Automated Ad Sales: Past, Present, and Future

Automated ad sales have been around longer than some might think. The first central ad server was actually introduced in 1995 for online advertising, according to Clearcode.

Over the course of the past few years, media companies have realized the value of automated ad sales beyond digital, and it’s currently expanding into a range of platforms.

Early Days of Advertising

Ad buying started as human to human interaction. Research departments would track performance trends and create estimates for sales. Agency planners would find the best fit for their client’s target consumer. Then, agency buyers and media sellers would meet to negotiate price, delivery expectations, and contract guarantees that would be executed over the broadcast or calendar year.

Transitioning to Automated Advertising

With the rollout of the internet and digital platforms came the ability to more easily capture data at various points in the consumer experience. More data-driven systems entered the marketplace and, as a result, merged the planning and buying processes. Digital, with its real-time capabilities, enabled a seamless planning to execution process, with buys electronically moving from the spreadsheet or database to ad server.

For those with a deep history in media sales like Arlene Manos, president emeritus of advertising sales at AMC Networks, data has been the game-changer.

In an interview with Manos, she noted that “Selling is now more applicable to specialized projects, which go beyond running a straight ad, such as sponsorship of events and integrated marketing.”
Direct response sales departments, in particular, aren’t needed if proper automation is in place. Sales digitization through automated advertising enables sales executives to forgo the elemental aspects of sales and apply their talents more strategically.

The Television Marketplace

Today, digital supply and demand marketplaces streamline processes by instantaneously calculating availability, negotiating price and CPM, delivering the units, and solving the problem of under-delivery closer to real-time. And, because the process removes human fallibility, there is also greater transparency and control for both buyer and seller, delivering greater value to both sides of the transaction.

But for some, the movement to a data-centric automated ad sales market has resulted in a stand-off. “Agencies, media companies, and independent tech companies are all building proprietary platforms,” said Hanna Gryncwajg, VP of enterprise accounts at TVSquared. Agencies believe they should have the process control because “they know their client’s marketing goals and needs” while media companies that have invested heavily in platforms and processes “don’t want to give up the ability to optimize their content, data, and platforms across their asset portfolio.”

The struggle for control is still being played out, but it’s clear that automated ad sales’ ability to streamline processes and provide transparency across the selling-buying ecosystem delivers value for content owners and distributors while also maximizing ad targetability. “Content is no longer king,” Gryncwajg asserted. “It is audiences that are king and finding an audience match that provides ROI to a marketer via automation always wins.”

This article first appeared on the Videa blog.

Looking Ahead on Tomorrow’s Tech Advancements

In a previous article I asked industry experts to recall their most amazing technological advancements from their early careers. Now I ask them to look forward and give me their best technological advancement predictions for 2018. My prediction is that more collaboration between companies will result in a more standardized system for buying, selling and tracking media. I also see A.I. playing a greater role in establishing behavioral patterns that can be used to craft content and target advertising. 

Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director, CIMM: In 2018, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers will launch an open standard audio watermark that can embed content and ad identifiers from EIDR and Ad-ID, along with time stamps and station identifiers.  This will hopefully bring innovation to automating TV workflows, and in the ability to track playout and measure audiences in real time!  

Sheryl Feldinger, Media Consultant: I'm fortunate to work with some tech-forward companies, so I see a lot of early adopter behavior at large organizations. In 2018, I think more companies will take a page from the social media playbook and embrace video chat in the work place. It works great, and does not require expensive equipment. The more traditional media companies are still a bit camera shy, but I hope that changes because video chat is as close as you can get to F2F meetings without leaving your time zone.

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia: The biggest technological advancement in 2018 won't be a new technology per se, but better utilization of technology that we already have. In 2018, the biggest advancement will be on the technology user side. Every day, more and more people working in the media industry are learning how to better exploit technology, whether it is the cloud or machine learning or predictive analytics. The biggest technological impacts this year will be driven by people, not some new code.

Brad Adgate, Independent Media Researcher:  I think the use of Artificial Intelligence to help manage the amount of data that are being used to make media recommendations will gain traction in 2018 and in the years ahead.

Caroline Horner, Co-Founder, Spicy Tequila: In 2018 it will be 1) Addressable hits scale with advancement from Spectrum, Comcast, OTT/Smart TVs, and 5G and ATSC 3.0.  And other intermediaries. 2) Blockchain technologies prove capable of resolving ID across distribution points. 3) MTA and AI optimize performance in tighter and more responsive cycles. And in 2019 I believe that it will be the re-emergence of the creative role in ad effectiveness.

Mitch Oscar, Advanced TV Strategist, USIM:  I predict that we will still be grappling with the technology and its functionality. We can now fast forward but what if the technology was able to extract the commercials so if I watch in the recorded mode I did not even have to fast forward. Some services are offering that capability now with a new setting. I see that as a real concern going forward. I also believe that addressability was introduced in 1996 and it is going to happen any day now. 

Arlene Manos, President Emeritus, AMC Networks: Greater expansion of OTT, and increased social media application.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Looking Back on the Technological Advancements of Yesterday

At this time of great disruption in the media industry, I find it interesting to look back and realize that disruption in media was always a constant. The systems we used to measure content continually changed, improved and even disrupted our ways of doing business. I recall that, when I was an intern at NBC years ago, I was impressed that my computer did not require punch cards. Am I dating myself? Probably. 

As we embark on 2018, I asked others in the industry to answer the question: “When you first started in the industry, what was the most amazing device/application/program/aspect/item at the time?” One person noted that in the 1990s when she was at Discovery “it was PCs and the internet. That technology changed everything.” For others, it was a range of other advancements:

Arlene Manos, President Emeritus, AMC Networks: When I started at A&E, we did a lot by spreadsheet. Someone I hired as an intern’ recently mentioned in an article, that he shared a computer with me since they were scarce. The first system we were on was Columbine, followed by a Nesbitt system for planning and posting. Don’t remember any more than that.

Mitch Oscar, Advanced TV Strategist, USIM:  In 1999 it was the introduction of TiVo, The inventor came to my office to talk to me about advertising and TiVo’s functionality. At about the same time, the head of IPG called me and said, “So advertising is dead?” TiVo was momentous because everyone was worried about the impact of two functionalities – the recording of programming and the ability of fast forwarding to skip commercials. We wondered if the speed be would be fast or slow enough to see the brand messaging.

Caroline Horner, Co-Founder, Spicy Tequila: Well, this will show my age...a desktop PC with a spreadsheet and database application and for data...LNA, MRI, Scanner data (IRI, I think.) and IMS (I started in a healthcare agency.) Then it was online services (pre-AOL) and then anything internet… and a laptop, cellphone and modem. Then there was the introduction of Java and JavaScript and dynamic webpage generation with ad serving, SAS enterprise miner, set top box data, mobile video, growth of marketing database companies, Programmatic. Addressable TV!

Kathy Newberger, Advanced Advertising Consultant: I was working in local ad sales at the time and we said it was going to be digital ad insertion. We were going from six networks that were inserted using tape decks to sixteen networks using digital equipment. We thought that was going to be amazing … and it was. Now it’s amplified by 500 times more – every network is insert-able. And on top of that is OTT.

Brad Adgate, Independent Media Researcher:  I think the most important introduction early in my career were spreadsheets. Long gone products like Lotus 1-2-3 and afterwards Quattro Pro were being used. Before that, workers used those large green accounting pads and calculators to fill in the data, took a lot longer and more error prone.

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia: In early 1993, I was working in "new media" helping newspaper companies develop ad and content strategies for early online services and partnerships with telcos and cable companies and had a chance to play with the Mosaic browser. It was pretty clear, even then, that a user managed rendering engine like the browser would change the media industry, particularly for print companies with text and still photos, which rendered well even without high speed internet. It certainly did.

Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director, CIMM: Back in 1982, we were analyzing clickstream data from set top boxes in a Pilot Test for Time Teletext, which was a text and graphic service similar to the early AOL, but delivered via the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) of a channel on Time Warner’s cable system!  I never thought it would take this long to get to nationally representative samples of Return Path Data!

Sheryl Feldinger, Media Consultant: I often comment to my 16-year-old that the biggest difference between growing up today versus the 1970s is the pace of life. Everything happens so much faster today. The pace of communication, especially, flies at warp speed. Confession: early in my career, fax machines were a game changer. They revolutionized the work place. No longer could you tell the client, "We will messenger it to your office first thing tomorrow." The new retort was, "Why wait? You can fax it tonight!" It didn't matter that the edges of the thermal paper curled. All of a sudden, deadlines got pushed up and we all had to work faster.

Next article – Looking Ahead to 2018.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Getting Ready for the Upfronts with the PeopleFront

This year’s PeopleFront focused on three main pillars of the media marketplace – people, outcomes and ROI – and offered discussion viewpoints from “the street”, the research, the data and the buyers and sellers.

Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of Simulmedia and the host of the PeopleFront, presented the big picture when he said, “There is a consensus that the next year or two will bring significant change.  TV is continuing to make money and is expected to make money for some time. There are steps that TV companies can do to extend the duration and profitability.” 

Here are the different views on possible solutions:

View from the Street

Change, consumer behavior evolution and the limitations of the measurement in a world of ever increasing pools of data cause a confluence of challenges. “The nature of what is TV is fluid,” noted Brian Weiser, Senior Analyst, Pivotal, “Younger demos change behavior more rapidly. Some behavior is not currently measured that would make consumption data more healthy.” He explained that there was a recent CRE insights study that showed that TV is ambient in a world of multi-tasking. “There is still an important role for TV,” he assured, “but it is changing” depending on the degree of programming engagement.

On the ad side of the equation, Anthony DiClemente, Managing Director, Nomera, said, “The U.S. ad growth is robust and we have upped our forecast. TV is showing unexpected resilience.” That is this season. The projection may change in two or three years as Anthony admitted, “Automation of TV ad selling is causing concern.”

Affiliate fees are an area of current concern, however. There are persistent concerns regarding cord cutting and shaving and the further consolidation in the distribution space. “We are shifting to larger and more scaled companies,’ said Anthony, “What is media doing with their cash? Are they investing organically? Are they automating? Or are they buying stock back? We applaud companies organically and investing in the right way such as in infrastructure, programming etc.”

What the Research Says
The ARF recently completed an ambitious series of studies to measure how advertising works. "We collected 40 industry leaders together, committed $1million investment on three studies over 5000 campaigns, twelve years of data, $375B in advertising spend in 41 countries across over 100 categories  in the areas of Cross platform ROI, improve creative and mobile mastery," explained ARF CEO Gayle Fuguitt. The insights were that advertisers need to invest across platforms, combine traditional and digital media, optimize digital by capping frequency and unify their creative while keeping in mind the unique characteristics of each platform to optimize performance.

“Targeting purchasers by direct match at scale increases ROI,” explained Bill Harvey, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, TiVo Research. “TiVo Research proved it with multiple advertisers. Now Simulmedia is proving it by running 72 campaigns for advertisers in 2015 using the same methods and showing ROI improvements in the same range as TiVo i.e. up to +250%. Simulmedia is also reducing waste frequency and is targeting day of week for recency. An example of a campaign where the same brand’s other TV had half the impressions in the excessive frequency range, the Simulmedia campaign had fewer than 5% in that bucket,” he concluded.

Daniel Slotwiner, Director Advertising Research at Facebook, recently conducted a study with Neuro-Insight on the coordination of TV advertising with digital to get the best impact. “We measured memorability, brand linkage, likability linkage and found the most efficient way to drive awareness.”

Connecting the Dots with Data

There is more data available than ever before and research companies are actively engaged in creating tools to maximize the value of this data. But there are challenges. In the case of Nielsen, Steve Hasker, President and COO explained that, “We have been working with STB data for 7 years, matching it up with credit card data and working on an independent currency measurement using the panel with large databases.” But it has not been easy. “We are chipping away to get access to STB data,” he added, “Most of today's STB data owners can't supply STB data over night.”

Omar Tawakoi, SVP, GM Oracle Data Cloud, said, “We are running a data cloud. Having a census approach is very important. In digital everything is census based and things are starting to get really interesting in TV. We are connecting offline sales to digital activities and want to prove that TV ads drive sales offline.”

“My clients only care if we moved the needle,” said Wes Nichols, Co-Founder, Marketshare, SVP Chief Strategy Officer. “They really don't care about measurement or the brilliance of a campaign etc. There is a huge credibility gap between marketing and the C-suite. We are cobbling together data based measurement and need to get a fuller assessment of our investment.”

Buyers and Sellers of the Eve of the Upfront

What about content providers and buyers? From the sellers side, Arlene Manos, President national Ad Sales, AMC, said, “Data has begun to figure into our discussion. But as a single company, we can’t effect change alone. We are using data to change internally and to figure out how to get viewers acquainted with our diverse programming.”

On the buyers side, Yin Woon Rani, VP, U.S. Marketing at Campbell’s, noted that, “Traditional advertisers take a TV centric viewpoint.  But digital is changing the nature of expectations. It is not that easy to compare between mediums so the real task for marketers is deciding where dollars can go across the media pool.”

But, there has been “an evolution over several years. We are getting more find tuned beyond demographics,” according to M’lou Walker, CEO, Matrixx. Because Matrixx in is the consumer healthcare industry, M’lou said that “Knowing when our consumers are sick is more important for us. We need to find who she is at that moment of illness. So we take segmentation data and find consumers at different points and roll it all up.  TV plus digital gets us much further. We can get to consumer in her moment.”

As Dave concluded, the industry is now “More evolutionary than revolutionary but the evolutionary pace is picking up. We are swimming in data. How to can we best operationalize it?” That will remain the burning question as we are about to enter the next upfront.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBlogger.com

Addressable Advertising Pushes the Television Evolution

The recent B&C Content Show dedicated a full half day to discussions regarding the advancements in addressable advertising, TV programmatic and transforming traditional advertising. But it was also a love song to STB data, segmentation, ROI data and analytics.

Addressable advertising is reaching scale according to Jaime Power of GroupM’s Mobi Media who said that the footprint is currently "42 million HH and expected to grow to 60 million HH" with a steady expansion from local into scatter and national outplays." But he cautioned that "addressable will not replace traditional TV because we need traditional TV for reach." I agree with Power to a point because I believe that traditional TV itself needs to evolve from a spots and dots sales model to segmentation and proof of ROI. Addressable may facilitate traditional TV’s evolution especially as addressability rolls out to a more nationalized  distribution and as television itself becomes more digital in the world of 100% smart TVs.

The Traditional TV Model is Changing
The television business has been undergoing stress and change. Sales are down across many networks and projections indicate that the trend could continue. When asked if Addressable can save the TV environment, Power replied that "TV has to evolve- it is unrecognizable compared to ten years ago. We need to understand the new landscape and find ways to measure it. Not all customers are the same. We need to need to get to the custom level and reach core segments. Like purchase data where we can locate not just households with a dog but households that buy a certain dog food. You need to prove you can steal share by honing in on people's viewing behavior. We are using STB data and working close with analytics teams."

Research and Analytics are Critical

Virtually every panel touched on the need for measurement, targeting, analytics and usable data sets as part of their company's addressable initiative. Ben Tatta of Cablevision explained that "Data analytics is a new thing for television. Now we are conducting forensics on the data, on exposure and on response. (we recognize the ) importance of first party data. For the first time advertisers can use their own customer file. Age and gender have been proxies. We now don't have to do modeling. We are literally counting Sales." Keith Kazerman of DirectTV fielded "over 500 campaigns this year where we go into deep analytics that are more than age and gender."

What is Big Data?
A panel on big data moderated by Barry Frey of the DPAA was tasked with defining big data. According to Chris Pizzurro of Canoe, "For us big data is about a ton of small data. We dig in and bring up insights from that. We measure each individual ad." Eric Schmitt of Allant had a slightly different view saying "We see big data and bigger data. Big data is 120 million TV households. Bigger data is activity data. We bring them together in a privacy safe way getting to audience based models across a range of platforms."

Sales Feels the Pressure

The pressures on the traditional TV sales model are coming from several angles. AMC’s Arlene Manos said that “TV advertising has to change. We didn't have the tools and weren't asked for the accountability but now we have accountability in digital and they want it in TV.” Mobi’s Seth Walters cast a more somber note explaining that “a clunky interface is part of the reason that viewers go OTT. Netflix is another reason. Roku is far easier to navigate and in some cases they are faster. Viewers can easily and quickly identify content that matters to them. What is the role of TV advertising once that occurs?” The sales solution? Brian Stempeck of The Trade Desk believes that it is “inevitable that TV will go programmatic.”

Despite all of the hand wringing I believe that traditional television has succeeded for over 60 years because it responds to change and continuously evolves. There has always been competition from other platforms from radio and print to digital devices. While we continue to grapple with how to evolve the business model in this changing environment, new successful solutions will be found. As Adam Lowy of Dish concluded,“Eventually we will get there. TV is the first screen.” I agree.

First published, in abbreviated form, on MediaBizBloggers.com