Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan Seeks Bold Change

Dave Morgan, CEO Simulmedia, made headlines recently when he resigned from the board of the ARF, citing the need for bolder action in fixing ad measurement.  According to Morgan, “We do not have a trusted way to measure the basics of impression reach and frequency across channels, even just the big media channels like linear TV, digital banners, digital video and radio.”
 
He shares his views on the state of the industry, its challenges and opportunities, to help clarify this position:

Charlene Weisler: I know your decision sparked a lot of industry discussion. What is holding us back in measurement?

Dave Morgan: It’s not because we lack the technology to do it. It’s because many lack the will to lead and drive it. The industry has sat back and let the Google and Facebook own the measurement and attribution stage and claim virtually all of the overall ad industry’s growth.

Weisler: How has the media landscape changed since you first launched Simulmedia?

Dave Morgan: A lot has changed, particularly in the world of video. Television didn’t go away – more people watch more live linear TV than in 2009 – but the viewing is much, much more fragmented across many more channels, programs, day-parts and devices. Plus we’ve seen a dramatic increase in streaming video viewing, most of it on connected TV’s, though only a small portion of it with ads. While digital video advertising has been a darling of the buying community for much of the past ten years, many of the advertisers have come to realize that it’s also fraught with problematic measurement, a lot of unsuitable content and way too much outright fraud. This is now driving a lot of large national advertisers to reevaluate TV, particularly now that there are platforms like ours that bring digital, audience approaches to TV ad targeting, activation and optimization.

Weisler: What are the major challenges that you face?

Morgan: Education. Industry trades, press releases and conference stages are loaded with a never-ending swirl of bright, shiny objects and acronyms-of-the-month, creating confusion and sowing too much misinformation.

Weisler: What is the current state of addressable advertising?

Morgan: Addressable advertising on TV is beginning to have its moment. While it will always lack the scale, quick impact and efficiency of data-optimized linear buys, it is becoming a powerful complement to more conventional linear and data-optimized buys and OTT ad buys.

Weisler: What is the current state of attribution?

Morgan: Attribution needs a lot of help. Walled Gardens like Google and Facebook have stolen the march by building strong, though naturally biased solutions of their own and working tirelessly to promote and educate their capabilities. We need more aggressive leadership here, and in advertising measurement generally, by the advertisers themselves. I am hopeful that the recent efforts of the Association of National Advertisers in this area will make a real impact.

Weisler: What do you think the media landscape will look like three years from now?

Morgan: In 2022, we’ll still see 80% of the premium video ad load on linear TV, but most video campaigns will be much better coordinated across linear TV and OTT and we’ll see a real resurgence and growth regional, mid-sized agencies as they begin to leverage software, data and superior client service and strategy to manage national media as well or better than large holding company agencies.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Optimism in the Face of Dramatic Change. ARF AUDIENCExSCIENCE Conference

For those of us who work in the media measurement space, the annual ARF measurement conference has always been a must-attend.  This year, topics ranged from the standardization of cross platform metrics, ad length, attribution, privacy and the uses of new technology like artificial intelligence to facilitate data insights. 

My impression is that measurement evolution is finally gaining traction with more collaboration between competing companies (Think: OpenAP), more efforts to create new standardized metrics and data labeling (CIMM and the IAB) and the end of business-as-usual constraints (ad lengths that vary from 6 seconds plus).

Three Big Trends

According to Scott McDonald, President and CEO, ARF, there are three major trends advancing in the industry. The first is “making progress with cross-platform audience measurement that is keeping up with technology and consumers—and if not, what the impediments are and how we can up our game.”

The second trend is breaking out of ad length constraints so as to more fully leverage platform and device viewing behaviors. The implementation of short-form ads, some as short as six seconds, is one possible solution. “But there are still questions around their effectiveness, how to best deploy them, and how they may affect the consumer’s frustration with ad clutter,” McDonald averred.

The third trend concerns privacy. “Marketing has been in a headlong race toward ever more precise targeting, fueled by the rise of big data, data analytics, and multi-touch attribution,” he noted. “Now, however, targeting is a risk with signs of consumer mistrust in how data is being used (from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its follow-on effects), and the continued impact of the rollout of GDPR, an EU law with global implications.” 

However, McDonald cannot predict how the concern over privacy will unfold, how it could impact the media ecosystem, or whether there will be regulatory restrictions on data-driven targeting. “The industry has to evaluate whether it has gone too far in its zeal for targeting – so much so as to diminish advertising ROI and damage relations with consumers,” he concluded.

Changing the Current Metrics to Better Measure Cross Platform

There are those who believe that it is time to find a new standard metric for media that goes beyond age and gender. There is so much useful data out there that can craft a more nuanced and targeted audience measurement that we only need to come together as an industry and craft a more appropriate cross platform metric. But, in reality, it is not that easy. 

For some, Nielsen is and will be the standard. Dave Morgan, CEO Simulmedia, believes that, “Nielsen will be the gold standard of TV measurement well into the future.” But, he expects an evolution with, “core panel ratings enhanced with much more granular measurements that capture much deeper characteristics of audiences reached at the person/impression level and also real attribution to the delivery of desired business outcomes.” He added that we are already seeing some of this enhanced measurement in the marketplace and he expects to see it become a very significant part of the measurement mix by the end of 2020.

For others, the reason why the industry moves slowly is that there are different crediting qualifiers for the same measurements on different platforms. Consensus on which rules should be used for all platforms is an important next step. Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer, comScore explained that for Live TV/DVR/TV VOD and OOH, credit for the full minute is given based off of who has the plurality of seconds in a given minute. Linear Mobile and Computer has a 30-second qualifier where credit is given only after a full 30 seconds of viewing has occurred. Dynamic Mobile and Computer currently has no qualifier but the MRC standard is 2 seconds with 50% of the ad viewable. How can these be reconciled and equated?

Consumers Continue to Rule

“We’re seeing a huge shift in viewing habits,” said Dan Robbins, Roku’s head of ad research. “Recent research of our cord cutting users shows that 78 percent think cable is too expensive, 57 percent believe there are too many channels, while 80 percent still watch as much TV as they did before they cut the cord. Streaming has become mainstream.”

But Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising and Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal, believes in the power of television because it offers premium content that is an unbeatable draw for audiences and advertisers. All of this talk about the power of digital is a false narrative, she posited. When advertisers are enticed by cheap CPMs for lower quality content, they fail to understand “the relative value of content they are getting.”

Maybe it’s all semantics. For Megan Clarken, President, Watch, Nielsen, it is all video no matter what device is being used. She explained that “from a measurement perspective, our job is to find comparable measurement across video,” placing TV as “part of the digital industry.”

Conclusion

Despite the continuing upheaval and viewer erosion on certain platforms, “I am extremely optimistic about the future,” Yaccarino stated, and added, “We need to challenge legacy. It is impacting all of our businesses all around. Why are we afraid of change? We have permission to change.” Change is certainly in the air. Now it is time to take a big breath and move decisively forward.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Simulmedia's Dave Morgan on Predicting the Future of Media

Does the past presage the future?  Generally speaking, one might say yes.  But some media executives see a future with little to no precedent.  Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, believes that the industry is undergoing such dramatic structural change that it is difficult to parse the future impact based solely on previous disruptions.  I recently talked with him about the complete disappearance of some forms of media, the impact of voice search and the future of TV measurement.

Charlene Weisler:  What is going on now in the media ecosystem?

Dave Morgan:  Most people, when they look at changing trends and forecasts in the media industry, look at what has changed in the most recent past.  They look at the trend lines in the longer-term past to see how fast they impact things and then they project that forward.  What I think is happening now that will make that approach difficult is that we are seeing really big structural changes in how people are consuming media, how advertising is being bought and sold and how marketers are going to deploy the money for the acquisition of customers.  It is going to be very unpredictable for a lot of people.  The truisms we have heard for decades that no subsequent new media destroys the old media will go away.  Yes, we will see less classic radio and more digital audio.  We will see less newspapers and more digital news.  But we will see what we always thought were long-term sustainable advertising channels truly disappear because of their inability to be economically supported.

Weisler:  So in your experience, has there been any other point in time where you have seen such dramatic transformation in the industry?

Morgan:  No.  I think that the big macro issues have been seen for a long time.  Certainly if you go back 30 years, Jack Myers was predicting these things and he was probably one of the only people who was doing so.  The tension between above the line and below the line in spend, what happens when marketers take greater control … the only thing that I think is close is what we saw with search and online classifieds.  I will use Craigslist as an example; what search did to the Yellow Pages and the classified business, that is probably comparable.

Weisler:  The result of that has been a disintermediation of that business.

Morgan:  The newspaper pillars have been taken out.  The Yellow Pages businesses are a fraction of what they used to be -- not even 5% I expect. So the vertical commerce classified businesses that have survived are interesting and pretty powerful but they are not nearly the profit drivers that we used to have in print classifieds.  But the good thing is, without question, the consumer, the user, the potential buyer, the seeker of commercial information has a dramatically more robust experience, simpler and faster than ever before.  So, the people who had to wait for the classified ads to show up, to see what car they could buy, or the person trying to dig through the Yellow Pages to try to find a restaurant to go to from books that were published 18 months before, they won.

Weisler:  Concerning the future of search, I have been hearing a lot about voice search.

Morgan:  I'm a believer in voice search.  I think the user experience of typing text either on a PC or a phone is not nearly as easy and simple and intuitive as talking.  So I do believe that voice search and voice commercial search would be pretty powerful.  This obviously tells you there is a chance to have a significant shift in the search business over time; away from Google, which is so dominant today, to something towards a company like Amazon which is a leading contender at the moment.

Weisler:  Television is still working with proxy measurements when everything is about targetability.  The rate of change appears to be lagging.  Do you see that to be true? 

Morgan:  This is probably the area that will be the most suddenly hit when it hits.  For a number of reasons, TV advertising has been much more resilient than a lot of people expected because it works.  As inefficiently bought, sold and measured as it is today, nothing beats TV in doing what TV does well.  Nothing reaches more people faster.  Nothing delivers more per-person delivery impact.  Nothing is fundamentally cheaper.

National cable CPMs per 30 second spots were $7 to $9 while premium digital, a six second pre-roll CPM is $40 to $50.  This is because most of the buyers in the digital world have come from direct response so they value things as what they are worth to them.  Because the prices are low on TV, there are more buyers than sellers.  So, if you have a line-up of buyers who are willing to purchase your inventory based on what you valuated it on a business model, you don't have to change things a whole lot.

But just like the Hemingway quote from the Sun Also Rises when Mike was asked how he went bankrupt and he replies, "Two ways, gradually then suddenly," I think that is the change coming to the TV industry.  Which is why every TV company is for sale today.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Looking Ahead on Tomorrow’s Tech Advancements

In a previous article I asked industry experts to recall their most amazing technological advancements from their early careers. Now I ask them to look forward and give me their best technological advancement predictions for 2018. My prediction is that more collaboration between companies will result in a more standardized system for buying, selling and tracking media. I also see A.I. playing a greater role in establishing behavioral patterns that can be used to craft content and target advertising. 

Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director, CIMM: In 2018, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers will launch an open standard audio watermark that can embed content and ad identifiers from EIDR and Ad-ID, along with time stamps and station identifiers.  This will hopefully bring innovation to automating TV workflows, and in the ability to track playout and measure audiences in real time!  

Sheryl Feldinger, Media Consultant: I'm fortunate to work with some tech-forward companies, so I see a lot of early adopter behavior at large organizations. In 2018, I think more companies will take a page from the social media playbook and embrace video chat in the work place. It works great, and does not require expensive equipment. The more traditional media companies are still a bit camera shy, but I hope that changes because video chat is as close as you can get to F2F meetings without leaving your time zone.

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia: The biggest technological advancement in 2018 won't be a new technology per se, but better utilization of technology that we already have. In 2018, the biggest advancement will be on the technology user side. Every day, more and more people working in the media industry are learning how to better exploit technology, whether it is the cloud or machine learning or predictive analytics. The biggest technological impacts this year will be driven by people, not some new code.

Brad Adgate, Independent Media Researcher:  I think the use of Artificial Intelligence to help manage the amount of data that are being used to make media recommendations will gain traction in 2018 and in the years ahead.

Caroline Horner, Co-Founder, Spicy Tequila: In 2018 it will be 1) Addressable hits scale with advancement from Spectrum, Comcast, OTT/Smart TVs, and 5G and ATSC 3.0.  And other intermediaries. 2) Blockchain technologies prove capable of resolving ID across distribution points. 3) MTA and AI optimize performance in tighter and more responsive cycles. And in 2019 I believe that it will be the re-emergence of the creative role in ad effectiveness.

Mitch Oscar, Advanced TV Strategist, USIM:  I predict that we will still be grappling with the technology and its functionality. We can now fast forward but what if the technology was able to extract the commercials so if I watch in the recorded mode I did not even have to fast forward. Some services are offering that capability now with a new setting. I see that as a real concern going forward. I also believe that addressability was introduced in 1996 and it is going to happen any day now. 

Arlene Manos, President Emeritus, AMC Networks: Greater expansion of OTT, and increased social media application.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Looking Back on the Technological Advancements of Yesterday

At this time of great disruption in the media industry, I find it interesting to look back and realize that disruption in media was always a constant. The systems we used to measure content continually changed, improved and even disrupted our ways of doing business. I recall that, when I was an intern at NBC years ago, I was impressed that my computer did not require punch cards. Am I dating myself? Probably. 

As we embark on 2018, I asked others in the industry to answer the question: “When you first started in the industry, what was the most amazing device/application/program/aspect/item at the time?” One person noted that in the 1990s when she was at Discovery “it was PCs and the internet. That technology changed everything.” For others, it was a range of other advancements:

Arlene Manos, President Emeritus, AMC Networks: When I started at A&E, we did a lot by spreadsheet. Someone I hired as an intern’ recently mentioned in an article, that he shared a computer with me since they were scarce. The first system we were on was Columbine, followed by a Nesbitt system for planning and posting. Don’t remember any more than that.

Mitch Oscar, Advanced TV Strategist, USIM:  In 1999 it was the introduction of TiVo, The inventor came to my office to talk to me about advertising and TiVo’s functionality. At about the same time, the head of IPG called me and said, “So advertising is dead?” TiVo was momentous because everyone was worried about the impact of two functionalities – the recording of programming and the ability of fast forwarding to skip commercials. We wondered if the speed be would be fast or slow enough to see the brand messaging.

Caroline Horner, Co-Founder, Spicy Tequila: Well, this will show my age...a desktop PC with a spreadsheet and database application and for data...LNA, MRI, Scanner data (IRI, I think.) and IMS (I started in a healthcare agency.) Then it was online services (pre-AOL) and then anything internet… and a laptop, cellphone and modem. Then there was the introduction of Java and JavaScript and dynamic webpage generation with ad serving, SAS enterprise miner, set top box data, mobile video, growth of marketing database companies, Programmatic. Addressable TV!

Kathy Newberger, Advanced Advertising Consultant: I was working in local ad sales at the time and we said it was going to be digital ad insertion. We were going from six networks that were inserted using tape decks to sixteen networks using digital equipment. We thought that was going to be amazing … and it was. Now it’s amplified by 500 times more – every network is insert-able. And on top of that is OTT.

Brad Adgate, Independent Media Researcher:  I think the most important introduction early in my career were spreadsheets. Long gone products like Lotus 1-2-3 and afterwards Quattro Pro were being used. Before that, workers used those large green accounting pads and calculators to fill in the data, took a lot longer and more error prone.

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia: In early 1993, I was working in "new media" helping newspaper companies develop ad and content strategies for early online services and partnerships with telcos and cable companies and had a chance to play with the Mosaic browser. It was pretty clear, even then, that a user managed rendering engine like the browser would change the media industry, particularly for print companies with text and still photos, which rendered well even without high speed internet. It certainly did.

Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director, CIMM: Back in 1982, we were analyzing clickstream data from set top boxes in a Pilot Test for Time Teletext, which was a text and graphic service similar to the early AOL, but delivered via the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) of a channel on Time Warner’s cable system!  I never thought it would take this long to get to nationally representative samples of Return Path Data!

Sheryl Feldinger, Media Consultant: I often comment to my 16-year-old that the biggest difference between growing up today versus the 1970s is the pace of life. Everything happens so much faster today. The pace of communication, especially, flies at warp speed. Confession: early in my career, fax machines were a game changer. They revolutionized the work place. No longer could you tell the client, "We will messenger it to your office first thing tomorrow." The new retort was, "Why wait? You can fax it tonight!" It didn't matter that the edges of the thermal paper curled. All of a sudden, deadlines got pushed up and we all had to work faster.

Next article – Looking Ahead to 2018.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Welcome the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The TV of Tomorrow Offers an Exciting and Dystopian Future.

Where is TV headed? What is the TV of tomorrow? That was the question on my mind while attending the TV of Tomorrow conference held in NYC last week.

Many issues are hitting the industry now. “People are trying to aggregate data in order to organize the KPIs and monetize them while understanding all of the barriers involved how to bring all that data together,’” noted, Tracy Swedlow, Editor-in-Chief of ITVT and Founder of the TVOT Conference. In the realm of social media, many companies are grappling with “YouTube and their changing algorithms, libraries that are being de-monetized and the creation of greener pastures,” she added. 

One thing is clear; the TV ecosystem of today will definitely not be the TV ecosystem of tomorrow. Millennials are cord-nevers who didn’t grow up in a world of TV networks. Don’t expect them to change their habits as they age. And they don’t see the media landscape the way older viewers do. As Helen Katz, SVP/Global Director of Media and Insights, Publicis Media, explained when she asked her daughter what her favorite TV channels were, replied, “What is a TV channel?” 

For those of use with years invested in the industry, the changes discussed at the TVOT are at once exciting and dystopian. Here are my takeaways:

Increasing Technological Dominance

This drumbeat of technological change is leading to what Stein Erik Sorhaug, VP Product Strategy, Vimond, terms the Fourth Industrial Revolution where, through artificial intelligence (AI), we will drive human behavior and human thought. AI, as applied through Machine Learning, has the future capability to craft the most engaging content, map the most effective media plan and measure everything everywhere through the consumer journey. Ideally there will be room for both AI and human input where computers "create an inference layer" according to Mika Rautiainen, CEO/CTO, Valossa Labs, followed by "human curators editorially creating playlists and new channels," Sorhaug added.

Skill sets need to keep pace

Certain jobs could disappear in this new media ecosystem or will require different skill sets. "No question that people in yesterday's supply chain will be wiped out," stated Dave Morgan, CEO, Simulmedia, "marketing managers today don't have hard science background and will lose jobs to those who do." Swedlow suggested future media mavens, “create their own channel with their own ideas for original content. There will always be an opportunity for great content with real personalities and people who have a compelling story to tell.” 

Measurement Still a Challenge

“The lines between linear and digital are blurring,” explained Jenny Burke, SVP Sales Strategy, NBCU, “so we are concentrating on content; distributing it to whatever platform the consumer prefers.” How can this consumer journey be best measured? Aaron Fetters, SVP National Agencies and CPG Business, comScore, noted that, “times are changing and measurement must change with it. We need to future proof measurement with the growth in IoT, OTT and wearables.” But how can we accomplish this when there are walled gardens and silos of data and no industry standard content identification system in place? Until we can agree on the best way to track content, through content identification and ACR, full cross-platform measurement will continue to be a challenge and will become more complex.

OTT is Growing and Cuts Out the Advertiser

Ignore the influence of OTT at your peril. “Four major OTT services account for 80% of viewing time in OTT households with Netflix at 39%,” stated Katz. And it is growing. Since much of OTT is subscription based, this can shut out advertising. Fetters added, “We see that viewers are spending 25 hours per month with Netflix on their TV screen and that is 25 hours per month that is not available to advertising. We need to find ways of adjusting the advertising plan to reach those households.”

ATSC 3.0 Brings TV into the New Age

Although still in the arena of the engineering wonks, the advent of ATSC 3.0 will prove to be a game changer for local TV. This new protocol will, as Swedlow explained, “enable regular digital television over the air – local television and every other broadcaster - to be able to explore the relationship between linear over-the-air and interactivity on-demand.” How fast and how profound ATSC 3.0 will be depends on timing – when will all of the new chips be installed? It will take a while, she explained, because there is no deadline by the government, “but I think it will pick up steam,” she concluded.

We have to be “savvy enough to take advantage of all of these new technologies because everything will be interactive. There will be shows that will be voice activated and there will be shows that will require you to interact with another person or deal with blockchain to monetize your content,” explained Swedlow. The best advice I can give is to embrace change and be nimble. The future of television will demand more of us but it will be an exciting journey.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com