Focusing on Mobile and App Data. An Interview with Sabio’s Aziz Rahimtoola

For Aziz Rahimtoola, CEO and Co-Founder of Sabio, the richness of mobile data is one of the keys to understanding consumer behavior. “Sabio means wise or experienced in Spanish,” he noted. His company strives to address the issues with current panel measurement systems through mobile and app data.  

 

Charlene Weisler: What is the state of CTV/OTT in general at this time and where is it headed?

 

Aziz Rahimtoola: The CTV/OTT media landscape is quite fragmented due to the various operating system platforms and increased competition from every angle. This is good for consumers as it allows choice, but it will continue to be confusing for marketers. 

 

Weisler: In terms of methodology, what approach is best for marketers?

 

Rahimtoola: I believe that app data is more effective than panels in understanding consumer behaviors. This has been validated by Nielsen and other panel-based companies that admit to not effectively understanding streamers (app users) or diverse audiences via panels. In the 1970s, when society was 11% and monolithic, panels were more effective than now when at 42%, our population is more diverse.  

 

Weisler: What is App Science?

 

Rahimtoola: App Science combines data signals from 280 million active mobile and 110 million CTV devices and closes the quality gap between multicultural and general market data. Traditional survey panels have historically underrepresented and undercounted multicultural segments of the population. By analyzing CTV and mobile device data, App Science draws a complete picture of multicultural audiences, their preferences, and interests. They also provide trends and insights for their clients to help them better understand consumer actions and interests so they can make better strategic business decisions. This can entail programming preferences, competitive analyses, industry vertical insights, or multicultural and diverse audience trends that traditional measurement companies typically underrepresent.

         

Weisler: What data do you at Sabio collect and apply?

 

Rahimtoola: We have GDPR and CCPA-compliant ways of obtaining mobile and CTV/OTT IDs. We also use machine learning extensively to understand consumers via predictive modeling better. In addition, we provide advertisers with a pixel, or a snippet of code used for tracking, that can be applied across media buys to measure campaigns. The information can help to compare viewership among different platforms and avoid targeting the same audiences repeatedly.

 

Overall, we capture over one terabyte of mobile and CTV/OTT data daily and ensure that everything is ethically sourced, privacy compliant, and cleansed. This data contains a wide range of metadata that allows us to apply machine learning algorithms and other predictive modeling to considerably understand consumers’ demographics, points of interest, behaviors, and life stages. From there, we can create granular audience insights and segments that can be applied to media buys and measure campaigns’ effectiveness.

 

Weisler: How do you craft segments from your data?

 

Rahimtoola: Segments are created from a collection of CTV and mobile data where we apply the nearest neighbor, lookalikes and another predictive modeling to various attributes. When we look at the data collected from CTV/OTT and mobile, we analyze various attributes such as app ecosystem, technographic, brand visitation, purchase signals, and census data and further verify with trusted 3rd party sources. From there, we apply machine learning algorithms such as the closest neighbor, lookalikes, associations, and topic modeling to create clusters, user profiles, and audience segments that all connect back to our proprietary 55MM household graph. 

 

Weisler: How does Sabio differ from other platforms in the CTV/OTT space?

 

Rahimtoola: Sabio Holdings is the only company outside Roku with a complete end-to-end CTV/OTT technology suite of services. We can partner up with content creators and launch apps along with creating and distributing add breaks in content with our newly acquired Vidillion SSP (Supply Side Platform) acquisition, monetize them via our Sabio DSP, all while providing differentiated non-panel-based analytics via its App Science platform.

 

Weisler: How do you use your data to inform political campaigns?

 

Rahimtoola: We enhance National voter files with insights that help identify a political party’s viewing habits, app behaviors, points of interest, and key issues that matter to them most so that they can use this audience insights to inform their future campaigns, validate they are reaching their audience, and optimize in real-time.

 

Weisler: What were some of the trends in political advertising leading up to the midterms?

 

Rahimtoola: Looking back on November 8^th, we noticed the most notable political advertising trends being the increase in growth in CTV and OTT.  The political sector has always been reluctant to buy into CTV, but compared to 2018, the shift has been dramatic. Prior, most political ad spending has been programmatic. We also saw an increase in the use of QR codes, and interestingly, there’s been a multicultural shift. In previous years agencies said they didn’t have a big enough budget for the Hispanic demographic. Still, there has been an increase in the general market putting money into the multicultural market.

 

First published in www.MediaVillage.com Thought Leaders

 Artwork by Charlene Weisler

How Political Advertisers are Adapting to Fragmentation & Connected TV with a4

Political advertisers are continuously looking for ways to reach highly specific voter groups with targeted messaging and it is Sten McGuire’s job as, Vice President of Sales, a4 Advertising for Political & Public Affairs sector to help make that happen.

Between the 2020 election and the pandemic, consumer usage of media has evolved making it easier for advertisers to leverage CTV and OTT in addition to linear. “While CTV and OTT aren't necessarily new to the midterms or, even the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic highlighted these environments as not just a complement to linear campaigns, but as a substitute or a must have,” he explained.

Advertisers would need to allocate budget dollars particularly when considering the scarcity of available inventory within the marketplace. Initially in the 2018 midterms, he noted, “OTT and CTV were looked at as a tactic to establish cross platform frequency,” and reach extension but during the pandemic, as people stayed home, there was a massive shift in viewer engagement and binge watching to these platforms and that, he stated, “Is where OTT really thrives.”

The benefit for political advertisers was evident. “It gave campaigns an opportunity to reach voters outside of their respective echo chambers on cable news or local news in a more laid back living room environment,” he shared.

And this viewing shift is not a fluke, according to McGuire.  “While streaming viewership was a growing trend over the past decade and accelerated throughout the 2020 presidential cycle, I don't think the pandemic or growth in streaming engagement is a fluke. Rather, I think it's a catalyst to consumer behavior as we know it now. Streaming is here to stay.” This bodes well for political advertisers who need to reach specific voters by zipcode in their living rooms where they are more open to messaging.  

But there are challenges that include regulatory differences between linear and digital. Are OTT and CTV considered linear or digital? “If it comes through an ad server, all signs point to digital, right?” McGuires posited. “But the reality is that 75% to 80% of impressions are landing on linear.” For advertisers, budget decisions and tactics rest on the right answer to that question. “One of the things that I question as we go into 2022 and 2024 and beyond, when 50% of budgets are still being allocated towards broadcast and they are contextual alignments, you might use impressions to evaluate the media post campaign but you're not transacting that way.”

Data usage is another challenge. “Sometimes I think we get too granular in the way we employ data,” he stated. There is the risk of serving too many impressions to the same people with OTT and CTV. “We need to start scaling and using actual insights to inform our tactics,” he advised.

Solutions for advertisers require not only good third party verification providers but also the strategic use of first party data. “I think that's going to become very important as we move towards a cookie less world,” McGuire noted. For a4, it is their ability to leverage authenticated IP addresses which helps with all sorts of fraud issues and insures that the advertiser is reaching an actual home and not a bot or other non-human traffic. “We have a proprietary compiler that washes PII data across several internet providers nationally,” he stated. “We have access to 92 million IP addresses that are refreshed every two weeks, so you know you're working with a first party refresh data set,” he added.

But the big opportunity here, according to McGuire, is first party ACR data. a4 has just partnered with LG which offers, “an ACR feature built into all of their 20 million devices. It insures that you're reaching real TV watchers and not just box.”

All of this lends to an ability to craft and customize segments. “We partner with dozens of third party data vendors, but I would say, from a political and public affairs standpoint, we have about seven or eight that we lean into directly,” McGuire explained. “We can create any kind of custom segment such as custom voter files.” His company is also testing in beta the ability to ascertain the effectiveness of creative through interactivity which will help advertisers tweak their messaging within the flight. “Actionable insights that we glean from real people and sequential messaging are going to be really important and something that's not really utilized right now.”

For McGuire, the future looks bright but more complex. “It's no surprise that our marketplace become more competitive,” he noted. “I would argue that if you're just tracking impressions or completions you're doing yourself a disservice. Having expert boots-on-the-ground to actually track KPIs is very important. Reporting is going to be a huge differentiator moving forward as will the growth of ACR,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

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

 

Explaining the CPM Increase in Media. An Interview with SQAD’s Marc Krigsman

Marc Krigsman has a deep background in TV from Fox Cable Network to Turner Networks Group, Cadent and Cross MediaWorks to becoming CEO of SQAD in 2015. 

“I have seen and been involved with many significant changes and advancements in television advertising,” he explained. So who better to assess the strength, opportunities, trends and challenges in pricing the media marketplace in 2020?

Charlene Weisler: What data does SQAD collect and what do you report?

Marc Krigsman: For more than four decades, SQAD has served as the industry source for ad cost data, processing more than $1 trillion in real transaction ad costs from advertising housekeeping system. This data is available through our MediaCosts platform and includes costs for national broadcast, cable, and syndicated television, as well as local broadcast, cable, and Hispanic TV, radio, and out-of-home advertising. We also provide audience analytics research tools for Nielsen data through our MediaLogic platform and provide advertisers and agencies with the industry’s leading media planning software, MediaTools.  

Weisler: How has audience fragmentation due to streaming, OTT, SVOD and cord-cutting impacted average unit ad costs on broadcast and cable if at all? Where do you see the trend?

Krigsman: It’s an interesting conundrum that we are in right now because as fragmentation occurs and audiences become more scattered there is still a revenue target outlets need to achieve for their inventory. So what is actually occurring is a CPM increase. That is because it is costing more to reach the same audience. As fragmentation happens, we’re seeing CPMs and rates go up.  Most in the industry thought that would not be the case, but in fact we are seeing an increase in prices. That also happens when you sell less inventory - CPMs go up. It’s a supply and demand issue. Fragmentation does not equate to a sale or reduction in prices. It is actually the opposite.

Weisler: What will the effect of increased audience based buying and impression based measurement be on unit ad costs and on advertising budgets?

Krigsman: The more focused and targeted you get, the more you are going to pay for that targeting. For some advertisers that makes sense. They will pay a premium to reach the audience they want to reach and only that audience. But other advertisers, CPG for example, don’t really care about pinpointing audiences. So for them addressable is not as efficient a buy.

The reality is that even with targeting you are still going to have waste. You have to be 100 percent clear about who the audience is you want to reach. You have to have a lot of audiences in your data to understand who your ideal customer is but when you do that the extras it takes to buy those segments will result in a higher price point.

For the seller, an advertiser using a targeted campaign to reach a limited HH, that means that they will have to fill their other inventory with other types of advertising if they can. The media outlet has to have confidence that the revenue they are getting from the targeted buy will be enough. They have to take into consideration that if it goes for a lower price, this will open an opportunity for bargain hunters looking for a bucket of impressions, not specific ones. Targeted buying could create opportunities for people who are looking for the opposite.

Weisler: What are the programming types that continue to command the highest CPMs?

Krigsman: Live shows, special events, news and sports – these are premier events that always command high CPMs because of their unique selling proposition in general. Overall you still have huge prices for traditional TV– sitcoms and other first run programming. But clearly live and special events are unique.

Weisler: How are live programs such as sports and awards shows faring in an environment where audiences are gravitating to watching highlights on-line? Does the data support this assumption? Press seems to infer that live programming delivers the most engaged audiences. Do you agree?

Krigsman: Programming that promote itself as unique or “watch it now” has the specialness of motivating viewers to want to watch it while it is happening, which always makes for an engaged audience.

Weisler: What can we expect for the CPMs of news programming as the presidential campaign season heats up? And how will data be best used to target independent voters? How is the tight inventory in local markets due to campaign buying impacting CPMs for advertisers?

Krigsman: History has shown that when there is a lot of pressure on inventory prices go up. From a national inventory perspective there will be a lot of pressure from PACs and other entities looking to support various issues and candidates. But most presidential advertising will be local rather than national. This will put pressure on local inventory and we will see an increase in those markets, but for only for a period of time, What traditionally happens is that those markets will go through to a period of  time and some of their core advertisers may not have available to them what they have had before.  But those local stations will then look to make goods following this period to offer to their bread and butter advertisers.

Weisler: How would you rate the TV ad market overall as we head into 2020?

Krigsman: The market is pretty healthy.  We are seeing a lot of increased pressure from other platforms but overall the ad market is healthy. People have a high level of confidence in the economy and when they do marketers spend against that confidence…that will reflect well in the ad market moving forward.

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com