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

Media Frenemies Gather to Share Concerns About Data

This past week I attended an off-the-record client meeting of executives from media companies AMC, A&E, NBCU, Google, Scripps, Univision, WWE and Viacom and measurement companies Nielsen, comScore and TiVo. It was convened by Gary Zander, President of Project One, to have a frank discussion about media analytics – current challenges and possible solutions – among, as Zander pointed out, “frenemies in an environment of coopertition.”

Zander’s company focuses on digital tech consulting and staffing for the Media Industry.. “This is an opportunity to discuss topics of importance. In this case it is media and TV/video analytics. No one will be quoted in the press so we can have an open dialogue,” he noted. In writing this article, I agreed to not name names and only report non-attributed opinions. I could, however, report on the opening presentation titled, Measurement in a Multiplatform World, by Lisa Ciancarelli, President of Quark Insights Consulting.

Measurement in a Multiplatform World

Ciancarelli launched into an overview of what companies need to do to formulate a comprehensive data measurement strategy. “We need to be more hands on when it comes to all of the distribution paths that our content takes,” she stated, and offered the following steps:

      1.       Define key stakeholders. Get the right people involved. Create a task force with representatives from all areas.

      2.       Focus on what drives your business. Prioritize the scope and cost. “You may not need to measure everything,” she counseled, “There are costs associated with measurement such as data transports, API, transcoding and for the services that scale by the amount of content.”

      3.       Define your business rules around the data and document them.

      4.       Set up measurement requirements and communicate across the company from ad sales and marketing to operations, engineers and content creators. If it doesn't need measurement, take it off the table.

      5.       Managing measurement by managing expectations. The only constant in digital measurement is change.

Off-The-Record Q&A

After the formal presentation, the meeting was open to a full discussion of data driven media. Here were the top points:

·       Walled Gardens are confounding data aggregation across platforms. “Every new platform comes up with its own metric,” was one complaint. “How do you know if the data is worth integrating?” and “There is no consistency across data sources,” were others.

·         Taxonomy across platforms is lacking. There is no standard content identification protocol. “A unique indicator doesn't exist’” said one executive. “We had to hire a third party aggregator so every product has its own unifier id and it does the mapping,” offered another.

·         How can the data be normalized? “We look at the data by minutes and then we have to model. It is incredibly complicated,” shared an executive. “What is a video impression on OTT for example?” questioned another. 

·         Measuring beyond minutes and views. “When does quality (like attention) get measured?” someone asked. “There is a universal truth,” another countered, “and that is that more attention is paid the closer the screen is to your face.” And yet, “Digital is very solitary,” someone stated, “I would rather see people co-viewing. We are losing that aspect if we just count views.” Another noted, “We look at retention rates. Do they come back? Is there viewing through commercial? We are looking at the user experience more holistically and using various points of engagement for attention.”

·         Tagging – from loading time to the time it takes to add tags. “One of the biggest problems we have is with tags,” one participant noted, “especially piggybacking and container tags.” Another stated, “If we want to place extra tags on a clients’ website, it takes two years.” 

·         Reconciliation of metrics across platforms. “We are living in a world of exactitude and we need to reconcile engagement on digital with Nielsen measurements,” someone noted. “What do you mean by engagement? Is engagement equal across platforms?” said another.

·         Fraud. “Forty percent of activity can be non-human traffic which is a huge deal,” someone offered and added, “It is not getting worse but it is not getting any better.” Another said, “It is a wack-a-mole game. You are getting cheated. TV is totally controlled but on the internet it is easy to set up a farm and have crazy stuff going on.”

·         Prioritization. The amalgam of data has become a focus unto itself. “We are spending too much time counting and not enough time strategizing,” one complained.

The solutions to the above are still be explored. Some conceded that “walled gardens and syndicated measurement will both be here for the foreseeable future,” while others are taking unusual and creative steps to bring data analysis into the 21^st century with “the gamification of data charts,” because “traditional PowerPoint doesn't really work when there are so many dimensions to analyze.” Whatever evolves from these conversations will benefit more than just those in the meeting. The first step is always opening up dialogue.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com