Revenue is a Byproduct of Great Customer Experience. The Wisdom of Viacom’s Bryson Gordon

“My career is weird,” confessed Bryson Gordon, Executive VP Advanced Advertising Group, Viacom. After starting his career “designing an ad blocker,” he is now responsible for expanding Viacom’s arsenal of cross media ad inventory by creating a great customer experience for targeting ads. “But”, he adds, “Business transformation has been a thread throughout.”

Gordon’s first job out of college was for a computer security company, where “we were the first to do software as a service (SAAS) before it was even called software as a service. We fundamentally changed the business model for that industry.” Then at Microsoft, where in a variety of roles, he grew the company’s then tiny direct-to-consumer business into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. “It was a fundamental shift for a gigantic company to reshape how it took its product to market,” he noted. Now at Viacom, he has found his calling. “Here I have the opportunity to work with an amazing set of people and transform the television business. I love that.” 

I sat down with Gordon to find out more about how he will transform television:

Charlene Weisler: Give me a short overview of your department initiatives. 

Bryson Gordon: When we first started Vantage (Viacom’s Data-Driven and Predictive Ad Solution Advertiser Service) it was very much about developing ad capabilities that focused on targeting, measurement, attribution, advanced audience modeling, etc. I ask myself this question: What is going to feel different? Not just some corporate mandate, but when we start to think about the North Star of the organization, what will feel different between our capabilities and where we are going in this new advanced advertising organization. The fundamental pivot is to shift from capabilities to the customer experience of advertising. Customer experience is a loaded term. But when we think about Viacom in creating formats, ad experiences, cross platforms, what are the specific audiences that really drive impact? What can we do as an organization of data scientists, information specialists, researchers, product development people, to fundamentally evolve the customer experience with advertising so that it is incredible for our customers and for our partners? 

Charlene: How will you achieve that?

Bryson: Our team has historically been made up of product managers and data scientists. Now the team spans product management, data science, developers, designers, people who are specialists in the launch of multi-platform environments where content ends up – the social and digital environment. Then we focus on creating not just traditional advertising but also branded marketing content to create the optimal advertising and marketing experiences for our fans in that environment. Then, what can we do to actually orchestrate that in a very thoughtful and methodical way around advanced audience targets that we develop within the organization.

Charlene: How will your work influence or impact OpenAP?

Bryson: OpenAP is foundational to what we are doing within advanced advertising. The focus that Sean Moran, Head of Sales, Viacom, has given us is the opportunity to go across all the different ad formats – from digital to social to linear television to OTT to addressable television – in our portfolio. As we continue to evolve with OpenAP, which launches in the fall, we are taking this notion of consistent advanced audience targeting beyond just the traditional linear television screen into the multi-platform environment. 

Charlene: What are the overall goals that you want to achieve now and over the next three years?

Bryson: I start from the position of the customer. My odd principle that has stuck with me over the years is: Revenue is a byproduct of great customer experience. It is simple but if we use that as a lens through which to assess the set of investments we make in the advanced advertising organization, it gives us tremendous focus. It helps us understand what we need to do to make the ad experience in traditional linear television even better. How do we do that through better targeting and through better formats? We think about the customer journey in Viacom content that cuts across platforms. What can we do, not just to connect, but actually orchestrate that? That is the thing that a year from now, I would like to look back and say that is the fundamental thing I wanted to achieve and I have achieved that.

Charlene: Are you developing attribution models to help you do that?

Bryson: We have been developing attribution models for a couple of years. Interestingly, our ability to drive precise measurement against advanced advertising on television and across multi-channels has facilitated the scaling of adoption of this new currency of TV. An example – a large automotive client who has done a number of campaigns with us, we have that ability to take their target, connect that target back to an addressable set top box, connect that to mobile phone Geo location data, and actually show them not only the physical list of people going to the auto dealership in a specific window after the campaign but also show them which specific dealers have the best local marketing investment on top of the national that was driving the highest lift for their specific region.

Charlene: Can you influence the ad market with your work? 

Bryson: I do because I have already seen that with the reception of Vantage and OpenAP.  We continue to see significant year to year growth in both the number of advertisers who are adopting advanced currencies and the amount of dollars flowing through advanced advertising currencies. 

Charlene: Your team comes from many different areas. How do you get them to strategize together?

Bryson: I deliberately try to not place them together. One of the things we found is that is super interesting is that I have hired a lot of people who don’t know anything about television. I hired a PhD in neuroscience from Toronto whose PhD was about how deep memories get formed in the brain. He doesn’t know the first thing about GRPs or Nielsen demos. What he does know is how you actually influence people and how you drive deep persuade-ability. We have people who bring perspective and expertise to our team that doesn’t look anything like how the TV industry looked like over the past 20 years. It makes for an environment where we can have hackathon style meetings and have people from industry, academia, science, economics, anthropology mixed with people with deep expertise in television. Great things happen. 

Charlene: How are you measuring results for advertisers and campaigns?

Bryson: There is a lot of customization depending on who is behind it and what the campaign is. One of the first conversations we have with an advertiser is: What are the KPIs that are important to you? Do you want to see a higher density of people within the segment? Do you want to see more de-duplicated reach within a segment? Do you want to measure physical lift to a restaurant, auto dealership or a retailer? We give them all of the normal measurements such as impressions delivered against your custom audience, but we also do a lot of custom reporting for clients, depending on what they are trying to achieve. These buys are guaranteed as a currency with in-target delivery. It makes people really comfortable.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
 

OpenAP Unveiled

It takes some doing to keep a secret like this. For close to one year, Viacom, Turner and Fox have been working together to build a three-corporation consortium for accepting third and first party datasets for use as guidance in the sales marketplace. They announced their joint effort this past week in New York City to an audience of advertisers, clients, suppliers and press.

OpenAP Announcement

“This is a historical day for all, of us,” announced Donna Speciale, President Turner Ad Sales. “We three (Turner, Viacom and Fox) are all here together. It has been a year in the making.” And referring to the high level agency executives in the crowd, she added, “We came together because of all of you. You were the catalyst, asking us to get together to unify and make data more scalable. We listened and are making it happen.”

The OpenAp was designed to address the many concerns in the media marketplace regarding data. “Despite all of the value that data provides, we still hear same concerns and that is that it is complicated, not scalable, there is a lack of auditing and it is not consistent. We needed to simplify audience targeting. It sounds simple but it is not an easy task,” noted Speciale.

What is also not an easy task is bringing together and coordinating the efforts of three highly competitive corporations and keeping these efforts under wraps for so long. “It’s crazy that we could keep it quiet,” stated Sean Moran, Head of Sales, VIACOM Media Networks.

OpenAP Interface

For those of us working with data, OpenAp is a tremendous step forward in beginning to address some of the challenges in the media marketplace from walled gardens, to scalability and accreditation.

Bryson Gordon, EVP Data Strategy, Viacom, explained that OpenAP has two separate pathways to access the audience data and see how the contract is posting. The first pathway is a website. “If you work for an agency or an advertiser, you will have a login to this website,” he explained, “Through that website you will be able to explore advanced audience and onboard your own advanced audiences and you will be able to pull down the post from the campaign across inventory from Fox, Viacom and Turner and any other member publisher that has joined.” The second pathway offers a way to onboard custom datasets that might be proprietary to the agency or advertiser. “We recognize that agencies and advertisers have made huge investments in defining audiences in proprietary data systems, through DMPs. So it is critical that we make it easy and seamless for you to have clean pathways into and out of OpenAP,” Gordon added.

OpenAP Details

OpenAP address some of the marketplace challenges. With normalization, scalability and accreditation, the consortium hired Accenture to manage those tasks. “Accenture is doing the build and the auditing of the measurement,” according to Joe Marchese, President of Advanced Advertising Products, Fox Network. Notably, Accenture is the company who jumped in to fix the Affordable Care website after it first crashed and now handles many of the health exchanges across the country. They are adept at managing vast amounts of data, normalizing it and keeping the data quality consistent and high. 

When it comes to the data sets, “We are data agnostic,” explained, Gordon, “At the end of the day, OpenAP is about supporting all the datasets that advertisers need to create the high value segments they want to target.” To start, OpenAP is working with two major data source ecosystems – “comScore for all of the set top box data and the associated third party syndicated datasets that they have,” he added, and “Nielsen as a key part of this initiative.”  In a press release that came directly after the OpenAP announcement, Lynda Clarizio, Nielsen’s President of U.S. Media, stated, “We support the consortium’s ambitions to create a clearinghouse for audience-based buying on linear television. We look forward to working with the participating networks and advertisers on the broader success of this initiative.”

When it comes to consistency, Gordon said, “Consistency is about have the same segments for all publishers making it easy to activate at scale. You can go find an advanced audience, have it consistently defined, have it activated across most of television in premium content that is absolutely brand safe. It’s about on-boarding once and activing again and again.”

Working Together for a Common Cause

How can you get three major competing corporations to work together for a common cause? “We all experienced a very similar pain, in talking to our agencies and clients who were all buying Fox, Turner and Viacom,” said Michael Strober, EVP Client Strategy and Ad Innovation, Turner and co-head of Turner Ignite, who added, ”How do we make it easier to buy and transact on a larger scale? We had open and honest conversations – are you experiencing the same thing? We met with Kern Schireson, Chief Data Officer, Viacom. I sat with Joe Marchese. We decided that nobody is going to do this for us. We needed to find the solution and do it ourselves. It was very organic and a response to the market.”

This is a big first step for OpenAP. As Marchese noted, “This is step one - live linear television. What comes next are dynamic advertising and VOD environments.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

The Secret Society Presents the Multi-Uses of Data

The Secret Society may not be so secret anymore since Steve Lanzano, President and CEO, TVB, gave it a shout out at the recent TVB Advertising Week event.  But some mystery still remains - the latest Secret Society meeting at the Turner offices in NYC was held in a non-descript conference room behind an unmarked door.

This meeting, which included presentations from Viacom, Hulu, NBCU and Turner, collected around a theme of data, audience targeting, addressability and branding. “Consumer choices are changing,” stated Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television, “1975 was the first year that broadcast networks guaranteed age and gender in the uprfonts. Prior it was household guarantees. Now we look at households with people of a specific age, gender and behavioral characteristics.”

Viacom – Enabling a Currency of Fandom

Bryson Gordon, EVP Data Strategy at Viacom, gave a stirring presentation on fandom through the lens of data and analytics. He is relatively new to media, starting his career at McAfee where he used audience insights and segmentations to move that business from box software to subscription. From there he moved to Microsoft to build up ecommerce services. The similarities these companies have with media companies, he posits, are the patterns of deconstruction and cultivation. When you examine the audience data, Gordon explained, “The pattern of deconstruction concentrates on sub communities within a homogenous base. The pattern of cultivation concentrates on a community who often doesn't transact or behave as a community yet. You don't know you are in the club yet. You share attributes and behaviors that can be targeted but don't yet share a common purpose.” He concluded, “TV doesn't participate in that today. Legacy approach in TV is failing to keep pace with the advancements within audience demographic traction and cultivation.”

His work in Viacom is to insure that all marketing efforts target the right audience. “The audience we believe we attract may not be our audience at all,” he added.  When Microsoft introduced their newest PC, they initially thought that hipsters who owned Apple devices would be their target. But using very advanced data science they found that the hipster focus was wrong. “Women who had two kids under the age of ten who lived in Midwest and who voted for Romney would be the target for this device,” he explained. “The good news,” he assured us, “is that data science is transforming TV. We can fuse data sets, the hygiene of the data is so much better than years ago and data science is way more sophisticated.” And the future for data in TV is bright. “There is a fundamental democratization of data science which allows us to take incredible sets of data and do precise analysis of fan segments,” he stated. At Viacom, he assured, “We plan with advertiser to understand custom target, inboard the data set, offer 17 predictive models and optimize on ongoing basis. We can do it without creating liability and we are transparent. This is leading to a new way of selling and a currency of fandom. TV can now be delivered in a variety of ways with both a custom audience and custom creative.”

Turner  - Data, Technology and Analytics Lead to Opportunities for Buyers

Major network groups like NBCU and Turner are focusing their efforts on data driven sales solutions. Larry Allen, VP Ad Innovation and Programmatic at Turner, presented an overview of two innovative approaches to buying media using technology and advanced data analytics - Turner Targeting Now and Turner Audience Now – through its Turner Ignite initiative.  

Part of the challenge of evolving to a more data driven approach is historical. “It is jarring to say you've been buying one way for 20 years and now you buy in a new way,” explained Allen. With Turner’s solutions the client can supply any custom data set they want. Dan Aversano, SVP Ad Innovation and Programmatic Solutions Turner, said, “We will use any dataset. We are data agnostic and can achieve consistency across solutions. We build a consistency of metrics without having a currency.”  “But seasonality is factor,” cautions Allen, “as is viewing between platforms and modality. Lots of touch points create a new dynamic. There is the issue of data freshness and audience changes for quarter to quarter. So we plan the impact quarter by quarter for plan optimization.”

The next step for Turner is Addressable which is a careful process. Aversano explained, “All of this has to work within our traffic system. It is a challenge for us because TV is a giant jigsaw puzzle and all of our inventory has to sit together from the traffic, deal and proposal systems.”

Secret Society Takeaway

The application of innovative data-driven solutions appears to be gaining traction among the major media companies. Through the efforts of the Secret Society and other industry initiatives, the sharing of initiative techniques and solutions will hopefully lead to a standardization of processes for the industry at large. Let’s continue to keep the conversation flowing.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com