The Many Facets of OTT and Its Expansion – A BIA Webinar Explores the Landscape

OTT has been a hot topic, made even more so by the fragmentation of television and the advancement of streaming options. To better understand the current OTT market and its expansion, Mitch Oscar, Director of Advanced TV Strategy at USIM and Rick Ducey, Managing Director, BIA Advisory Services, presented a panel of experts last week that included Kemal Bokhari, GM, Data and Analytics at Dish, Jessica Daigle, VP Sales Intelligence at Tegna, Nelson Ferreira, Senior Director, Regional Sales at Gamut, Justin Fromm, Head of Research at LG Ads, Phil Herring, VP Digital Strategy at USIM, Jo Kinsella, President at TVSquared and Adam Noble, Director of Product Marketing at Advanced Video.

The Challenges and Opportunities in OTT

OTT is not without its challenges. For Ducey, the biggest challenges to OTT today are, “Fragmented inventory, cross-platform measurement of linear TV + OTT, frequency capping and applying linear TV business rules using pods, pod positions, brand separation, brand safety, etc.”

But according to Noble, “OTT is not as hard as we think it is and as many perceive,” and while, ”there is a lot of disruption in the industry, any new method of reaching viewers is going to create new opportunities for advertisers in the industry.” Owners can now go direct to consumers, there is a splintering of buying opportunities and channels and the replacement of certain hardware such as set top boxes facilitates the convergence of linear with digital. There are also many new competitive entrants into the space like Pluto TV, “which gives consumers the option to view for free.” All of this impacts the business model.

“Confusion is driven in large part by fragmentation,” he noted. This confusion drives the need to sort through ownership of data, the coordination between services for a seamless advertiser buy and the lack of measurement standardization. “Who has the right to sell what inventory,” he queried, and how can it best be measured?

Yet, a myriad of opportunities abound in OTT. Ducey listed, “Converging the power of digital targeting, workflow, optimization, attribution with the power of premium OTT video combined with linear TV at scale.”

The Importance of Incremental Reach

For Daigle, “Fundamentally, OTT was formed to fulfill a promise of bringing together what I like to think of as digital superpowers of measurement, targeting with the magic of sight, sound and motion. That is why attribution, measure-ability, reach extension, etc. are so critical.” She added that the stakes are higher as clients are demanding more.

Ferreira agreed that, “Brands are demanding more of us, especially in local where it is harder to measure and define those attributes. That challenge is even more challenging.” To that end he is working with clients on solving for reach extension through frequency capping and recency capping.

Television’s overall value is unsurpassed in the marketplace. Fromm explained that, “TV remains one of the most if not the most important medium for many advertisers,” in both national and local. “It also enables tremendous reach in a short period of time. But linear viewing has changed drastically over the last decade or so.” This reduction in viewing underscores the need for reach extension in the OEM universe. “Reach extension is certainly something we are thinking about and the OEMs are well positioned to do.”

According to TVSquared’s recent survey on CTV engagement, Kinsella noted that, “the main reason for advertising on streaming was incremental reach. The people that we surveyed 70% cited the ability to extend reach and engage with audiences beyond linear was why,” they advertised on CTV. She added that, “17% said that understanding deduplicated and incremental reach across streaming platforms is their biggest barrier from fully leaning into streaming.” She advised that we have to be cognizant of the walled gardens and OEMs. “Most of the time they can only measure their data, their piece and more and more, marketers need to be able to measure everything.”

Bokhari noted that reach extension is, “an important part of the advertiser’s strategy to continue to maximize their reach for their ad. What we have done at Dish is to utilize our addressable technology, our viewership data to be able to let the advertiser know what their reach was on the Dish platform for that linear ad and then be able to target one-to-one to those household that were either missed, not exposed to that ad or who were underexposed and create a plan to maximize their reach.”

From the agency perspective, Herring explained that, “We are being held more and more accountable for the media we purchase on behalf of our clients. So while it is hard to make a one-size-fits-all statement when it comes to reach extension, it depends on the campaign, I would say the majority of campaigns, reach extension is important especially in the CTV space.”

The Future of OTT

The Future of OTT is bright. Ducey concluded that three years from now, “In local OTT, BIA is forecasting nearly 2x the ad spend we’ll see in 2021. I suspect we’ll adjust that to be both sooner and higher as time goes on. The industry is working toward an environment where impressions-based trading, measurement, and attribution will have increasingly less friction in cross-platform (linear TV + OTT) activations. I see linear for reach and OTT for targeting and extension to reach non-linear audiences. Linear and OTT will make a formidable 1-2 marketing punch in local video.”

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com

 

Addressable Campaigns: From Data Quality to Optimization

We are hearing more conversations on Addressable that focus on data optimization and quality. The media industry has historically relied on third party data but as more companies can amass first party data from their own customer pools, we are seeing a shift in how all types of data are being integrated and analyzed.  

Kemal Bokhari, General Manager Data and Analytics, DISH Media Sales, and Allison Metcalfe, General Manager, LiveRamp TV, take a look at this complex data issue from a right brain (holistic thinking and imaginative approach, or in this case, data quality) and a left brain (analytical or methodical approach) perspective. How can data optimization provide a continuous and confident feedback loop for advertisers to utilize in strengthening their creative campaigns? 

Charlene Weisler: How are companies finding the right data to use and making sure it's used correctly and to the greatest benefit? 

Kemal Bokhari: Dish is data agnostic so we don’t necessarily recommend that a client use a specific dataset. We find that many advertisers and agencies who come to us for addressable campaigns come with a target audience in mind and / or their own dataset. I believe that there is really no such thing as “the right dataset”. It all depends upon the specific goals of the campaign. We help our clients strategize and accomplish those goals.

Weisler: Given all of the discussions about data and privacy today, how do you protect user privacy while using data to give them a better experience?

Allison Metcalfe: To insure privacy, you use privacy-conscious deterministic onboarding like LiveRamp and only the highest quality data providers. LiveRamp had the first Chief Privacy Officer ever and we take this very seriously, requiring all partners to go through an audit, and annual audits thereafter to ensure that consumer privacy is being handled correctly. 

Weisler: What is the difference between first party data vs third party data?

Bokhari: First party data is data that you own yourself; Where you have a direct relationship with that subscriber or customer. CRM data is considered to be first party data. Third party data is the aggregator of first party datasets. They get a list of subscribers to target and then sell that to interested advertisers. 

Weisler: If you had to explain the use of first party, third party and data privacy to your grandparents how would you explain it?

Metcalfe: I would tell her that first party data is like Bloomingdales mailing you catalogues. You've given Bloomingdales your info and they have it to market to you. Third party data is like Visa packaging up buying behavior into segments like "department store spenders". Data privacy is about making sure that both Bloomingdales and Visa are responsible with your data and don't let it get to bad actors. (And I want to add that my grandma is an avid shopper so she will understand this explanation!)

Weisler: How can these two types of datasets enhance each other?

Bokhari: We have advertisers who come to us with their own CRM data that they may want to match to demographic data and other targets. An example would be with a credit card company who would want to contact existing cardholders for a new type of card and who live in a specific geographic zip code or DMA and earn about a certain income level. That is where we could help them enhance their first party data with our third party data to help them reach and hyper target these consumers. 

Weisler: How can data best be used for continuous ad campaign optimization? We all know that advertisers are using data to target, but how are they using previous campaign measurement to influence the way they target, the type of data they use, etc. 

Bokhari: Everyone can use their CRM data to create a targeting file. They use third party data to enhance their audience. And they learn from previous experiences what has worked and what has not worked. What has worked can be used in the next iteration of studies and campaigns to get a bigger ROI. 

Metcalfe: Many of LiveRamp's brands are conducting closed-loop measurement and are able to quite easily see how data has performed for their campaigns. Our most advanced advertisers are using multi-touch attribution modeling and/or data lakes so they can really analyze the impact of data on the customer journey.

Weisler: What is the biggest pain point for addressable advertisers when using different data sets, and how do you suggest avoiding it?

Metcalfe: I would say that the biggest pain point is probably scaling up a precise target to make sense for a TV ad campaign. They can conquer that problem by using trusted partners to onboard and model their audiences.

Weisler: Where do you see the use of data in addressable going in the next three years?

Bokhari: The only way is up. Advertisers will continue to use audiences in targeting. We expect this to expand and to be able to seamlessly target across platforms –across TV and digital. We know from our experiences that when someone runs an addressable campaign, they come back and do another. There is no waste and it is highly targeted.

Metcalfe: I see both growth and adoption as there are more and more addressable households and more inventory on a national scale to buy.

Weisler: What do you see as the biggest reason for advertisers to start using data to target audiences through addressable?

Metcalfe: It is because addressable offers advertisers the best of precise ad targeting within a powerful brand advertising medium.

For more info on DISH Media Sales’ Addressable Solution and additional Addressable Insights such as Wins and Reports, please head to the DISH Media Sales website. 

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com