How Can a Small Sales Org Make a BIG Splash? New York Interconnect Has the Answer

Can one place Amazon, Google and New York Interconnect in the same group? The answer is yes, according to Ed Renicker, CEO, NYI. New York Interconnect (NYI) was named the #3 Overall Sales Organization alongside these nationwide heavy hitters.

“This is the story of the little New York TV Media Buying Corporation that could - and did - not only land on a list that included national and global household names, but also managed to keep their clients happy and profitable in the middle of a tumultuous year in a market that was initially the epicenter of the pandemic,” explained Renicker. “This was all happening while placing #1 in categories like Proactive Impact, Innovation, and Communicate Value.”

MediaVillage sat down with Renicker, to find out exactly what NYI does to pull ahead of the pack and its future plans to insure they stay there.

New York Interconnect’s Audience One

“New York Interconnect (NYI) has been an industry leader for over three decades,” he began. In fact, the company is a joint venture between three impressive media firms - Altice USA, Charter Communications and Comcast. For Renicker, “NYI continues to pave the way for the future of TV media buying across all screens in the nation’s largest, most diverse, and most affluent market.”

It is a time of great transformation in the media space with more platforms and quality content than ever before. “In this revolutionary ecosystem, NYI continues to navigate the ever-evolving TV landscape through its ground-breaking Audience One platform,” Renicker explained and added, “Audience One is a multiscreen approach that integrates TV content into one holistic marketing platform that incorporates TV, digital, video on demand, live streaming, OTT, and exclusive network sponsorships, for an end-to-end media plan that connects advertisers to the right consumers.”

NYI Sales Organization Kudos

NYI was recently named #3 Overall Sales Organization in the Myers Report alongside corporations that include Google and Amazon. For Renicker, that success is no surprise. “NYI has that rare advantage of being a corporation that operates like a small business, as far as our ability to maintain close personal relationships with all our clients and first-hand knowledge of the brands they represent, yet NYI has the power, influence and reach of a large, powerful organization,” he shared.

“We’ve been at this for thirty years and NYI is always on the cutting edge of the next technology and at the forefront of the TV media evolution. So that combination has allowed us to be in the unique position of ranking up there with household names like Google and Amazon,” he added.

NYI also was the recognized leader in such attributes as Proactive Impact, Innovation, and Communicate Value. “Being proactive and innovative has always been part of the fabric with NYI,” he explained, “Whether finding the next great opportunity for our clients or recognizing an industry trend that we think our clients need to be aware of, the sales team at NYI never stops looking for the next great move for our clients.”

NYI makes it a point to communicate value across a range of messaging from trade publications and industry events. “We also pride ourselves for always moving the conversation forward when it comes to our industry. We’re always eager to share our latest research and findings with not only clients, but with colleagues because we believe that anything that advances our industry is good for everyone,” he noted.

Marketing During the Pandemic

The Myers Study client satisfaction study was fielded during the pandemic in 2020. In such an unusual and difficult year, the question is, how did NYI manage to steer their clients’ strategies to success, especially when New York, in particular, was initially the epicenter of the pandemic in the US?

Renicker and his team met the challenge. “When the pandemic hit New York, our teams were forced to chart a new course for each of our existing clients (as well as some new ones), all without ever even being able to step foot back in the office. Our sales and support teams all quickly recalibrated, reallocated, and rebounded from this setback in a way that not only left the company reaching its 2020 sales goals, but also helped to ensure the continued success of its clients, their brands, and their verticals.”

NYI’s Multi-Pronged Approach During the Pandemic

Renicker was quick to take the necessary actions during the pandemic to insure success for both his clients and his team. The areas of concentration were:

Messaging: The NYI sales team saw that the environment had changed and advised their clients of the new tonality. In fact, he noted, “Many business verticals had to pull their current creative to revise messaging to be more mindful of the current climate. In addition to pulling creative to protect their clients’ brands with acceptable tonality and re-allocating dollars because of pulled and revised programming, the team reconfigured schedules for the betterment of their clients and to accommodate the changes in programming.”

Following the Data: Data became especially important to guide the decision making process. “Our teams followed the data to find the desired audience of their clients now that so many cancellations were coming into play, especially when it came to live sports,” he said and added, “Audiences were migrating to news and entertainment programming; our data allowed brands to actually follow and continue to connect to their target consumers wherever and whenever they were watching.”

Business Verticals: During the pandemic there was a notable and not unexpected shift in advertiser categories. And NYI was ready. “For every vertical that pulled back on their TV media schedules in 2020, there were more that came to the forefront,” Renicker explained, “All matters of healthcare and hospitals found themselves wanting to get important information out. New verticals like online gaming and food delivery services found themselves in great demand. The sales team of NYI fought to keep their struggling verticals visible so they would be strongly positioned when the market rebounded. They also sought the right opportunities for the verticals that were now in high demand by creating effective media plans to maximize their exposure and profitability.”

News, Sponsorships and Political: Programming and advertising categories shifted in importance. He explained that, “All eyes were on the news in 2020. Daytime viewership skyrocketed and prime-time was now around-the-clock. Local cable news networks including News 12 and Spectrum NY1 found loyal viewers tuning in for hours at a time daily as their coverage spanned everything from updates on the pandemic, new healthcare protocols and news on protests taking place around their local neighborhoods. We placed important healthcare ads during peak viewership hours and created sponsorship opportunities that would align with the new programming being implemented by the cable networks.” He added that, “Political was also huge in 2020. A holistic advertising approach was the key to getting the word out in 2020 which is just want our teams did. The campaigns benefited from a more-targeted, audience-based approach in addition to their standard linear buys.”

Digital & Multiscreen: Through all of this, a multi-platform approach was pivotal to establish one-on-one connections with customers. “Brands need to reach them across devices at-home and beyond,” he shared, “Digital targeted advertising acts as a primary touchpoint for smaller brands and a bolster to video advertising across platforms for larger ones. The digital arm of a holistic marketing strategy is particularly crucial to attribution. Brands can see the conversion rate of households exposed to its commercial on multiple platforms, as well as metrics like website visitation, location data, or tune-in conversion after being exposed to an ad.”

The Beauty of the New York Market and NYI for Advertisers

When you are representing the biggest, most diverse global market as New York, you can’t help but see the great importance the market has for advertiser brand’s TV media strategy. It is a must-buy. “It all happens in New York!” Renicker exclaimed. “We are the #1 market in the country. We have the most affluent, diversified consumers and now, thanks to data and reporting, we have the ability to target like never before and prove a brand’s ROI.”

NYI should be the centerpiece of any marketing effort. In addition to the accolades NYI has received with the Myers Report rankings, their Marketing Team was recognized as Marketing Team of the year by the Faxies- and NYI was a runner up for Best Sales Organization. “NYI has always strived to maintain a great blend of talent that includes Sales personnel, Operational personnel, Marketing personnel, Business/Financial Planning personnel, HR personnel, and overall sales support personnel,” he explained, “We truly work as a team with the objective of servicing our clients at the very highest level. We do this by having homegrown talent combined with bringing in talented subject-matter experts when required.”

When asked to summarize what the secret sauce is to NYI’s success, Renicker didn’t hesitate in his answer.  “1. Client service, 2. Client service and 3. Client service. Our technology is always the most current, but our philosophy is always the most tried and true. Our clients come first in everything we do and keeping the best interest of our clients as our driving force has never steered us wrong.” The proof is in the Myers’ ranking.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

The Many Challenges for Media Technology Departments

With all of the change and transformation taking place in the media industry today, we may tend to forget that there is one area of expertise that is under great pressure to get it done, get it right and get it within the budget as quickly as possible. That would be corporate technology departments who must find efficient, successful methods to build the systems that will drive the business and that, oh by the way, will not become obsolete just as it is completed. It is quite a feat!

This week I attended an off-the-record roundtable on this subject that included representatives from such companies as AMC, Charter, Disney, Google, Legends, NBCU, Nielsen, NY Times, NPD Group, Ogilvy, Scholastic, Vice and WarnerMedia. This event, sponsored by Eliassen Group and hosted by WarnerMedia, shed light on the challenges that technology departments face in building and off-loading measurement and sales systems. With the ever expanding range of data sets (that sometimes have to be normalized and cleansed) to addressable and programmatic advertising sales components (that need to be built into current sales, inventory and traffic systems) to the promises of groundbreaking custom media systems (that cross siloed internal departments), there is a lot that can go wrong or miscalculated. And let’s not forget the need to comply with ever-evolving privacy legislation.

Organizing and Managing Project Teams

How does a CTO start to herd all the cats in a major technology project cross company? To some, this was less of a challenge in smaller companies than in larger ones. “A small company is federated,” noted one attendee. For those in larger corporations, “small agile teams,” might be the way to start but there needs to be some type of centralized body or council so the governance doesn’t slip and a set of corporate standards to set general parameters and deliverables.

Collaboration tools can be an unexpected challenge. According to another participant, tools can vary within a company. “Some use Slack,” he noted, but other departments use other systems. “Some don’t use Hangout.” Picking the right collaboration tools is pivotal, noted another attendee, so that the technical tools “get normalized.” There is great value in being proactive by immediately training in any collaboration tool when on-boarding a project. Sometimes rejection exists simply because the person doesn’t know how to use it. One executive suggested incentivizing employees and offered the following example: In moving from Office, her company offered Amazon gift cards to those employees who made the change.

Privacy

In the discussion of privacy, the thought was that, as CCPA goes into effect and with GDPR, advertisers would have to go back to contextual advertising from more personalized targeting.

For one participant, the irony is that as the TV side of the market becomes more addressable, it is possible that digital may become more contextualized.

Most agreed that it was a “hard regulatory environment,” where CCPA is the first salvo but not the last. One executive added that there were different criteria depending on the legislation – opting in for GDPR or opting out for CCPA. Anecdotally, she noted that, “with GDPR there is some blindness to opt-in. Consumers in 40% to 50% of cases ignore it” which is, “similar to ad blindness,” although there is no feedback as of yet on CCPA. And with legislation going out state by state it is really an, “evolving story.”

For another attendee, the concern is “reputational risk,” where we need to ascertain exactly what is going out to the consumer. “Where have you pulled the personal information and what are you doing with it? What are the exceptions?” It all must be within scope. His company demands privacy on enterprise level but individual nets may manage risk in different way and is “operated in a siloed manner” because of all of the different businesses they own. For another company that offers subscription streaming services, the consumer can delete their data but then they do, they are unsubscribed.

Privacy legislation could impact recommendation engines. Services like Chrome will be phasing out of cookies. Both of these situations present their own challenges in tracking consumers. As a result, some participants believe that this will result in more of a move to subscriptions.

Direct to Consumer Model

Being content with the status quo is not an option nowadays. For one executive, “We’ve had such a stable model for such a long time, you didn’t need to change anything. It just worked.” Now, faced with strict functional silos and the need to think differently, change management has been a challenging process and their current informal structure will be forced to evolve.

For some, the impact of mergers, purchases and consolidations creates a much larger company that needs to focus on assembling the organization within an aggressive time line. Content Rights is also undergoing a shift. It used to be more profitable to “split rights and sell them off to different parties. But now there is a scramble to re-aggregate these rights.”

In a world of cord-cutting, is there a future for cable television? For many, the answer is yes by upgrading the network to offer higher speed for gaming and more experiential content with aggregation being a solution for brands and distribution. “It’s a fun time to be in the distribution business. I don’t see the cable companies going away. Where would you go,” one participant stated.

As viewers increasingly watch individual programs and may not be aware of the network it is on, branding will be more and more pivotal going forward. “There is always a market for high end production,” concluded an attendee … as long as the consumer knows where it originates.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Bringing Linear TV into the Addressable Market – The Spectrum and 605 Data Partnership

“Linear television does not come to mind when people think of advanced products,” noted Rob Klippel, Senior Vice President of Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, Spectrum Reach, but being able to do targeted one-to-one addressable in linear television is becoming closer to a reality. 

Of course, “even just applying data to linear TV, even if it is not one-to-one targeted, to better find audiences and on the back end use data to find ad exposure is part of an advanced advertising group,” he concluded.

Now as the dust settles on the Spectrum and 605 data partnership, we begin to see how addressability in linear TV has taken a step forward with the introduction of their AudienceApp data platform. This new platform was developed in partnership between Spectrum Reach and 605 for linear media planning and optimization. I sat down with Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605 and Rob Klippel to learn more:

Charlene Weisler: What types of data points will be made available by Charter for 605?

Ben Tatta: As the second largest cable operator in the U.S., Charter provides 605 with aggregated TV platform data from all its cable system operations nationally resulting in more robust and granular audience measurement and analytics solutions. Charter data gives us broad national reach and deep coverage in 13 of the top 20 U.S. markets. As part of the partnership, we also have matching rights to Charter data giving us the ability to append a broad array of household attributes to the viewing data (in a secure manner that protects privacy).

Weisler: What are some of the challenges?

Tatta: This partnership is a major step in fueling the industry migration from sample-based measurement to true census-level measurement moving beyond traditional ratings to deeper, more actionable, impressions-based data. The challenge will be educating and encouraging the industry to embrace this transition, which will be of benefit to all from advertisers, programmers, providers – ultimately the buyers and sellers.

Weisler: Will there be the ability to use the data in some form to measure cross platform?

Klippel: Yes. We are capturing and providing aggregated and anonymized viewing across all platforms.    This gives us the ability to not only leverage cross-platform insights for planning and execution, but also post-campaign analysis and attribution.

Weisler: What other data sets will be part of this effort?

Tatta: 605 uses data from over 40 million addressable households to deliver its ad and campaign analytics services and also maintains a library of over 1,500 demographics, behavioral, transactional and psychographic attributes and possesses consumer records for 131 million unique households, containing 240 million adults.

Klippel: Charter has a robust set of first party and third party attributes that we leverage for the most effective and efficient way to deliver specific segments for our local and regional advertisers.  A unique aspect of our partnership with 605 is the broad append rights to enable similar detailed customer segmentation for national advertisers and programmers.

Weisler: What metrics will you use?

Tatta: In addition to more granular, household level impressions data, 605 also measures content and/or ad consumption on a second-by-second basis.  605 also developed a set of engagement and conversion metrics designed to measure ad response, ROI and attribution.  Ultimately, the metrics we utilize vary based on the unique objectives of our clients.

Weisler: Have any advertisers signed up for this yet?

Tatta: 605 currently works with blue-chip advertisers such as Walmart and Uber. We are also working with programmers such as A&E to help them understand specific audience attributes to enable them to serve their advertisers and connect with specific audiences. We have also added several new advertisers following the launch of AudienceApp.

Klippel: AudienceApp was launched in August and our goal is to have all markets launched by the end of Q2 2018.  In the markets that have launched, AudienceApp has had an immediate impact on our customers and the way campaigns are being planned.  We have seen early and open adoption by our local customers, changing the way existing customers are buying TV as well as bringing new advertisers to local TV.

Weisler: How will this be marketed?

Tatta: Our efforts center heavily on industry education and building awareness about the benefits of census-level audience measurement and advanced analytics relative to TV advertising and programming. Ultimately, it’s about doing really great client work so being able to communicate some of the interesting things we’re doing for clients like Walmart and Charter is truly a privilege.

Klippel: AudienceApp is a mobile tool that will be in the hands of our sales account executives to allow them to work in real-time with their customers to plan and optimize against audiences.  In addition, we will be working to build awareness of the benefits and effectiveness of using viewership and audience data to drive advanced campaign planning and advanced analytics, ROI and attribution.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com