Unlocking The Addressable Future

According to eMarketer, Addressable TV ad spend is on a tear, increasing from $760million in 2016 and projected to rise to $3.49billion by 2021. The advantages that addressable offers both buyers and sellers also benefits consumers who can now receive messaging that is tailored to their interests and needs. Many companies believe that there is an even greater opportunity for growth in the next few years and are willing to place more dollars against it in the next sales cycle. 

Advertising Week’s panel titled, Unlocking the Addressable Future brought Discovery, Xander, FreeWheel and Omnicom together to discuss how they will ‘unlock’ these opportunities. The potential is great. “First, the infrastructure exists,” stated, David Algranati, Chief Product Officer, Comscore, there is, “the ability to version ads at the household level at scale.” And with national addressable, “If the networks, in conjunction with the MVPDs were to version the inventory that the networks own, the scale or available inventory for addressable advertising would dramatically increase creating a whole new set of opportunities for advertisers.” 

Where is Addressable Today?

For Dan Rosenfeld, Vice President Data Strategy, Xandr, addressable offers relevant advertising delivered one-to-one directly to the consumer or a household through TV distribution or digital. Keith Kazerman, Executive Vice President, Digital Sales, Advanced Advertising and Research, Discovery, essentially agreed, adding that the ads are dynamically inserted.

On the agency side, Matt Kramer, Managing Director, Advanced Advertising, Omnicom, suggested that companies consider the levels of delivery. “At the top you have data driven linear, using first and third party data to better select what networks, dayparts and programs to buy,” he explained, “Layer number two is getting down to the household level and finally you have the IPTV space which is built upon connected devices at the access point and the OTT apps you are trying to sponsor,” which is at the programmatic level.

For Claudio Marcus, General Manager, Data Platform, FreeWheel, addressable identifies segments of consumers who share common attributes and is not necessarily one-to-one marketing.  “This is not,” he assured, “targeting people on a single individual basis.” This is an important distinction, coming at a time of GDPR in the E.U. and state level privacy legislation such as CCPA in the US. He added that addressable offers not only target-ability but is also ubiquitously measureable. “The measurement component of addressability extends beyond the households that don’t support targeting today,” he stated, meaning that an advertiser can deliver a linear ad and still understand which household received that ad. 

Where is Addressable going?

So today, Addressable can be used in a myriad of ways to capture consumers by segment and to measure against traditional targeting and delivery. But where is it headed? For Marcus, looking ahead three years from now will bring profound applications. "Three years from now, the definition of addressable TV advertising will be ads that are targeted to anonymous, likeminded segments of consumers who are reached via TV and premium video content, regardless of the type of delivery or device. Addressable TV ads will be seamlessly enabled across National, Local and premium digital video, and will considerably easier to plan, buy, execute and measure," he predicted.

For Zazerman, the stakes are high and collaboration is pivotal. “If national programmer addressability is not available at scale in 3 years, everyone on this stage should be held accountable. Collaboration is key to bringing this opportunity to market for our collective clients,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

What is the Strategy in This Brave New Media World?

As the media landscape continues to evolve, media mavens sat down at the recent IRTS breakfast to discuss how the industry can respond to evolving consumer behaviors, decide which metrics are most meaningful in an omni-channel world and where they see the upfront going into the future. One thing they agreed upon is that the most important consideration is to make each dollar count by reaching the right consumer at the right time on the right device… and it isn’t easy.

What is the Strategy on the Programmer Side?

Data from all the possible touch points dictates how companies are deciding how to best manage their content for both ad-supported and subscription services noted Lisa Valentino, Executive Vice President, Client and Brand Solutions, Disney Ad Sales, thus creating multiple revenue streams for the company. “Our subscription businesses are going to fuel product development, the data strategy and the target-ability and addressability that we can offer going forward.”

Kirk McDonald, Chief Marketing Officer, Xandr, stated that his company has, “big investments in our strategy in on-demand,” and in the ad-supported sector, his company is, “collecting signals from all of the touch points across our mobility business as well as the consumption that happens in on-demand services, normalizing those data signals, parsing them in a way that we can add them to decorate the impressions we want to sell in ad-supported and doing that closer and closer to real time especially as CTV and digital come together.” McDonald believes that it is important to make it easier for agencies to buy into these various platforms and invited the industry to participate in a community marketplace, “to make it easier to buy those audiences at scale.” He concluded by saying, “It’s not the units in environments, it is the audiences and where and how they want to consume. You have to make that much easier.”

What is the Strategy on the Advertiser Side?

In seeking a go-forward strategy to reach the right audience, Catherine Sullivan, Chief Investment Officer NA, Omnicom Media Group, stated, “With the streaming services, consumers should have the choice to choose whether or not they want advertising or not. Let’s let them make the choice instead of someone else.” In this way consumers, who she sees as generally being open to advertising messages, won’t be subjected to too much advertising or irrelevant messaging and can therefore maximize their enjoyment of the content. “We have to do a better job as an industry to provide better formats for the consumer,” she added.  

Looking at streaming companies such as Netflix, she sees opportunities to create marketing partnerships and believes that, “we will see an ad-supported new world order that will allow the consumer to make the choice for advertising across platforms.”

What is the Strategy in Live?

Live events are important lean-in, tent poles and are now encompassing a variety of cross platform opportunities. For Sullivan, distinguishing marquee events requires not only working with frenemy companies but also with social media companies, “to help the consumer have a bigger experience.” It is also important, she added, to make sure that in live events, “we help our marketers get more bang for their buck and make those experiences bigger and longer,” and also lead up to the red carpet or the Olympics. “You have to map it out to get the most leverage,” she concluded.

Authenticity in live events is vital, noted McDonald. “If it’s not authentic and if it is forced, you will backlash,” that will impact the content creator and the advertising brands. “We are looking for those authentic moments.” He explained that with any partnership with Xandr, “ads have to be less interruptive,” with a good balance of the ads that viewers see against the content they came to view. “That is where we think there has to be a lot of innovation and make ads complimentary to the experience.”

Conclusion

All of this change and innovation has the potential to deliver a much better, more immersive and highly relevant viewer experience that not only benefits the viewer but also the brands that support the content.

This article first appeared in MediaVillage.com

The Confusion Between Data and Measurement

If you read enough about what is going on in our industry today, you will see that Data is an all-powerful presence. It seems to command every conversation and rule over every project. As statistician W. Edwards Deming once quipped, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
But in our effusive fealty to Data, we sometimes give it more unfettered control over decision-making than it deserves. Not all data is relevant and not all data is good and pure. It needs to be assessed, put into context and framed by measurement. While there is no measurement without some form of data, data alone is unusable unless it is put into a structured measurement framework.
So I knew you would ask for definitions. In the media world, data is essentially a rough and structure-less collection of different types of quantities that has the potential to be used to draw conclusions.  Measurement enables us to draw accurate conclusions from the data by creating a logical structure for analysis. Data needs a logical and accurate measurement to be useful. Measurement without data is irrelevant.

“There are a lot of companies and agencies in the market cobbling together raw data or portions of data and mistaking that for actionable intelligence,” noted Sean Muller, CEO of the TV measurement company iSpot. “In order to use data effectively, it’s critical that the inputs into a model are cleaned, normalized and contextualized properly or entire framework will be off. Doing things like attribution using data that is not measurement grade or that is ad-hoc in nature is like building a house on the beach without preparing for the weather and tide patterns. Things will crumble pretty quickly,” he added.

Today, there are all types of data being thrown off from devices, culled from the internet, collected by businesses and otherwise amassed through various means. Data takes on many forms and sizes. There is attitudinal data that is more qualitative (like a series of open-ended comments) and data that looks like a bunch of unrelated numbers (MAC addresses coupled with viewing levels).

In the old days of television measurement, companies such as Nielsen relied on small representative samples to project the full population of television households and viewers. They took their viewing data and created measurement using edit rules and algorithms that formatted and contextualized their dataset into a projectable larger behavioral context. And yes, it was fairly accurate … as long as your network had enough meters in the sample to get statistically reliable projections.

In 1985, Nielsen’s sample size of 5,500 represented approximately 84.9 million homes (or just less than 0.01 percent of all TV households) when media options were less fragmented. But as omni-channel options expanded and the number of viewing opportunities increased, this small a sample measurement just didn’t cut it anymore. Currently, Nielsen estimates 119.9 million U.S. TV households with a sample of 40,000, or just over .03 percent of total U.S. TV homes. To Nielsen’s credit, they continue to expand their sample to include more national meters, portable people meters and the incorporation of local meters into the national sample. All are steps in the right direction but it might still not be enough for the tiny members of our media club.

Today, ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) measurement in TV is shaking things up. Nielsen recently bought Gracenote, in part to help layer in a much broader sample set from TV makers, to collect information from the glass of TVs regardless of which device or service is being used to deliver content and ads to the home. But the challenge is how to add that specific data source into the traditional and profitable metric of GRPs. Independent companies like Inscape, which licenses glass level viewing detection from over 11 million VIZIO SmartTVs, are offering datasets that are being incorporated into new systems used by networks, agencies and brands.

“The world is awash in data but without context, it isn’t useful. And without proper measurement you can’t find proper context,” said Allison Stern, co-founder of Tubular Labs, which, she says, is the only company to measure social video on a truly global scale. “In Tubular’s case we organize a massive amount of data about social video and then using measurement we can find trends around content types, and the velocity, engagement rates, and even audience quality that helps people make decisions.”

The advancements of these new data sources, coupled with the exploration of new measurement metrics, is a healthy evolution for media from a delivery scorecard to business outcome attribution. Measurement companies such as iSpot contribute to that effort along with companies that offer cross platform planning tools such as Omnicom, VideoAmp and 4C. All of this is at the center of the new addressable advertising consortium, Project OAR, which currently has nine networks signed on. All of these efforts successfully move data from its raw form into a projectable measurement that can be applied to business intelligence.

 This article first appeared in TV[REV]

Header photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The Update on Advanced Advertising

They say that the more things change the more they stay the same. The recent Advanced Advertising Summit this past week was notable in that the issues facing the industry seem to remain the same year after year. 

But the good news is that the technology is advancing to a point where the ability to seamlessly integrate digital and linear is ever closer to launch. Another positive change, for me, is the presence of more and more research and data executives in attendance at these types of conferences. When I first attended these events, there were few of my research compatriots there. Now we are even on sales panels!

Challenges in Advanced Advertising

Irwin Gottlieb, Senior Advisor WPP, in his keynote, explained that while advanced advertising has been around for years, it is not scalable yet. It is “somewhat scalable today,” he averred, “there are two minutes an hour (available) in local but it is not scalable in terms of support systems or inventory.” On the bright side, according to Gottlieb, there are no technology obstacles because companies such as WPP made deep investments in tech years ago. But there continues to be business obstacles where short term thinking, intra company fiefdoms and local vs national interests have enabled digital to “eat TV’s lunch.”

Scaling from a test to a full buy is another aspect of scalability that brings pain to the industry. Dan Riess, Executive Vice President of Ignite, WarnerMedia, noted, “We can always get clients to start a test but have find ways to scale that will trigger the technology to make it happen.” As a stopgap, he starts manually “to see how it works,” but there are, “so many different datasets, for example, that make it hard to scale.” Ultimately, we “need to move faster.”

Legacy systems are another challenge. Mike Mayer, Executive Vice President Sales Solutions, NBCU, explained that they are taking a “one order one report approach,” but if the order trail takes them from a legacy to legacy system, the buy has to be put together later. “It’s complicated,” he admitted, and it “can’t change overnight.”

Add to this the issue of silos. “Walled gardens make it difficult to develop business,” stated Jennifer Koester, Director of Telco and Distribution Partnership, Google. The solution is, “more standard segments,” noted Maureen Bosetti, Chief Investment Officer, Initiative, who added, “how it is being measured, more standardization and a privacy standard on identification,” with full compliance.

Positives in Advanced Advertising

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Many aspects of advanced advertising are hugely successful, offering manifold opportunities for both digital and television. Although linear TV is declining in usage, TV as a whole is adapting well to this multi-platform, advanced advertising ecosystem. Jason Brown, Senior Vice President, Head of Ad Sales partnerships, Xandr Media, finds that granular data enables us to “reach micro segments,” where the result is that “many advertisers are moving up the funnel,” and “TV is now full funnel for purchases, depending on the category.” This has resulted in “price hikes well beyond inflation.”

If there is one thing that TV does well, it is storytelling. Paul Alfieri, Chief Marketing Officer, Cadent, explained. Within the realm of advanced advertising, “a marketer can tell their story to consumers where they are and when they want. Is it seamless and we close the loop.” TV, according to Alfieri is learning from digital. “The industry has simplified it into one funnel and advertising is getting more sophisticated. It’s happening quickly because of paradigms you have in digital,” he stated.

No one is complacent. Many companies are creating their own systems that address advanced advertising like NBCU’s CFlight which, according to Mayer, “combines linear with digital impressions and sells deal with total impressions.” Others are joining consortiums like Vizio’s Project OAR, which stands for Open Addressable Ready. Project OAR includes Disney’s Media Networks, Turner, Xandr, Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBC Universal, CBS, Discovery, Hearst Television, AMC Networks and Inscape with the goal to define technical standards for linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group, recommended, a “focused on education on both the strategy and investment side.” He sees a big shift from linear TV to a more expansive view of TV in the digital space where we, “can use same strategic targets.”

Conclusion

So, yes, there are still vexing challenges in getting advanced advertising to scale, especially in national inventory, and we still need to agree on standards for measurement, segments and protocols. But the industry is hyper-focused on these addressing issues, often working together and always committed to progress.  That might be the greatest positive of them all.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com