Revealing Video Martketplace Trends in the Freewheel 1Q23 Report

For the past thirteen years, FreeWheel’s Video Marketplace Report has provided the advertising industry with core assessments of an ever evolving national and global digital video marketplace. Released twice a year, the report includes an analysis of the advertising marketplace, current audience usage habits and an assessment of the programmatic marketplace.

According to Bridget Greaney, Consultant at Comcast FreeWheel, the basis of the analysis was derived from the rich anonymized first party data set culled from the FreeWheel platform on premium video for 1Q23, compared to 1Q22. This yielded key takeaways for the industry. According to Greaney, “We're seeing a shift toward more ad supported tiers with the convergence of publishers and consumers. The publishers are looking for a more financially sustainable approach to streaming often with subscription streaming sites.”

From the consumer side of the business, she indicated that, “Consumers are looking for a more a way to manage their costs as it was with original traditional television. We now see more ad supported premium video content which has resulted in overall ad view growth at 9% across the U.S and EU compared to the same time last year.”

Unsurprisingly, viewer experience is becoming an important factor in ad optimization. “There is the increasing importance of the viewer experience because there is so much more premium video relying on supported content that optimizing the viewer experience becomes vital,” she asserted. “It's always been important,” she averred, “but it's becoming even more so. We think of three different buckets of quantity, quality and relevancy of the ads for the audience and have found that audiences do not mind watching advertisements as long as it doesn't disrupt their overall content viewing experience.” In addition to ad relevancy, viewer experience is impacted by other factors such as device type and screen size. “How does that factor into what publishers may consider when it comes to the viewer experience?” she queried.

Comparing global to U.S. data, she explained that, “one very interesting point is how the distribution platform breaks down. TV everywhere is most prominent in both the U.S. and the EU. But that's where the similarities for distribution platform end. There's a significantly larger use of operator authentication platforms in the EU than in the U.S. and a lot more OTT in the U.S. and that's in part because Europe has a much stronger use of set top boxes whereas in the U.S., FAST channels that are direct to consumer through OTT platforms are more prominent. It is interesting to see that while the majority platform still is the same in both worlds once you start digging in, different regions function a bit differently.” She saw from the data that, “Content curation opportunities vary by platform. Longer form content may be accessed on a larger screen, for example and you can do longer and more mid-roles which enable greater ad loads.” But according to Greaney , oftentimes the threshold for those number of commercials can become disruptive for a viewer. “They have a low threshold. So you have to be more particular.”

In terms of trends, Programmatic is one area which has experienced dramatic growth over the years. “We saw 21% growth in the U.S. in programmatic distribution. It is current 35% of the ad views in the U.S. and 19% in the EU in the first half of this year. It is a growing area of the industry,” she noted.

Finally, when you compare audience targeting to behavioral targeting, the U.S. is more committed to audience targeting while the EU relies more heavily towards behavioral targeting.

Looking ahead, Greaney believes that, “The video marketplace will have more content being ad supported and premium video,” within a hybrid model of video on demand subscription services and FAST channel growth. “This is becoming more of a trend,” she explained, “Evolution has always been the nature of the industry. Think about traditional television and commercial breaks. We're just seeing more and more of that happen across the board. The other piece of this is the importance of viewer experience, especially as the market becomes more saturated for consumers.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Is It Now or Never For Advanced TV?

Changes in the media ecosystem didn’t start with the pandemic. In fact, some aspects of media buying and selling have been in discussion since the 1990s including Advanced advertising, according to Research futurist Bill Harvey, who has been touting the concept of advanced advertising since then.

Harvey participated in a recent Myers Collective Leadership conversation on the future of Advanced TV with a panel that included Kevin Arrix, Senior Vice President, Dish Media Sales, Jamie Power, Chief Operating Officer, Cadent, Marcien Jenckes, President of Advertising, Comcast and moderated by Jack Myers, Founder of MediaVillage.

The Addressable Market Landscape Today

Myers launched the panel with an opinion that I believe many of us share in the industry. “I have been studying the advanced, interactive, VOD, addressable market for a long time,” he began, “and truthfully, I’m not all that clear on who’s who and what’s what.” There is a litany of companies in the media space, who seem to offer opportunities that can overlap or conflict or split the market.  “Help me understand the dynamics,” he asked.

For Powers, one of the reasons that there might be some confusion is, “because we over complicate it.” In looking at the current set top box addressable marketplace with the MVPDs, she explained that there is, “Ampersand that has about 60% of the addressable households … then you have Dish and then Xandr,” which, combined, rounds out to the rest of the 40% of the country. She then noted that they have expanded to IP addressable to get their clients full reach in television. Cadent’s role is that they have, “created a platform to make it easy to execute across all the different screens and channels with consistent workflows and universal data, to get measurement aggregated all in one place” she stated.

“It’s worth noting,” added Arrix, “Advanced television is a holistic category. I would define it as anything that is data driven. I think Addressable is a part of the Advanced television marketplace. From my point of view addressable is defined as deterministic. That is the line that makes something addressable or not.” Ampersand, Dish and Xandr all have deterministic, set top box data, he noted, adding Sling, ATT TV Now, YouTube TV, Google Live and Fubo TV that are also subscriber based MVPDs.

Jenckes believes that the competitive set within advanced television is complementary because, “different distributors reach different households. So in order to reach the full US market you have to figure out ways to work across them.” He agreed with Arrix that, “there are other new forms of distribution that are emerging, like Roku which is a virtual distributor in some sense and there are others with addressable capabilities out there.” He added that once the national networks are enabled, we should expect significant growth in the amount of addressable inventory available in the marketplace.

“I agree with everything that has been said. Addressable is the umbrella term and the one type we have not called out yet is data-driven linear,” explained Harvey who added, “All of this is aimed at better results for advertising. That’s the whole point.” For Harvey, the topology maps out as such: MVPD addressability through a switch from the set top box and the Connected TV which can be a Smart TV or a connected device. The challenge from a data standpoint (which is something Nielsen and Project OAR is tackling) is how to best combine different data streams (such as from a smart TV in a local household or from terrestrial and satellite sources) that may have different latencies, delay times and black screens.

The Addressable Market Marketplace

So where is addressable headed? Forrester predicted in 2000 that addressable advanced television would be a $30billion industry in 2020. “Well here we are in 2020,” Myers noted, “and it’s significantly less. It’s a fraction of that.” He added that, “our forecasts are that in 2025 it will represent about 8-10% of the television ad revenues which will be significant growth but not the $30billion that Forrester recommended we would have today.“ Considering how off predictions were in 2000, one could be forgiven for being a bit skeptical about the robustness of addressable revenue growth in the next few years.

And yet, Jenckes believes that the biggest barrier to addressable growth – the technological challenge of switching from programming to ads - has now essentially been solved. But, he added, “the limitations we are having right now are around the amount of inventory we have available,” which is the two minutes an hour for addressable but even then, this inventory is often used in other ways. “So the challenge is how you improve inventory and how you manage yield. You can sell the inventory in a lot of different ways. I can sell a full spot at a set CPM or a much narrower sliver of that spot for a higher CPM but as the owner of the inventory I have to figure out which is best and how I optimize the value of that.”

The final challenge, Jenckes added, “is measurement and the biggest issue around measurement has been the historical restrictions that Nielsen has imposed on us as an industry,” Addressable is easy to measure because it is impressions based. The challenge is to measure, “the under addressable part of the campaign. What happens to the rest of the spot? Since Nielsen is panel based, if one of the panelists happens to get a different ad it breaks the model because Nielsen doesn’t know if that is one impression or a lot of impressions represented by that one panelist. There is a lot of work that needs to happen on that front,” he concluded.” But,” he then added, “these hurdles have been coming down. There has been a lot of progress around standards, around enablement and even on the measurement front although I think that will be the last frontier.”

For Powers, “the opportunity of addressable has been around for years. But agencies haven’t done it because we haven’t invested in the ad tech,” to facilitate the consistent measurement across platforms and services. In addition, “as a marketplace we are not articulating what the value-proposition is. We are over-complicating it. Advertisers and agencies are not understanding it.” She advocates for the creation of standards and a common currency. "If we cannot even agree … it makes it really confusing and there is not trust in the marketplace to try it.”

According to Arrix, “The key to the future is all about interoperability. The technology is getting better, the process is getting better. There has been a significant amount of progress made in the last few years.” That, with the recognition by the industry that, “data-driven advertising is just smarter,” is leading the industry to a growth surge for addressable.

The Future of Addressable

Propelling a robust future for addressable is data and measurement. In the past, the industry was wedded to the Nielsen panel. “But,” as Harvey pointed out, “right now there is more data each individual party has. The data is now disaggregated into these silos and if we put them all together we have the measurement system of the future. We don’t need panels except for nuances like co-viewing projections and stuff like that. Eventually that goes away too.” He admonished the industry to, “work together. Not just say it like we used to do but actually do it.”

That is the underlying structure for the business. “The big money comes when we get the network inventory. The two minutes an hour is not going to make it a big business. The $30billion comes as soon as you start switching to network addressable,” Harvey concluded.

“It is at the beginning of the game,” Arrix noted. “We see two paths right now. There is the true addressable path where you are breaking up the linear spot into impressions and you end up having the 80/20 rule with the 20% as the target and the 80% is the underlying impressions that you have to figure out how to monetize. That is how we operate now in our addressable business. The other initiative is creative versioning where you are not breaking up the linear spot but you are using deterministic data to deliver the right creative to the right household.”

But the stakes are high and the future is not assured if we all can’t come together as an industry to create standards and work together. “My fear is that unless we do that, we will be relegated to … the weakest player within television,” Jenckes warned. “And if that’s the case, we can all start the clock right now for the full and predictive demise of TV folks have been talking about for a long time. The good news is that because of the progress we’ve had, I don’t think that is going happen. There is a path and it requires collaboration.”

When it comes to business during the pandemic, “is business a bit little softer than usual? Yeah. But I don’t think COVD has a major effect on this,” Powers stated, “The same problems that existed before COVID, exist now. One thing that has happened is that there are more eyeballs watching the television and we know that we will pass the threshold (of 50%) at the end of this year from linear to non-linear viewing. Data is the only thing that is going to win in this marketplace.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

TV Ad Targeting: Lessons From the Digital World

Advancements made in TV ad targeting are proving to be a boon despite linear viewership erosion. A recent Advanced Advertising Summit highlighted how advanced advertising, precision audience targeting, and cross media measurement are adding to television’s assets and fueling its growth.

Advanced Advertising for TV Full Speed Ahead

According to Summit speaker Irwin Gotlieb, senior advisor to WPP, there are no technical obstacles standing in the way of TV ad targeting. The obstacles lie in business operations that continue to silo television and digital as well as in the measurement that has not kept up with the changing ecosystem. “A significant portion in the decline of TV viewing is poor measurement,” Gotlieb stated, as flawed measurement causes undercounting and less inventory.

But TV has an advantage. Its unparalleled reach, combined with newly available granular data, better targets the consumer through the purchase cycle and moves TV down the purchase funnel.

Learning From Digital’s Mistakes

As with any targeting technology, privacy looms large. In a recent article for AdExchanger, Alison Weissbrot wrote, “As digital marketers enter the TV buying world with sophisticated targeting capabilities, identifying the right balance for personalization in the living room is crucial.” At what point does a message become intrusive? While digital ads target individuals, the advantage for television is that ads target households. Relevant ads for the household protect privacy more so than those targeted to a specific individual.

Ad fatigue, ad irrelevancy, and brand safety are other problems faced by digital. TV ad targeting can avoid these issues with frequency capping and a fair ad rotation to avoid fatigue. Additionally, curated ad campaigns, bolstered by data analytics now available in advanced advertising platforms, ensure ad relevancy and brand safety. Jason DeMarco, vice president of Programmatic and Audience Solutions at A+E Networks, told MediaVillage, “We have identified the ability to increase the frequency of advertisers to have a more well-balanced delivery of ads and creative.” This helps the consumer on the user experience side and avoids saturation on the advertiser side.

Learning From Digital’s Successes

TV is also learning from digital by reaching out to smaller advertisers who might have previously been priced out of that marketplace. A recent example, reported MediaVillage, is A+E Network’s Precision1. According to Peter Olsen, executive vice president of Ad Sales and Content Partnerships, it “gives access to people who aren’t traditionally big spenders in TV.”

Some companies are also advancing the connection between digital and TV through initiatives such as CFlight. According to conference speaker Mike Mayer, executive vice president of Sales Solutions at NBCUniversal, CFlight “combines linear with digital impressions and sells deals with total impressions.” Consortiums like Vizio’s Project OAR, which stands for Open Addressable Ready, is another industry initiative.

Currently, addressable advertising for TV is two minutes local time per hour. But nothing will be ready on a national level until the measurement systems can handle it without any manual effort by the back office. However, the lessons drawn from digital will enable TV to more successfully and quickly move into this new advertising paradigm.

This article first appeared in Videa blog.

Challenges and Opportunities in Advanced Television

To many in the industry, advanced advertising holds the promise of optimizing inventory across all dayparts and platforms by targeting consumers no matter where they are and when they are consuming content. 

The benefits to consumers are that ad messaging is relevant and contextual, therefore meaningful and helpful. In a perfect world, the meeting of business commerce at all points of contact in the funnel will be both seamless and measureable.

But there are still a few bumps in the road for Advanced advertising that need to be addressed before it can fulfill its full national potential. A recent panel at the Advanced Advertising Summit discussed how the industry can put it all together.

Growth But Challenges
The Advanced advertising market is “seeing growth,” stated Chris Pizzurro, VP Global Sales, Canoe. Still, Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group, listed three main challenges. “The biggest problem is awareness, then ease of use and then measurement,” he explained. “We need to focus on education and make the big shift from linear TV to thinking about TV in the digital space.” It is important to explain to advertisers why they should invest in advanced advertising, proving to them that it is worth the investment. Steuer explained that the current compensation models are based on grps costs and delivery targets and, as an industry, we should be looking at deliverables in parallel with advanced results. He predicted that, “It would be more efficient and we will have money left over to retarget.”

Challenges But Opportunities
While still essentially local, Advanced is also global. Denise Colella, SVP Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU, noted that Sky TV has access to over 50 million global households enabling, “Global strategies that need to be implemented locally.” Measurement predicated on granular data points that are collected passively, and with privacy compliance, is improving. Jodie McAfee, SVP Sales and Marketing, Inscape, noted that his company, “generates TV viewing data on 10.5 million active TVs that must be connected to internet and opt-in to privacy.” Since all TVs sold today are connected TVs, the future will be more and more on the IP and thus facilitate the collection of all relevant consumption data. Inscape, according to McAfee, has a match key to the TV in the home anchored to the multi-touch devices, enabling better collection of usable data.

All panelists agreed that it is vital to think about the experience of the end users. Ease of use for advertisers is paramount, concluded, Colella. “We believe in an ad supported model that is hassle free,” she explained, “People are less tolerant of tech issues.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

The Update on Advanced Advertising

They say that the more things change the more they stay the same. The recent Advanced Advertising Summit this past week was notable in that the issues facing the industry seem to remain the same year after year. 

But the good news is that the technology is advancing to a point where the ability to seamlessly integrate digital and linear is ever closer to launch. Another positive change, for me, is the presence of more and more research and data executives in attendance at these types of conferences. When I first attended these events, there were few of my research compatriots there. Now we are even on sales panels!

Challenges in Advanced Advertising

Irwin Gottlieb, Senior Advisor WPP, in his keynote, explained that while advanced advertising has been around for years, it is not scalable yet. It is “somewhat scalable today,” he averred, “there are two minutes an hour (available) in local but it is not scalable in terms of support systems or inventory.” On the bright side, according to Gottlieb, there are no technology obstacles because companies such as WPP made deep investments in tech years ago. But there continues to be business obstacles where short term thinking, intra company fiefdoms and local vs national interests have enabled digital to “eat TV’s lunch.”

Scaling from a test to a full buy is another aspect of scalability that brings pain to the industry. Dan Riess, Executive Vice President of Ignite, WarnerMedia, noted, “We can always get clients to start a test but have find ways to scale that will trigger the technology to make it happen.” As a stopgap, he starts manually “to see how it works,” but there are, “so many different datasets, for example, that make it hard to scale.” Ultimately, we “need to move faster.”

Legacy systems are another challenge. Mike Mayer, Executive Vice President Sales Solutions, NBCU, explained that they are taking a “one order one report approach,” but if the order trail takes them from a legacy to legacy system, the buy has to be put together later. “It’s complicated,” he admitted, and it “can’t change overnight.”

Add to this the issue of silos. “Walled gardens make it difficult to develop business,” stated Jennifer Koester, Director of Telco and Distribution Partnership, Google. The solution is, “more standard segments,” noted Maureen Bosetti, Chief Investment Officer, Initiative, who added, “how it is being measured, more standardization and a privacy standard on identification,” with full compliance.

Positives in Advanced Advertising

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Many aspects of advanced advertising are hugely successful, offering manifold opportunities for both digital and television. Although linear TV is declining in usage, TV as a whole is adapting well to this multi-platform, advanced advertising ecosystem. Jason Brown, Senior Vice President, Head of Ad Sales partnerships, Xandr Media, finds that granular data enables us to “reach micro segments,” where the result is that “many advertisers are moving up the funnel,” and “TV is now full funnel for purchases, depending on the category.” This has resulted in “price hikes well beyond inflation.”

If there is one thing that TV does well, it is storytelling. Paul Alfieri, Chief Marketing Officer, Cadent, explained. Within the realm of advanced advertising, “a marketer can tell their story to consumers where they are and when they want. Is it seamless and we close the loop.” TV, according to Alfieri is learning from digital. “The industry has simplified it into one funnel and advertising is getting more sophisticated. It’s happening quickly because of paradigms you have in digital,” he stated.

No one is complacent. Many companies are creating their own systems that address advanced advertising like NBCU’s CFlight which, according to Mayer, “combines linear with digital impressions and sells deal with total impressions.” Others are joining consortiums like Vizio’s Project OAR, which stands for Open Addressable Ready. Project OAR includes Disney’s Media Networks, Turner, Xandr, Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBC Universal, CBS, Discovery, Hearst Television, AMC Networks and Inscape with the goal to define technical standards for linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group, recommended, a “focused on education on both the strategy and investment side.” He sees a big shift from linear TV to a more expansive view of TV in the digital space where we, “can use same strategic targets.”

Conclusion

So, yes, there are still vexing challenges in getting advanced advertising to scale, especially in national inventory, and we still need to agree on standards for measurement, segments and protocols. But the industry is hyper-focused on these addressing issues, often working together and always committed to progress.  That might be the greatest positive of them all.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Championing Television Targeting Through the ATSG

Sometimes the best way to advance initiatives is to band together a group of frenemies and form a consortium. In the case of ATSG, (Advanced Target Standards Group), Discovery, ESPN, Fox, Turner and Viacom shared their expertise to accelerate the use of advanced targets in the buying and selling of TV advertising.

The group was formed in 2016 when data -driven linear deals were fairly new. At the time, “all the participants recognized that there was a need for standard approaches and consistency in defining and measuring advanced audiences,” explained Pete Doe, Chief Research Officer, clypd who also leads the ATSG. “Since then we’ve grown to include representation from more media owners, agencies and CIMM.”

Since their inception, the group has deliverables in the following areas –

• Guidelines to help buyers and sellers manage advanced audience deals and first party data.
• Calculation Principles ensuring consistent and transparent advanced audience definitions and calculations.
• Pre-defined Advanced Audience Definitions.
• Perspectives on data quality for advanced TV data sets and Attribution.

The need for such a group is evident when you compare linear TV to digital. “Linear inventory is finite while digital is effectively infinite, so that leads to very different demand and supply and monetization,” noted Doe. But another key difference is measurement where linear TV with its human-based panel is a counterpoint to digital which is device driven with inferences about humans being drawn from observed online activity and big data matching.

“Typically, the assumption is that a served digital ad is seen by one person, but with television, co-viewing is common. As OTT continues to grow, measurement needs to reflect that more than one person is watching the IP-delivered content on the big screen. The best of both worlds has to be a hybrid measurement of big data sources reflecting device activity, informed by representative panel measurements of people,” concluded Doe.

The next steps for ATSG are to expand their membership to include other parts of the media ecosystem while continuing to work on cross-platform target definition consistency and guidelines on the reliability of advanced audience campaign delivery.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

The Secret to Increasing Unduplicated Reach. Interview with Dataxu’s Mike Baker

Nine years ago, a group of data scientists from MIT Labs formed a partnership to more fully explore the use of data science in advertising and marketing. 

From this, dataxu was born. “I think what is interesting about our starting premise was the idea that the world of media, marketing and advertising would benefit from stronger data analytics,” explained Mike Baker, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of dataxu. 

In those early days, it was difficult to get upper management at media companies to think beyond the standard datasets because the business model greatly relied on syndicated data research to track the business. But today the use of data science, algorithms and multi-sourced datasets to track the media business has become, as he noted, “orthodox wisdom.”

Dataxu focuses on the value of advanced television, specifically connected TV, to enable advertisers to more fully and tactically reach their audiences across all platforms. His work with agencies has not only accelerated the formation of true cross platform buying and planning but also helps to herald a new way of thinking among digital-only buyers – that TV still has immense value and is vital to any media plan. 

Baker shared some of his candid thoughts on the subject.

Charlene Weisler: What type of company is leading the charge in advanced TV curiosity and adoption?

Mike Baker: The leaders in using technology are mid-market agencies, many of whom are seizing on connected TV in particular as an opportunity to grow a TV practice that they haven’t had previously. Notably, they are doing so through their own self-serve tool which is a do it yourself processing interface for data analysis. It’s powerful for a smaller agency that doesn’t have a large traditional planning and buying department for TV. Mid-market agencies have gotten on board early with self-serve tools that offer sophisticated data analysis and are currently investing aggressively.

The other leading group is direct-to-consumer companies, many of whom have maxed out on Facebook and Google Search. They are looking for new channels and new opportunities to bring their data-driven planning and buying to the richer palette of video and TV. What they find appealing are the digital characteristics of connected TVs, the ability to immediately understand who is exposed to an ad and connect that to sales and to quickly understand Return on Ad Spend. 

Weisler: What is the TV opportunity at large and what should every agency know, whether they are just getting started or currently immersed in Next Gen TV?

Baker: There is a very dramatic transition happening among viewers of TV as to how they’re choosing to watch TV which is increasingly on-demand, done typically through streaming. We talk about connected TVs which are the large TVs typically in the living room connected to a streaming device. So the first thing to note is that traditional linear TV audiences are declining. Which means that simply doing what you did last year will lead to a worse result for your client. 

We now see video as the fastest growing part of the media and digital marketplace. That growth is occurring through mobile devices for short form video and TVs for long form, high quality content. If you are an agency, more and more turns on your capabilities with data analytics for your point of differentiation and your ability to win new clients and retain valuable business. It’s a great opportunity for agencies to build a practice, get new customers and grow their businesses in an area that is up for grabs because data sits between connected TVs, traditional linear TV and digital teams. I find that larger agencies are having a political stand-off between these groups which gives the innovative agencies a leg up – the opportunity to integrate digital and linear to create more competitive solutions to their clients.

Weisler: For agencies just getting started, what's essential for them to know?

Baker: Most agencies aren’t aware that you can target specific audiences on TV. You can take cookie data or DMP data and translate that into streaming devices to import a digital audience over into dynamic ad insertion in long form TV content. But you need a tool to help you with identity management that is privacy compliant. Dataxu offers one, which has become one of the fastest growing parts of our business. It is now possible to translate traditional digital audiences that have been curated by DMPs into the new world of connected TV. 

Agencies just getting started also need to know that there are many premium programming brands available. The premium inventory on connected TVs - those familiar top tier programming names like NBC, Turner and Fox – is available for purchase programmatically. We at dataxu have created a special private marketplace directly with publishers to insure that the volume is there for advertisers who want to buy on a spot basis. This is incredibly easy to do compared to negotiating with a national network or even local scatter buys.

Weisler: For the most sophisticated agencies, what wins and challenges are they sharing?

Baker: What sophisticated agencies are doing is tackling the next key problem as viewership fragments between the set top box, streaming device and mobile phone. We look across the total viewership of TV audiences and understand, with great precision, how to maximize unduplicated reach of an ad message. TV has traditionally been the greatest vehicle for broad reach that makes consumers aware of new products and services. It’s still very powerful, but its power is winnowing as fewer people choose to watch traditional linear TV. So advanced agencies are using analytics to understand the unduplicated reach that can be brought to an overall TV plan by using connected TV. To do that you need to join linear and digital viewership data - something we do through Dataxu’s One View. The results are powerful. We are working with an agency that has a large automotive client. They were able to predict the growth in unduplicated reach of a new model launch ad by about +20% through a connected TV investment. That investment was shown only to households that hadn’t viewed the ad through a traditional TV connection. 

Weisler: Do you see key differences between agencies in TV implementation?

Baker: Definitely. Agencies that have integrated and trained their digital and traditional TV buying teams seem to be ahead of those who are struggling with siloed teams. In 2019 you’ll increasingly see the TV teams re-formed to bring the digital know-how and the traditional linear expertise together.

Weisler: There's been A LOT of Buzz around LiveRamp's Identity Link launch. Can you explain it and how it empowers digital and TV buyers across brands and agencies?  

Baker: Identity Link enables brands and agencies to target specific consumers in a privacy compliant manner with a high degree of confidence. Dataxu’s partnership with LiveRamp makes us the only demand side platform that can translate those identities and execute them in digital and TV without losing any of the audience size. We are seeing a lot of advertiser interest, especially among Retailers and Financial Services companies who have evolved extensive first party databases. Oftentimes these kind of data-driven firms want to use their CRM files to build media audiences whether that’s a one-to-one basis or as a seed for creating lookalike audiences. For these kind of advertisers, the ability to move from data into action with the LiveRamp/dataxu partnership is unique and powerful. We look forward to seeing this initiative continue to scale.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com