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

 

How Are Gross Rating Points (GRPs) Evolving in the Media Industry?

Gross rating points, or GRPs, are standard television measurements used in ad buying and selling to ensure the delivery of an advertiser’s contract. This measurement is based on age and gender, requiring a universe estimate to calculate. How will GRPs evolve with the industry moving toward addressable advertising and audience fragmentation?

Evolving Gross Rating Points
The industry has relied on these metrics for many years, and it takes hefty investment to change systems based on long-established protocols. Lorne Brown, CEO at Operative, said in a MediaPost interview, “Agencies don’t have the capital structures necessary to dismantle their systems that are based on Nielsen audience measurement.” Yet, it is clear that people are viewing TV in very different ways than just a few years ago, so there may be room for evolved forms of measurement.
The GRP universe estimate calculation is prone to variation in a multi-platform world. “In television, the universe estimate changes every year,” noted Brad Adgate, a media consultant. “But if you move toward audience-based buying, like weekend moviegoers, the universe changes every day.” It might be possible to form agreed-upon segments and universes that change frequently, but that will take time.

It is evident that, “GRPs have to evolve,” said Mitch Oscar, a director at U.S. International Media, “because all advanced television platforms are starting to transact on impressions whether it’s optimized linear, TV everywhere,......

Read the full article on  the Videa blog.

Less Secret Every Day: ACR and Logistics at the Secret Society Meeting

The Secret Society, established in 2015 by Mitch Oscar, an advanced television strategist with USIM, was created to inform industry leaders about the advanced TV landscape, addressability, and data-driven advertising. 

Each annual meeting is designed to bring forward pertinent issues within the industry, such as attribution, targeting with data, and other trends and initiatives. Here we dive into two focal trends: automatic content recognition (ACR) and logistics.

What Is Automatic Content Recognition?
ACR is a content labeling protocol that enables the tracking of a piece of content across all platforms. Alan Wolk, co-founder, editor, and lead analyst at TV[R]EV, stated that while automatic content recognition “functions off smart TVs,” it’s also present in smartphones and other mobile devices.
There are two types of automatic content recognition: video and audio. Video captures pixels from a screen and then matches those pixels to others off-screen or on other content platforms. Audio runs off apps, listening to what’s on the TV and then performing the same comparison across other platforms.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Looking Ahead on Tomorrow’s Tech Advancements

In a previous article I asked industry experts to recall their most amazing technological advancements from their early careers. Now I ask them to look forward and give me their best technological advancement predictions for 2018. My prediction is that more collaboration between companies will result in a more standardized system for buying, selling and tracking media. I also see A.I. playing a greater role in establishing behavioral patterns that can be used to craft content and target advertising. 

Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director, CIMM: In 2018, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers will launch an open standard audio watermark that can embed content and ad identifiers from EIDR and Ad-ID, along with time stamps and station identifiers.  This will hopefully bring innovation to automating TV workflows, and in the ability to track playout and measure audiences in real time!  

Sheryl Feldinger, Media Consultant: I'm fortunate to work with some tech-forward companies, so I see a lot of early adopter behavior at large organizations. In 2018, I think more companies will take a page from the social media playbook and embrace video chat in the work place. It works great, and does not require expensive equipment. The more traditional media companies are still a bit camera shy, but I hope that changes because video chat is as close as you can get to F2F meetings without leaving your time zone.

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia: The biggest technological advancement in 2018 won't be a new technology per se, but better utilization of technology that we already have. In 2018, the biggest advancement will be on the technology user side. Every day, more and more people working in the media industry are learning how to better exploit technology, whether it is the cloud or machine learning or predictive analytics. The biggest technological impacts this year will be driven by people, not some new code.

Brad Adgate, Independent Media Researcher:  I think the use of Artificial Intelligence to help manage the amount of data that are being used to make media recommendations will gain traction in 2018 and in the years ahead.

Caroline Horner, Co-Founder, Spicy Tequila: In 2018 it will be 1) Addressable hits scale with advancement from Spectrum, Comcast, OTT/Smart TVs, and 5G and ATSC 3.0.  And other intermediaries. 2) Blockchain technologies prove capable of resolving ID across distribution points. 3) MTA and AI optimize performance in tighter and more responsive cycles. And in 2019 I believe that it will be the re-emergence of the creative role in ad effectiveness.

Mitch Oscar, Advanced TV Strategist, USIM:  I predict that we will still be grappling with the technology and its functionality. We can now fast forward but what if the technology was able to extract the commercials so if I watch in the recorded mode I did not even have to fast forward. Some services are offering that capability now with a new setting. I see that as a real concern going forward. I also believe that addressability was introduced in 1996 and it is going to happen any day now. 

Arlene Manos, President Emeritus, AMC Networks: Greater expansion of OTT, and increased social media application.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Looking Back on the Technological Advancements of Yesterday

At this time of great disruption in the media industry, I find it interesting to look back and realize that disruption in media was always a constant. The systems we used to measure content continually changed, improved and even disrupted our ways of doing business. I recall that, when I was an intern at NBC years ago, I was impressed that my computer did not require punch cards. Am I dating myself? Probably. 

As we embark on 2018, I asked others in the industry to answer the question: “When you first started in the industry, what was the most amazing device/application/program/aspect/item at the time?” One person noted that in the 1990s when she was at Discovery “it was PCs and the internet. That technology changed everything.” For others, it was a range of other advancements:

Arlene Manos, President Emeritus, AMC Networks: When I started at A&E, we did a lot by spreadsheet. Someone I hired as an intern’ recently mentioned in an article, that he shared a computer with me since they were scarce. The first system we were on was Columbine, followed by a Nesbitt system for planning and posting. Don’t remember any more than that.

Mitch Oscar, Advanced TV Strategist, USIM:  In 1999 it was the introduction of TiVo, The inventor came to my office to talk to me about advertising and TiVo’s functionality. At about the same time, the head of IPG called me and said, “So advertising is dead?” TiVo was momentous because everyone was worried about the impact of two functionalities – the recording of programming and the ability of fast forwarding to skip commercials. We wondered if the speed be would be fast or slow enough to see the brand messaging.

Caroline Horner, Co-Founder, Spicy Tequila: Well, this will show my age...a desktop PC with a spreadsheet and database application and for data...LNA, MRI, Scanner data (IRI, I think.) and IMS (I started in a healthcare agency.) Then it was online services (pre-AOL) and then anything internet… and a laptop, cellphone and modem. Then there was the introduction of Java and JavaScript and dynamic webpage generation with ad serving, SAS enterprise miner, set top box data, mobile video, growth of marketing database companies, Programmatic. Addressable TV!

Kathy Newberger, Advanced Advertising Consultant: I was working in local ad sales at the time and we said it was going to be digital ad insertion. We were going from six networks that were inserted using tape decks to sixteen networks using digital equipment. We thought that was going to be amazing … and it was. Now it’s amplified by 500 times more – every network is insert-able. And on top of that is OTT.

Brad Adgate, Independent Media Researcher:  I think the most important introduction early in my career were spreadsheets. Long gone products like Lotus 1-2-3 and afterwards Quattro Pro were being used. Before that, workers used those large green accounting pads and calculators to fill in the data, took a lot longer and more error prone.

Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia: In early 1993, I was working in "new media" helping newspaper companies develop ad and content strategies for early online services and partnerships with telcos and cable companies and had a chance to play with the Mosaic browser. It was pretty clear, even then, that a user managed rendering engine like the browser would change the media industry, particularly for print companies with text and still photos, which rendered well even without high speed internet. It certainly did.

Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director, CIMM: Back in 1982, we were analyzing clickstream data from set top boxes in a Pilot Test for Time Teletext, which was a text and graphic service similar to the early AOL, but delivered via the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) of a channel on Time Warner’s cable system!  I never thought it would take this long to get to nationally representative samples of Return Path Data!

Sheryl Feldinger, Media Consultant: I often comment to my 16-year-old that the biggest difference between growing up today versus the 1970s is the pace of life. Everything happens so much faster today. The pace of communication, especially, flies at warp speed. Confession: early in my career, fax machines were a game changer. They revolutionized the work place. No longer could you tell the client, "We will messenger it to your office first thing tomorrow." The new retort was, "Why wait? You can fax it tonight!" It didn't matter that the edges of the thermal paper curled. All of a sudden, deadlines got pushed up and we all had to work faster.

Next article – Looking Ahead to 2018.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Secret Society Update: Challenges (and Solutions) of Workflow Revealed!

After seeing the standing room only crowd at the Secret Society meeting at Turner Ignite in New York this past week, one can see that the secret is finally out.  Mitch Oscar, USIM Advanced Television Strategist, created the Secret Society “to talk about issues that affect the Advanced TV space,” and this particular session was filled with speakers on the subject.  The primary takeaways follow below.

Workflow
The subject of workflow looms largeTo those companies that are grappling with the evolution towards Advanced TV.  Just like the plumbing in a house, workflow is an unheralded but vital aspect of bringing data-driven targeting advertising to television viewers.  It is perhaps for that reason that it doesn’t get more coverage in the media.  But Oscar is focused on getting the industry to consider the challenges and solutions of changing workflow and chose presentations that highlighted the subject, from departmental transitions such as the changing role of research to cross-industry solutions such as OpenAP.

The Evolution of Research
Research’s role has ascended over the past few years with the advancement of data-driven solutions.  Tom Ziangas, Senior Vice President Research, AMC Networks, presented a compelling case for the expansion of Research Departments.  “The increasing complexity of the media landscape has transformed the workflow of the Research Department,” he said.  To that end, he noted that the requirements for a job in research have changed in the past few years from communications majors to data scientists and mathematicians.  In addition, research teams have become less hierarchical as the number and extent of internal client departments have become more formalized.  “Research counts nearly every department in the company as either a stakeholder seeking insights or partner required for measurement across growing data sources,” he explained.

But it’s not just hierarchy and headcount that has changed for research.  The massive influx of first and third-party datasets as part of the measurement process has placed research in the corporate epicenter with the demand for creative (and accurate) solutions.  “The number of data sources research is now digesting has grown ten times in the past ten years driven by digital platforms and deeper granularity into linear viewing,” Ziangas concluded.

Cooperation Across Competing Media Companies
It is becoming clear that traditional media companies will have to work together to establish the industry standard protocols that enable inter-business cross-platform sales processes.  Important first steps have been taken such as OpenAP, which is a partnership between Fox, Turner and Viacom.
Larry Allen, Vice President, Ad Innovation and Programmatic Solutions, Turner, and Noah Levine, Senior Vice President, Advertising Data and Technology Solutions, Fox Networks Group, gave an update to OpenAP.  Allen noted that the collaboration on OpenAP “sought to solve a couple of problems”  -- the need for a democratization of data and the need to taking friction out of buying television was apparent.  “We sought to free up the data so you can see it, build segments against it and see if clients want to buy against it,” he added.  Making it a cross-corporation effort avoided the problem of media entities grading their own homework.

In an update, Levine noted that OpenAP is currently in the process of recruiting national TV programmers to join in.  The challenges to data-driven adoption such as the lack of scale in on-boarding, inconsistent segments across companies and no third-party posts would be solved by joining it.  “We are focused on making it easy and simple with the ability to activate it across all national media companies at once," Levine said.  "OpenAP solves the problem of consistency in defining the targets."

OpenAP offers “an agency [the ability] to share a segment within itself,” Allen added.  For those who wish to explore the platform, OpenAP.tv just launched for linear TV only as phase one.

Conclusion

The media industry is being hit with many changes all at once from data flow to complex world of attribution modeling. But unless we get the workflow flowing and agree on new industry standards in both data usage and segmentation, the ability to maximize inventory value across devices and platforms will be limited.

 


This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Automated TV Buying Trends: An Interview With Strategist Mitch Oscar

Mitch Oscar has been in the advertising business for over 40 years, having worked at Universal McCann, Carat, and Havas MPG. He is currently the advanced TV strategist at U.S. International Media (USIM).

However, Oscar is perhaps best known for his work forming think tanks—such as the Collaborative Alliance and Secret Society—which have focused on automated TV buying trends like big data, audience-based advertising, programmatic, and advanced TV. “We meet to share ideas. We’re probably one of the last democratic institutions left in the United States,” Oscar deadpans.
“There’s a lot of competition by sector, whether addressable of local programmatic, over-the-top groups, data companies, even mixture companies,” Oscar says. “It’s a crowded playing field.” As a result, agencies are having a tough time.

“When I first started in 1975, there was a 15 percent commission...

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Secret Meetings to Advance Advanced TV

Even something like the Secret Society cannot be kept secret for too long. On a very rainy day in New York City, the room was packed with attendees. 

The most recent meeting focused on, as Mitch Oscar, USIM Advanced Television Strategist, noted, “Dialoguing issues on Advanced TV.” Speakers from networks, agencies, data specialists and research companies offered their perspectives on the advantages, challenges and futures of Advanced TV, Addressable TV and Programmatic.

Data has never been more important to ad tech and the systems that are emerging for targeted advertising. In an important next step, some of the walled gardens are coming down as the industry is starting to coalesce around shared interests. Since the Secret Society meeting, Viacom, Fox and Turner announced their joint effort called OpenAP.

The full adoption of Advanced TV still has its strengths and challenges. Obviously, the ability to more finely hone an ad message delivered to the right audience makes Advanced TV a ‘must consider’. Yet, the available inventory is still somewhat restricted and issues like workflow, fragmentation and walled gardens need to be addressed. And we need more overall industry participation to accelerate progress.

Strengths and Challenges

      Ø  Targeting. Finally there is a way to go beyond age and gender in a meaningful way. For those of us who have been in the industry for a while, the opportunity to target is seismic. “In 1975 when I was negotiating for broadcast TV, it was the first year that the guarantees were based on age and gender and not household,” Oscar reminisced, “At that time we said, ‘households don’t buy products, people do.’ Forty plus years later, we are looking at households that have people of different ages and genders that exhibit behavioral characteristics as behavioral targets. We are getting closer to targeting people who might be interested in the product and eventually purchase it.”

      Ø  Inventory. However, there are not enough national opportunities to target. The inventory currently available in Advanced TV is two minutes of local inventory per hour.  

      Ø  Workflow and Fragmentation. “Workflow for audience systems does not exist. We need a universal workflow instead of taking bits and pieces from various media companies,” Oscar noted. But even before the workflow, there is a need to address the myriad of platforms, networks and data sources that silo efforts. “The most important challenge is how many different platforms and data sources there are,” he continued, “Seven addressable TV platforms, 15 programmatic platforms, 6 contextual audience networks that offer 31 flavors of products, and over 68 data sources across these platforms makes it difficult to evaluate and implement.”

      Ø  Participation. Getting more clients on board and involved is paramount according to Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia. “It is critical that the Advanced TV industry work harder to get clients - the marketers - much more directly involved in development,” he stated, “Customer and purchase data is the key fuel in all Advanced TV applications and it is the client that controls that data.”

      Ø  Marketing Focus. Demonstrate the value of Advanced TV. Morgan believes, “We need to make it more about marketing - driving provable sales, ROI and other desired business outcomes - than advertising - delivering impressions and other media metrics. The future of advertising is about performance. That is where Advanced TV efforts should be focused.”

The Next Step

Arguably the next step in advancing Advanced TV is working together towards shared interests.Enter OpenAP. Audrey Steele, EVP, Sales Research Insights and Strategy, Fox Networks Group, spoke about OpenAP as a way to break down some of the walled gardens, set some level of standardization and accelerate the adoption of Advanced TV advertising. She explained that the three partners, Viacom, Fox and Turner, are “Frenemies,” who are, “similar in intent but the execution of sales inventory is different.” Steele noted that OpenAp:

     Ø  Offers the ability to optimize existing base buys.

     Ø  Is unified in need for standardization.

     Ø  Offers the promise of digital programmatic.

     Ø  Enables the most persuasive message for ad placement.

     Ø  Is an immersive environment with digital precision for your brand message

     Ø  Is fraud free and is transparent.

The Future

Some media executives believe that the future of Advanced TV is now and is quickly enlisting many more players. Morgan stated, “I think that we are going to see a significant acceleration of data-optimized linear TV ads, particularly as we see big enterprise tech companies like Oracle and Adobe getting more involved and as we see the big digital players like Facebook and Google getting more and more involved in TV advertising.”

Others think that despite the recent advancements, progress still seems slow. “In 1996 addressability was thought to happen any day now,” posited Oscar, “So we do have more platforms rolling out. But its deployment slow. Right now with Addressable TV, we have 34 million homes that can get addressable linear TV commercials and 19 million in the ad supported VOD addressable realm. That is 20 years later and we are nearly in half the country of 118 million homes.”

For me, while it has taken decades to reach this point, the technological rollout is accelerating and the industry is embracing all of the elements of a successful Advanced TV marketplace. So I believe that the future is now, as long as we keep the channels of discussion and cooperation flowing.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com