Establishing Best Practices to Benefit Clients. An Interview with Comcast Spotlight’s Nora Shimmel

It’s not often that someone in media moves from Sales to Research but Nora Shimmel, who began her career as a sales assistant in broadcast spot sales, is one of those rare talents.

Currently working as the Senior Research Manager at Comcast Spotlight, Shimmel has found that adding set top box data to her arsenal of research systems has greatly heightened her ability to parse the tuning habits of television viewers and, “utilize data to drive successful campaigns for our clients in ways that are feasible and that our sales team can execute.” Comcast is especially rich in data and boasts a new platform which, she noted, “gives us a lot of levers that we can pull to execute a linear TV buy in several ways for our clients depending on their goals.” 

She has just completed a seminal study on the four Best Practices for driving tune in and building loyal viewers in a time of almost limitless entertainment choices. This data-centric study enables Comcast Spotlight’s Media and Entertainment clients from both movies and television to better target the right viewers at the right time on the right platform. 

The Basis of Best Practices

Shimmel explained the process of forming these best practices through research analyses and data mining. “The best practices came about as a result of the expansion of our conversion studies. We joined our ad exposure data with our viewership data in a privacy compliant way,” she explained, in order to, “move the needle to drive show viewership for our clients for all aspects of television whether live or in a catch-up strategy.”

Using Comcast’s own viewership data to do that, at first manually, required several groups within the company to coordinate their efforts.  Soon the process was standardized and they could see, “what trends there, what methodology was most consistent, what works and doesn’t work.” Shimmel’s group analyzed and tested 36 campaigns across all genres and networks, checked for synergies and conflicts between programming types and networks, monitored the trends and outcomes and identified four general truisms that most drove results to benefit clients.

Shimmel explained that within Comcast, they can access viewership data from 70 million homes, resulting in ample data from which to draw conclusions. “We don’t have to model anything. We have true viewing data at our fingertips.” It took about a year of hard work to analyze the results and formulate conclusions.

The Four Best Practices

According to Shimmel, best practices are the recommended ways in which media and entertainment clients should think about investing in TV. The research behind these best practices have proven to drive tune in and overall viewership of all content.

The four key best practices crafted by Comcast Spotlight to insure a successful advertising campaign are:

Take a Sustaining Media Approach. According to Shimmel this is specifically for episodic programming, different for a movie on demand. “For episodic programming we recommend five to seven weeks of sustaining media, promoting multiple episodes as well as live and time shifted viewing,” she stated. Viewing is fragmented and getting more so. “People are watching in so many different ways, the idea is to give them an opportunity to catch up to find out what your show is about.” She also added that live viewing is important but there is also value in time-shifted viewing in the plus three window and even further out for viewers to catch up. Having a sustained media campaign allows for the content to reach more people and results in a better lift in ad conversion. 

Multi-Platform Touch Drives Superior Tune-In. Once a multiple week media approach is applied, the next question is where the campaign should run. “Twenty five of the 36 campaigns were running on both linear and VOD. We bucketed the exposed households into linear-only, VOD-only or exposed to both,” she continued, “and frequently we saw that the exposed-both had the greatest conversion rate.” She attributed this to two things – increased frequency exposure and the differences in mindset when watching on one platform versus another. The study continued with campaigns that ran on one-to-two platforms compared to those that ran on 3+. “The exposed lift compared to the unexposed was nearly double for 3+ campaigns,” she concluded. “You need multi-platform to grow your reach and to find people in the right moment to take action.”

Invest in Platforms Strategically. Now that it is proven that a campaign needs to run on multiple platforms, which platforms are most impactful, how should they be layered and how this can best fit into the budget? “We looked at how the different platforms work, the difference between an average reach versus an average lift. For a local campaign the conversion rate may be a little lower overall but the lift may be very high. You need to have the broad coverage but also hammer home with a niche strategy,” she advised.

Build Target Audience Segments Wisely. “Knowing that we are recommending niche on top of broad, we were starting to see a lot of ‘don’ts.’ What targets are we seeing that are doing the best? Who might be your target that you have not previously considered?” She added, “We started seeing targets that were not doing well such as those who were only targeting their previous season’s viewers who are already very invested in the show.” Clients must expand their range and not just target previous franchise viewers of a show. “Find conquesting viewers to grow your incremental households,” she advised, “And using data is the best way to do that.”

Having these best practices provides a good roadmap for both media companies and advertisers in this ever fragmenting and increasingly complex media world to improve overall performance. “We want to continue our efforts, monitoring trends and get even deeper data to look at time of year, for example, as well as additional analyses to inform catch up strategies and binging and other ways to get consumption,” she concluded.

This article first appeared in MediaVillage.com

Surprising TV Trends From Comcast STB Data. An Interview with Heather Coghill

Heather Coghill, Senior Director Audience Insights, Comcast Spotlight has been a fan of set top box data for years. And now, with the recent announcement of a new television insights study based on Comcast Spotlight’s footprint, she has more than enough data to discern both national and local market trends.  

But in a media market that offers a choice of many television performance reports, why release another one now? “When we first unlocked our set top box data, we saw that it was uncovering new insights which we publicized internally,” she explained. “We shared the results with our clients. Now we want to release the results to a wider audience.” Indeed, the insights gleaned from the set top box data dispels many myths regarding consumer preferences and gives greater clarity to both advertisers and programmers on viewer behaviors.

The Data

The report culls insights from over 17 million Comcast households across 65 markets. This is, “based on approximately nine billion hours of viewing data captured in Q1 2019. To put that number in perspective, it would take over 100,000 years to watch one billion hours of content,” she noted.  All of this data is managed by an analytics team. “We have data scientists and people who are used to working with big data and they cultivated it for us.”

For Coghill, time spent per day was an important metric. “The press reports that TV is dying, but in fact people are spending a lot of time with TV daily – over 6 hours – and it was up year to year.” The data shows that “TV is as strong as ever.”

A New Television Landscape

However, “TV viewing has changed,” she stated. “It’s not just about watching the four broadcast networks in primetime anymore. We found that 68% of time spent with linear TV is spent outside of primetime. The sheer number of networks that households are watching total over 34 per month. And the networks vary by household with cable accounting for 65% of all viewing.” The amount of networks viewed per month surprised both Coghill and me and is higher than other analyses based on much smaller samples. “If you just took the most watched network across all of our households, it is 308 different networks,” she added, which means that, “it’s getting harder and harder for advertisers to reach audiences at scale.” For Coghill, all of this speaks to the degree of fragmentation, “which we knew to be true but I was surprised as to how much fragmentation there actually is.”

The report found that primetime is not necessarily the highest viewing daypart, Sunday is not necessarily the highest viewing day of the week and the share of live and time-shifted viewing remained constant throughout the week. These insights hold great implications for programmers, schedulers, marketers and advertisers.

According to the report results, there was a significant uptick in viewing 1Q18 to 1Q19 with viewing on cable networks and Video on Demand (VOD) driving a large part of this growth. Notably, VOD viewership in Comcast homes doubled since 2016. 

Local Market Insights

“The data becomes especially valuable when you look at the local market level, especially when you get into niche audience segments,” because of the ample sample size that the Comcast data offers. “We can look at tens of thousands of households in many markets,” she stated. I found that there were fairly consistent viewing patterns across markets. Examples: The number of networks watched on a market-by-market level ranged from 30-37 and the amount of time viewing outside of prime ranged from 66% to 70%.

In comparing year to year trends, Coghill explained that, “While the big picture trends remain consistent across markets, there are definitely some nuances – households in Pittsburgh spend 6 hours 27 minutes with live linear television daily, while households in Salt Lake City spend 4 hours 41 minutes with live linear television daily. Households in Sacramento spend 1 hour 8 minutes with time-shifted viewing daily (DVR/VOD), while households in Miami only spend 35 minutes a day. When we get into the network level viewing, these differences become even more apparent.”

Stay Tuned

With all of this available data, there will be added analyses in future reports. “We are going to take a deeper look at viewing by market and by audience segments in an upcoming edition,” Coghill shared, “and these reports will come out quarterly going forward.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

FreeWheel’s James Rothwell on the Potent Combination of Linear TV and Digital

James Rothwell, Vice President, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations at Comcast Advertising, can be considered a television evangelist. 

He currently handles responsibilities across FreeWheel and Spotlight, which means he manages both the sell and buy side of the business.  “Four years ago, I actually wrote my own job description, pitching to the FreeWheel CEO at the time that we needed to push our thought leadership out there, sharing the story about premium video and why TV is important to buyers,” he explained.  "It was a time when digital video was gaining a lot of traction in the marketplace.”

FreeWheel Council for Premium Video
It is vitally important to Rothwell (pictured at top) to support clients by “banging the drum” to highlight TV’s unique contributions to the advertising mix.  This philosophy resulted in the creation of the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.  The group advocates on behalf of all FreeWheel clients on the publishing side -- meeting on a regular basis to discuss important topics of the day, including how to move the industry forward and research, data and thought leadership on the value of premium video, especially targeted at the buy side.

Since the council started, and three years into his leadership, Rothwell reflected that, at the time, “digital was the new kid on the block, getting all of the headlines and gaining the mindshare of advertisers and the press.”  But the landscape is shifting.  “Over the years, we have seen brand safety challenges and issues that have been happening on the digital side that have called the value proposition into question," he said.  "We have been trying to focus our efforts on making sure that message is not lost.  The TV ecosystem is superior in terms of the value it can generate for marketers with none of the risk.”

Fragmentation and Its Impact
But, let’s face it, TV audiences have been fragmenting and this is causing a shift in advertiser perceptions and in the marketplace in general.  I asked Rothwell how this TV viewership fragmentation is impacting advertisers’ ability to reach their target audience.  He conceded that “people are watching TV wherever and whenever they want on whatever device they choose.  As a result, companies have had to adapt and change their outlook, as well as the way they manage their businesses and the value propositions and solutions they offer to advertisers.”  The goal is to make it as easy as possible to transact and ultimately re-aggregate those audiences.  Rothwell focuses on that convergence and the idea that linear TV and digital needs to be as seamless as possible from offering to execution to measurement.

To Rothwell, with the fragmenting media landscape, advertisers are now trying to “find unique audiences and unique individuals within those audiences, as well as be able to manage the exposure of their advertising message across all of these different environments.”  In planning, he noted that there is an understanding of where that audience is.  But from a buying, executing and measurement perspective, there is a challenge because each of those different environments treats the delivery of those audiences separately.  This becomes cumbersome for advertisers to get a true sense of the total audience and manage the way they expose messages.  Synergies need to be established to move the business forward.

Measurement continues to be an issue and “has not caught up to audiences yet,” Rothwell noted.  "[Although we are] chipping away at it every year, it still has a long way to go.”  And as audiences are split across different screens, the advertising experience, “which isn’t consistent across those screens, is something that continues to be refined.”  He pointed out that there is a lot of testing going on in the industry, from ad length to formats, ensuring that the consumer gets the best experience and advertisers get the best value.

Challenges In Optimal Reach
For Rothwell, in addition to fragmentation, another challenge that prevents advertisers from attaining optimal reach is audience duplication.  “If we think about those audiences across television and digital screens, they are not mutually exclusive and many heavy streamers still consume hours of linear TV across multiple publishers," he said.  "I watch linear and OTT, and on my mobile device.”  He added that many heavy streamers also consume hours of linear TV across multiple publishers.
Complete audience de-duplication is also a challenge.  “Today, programmers and operators are increasingly able to de-duplicate their own audiences, but an advertiser needs to be able to manage reach across all channels, platforms and publishers," he asserted.  "It’s a big challenge."  This is important for monitoring ad exposures and fatigue.  “While TV viewers are scattered across the multitude of channels, digital video is even more fragmented than linear is with different streaming services, platforms and devices,” which adds to the complexity, he said.  Finally, up to a certain point, “linear TV can be very efficient in terms of target reach, but beyond that the cost of incremental reach percentage points climbs exponentially.”

Achieving Optimal Reach
Citing an example of incremental reach in the marketplace, Rothwell took a look at some of the Comcast data and FreeWheel campaigns running on their platform and saw what the audience overlap looked like when the campaigns ran on both digital and linear.  “What was really interesting was when we had large linear TV buys, the incremental reach opportunity on digital was good but didn’t blow us away," he said.  "When the buys were more evenly spread across linear and digital, digital was able to drive a huge amount of incremental reach and incremental audience for that particular brand.  That was interesting to us to see how digital can support linear, especially when investment in linear was lower.”  They also conducted research on reaching the right audiences with the right number of exposures across a combination of both linear and digital, introducing the concept of effective incremental reach, including optimal frequency.

“This is a huge opportunity for the TV business to create reach efficiencies across the different channels and across the different consumption patterns," he explained.  "It is a very complex problem to solve, but as data becomes more sophisticated and is liberated from its legacy silos, the promise of incremental reach will become a reality.  The value for a brand to be able to understand and control that messaging to different audiences in different engaging environments is phenomenal.”

For a more in-depth look at the FreeWheel Council’s work on incremental reach, click here.

This article first appeared in WWW.MediaVillage.com

Q&A Interview with Mark Altschuler - Comcast Spotlight

It all comes down to sales and Mark Altschuler knows sales. Mark is Vice President, National Advertising Sales at Comcast Spotlight in New York. He started at the national sales organization in 2002 as Director of National Sales for the Eastern and NorthCentral Divisions and was promoted in 2007. Prior to joining Comcast Spotlight Mark held management and sales positions with software technology startup ClickRadio (1999-2002); The Myers Group (1997-1999); New World Sales & Marketing (1994-1997); Group W Sports Marketing (1989-1994) and WGN TV (1986-1989).  He began his sales career in 1980 with Telerep. 

His work at Comcast Spotlight is at a time when digitization, cross platform and the impact of new technology is disrupting “business as usual”. Mark talks about cross platform impact on his business, addressable advertising, dynamic ad insertion, use of segmentation, relationships with agencies and how his job is evolving. He also offers some insights on the sales road ahead.

The five videos of the complete interview are as follows:

Subject                                    Length (in minutes)

Background                              (4:58)

Xfinity, Video, STB data             (4:52)

Comcast Spotlight                    (7:11)

Addressable and DAI                (9:14)   

Predictions & Agencies             (7:58)

Charlene Weisler interviews Mark Altschuler who talks about his background in this 4:58 minute video:

Mark Altschuler talks to Charlene Weisler about Comcast's Xfinity service and the Video media environment in this 4:52 minute video:

 


Mark Altschuler talks to Charlene Weisler about Comcast Spotlight in this 7:11 minute video:



Charlene Weisler interviews Mark Altschuler who discusses the addressable advertising marketplace and the structure of dynamic add insertion in this 9:14 minute video:



In this concluding 7:58 minute video Mark Altschuler talks to Charlene Weisler about the agency environment and looks forward intot he media landscape over the next five years: