebration of innovation in the market, in spite of all the word count about the topic and therefore we set the ABBI’s in motion to celebrate all the great innovation in media and marketing as well as media and marketing leadership that is happening. 

The awards range from tech platform innovation (DSP, DMP, SSP of the year) to agency and media/marketing leadership innovation to campaign and creative innovation. We have some of the categories other awards might (Cross Device Campaign of the year, Best use of data, etc.) but we are all about celebrating innovation and audience based buying. For GABBCON it’s all about audience in everything we do. The award itself is even quite innovative in it’s design. Last year’s winners marveled in it’s size and innovative design.

Weisler: What is your recap of this year’s upfront? Who are the winners and the losers?

Greenberg: This year’s upfront has been a mixed year – but for the most part I think the winners are the content owners and producers.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com