How Political Advertisers are Adapting to Fragmentation & Connected TV with a4

Political advertisers are continuously looking for ways to reach highly specific voter groups with targeted messaging and it is Sten McGuire’s job as, Vice President of Sales, a4 Advertising for Political & Public Affairs sector to help make that happen.

Between the 2020 election and the pandemic, consumer usage of media has evolved making it easier for advertisers to leverage CTV and OTT in addition to linear. “While CTV and OTT aren't necessarily new to the midterms or, even the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic highlighted these environments as not just a complement to linear campaigns, but as a substitute or a must have,” he explained.

Advertisers would need to allocate budget dollars particularly when considering the scarcity of available inventory within the marketplace. Initially in the 2018 midterms, he noted, “OTT and CTV were looked at as a tactic to establish cross platform frequency,” and reach extension but during the pandemic, as people stayed home, there was a massive shift in viewer engagement and binge watching to these platforms and that, he stated, “Is where OTT really thrives.”

The benefit for political advertisers was evident. “It gave campaigns an opportunity to reach voters outside of their respective echo chambers on cable news or local news in a more laid back living room environment,” he shared.

And this viewing shift is not a fluke, according to McGuire.  “While streaming viewership was a growing trend over the past decade and accelerated throughout the 2020 presidential cycle, I don't think the pandemic or growth in streaming engagement is a fluke. Rather, I think it's a catalyst to consumer behavior as we know it now. Streaming is here to stay.” This bodes well for political advertisers who need to reach specific voters by zipcode in their living rooms where they are more open to messaging.  

But there are challenges that include regulatory differences between linear and digital. Are OTT and CTV considered linear or digital? “If it comes through an ad server, all signs point to digital, right?” McGuires posited. “But the reality is that 75% to 80% of impressions are landing on linear.” For advertisers, budget decisions and tactics rest on the right answer to that question. “One of the things that I question as we go into 2022 and 2024 and beyond, when 50% of budgets are still being allocated towards broadcast and they are contextual alignments, you might use impressions to evaluate the media post campaign but you're not transacting that way.”

Data usage is another challenge. “Sometimes I think we get too granular in the way we employ data,” he stated. There is the risk of serving too many impressions to the same people with OTT and CTV. “We need to start scaling and using actual insights to inform our tactics,” he advised.

Solutions for advertisers require not only good third party verification providers but also the strategic use of first party data. “I think that's going to become very important as we move towards a cookie less world,” McGuire noted. For a4, it is their ability to leverage authenticated IP addresses which helps with all sorts of fraud issues and insures that the advertiser is reaching an actual home and not a bot or other non-human traffic. “We have a proprietary compiler that washes PII data across several internet providers nationally,” he stated. “We have access to 92 million IP addresses that are refreshed every two weeks, so you know you're working with a first party refresh data set,” he added.

But the big opportunity here, according to McGuire, is first party ACR data. a4 has just partnered with LG which offers, “an ACR feature built into all of their 20 million devices. It insures that you're reaching real TV watchers and not just box.”

All of this lends to an ability to craft and customize segments. “We partner with dozens of third party data vendors, but I would say, from a political and public affairs standpoint, we have about seven or eight that we lean into directly,” McGuire explained. “We can create any kind of custom segment such as custom voter files.” His company is also testing in beta the ability to ascertain the effectiveness of creative through interactivity which will help advertisers tweak their messaging within the flight. “Actionable insights that we glean from real people and sequential messaging are going to be really important and something that's not really utilized right now.”

For McGuire, the future looks bright but more complex. “It's no surprise that our marketplace become more competitive,” he noted. “I would argue that if you're just tracking impressions or completions you're doing yourself a disservice. Having expert boots-on-the-ground to actually track KPIs is very important. Reporting is going to be a huge differentiator moving forward as will the growth of ACR,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

Optimizing Your Cross Media Planning. An Interview with a4’s Kevin O’Reilly

Cross media planning offers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the range of media and datasets available to marketers. This is why a seasoned professional like Kevin O’Reilly, Senior Vice President of Product, Data and Monetization for a4, is the go-to person to help optimize advertising messages in the planning stage through sales enablement across cable, OTT and digital.

The Value of Cross Media Planning

Cross media planning involves, according to O’Reilly, “reaching households that you need to with the appropriate efficiency and the appropriate frequency for targeting.” This process requires deftness. “When you build a plan,” he explained, “there are many options such as targetable media, which is one-to-one. But with that there is a trade-off in cost and, to be honest, accuracy. How do I make sure that I am achieving the greatest efficiency that I can? I want to make sure my clients are reaching their correct audiences without waste. So when it comes into that full sales process, it’s about the conversation. ”

Balance in a plan is vital. “When you look at cross platform you have to ask the question, how do I establish the most efficient base? How can I get, from a good pricing perspective, the majority of my reach? And then when I start paying for incremental reach, I start using the targeting platforms, while controlling the frequency.”

The Components of Cross Media

The two big core pieces of media in a4, “are local linear, a commercial ad on a spot, in a market, on a station on a specific point of time in a day. But that might be delivering to a couple of thousand households – it depends on the size of the zone. Then there is OTT and to a lesser extent OLV into devices like iPads etc in the house,” he stated. And, when the client requests it, household addressable, which, “gives us the ability to reach a set of target households with a specific piece of content back to the zone.” For a programmer, the remaining households in that zone would see a different piece of content, a PSA or a different commercial.  

There is also Direct-to-Mobile, which O’Reilly explained, “is our own messenger product which has the ability to target very specific households within a very local region.” Content here can be text messaging as a bottom display with an ability to click on it. “It can take you directly into the video that we have been showing on the big screen or, if you are a local retailer, could actually be your address on Google maps or some other form of sequential messaging that you would want to put in front of the customer,” he added.

The Importance of Data and Metrics

The wealth of data Available to a4 is focused mainly within their footprint although there are also opportunities to work with data from outside partners. Within a4, “we have deterministic device graphs,” he noted, “we have anonymized unique household IDs which are obviously router ID addresses. So when it comes to targeting, we are leveraging this anonymized key to reach across all of our various digital assets.” And he added, “On top of that we have our set top box data and we also supplement with ACR data with vendors.”  All of this revolves around privacy which is secured through an anonymized key. “We never see the household data,” he assured.

When it comes to metrics, “a lot of our clients and agencies out there are still relying heavily on ratings and reach,” he revealed. “For me, I try to understand the cost of incremental action that we are generating whether that is reach or frequency or further down the attribution funnel. But also what is really important to me is the concept of effective frequency – not average frequency.“

But, he advised, “it’s becoming increasingly important for advertisers to understand the data that are being used inside the ecosystem. Understand the source of the data when you are talking with your partners about doing targeted ads. Make sure that the data reflects that you are reaching who you think you are reaching.”

Perfecting Cross Media Planning

When it comes to launching a cross media plan, O’Reilly offered some cogent advice for advertisers. “Understand what it is that you are trying to achieve,” he noted, “What are the critical business metrics that I am looking to achieve? Am I trying to get more people to buy my product? Am I trying to get people to the top of my funnel? What is my internal sales cycle? What is the business outcome I am to achieve?”  That is the starting point. Then you need to find media, “that activates customers from this part of the funnel, to have a conversion event to get them through the next part of the funnel,” he explained.  

Ultimately it comes down to perfecting timing, “how much business activity am I trying to drive to a point in the future. Then there is a work back calendar when you start to think about how to best treat specific customer segments, when does that campaign start, when do we have a flighting structure, maybe building up to crescendo in the final two weeks reiterating the message,”  he stated.

When it comes to the future, with the impact of the pandemic taken into account, O’Reilly is bullish. “It will definitely be more digital. The way people are consuming linear is changing as is the increase in bandwidth which creates even more opportunities. Two years from now, IPV6 will be ‘a thing.’ We will make that move from being just household addressable into individual devices beyond the router.” His enthusiasm is infectious. It looks like the future of cross media planning will be even brighter.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

Ignore the Hispanic Consumer at Your Peril. An Interview with a4’s Glenda Villanueva-Marchetta

As datasets get more granular, advertisers are able to maximize their ability to hyper target a range of important consumer groups. One important consumer constituency, Hispanics, is poised to become a significant percentage of the U.S. population in the coming years. 

A company like a4, with its rich dataset that includes the highly diverse New York DMA, is a must-have for advertisers as Glenda Villanueva-Marchetta, a4’s Head of Multicultural , explains in this exclusive interview.

Altice and a4 Advertising

According to Villanueva-Marchetta, a4 is, “the national, audience driven multi-screen ad division for Altice USA.” Altice, as the parent company, “has a very strong presence in Europe and the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic and in 2016, 2017 purchased Suddenlink on the West coast and Cablevision on the East coast making us the fourth largest operation in the U.S. for video services and broadband with operations in over 20 states.”

Over the years, Altice purchased several data companies. That, in addition to the granular data provided by its footprint, enables a4 to offer advertisers hyper-targeting opportunities. “Our super power is our proprietary ISP authenticated IP targeting technology, which is unique to us,” she explained. This enables a4 to, “Marry our IP addressability with multicultural audiences,” she added. There is arguably no better dataset to reach a range of ethnicities as a4’s with the Cablevision footprint. “I didn’t realize that the most diverse area in the world was Queens,” she explained. 

Changes in the Media Marketplace

In assessing the state of the current marketplace, with all of these seismic society changes and challenges, Villanueva-Marchetta is introspective. “There have been so many changes. From a personal standpoint, working from home has changed everything with added screen time and,” she explained, “telling a Latino to social distance, it just goes against our social being. In terms of business, some of our clients have changed drastically from Covid to the social movement. So just when you thought you would get back to normal, there has been an impact to our customers’ needs. This has made us refocus. Connection to multicultural consumers is more important than ever and the social movement has given us a voice.”

This change is not only growing, it is forming new alliances. “Something that I find is exciting is that all of the different groups are actually aligning and allying with each other,” she stated. “Our customers, brands and ad agencies are looking to connect to multicultural consumers in an authentic way. I also think they are acknowledging that they need more flexibility than ever.”

Priorities for 2021

In looking ahead to next year, Villanueva-Marchetta  sees a new type of media marketplace. “Maybe upfront buys will change in the future,” she noted, “You have to be able to pivot. Pivoting without penalties is critical and pivoting your budgets and creative, we realize that we have to be more nimble than in the past.” The future also brings more of what we are seeing during the pandemic such as “device proliferation. We are watching more screens than ever, so we need a strategy that is all platforms. And there is greater competition for consumer attention and binge watching,” she explained and added that it was important to reach consumers in the language that they are speaking.

She continued that, “Industry regulations are changing. We have to refocus our third party cookie campaigns. That’s going to be a priority for 2021. Digital campaigns now need to place an emphasis on using first party data. There are a bunch of things coming together at once at the end of this year and moving forward into 2021.” For Villanueva-Marchetta , “Data driven advertising, because it is addressable, is efficient. So when you are looking to do more with less, this is the best way. It is an audience driven play. Addressability will definitely play a bigger role going forward.”

The Hispanic Market Explained

If there is one ethnic group that advertisers cannot afford to ignore, it is Hispanics. According to Villanueva-Marchetta, there are 28.8 million Hispanics in the U.S., which represent about 20% of the population. It is one of the fastest growing segments and represents $2trillion in buying power.  “To put it into context, the U.S. Hispanic population is larger than Canada. If it were a separate Latin American country, we would be the second largest and wealthiest in the world,” she noted. In the next five years, the non-Hispanic white population of the U.S. is set to decline while the Hispanic population is poised to grow. “Negative 1.3 million versus positive 6.6 million,” she added, “This growth isn’t stopping. The growth has and will come from birth rates, not from immigration. One in every three in the Alpha generation is Hispanic.”

Seventy percent of the Hispanic population is bi-lingual and even among the younger generations, the language is not lost. “There is a misconception that if you are born in this country that you are not using Spanish anymore. That’s not the case. We hold our culture very dear to us. Speaking Spanish at home, especially to your elders is a sign of respect,” she noted. “It’s easy to mingle when you are bi-lingual.”

Hispanics account for 63% of all U.S. home ownership, fueling purchasing behavior in all of the consumer product and services that go with that lifestyle. Further, “we represent 81% of the labor force growth,” she stated, as well as influencing the overall culture such as the SuperBowl in the large Hispanic market Miami that boasted three Latina performers.

Why Target Hispanic Consumer?

When I asked Villanueva-Marchetta this question, she explained, “As a brand, as an advertiser, it is crazy to continue to advertise to a segment of the population that is declining and not advertise to a segment of the population that is growing. We are not only growing in size, we are growing in wealth and in influence. Thirty-two million of us will be eligible to vote. Look at the numbers. Look at the buying power. Look at the money that is there. If you are a company looking at your five year plan, and you are not considering multicultural, how will you grow your business?” Then she paused and added, “I don’t see how.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

Advancing Advertising with Athena. An Interview with a4’s Michelle Pannell

Athena may be known as the goddess of wisdom, courage and inspiration in some circles, but in the media world, Athena is best known as a4’s new addressable advertising platform. Michelle Pannell, a4’s Director of Product Management, is overseeing the rollout and implementation of Athena and is enthusiastic about its range of abilities for advertisers. “It’s all about the audience,” she explained, “We are creating a way for small businesses to have easy access to data so that they know that they are targeting the right audiences.” 

Pannell has deep experience in digital sales and advanced advertising, combining local sales acumen with product development and marketing. Her work on Athena over the past two years has been to build out the system and expand the range from footprint-only linear television and digital multiscreen to national TV and digital everywhere. “The last two months we started rolling out the newest version of Athena which is digital everywhere,” she noted. Her job now is to train all of the local sales executives in all of Athena’s features and capabilities. “We have 200 sales people from across the country and a lot of them are traditional linear TV sales people. My job is to show them how digital works.”

Athena the Powerful

Athena’s power rests in the data. “We have an advanced way of reaching audiences at the household level because of the technology that sits in the cable system behind the firewall. It allows us to gather IP addresses,” she stated. And this IP data is constantly refreshed so it is as accurate as possible. a4, which is owned by Altice, partners with a slew of data services which enables advertisers to highly target their audiences outside of the Altice footprint. “We have access to many data sources nationwide that other companies don’t have access to,” she added.

Athena the Private

Working with so many datasets and capturing data off the box leads to the question of privacy. For a4 and Pannell, privacy compliance is paramount. “We are taking those IP data, which is obviously tied to a household address, and feed it into a compiler which takes all the IP data and translates it into a unique household ID that we then use to target in the aggregate to maintain privacy,” she explained. “That UHH ID is what we share with the DSP. We are not sharing an address. We’re not sharing names.” These IDs are just to create a segment for advertisers to use to target their audiences.

Athena the Sales Solution

Athena offers advertisers an opportunity to easily craft their campaign. There is the opportunity to choose location, audience characteristics and lifestyle, “We also have automotive data because it is such an important category,” she stated. The platform also has a media recommendation capability that helps advertisers better match their segments to the right platform and media. Then advertisers add their budget and the platform calculates an optimized media plan with de-duped reach into the media buying platform.

The response from sales people has been very positive. “There are quite a few digital agencies specifically and larger agencies that are excited to have access to the data. The feedback has been great both internally and externally,” she concluded. Going forward, since the television component is “national level only right now and digital is everywhere,” she would like to see “local television enablement everywhere in the country as well, so an advertiser in a non-Altice market can create a media plan and advertise on television and digital.” That future is not that far off.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Paul Haddad Explains How a4 Is Inventing the Way Advertising Works

Navigating the transition from collecting and mining data to actually applying it in addressable advertising is a talent that a4 President Paul Haddad (pictured at top) has in abundance. With an engineering background and extensive work in collecting data at the set-top box level from his tenure at Cablevision, he has a keen sense of how the addressable landscape looks and what the underpinnings of data and analytics need to be to ensure a seamless, real-time, targeted experience for both consumers and advertisers.

His evolution from entrepreneur to data geek (an epithet that we both agree is a source of pride) to president has been facilitated by his early work at Cablevision, the mentorship of then-department head Kim Norris (currently the division vice president), Spectrum Reach, the acquisition of Cablevision by Altice, Patrick Drahi’s support of disrupting status quos, Dexter Goei’s coaching on building growth-driven business and the recognition by the industry of the value and power of data and targeting.

A One-Stop Advertising Shop
Utilizing data culled from many sources and offers, a4 is "a one-stop shop for audience-driven, integrated, multi-screen advertising and end-to-end ROI analytics across the U.S.," Haddad said.  But as complete as that sounds, that is not all it is.  Owned by Altice, which purchased Cablevision in 2015, a4 is actually a large advertiser in its own right, representing Altice's $200 million budget as an in-house agency.  So, a4 not only offers capability in both the buying and selling aspects of advertising, it also manages and stewards small $250 campaigns to multi-million-dollar campaigns, as well as national and local accounts through an interface platform controlled by the advertiser.  a4 is helping to transition the media world by "inventing the way advertising works," and it has been very successful.  "We now have over $500 million in total media revenue, over 500 employees and the fastest growing business at Altice," Haddad noted.

Going from Local to National
Transitioning from local MVPD operation to a national footprint was not without some internal questions.  "What is an audience to us?" Haddad posited. "Is it market-driven or is it location-driven or is it size-driven?"  After two years of tests, he realized that "audience targeting has no location or specific size."  So, the conclusion was that "when it comes to audience, we do not see the world as local or national at all," he explained.  "We do not see the world as TV or digital.  We see the world as household targets.  We deliver a household-based audience targeted campaign across all screens anywhere in the U.S. at any time and at any size of segment."  In sum, a4 essentially removes the need to label anything other than audience at a household level -- and that appears to be the wave of the future.

Haddad said that those still operating under the legacy mindset of local versus national are "limiting" themselves and warned that his competitors who stick to the old parameters of measurement are "being held as techno-hostages."

Finding Intent in Targeting
a4 has access to a myriad of datasets at the MVPD set-top box level, at the device level, at various digital touch points and through third and first-party partnerships.  To ensure privacy and create effective reach pathways, "our datasets are focused on household targeting," he explained.  "To target a household, you need to understand and provide to our advertising clients the means to create a segment.  And the way to create the segment is to collect data that finds intent."
He noted that intent on a household level is based on:

• Viewing and content consumption (a4 currently covers 12.5 million homes at the set-top box level covering 210 DMAs)
• Spending patterns (such as luxury items or beauty products or tech-gadgets)
• Consumer profile data (totaling 300 million homes)
• Geo-location data (sports stadium visits or high-end store or auto dealership visits)
• IP targeted data with a platform deployed behind the firewall at most MVPDs in the U.S. (accessing 50 million household data on digital and mobile devices for in and out-of-home addressability.)

"When you put it all together you can use the data for audience creation on the front of a campaign," he explained.  "You can then use the 'same' segment to plan when and how to reach them.  Finally, you measure and report all the impressions for that 'same' segment across all their devices, and clearly analyze the effect and whether you reached these audiences or not and what was the ROI."
In addition, a4 gives the client an on-boarding, self-service, full stewardship platform where proprietary CRM data can be uploaded privately and safely and matched with all of a4's data free of charge and within hours, not days.  So, from audience creation to media planning to media activation across all screens (which includes linear and optimized TV, OTT, digital video and display, social media, mobile display and in-apps banner), "we provide the measurement at the household level, plus all of these screens for the campaign, from the exposure to the medium to how often, and then we post at the end of the campaign."

As far as privacy is concerned, Altice applies a strict and disciplined compliance approach to all its data operations and business use cases.   "Privacy is extremely important and serious to us," Haddad asserted.

Time for a "Datalution"
Giving the client full access and control over all aspects of a campaign by targeting the intent of households is something that few companies offer. Haddad shepherds his company in a new direction that is poised to change the business of advertising as we know it.  "The advertising world is broken into a fast lane of born-data companies and the slow lane of legacy processes," he said.  "The slow lane has no choice but to revolutionize the way they do business.  It's a question of time."

The clock is ticking.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Getting Rid of the Noise in Advertising and Data. An Interview with a4’s Hamid Qayyum

Hamid Qayyum, Head of Strategic Partnerships at a4, is a data and media veteran, starting his career at ratings upstart, erinMedia back in the 1990s. He is currently charged with taking all the data and media that is gathered from Altice and other data partnerships and acquisitions and use it to supercharge a4’s local and national sales efforts. 

Qayyum works with brands, agencies and supply partners “to facilitate our ability to deliver advertising effectively across all devices that consume media,” for the a4 universe of 92 million optimized linear TV households and 65 million IP addressable households. 

Charlene Weisler: You have worked for companies who very early on were working with data in very creative ways. How has the data landscape changed since the 1990s?

Hamid Qayyum: Data collection is far easier now. As the world becomes more digital, there is better data and as the TV world becomes more IP, we have access to more data. But on the flip side, we have to be more careful with how we treat that data – with more privacy and making sure that we are good caretakers of people’s profiles and habits. We have access to data that is very personal so we have to make sure that we guard that data very carefully. The more data we get the better products we can provide. From the media advertising perspective, we can do a better job of understanding what a consumer wants and delivering it to the consumer who wants it. 

Weisler: Talking about privacy and GDPR, how do you see this impacting the U.S.?

Qayyum: It’s very relevant for us. Altice, being a cable company and a4 being a division of Altice we take privacy very seriously. We have a lot of safeguards, such as a firewall between us and the data, to be sure that we got things right. How we use data, the ways we use data, we make sure that it complies with the latest privacy rules. Some industries will be greatly impacted by GDPR more than it will impact us because have already taken steps to be ahead of the curve and be GDPR compliant … or better. We don’t scrape data. There are a lot of companies that will scrape the bid stream and say ‘We have an IP address that we can target’ but we don’t do anything like that. That data is not really authenticated.  We authenticate everything in a privacy compliant manner.  

Weisler: What are the different datasets that you use?

Qayyum: One of the advantages we have is that we are part of Altice USA which is a very large marketer. We work very closely with the Altice marketing team to facilitate their marketing efforts. We also use the data that is used for marketing Altice’s products to better serve our strategic marketing partners from demographics to lifestyle to purchase habits to all of the viewership statistics – some of it is proprietary and some is acquired –as well as IP data. We have created a data warehouse that we can use for our national partners, brands and agencies. We also have a lot of political data, unique viewership data sets and have created a range of proprietary segments.

Data is at the core of what we do. But we don’t sell data. We are a media company. When you come to us you can buy local media, national media, TV, Digital and we will use all of this data that we have to find your audience.

Weisler: Altice was Cablevision. So this is Cablevision data?

Qayyum: We also have Suddenlink in addition to Cablevision plus data we acquire and data we receive through partnerships.

Weisler: What about the impact of the new technology – ATSC 3.0 and 5G?

Qayyum: The way we look at it from our side of the business, the more bandwidth you have, the more you will consume that bandwidth on more devices in the home. That is why we like the IP targeting aspect of our business, because consumers will consume more outside of just watching the television, whether through OTT or some other mechanism of content delivery.

That bandwidth has a couple of uses. One is driving the streaming part of the business and the other is driving the gaming part of the business. Everyone wants low latency in gaming. We are making huge headway in CTV and OTT with new offerings that leverage our IP targeting technology to deliver the next generation of addressable television. We have partnered with AT&T to cover the linear part of the addressable business to make a national footprint but also have the future of addressable through OTT and CTV where we leverage the IP targeting technology incorporated in our system to create a true multiscreen addressable solution.

Weisler: Can you de-duplicate your data?

Qayyum: Yes. We partner with various companies such as LiveRamp and Experian for data matching, etc. and we have a superb data team here internally that warehouses it and does the deduping. We then make it available to our customers for media buying through our platform, Athena. 

Weisler: What are some of the critical issues that the media industry faces now?

Qayyum: First, there is a lot of noise out there – what companies say they can do vs. what they can actually do. There are privacy regulations but data is still in the ‘wild west’ phase of evolution.  It would be great to have something that assigns a value to the data you have. People say, ‘here is the value of my data’ and that data may be wrong or improperly collected and there is no real way to say that this data is pure, authentic or good. 

The other issue is value of media. There are a lot of media choices as media consumption fragments. You no longer have families gathering in front of the TV on a Thursday night at 8 pm to watch Seinfeld. So while the audience and devices fragment, the business still works in silos. There are TV buyers and digital buyers. We need to get those walls broken so an advertiser can get the best value for their money. We broke down that barrier for Altice with a comprehensive media approach and are doing the same for other progressive marketers. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com