The Many Facets of OTT and Its Expansion – A BIA Webinar Explores the Landscape

OTT has been a hot topic, made even more so by the fragmentation of television and the advancement of streaming options. To better understand the current OTT market and its expansion, Mitch Oscar, Director of Advanced TV Strategy at USIM and Rick Ducey, Managing Director, BIA Advisory Services, presented a panel of experts last week that included Kemal Bokhari, GM, Data and Analytics at Dish, Jessica Daigle, VP Sales Intelligence at Tegna, Nelson Ferreira, Senior Director, Regional Sales at Gamut, Justin Fromm, Head of Research at LG Ads, Phil Herring, VP Digital Strategy at USIM, Jo Kinsella, President at TVSquared and Adam Noble, Director of Product Marketing at Advanced Video.

The Challenges and Opportunities in OTT

OTT is not without its challenges. For Ducey, the biggest challenges to OTT today are, “Fragmented inventory, cross-platform measurement of linear TV + OTT, frequency capping and applying linear TV business rules using pods, pod positions, brand separation, brand safety, etc.”

But according to Noble, “OTT is not as hard as we think it is and as many perceive,” and while, ”there is a lot of disruption in the industry, any new method of reaching viewers is going to create new opportunities for advertisers in the industry.” Owners can now go direct to consumers, there is a splintering of buying opportunities and channels and the replacement of certain hardware such as set top boxes facilitates the convergence of linear with digital. There are also many new competitive entrants into the space like Pluto TV, “which gives consumers the option to view for free.” All of this impacts the business model.

“Confusion is driven in large part by fragmentation,” he noted. This confusion drives the need to sort through ownership of data, the coordination between services for a seamless advertiser buy and the lack of measurement standardization. “Who has the right to sell what inventory,” he queried, and how can it best be measured?

Yet, a myriad of opportunities abound in OTT. Ducey listed, “Converging the power of digital targeting, workflow, optimization, attribution with the power of premium OTT video combined with linear TV at scale.”

The Importance of Incremental Reach

For Daigle, “Fundamentally, OTT was formed to fulfill a promise of bringing together what I like to think of as digital superpowers of measurement, targeting with the magic of sight, sound and motion. That is why attribution, measure-ability, reach extension, etc. are so critical.” She added that the stakes are higher as clients are demanding more.

Ferreira agreed that, “Brands are demanding more of us, especially in local where it is harder to measure and define those attributes. That challenge is even more challenging.” To that end he is working with clients on solving for reach extension through frequency capping and recency capping.

Television’s overall value is unsurpassed in the marketplace. Fromm explained that, “TV remains one of the most if not the most important medium for many advertisers,” in both national and local. “It also enables tremendous reach in a short period of time. But linear viewing has changed drastically over the last decade or so.” This reduction in viewing underscores the need for reach extension in the OEM universe. “Reach extension is certainly something we are thinking about and the OEMs are well positioned to do.”

According to TVSquared’s recent survey on CTV engagement, Kinsella noted that, “the main reason for advertising on streaming was incremental reach. The people that we surveyed 70% cited the ability to extend reach and engage with audiences beyond linear was why,” they advertised on CTV. She added that, “17% said that understanding deduplicated and incremental reach across streaming platforms is their biggest barrier from fully leaning into streaming.” She advised that we have to be cognizant of the walled gardens and OEMs. “Most of the time they can only measure their data, their piece and more and more, marketers need to be able to measure everything.”

Bokhari noted that reach extension is, “an important part of the advertiser’s strategy to continue to maximize their reach for their ad. What we have done at Dish is to utilize our addressable technology, our viewership data to be able to let the advertiser know what their reach was on the Dish platform for that linear ad and then be able to target one-to-one to those household that were either missed, not exposed to that ad or who were underexposed and create a plan to maximize their reach.”

From the agency perspective, Herring explained that, “We are being held more and more accountable for the media we purchase on behalf of our clients. So while it is hard to make a one-size-fits-all statement when it comes to reach extension, it depends on the campaign, I would say the majority of campaigns, reach extension is important especially in the CTV space.”

The Future of OTT

The Future of OTT is bright. Ducey concluded that three years from now, “In local OTT, BIA is forecasting nearly 2x the ad spend we’ll see in 2021. I suspect we’ll adjust that to be both sooner and higher as time goes on. The industry is working toward an environment where impressions-based trading, measurement, and attribution will have increasingly less friction in cross-platform (linear TV + OTT) activations. I see linear for reach and OTT for targeting and extension to reach non-linear audiences. Linear and OTT will make a formidable 1-2 marketing punch in local video.”

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com

 

Everything You Wanted to Know About Esports. An Interview with Zach Oscar

Zach Oscar, Esports and Gaming Consultant, his esports teeth in 2018 writing for MediaPost on the Gaming/Esports industries and, at the same time, working for MRI-Simmons on their esports/gaming data offering. That combination enabled him to explore both the news and the measurement side of that business. 

He has also presented, “Video Gaming and Esports; A Clarification,” to companies such as AMC Networks, Comscore, and Sinclair Broadcasting to help them keep up to date on this fast-moving and confusing landscape. Most recently he has been working with Simulmedia as they enter the in-game advertising space. He has presented an industry overview of advertising in esports and gaming at a recent Secret Society meeting which is a gathering of advanced TV executives. 

Charlene Weisler: How do you define esports?

Zach Oscar: Esports refers specifically to professional, organized, regulated, sponsored multiplayer video game competition. So why is there so much confusion? Games like Fortnite make people think that anyone who plays Fortnite plays esports. Unless you’re playing for a prize, in a regulated professional environment against other professionals, you’re not in esports, you’re a gamer. 

Weisler: We talk about esports and gaming as the same thing, but there are obviously differences. Can you go into the differences and similarities?

Oscar: Both esports and gaming are about video games. Esports exists within the broader gaming ecosystem. However, while all esports are video games, not all video games are esports. For example, some of the world's most popular game lines like Skyrim, Animal Crossing, and God of War are not esports capable, meaning they don't have a competitive angle through which multiplayer professional teams could compete for prizes and the championship titles.

Weisler: How does esports compare with traditional sports? 

Oscar: In some respects they are similar. Esports senior management have deliberately talked about how they parallel to the traditional sports world i.e. a developmental/high school equivalent, a minor league system, a major league system, and then a championship. 

But there are differences. Esports are growing faster in the 18-34 year old category than almost any other sport except the NFL and NBA. The viewing experience between the two are very different. If you're watching a football game, talking with friends or others about it requires you to either have friends in person, on the phone, or message through a third party app not tied directly to the sports broadcast. Places to watch esports like Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook Gaming all have chat capabilities integrated into the platform, and community engagement during these games is massive. People comment on gameplay, send funny memes, put in specific codes during the broadcast to try to enter to win prizes, it's a very unique experience. 

However, the most crucial difference is ownership. In basketball, for example, no one owns the sport. The NBA is the league operation which regulates the game. Very rarely are any changes made. In esports, the publishers and developers who create these games are often the owners of the leagues in which they are played, too. The games change ALL the time. New characters, weapons, abilities, etc. can have a fundamental impact on the gameplay. So not only do they regulate the play, but they also set the terms of the play itself.

Advertisers can work with publishers to find ways to get into the games themselves in an authentic and player-focused way. League of Legends, for example, has recently announced a few partners for its in-game banner advertising which will only be visible to people watching the esports competition online, not to the actual athletes playing the game. Mastercard is one of the first to get on this wave. 

Weisler: How have esports evolved over the past 3 years?

Oscar: People say that esports are still not mainstream but esports' presence has been creeping up for many years. Since 2016, competitions like the ESL Pro Counter Strike championship have been filling up massive arenas like the Barclays, and acquiring major, almost unthinkable partnerships/sponsorships from big name brands over the past year alone. For example, Louis Vuitton, BMW, Gucci, and other unexpected advertisers have entered the esports scene. 

Also, games like Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone (Call of Duty's Fortnite equivalent) have become so popular as video games, that by extension of their interest in the game itself people are watching competitive esports. So many more people are gamers today and some of those people then get into esports. 

Another trend is the experimental expansion of esports. Activision Blizzard, creators of Overwatch and Call of Duty, have begun attempting to create local team franchises based in the US and abroad to foster a traditional sports like following. Because of this, too, there is more planned esports specific venue building and therefore opportunity for regional sports networks to air competitions. Plus, esports have acted as a substitute for traditional sports in lieu of COVID-19; some professional athletes have held their competitions virtually, for fun, like NASCAR's iRacing virtual competition that took place earlier this year in lieu of normal races. 

Weisler: Has the pandemic caused any change in the esports model?

Oscar: With the pandemic halting in-person competition until recently, there was a lot of hype around the ease with which esports would be able to continue onwards totally online. There's definitely merit to that idea - the Call of Duty League championships, which took place just this past Sunday broke their peak viewership on YouTube for any of their other esports competitions at 331,000 viewers on the platform - the previous peak was around 200k for the league. TEGNA, the local TV station conglomerate in Texas, partnered with local esports teams Houston Outlaws and Dallas FUEL to put on competitions over three weeks and create a docuseries that ran on weekends. Also, sponsorships have continued to pour in to esports since there's scarce opportunity in other postponed sports, with major brands like Nike announcing just this past week a streetwear sneaker deal with the League of Legends 2020 World Championships. 

Additionally, without that sports programming, ESPN and other sports networks have started showing more esports competitions live. However, it's not all roses for the esports world. A common misconception is that esports is perfectly healthy when it is entirely online. As I mentioned earlier, esports wants to be viewed in the same light as traditional sports by marketers (except with an even younger audience), including in-person audience opportunity. Ticket sales, merch sales, visual sponsorships are all big parts of the esports revenue, which accounted for approximately $100 million worldwide in 2019.

Weisler: Tell me about the demos for esports.

Oscar: According to MRI-Simmons' latest report on esports fans, around 47 million Americans are esports fans, which consists mainly of 18-34 year old millennials, who make more than the national average income, which is around 60k. Esports fans skew male, as is to be expected, by a roughly 60-40 split. However, we still need more data and insights into esports fans under 18 years old, since it is burgeoning for younger people. Comscore has been working with Twitch to get more viewership data and put it in context with cross-media viewership data, and YouGov has collected sentiment data on activations within esports, but we’re still waiting to see the bulk of all that. According to Nielsen and Riot Games, the League of Legends North American tournament series is the third most popular league for adults 18-34 behind the NFL and NBA, but the gap is noticeable (around 2.5m for NFL, 470k for NBA, and 123k for League of Legends). If you included people under 18, I bet these numbers would be even closer together. 

Weisler: Where do you see esports 2-3 years from now?

Oscar: According to many projections, esports is set to grow to about $2bn in worldwide revenue, with a CAGR of 23%. I am not sure how that will play out, but viewership will continue to grow as more and more people start to use platforms like Twitch and YouTube for their m
ainstream entertainment. Esports is an integral part of that. Currently, around 500M people worldwide watch esports and that is projected to grow to around 650M in 2023, according to gaming/esports research firm NewZoo. It's hard to know how reliable all these projections are, especially since esports is such a broad bucket of interests, but if history has taught us anything it's that esports continues to draw more viewers over the years.  

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

How Are Gross Rating Points (GRPs) Evolving in the Media Industry?

Gross rating points, or GRPs, are standard television measurements used in ad buying and selling to ensure the delivery of an advertiser’s contract. This measurement is based on age and gender, requiring a universe estimate to calculate. How will GRPs evolve with the industry moving toward addressable advertising and audience fragmentation?

Evolving Gross Rating Points
The industry has relied on these metrics for many years, and it takes hefty investment to change systems based on long-established protocols. Lorne Brown, CEO at Operative, said in a MediaPost interview, “Agencies don’t have the capital structures necessary to dismantle their systems that are based on Nielsen audience measurement.” Yet, it is clear that people are viewing TV in very different ways than just a few years ago, so there may be room for evolved forms of measurement.
The GRP universe estimate calculation is prone to variation in a multi-platform world. “In television, the universe estimate changes every year,” noted Brad Adgate, a media consultant. “But if you move toward audience-based buying, like weekend moviegoers, the universe changes every day.” It might be possible to form agreed-upon segments and universes that change frequently, but that will take time.

It is evident that, “GRPs have to evolve,” said Mitch Oscar, a director at U.S. International Media, “because all advanced television platforms are starting to transact on impressions whether it’s optimized linear, TV everywhere,......

Read the full article on  the Videa blog.

Designated Market Areas: The Swiss Army Knife of Media Buys

Designated market areas were created in the mid-1950s specifically for use in national TV spot buying. 

Each designated market area (or DMA) covers an area where viewers have access to the same television options, according to The Balance. “Advertisers wanted to tailor their buys to the specific areas of the country where sales were concentrated . . . [DMAs] facilitated this marketplace,” explains media historian Tim Brooks.

Are DMAs a concept that has come and gone? “No, but they need to come into the 21st century,” says Patti Gold, managing partner and chief media officer at The Shipyard. “DMAs work in a way that other definitions—like metro areas—don’t, because they include virtually everyone in the country. We need this kind of common denominator in order to cleanly value offline media and compare apples to apples between offline and online.”

Today, there are 210 designated market areas, according to Nielsen, representing 114,695,130 total TV homes in the U.S.

Read the full article  on the Videa site

From Digital to Broadcast Radio. iHeart Media’s Creative Data Initiatives Revealed at the Secret Society

“Data is all about interpretation,” according to Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television. His efforts to progress the discussion and implementation of data in our industry have been a cornerstone of his Secret Society mission. The June 2016 meeting, held at comScore / Rentrak offices, highlighted those data initiatives that pushed the uses of digital data sets and their insights into traditional media platforms. 

It was at that meeting that Brian Kaminsky, President Programmatic and Data Operations, iHeartMedia, revealed how they took digital data, mined it for insights and applied those insights to their broadcast radio viewers to expand knowledge of that group and use it for branding, marketing and sales purposes.

iHeart Media - Digital Data to Broadcast Radio

Kaminsky explained how his company added a digital DMP and ad serving system and used the insights gathered on digital uses to infer the behaviors of their broadcast radio viewers. “With over a quarter of a billion monthly listeners in the U.S. and over 85 million social followers, iHeartMedia has the largest reach of any radio or television outlet in America. It serves over 150 markets through 858 owned radio stations,” he explained. “By leveraging iHeartRadio user database associated with those digital extensions in combination with data from social platform APIs and other third party vendors, our data science team is able to express iHeartRadio terrestrial broadcast station’s audiences with the same type of data and insights normally associated with digital marketing,” he added.   

Kaminsky’s goal was to get people to use broadcast differently by using deeper level of consumer insights from digital. “We needed a DMP to make output actionable and make the consumer come to life,” he said. The result was the creation of data segmentations, the planning against those segments and then used the data to make radio optimizable on a market by market basis. “We also took data, matched it to social behavior, brought in third party data, normalized it and brought it into the iHeartRadio map. We intend to create a series of private marketplaces for iHeartRadio,” he concluded.

Radha Subramanyam, President of Insights, Research and Data Analytics for iHeartMedia, sees great opportunity with this initiative. She said, "It is incredibly exciting when you can deliver the deep insights and precision of digital media with the scale of broadcast media. Advertisers can optimize campaigns against their targets yet reach enough people to truly have an impact. Targeting at scale is the next big leap forward in the application of data."

Conclusion

For Oscar, the opportunity to showcase a range of data initiatives worked not only for the assembled attendees but also for the industry at large. The four presenters at this Secret Society meeting ranged from iHeartRadio (applying the precision, data and insights of digital and social to broadcast) to Sinclair Broadcasting (using programmatic techniques for the delivery of the primary audience guarantee as well as the equally important secondary target)  to 4Cinsights (providing Coca-Cola with a better understanding of how it could reach its unique target) to Roku (demonstrating the value of timely registration information of its OTT/ cord cutting/ cord-nevers growing subscription population). Future meetings will continue to explore the creative use of data for extraordinary targeting capabilities.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Applying Digital Data to Broadcast. Sinclair’s Creative Data Initiatives Revealed at the Secret Society

Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television is all about collaboration and sharing of great ideas. His ever expanding Secret Society was created to forward the discussion of data driven solutions by media companies. The June 2016 meeting, held at comScore / Rentrak offices, highlighted those data initiatives that pushed the uses of digital data sets and their insights into traditional media platforms.  

The four presenters were:

       1.       Sinclair Broadcasting used programmatic techniques to insure the delivery of its primary audience guarantee and concurrently improve the aggregation of its client’s equally important secondary target.

       2.       iHeartRadio stressed the emergence of its capability to apply the precision, data and insights of digital and social to broadcast.

       3.       4Cinsights socialization provided Coca-Cola with a better understanding of how it could reach its unique target.

       4.       Roku demonstrated the value of the exploitation of timely registration information of its OTT/ cord cutting/ cord-nevers growing subscription population.

Sinclair – Applying Digital Insights to Buy Broadcast

Sinclair Broadcast is one of the largest broadcasting companies in the country, with 172 stations in 81 markets. Besides being the largest owner/operator of TV Stations, the company also owns The Tennis Channel cable network, American Sports Network and Ring of Honor Wrestling. Its network ad sales team worked with Russell Zingale, USIM Eastern President, and a client to provide a roadmap to buy a footprint by utilizing programmatic tactics.

Their initiative, called “Equitable Distribution versus Equitable Optimization” referenced the usage of data to place commercial spots every week in breaks that maintain the delivery of the primary demo (Adults 25-54) while also providing lift via a secondary demo ( less than $30k HH income).  To do this, Sinclair combined their footprint with Tribune to get nationalized distribution (+75%) for the USIM client (who was not revealed in the presentation). The two station groups together were then able to capture network allocated budgets and the deal was guaranteed on comScore/Rentrak deliveries, “the first time comScore/Rentrak data was used as the primary currency for a national broadcast campaign,” according to Oscar.

Stephen Spencer provided a more detailed summary of the management of the schedule and the results. He explained, “To achieve a schedule and a guarantee, it’s common to do an impartial but otherwise arbitrary rotation. We referred to as equitable distribution which is based on rotation of commercials within a program pod as well as pods within a program applying the precision, data, and insights of digital and social to broadcast. This time, we did a rotation that was still impartial on the underlying age-and-gender-based primary demo, but within that, we cherry-picked on the secondary demo, which in this case was based on income. It took some doing on the math, and this is just an experiment with only directional results, but it looks good. We thought the cherry-picking would raise our index from basically flat to as much as 15 or 25 percent, it actually ended up around 30 percent on average.”

Conclusion

The boundaries of what we can discover by using data creatively are now being pushed by new troves of first party data. The future, according to Zingale and Oscar, is very exciting. “During the Secret Society clandestine gathering, we were able to bring together for presentation purposes four distinct platforms that demonstrated a unique utilization of data,” Oscar explained. “Those were first party, third party, social and registration coupled with viewing and listening measurement,” he added.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

Data is a Multi-Faceted Gem With Sharp Distinctions

The world of advanced advertising is expanding in terms of attention and participation. There are more opportunities for advertisers to improve performance and for content providers to maximize the value of their inventory. A range of industry speakers outlined all these new initiatives at the recent MultiChannel B&C Addressable Advertising conference. The conclusion? It all comes down to data.

In discussions involving the use of data in advanced advertising or programmatic and across the myriad of proprietary data initiatives being offered by content companies, it is easy to become confused. I have over 38 years of research and data experience and I get confused by who is doing what and how they are doing it. But in all of this industry confusion, there is a way to see through the fog of announcements and claims. My suggestion is to look at data according to areas of purpose.

“There are two big transformations occurring in the media industry: the consumption of media across a plethora of digital devices and the growth of purchasing and behavioral datasets that enable advertisers to segment customers more precisely with messages.  New measurement solutions need to address both trends,” explained Jane Clarke, CEO, Managing Director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM). 

Data for Currency – The Industry POV

Data for currency includes any industry accepted metric that is used at both buyers and sellers of media. In linear TV that is currently Nielsen age and gender. With the announcement of Nielsen total ratings for cross platform measurement the question begs whether this will help to evolve the current Nielsen currency. When asked, Megan Clarken, President of Global Product Leadership for Nielsen, said that their latest Total Audience product will “influence and inform the currency. There were new rules that were established in 2007 where we now report out to 7 days with the exact same ad load. So this is a settlement number. The currency today does not show total audience across platforms but our Total Audience service does.”

So is there any way to get to a generally accepted industry currency for the new suite of advertising opportunities? Dan Aversano, SVP Ad Innovation and Programmatic Solutions at Turner, is not so sure. He concludes, “Most data is third party data that is available to everybody. From the advertiser and agency viewpoint, it is better to start with data, even if progressing with different solutions. The future is not one currency.” 

In the world of cross platform, maybe instead of currency we really mean greater automation. Chris Pizzurro, Head of Product Sales and Marketing for Canoe, spoke from the cable VOD viewpoint and said, “Years ago we used spreadsheets. And we hooked clients into our systems via integration with companies like Freewheel and Broadway Systems etc. Now 60% of our business through such systems. We have the advantage of not having a traditional system for on demand so we can write the rules. We use a little bit of TV rules and a little bit of digital rules.”

Data for Planning – The Agencies POV

Partnerships and data fueled initiatives are announced every day whether it is to forward thought leadership in cross platform, addressable advertising or programmatic.  "Data influenced TV is here," noted Adam Gaynor, VP Media Sales, Dish. “We are in the beginning stage to reach impressions in TV automatically. We can get targeting and ROI. Programmatic adds automation.”

But the essential goal of advertising has not changed. “Although consumer video viewing behaviors have fragmented, an advertiser’s fundamental marketing objectives have not changed: Finding the specific, right audiences, aggregating them at scale and driving them to the desired action,” explained George Musi, Managing Partner, Analytics, Insights and Attribution, Mindshare. “To do this we need to take the different relevant contexts, modes and types of data sources and diverse analytical tools to shorten the time to opportunities.”

How much do individual company data initiatives impact the media sales marketplace for the long term? Data for planning - that which is used for sales purposes like targeting and segmentation – is difficult to standardize because if it is based on segments, there would have to be consensus on a standard set of segments. 

Mitch Oscar, Director, Programmatic TV Strategy, USIM, concurred, “Currently, there is no unified source to assist agency buying departments to purchase addressable TV. Each platform must be contacted individually to ascertain a match between a marketer's customized universe and the platform's subscriber base. And each platform defines targeting goals differently utilizing a variety of sources. Similarly, platforms work with third party data providers to vivisect subscriber attributes to sway buyers to purchase their platform. Marketers are not able to verify the data points presented by the platforms. It is still a blind match between platforms and third party data providers and the resulting segmentation presented to buyers.”

Data for Insights – The Programmers POV

As opposed to data for planning and currency, the industry also needs data for insights. Data for insights includes that which informs program and campaign performance beyond the currency - what is my conversion, what is my ROI, what are my viewers doing beyond the first platform or device? This is no easy matter.

According to Dan Aversano, SVP Ad Innovation and Programmatic Solutions at Turner, “It has to be about the data and the analytics - all of the things that make an ad connect with someone. Ascertaining how many times and measuring the creative, the context, the recency and the platform. And screens are not agnostic. My personal phone is different from the tablet I use for work. We need to measure the interrelations and the impact of how an ad performs on different platforms, devices and conditions.”

The rush for more and more data analytics will continue as new devices and platforms are developed and the quest for a way to link all type of user hardware and technology continues. Ultimately it is the siloization of data and of data solutions that are causing the greatest miscommunication in the marketplace. How to bring it all together into one voice is the critical next step for currency. But we may all want to sing our own tunes when mining data for planning and insight purposes.

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