OpenAP 2.0 Optimizes Reach and Unifies Campaigns

Despite the shift in partners in the last few months, when Turner (WarnerMedia) opted out and NBCU opted in, OpenAP did not miss a beat.  At the recent Programmatic TV Summit, Denise Colella, Senior Vice President, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU; Amarachi Miller, Vice President Product Management and Data Science, Viacom, and Dan Callahan, Vice President, Audience and Automated Sales, Fox, talked about OpenAP, the marketplace and the future.

Standardization and Collaboration
There is a standardization challenge in the marketplace, noted Miller, where different segmentations and measurement parameters make it difficult to combine the performance of a contract across different companies.  OpenAP solves that.  "You have to have an apples-to-apples comparison for measurement and guarantees," he said, "and be able to create campaigns around a unified set of segments."

"We had a lot of clients who expressed an interest in getting involved in advanced advertising, but we didn't make it easy for them," Colella explained.  "They had to define a segment for each network group.  What was happening was that we were being relegated to only one company getting a portion of a budget or perhaps just a test budget.  So, we wanted to make it easier and take away both the pain and excuses for taking on advanced advertising because we knew we could offer the client something much better (through OpenAP)."

"The founding principles are standardization and collaboration," added Callahan.

OpenAP 2.0
OpenAP has gotten more fluid and connective since its launch.  Initially defined as standardized segments and posting, it has moved to a point where, as Miller explained.  "Everyone can grade off the same starting point and move to a unified campaign," he said.  "So, you can submit a budget to all three of the publishers based on that same segment, have each of them return to you a plan based on that and basically automate the negotiation process," creating a unified post that includes a look at unduplicated reach.

Next steps have also included a "look at workflow tools," Colella noted.  "In addition to being able to standardize the audiences and post them to the publishers, we have unified the workflow tools so campaigns can look the same no matter who you are dealing with, as well as the posting."  OpenAP 2.0 now includes a digital marketplace, "so you can do a digital buy that reaches across the publishers in OpenAP" on the dot coms, she added.

When Frenemies Compete
But how does the apportionment of a budget work when you have three competing companies working together?  On the front end of the campaign, agencies and buyers start by assigning a budget to each of the networks based on the desired segment provided on an automated RFP. "You would then receive a plan based on the aggregated view of the entire plan submitted and then decide whether you want to accept or continue negotiating," Miller revealed.  Once all negotiated, a complete plan with unified reach would be confirmed.

"The way we compete is that we each have our own optimization system once the audience is determined," Colella explained.  "Think of it as determining your audience once and it pushes it out in each system; in our case, our AdSmart system, which sends our results back to the amalgamated OpenAP."

"We are all responsible for our own pieces," added Callahan.  "Our goal is for OpenAP to become a trusted marketplace."

Since joining the OpenAP team in late November, NBCU has garnered "a handful of clients," according to Colella, using Nielsen and comScore data for optimization.  But overall, NBCU "has over 400 clients take advantage of advanced advertising."

For Miller, "there is a huge amount of momentum in advanced advertising" in this Upfront, and "OpenAP makes it easier to transact."

Callahan is finding that "it is a part of every conversation."  So, with the help of OpenAP to smooth out the advanced advertising buying process, plus all of the great content at NBCU, Viacom and Fox, the future is bright for OpenAP 2.0 and beyond.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Challenges and Opportunities in Advanced Television

To many in the industry, advanced advertising holds the promise of optimizing inventory across all dayparts and platforms by targeting consumers no matter where they are and when they are consuming content. 

The benefits to consumers are that ad messaging is relevant and contextual, therefore meaningful and helpful. In a perfect world, the meeting of business commerce at all points of contact in the funnel will be both seamless and measureable.

But there are still a few bumps in the road for Advanced advertising that need to be addressed before it can fulfill its full national potential. A recent panel at the Advanced Advertising Summit discussed how the industry can put it all together.

Growth But Challenges
The Advanced advertising market is “seeing growth,” stated Chris Pizzurro, VP Global Sales, Canoe. Still, Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group, listed three main challenges. “The biggest problem is awareness, then ease of use and then measurement,” he explained. “We need to focus on education and make the big shift from linear TV to thinking about TV in the digital space.” It is important to explain to advertisers why they should invest in advanced advertising, proving to them that it is worth the investment. Steuer explained that the current compensation models are based on grps costs and delivery targets and, as an industry, we should be looking at deliverables in parallel with advanced results. He predicted that, “It would be more efficient and we will have money left over to retarget.”

Challenges But Opportunities
While still essentially local, Advanced is also global. Denise Colella, SVP Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU, noted that Sky TV has access to over 50 million global households enabling, “Global strategies that need to be implemented locally.” Measurement predicated on granular data points that are collected passively, and with privacy compliance, is improving. Jodie McAfee, SVP Sales and Marketing, Inscape, noted that his company, “generates TV viewing data on 10.5 million active TVs that must be connected to internet and opt-in to privacy.” Since all TVs sold today are connected TVs, the future will be more and more on the IP and thus facilitate the collection of all relevant consumption data. Inscape, according to McAfee, has a match key to the TV in the home anchored to the multi-touch devices, enabling better collection of usable data.

All panelists agreed that it is vital to think about the experience of the end users. Ease of use for advertisers is paramount, concluded, Colella. “We believe in an ad supported model that is hassle free,” she explained, “People are less tolerant of tech issues.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

GABBCON Focuses on Audience Based Buying Challenges and Opportunities

GABBCON, a relatively new conference now in its second year, held its conference in New York City last week. The event offered visionary thinking about the progression of programmatic, audience based targeting, cookies, blockchain technology, data and brand safety.  In his opening remarks, Gabe Greenberg, CEO and co-founder of GABBCON, Inc., noted that "audience based buying is at a turning point. We need to break down walled gardens and find new solutions to bring the industry together."

The ways to bring the industry together were outlined throughout the day:

It’s All About Data and How We Use It

Data continues to be one of the hottest topics but the focus of the data discussion is shifting. For some, data has become paramount, even over programming. According to Peter Naylor, SVP Sales at  hulu, “Audience is the product, not the shows. We sell audiences first. Data allows us to go beyond age and demo.”  Denise Colella, SVP Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy Advertising Sales, NBCUniversal, explained, “Data is paramount to everything we do. We have access to all types of data including Comcast STB data that allows us to help our advertisers and reach niche audiences. Data advises everything for us and we need to be able to measure it properly.” But, she continued, “there is new data all the time. It is a living and breathing thing. We are seeing more brands bringing their own data to the table – their own first party data.”

Understanding which data sets in combination are the most insightful is emerging as one of the key challenges and opportunities for marketers. Gary Reisman, CEO and Founder of LEAP Media Investments agrees: “While it’s true that data is powerful, we have almost too much data and are employing mostly tactical uses of that data.  The next generation of audience-based targeting will be focused on transforming the data sets we have into intelligence, leading to better informed strategic planning and audience creation.”

Guarantee Brand Safety

There has to be a sense of comfort among advertisers that their ads are being showcased with the right audience and with contextual brand safety. Fraud takes on many forms and is an impediment to robust advertising growth. John Montgomery, EVP of Brand Safety at GroupM, explained, “Brand safety means different things to different people. The risks that have emerged for some of our brands include fraud, privacy, viewability and ad blocking. We looked into data rights and data permissions, addressing one by one. We haven't conquered the beast but we caged it. We have done what we can.” But more is expected. “Marketers have moved trust transparency up the digital chain. It is the number one priority in the next year,” he added.

Embrace Blockchain Technology

To those who may not be familiar with the term, blockchain is the public ledger of bitcoin by which payments are executed peer-to-peer. Since blockchain essentially tracks transactions in a highly secure manner, there are those in our industry who believe that its roll-out in audience-based buying will help in tracking the consumer path with a higher level of trust and efficacy. Stacy Huggins, Co-Founder/CMO at Madhive, noted that, “the cost of trust is enormous. So blockchain is gaining a lot of adoption. The protocol secures data and lowers the cost of trust.” Jim Wilson, President at Premion, a Tegna Company, added that clients are asking for transparency - what networks were bought, who is seeing the ad. “We are trying to create standards. Blockchain creates transparency and consistency. It is efficient for publishers and advertisers.”

Put an End to Walled Gardens

Walled gardens, Montgomery noted, “are safer and there is less fraud.”  But walled gardens also create and perpetuate data delivery silos that make it more difficult to standardize and blend measurement across platforms and devices. For Howard Shimmel, Chief Research Officer at Turner, audience measurement today still has many challenges. “We still measure in silos and walled gardens create this challenge. We don't understand what drives outcome. What is it about a given exposure that drives an outcome?” he asked.  Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, agreed, “We need some standardization across the walled gardens. We need some building blocks of comparability - how to count a duration, what is a viewability standard.” The answer, according to Shimmel is, “Get everyone in a room together and decide on the platform we need to build. We need to get aligned to where the future will be.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com