OpenAP Gains Firepower with Alliances, Advances and Scale

OpenAP is gathering momentum as new alliances and developments set the stage for greater growth. The advanced advertising company is engaged in some new initiatives and alliances that are expanding its strength as a cross-platform measurement solution.

There have been a range of new developments in the past year, and more are in the works, said the company's CEO David Levy. "OpenAP has been, from the inception, focused on centralizing the process for television publishers around audience activation," he noted, adding that it measures digital with linear television to enable a consistent way to create an audience.

This offers a consistency in the data, unifying results. The company's ultimate goal is to create an industry standard for audience-based cross-platform measurement.

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To manage all the disparate data, OpenAP introduced its OpenID solution about eight months ago. "It is our own identity framework and identity spine that we use for all of that audience activation," Levy explained. It's the backbone by which OpenAP can seamlessly interweave de-duplicated data sources for campaigns.

After launching OpenID as a framework, the company then debuted XPM Measurement, which gives users the ability to pool and normalize audiences "through OpenAP. And it allows them to "transact that [audience] across any broadcasting publisher today," Levy said. "You can actually get de-duplicated reach and frequency not just across all of your publishers but also across platforms, which has really been an elusive thing across television."

This has been a quiet initiative. OpenAP has worked directly with all publishers on one platform. There has been a lot of focus on guaranteeing that all the internal systems are integrated and in sync to ingest and process the data into one central identifier.

ViacomCBS is one of OpenAP's investors. For Radha Subramanyam, President and Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS Corp., it is critical to prove the value of broadcast television in conjunction with all of the linear-originated programming on other platforms.

"As audiences seek programming they like, there are more opportunities for viewing. We need to capture and standardize the collection of all viewing on any platform, and OpenAP is a way to do move the process forward," Subramanyam said.

Steve Silvestri, Senior Vice President, Audience Solutions, Discovery, concurred. "OpenAP offers the market a simple, more scalable approach to audience-based buying across the premium ecosystem," he said. "It represents more than just standard audience segments. It has evolved into a company that is solving for industry challenges across cross-platform measurement and insights, data adoption and clean room resolution, and ultimately programmer addressable activation."

Structural Change

OpenAP has also undergone a structural pivot for greater agility. Levy shifted OpenAP from a consortium model to a standard company structure. In other words, it no longer requires membership dues or consortium fees. "It is all based off transaction fees today," Levy explained. That removes some bureaucracy, enabling more fluid decision-making and execution of clear-cut goals.

It also makes it easier to serve all video-focused companies, including digital and advanced video-on-demand services. "We work with every national publisher across the ecosystem today, including Disney, including Discovery," Levy said. "The ability of an advertiser to come to us, create an audience that can then be used and transacted across any publisher was true at the beginning of [2021] and is true today."

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OpenAP's success is based on "how to make it easier for buyers to take one audience and have a good understanding of where that audience lives across all of these disparate screens," he noted. "It is important for the television community to come together and make it easier for buyers to do that."

With partners such as Discovery, OpenAP can go even further, faster. "Discovery is a large player in this space, and by joining OpenAP, we can accelerate the current efforts underway," Silvestri said.

More Growth Ahead

The changes are paying off. OpenAP is now a half-billion-dollar entity and is expected to become even bigger this year. Part of that is due to more widespread industry momentum.

"The growth in cross-platform advertising in general has been tremendous within the TV community," Levy said. "There was a significant increase in last year's Upfront, and we anticipate having an even larger jump in this Upfront. Most buyers now are really thinking about taking one consistent audience and being able to use that across both linear and digital.

"It is a very exciting time for us," he concluded.

 

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

OpenAP 2.0 Optimizes Reach and Unifies Campaigns

Despite the shift in partners in the last few months, when Turner (WarnerMedia) opted out and NBCU opted in, OpenAP did not miss a beat.  At the recent Programmatic TV Summit, Denise Colella, Senior Vice President, Advanced Advertising Products and Strategy, NBCU; Amarachi Miller, Vice President Product Management and Data Science, Viacom, and Dan Callahan, Vice President, Audience and Automated Sales, Fox, talked about OpenAP, the marketplace and the future.

Standardization and Collaboration
There is a standardization challenge in the marketplace, noted Miller, where different segmentations and measurement parameters make it difficult to combine the performance of a contract across different companies.  OpenAP solves that.  "You have to have an apples-to-apples comparison for measurement and guarantees," he said, "and be able to create campaigns around a unified set of segments."

"We had a lot of clients who expressed an interest in getting involved in advanced advertising, but we didn't make it easy for them," Colella explained.  "They had to define a segment for each network group.  What was happening was that we were being relegated to only one company getting a portion of a budget or perhaps just a test budget.  So, we wanted to make it easier and take away both the pain and excuses for taking on advanced advertising because we knew we could offer the client something much better (through OpenAP)."

"The founding principles are standardization and collaboration," added Callahan.

OpenAP 2.0
OpenAP has gotten more fluid and connective since its launch.  Initially defined as standardized segments and posting, it has moved to a point where, as Miller explained.  "Everyone can grade off the same starting point and move to a unified campaign," he said.  "So, you can submit a budget to all three of the publishers based on that same segment, have each of them return to you a plan based on that and basically automate the negotiation process," creating a unified post that includes a look at unduplicated reach.

Next steps have also included a "look at workflow tools," Colella noted.  "In addition to being able to standardize the audiences and post them to the publishers, we have unified the workflow tools so campaigns can look the same no matter who you are dealing with, as well as the posting."  OpenAP 2.0 now includes a digital marketplace, "so you can do a digital buy that reaches across the publishers in OpenAP" on the dot coms, she added.

When Frenemies Compete
But how does the apportionment of a budget work when you have three competing companies working together?  On the front end of the campaign, agencies and buyers start by assigning a budget to each of the networks based on the desired segment provided on an automated RFP. "You would then receive a plan based on the aggregated view of the entire plan submitted and then decide whether you want to accept or continue negotiating," Miller revealed.  Once all negotiated, a complete plan with unified reach would be confirmed.

"The way we compete is that we each have our own optimization system once the audience is determined," Colella explained.  "Think of it as determining your audience once and it pushes it out in each system; in our case, our AdSmart system, which sends our results back to the amalgamated OpenAP."

"We are all responsible for our own pieces," added Callahan.  "Our goal is for OpenAP to become a trusted marketplace."

Since joining the OpenAP team in late November, NBCU has garnered "a handful of clients," according to Colella, using Nielsen and comScore data for optimization.  But overall, NBCU "has over 400 clients take advantage of advanced advertising."

For Miller, "there is a huge amount of momentum in advanced advertising" in this Upfront, and "OpenAP makes it easier to transact."

Callahan is finding that "it is a part of every conversation."  So, with the help of OpenAP to smooth out the advanced advertising buying process, plus all of the great content at NBCU, Viacom and Fox, the future is bright for OpenAP 2.0 and beyond.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

OpenAP CEO David Levy Is Engaging Consumers with Compelling Advertising

David Levy has always been on a mission to "be more efficient with consumers' time and attention."  Throughout his career, he has focused on "what components of attention really matter."  His past contributions to the knowledge base of attention measurement are perfectly matched to maximizing the value of ad-supported television as part of his new role as the new Chief Executive Officer of OpenAP.

A Focus on Viewer Engagement
At his previous company, TrueX, which he co-founded and later sold to Fox, the challenge at the time was that "with the advent of digital advertising, we were in an unfortunate cycle of just putting more and more messaging in front of consumers and not actually getting quality attention because people were finding ways of avoiding the advertising," he recalled.  As a result, advertising effectiveness declined, as did the pricing, and "the only way to make enough money was by adding more ads per page."  His solution, he said, was to focus on "the most premium form of attention," which was dubbed an "engagement ad."

Engagement ads are full-screen experiences where the consumer is incentivized to interact with the ad for at least 30 seconds.  "We did a lot of work on the science of attention and how to drive quality interaction while offering consumers a better user experience," Levy explained.  By focusing on viewer engagement of ads in a world of greater ad-free options, media companies could "present consumers with an experience that was comparable to ad-free but within an ad-supported model," he added.

A Changing Ad-Supported Television Market
At Fox, Levy took the same focus on engagement that he had at TrueX and "brought it to the business challenges at Fox," where he worked in a Chief Operating Officer role for Fox's ad business.  Challenges to the ad-supported television model abound, not least of which is, "on one side you have Netflix and Amazon subsidizing these ad-free experiences, which consumers enjoy," and almost compelling ad-supported television to reduce its ad time to compete and create better consumer experiences.  "On the other hand, you have Facebook and Google flooding the market with valueless impressions -- highly targetable but with low attention," he asserted.  It was important to prove that the quality of attention could impact ROI.

The focus at Fox, which later proved pivotal for his role at OpenAP was three-fold:

1. Reaching the right consumers by finding better data to target more relevant advertising to them.

2. Once the right consumer was identified, developing ad products that best delivered those messages to the individual, "depending on where they were and on which device, where they were in the funnel, who they were."

3. Developing measurement that not only measured the quality of the attention but also optimized the experiences down the funnel.

A Move to OpenAP
"If you really want to evoke change, doing something in silos is not conducive to success," Levy said.  "The only way you are going to transform the industry is doing it together.  So, when we were approached by Viacom and [WarnerMedia] to form OpenAP, the premise was closely aligned with our vision to find better ways to get more efficient with consumers' time and attention."

Levy "fell in love with the vision" and "the people around the table" from those competing companies.  The purchase of Fox by Disney enabled him to make the move to OpenAP and "get back to [his] entrepreneurial roots" while still "staying connected to some of the exciting business challenges with people [he had] been working with for so long."

Next Steps for OpenAP
"The best way to scale any new ad product or any new investment in bettering the advertising ecosystem is if we all do it together," Levy said. To that end, he is seeking "adoption from everybody" to enable scale for any new marketplace developments.  OpenAP will be in a position to "evaluate new ad products in data-driven linear and optimized linear addressable to unify around the way we buy advanced ad products."

Going forward, Levy sees OpenAP moving from phase one -- which focused on unifying audience data on linear by individual company -- to phase two -- which standardizes segments across all OpenAP members.  Phase two, just recently announced, will go from unified audiences to unified campaigns, so that, for example, auto intenders for Viacom will have the same behavioral composition as auto intenders for Fox.  "We are introducing a tool for OpenAP with which advertisers can come in, define the audience segment that they want -- it will be standard across everybody -- put in campaign requirements and get back a unified campaign proposal across all of the member publishers," he explained.

OpenAP is also launching a digital marketplace that goes further.  "You can define your audience segments and not just get back a unified proposal, but also optimize across all of the publishers for reach and audience segment," Levy said.  Beyond that, he is thinking about how to accelerate the mission.  "There are so many opportunities with a unified approach -- with ad products, with measurement and with one of the biggest opportunities; building out a much more sophisticated data infrastructure that can be leveraged across all of the publishers," he noted.  "This will ultimately bring an automated marketplace that is cross-publisher, cross-device together."  But, he hastened to add, this effort will focus solely on premium inventory in the market: Long-form television ad-supported content resulting in less waste, more ROI and greater viewer engagement.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Working Together to Improve Measurement. Insights from the Cynopsis Data and Measurement Conference

For anyone working in the research, data and analytics space, there is no better event than the annual Cynopsis Measurement and Data conference. It is an opportunity to dissect what is going on in the Wild West World of media data that maps the intersection of two main issues; the ever increasing availability of new datasets that expand our knowledge of consumer behavior and the legacy measurement that continues to monetize and fuel the business. At some point these two forces must merge. But how?

What is Constant and What is Evolving

There are some aspects of the media business that remain constant such as the need to agree on KPIs for a campaign, the need to form partnerships that have open communication and the need to agree on how success will be measured. But more and more, we are seeing elements of the business that are perpetually in flux such as the range of data availability, metrics and measurement analytics and  consumer behavior with device usage. For George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, Media Ratings Council, getting a handle on measurement all boils down to data usage. The two major industry changes according to Ivie, are, “How the industry views using research data and how consumers view data usage.”

Defining outcomes are pivotal to managing change. From a technological standpoint we need to understand “how consumers are using technology. They are moving off linear and the MRC is tracking that behavior. Everything is mobile which is harder to measure and nail down,” he noted. “Consumer choice is causing tension in our business. We need to design server side ad insertion and find ways to avoid ad blocking,” he concluded.

Improve the User Experience

Solving for content navigation in a world of increasing choice would seem to be a no-brainer for the industry. Carol Hanley, Chief Revenue Officer, TV Time offers a solution. “We are a consumer facing app,” she explained, “With 13 million global users who interact around TV content. There is a need in the TV business to understand how to get content and we are like a TV Guide on steroids,” she explained. This app also captures user data such as sentiment information, social dialogue and moment by moment interactions.

Scott Levine, Senior Vice President, Product and Technology Distribution, Univision, looks at content to drive viewer satisfaction and delight. This is an ongoing process. “Our whole history as media company is about evolution and creating a closer and more direct relationship to our audience. What makes people happy,” he explained.

Improve the Advertiser Experience

Attention appears to be the most valuable commodity for advertisers, once the ad itself is viewable and unblocked. But how does one define attention? Dan Schiffman, CRO and Co-Founder, TVision, believes that, “Attention can be defined by the outcomes that occur after a person sees an ad.” But how much time does it take for a brand attention to occur? How many seconds? Schiffman says three seconds is that threshold for recall and awareness of that ad. But Julie Detraglia, Vice President and Head of Research, Hulu, disagrees. “It’s hard to believe that three seconds are enough for an individual. We have more work to do to understand what the threshold is.” She noted that Hulu only charges when ad completed 100% and the viewer can't skip ads.

Donna Speciale, President Ad Sales, Turner, has made it her mission to reimagine TV and advertising. “Our collective goal is to make advertising better for our fans and clients,” she explained, “We develop smart marketing initiatives across all platforms empowered with ideas and solutions to drive consumer outcomes.” She advocates a new direction for measurement. “We need to transact on those formulas that show how people are actually consuming our content.” 

Next Steps

Maybe the era of competitive cooperation is here and will lead to much needed new industry measurements and standards. Apropos of OpenAP, the Advanced Audience Platform created by Turner, Fox and Viacom that has now added NBCU to the mix, Speciale noted that, “We have a lot more work to do. No one company can change the industry. We need to hold each other accountable so we all win.”

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Working Together to Advance TV Advertising. Takeaways From NewBay Media’s Advanced Advertising Conference

Data and its use in advanced advertising targeting continue to be core topics of NewBay Media's Advanced Advertising Conferences. In today’s conference, the impact of data targeting efforts in linear TV spurred discussion about OpenAP, attribution and programmatic.

The major takeaways were as follows:

Legacy Data vs Newer Datasets

To some, legacy data is a paramount measurement tool, offering legitimacy and safety with established, industry accepted standards, quality and auditing. To others, legacy data is holding TV back. “Data is advancing more quickly than our ability to transact on it,” noted Mike Rosen, EVP Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales. “In TV there are so many legacy principles that have been around for decades. Data is happening so quickly that the industry has trouble figuring out how it fits,” he added.

So where does an established TV media company start? "Never start with age and gender," Rosen advised, "Everyone is 25-54 so 25-54 is not a target. What is your outcome for your campaign? Sales? Reach?" Mike Bologna, President of one2one Media, agreed, “If advertising has to be advanced, then the data has to be better than the past. We need different forms of data to best calculate.”

Business Infrastructure is Holding TV Back

Beyond data, it is the legacy infrastructure of the TV business that can impede its advanced advertising growth. Facebook and Google have put TV in a corner as a branding tool. “TV much more powerful than brand building and we tend to get trapped. We say, ‘That is what you do, so just keep doing it.’ But TV offers much more value beyond branding,” noted Rosen.

“We are dealing with a lot of legacy systems and they are not going anywhere. We are trying to reduce friction but it is hard and the least sexiest part of the business,” explained Doug Hurd, Co-Founder, EVP Business Development, clypd. However, Sarah Foss, Chief Product Officer, Advertising Management Systems, Imagine Communications, saw the TV model as more flexible, though it needed some creative re-adaptions. “The business model has always changed. We are multichannel now,” she stated, “We are selling TV to get to audience and devices in different ways. Most of our clients are selling impressions and macgyvering it back into the system.”

Cross Platform Measurement is a Team Sport

There is a lot of talk about "frenemy" companies working together to find solutions. OpenAP is a great example of three major media competitors working together for a common solution. Noah Levine, SVP Advertising Data, Technology Solutions, Fox, explained that OpenAP was designed to offer, “Consistency in audience definitions and sizing, consistency in sharing across sellers and facilitating a mechanism to provide posts from OpenAP data companies such as Nielsen and comScore.”

This collaborative effort might be the tipping point for more joint initiatives. "The industry is ready to work together" to move cross platform measurement forward, according to Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer, VideoAmp. “It’s time to figure it out and to measure impressions,” he added, advocating measurement progress in three steps:

·         “Crawl” = getting an age and gender metric across linear and digital.

·         “Walk” = measuring advanced targets such as age and gender plus income across linear, addressable, and digital.

·         “Run” = Measure any digital target, even advertiser CRM based segments on all video playback formats including the above plus OTT plus VOD plus DVR over an entire flight of a campaign, and not just C3 or C7.

Prasad believes that the adoption of standards is close at hand. He forecast that in the next two years, “Advanced currencies backed by attribution data will replace GRPs and siloed digital measurement.”

Conclusion

Whatever the new technologies and datasets bring to TV and advanced advertising, it will be exciting and will require constant adaption to change. Some companies are getting out ahead of the change by partnering with competing companies. Others are creatively adapting legacy systems to the new normal. Whether we crawl, walk or run, the great takeaway of the day is that we need to do it together.

This article first appeared in CableFax.

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

Revenue is a Byproduct of Great Customer Experience. The Wisdom of Viacom’s Bryson Gordon

“My career is weird,” confessed Bryson Gordon, Executive VP Advanced Advertising Group, Viacom. After starting his career “designing an ad blocker,” he is now responsible for expanding Viacom’s arsenal of cross media ad inventory by creating a great customer experience for targeting ads. “But”, he adds, “Business transformation has been a thread throughout.”

Gordon’s first job out of college was for a computer security company, where “we were the first to do software as a service (SAAS) before it was even called software as a service. We fundamentally changed the business model for that industry.” Then at Microsoft, where in a variety of roles, he grew the company’s then tiny direct-to-consumer business into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. “It was a fundamental shift for a gigantic company to reshape how it took its product to market,” he noted. Now at Viacom, he has found his calling. “Here I have the opportunity to work with an amazing set of people and transform the television business. I love that.” 

I sat down with Gordon to find out more about how he will transform television:

Charlene Weisler: Give me a short overview of your department initiatives. 

Bryson Gordon: When we first started Vantage (Viacom’s Data-Driven and Predictive Ad Solution Advertiser Service) it was very much about developing ad capabilities that focused on targeting, measurement, attribution, advanced audience modeling, etc. I ask myself this question: What is going to feel different? Not just some corporate mandate, but when we start to think about the North Star of the organization, what will feel different between our capabilities and where we are going in this new advanced advertising organization. The fundamental pivot is to shift from capabilities to the customer experience of advertising. Customer experience is a loaded term. But when we think about Viacom in creating formats, ad experiences, cross platforms, what are the specific audiences that really drive impact? What can we do as an organization of data scientists, information specialists, researchers, product development people, to fundamentally evolve the customer experience with advertising so that it is incredible for our customers and for our partners? 

Charlene: How will you achieve that?

Bryson: Our team has historically been made up of product managers and data scientists. Now the team spans product management, data science, developers, designers, people who are specialists in the launch of multi-platform environments where content ends up – the social and digital environment. Then we focus on creating not just traditional advertising but also branded marketing content to create the optimal advertising and marketing experiences for our fans in that environment. Then, what can we do to actually orchestrate that in a very thoughtful and methodical way around advanced audience targets that we develop within the organization.

Charlene: How will your work influence or impact OpenAP?

Bryson: OpenAP is foundational to what we are doing within advanced advertising. The focus that Sean Moran, Head of Sales, Viacom, has given us is the opportunity to go across all the different ad formats – from digital to social to linear television to OTT to addressable television – in our portfolio. As we continue to evolve with OpenAP, which launches in the fall, we are taking this notion of consistent advanced audience targeting beyond just the traditional linear television screen into the multi-platform environment. 

Charlene: What are the overall goals that you want to achieve now and over the next three years?

Bryson: I start from the position of the customer. My odd principle that has stuck with me over the years is: Revenue is a byproduct of great customer experience. It is simple but if we use that as a lens through which to assess the set of investments we make in the advanced advertising organization, it gives us tremendous focus. It helps us understand what we need to do to make the ad experience in traditional linear television even better. How do we do that through better targeting and through better formats? We think about the customer journey in Viacom content that cuts across platforms. What can we do, not just to connect, but actually orchestrate that? That is the thing that a year from now, I would like to look back and say that is the fundamental thing I wanted to achieve and I have achieved that.

Charlene: Are you developing attribution models to help you do that?

Bryson: We have been developing attribution models for a couple of years. Interestingly, our ability to drive precise measurement against advanced advertising on television and across multi-channels has facilitated the scaling of adoption of this new currency of TV. An example – a large automotive client who has done a number of campaigns with us, we have that ability to take their target, connect that target back to an addressable set top box, connect that to mobile phone Geo location data, and actually show them not only the physical list of people going to the auto dealership in a specific window after the campaign but also show them which specific dealers have the best local marketing investment on top of the national that was driving the highest lift for their specific region.

Charlene: Can you influence the ad market with your work? 

Bryson: I do because I have already seen that with the reception of Vantage and OpenAP.  We continue to see significant year to year growth in both the number of advertisers who are adopting advanced currencies and the amount of dollars flowing through advanced advertising currencies. 

Charlene: Your team comes from many different areas. How do you get them to strategize together?

Bryson: I deliberately try to not place them together. One of the things we found is that is super interesting is that I have hired a lot of people who don’t know anything about television. I hired a PhD in neuroscience from Toronto whose PhD was about how deep memories get formed in the brain. He doesn’t know the first thing about GRPs or Nielsen demos. What he does know is how you actually influence people and how you drive deep persuade-ability. We have people who bring perspective and expertise to our team that doesn’t look anything like how the TV industry looked like over the past 20 years. It makes for an environment where we can have hackathon style meetings and have people from industry, academia, science, economics, anthropology mixed with people with deep expertise in television. Great things happen. 

Charlene: How are you measuring results for advertisers and campaigns?

Bryson: There is a lot of customization depending on who is behind it and what the campaign is. One of the first conversations we have with an advertiser is: What are the KPIs that are important to you? Do you want to see a higher density of people within the segment? Do you want to see more de-duplicated reach within a segment? Do you want to measure physical lift to a restaurant, auto dealership or a retailer? We give them all of the normal measurements such as impressions delivered against your custom audience, but we also do a lot of custom reporting for clients, depending on what they are trying to achieve. These buys are guaranteed as a currency with in-target delivery. It makes people really comfortable.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com