Paul Haddad Explains How a4 Is Inventing the Way Advertising Works

Navigating the transition from collecting and mining data to actually applying it in addressable advertising is a talent that a4 President Paul Haddad (pictured at top) has in abundance. With an engineering background and extensive work in collecting data at the set-top box level from his tenure at Cablevision, he has a keen sense of how the addressable landscape looks and what the underpinnings of data and analytics need to be to ensure a seamless, real-time, targeted experience for both consumers and advertisers.

His evolution from entrepreneur to data geek (an epithet that we both agree is a source of pride) to president has been facilitated by his early work at Cablevision, the mentorship of then-department head Kim Norris (currently the division vice president), Spectrum Reach, the acquisition of Cablevision by Altice, Patrick Drahi’s support of disrupting status quos, Dexter Goei’s coaching on building growth-driven business and the recognition by the industry of the value and power of data and targeting.

A One-Stop Advertising Shop
Utilizing data culled from many sources and offers, a4 is "a one-stop shop for audience-driven, integrated, multi-screen advertising and end-to-end ROI analytics across the U.S.," Haddad said.  But as complete as that sounds, that is not all it is.  Owned by Altice, which purchased Cablevision in 2015, a4 is actually a large advertiser in its own right, representing Altice's $200 million budget as an in-house agency.  So, a4 not only offers capability in both the buying and selling aspects of advertising, it also manages and stewards small $250 campaigns to multi-million-dollar campaigns, as well as national and local accounts through an interface platform controlled by the advertiser.  a4 is helping to transition the media world by "inventing the way advertising works," and it has been very successful.  "We now have over $500 million in total media revenue, over 500 employees and the fastest growing business at Altice," Haddad noted.

Going from Local to National
Transitioning from local MVPD operation to a national footprint was not without some internal questions.  "What is an audience to us?" Haddad posited. "Is it market-driven or is it location-driven or is it size-driven?"  After two years of tests, he realized that "audience targeting has no location or specific size."  So, the conclusion was that "when it comes to audience, we do not see the world as local or national at all," he explained.  "We do not see the world as TV or digital.  We see the world as household targets.  We deliver a household-based audience targeted campaign across all screens anywhere in the U.S. at any time and at any size of segment."  In sum, a4 essentially removes the need to label anything other than audience at a household level -- and that appears to be the wave of the future.

Haddad said that those still operating under the legacy mindset of local versus national are "limiting" themselves and warned that his competitors who stick to the old parameters of measurement are "being held as techno-hostages."

Finding Intent in Targeting
a4 has access to a myriad of datasets at the MVPD set-top box level, at the device level, at various digital touch points and through third and first-party partnerships.  To ensure privacy and create effective reach pathways, "our datasets are focused on household targeting," he explained.  "To target a household, you need to understand and provide to our advertising clients the means to create a segment.  And the way to create the segment is to collect data that finds intent."
He noted that intent on a household level is based on:

• Viewing and content consumption (a4 currently covers 12.5 million homes at the set-top box level covering 210 DMAs)
• Spending patterns (such as luxury items or beauty products or tech-gadgets)
• Consumer profile data (totaling 300 million homes)
• Geo-location data (sports stadium visits or high-end store or auto dealership visits)
• IP targeted data with a platform deployed behind the firewall at most MVPDs in the U.S. (accessing 50 million household data on digital and mobile devices for in and out-of-home addressability.)

"When you put it all together you can use the data for audience creation on the front of a campaign," he explained.  "You can then use the 'same' segment to plan when and how to reach them.  Finally, you measure and report all the impressions for that 'same' segment across all their devices, and clearly analyze the effect and whether you reached these audiences or not and what was the ROI."
In addition, a4 gives the client an on-boarding, self-service, full stewardship platform where proprietary CRM data can be uploaded privately and safely and matched with all of a4's data free of charge and within hours, not days.  So, from audience creation to media planning to media activation across all screens (which includes linear and optimized TV, OTT, digital video and display, social media, mobile display and in-apps banner), "we provide the measurement at the household level, plus all of these screens for the campaign, from the exposure to the medium to how often, and then we post at the end of the campaign."

As far as privacy is concerned, Altice applies a strict and disciplined compliance approach to all its data operations and business use cases.   "Privacy is extremely important and serious to us," Haddad asserted.

Time for a "Datalution"
Giving the client full access and control over all aspects of a campaign by targeting the intent of households is something that few companies offer. Haddad shepherds his company in a new direction that is poised to change the business of advertising as we know it.  "The advertising world is broken into a fast lane of born-data companies and the slow lane of legacy processes," he said.  "The slow lane has no choice but to revolutionize the way they do business.  It's a question of time."

The clock is ticking.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Nationalizing STB Data Driven Sales – The Cablevision and Fourthwall Partnership

With all of the data initiatives out there, I am personally drawn to Cablevision’s whose STB data represents the largest and most diverse DMA in the country.  Currently weighing in at 2.6 million homes and 7.2 million STBs, it covers linear, live and VOD tuning. So it was with great interest that I sat down with Paul Haddad, SVP and GM, Advanced Data Analytics, Cablevision Media Sales and Bill Feininger, President, Fourthwall, to discuss their recent partnership and how Cablevision data insights could be incorporated into a more national footprint.

Cablevision has developed two types of portfolios using data. The first is for the advertising arm of Cablevision Media Sales to help sell audience for impressions based campaigns. The other is, according to Paul, “a standalone system for programmers who do business with Cablevision. This portfolio helps them with analytics services which include in-depth program analysis by specific segments, advanced research of the effectiveness and the health of their programming and campaigns they ran locally or nationally, and audience reach and frequency by relevant segments.” In the past this analysis would be solely in the Cablevision coverage area but now with the addition of Fourthwall data, it enables analysis beyond the footprint.

I was curious as to why Cablevision would choose Fourthwall as a partner. Paul explained, “We did an evaluation of different datasets and were seeking an unbiased party that was pure in its offering. Other datasets, such as those from other MVPDs and SmartTVs were biased, in our opinion, because they were from only one source. We too are considered a biased source being an MVPD. We wanted purity and neutrality of the data collection and quality and there was only one – Fourthwall – where we liked the representativeness of the Fourthwall markets given that it aligns well with where we want to go. We wanted markets across the country to analyze and understand the nuances of Television viewership across these markets. We also wanted Live and DVR data combined given that a lot of valuable insights can be provided by analyzing and understanding the shift of audiences between these two mediums. Other datasets have either Live and VOD, but not DVR.” 

The key applications for this partnership are:

          Audience Based Media Planning for brands or programmers with national media plans based on audiences with expanded attributes beyond age and gender. It is possible to create segmentations and receive plans that they can then execute. 

   Programming Conversion Analysis looking at the relationship between live and DVR viewing, reach and frequency, household that might have viewed last year versus this year and the conversion of the targeted audience after the campaign.

           Audience Analysis looking at loyal viewers and how their viewing has evolved in the current season. Did they move from linear to DVR, for example, and the programs audience analytics. 

                 National Advertising Analytics where campaigns are run with the use of extended datasets to measure conversion to specific audiences reached. 

From Fourthwall’s perspective, Bill explained that, “FourthWall Media serves the industry as a data provider and also provides the keys to link 1st and 3rd party data.  These patent-pending techniques allow our clients to go from traditional age/gender targeting to purchase behaviors, loyalty card members’ viewership, etc.  The intent is to be able to find very specific audience segments.  Our dataset and matching services make this happen.”

It is my personal hope that the industry moves from silo’ed proprietary data solutions to something that can be syndicate-able and delivers powerful insights and analytics. Paul agreed and said, “We are focused on building an open and advanced analytics platform using first party and census-level MVPD data to help evolve the legacy TV measurement methodologies. Such an offering is desperately needed by programmers and advertisers today so they can understand the dynamics that are impacting their marketing, programming, and ad sales initiatives, and to make better decisions that can help them compete with the analytics-savvy competitors. Our goal is to also help evolve the research function - that currently uses sample or hybrid data models - to a powerful analytics function using census level data sets and advance analytics platforms. By joining with Fourthwall, we are implementing our plan to do this at scale and we support bringing more companies into our model as we find additional quality data sets.”

I am personally optimistic.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

OMMA Programmatic Television - September 30, 2015

I will be moderating a panel on Advanced Television at the OMMA on September 30, 2015.
Come and see the panel:

Panel: How Does Advanced TV Add Up?
Date/Time: September 30, 11:45 AM As TV buying moves way beyond traditional techniques and relies on much more complex inputs and platforms, so too will the metrics. Who is measuring what? Which metrics and data vendors are emerging as important players in the advanced TV space. What do the numbers mean when compared to traditional metrics or even to other digital platforms?

Panelists:
Ben Tatta, President Media Sales, Cablevision
Matthew Bayer, SVP  Advanced TV, MagnaGlobal

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