It takes
some doing to keep a secret like this. For close to one year, Viacom, Turner
and Fox have been working together to build a three-corporation consortium for
accepting third and first party datasets for use as guidance in the sales
marketplace. They announced their joint effort this past week in New York City
to an audience of advertisers, clients, suppliers and press.
OpenAP Announcement
“This is a historical
day for all, of us,” announced Donna Speciale, President Turner
Ad Sales. “We three (Turner, Viacom and Fox) are all here together. It has
been a year in the making.” And referring to the high level agency executives
in the crowd, she added, “We came together because of all of you. You were the
catalyst, asking us to get together to unify and make data more scalable. We listened
and are making it happen.”
The OpenAp
was designed to address the many concerns in the media marketplace regarding
data. “Despite all of the value that data provides, we still hear same concerns
and that is that it is complicated, not scalable, there is a lack of auditing
and it is not consistent. We needed to simplify audience targeting. It sounds
simple but it is not an easy task,” noted Speciale.
What is also
not an easy task is bringing together and coordinating the efforts of three
highly competitive corporations and keeping these efforts under wraps for so
long. “It’s crazy that we could keep it quiet,” stated Sean Moran, Head of
Sales, VIACOM
Media Networks.
OpenAP Interface
For those of
us working with data, OpenAp is a tremendous step forward in beginning to
address some of the challenges in the media marketplace from walled gardens, to
scalability and accreditation.
Bryson
Gordon, EVP Data Strategy, Viacom, explained that OpenAP has two separate
pathways to access the audience data and see how the contract is posting. The
first pathway is a website. “If you work for an agency or an advertiser, you
will have a login to this website,” he explained, “Through that website you
will be able to explore advanced audience and onboard your own advanced
audiences and you will be able to pull down the post from the campaign across
inventory from Fox, Viacom and Turner and any other member publisher that has
joined.” The second pathway offers a way to onboard custom datasets that might
be proprietary to the agency or advertiser. “We recognize that agencies and
advertisers have made huge investments in defining audiences in proprietary
data systems, through DMPs. So it is critical that we make it easy and seamless
for you to have clean pathways into and out of OpenAP,” Gordon added.
OpenAP Details
OpenAP address some of the marketplace challenges. With
normalization, scalability and accreditation, the consortium hired Accenture to
manage those tasks. “Accenture is doing the build and the auditing of the
measurement,” according to Joe Marchese, President of Advanced Advertising
Products, Fox
Network. Notably, Accenture is the company who jumped in to fix the
Affordable Care website after it first crashed and now handles many of the
health exchanges across the country. They are adept at managing vast amounts of
data, normalizing it and keeping the data quality consistent and high.
When it comes to the data sets, “We are data agnostic,”
explained, Gordon, “At the end of the day, OpenAP is about supporting all the
datasets that advertisers need to create the high value segments they want to
target.” To start, OpenAP is working with two major data source ecosystems –
“comScore for all of the set top box data and the associated third party
syndicated datasets that they have,” he added, and “Nielsen as a key part of
this initiative.” In a press release that
came directly after the OpenAP announcement, Lynda Clarizio, Nielsen’s
President of U.S. Media, stated, “We support the consortium’s ambitions to
create a clearinghouse for audience-based buying on linear television. We look
forward to working with the participating networks and advertisers on the
broader success of this initiative.”
When it comes to consistency, Gordon said, “Consistency is
about have the same segments for all publishers making it easy to activate at
scale. You can go find an advanced audience, have it consistently defined, have
it activated across most of television in premium content that is absolutely
brand safe. It’s about on-boarding once and activing again and again.”
Working Together for a Common Cause
How can you
get three major competing corporations to work together for a common cause? “We
all experienced a very similar pain, in talking to our agencies and clients who
were all buying Fox, Turner and Viacom,” said Michael Strober, EVP Client Strategy
and Ad Innovation, Turner and co-head of Turner Ignite, who added, ”How do we
make it easier to buy and transact on a larger scale? We had open and honest
conversations – are you experiencing the same thing? We met with Kern Schireson,
Chief Data Officer, Viacom. I sat with Joe Marchese. We decided that nobody is
going to do this for us. We needed to find the solution and do it ourselves. It
was very organic and a response to the market.”
This is a big first step for OpenAP. As Marchese noted,
“This is step one - live linear television. What comes next are dynamic
advertising and VOD environments.”
This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
