Takeways From the Programmatic TV Summit

“It’s TV but not quite TV anymore,” posited Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO, Vetere Group. Randi Schatz, VP, Market Leader of Media Entertainment, Future plc, called it, “the most transformational topic in media today with rapidly changing developments offering a myriad of opportunity and challenges to TVs technological future.”

Arguably one of the fastest growing and increasingly morphing movements in media today is in programmatic. From its early years of automatic buying and real time bidding, today’s programmatic has been both humanized and computerized in a way that lends itself to all platforms of media buying and selling. How is the industry handling yet another area of transformative change?
Here are the takeaways from the recent Programmatic TV Summit held in NYC:

• Programmatic TV is expanding into more areas of television and spending is on a steady rise according to eMarketer, offering opportunities even in linear avails. The whole nature of programmatic has evolved. Will Offeman, Chief Product Officer, WideOrbit, noted that, “now there is programmatic against premium inventory.”

• But legacy systems and protocols are slowing down progress. As Gerard Broussard, Principal, Premeditated Media, pointed out, linear TV currently lacks the technological bones for exact digital-like programmatic and older systems are slowing down the roll-out. But there are industry initiatives likeTIP (Television Interface Practices) that are tackling the obstacles.

• Creative is innovating so as to take advantage of the flexibility of formats, messaging and pod lengths that are enabled by the various device platforms. Xandr has “a brand new user interface with a suite of products to expand creative formats and a powerful optimization engine with a new user interface that can activate on these different formats,” according to Lindsey Van Kirk, Vice President of Product Management.

• Consumer opportunities are expanding. Technological innovations like driverless cars (where consumers will have uninterrupted travel time, ripe for messaging) and smart products (like dog collars that indicate when to feed and when to walk the dog) are creating new advertising opportunities coupled with new data streams.

• Technology is streamlining and improving the business. Joan Fitzgerald, SVP Advanced TV Global Partnerships, PremiumMedia360, explained that A.I. is enabling clients to, “figure out media in advance along with stewardship, reconciliation and payments.” Adam Lowy, Chief Commercial Officer, Telaria, noted that “There is traction. In OTT the supply is growing and more facets of the inventory is being realized. More people experimenting with programmatic to target smarter.” Programmatic, according to Lowy, “is more of a core part of businesses.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Takeaways From the 2018 TV Data Summit: “The Audience Is Now in Charge”

As Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO at the Vertere Group, explained at the 2018 TV Data Summit, the media business is going through a transformative time. TV grapples with data as tech navigates strategies and solutions. “It is revenge of the nerds,” he concluded, “leading to an amazing future of data and targeting.”

Panelists at the NYC Television Week event offered their insights:

Data Changes Everything

Data is taking on greater importance from content creation to campaign deliveries. More aspects of the business are touched by data through machine learning and artificial intelligence. As technology advances, it’s possible to dynamically insert different advertising messages to individual households based on audience profiles and viewing behaviors.

“Data is everything,” stated Eric Schenk, a technical director at Google Cloud. But data is often fragmented, clustered in silos and walled gardens. Analysis, depending on data sets, algorithms, and applications, often leads to different results and conclusions. Machine learning’s capabilities help address these challenges. These capabilities include video intelligence (enabling better viewer content identification and curation), translation (allowing for fast global expansion of content offerings), and custom data extensions (offering new ways to analyze and gain insights from data sets).

Business Pivots

Previously, “Sales used to be the last mile, but now it’s content,” Hanlon warned. Schenk added, “Audience is king,” requiring a pivot to audiences and what they want in content.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

The Future of Television with the Same Challenges

You know when television has crossed the Rubicon from a traditional box of analogue content to a multiplatform black box of digital video when the first moderator at the recent DMW Future of Television conference (Vertere’s Tim Hanlon) explained his background as coming from "the medium formerly known as television."

It confirmed to me the general acceptance of television’s changing market position but also led to some uneasy questions: Since consumers are the drivers of change, are we as an industry leading from behind? If television is indeed transitioning, why do we cleave to legacy measurement? Will we be able to hold onto television ad dollars or will it erode as the landscape becomes more digitized? How can we better monetize all the new technological opportunities? How can we best harness big data so that it reveals the true story?

While these are not new questions, we are still waiting for answers.

"Is it the best of times or the worst of times for television?” Hanlon began, “Is it a vast cornucopia of choice, quality content or it is at the edge of a nervous breakdown with financial models, the illegalities of peer sharing and unmeasured audiences?" For those on the content side such as Matt Diamond of Defy Media and Roy Sekoff of Huffpost Live, the answer was resoundingly positive – it is absolutely the best of times. But for those on the buy and sell side, such DigitasLBi's John McCarus who is grappling with monetization under fire, “It is the best of times but with dark clouds." The uncertainties of living with change and the slow progress on entrenched challenges continue to vex and increasingly worry the traditional sectors of our industry.

Predictions are rampant. Diamond predicted that “The consumer wants choice either in an internet minute or a radio decade. Consumers will win out. You don't need a cord to watch. It will be choice so eventually all will be a la carte.” CBS’ David Poltrack said, “We are adding dynamic ad insertion so an ad can be schedule close to the point of sale. That is where we are going as an industry. We are making our medium more effective.” But Sekoff noted that,” We have not made the next great leap forward in advertising. We are still talking about 30 second pre-roll and you can't have that before a six second vine.”

As for me, the issue of measurement looms large. We still use the proxy of age and gender to transact in television when, with the expansion and convergence of big data sets and innovative systems to data blend, we could target much more efficiently.  And with the roll out of smart TVs, it is expected that the entire television household universe will be digitized in the next few years. So why then the measurement stasis?

Howard Shimmel of Turner put it into context, “We have a huge challenge in the TV (measurement) space. We typically use historical data to predict the future. Basing it on age and sex is ridiculous; Lady Gaga and Sara Palin are both W25-54.” On the buy side, Jonathan Boker of MediaVest saw the challenge in the silo’d nature of the industry and to some extent, the data. “You can't shovel attributes off one platform into another. It doesn't work. The TV platform and its underlying technology is different from IT platform.” From the sell side, Shimmel concurred, “How do we put new data into our current infrastructure? We structured our inventory according to age and gender. Now, how do we do it with target segments? We struggle with doing that in scale. We license some outside technology that plugs into our infrastructure. In concept it is wonderful. But in practice it is not simple.”

Since the user interfaces are different, it can impact usage. Linda Ong of TruthCo noted that content choices are reached differently depending upon the platform; “You can’t channel surf on an iPad as you do with a TV.” She continued, “We use psychographics. Breaking Bad viewers have more of a common sensibility which is not necessarily related to age or gender.”

It may be a matter of continuing to allow the advancement of technology to wend its way through the various industry silos until a commonly accepted solution can be developed. But in the meantime we scramble to find temporary solutions while leaving money on the table and allowing certain industry sectors to either entropy and erode or lie fallow. But what may arguably be the biggest risk is disenfranchising clients, as Allison Dollar of the interactive Television Alliance stated, “We are tired of being promised things that are not delivered.”

Yes, indeed.