Contextual Targeting Using Fox News’ ATLAS

As the upfront heats up, Fox News Media has prepared a technological solution to match its expanding demographic appeal – the introduction of ATLAS which analyzes both the spoken word and video content to facilitate contextual targeting for ads. 

Fox News, in general, is on a roll. Not only is it a news leader for years in the key demos, it’s now reaching a new level of success in certain other dayparts. According to Jeff Collins, Executive Vice President Ad Sales, Fox News now has the ratings and scale of broadcast shows like The View and GMA and, as such, is reaching a much broader audience. Performance highlights include the comedy show  Gutfeld, their new late night program which has out-performed other late night shows, including Colbert, on occasion and the news program The Five which airs at 5P, is #1 in cable news, outpacing primetime in total viewers.

Now, with the introduction of ATLAS, FOX News Media is able to capitalize on those demos for advertisers. “ATLAS is different than a lot of current solutions that really just analyze the spoken word - transcripts of the video content without the additional context of what's up on the screen,” Collins explained.

ATLAS uses AI and machine learning to better understand the context of the video content in real time.  “It looks on a second by second basis. Within a news environment, topics change fairly rapidly. It could go from lifestyle to news or weather,” he explained. ATLAS allows for fast changing topics, allowing advertisers the ability to align their brands closer to preferred content in a more granular manner. He noted that, especially in news, it is possible to watch a talking head with a video in the background. “Oftentimes the video might not be aligned with the spoken words the anchor is saying. We felt it was very important as a news organization to be able to arm our clients with proprietary tools that got a lot more granular than the current solutions.”

Privacy should not be a concern with ATLAS. Collins stated that, “The ability to target consumers is going to be really severely limited due to privacy regulations. This makes contextual targeting that much more important as there's all these limitations put on targeting actual consumers.” He added that, “We're not collecting any personally identifiable information. This is purely collecting data on the overall content and context, so I think that's an important thing to note given privacy regulations and restrictions and ad targeting these days.”

The way ATLAS works is by, “grading everything,” using keywords to better match an advertisement through the spoken word and visuals. Additionally ATLAS can tag according to sentiment through machine learning. “There's a lot more selection of new types of content and a tool like ATLAS allows our clients to be able to align their brands closer to our diversity of content and place the advertisers messaging as close to the types of content that they would want to be associated with,” he stated.

According to Collins, “There have been countless studies on the importance of aligning and being around the right context and how that increases upper funnel and also lower funnel metrics, brand metrics and performance. We're partnering with some of our clients now to be able to utilize ATLAS and run it alongside some of their current solutions, looking at the variances between what ATLAS is grading and what the current solutions are.” It is then possible to examine those variances and get a better understanding of why ATLAS is grading things a certain way. “It's providing more granular targeting capabilities,” he added.

One of the deliverables ATLAS can provide is attribution, “to be able to say okay, is ATLAS actually driving better real world outcomes for our clients? Is the contextual alignment actually helping to drive more site visitation or in store traffic? So we'll do ATLAS targeting for a particular campaign and then on the back end of that do attribution studies which look at the amount of site visitation that that drove in store traffic,” he posited.

ATLAS’ main advantage is its ability to review and grade content quickly. “The current solutions in the market look at transcripts at about 2000 characters per hour. ATLAS looks at closer to 60,000 characters per hour because we're picking up all of the background video as well,” he explained. This is especially important in news because of all of the variations in news content that tend to run in a 10 or 15 minute block. “Being able to actually slice that out is something that I think is an important distinction for ATLAS versus what other tools are currently offer,” he said. And these solutions are customizable. “We don't take a one size fits all approach,” he stated and added, “It has to come down to what our clients are comfortable with. We're not grading our own homework. We're allowing a third party to be able to judge the results and to judge it against the entirety of an advertiser's campaign, not just what's happening within our ecosystem.”

The result, according to Collins, “has been overwhelmingly positive. We are engaging with every major holding company and we're running tests now with most of them. Everybody is looking for better solutions in the space. They're happy to see us taking a leadership position in this area,” he concluded.

 

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

The Importance of Streamers. An Interview with Tubi’s Melinda Staros and Natalie Bastian

Since the pandemic, VOD has accelerated in its growth and acceptance among viewers, but its rapid progress is out-pacing our ability to assess its full impact on the media business. This is why Tubi’s recent study called, The Stream – 2021 Actionable Audience Insights for Brands, is a welcomed addition to our knowledge of the state and the future of AVOD for both advertisers and programmers.

The launch of this expansive study involved a partnership between Tubi, which is owned by FOX, and an impressive roster of first and third party data sources in order to match the quantitative with the qualitative results. For Tubi’s Natalie Bastian, Vice President Marketing, the study opened up, “a treasure trove of insights we had at our disposal because we are the platform and are so focused on data, tech and our audience. It is one of the best untold stories.”

The Stream, The Study

In offering an overview of the findings, Bastian explained, “The report looks at the broader shifts of content consumption, the rapid growth in streaming but specifically in AVOD and how AVOD is at a pivotal point of scale. We are going to see fundamental shifts in how brands are shifting their TV strategies especially going into upfront this year. Scale, targeting and measurement are all coming to a head. Because of our scale, (the results are) representative of the broader AVOD streaming audience.” The report is timed to maximize the value of AVOD in the upfront as an addition to linear. “This is our first proprietary research study,” she added, but not the last. The Stream is poised to be an ongoing assessment of the marketplace and the importance of AVOD in it. “This is our stamp and our voice,” regarding, “consumption and engagement and the reasons why consumers are gravitating to streaming platforms.”

The Stream, The Meta-Analysis

The study’s methodology was especially interesting to Melinda Staros, Tubi’s Director of Audience Research, “It was a meta-analysis of first party and third party data and our ability to thread that together. We used our first party audience data with all of our proprietary analytics – this was the first time we were using these to this scale.” The study also added Tubi’s qualitative research and, “all of the interviews we have done with our streamers for the past couple of years.” In addition, “We ran a custom B2B research study with Advertiser Perceptions,” which was then shared publicly and incorporated data from a number of different industry research sources such as MRI Simmons, TVSquared, Kantar and Nielsen. “There are many layers to peel back in this report,” she noted, “and it’s a compilation of all of these different methodologies and how they connect together.” The uniqueness of this study is its 360 degree holistic view of the industry.

The Stream, The Takeaways

For Staros, the study’s biggest takeaway, “has three layers. The first one is the industry where we found a discrepancy in the numbers. Seventy-nine percent of the people are streaming, growing daily and cutting the cord for cable. Streaming is so prevalent on the consumer side … and yet up to 90% of the video ad spend is still going to linear. There is a disconnection from the B2C side to the B2B side of the business.” But she is sure that will change in the next year. “From an audience perspective,” she continued, “it’s really the fact that it is incremental audience and that they are nationally representative. They are young and diverse as we see the national US population is. The industry isn’t necessarily used to that. The third is measurement. That is having substantial impact.”

For Bastian, an ah-ha insight was that, “When people in the marketplace talk about incremental reach the assumption is that it is incremental over linear TV. But what we found is that our audience is uniquely incremental to other streaming audiences as well.” She pointed out that while there is little overlap between Tubi and other AVOD audiences, there is some overlap between her service and Netflix which is not ad supported, thus enabling advertisers to reach those desirable audiences through Tubi. “We find that not only is our audience young, diverse and highly engaged, we can click into what they are watching, how long they are watching and when they are watching.” Tubi also boasts one of the lowest ad loads in TV – an average of 3 to 5 ads per hour.

The Stream, The Pandemic

While some industries have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, for Bastian, “The pandemic has across-the-board expedited the speed to stream for consumers.  It has accelerated launch efforts for other platforms to come to market,” but, she added, “I think that will level out over time. I think that over the next year, consumers will say, ‘wow, I’m spending so much money in streaming’… I think SVOD will level off and AVOD will continue to rise … especially free AVOD,” which includes Tubi.

“In terms of the numbers we are seeing, the pandemic has had a big impact on the sudden jump in the number of people streaming and the amount of time they spend streaming,” noted Staros who added, ”one in five people have cancelled their paid streaming service because of Covid and that was especially true of people ages 18-34 (at 33%) who tend to have lower household incomes and tend to be early adopters.”

The Stream, The Value to Advertisers and Programmers

For both Bastian and Staros, the value of AVOD and Tubi in particular to advertisers is a no-brainer.  Bastian explained that, “when you look at how linear and cable numbers are shifting and how streaming numbers are growing, you need to be able to diversify where you are spending your money.” She believes that buyers will pivot and make AVOD a must-buy with Tubi at the top of the list. “We have one of the largest, most engaged AVOD and we are nationally representative and we are highly targetable as well,” she stated.

For programmers, Staros shared that it is possible to take a program on linear that may skew older and, on a young platform like Tubi, age it down. “When FOX released the Masked Singer on its network, they had huge viewership, but it skewed significantly older,” she explained, “The big question was, if they put it on Tubi could they reach a younger audience or is the audience inherently older? The answer was that the platform dictates the type of viewership that you are going to get.”

The Stream, The Future

The future is bright for AVOD. “Streaming consumption is only going to continue … and in two years ad supported streaming will surpass cable … at a high level,” Bastian noted. The data supports this. “The more cord cutting, the more streaming, the more services, there are definite changes happening in the marketplace. The shift is really pronounced in that there are so many people who are not  going to be reachable through linear that at some point we are going to hit a threshold. They are saying by 2023,” Staros concluded. The future certainly looks exciting, especially for AVOD.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

Explaining the CPM Increase in Media. An Interview with SQAD’s Marc Krigsman

Marc Krigsman has a deep background in TV from Fox Cable Network to Turner Networks Group, Cadent and Cross MediaWorks to becoming CEO of SQAD in 2015. 

“I have seen and been involved with many significant changes and advancements in television advertising,” he explained. So who better to assess the strength, opportunities, trends and challenges in pricing the media marketplace in 2020?

Charlene Weisler: What data does SQAD collect and what do you report?

Marc Krigsman: For more than four decades, SQAD has served as the industry source for ad cost data, processing more than $1 trillion in real transaction ad costs from advertising housekeeping system. This data is available through our MediaCosts platform and includes costs for national broadcast, cable, and syndicated television, as well as local broadcast, cable, and Hispanic TV, radio, and out-of-home advertising. We also provide audience analytics research tools for Nielsen data through our MediaLogic platform and provide advertisers and agencies with the industry’s leading media planning software, MediaTools.  

Weisler: How has audience fragmentation due to streaming, OTT, SVOD and cord-cutting impacted average unit ad costs on broadcast and cable if at all? Where do you see the trend?

Krigsman: It’s an interesting conundrum that we are in right now because as fragmentation occurs and audiences become more scattered there is still a revenue target outlets need to achieve for their inventory. So what is actually occurring is a CPM increase. That is because it is costing more to reach the same audience. As fragmentation happens, we’re seeing CPMs and rates go up.  Most in the industry thought that would not be the case, but in fact we are seeing an increase in prices. That also happens when you sell less inventory - CPMs go up. It’s a supply and demand issue. Fragmentation does not equate to a sale or reduction in prices. It is actually the opposite.

Weisler: What will the effect of increased audience based buying and impression based measurement be on unit ad costs and on advertising budgets?

Krigsman: The more focused and targeted you get, the more you are going to pay for that targeting. For some advertisers that makes sense. They will pay a premium to reach the audience they want to reach and only that audience. But other advertisers, CPG for example, don’t really care about pinpointing audiences. So for them addressable is not as efficient a buy.

The reality is that even with targeting you are still going to have waste. You have to be 100 percent clear about who the audience is you want to reach. You have to have a lot of audiences in your data to understand who your ideal customer is but when you do that the extras it takes to buy those segments will result in a higher price point.

For the seller, an advertiser using a targeted campaign to reach a limited HH, that means that they will have to fill their other inventory with other types of advertising if they can. The media outlet has to have confidence that the revenue they are getting from the targeted buy will be enough. They have to take into consideration that if it goes for a lower price, this will open an opportunity for bargain hunters looking for a bucket of impressions, not specific ones. Targeted buying could create opportunities for people who are looking for the opposite.

Weisler: What are the programming types that continue to command the highest CPMs?

Krigsman: Live shows, special events, news and sports – these are premier events that always command high CPMs because of their unique selling proposition in general. Overall you still have huge prices for traditional TV– sitcoms and other first run programming. But clearly live and special events are unique.

Weisler: How are live programs such as sports and awards shows faring in an environment where audiences are gravitating to watching highlights on-line? Does the data support this assumption? Press seems to infer that live programming delivers the most engaged audiences. Do you agree?

Krigsman: Programming that promote itself as unique or “watch it now” has the specialness of motivating viewers to want to watch it while it is happening, which always makes for an engaged audience.

Weisler: What can we expect for the CPMs of news programming as the presidential campaign season heats up? And how will data be best used to target independent voters? How is the tight inventory in local markets due to campaign buying impacting CPMs for advertisers?

Krigsman: History has shown that when there is a lot of pressure on inventory prices go up. From a national inventory perspective there will be a lot of pressure from PACs and other entities looking to support various issues and candidates. But most presidential advertising will be local rather than national. This will put pressure on local inventory and we will see an increase in those markets, but for only for a period of time, What traditionally happens is that those markets will go through to a period of  time and some of their core advertisers may not have available to them what they have had before.  But those local stations will then look to make goods following this period to offer to their bread and butter advertisers.

Weisler: How would you rate the TV ad market overall as we head into 2020?

Krigsman: The market is pretty healthy.  We are seeing a lot of increased pressure from other platforms but overall the ad market is healthy. People have a high level of confidence in the economy and when they do marketers spend against that confidence…that will reflect well in the ad market moving forward.

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com