Sean Muller of iSpot Announces a Partnership with Neustar

Sean Muller, Founder and CEO, iSpot, just announced the partnership of his company with Neustar. The merging of efforts of these two companies has the potential to better consolidate and track the attribution journey of consumers. 

For Muller, Neustar offers, “market leadership in identity resolution and marketing analytics with dominance in digital multi-touch attribution, media mixed modeling and data security for the world’s largest brands,” while his company, iSpot, “is the market leader for real-time TV advertising intelligence, with products built on granular second by second Ad occurrence data enabling decision making for 40% of the TV ad market on a daily basis. Its business outcome analytics are increasingly used by networks and brands as a secondary currency.” And Neustar, Muller noted, is one of only two companies in the industry to do attribution on Facebook. 

Charlene Weisler: How will this partnership blend the two company’s unique capabilities?

Sean Muller: This is an integration of best-in-breed digital multi-touch and granular TV ad attribution.  Technology integrations just completed, the Neustar and iSpot IDS have already been matched and synchronized.  All of iSpot’s measurement across 12k advertisers is flowing to Neustar, and offline data flows from Neustar to iSpot’s dashboard

Weisler: How does this partnership enhance business opportunities?

Muller: In many ways, the marketplace brought us together for a unified solution. We found major CPG, auto makers, and retailers and financial service companies were combining our capabilities for a unified, granular view into performance across customer channels. By integrating, we’re making it easier for brands to have a unified solution. The implementation is done, clients can take advantage today.

Weisler: Are there any overlaps and if so, how will it be handled?

Muller: The technologies and capabilities are very complimentary fir brands wanting unified attribution with granularity on all ends. While overlap in capabilities are to be expected, KPIs and frameworks for managing customer touch points vary by industry and customer, so overlaps will be resolved by a true focus on delivering the best solution for the brand customer.

Weisler: Are there any gaps still to be filled and if so what and how would they be filled?

Muller: True and absolute unification will always have a distance to travel because there are brand exposures and influences that are impossible to always count, such as in person recommendation, subtle out of home and unmarked social influencer content integrations… This is the most complete unification technology suite on the market today full stop.

Weisler: Both companies offer attribution. How will processes be handled/merged/standardized (if going to do so)?

Muller: Each company will retain their attribution and performance scoring systems and methodology, however with data flowing more seamlessly between platforms, customers will be able to go deeper into things such as creative performance, time of day. The two will look to evolve offerings down the road beyond that.

Weisler: From an overall media ecosystem perspective, what are still the biggest challenges for buyers and sellers out there?

Muller: The biggest problem for the broader ecosystem revolves around quality, accuracy, scale and trust. The abundance of big, raw data sets and proliferation of analytics boutiques has given rise to low quality, low cost attribution services that are just plain risky as a means for making decisions. So the big challenges are educating the advertisers and media buyers on the importance of data fidelity, quality and consistency and giving brands the tools to properly leverage the insights to generate more revenues, cost savings and so forth.

Weisler: How will your partnership meet those challenges?

Muller: Together with leading brands, iSpot and Neustar are developing best practice guidelines other brands can use to make informed decisions when thinking about connecting ad investments to attribution or other analysis.

Weisler: Where do you see the ecosystem going and the role of this partnership three years from now?

Muller: The movement towards outcome based buying, optimization and performance guarantees in TV will continue to accelerate.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
 

In Digital Advertising, More of the Same and a Lot More. An Interview with Neustar’s Steven Silvers

Steve Silvers, VP, Product Management, Neustar IDMP, works in the field of identity resolution. “We work with advertisers to help them know everything they can about their customers and prospects, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and measure the impact of their marketing, with our unified marketing intelligence platform,” he explained. His company is pouncing on the opportunity created by Google’s dissolution of DoubleClick IDs by partnering with the global ad management platform Flashtalking. 

How that will impact the digital advertising field is his story to tell:

Charlene Weisler: What is Flashtalking?

Steve Silvers: Flashtalking is a global platform for ad management, data activation and insights that help marketers use data to personalize advertising, analyze its effectiveness and optimize performance across channels and formats. It is powered by proprietary cookieless tracking, data unification and algorithmic attribution. 

Charlene Weisler: Describe the partnership between Flashtalking and Neustar.

Steve Silvers: In the wake of Google’s recent announcement that it will restrict and ultimately eliminate the use of DoubleClick IDs, marketers were at risk of being left without a way to measure the impact of their marketing. This partnership was established to address that gap. 

Charlene Weisler: Why do you think Google retired DoubleClick?

Steve Silvers: The sun-setting of the DoubleClick name is not a new phenomenon in the ad- and mar-tech industry. Google wants to consolidate and streamline their stack, simplifying their product offering to their clients and prospects. They are pushing the ecosystem to think of Google as an integrated offering – analytics and ads working together as one. And they are not wrong with this assumption. 

The larger change that Google has made, however, is the elimination of the USERID and PARTNERID fields in their data transfer (log) files. This is data that brands have been leveraging to match users to their third-party platform identities. As an alternative, Google will be pushing all clients to their Ads Data Hub product. This will restrict clients to Google-only identity, creating further fragmentation and detachment from a single and holistic customer view.

Charlene Weisler: Describe the void that your partnership fills.

Steve Silvers: The implications of Google’s action are significant, as this change directly impacts data linkage and alignment. Advertisers will now need to decide how much control and transparency they want from their media partnerships and whether to untether from the Google ecosystem entirely or work with other neutral measurement partners to provide an independent view across their media. Our partnership is giving marketers an alternative way to maintain a single unified view of their impression data, enabling analytics and accountability.

Charlene Weisler: Who is your competition?

Steve Silvers: Neustar's portfolio has three solution categories - Customer Intelligence, Customer Experience, and Customer Analytics.

• Customer Intelligence helps clients manage and improve their own data while providing additional intelligence to maximize their marketing, sharpen their analytics, and optimize their organizational processes. We compete with those who link offline identity management and CRM services, audience scoring and segmentation as well as channel centric services, such as call center, direct mail, and lead intelligence. 

• Customer Experience helps clients build and deliver better customer experiences at scale. Built on a framework of authoritative identity, we connect offline identity with website behavior, and addressable media engagement to build a sustainable legacy of the customer that grows and optimizes as they move along their journey. Competitors include those who offer data onboarding, data management, audience and media planning, cross-channel measurement, data science services, omnichannel remarketing, as well as customer data and identity management. 

• Customer Analytics provides insight into what is working and guidance into how to drive more effective and efficient marketing. Unified analytics enables holistic measurement and optimization across addressable and non-addressable business drivers to fuel marketing that makes a measureable difference. Competitors include those in Marketing Mix Modeling, Multi-touch Attribution, as well as both unified and channel centric measurement services like TV.

We are unique in that we have an end-to-end system of identity that enables everything from upstream segmentation and enrichment of first-party data, to onboarding and activation, to analytics. 

Charlene Weisler: What does the end of Doubleclick mean for the marketplace?

Steve Silvers: Due to the removal of the DoubleClick ID, advertisers may encounter limitations as they use independent third parties for a number of critical functions, including:

•             Verification of user-level delivery, reach, and frequency

•             Analysis of cross-channel and cross-device engagement

•             Multi-touch attribution outside of Google’s own measurement tools

•             Measurement and optimization of ad creative, beyond click-through rates or last-touch KPIs

•             Attributing store visits and offline transactions to online media engagement

•             Analysis of user-level data to understand customer interests, behavior, and preferences

This is why Flashtalking and Neustar created an open, integrated alternative to Google’s marketing platform. This provides a foundation for a connected ecosystem based on ad management and identity management for a better integration between the DMP, ID graph, ad serving/cookieless tracking, personalization and data unification. And it is a cross platform solution.

Charlene Weisler: What data are you using and how will it be presented?

Steve Silvers: Neustar builds identity graphs of both online pseudonymous identifiers, such as cookies, Mobile Ad IDs, publisher account IDs, set top box IDs, as well as graphs of offline identifiers, such as name, postal address, phone and email, etc. We have pioneered the use of Converged Graph techniques using all possible data points to resolve and create consumer identities and the extended associated identities of the device they used and the locations they inhabit and visit (people, places and things). We construct this identity using all the identity points that are available from all the sources commonly accessible to the market, but also from unique Neustar service exhaust data and relationships in Marketing Solutions, Risk Solutions, Security Solutions and Telecommunication Solutions. 

 

This is done while retaining user privacy and controls on mixing of PII with pseudonymous identifier data with places and devices. We also have the capability to incorporate customer data into private identity graphs which allow tailored versions of identity resolution on a per client basis.

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see digital advertising going in the next three years?

Steve Silvers: Digital advertising is only going to increase as more and more media becomes available digitally – look at the shift of linear TV to OTT and streaming, or the rise of Spotify vs. terrestrial radio, and the growth of digital out-of-home. The key trends to look for in the next three years are whether anyone can challenge the dominance of the walled gardens, the impact of GDPR and the CA legislation on the use of different data categories and rise of consent, and the development of greater tools and intelligence to help marketers measure and build accountability. In other words, more of the same. A lot more!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Future of Marketing Forum with Neustar

Who would have thought that a forum on marketing would have so much discussion about data, research and analytics? So it was at the recent Future of Marketing Forum by Neustar. Steve Wolfe Pereira, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Neustar, painted a dire picture of the state of marketing in his conference introduction. "Over trillion dollars is currently spent in marketing but many companies experienced revenue decline," he began. "The medium tenure for a CMO is now down from 33 to 27 months. This is not a lot of time to achieve impact." And, he continued, "There are challenges from bots, to fraud to even hurricanes. Is this the end of marketing as we know it?"

Here is where marketing is going:

Preparing Content for Sales

There is an increasing viewer backlash to ad loads. Suzanne Vranica, advertising editor at the Wall Street Journal called it the "rise of anti-advertising" where "ad blocking has become a problem." The answer may be to reduce the ad load. But how does that impact revenue? Donna Speciale, President Ad Sales at Turner, explained why her company made it a strategy to reduce the ad loads on their networks. "We are focusing on the consumer," she stated, "Viewer behavior is changing. So, reducing ad loads for us was part of the equation. The messaging has to change and storytelling within pods had to change. We wanted to make the experience better." And, the reduced ad load withtruTV, had “a huge upside with ratings" and revenue-wise, the network "made more money," she added.

Forging Connection

Brands need to reinforce their connection to their customer. But how can we best do that in the cacophony of platform and content choices? Some companies like HBO have a business model based on opt-in subscriptions and a brand promise that has withstood the test of time. Lucinda Martinez, Senior Vice President, Multicultural and International Marketing, HBO, explained, "We deliver an experience that is specific and on brand. We market to a multicultural audience and we are really careful about designing the campaign." It is all about storytelling at HBO where content is designed so that "the story is bigger than the characters," she added.

To insure the connection between content, audience and branding, companies have to have inner connection.  At HBO, department silos have been broken down between marketing and the creators. Marketer Martinez noted that, "We sit in same room as creators so we know when the plot surprise is coming." in this way, marketing messages can be released to coincide with program climaxes that can come in the middle of the series' run. this can create more watercooler moments.

Messaging and Bots

Challenges to marketing and branding seem to abound. So, it is vital that marketers keep up with change. According to Michael J. Wolf, Founder and Partner, Activate, "The stakes are high in the messaging wars. But messaging will not be a winner-take-all. The battle will be fought by bots. People will get more comfortable using chat bots and integrating into their purchasing and personal lives." What this means is an evolution to more sophisticated AI, easier discovery tools, better payment integration and greater cross-platform portability.

The Future of Marketing

The future is a more connected world where there will continue to be great opportunities and vexing challenges. The secret to success is, as Pereira concluded, to get back to basics with a twist. It’s still product, price, promotion and place, in a radically transformed way, and, he noted: “Product becomes all about experience, price becomes the exchange of value, promotion becomes evangelists and place becomes everywhere. We need to focus on the things that matter.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Broadcast Television: Another Technology Able to Adapt

With all the increased competition among content viewing platforms, one might be forgiven for thinking broadcast television is under great strain. But to adapt a phrase from Mark Twain: The report on the death of broadcast television is greatly exaggerated.

In fact, television is not only not dying, it’s poised for a new era of growth and evolution. As Ed DiNicola, head of TV at Cambridge Analytica, notes in MediaPost, “What some are calling the end of TV is just another evolution.”

Working in Tandem

Buying both television and digital gives advertisers greater impact, with the combination of television and digital delivering better results than either can achieve individually. Jasper Snyder, executive vice president of cross-platform research and innovation at the Advertising Research Foundation, actually found a “kicker effect” when TV is added back to digital spending.

Turner’s and Neustar’s recent study demonstrated that television is making good use of advanced...

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

TV Leads All Other Media in Delivering a Brand Message

TV continues to reign supreme, according to an updated Neustar research study commissioned by Turner and Horizon Media. This extensive research study – originally conducted in 2015 and updated this year, examines the effect of TV advertising compared to other forms of advertising in the marketplace. Given the rapid expansion of the media landscape and increased pervasiveness of programmatic and digital video in just two years, it is important to compare and contrast more frequently than ever.

According to the research, despite those advancements in technology, new digital platforms, and changes in consumer behavior, TV remains the best vehicle for delivering a brand’s message to a mass audience. The report states that “the new findings from a fresh set of verticals (Movies, QSRs and Consumer Electronics) closely mimic the findings from our original research, meaning that the effectiveness of TV advertising is essentially unchanged despite the explosion of online media over that time.” 

The study confirmed four important takeaways:

1.       TV is Efficient. TV has the highest relative efficiency in achieving KPIs, compared to other media whether offline or online. This means that at a given level of spend, TV generates more business outcomes.

2.       Advanced Analytics Optimizes TV Spend. Marketers should leverage high-frequency data to quickly reallocate resources by TV type, network, creative, and day part to significantly impact results.

3.       Premium Streaming Content is More Effective than User-Generated. And, behavioral targeting required the fewest impressions to generate an interaction.

4.       TV Offers Significant Cross-Product Halo Effect For Advertisers.  And, removing TV and implementing standalone digital strategy had an average negative halo effect of -18% on ROI. For example, TV advertising drives the highest increase of box office sales and online engagement activities surrounding Movies with a 40% bump in overall movie ticket sales when compared to organic search and social media. 

“TV advertising is undergoing an incredible data-driven renaissance, fusing the best of digital’s targeting and measurement with the best of TV’s premium content and reach,” explained Steven Wolfe Pereira, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Neustar.  “Nothing beats the sight, sound and motion experience of TV and its ability to truly capture attention and drive engagement.  In a world where both brand safety and business outcomes matter, I am extremely bullish about the future of TV.  We’re just scratching the surface of what addressable TV targeting and measurement can do,” he concluded.

“This research reaffirms that television continues to be the biggest driver of marketing success today, yet there remains a lot of room to grow even further as the industry and consumer habits shift,” noted Beth Rockwood, Vice President, Portfolio Research and Chief of Staff, Turner. “Recognizing that growth opportunity, Turner has been one of the industry’s biggest proponents for reimagining the experience of television – developing new audience targeting methods, as well as forging innovative content partnerships, to deliver highly engaging, unexpected experiences to fans,” she added.  

The underlying methodology was based on econometric regression techniques that establish the mathematical relationships between marketing investments and sales outcomes by examining week-to-week sales volume shifts.

Review the full report here.   

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com