It’s All About the Being the Best. Experiencing the Disney Roadshow Upfront.

There is a new normal in media and that is the virtual upfront. This week the Disney Roadshow introduced their slate of programming with a cheeky nod to the shelter-in-place state of the industry at a time when we really want to get together and enjoy new programming offerings at a fabulous venue. 

Okay so it is not Lincoln Center, but it is nice to attend this year’s event in pajamas. 

For Rita Ferro, President Disney Advertising Sales, this time of crisis has brought out the best in her company. "The events of the world have been a catalyst for innovation for all of us, leading us to new ways of working, and a recommit to purpose,” she began. “Unlike any other media company, Disney resonates on the deepest human levels awakening and celebrating our individual and collective spirits guiding us through the low moments and rocketing us to now highs, giving us hope for the future,” she added.

It’s All About Programming

The array of Disney media properties can attract viewers across all demographic groups. There is something for everybody. This year’s upfront included presentations by Connor Schell, Executive Vice President Content, ESPN, James Goldston, President ABC News, Karey Burke, President ABC Entertainment, Craig Erwich, Senior Vice President Scripted Original Programming, Hulu, John Landgraf, Chairman, FX Networks and Productions, Courteney Monroe, President, National Geographic Global Television Networks and Lauren Corrao, Executive Vice President Original Programming and Development, Freeform.

“These brands are fueled by an unrivaled roster of award-winning owned production studios that are the best in the business,” Ferro noted, “an enviable portfolio of sports rights and a pioneer that is the clear leader in streaming television.” Each network executive noted that during this time of uncertainty, there is an opportunity for innovation through the range of platforms and devices as well as through creative storytelling that spans all moods and emotions. With the vast selection of Disney properties, viewers can satisfy any interest and type of entertainment.

It’s All About the Advertisers

Viewer engagement and enthusiasm is reflected in the numbers. Disney’s reach, according to Ferro, is 284 million people a month, engagement with, “two of three people on the internet,” with a young audience who have, “elevated expectations for the formats and types of commercial messages they see from brands.” Disney also boasts, “the most robust audience targeting solutions in premium video and the most innovative brand integrations in the business.” Last year, Disney introduced Luminate which is Disney’s suite of advanced advertising solutions. This year, Ferro noted that, “we have a number of important updates to announce across data, linear addressability, attribution and automation.” 

A notable advancement is the addition of Hulu data to Disney’s first party data. It will be used to model hundreds psychographic and behavioral attributes, “to meet the needs of specific industries,” and “span our entire addressable platform.” In the area of automation, Ferro explained that, “we are enabling a unified programmatic approach that allows the use of your audience data for enhanced targeting as well as the ability to measure and manage brand frequency across the total Disney digital platform.”

Disney also offered attribution solutions. “We are now providing an end-to-end attribution solution that spans both linear and digital,” enabling the measurement of specific KPIs from purchase intent, point of sale, creative effectiveness and time spent with the brand. Collecting all of their data into one platform enables them to create over 650 audience segments both on individuals and on unified households built on the Disney ID Graph.

In terms of advertising creative execution, Disney has a creative in-house team which offers advertisers the ability to holistically, as Ferro explained, “take a core concept and find authentic ways to execute across sports, entertainment and streaming.” This with the addition of the knowledge gleaned from the data, has the ability to deliver an end-to-end solution for advertisers.

It’s All About the Audience

Viewer behavior has also added to Disney’s value with more co-viewing taking place at this time. Disney reports that their reach is higher than any other media company at 65 billion hours consumed every year. Further, in live hours, their programming wins one out of every three nights.

In the streaming sector, the addition of Hulu to the Disney portfolio has significantly grown among young and engaged viewers who binge more, have more devices and crave more control through on-demand and personalized experiences. According to Disney, viewers under 35 watch nearly two times more streaming TV than those over 35, with 2/3rds of them exposed to ads on Hulu that they did not see on any linear network.

Digital’s future looms large and Disney’s digital portfolio boasts more than 150 million users each month, generating over 5.7 billion video views, second only to Google in size, and placing it among the top five networks in reach.

It’s All About the Delivery on the Promise

There will be those who think that the creation of new content - programming and advertising - will be stymied by the pandemic but, as founder Walt Disney stated, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” And that is exactly what Disney is all about today.

This article first appeared on 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

OpenAP CEO David Levy Is Engaging Consumers with Compelling Advertising

David Levy has always been on a mission to "be more efficient with consumers' time and attention."  Throughout his career, he has focused on "what components of attention really matter."  His past contributions to the knowledge base of attention measurement are perfectly matched to maximizing the value of ad-supported television as part of his new role as the new Chief Executive Officer of OpenAP.

A Focus on Viewer Engagement
At his previous company, TrueX, which he co-founded and later sold to Fox, the challenge at the time was that "with the advent of digital advertising, we were in an unfortunate cycle of just putting more and more messaging in front of consumers and not actually getting quality attention because people were finding ways of avoiding the advertising," he recalled.  As a result, advertising effectiveness declined, as did the pricing, and "the only way to make enough money was by adding more ads per page."  His solution, he said, was to focus on "the most premium form of attention," which was dubbed an "engagement ad."

Engagement ads are full-screen experiences where the consumer is incentivized to interact with the ad for at least 30 seconds.  "We did a lot of work on the science of attention and how to drive quality interaction while offering consumers a better user experience," Levy explained.  By focusing on viewer engagement of ads in a world of greater ad-free options, media companies could "present consumers with an experience that was comparable to ad-free but within an ad-supported model," he added.

A Changing Ad-Supported Television Market
At Fox, Levy took the same focus on engagement that he had at TrueX and "brought it to the business challenges at Fox," where he worked in a Chief Operating Officer role for Fox's ad business.  Challenges to the ad-supported television model abound, not least of which is, "on one side you have Netflix and Amazon subsidizing these ad-free experiences, which consumers enjoy," and almost compelling ad-supported television to reduce its ad time to compete and create better consumer experiences.  "On the other hand, you have Facebook and Google flooding the market with valueless impressions -- highly targetable but with low attention," he asserted.  It was important to prove that the quality of attention could impact ROI.

The focus at Fox, which later proved pivotal for his role at OpenAP was three-fold:

1. Reaching the right consumers by finding better data to target more relevant advertising to them.

2. Once the right consumer was identified, developing ad products that best delivered those messages to the individual, "depending on where they were and on which device, where they were in the funnel, who they were."

3. Developing measurement that not only measured the quality of the attention but also optimized the experiences down the funnel.

A Move to OpenAP
"If you really want to evoke change, doing something in silos is not conducive to success," Levy said.  "The only way you are going to transform the industry is doing it together.  So, when we were approached by Viacom and [WarnerMedia] to form OpenAP, the premise was closely aligned with our vision to find better ways to get more efficient with consumers' time and attention."

Levy "fell in love with the vision" and "the people around the table" from those competing companies.  The purchase of Fox by Disney enabled him to make the move to OpenAP and "get back to [his] entrepreneurial roots" while still "staying connected to some of the exciting business challenges with people [he had] been working with for so long."

Next Steps for OpenAP
"The best way to scale any new ad product or any new investment in bettering the advertising ecosystem is if we all do it together," Levy said. To that end, he is seeking "adoption from everybody" to enable scale for any new marketplace developments.  OpenAP will be in a position to "evaluate new ad products in data-driven linear and optimized linear addressable to unify around the way we buy advanced ad products."

Going forward, Levy sees OpenAP moving from phase one -- which focused on unifying audience data on linear by individual company -- to phase two -- which standardizes segments across all OpenAP members.  Phase two, just recently announced, will go from unified audiences to unified campaigns, so that, for example, auto intenders for Viacom will have the same behavioral composition as auto intenders for Fox.  "We are introducing a tool for OpenAP with which advertisers can come in, define the audience segment that they want -- it will be standard across everybody -- put in campaign requirements and get back a unified campaign proposal across all of the member publishers," he explained.

OpenAP is also launching a digital marketplace that goes further.  "You can define your audience segments and not just get back a unified proposal, but also optimize across all of the publishers for reach and audience segment," Levy said.  Beyond that, he is thinking about how to accelerate the mission.  "There are so many opportunities with a unified approach -- with ad products, with measurement and with one of the biggest opportunities; building out a much more sophisticated data infrastructure that can be leveraged across all of the publishers," he noted.  "This will ultimately bring an automated marketplace that is cross-publisher, cross-device together."  But, he hastened to add, this effort will focus solely on premium inventory in the market: Long-form television ad-supported content resulting in less waste, more ROI and greater viewer engagement.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Disney’s Upfront by the Numbers

Disney’s highly anticipated upfront comes at the heels of its acquisition of Fox properties. So the event this year not only heralds in a new expansive era for the company, it also presented a synergy of established, previously frenemy properties. As part of their presentation, it was also announced that Disney has just acquired full operational control of Hulu with the ability to acquire full ownership at a future time.

Storytelling in all of its forms is a paramount vision for the network group, from ESPN (focusing on gaining more rights, weaving compelling stories and showcasing more live events), National Geographic (focusing on premium factual storytelling), FX (scripted shows) and Freeform (embracing disruptive voices).

In addition to a range of network specific content, Rita Ferro, President, The Walt Disney Company Advertising Sales and Partnerships, announced there were, “investments around data and technology. There has been tremendous advancement in that space with an emphasis on reach, effectiveness and delivering on those results that are important to our clients.”

Disney+, the OTT subscription service, loomed large with some of the properties slated to be included in the service and other waiting to hear. The aggregation of compelling content has been ramped up in this new expanding company with each network offering something for a different audience segment.

ESPN announced a deal with Caesars to be the official odds provider for the network for, as Connor Schell, EVP Content, ESPN, stated, “for fans interested in betting content.” He noted that in 2018, and for the 5th straight year, ESPN was “the top network in every key male demo,” and added that the network had the “best portfolio of rights across the industry for live events – 25,000 of them.” He proposed an aggressive social media strategy including 200 live shows on Twitter, all with advertising.

For FX CEO John Landgraf, there is, “a lot to figure out as to how this (acquisition) will work out in its optimal form.” But with an array of original scripted programming, the network has the inventory. “Over the past 15 years, we went from one to 15 scripted shows,” he stated, and then added, “but 15 scripted shows aren’t enough.” He is examining non-linear rights and expects to see “a lot of innovation about what can be done in this new system.” Rather than placing FX on Disney+, Landgraf sees Hulu as the best streaming service for his network.

Courteney Monroe, CEO, National Geographic, noted that her network is a recent addition to Disney and sets itself apart with “premium factual storytelling,” and “quality, excellence and distinctiveness above all else.” The network is adding scripted anthologies such as the Genius series and reaching bigger and broader upscale audiences. “Entertaining and smart are not mutually exclusive,” she concluded.

Tom Ascheim, President, Freeform, positions the network for young adult women and highlights inclusiveness. “We are embracing disruptive voices,” he explained and added that one of the benefits of the merger is that Freeform will air The Simpsons. “Millennials currently outnumber boomers,” he stated, “and we are the leading brand for that audience.”

Karey Burke, President ABC Entertainment, concluded the event with an overview of the new season’s schedule, stressing the importance of stability and the need to carefully craft every show before it’s ready to launch. “We are stabilizing the schedule and scheduling fewer new series,” she explained, “There are too many messages to get out there so we will have fewer and bigger launches. There is a value in nurturing the shows you already have.” ABC network is aiming for a strong female POV and this strategy is paying off. “ABC dominates with women. We are #1 since January,” she concluded.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Advancing Cross Media Measurement. Takeaways from the CIMM Cross Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit

 

To those of us in the media world, the discussion of attribution and cross platform measurement has been going on for decades. Waiting for solutions has been painfully slow. But in the most recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit (now in its 8^th year) the big reveal was that not only has significant progress been made in attribution and cross platform measurement, feverish activity has been taking place behind the scenes for years. 

The reason is that it’s simply not easy to form new metrics and protocols between the need for consensus across all types of companies and the persistent evolution and expansion of technologies.

For Jane Clarke, CEO Managing Director of CIMM, 2018 was a year of significant advancements. At last year’s conference, CIMM announced a Measurement Manifesto to keep the industry focused on cross platform measurement. Her work on content labeling has been pivotal to stitching all pieces of video together across screens. This year Clarke announced the launch of TAXI Complete (Trackable Asset Cross Platform Identification) which is the creation of audio watermarks for content (EIDR) and ads (Ad-ID). It will, according to Clarke, “Advance cross platform video measurement and bring more measurement to TV.”

For me, the major takeaways were:

Ø  While content labeling gains traction, deduplication is pivotal to getting to a reliable and adoptable cross platform measurement currency.

If it can’t be measured it can’t be monetized and if it can’t be measured accurately, monetization will be flawed. Content labeling is continuing apace with more companies adopting the coding and the cost of entry to enroll has been lowered. One next step includes the advancement of deduplicated reach measurement to help accuracy. 

According to Beth Rockwood, Senior Vice President, Ad Sales Research, Turner, “Questions can be answered well with deduplicated reach. It’s an important tool and fits into context of marketing mix models and attribution.”

Ø  Measurement challenges will continue as we try to keep pace with evolving technologies and how consumers use them.

As Krishan Bhatia, Executive Vice President, Business Operations and Strategy, NBCU, noted, “The transformation of the consumption of video on a cross platform basis … has accelerated in the past 18-24 months. Devices are driving it (while) measurement has not caught up or stayed ahead of the curve.“

Evolving technologies such as voice assistants, “are making measurement more difficult,” Jack Smith, Chief Product Officer, Global Investment, GroupM pointed out. “It is happening in apps that are already walled gardens and operating systems are also intermediaries which can control pricing, ordering products and recommendations instead of having a direct relationship with the brand.” These, along with screens in self-driving cars, provide new viewing venues and experiences. As an industry we need to understand how it all works … and morphs over time. 

Ø  Privacy and Transparency need to be addressed. We can no longer kick the can down the road.

“Privacy and data issues will become more important,” stated to Laura Nathanson, Executive Vice President Revenue and Operations, Disney Advertising Sales. “Consumers will demand more privacy and more walls,” she added. But how privacy balances with transparency is still to be discussed. For others there is not enough transparency, at least when it comes to data labeling. 

To that end, part of the content labeling initiative includes  a data transparency label which points to aspects of the data and its collection such as how the data got created and where it came from. The careful balance between privacy and transparency, including the impact of GDPR in Europe on the U.S., require us to continue the discussion and create protocols. 

Ø  As an industry we need to work together to develop and establish adoptable measurements.

“We need to hit the pause button and up level the conversation,” stated Radha Subramanyam, Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS. She was referring to the clamor of competing voices around measurement today. “I love the innovation in measurement and the abundance of products and granular data,” she continued, “But are we any closer to making things make sense? My call is for a common sense framework. Stop the noise and see what we are really trying to solve for.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com