The State of TV Data Measurement: Interview with Videa’s Brad Smith at TV Week 2017

The current and future state of TV data measurement continues to be a hotly debated question. Brad Smith, senior vice president of revenue and operations at Videa, discussed his views regarding programmatic television, current challenges, the need for open standards, and the successful path forward to growing the television business, in an exclusive interview at the 2017 Television Week conference.

What would you say is currently the biggest challenge for programmatic in the marketplace?

Brad Smith: It’s partially education and the need to push for open standards, allowing systems to talk to each other. I also think a large part is change management. You have to be able to show people how this is going to positively affect them.

You have sales folks who are subject matter experts, and if you’re unable to give them the tools to empower them to do more, they’ll be afraid of it and slow down the process.

How do you think we can realistically get to an open standard, seeing as it’s still such a competitive environment?

Read the full interview at the Videa blog.

Television Week 2017: Linear TV Finds Its Footing in the New Media World

At this year’s Television Week 2017, Chris Pizzurro, head of sales and marketing at Canoe Ventures, likened linear TV to the Six Million Dollar Man. You know the story: after being in a terrible accident, an astronaut is rebuilt with the latest technology to be bigger and stronger than ever.

This laudable comparison may apply to linear TV but for a couple of challenges—measurement and legacy infrastructure. Both issues were given a lot of thought at the recent Advanced Advertising conference, which was part of Television Week 2017. Here are our takeaways.

What Exactly Is Programmatic?
Are we really still asking this question? Well, yes. Depending on which side of the business you’re on, programmatic can mean automatic buying, real-time bidding, or dynamic ad insertion.
One might think that with a group of television executives as panelists, there’d be agreement. But as Brad Smith, senior vice president of revenue and operations at Videa, pointed out, “All programmatic is not real-time bidding. There are all different definitions of programmatic. The term needs clarification.” For instance, Videa’s platform offers automated, end-to-end buying and selling of forward reserve, local spot TV inventory for sellers and buyers.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Open-Standard Content Recognition for a More Organized Industry

Let’s talk about silos. In addition to data silos impeding accurate cross-platform measurement, there are also content recognition coding silos. Companies like Nielsen, comScore, and Google all have their own content ID protocols—or “walled gardens” of proprietary coding—and none of those protocols are compatible with the others.

This makes it almost impossible to effectively and accurately track a piece of content through its various platform exposures. So advertisers may know where their ads are running, but they still need to manually stitch together all the sources.

Why Do We Need Them?
Open standards—whether for data, content IDs, and even fee structures—”establish rules of engagement between marketplaces so demand and inventory are represented fairly,” notes Brad Smith, senior vice president of revenue and operations at Videa, in a piece for AdExchanger.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

From the Next TV Summit: Insights From Videa’s Brad Smith

Brad Smith, SVP, Revenue and Operations for Videa, was one of the panelists featured at the recent Advanced Advertising Next TV Summit. His panel, “What Makes a Programmatic Campaign Successful and Will Programmatic Spending Grow?”, sparked some fascinating discussion points.

What were the most surprising takeaways from the Advanced Advertising event?

From the buy side it was impressive to hear others focus on data and on making programmatic sustainable for both buyers and the sellers in this new world. And on our panel, it was the shared level of importance that Doug (from Hulu) and Adam (from Dish) had for items that we at Videa see as crucial for programmatic to be positively impactful for all parties involved—from the need for pricing and order transparency to the demand for better triangulation of data. It shows me that the marketplace has come a long way in the past 18 months in terms of getting our collective priorities and standards in order and what will make the industry sustainable in the marketplace from both a buying and selling side.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

FTC Regulations in a World of Big Data, Consumers, Advertisers, and TV

FTC regulations regarding consumer privacy are pivotal pieces of legislation. Television has increasingly come to rely on big datasets, with new initiatives by Viacom and Turner concerning their linear, addressable, and programmatic data platforms.

Wherever big data is used, there’s an unspoken assumption that the industry will be privacy compliant, that the data is hashed, and that it’s only used to target consumers on an anonymous basis. But as companies gather ever more granular data that can be combined and modeled using machine learning, how close will targeting become to specific one-to-one marketing in television? And at that point, how much privacy can consumers expect?

Failing to Create Standards Creates Risk
Cooperation across companies to develop a data-privacy industry standard not only helps consumers—it helps businesses as well. In a recent article in AdExchanger, Brad Smith, SVP Revenue and Operations at Videa, noted, “Guidelines and best practices drive consistency and repeatability in systems and processes. It also preserves and improves the art of selling broadcast linear television advertising and the use of first- and third-party data overlays to better understand audience value. (It) establishes rules of engagement between marketplaces so demand and inventory are represented fairly.”


Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Welcome to the Secret Society of TV Programmatic

For many of us in the television space, the prospect of programmatic TV is at once both fascinating and a bit confusing. Exactly how would it work? Would it enable cherry picking of programs? Would it lower CPMs on top inventory? Can it be executed nationally? Does this displace direct response? What is “premium” inventory anyway?

US International Media (USIM), an independent, diversified, and fully-integrated media agency, has launched an ambitious initiative to more intensely explore the world of Programmatic TV buying and selling with the help of futurist and televisual expert Mitch Oscar.  Dubbed a “TV Programmatic Secret Society,” its intent is to create a series of meetings that take attendees through concrete examples of programmatic TV execution to open up a "dialogue about programmatic space without politics," according to Oscar.

The first “secret society” meeting was held on October 5 at Rentrak and was attended by over 40 executives from media companies as diverse as USIM, Clypd, Dish, Experian, Comcast, RLTV, Reelz, Fox, Horizon, OMD, Placemedia, Rentrak, The Trade Desk, TubeMogul, Videa, Sintec, Nexstar, Mediakitchen, BIA/Kelsey AT&T, Yashi, NAB and TIVO.  Everyone was given a mask, which few used, and name tags, which all used. So much for secrecy.

It is not easy to execute Programmatic TV for a variety of reasons. Any yet, the positive impact for an advertiser is evident in the results of campaigns. Some takeaways from this first meeting were as follows:

TV Programmatic Works …

Russel Zingale President, Eastern Region USIM presented a recent campaign for Aruba tourism which got the advertiser back on a television buy. The agency launched an addressable campaign with New York Cablevision and DirectTV targeting family with kids and empty nesters. The result was that in the first week in September in NY delivery in was up 31% and NY based travel to Aruba dramatically improved.

… But There Are Challenges
According to Mitch Oscar, programmatic TV is “an odyssey of process” which doesn’t allow for integration. There are not only National and Local addressable DSPs, you need to take into account the range of measurement possibilities – whether national, addressable, local and ad supported video on demand – and measurement subsets like daypart, age and gender, impressions and targets across networks. All of the proposals offered in the USIM example had different definitions of what the daypart includes.  From a posting standpoint, the inventory schedule opaque and lacks standardized definition.

A Black Box of Algorithms

Obviously you can get different proposal solutions to a campaign based on the dataset, the target and the distribution. However even with common attributes, suggested networks and programming can vary widely. In this case, one proposal included a range of sports network “because the algorithm said so,” according to Zingale. What does that really mean? In some cases, the algorithms reveal that prime time is not always prime time. If addressable indicates late night, should I be planning on late night instead of prime?

Siloes of Results

How do you combine targets? In this case it was a combination of A25-54, Upscale Families which resulted in three different indices with different sources. How do you proportionate? In addition there is limited compatibility with traditional buying results – how can you merge the two together to get a fuller picture of how a campaign delivered as a complete valuation (TV stations, cable Networks, MVPD, ad supported, etc)? And if successful, you cannot replicate the campaign. 

So What Does this Really Cost?

There are many different versions of fees in a Programmatic TV buy. Is the package cost net or gross? What does each term really mean? Is there a transaction fee? Are there guarantees? Is it by age and gender and individual TV impressions or daypart impressions? Is there a day of the week ratio?

Bringing it All Together

Brad Smith, SVP, Revenue and Operations of Videa noted that, “TV is evolving differently than online. Digital started RTB and supply outstripped demand. That is different from television where supply is more limited.” He continued, “But there is a consistent rise in quality integration.” He spoke of the Wild West atmosphere surrounding data toady and called for the data to become “a bridge that allows you to translate between different data source. The question is - How do you make data fungible?” One way, he postied, was to get away from Walled Gardens.

My opinion is that these are tall orders at a time where everyone is elbowing for market position. But who knows? The advance of technology and the ease with which we begin to harness, integrate and algorithmically merge datasets (getting easier every day…) may force the marketplace players to form a more perfect union… or at least a working industry group to help form policy and standards.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com