Secret Meetings to Advance Advanced TV

Even something like the Secret Society cannot be kept secret for too long. On a very rainy day in New York City, the room was packed with attendees. 

The most recent meeting focused on, as Mitch Oscar, USIM Advanced Television Strategist, noted, “Dialoguing issues on Advanced TV.” Speakers from networks, agencies, data specialists and research companies offered their perspectives on the advantages, challenges and futures of Advanced TV, Addressable TV and Programmatic.

Data has never been more important to ad tech and the systems that are emerging for targeted advertising. In an important next step, some of the walled gardens are coming down as the industry is starting to coalesce around shared interests. Since the Secret Society meeting, Viacom, Fox and Turner announced their joint effort called OpenAP.

The full adoption of Advanced TV still has its strengths and challenges. Obviously, the ability to more finely hone an ad message delivered to the right audience makes Advanced TV a ‘must consider’. Yet, the available inventory is still somewhat restricted and issues like workflow, fragmentation and walled gardens need to be addressed. And we need more overall industry participation to accelerate progress.

Strengths and Challenges

      Ø  Targeting. Finally there is a way to go beyond age and gender in a meaningful way. For those of us who have been in the industry for a while, the opportunity to target is seismic. “In 1975 when I was negotiating for broadcast TV, it was the first year that the guarantees were based on age and gender and not household,” Oscar reminisced, “At that time we said, ‘households don’t buy products, people do.’ Forty plus years later, we are looking at households that have people of different ages and genders that exhibit behavioral characteristics as behavioral targets. We are getting closer to targeting people who might be interested in the product and eventually purchase it.”

      Ø  Inventory. However, there are not enough national opportunities to target. The inventory currently available in Advanced TV is two minutes of local inventory per hour.  

      Ø  Workflow and Fragmentation. “Workflow for audience systems does not exist. We need a universal workflow instead of taking bits and pieces from various media companies,” Oscar noted. But even before the workflow, there is a need to address the myriad of platforms, networks and data sources that silo efforts. “The most important challenge is how many different platforms and data sources there are,” he continued, “Seven addressable TV platforms, 15 programmatic platforms, 6 contextual audience networks that offer 31 flavors of products, and over 68 data sources across these platforms makes it difficult to evaluate and implement.”

      Ø  Participation. Getting more clients on board and involved is paramount according to Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia. “It is critical that the Advanced TV industry work harder to get clients - the marketers - much more directly involved in development,” he stated, “Customer and purchase data is the key fuel in all Advanced TV applications and it is the client that controls that data.”

      Ø  Marketing Focus. Demonstrate the value of Advanced TV. Morgan believes, “We need to make it more about marketing - driving provable sales, ROI and other desired business outcomes - than advertising - delivering impressions and other media metrics. The future of advertising is about performance. That is where Advanced TV efforts should be focused.”

The Next Step

Arguably the next step in advancing Advanced TV is working together towards shared interests.Enter OpenAP. Audrey Steele, EVP, Sales Research Insights and Strategy, Fox Networks Group, spoke about OpenAP as a way to break down some of the walled gardens, set some level of standardization and accelerate the adoption of Advanced TV advertising. She explained that the three partners, Viacom, Fox and Turner, are “Frenemies,” who are, “similar in intent but the execution of sales inventory is different.” Steele noted that OpenAp:

     Ø  Offers the ability to optimize existing base buys.

     Ø  Is unified in need for standardization.

     Ø  Offers the promise of digital programmatic.

     Ø  Enables the most persuasive message for ad placement.

     Ø  Is an immersive environment with digital precision for your brand message

     Ø  Is fraud free and is transparent.

The Future

Some media executives believe that the future of Advanced TV is now and is quickly enlisting many more players. Morgan stated, “I think that we are going to see a significant acceleration of data-optimized linear TV ads, particularly as we see big enterprise tech companies like Oracle and Adobe getting more involved and as we see the big digital players like Facebook and Google getting more and more involved in TV advertising.”

Others think that despite the recent advancements, progress still seems slow. “In 1996 addressability was thought to happen any day now,” posited Oscar, “So we do have more platforms rolling out. But its deployment slow. Right now with Addressable TV, we have 34 million homes that can get addressable linear TV commercials and 19 million in the ad supported VOD addressable realm. That is 20 years later and we are nearly in half the country of 118 million homes.”

For me, while it has taken decades to reach this point, the technological rollout is accelerating and the industry is embracing all of the elements of a successful Advanced TV marketplace. So I believe that the future is now, as long as we keep the channels of discussion and cooperation flowing.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

FOX Takes AIM at Data, Programmatic and Advanced Advertising

There continues to be a myriad of fascinating and creative data-fueled solutions introduced into the sales process by media networks this year. One of the more recent ones is FOX’s AIM which, according to Audrey Steele, SVP Sales Research & Marketing at FOX Broadcasting, offers “a suite of advanced advertising tools that use consumer target and behavioral data to offer varying degrees of campaign optimization flexibility.”

It started with a series of meetings and discussions with select clients. “Needs are different agency to agency and client to client,” Steele explained, so with that in mind, the FOX team of executives and a group of expert consultants in data, technology and engineering, set out to create a system whose core guarantees on client targets for both base and incremental buys.  “We’re putting our money where our mouth is and holding ourselves to a more meaningful standard.”   

FOX AIM offers four products, according to Steele:

• Optimized Audience Read: Uses Fox’s proprietary data engine to improve campaign performance by recommending commercial inventory based on advertiser-supplied precision targets and by providing a tCPM (targeted cost per thousand) read of consumer audience delivery. 

• Target Audience Guarantee: Provides a single linear tCPM guarantee across Fox Networks using Fox’s premier data enabled television platform to forecast and optimize campaign performance.

• Multi-Platform Guarantee: Offers a platform-agnostic premium content audience package with a tCPM guarantee across linear and nonlinear properties.

• Linear Programmatic Buying: Empowers advertisers to buy Fox national inventory against advanced audience targets within a private marketplace. This allows for integration with leading media buying and demand-side platforms.

The data components of this initiative include a mix of 3^rd party linear and nonlinear data sets and custom first and second party data that ultimately will be leveraged in a unified fashion for multiplatform buys, enabling true cross-screen optimization. 

A particularly satisfying aspect of this initiative for me is that the Research department has played an active and integral role in the development of the product. “Research has been central to bringing together the partners, data sets and measurement objectives,” Steele noted, “but developing tools that capitalize on the value of attention in our content, in this case by making relevance a key part of the audience deliverable, is a primary focus of several areas of the company,” which is also developing a suite of engagement ad products. 

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Data, Data Everywhere in the Upfront. An Overview - Part 1

I have been attending (and contributing to) the upfronts for many years but this appears to be the first year that so many networks are parlaying their innovative Research / Big Data / Analytics expertise as an integral part of their sales promise. “We are at an inflection point,” announced Turner President of Broadcast Sales, Donna Speciale at their recent upfront, “Data and content are officially hitched.” 

There has been a great deal of press on each individual networks’ data innovation and  when you gather all of the pronouncements together, it is a fairly impressive tidal wave of Research that seems to be upending and guiding the media sales process. All in all, it is all very heady for those of us with years toiling in the back offices of Research.

I attended the Turner upfront where Speciale announced, “We are in the Wild West of metrics” as she capped off her presentation with a Big Data video ... preceding all the glossy individual network programming videos and announcements that have always been an Upfront staple. Linda Yaccarino, NBCU Chairman, Advertising Sales and Client Partnerships, announced at her upfront that “Data matters more now than ever,” as part of an initiative where NBCU will use Comcast set top box data.

Turner and NBCU are not alone. There is a lot of noise in the industry as everyone shouts from their own rooftops. I decided that it would be beneficial to get as many of these announcements in one place, asking each company the same set of questions. 

My take: These data approaches are creatively varied in their use of datasets and metrics. Some collect their datasets in a DMP or Cloud while others partner with research vendors for their metrics and custom data. Surprisingly, only some initiatives specifically include set top box data which, along with Nielsen, may be one of the few datasets that can be used to standardize and compare results across networks. Is standardization in our future? It doesn’t seem likely to me at this time.

This the first article in a series. Thank you to all who participated.

Question 1: Does your company have a data initiative? If so what is it in two sentences?

Paul Haddad (SVP and General Manager Advanced Data Analytics, Cablevision Media Sales): Cablevision is leveraging aggregated, de-identified census-level audience tuning data to deliver unmatched audience relevancy, effectiveness and measurement and offering clients impressions-based campaigns that are purchased on a CPM basis vs. GRP. By applying the power of set-top box data to deliver data enriched media campaigns to advertisers and to deliver advanced analytics that provide unique insights we are allowing advertisers to better understand their audiences, and power more effective and efficient media campaigns, ensuring the right messages target the right audience.

Katie Larkin (EVP Advertising Sales Research and Strategy, NBCU): One of our data initiatives is our newly launched Audience Targeting Platform (ATP) which matches set top box data with consumer data and applies that combination to our national portfolio inventory on the broad NBCUniversal portfolio for more precise targeting and schedule optimization.

David Poltrack (Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President of CBS VISION): Campaign Performance Audit is a data-driven initiative that helps clients test the effectiveness of their ads, maximize reach and “recency,” and offers more precise targeting and favorable context.  The use of the analytical tools to implement these various components gives clients with a roadmap to planning and purchasing an effective television media buy while also providing a precise and actionable scorecard showing the measurable return on investment of the campaign.

Bill Rosolie (SVP Advertising Sales, Reelz): Reelz is expanding beyond traditional Nielsen audience metrics with a quantifiable audience engagement measure. In conjunction with Magid’s EmotionalDNATM Intentionality Index and Evaluation Scores, we have developed a proprietary engagement measure known as the Z-Score. This score combines the two measurements and can be used across over a 1,000 programs.

Jo Ann Ross (President, CBS Network Sales): In addition to the CPA initiative that we launched in March, CBS is in development of a TV layer to its existing DMP (Data Management Platform) for digital. The goal of this will ultimately be to provide data-enabled decision making across screens, especially for TV planning and buying, like we do today on digital. CBS will come to market with products that provide KPIs important to marketers like; scale, consistency, and proof of ROI. 

Howard Shimmel (Chief Research Officer, Turner Broadcasting): Building on what was introduced last year, we will continue to provide advertisers premium environments with targeting capabilities through our innovative ad products Targeting Now and Audience Now. Further, we will continue to align with marketers to better understand how our campaigns move product, utilizing ROI Now. Our ultimate goal is to provide stronger results for partners. And now with Turner Data Cloud, we are allowing our sales teams to open up the conversation to a more thoughtful scale. Research plays a crucial role in all this.

Audrey Steele (SVP Sales Research & Marketing, FOX Broadcasting): FOX Networks has multiple 3rd party data integrations and our own proprietary data set integrated into our DMP (Data Management Platform) and technology platforms to help clients improve performance on their precision targets for the linear and non-linear audiences.  We have data and technology partnerships that can aid our clients in determining the mix of attributes that define the consumer targets that best deliver on their sales and marketing goals.

Tom Ziangas (SVP Research and Insights, AMC Networks): AMC Networks has created a Business Intelligence group to ingest and manage over twenty data sources to best provide Research and key business stakeholders data and reporting analytics that provide efficiency, speed and insights in the decision making process. We are also moving into a B2C (business to consumer) model and a gaining detailed understanding on how our consumers are interacting with our various media platforms.

Geri Wang (President ABC Sales, ABC):  We have various data initiatives aimed at delivering 1) more relevant audience insights for planning purposes, and 2) varying levels of actionable targeting across our digital and linear video inventory.  ABC Unified Insights, which will launch this fall on ABCAllAccess.com, will provide comprehensive, cross-platform audience and viewing data for ABC programming from aggregated Nielsen, Rentrak, and internal digital platforms.  From a targeting perspective, we have launched two capabilities – one for digital, and one for linear TV.  For digital media, The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) has deployed a single cross-business DMP to centralize our audience data and offer impression level targeting against client data, third party data, as well as some unique TWDC data.  This offering will be available at an aggregated portfolio level across addressable digital media from ABC, ESPN, ABC Family, ABC Owned TV Stations, Disney Channel Media, Makers Studio, and Marvel.  For linear TV, ABC has built a set-top-box based data solution that matches viewership data with client or 3rd party data sources, allowing us to plan and deliver TV schedules that better deliver against a client’s core objectives.

Beth Rockwood (Senior Vice President, Market Resources, Discovery Communications):  Discovery’s client focused research projects are managed through our “Curiosity Lab”.  We work with clients to provide, insights, targeting and accountability on a highly customized basis.  Our new data partnerships will add significant capabilities to the Curiosity Lab, including both first and third party data. 

 

Part 2, to be published next week, asks the question - Is your company's data initiative gaining traction in the industry? How is it impacting your business?

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com