Unlocking The Addressable Future

According to eMarketer, Addressable TV ad spend is on a tear, increasing from $760million in 2016 and projected to rise to $3.49billion by 2021. The advantages that addressable offers both buyers and sellers also benefits consumers who can now receive messaging that is tailored to their interests and needs. Many companies believe that there is an even greater opportunity for growth in the next few years and are willing to place more dollars against it in the next sales cycle. 

Advertising Week’s panel titled, Unlocking the Addressable Future brought Discovery, Xander, FreeWheel and Omnicom together to discuss how they will ‘unlock’ these opportunities. The potential is great. “First, the infrastructure exists,” stated, David Algranati, Chief Product Officer, Comscore, there is, “the ability to version ads at the household level at scale.” And with national addressable, “If the networks, in conjunction with the MVPDs were to version the inventory that the networks own, the scale or available inventory for addressable advertising would dramatically increase creating a whole new set of opportunities for advertisers.” 

Where is Addressable Today?

For Dan Rosenfeld, Vice President Data Strategy, Xandr, addressable offers relevant advertising delivered one-to-one directly to the consumer or a household through TV distribution or digital. Keith Kazerman, Executive Vice President, Digital Sales, Advanced Advertising and Research, Discovery, essentially agreed, adding that the ads are dynamically inserted.

On the agency side, Matt Kramer, Managing Director, Advanced Advertising, Omnicom, suggested that companies consider the levels of delivery. “At the top you have data driven linear, using first and third party data to better select what networks, dayparts and programs to buy,” he explained, “Layer number two is getting down to the household level and finally you have the IPTV space which is built upon connected devices at the access point and the OTT apps you are trying to sponsor,” which is at the programmatic level.

For Claudio Marcus, General Manager, Data Platform, FreeWheel, addressable identifies segments of consumers who share common attributes and is not necessarily one-to-one marketing.  “This is not,” he assured, “targeting people on a single individual basis.” This is an important distinction, coming at a time of GDPR in the E.U. and state level privacy legislation such as CCPA in the US. He added that addressable offers not only target-ability but is also ubiquitously measureable. “The measurement component of addressability extends beyond the households that don’t support targeting today,” he stated, meaning that an advertiser can deliver a linear ad and still understand which household received that ad. 

Where is Addressable going?

So today, Addressable can be used in a myriad of ways to capture consumers by segment and to measure against traditional targeting and delivery. But where is it headed? For Marcus, looking ahead three years from now will bring profound applications. "Three years from now, the definition of addressable TV advertising will be ads that are targeted to anonymous, likeminded segments of consumers who are reached via TV and premium video content, regardless of the type of delivery or device. Addressable TV ads will be seamlessly enabled across National, Local and premium digital video, and will considerably easier to plan, buy, execute and measure," he predicted.

For Zazerman, the stakes are high and collaboration is pivotal. “If national programmer addressability is not available at scale in 3 years, everyone on this stage should be held accountable. Collaboration is key to bringing this opportunity to market for our collective clients,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Working Together to Find Solutions … While Remaining Competitive. The Advanced Advertising Summit

At last week’s Advanced Advertising Summit in New York, Dan Aversano shared his version of an “ah ha” moment: the key to success for OpenAP will be building scale, consistency and simplicity. The Senior Vice President of Ad Innovation and Programmatic Solutions for Turner Ignite was just one of the speakers reporting on how data can best be used in advanced television advertising at the B&C/Multichannel News conference.   

Panels focused on a range of data, measurement and industry initiatives that highlighted the frenetic and changing landscape for marketers and media, each with a common theme of making data-driven targeted advertising more effective. 

Cross corporation partnerships is a significant step forward. In addition, the industry can benefit from monitoring data usage, creating industry standards and protocols and using data in an ethical manner. 

OpenAP – An Update

In talking about OpenAP, Aversano was joined by Noah Levine, Senior Vice President, Advertising Data and Technology Solutions, Fox and Gabe Bevilacqua, Senior Vice President, Product Management Advanced Advertising, Viacom. Aversano went on to say that media companies can work independently and reach their own, great solutions but they will all be different and difficult to merge. The ‘ah ha’ realization can take OpenAP from a custom solution to an industry standard.

“OpenAP focuses on linear TV,” added Levine, “and makes it easy to transact on the same ad across optimized linear.” It enables all types of advertisers, from short purchase cycle CPG to longer cycle Automotives, to better achieve their goals beyond adults 25-54. “We are bringing new types of advertisers to the table, which is critical to continued success of TV. Also, it allows us to improve the end user viewer experience. Long term goals include lowering the ad loads and offering different types of ad experiences,” he concluded.

The partnering of frenemy companies is both new and welcome. Bevilacqua noted, “We are extremely competitive and want to deliver the best results for our clients but we won't win by coming up with our own definitions. It doesn't scale this business for any of us. So we can agree and still have our lanes. There is a lot of land out there that is right spot for us to compete.” Currently OpenAp has 30 agencies on-boarded in time for this upfront.

Attribution

The best industry standard attribution model for media continues to be elusive, but there are many media experts focusing on the issue. Data+Math is a TV metrics company that focuses on TV attribution. John Hoctor, Co-founder and CEO, explained, “We take exposure data from Smart TVs and Set Top Boxes and connect exposure data anonymously to other datasets.” 

Adam Gaynor, Vice President, Advertising and Data Solutions Sales, AMC, found this data output useful, “Now we can help tie what brand is trying to do. And it adds extra elements of insights. TV works and now we are able to prove it.” But for Keith Kazerman, Group Senior Vice President, Client Solutions, Discovery, the question is, “How do we standardize measurement? Eighty percent of questions from clients are about how we can do better than yesterday. How can we measure outcomes?” Attribution is table stakes - not across categories, but by clients. “For example, financial clients demand attribution,” stated Kazerman.

The biggest untapped targets for this next TV Upfront are, according to Gaynor, measurement, technology and collaboration. “We need to work together as an industry to find solutions,” he added. For Kazerman, the target is “Standardization. Make it efficient.”

Optimism in the industry is high ... and focused on data and how it maps the consumer journey. “2018 is the year of audiences. And attribution is another tool that enables us to see what happens. It all gets us further down the funnel,” concluded Gaynor.

Conclusion

The core takeaway for me is that the media industry needs to exert both optimism and vigilance. “Optimism” that this continuous industry evolution is beneficial and creates opportunities to better serve consumers and improve the overall business model. “Vigilance” that the data we use is not only scientifically fact-based but also appropriate for the analysis and ethically obtained.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Addressable Advertising Pushes the Television Evolution

The recent B&C Content Show dedicated a full half day to discussions regarding the advancements in addressable advertising, TV programmatic and transforming traditional advertising. But it was also a love song to STB data, segmentation, ROI data and analytics.

Addressable advertising is reaching scale according to Jaime Power of GroupM’s Mobi Media who said that the footprint is currently "42 million HH and expected to grow to 60 million HH" with a steady expansion from local into scatter and national outplays." But he cautioned that "addressable will not replace traditional TV because we need traditional TV for reach." I agree with Power to a point because I believe that traditional TV itself needs to evolve from a spots and dots sales model to segmentation and proof of ROI. Addressable may facilitate traditional TV’s evolution especially as addressability rolls out to a more nationalized  distribution and as television itself becomes more digital in the world of 100% smart TVs.

The Traditional TV Model is Changing
The television business has been undergoing stress and change. Sales are down across many networks and projections indicate that the trend could continue. When asked if Addressable can save the TV environment, Power replied that "TV has to evolve- it is unrecognizable compared to ten years ago. We need to understand the new landscape and find ways to measure it. Not all customers are the same. We need to need to get to the custom level and reach core segments. Like purchase data where we can locate not just households with a dog but households that buy a certain dog food. You need to prove you can steal share by honing in on people's viewing behavior. We are using STB data and working close with analytics teams."

Research and Analytics are Critical

Virtually every panel touched on the need for measurement, targeting, analytics and usable data sets as part of their company's addressable initiative. Ben Tatta of Cablevision explained that "Data analytics is a new thing for television. Now we are conducting forensics on the data, on exposure and on response. (we recognize the ) importance of first party data. For the first time advertisers can use their own customer file. Age and gender have been proxies. We now don't have to do modeling. We are literally counting Sales." Keith Kazerman of DirectTV fielded "over 500 campaigns this year where we go into deep analytics that are more than age and gender."

What is Big Data?
A panel on big data moderated by Barry Frey of the DPAA was tasked with defining big data. According to Chris Pizzurro of Canoe, "For us big data is about a ton of small data. We dig in and bring up insights from that. We measure each individual ad." Eric Schmitt of Allant had a slightly different view saying "We see big data and bigger data. Big data is 120 million TV households. Bigger data is activity data. We bring them together in a privacy safe way getting to audience based models across a range of platforms."

Sales Feels the Pressure

The pressures on the traditional TV sales model are coming from several angles. AMC’s Arlene Manos said that “TV advertising has to change. We didn't have the tools and weren't asked for the accountability but now we have accountability in digital and they want it in TV.” Mobi’s Seth Walters cast a more somber note explaining that “a clunky interface is part of the reason that viewers go OTT. Netflix is another reason. Roku is far easier to navigate and in some cases they are faster. Viewers can easily and quickly identify content that matters to them. What is the role of TV advertising once that occurs?” The sales solution? Brian Stempeck of The Trade Desk believes that it is “inevitable that TV will go programmatic.”

Despite all of the hand wringing I believe that traditional television has succeeded for over 60 years because it responds to change and continuously evolves. There has always been competition from other platforms from radio and print to digital devices. While we continue to grapple with how to evolve the business model in this changing environment, new successful solutions will be found. As Adam Lowy of Dish concluded,“Eventually we will get there. TV is the first screen.” I agree.

First published, in abbreviated form, on MediaBizBloggers.com