Peering into the Media Crystal Ball at The TV of Tomorrow Conference

Every December in New York, we are given an opportunity to map out the future developments in media at the TV of Tomorrow conference. This year, Tracy Swedlow, co-founder and CEO, TMRW Corp., focused the event on hot topics such as Attribution, Addressable Advertising and Data and how these three impact content creation and sales.

Here are the major takeaways:

Addressable Advertising Advances

“Traditional TV was a one-to-many ad medium where all would see the same ad,” explained Brett Hurwitz, Business Lead, Advanced TV, Oath. ”Addressable is not the case. It delivers a direct ad to the most relevant individuals. It is individualized advertising,” he added.

According to Amy Leifer, Vice President Sales Planning and Operations, Xandr, there is huge potential in addressable. “When you use data to attract audiences, it is more meaningful. Outcomes are so much better than using blunt media,” she stated, and added, “The reality is that it works regardless of whatever vertical you use. And it continues to grow because it works.” Xandr, AT&T’s new advertising division, launched their addressable product seven years ago.

Competing companies, such as AT&T and Dish, are now partnering on certain addressable initiatives, such as the political advertising marketplace, where they need scale and reach. “They are a competitor but we are combining our audiences in certain markets. We have an office in Washington DC that is dedicated to that marketplace,” Leifer noted.

Desirable niche targets sometimes pose a risk in addressable. We need to monitor, “which households are seeing any given ad far too many times,” advised Kevin Arrix, Senior Vice President of Dish Media. “It is difficult to control because sequencing is sold by certain groups.”

Understand How to Leverage Content

Karen Leever, President, US Digital Products, Discovery, understands the importance of content format in attracting the right consumer on the right platform. “Consumers deserve ubiquity of content and we need to give them reasons to come back,” she explained. Discovery offers full seasons on demand and, with key tent pole shows like Shark Week, the company strives to “go deeper on those for super fans” by offering short form content on the event, 8-15 minutes in length that they especially enjoy.

Leever measures the success with number of streams and minutes watched which she examines every day for both long and short form programs. In addition, Discovery has a social media initiative and has developed a robust social media community. “We have 300 million social media fans,” she noted. Discovery partners with such companies as Group 9, Dodo and Seeker which helps age down their linear TV demographic. But this effort is only used to build awareness. “There is not a lot of access to  programming over social media. Viewers must go to the provider,” she explained.

While Discovery seeks to own their content, Google sources news rather than creates it, according to Rebekah Dopp, Principal, News and Local Media Global Partnerships, Google. And thre are no plans at this time to go beyond aggregating. “It is not our core competency, not in our DNA,” she explained. “We are not content creators but a platform. And we do all we can do to maintain integrity of those who provide content.”

Attribution is Hitting Its Stride

Media companies and agencies are focusing more and more on attribution. “Attribution is a super-hot topic,” according to Tracy Swedlow, co-founder and CEO, TMRW Corp, the parent company of TV of Tomorrow. 

For agencies, it is important to manage for frequency and understand targets that are applied to linear space, according to Helen Katz, SVP, Global Director of Data and Contract, Publicis Spine. Creative has been a bigger challenge, she noted, because there isn’t always multi versions of creative that can be used for targeting. “We are in a learning curve,” she stated. But it is possible to measure success. Katz has seen sellers guarantee against the outcome in addition to the grps. And yes, “they have to hit both guarantees,” she added.

Media companies have to create their own benchmarks in this new and emerging space because there is little history to rely upon. “We update our guidelines every year,” Katz said

Data Continues to Rule

Donna Speciale, President of Turner Ad Sales, is a big proponent of data to help sales maximize the value of their inventory. Their work with AT&T’s Xandr has been formalized this past June and now they are working closely, collaborating and gathering data to enhance their current products. Xandr offers Turner access to AT&T first party data for 25 million set top boxes and 147 million mobile devices. “Our goals is to enhance our audience products,” Speciale noted, “making them faster. Our goal is to have real time optimization so we can post a lot quicker and cleaner.”

Speciale is hoping to get to national addressable. “But we are not there yet,” she admitted. “To me, it would have to get to at least a 50% mark for it to be a viable option. It is hard for us to do anything of that size because anything that deviates in a national footprint for C3, we won't get credit for. Nielsen needs one marketer for a national unit.” If ads are split between two different advertisers, Turner would lose that national rating for that telecast.

But in the meantime, Turner is doing beta testing to make the data actionable within audience segments. Speciale expects to announce new products by 2Q 2019. She also plans on being able to do her own attribution instead of going to third party sources. “We’ve got to get out of the demo and into audiences,” she stated.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Measuring the Gaze For Ads-in-Program. An Interview with Samuel Huber of admix.in

Monetizing content has at once become easier and far more complicated with new technologies enabling insertions pre, mid, post and within programming. With the advent of AR and VR, the options have widened further. Enter, Samuel Huber, Founder and CEO, Admix who has been grappling with, as he explained, “the struggles of creating and monetizing content” for many years. 

He noted that there was, “not much choice, besides banners at the bottom of the screen. When I discovered VR for the first time, I immediately thought we could do better than that, because the environment is not limited to a small screen anymore.” 

Charlene Weisler: Give me a short description of your company - is it only for the AR and VR space?

Samuel Huber: Admix is the first monetzsation platform for XR, helping over 200 VR/AR developers like High Fidelity, Somnium Space or Atom Universe, monetize their content through non-intrusive advertising. Through a free plugin for Unity, developers can create inventory within their app (a banner on a wall, a screen, or a 3D item on a table), filter the advertisers they want, to ensure ads are relevant to the content. That way, the ads will never interrupt the users, because they are in line with the content. Because we integrate with Unity, any 3D content can use Admix, not just VR/AR - we are integrating with Atom Universe which is a PS4 title. We are the first company to build the infrastructure to distribute XR ads programmatically, meaning automated and at scale. We are building new standards together with Yahoo, AOL and other demand partners, giving their advertisers the ability to access VR/AR media for the very first time.

Weisler: What technology do you use to implant ads? 

Huber: Admix is a supply side platform (SSP) built in house and selling inventory to 3rd party demand side platforms, such as Brightroll (Yahoo/AOL ). We then use our own renderer to display the ads in a 3D environment. 

Weisler: Are they static?

Huber: We have 3 ad formats - banner, video and 3D. Banner and videos are existing formats used by advertisers. The 3D format is a new format we are pioneering with our demand partners and that will be interactive and enable new interactions between brands and consumers.

Weisler: How are the ads measured? What data do you use and how do you integrate it into the buy/sell?

Huber: Being programmatic, we capture contextual data (about the environment) and gaze tracking data (where the users are looking) to calculate viewability. Gaze tracking data is anonymized and used in aggregate, to understand how people consume a specific ad, how long they spend gazing at it, which is used to qualify the impact of the ad in a much more granular way than possible on the web. ‘Impressions’ are not binary anymore, but on a continuous spectrum, giving advertisers a lot more insights. In the future, we aim to define a Cost per Gaze model, which will charge advertisers differently based on the interaction level with a specific ad. We can then feed that information back to advertisers, to give them more insights on the profile of the person interacting with their ads.

Weisler: Are you working with any media measurement companies and if so who?

Huber: The answer is not yet, we are having discussions with 3rd party measurement companies but no integration yet. To popularize the gaze tracking metric, we are working together with Oath building these standards so will aim to make it a standards with existing players first.

Weisler: Is there a thought to integrate with other media platforms and if so what?

Huber: We are currently integrating with various DSPs to give us access to more advertisers.

Weisler: What do you see as the future of advertising 3 years from now?

Huber: I believe that XR will profoundly improve advertising for the better, by bringing it at the center of the creative process and giving developers the ability to control the experience. VR and AR give advertisers a lot more freedom to be creative. In particular, product placements, which do not interrupt and are relevant to the story, are going to replace banners, pre rolls and popups. From a financial point of view, because they do not interrupt, you can imagine having 50 product placements per app, as opposed to 1 pre roll when the app loads, meaning more revenue for the developers, and more brand recognition for the advertisers! For the first time, interests of the consumers, the developers and the publishers are aligned. This is the future that we see at Admix, and are working on building!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Lotame Ignite Americas Conference Focuses on the Power of Data

Data has (finally) become the force for change in our industry. Not only have many media companies devoted much of their upfronts about it, but Lotame's inaugural Ignite Americas forum last week expanded the discussion of how data can be used to improve ROI, upend legacy measurements, tell a story and totally restructure a company. It is finally revenge of the nerds. 

Data Attributes Have Evolved

There is so much data available from first, second and third party data that the parameters of what constitutes a valuable dataset have evolved. Previously, data size was one of the paramount requests. Do we have a large enough sample approaching census that will get us stable results? Now, with the complexity and sophistication of data availability, the wants have shifted from size to data quality. The components of data quality are Transparency (Do we understand the data attributes and origins?) Accuracy (Are we getting actionable successful results?) and Performance (Do the results deliver on the KPIs and/or ROI?).

Data expert Joyce Lee, Director Global Data Sales Strategy, Oath, has seen her role evolve from accumulating third party data to finding ways to "sync all first party data in the Oath family." Data stitching is like cooking, she noted, from having the right ingredients, to blending them together to serving a final, perfect result. Michelle Mirshak, Vice President Data Architecture and Platforms, Spark Foundry, noted that "Some of our more sophisticated clients are asking us to normalize data across channels to better track performance," as the data is analyzed in a more holistic way. The importance of data quality cannot be understated. According to Mirshak, whether it is third, second or first party data, "it all comes down to performance," because quality is not just a first party data attribute.

Data From Collection to Insights

Alejandro Matos, Digital Marketing Director, Omnicom Media Group, Dominican Republic and The Caribbean, explained the challenge he faced in generating insights for a local retailer who had limited data on its online consumers. “We needed to come up with a way to capture data,” he said. His work in capturing data that explained the consumer journey focused on a variety of sources - from placing beacons in various locations in the store, launching a DMP, CRM on social media and on apps, placing pixels in banner ads, gathering data on mobile, emails, websites, from multiple sources and then matched with third party data before modeling.

The result was the ability to more clearly understand the consumer journey, but it was putting the collection structure into place that made all the difference. Is every data project unique and custom? Not necessarily, according to Matos. The collection methods may be similar across clients but the insights and stories that can be crafted from the data, even from similar data sets, will differ.

A Move From Legacy Metrics to Segmentation and Attribution

With the availability of sophisticated datasets, it is time for the industry to move away from legacy age and gender demographics. According to Chris Frazier, Vice President Business Intelligence, Cadent Network, his company uses data to, “build what that audience will be” by building out a target consumer beyond age and gender, to “reach the intended target at the right time.” He added that linking to linear TV using traditional Nielsen to digital platform performance is a challenge, impeding the ability to measure and guarantee standardize-able sales deliveries across platforms. “We would like to see uniformity in how we measure impressions. Is it two seconds? Is it a minute? We want to see industry standards,” he stated. When it comes to addressable, attribution is key. “Attribution allows you to connect your exposures to where the sales are. It’s a measure of ROI to media spend.”  

The TV industry is beginning to embrace the use of consumer data in measurement in conjunction with demographic data enabling cross platform measurement. The need for a holistic, unified view of audiences and campaigns has never been greater and is essential for the evolution of the advertising industry. As data advocate, Andy Monfried, Founder and CEO, Lotame, concluded in his opening keynote, the requirements of a DMP is to unify disparate datasets to target the right audiences, extend a brand’s position to find and reach new customers and to better understand a consumer journey through greater personalization. This requires internal buy-in, retaining talent and aligning the strategic corporate vision to better understand and execute on the data insights. We are at the beginning stages. For the industry and for a company like Lotame, it should be an exciting and ground-breaking time going forward.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Ads.txt Provides Greater Transparency for Advertisers

Transparency is a vital component of any digital advertising message. Now as Programmatic becomes more ubiquitous, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has developed a protocol that protects ad buyers from fraudulent sellers. 

Ads.txt (which stands for Authorized Digital Sellers) is a simple, flexible and easy method for publishers and distributors to publicly display all of the vetted companies allowed to sell that domain’s digital inventory. A simple text file, ads.txt offers a very transparent way to prevent unauthorized inventory sales from those bad actors who arbitrage inventory and spoof domains by listing all authorized sellers of the site so anyone can cross check.   

Tim Mahlman, President of Advertising and Publisher Strategy, Oath, is a big proponent of ads.txt.  “Advertisers want greater transparency from their media partners,” he explained. “Publishers that have embraced ads.txt have taken a positive step toward delivering that. It’s a more secure way to publicly identify the platforms authorized to sell publisher inventory, limiting bad actors. And it gives advertisers a more accurate representation of media impressions and who’s selling them. For publishers that haven’t yet implemented ads.txt, they’ll ultimately get on board. They can’t afford not to as more advertisers buy based on transparency,” he added.

To further understand the familiarity and implementation of ads.txt, Oath just completed a study on the subject polling 220 ad and agency executives. 

The study revealed that ads.txt is a huge plus for the industry:

·         51% of the respondents say that ads.txt make them more comfortable about buying programmatic

·         48% say that they’re suspicious of publishers who are not using ads.txt 

One-third will only advertise with publishers who are using ads.txtBut there is still work to be done. 

While ads.txt is continuing to grow, only 60% of the top 1,000 U.S. publishers have already implemented it. 

And more education needed as nearly 20% of advertisers have never head of ads.txt 
 

Arguably, ads.txt is “still a new development in our industry,” noted Mahlman, “The IAB only launched it one year ago. That education gap will shrink quickly this year as more advertisers demand tools for inventory transparency.” He added that, “Adoption is growing. It’s gaining momentum but is still unfamiliar to some buyers. Partners need to continue to educate advertisers on the benefits of buying ads.txt-enabled inventory.”

Mahlman is enthusiastic about ads.txt and stated that his company has supported it “from the beginning and has already implemented it across its properties. We are also collaborating with publishers and approved resellers and have been enforcing ads.txt across our platforms and filtering inventory on domains where DSPs buy.” 

The future of ads.txt looks abundantly clear. “Since ads.txt was implemented last year, increased transparency in the programmatic ecosystem has become even more prevalent. Advertisers can use it to verify inventory sellers by simply adding ads.txt to the end of a URL,” concluded Mahlman.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com