Less Secret Every Day: ACR and Logistics at the Secret Society Meeting

The Secret Society, established in 2015 by Mitch Oscar, an advanced television strategist with USIM, was created to inform industry leaders about the advanced TV landscape, addressability, and data-driven advertising. 

Each annual meeting is designed to bring forward pertinent issues within the industry, such as attribution, targeting with data, and other trends and initiatives. Here we dive into two focal trends: automatic content recognition (ACR) and logistics.

What Is Automatic Content Recognition?
ACR is a content labeling protocol that enables the tracking of a piece of content across all platforms. Alan Wolk, co-founder, editor, and lead analyst at TV[R]EV, stated that while automatic content recognition “functions off smart TVs,” it’s also present in smartphones and other mobile devices.
There are two types of automatic content recognition: video and audio. Video captures pixels from a screen and then matches those pixels to others off-screen or on other content platforms. Audio runs off apps, listening to what’s on the TV and then performing the same comparison across other platforms.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

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

Secret Meetings to Advance Advanced TV

Even something like the Secret Society cannot be kept secret for too long. On a very rainy day in New York City, the room was packed with attendees. 

The most recent meeting focused on, as Mitch Oscar, USIM Advanced Television Strategist, noted, “Dialoguing issues on Advanced TV.” Speakers from networks, agencies, data specialists and research companies offered their perspectives on the advantages, challenges and futures of Advanced TV, Addressable TV and Programmatic.

Data has never been more important to ad tech and the systems that are emerging for targeted advertising. In an important next step, some of the walled gardens are coming down as the industry is starting to coalesce around shared interests. Since the Secret Society meeting, Viacom, Fox and Turner announced their joint effort called OpenAP.

The full adoption of Advanced TV still has its strengths and challenges. Obviously, the ability to more finely hone an ad message delivered to the right audience makes Advanced TV a ‘must consider’. Yet, the available inventory is still somewhat restricted and issues like workflow, fragmentation and walled gardens need to be addressed. And we need more overall industry participation to accelerate progress.

Strengths and Challenges

      Ø  Targeting. Finally there is a way to go beyond age and gender in a meaningful way. For those of us who have been in the industry for a while, the opportunity to target is seismic. “In 1975 when I was negotiating for broadcast TV, it was the first year that the guarantees were based on age and gender and not household,” Oscar reminisced, “At that time we said, ‘households don’t buy products, people do.’ Forty plus years later, we are looking at households that have people of different ages and genders that exhibit behavioral characteristics as behavioral targets. We are getting closer to targeting people who might be interested in the product and eventually purchase it.”

      Ø  Inventory. However, there are not enough national opportunities to target. The inventory currently available in Advanced TV is two minutes of local inventory per hour.  

      Ø  Workflow and Fragmentation. “Workflow for audience systems does not exist. We need a universal workflow instead of taking bits and pieces from various media companies,” Oscar noted. But even before the workflow, there is a need to address the myriad of platforms, networks and data sources that silo efforts. “The most important challenge is how many different platforms and data sources there are,” he continued, “Seven addressable TV platforms, 15 programmatic platforms, 6 contextual audience networks that offer 31 flavors of products, and over 68 data sources across these platforms makes it difficult to evaluate and implement.”

      Ø  Participation. Getting more clients on board and involved is paramount according to Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder, Simulmedia. “It is critical that the Advanced TV industry work harder to get clients - the marketers - much more directly involved in development,” he stated, “Customer and purchase data is the key fuel in all Advanced TV applications and it is the client that controls that data.”

      Ø  Marketing Focus. Demonstrate the value of Advanced TV. Morgan believes, “We need to make it more about marketing - driving provable sales, ROI and other desired business outcomes - than advertising - delivering impressions and other media metrics. The future of advertising is about performance. That is where Advanced TV efforts should be focused.”

The Next Step

Arguably the next step in advancing Advanced TV is working together towards shared interests.Enter OpenAP. Audrey Steele, EVP, Sales Research Insights and Strategy, Fox Networks Group, spoke about OpenAP as a way to break down some of the walled gardens, set some level of standardization and accelerate the adoption of Advanced TV advertising. She explained that the three partners, Viacom, Fox and Turner, are “Frenemies,” who are, “similar in intent but the execution of sales inventory is different.” Steele noted that OpenAp:

     Ø  Offers the ability to optimize existing base buys.

     Ø  Is unified in need for standardization.

     Ø  Offers the promise of digital programmatic.

     Ø  Enables the most persuasive message for ad placement.

     Ø  Is an immersive environment with digital precision for your brand message

     Ø  Is fraud free and is transparent.

The Future

Some media executives believe that the future of Advanced TV is now and is quickly enlisting many more players. Morgan stated, “I think that we are going to see a significant acceleration of data-optimized linear TV ads, particularly as we see big enterprise tech companies like Oracle and Adobe getting more involved and as we see the big digital players like Facebook and Google getting more and more involved in TV advertising.”

Others think that despite the recent advancements, progress still seems slow. “In 1996 addressability was thought to happen any day now,” posited Oscar, “So we do have more platforms rolling out. But its deployment slow. Right now with Addressable TV, we have 34 million homes that can get addressable linear TV commercials and 19 million in the ad supported VOD addressable realm. That is 20 years later and we are nearly in half the country of 118 million homes.”

For me, while it has taken decades to reach this point, the technological rollout is accelerating and the industry is embracing all of the elements of a successful Advanced TV marketplace. So I believe that the future is now, as long as we keep the channels of discussion and cooperation flowing.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

TV Programmatic – A Big Game of Hot Potato

US International Media was the host of the second meeting of the Secret Society on TV Programmatic held just before Thanksgiving. Mitch Oscar presided over the cohort, which included representatives from 4C Insights, AT&T/DirecTV, BIA/Kelsey, Cablevision, Epsilon, Experian, Horizon, Media Kitchen, Prohaska Group, Rentrak, Rovi, Sintec, TiVo, USIM, and Videa.

As part of the secretiveness of the meeting, all wore masks…just for the group photograph. Then the masks and gloves were off.  The areas of lively contention were De-duping datasets, the cost of data and Data-gaps.

My Take: The Secret Society was formed to take a deep, objective dive into the issues of TV Programmatic. In a media storm of pronouncements and self-promotions by various companies, it is difficult for many of us to make sense of the real challenges in rolling out programmatic into TV, especially national TV. For example, while I was aware of the need to de-dupe data, I never considered the challenge of STB household data overlap when one begins to collect STB data from several suppliers. I assumed that the PII (Personally Identifiable Information) would solve for that problem. With this issue, as with the others outlined in this article, the question of responsibility loomed large. The data-ists at the table thought the responsibility of de-duped audiences resided with the ad agencies and programmers; the ad agencies and programmers vehemently suggested the reverse. From what I see so far, TV Programmatic is becoming one big game of hot potato.

At the first meeting of the Secret Society, a few months ago, programmatic local TV platform Videa discussed the need for the media community, buyers and sellers, to have access to multiple data sources to drive programmatic market transparency. They said that they were in discussion with a variety of data companies - 4C Insights, Cardlytics, Civis, FourthWall, Nieslen, Rentrak and TiVo – to obtain data sets from each in order to comprehend how they could be utilized to better serve their constituencies.

Data Overlap

For a marketer cobbling a national campaign using the full set of data suppliers from Rentrak to Nielsen, TiVo to Fourthwall, to AT&T/DreicTV to individual MVPDs, there is the issue of de-duping these standardized but overlapping industry datasets. No one is doing this now. All concurred. Videa’s Bret Adamczyk, VP Business Development & Strategy, led the discussion. “Here is part of my problem, I’m paying, or will be paying, millions of dollars to license datasets from the majority of people that are on that side of the business and a lot of those people are licensing the same data from the same people that are on that side.”

Data De-Duping

The question raised was: Are the buyers of data getting the same data over and over again? How can the players in the space that are utilizing the data de-dupe it so we can be sure that we are not using the same homes several times when we only need to use them once? “When I try to do my targeting on a program level basis, we (Videa) are pulling information from our station partners’ traffic warehouses that we have four years of history down to the spot level: what ran, what the price was, what the rating was… What we need to be able to do is overlay data from an audience targeting perspective so we can index those attributes against every program that is on the schedule,” Bret explained.

Dayparts

Mitch Oscar, the Secret Society organizer, said, “In terms of national programmatic TV, advertisers do not know the specific TV network programs that they purchase. We only know networks and the total number of impressions purchased by the individual network. No dayparts. At the conclusion of the campaign the post analysis consists of total impressions broken down by individual network, daypart breakdown by total schedule (all networks) and if requested an As Run report.” In terms of the As Run report, Mitch quipped: “the As Run report for one of our campaigns, which cost $150,000, consisted of over 163,000 lines of reportage detail spread of 3,500 pages.”

Addressability

The discussion then jumped to the topic of data and TV addressability. The group agreed that local broadcasters, at this juncture, do not have addressable capabilities. An advertiser can buy the DMA, which is tough to target audiences. A debate ensued about what type of data intelligence could be brought to local other than the generic DMA buy or the more granular zip level. Frank Foster, SVP, GM TiVo stated, “The CEO of Walmart says that programmatic TV doesn’t do what he wants for Walmart. He may want to drive people to the store from 12n-5pm so they need to see the message from 10am-12n. We therefore need first party foot traffic and be able to show the differences in campaigns for both local and non-local.”

Next Steps

As the meet concluded, a task was presented to different members: Videa was directed to put together a list of 10 data points that they would want the data providers to help answer; TiVo, 4C Insights, Rentrak and Epsilon were tasked with coming up with 10 data points that individually they think Videa should be requesting; and USIM, Horizon and The Media Kitchen would compare notes and present findings.

The challenges seem formidable. Even the creation of a JIC (Joint Industry Committee) to facilitate the standardization of edit rules or duplication of datasets is fraught with business conflict. If, for example, it is decided that one data company has a large duplication with other data companies, how would the market respond? Would the highly duplicated company lose business? Something that ultimately could help the many could potentially be deadly for a few. But not findings ways to address data concerns is also problematic.

As Russell Zingale, President of USIM, noted, “Every data company should be purchased by everyone in the food chain, whether it is a content creator, content distributor like the MVPDs or an agency. That is a lot of data for each of these groups to license – though it would be wonderful for the data companies to have such a lucrative business.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com