Mapping the Transformation of Television at Dish. An Interview with Tim Myers

It is a given that television has been on an accelerated path of evolution with greater complexity, fragmentation and choice which offers both opportunities and challenges for addressable. To better understand the current and future ecosystem of television and the role that addressable plays in it, Dish embarked on a pivotal study titled The Transformation of Television, the results of which clarifies the underlying issues, mechanics and attitudes that impacts addressable’s multi-level adoption and expansion.

Interestingly, this study came on the heels of the pandemic which, according to Tim Myers, GM Addressable Operations & Strategic Partnerships at Dish, resulted in an advertiser pull-back. “We wanted to really understand the mindset of buyers and agencies as well as our peers on the sell side,” he explained, “We wanted to learn what the trajectory would be for us in TV and what we could do to change that arc.” The information gleaned from that study proved out as the pandemic year progressed.

Addressable’s Advantages and Challenges

“Addressable is a tremendous opportunity,” Myers began, “and provides a lot of value for both the buyer and the agency in terms of being able to deliver a product and of executing marketing and advertising campaigns that tie into the trends that began to emerge and accelerate during the pandemic with better accountability, different forms of measurement, (and the ability to) go after high value audiences that reach consumers in new ways.”

But there are challenges that need to be addressed across all sectors of the ecosystem. On the sell side, scale continues to be a challenge as well as, Myers pointed out, “Making sure that we remove some of the complexities that create headwinds that lead to a lack of confidence about integrating addressable into the mainstream.” From the buying perspective, he noted, “We have to make sure that brands and agencies shift addressable out of innovation buckets and into the mainstream.”  However, he admitted that the mainstreaming of addressable had its trade-offs requiring concrete solutions with the agreement that, “The industry would adopt this mainstream approach and help fund the work that needs to be done to make this a more scalable product.”

In short, the study revealed that, “We definitely need to simplify the buying, managing of campaign across suppliers, increase in scale, provide more of a national footprint, increase interoperability among MVPDs and technology partners and solve some of the measurement issues,” he said. Measurement specifically needs to solve, “across the differences in how people have traditionally planned and measured television, how these new impressions based models work and ultimately how you can tie this into attribution and other techniques to measure the performance.” All of this is not impossible but will take a coordinated full industry effort and commitment.

The Path Forward

It takes a village or, in this case, an industry, to facilitate the mainstreaming of addressable. For their part, Dish has been focused on forming sell side partnerships. “We’ve been working with other distributors and platform and technology partners that we directly interface with to begin to make changes and that would also include non-traditional partnerships with companies like DirectTV,” as well as Comcast, Charter and Cox as well as Ampersand for local markets. “We are beginning to partner with the programmers themselves and offer addressable services,” he added, beyond the two minute local avails and into the 14 minutes of national inventory. “It’s not just available through the more traditional buying channels,” he explained, and that enables the mainstreaming of addressable by solving for scale.

According to Myers, the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already occurring pre-Covid, such as the proliferation of choice for viewers and more fragmentation in the marketplace. “People were looking for more entertainment in the home during the pandemic,” he stated, “We at Dish are always concerned about making sure that consumers receive the most value for their spend. That has created new opportunity in the TV advertising ecosystem where we have this fragmentation but we also have these new ad supported platforms that are out there for consumers.”

Measurement and the Future of Addressable

When it comes to measurement, Myers noted that, “addressable is an impressions based product that measures at a household level and that opens up the ability to also provide attribution and other types of measurement metrics. That is one of the major benefits of moving to addressable TV. It was way more precise measurement not only the delivery of the impression itself but then it can be linked to clear consumer behaviors which ultimately help calculate the ROI and the performance of that media spend.”   

As far as the future of addressable is concerned, Myers is optimistic. “We will continue to see addressable build in terms of its importance in the execution of TV advertising,” he predicted. “We will see it shift from innovation budgets into mainstream. We will be able to provide a simple and interoperable means of creating these transactions. Measurement will make it easier to tie it all back to the sales activity. Attribution will become more seamless and easier to execute. In three to five years addressable will become a mainstream part of the TV advertising mix,” he concluded.    

This article first appeared in MediaVillage.com

Helping Advertisers Maximize Their Budgets Through the FreeWheel and Simplifi.fi Partnership

Viewers are increasingly turning to OTT/CTV to satisfy their content cravings. This behavior accelerated during the pandemic as more time spent at home translated into a heightened search for quality entertainment.  The expansion of choice is great for consumers but a challenge for advertisers, especially smaller ones. How can they maximize their ever shrinking budgets as fragmentation makes viewers more elusive than ever?

The Current TV Marketplace

When we look at the current TV marketplace and how it has evolved over the past couple of years, “there are a few areas of priority and they have had ripple effects, explained Mark McKee, FreeWheel’s U.S. Chief Revenue Officer with audience and automation getting the greatest amount of focus. He added that connected TV and the rise of direct-to-consumer offerings over the last two years, “has really catapulted adoption of new forms of TV and has given rise to more fragmentation so the need for standardization, how people buy and sell is something of great importance.” Data has also been a top priority for the TV industry in all of its forms as well as consumer privacy. “These are all paramount topics for the industry,” he noted, as well as for, “marketers and how they use data to craft the audiences beyond just using content as that proxy for audience.”

For Simplif.fi’s CEO and Co-Founder Frost Prioleau, “The biggest difference we’ve seen from a programmatic CTV advertising provider is the increase in inventory. We were starting to see increased inventory before the pandemic but in many cases TV advertisers were hesitant to advertise on purely connected TV because they felt it there wasn’t enough scale. Clearly the pandemic with people staying inside drove strong adoption of streaming television including advertising supported video on demand. Today there is very high quality scale available and the ability to target audiences.”

FreeWheel and Simplif.fi Partnership

With all of this expansion, opportunity and enthusiasm, FreeWheel and Simplif.fi, have teamed up to offer FreeWheel’s agencies the ability to buy OTT addressable programmatically the same way they buy digital media. Advertisers can access the full OTT marketplace through exchanges and direct premium publisher integrations, ending the need for minimum spend levels and simplifying the management of multiple campaigns across different vendors and geographies, even on the local level.

For McKee, the importance of this partnership is clear. “The Strata platform has about 1200 agencies, largely local agencies that transact across all formats from print to TV to digital. With all of this fragmentation, we focused on how we could make this process easier for those who use this Strata platform,” he explained and added, “One of the great partners that we identified and are working with is Simplif.fi. Just given the role that they play and the offerings that they bring to this very tailored group of buyers and agencies and the local markets.”

McKee noted that the offer enables small and local advertisers, ”To look at their audiences in a much more holistic or converged fashion and plan and execute against them.” He added that, “From a measurement and data perspective, the Simplif.fi product does a nice job of automating the buying and execution process as well as the management of that. The partnership also enables the ability to form a  proprietary integration of FreeWheel’s mini-market of unique inventory packages automated  through SImplif.fi from planning to execution and reconciliation.

Prioleau added, “The agencies that Strata serves, which overlap highly with the types of agencies that (we) serve, need tools to be more effective and efficient. Strata does a great job across many of the pieces and we look to extending that into their programmatic buying across CTV and into their workflow similar to how they buy linear TV and across other digital formats.”  

The reception from the marketplace has been impressive. “We have more than 200 clients that have taken advantage of this unique integration working with Simplif.fi,” McKee stated.

Looking into the Future

When I asked both McKee and Frost about what the future might bring, both were circumspect. “Three to five years is a long time,” Frost quipped and then predicted, “I see more and more of the viewership will be on streaming TV, but not all. There will still be a split there. I think it will be all about the tools that help buyers buy seamlessly across all TV formats whether that’s streaming, live linear or some other format and being able to not only target consistent audience across all those but also buy frequency caps as well as measure and deliver attribution across all TV types.”

For McKee, “The growth of addressability both on linear and in digital is going to fundamentally change the way TV is bought and sold. This will require a lot of creative development and innovation because it’s really changing the workflow that everyone currently has whether it is the home grown systems that everyone has developed or the technology solutions that they use today. It will make a lot of the convergence components that Frost mentions much more automated.” This is vital because without the fuller roll-out of automation, according to McKee, addressability won’t scale. “The ability to understand, ‘I reached this audience and it converted or drove the ROI that I wanted’ will soon become easier in the next two to five years,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

 

 

 

The Challenge of Measuring Video Inventory. An Interview with AMC Networks’ Tom Ziangas

The question of measurement looms large, especially in how we treat remnant inventory.  How should the industry monitor, handle and best measure this inventory?  Tom Ziangas, Senior Vice President Research for AMC Networks, recently participated in a panel on addressable advertising hosted by Mitch Oscar, USIM’s Advanced TV Strategist, for BIA.  Ziangas shared his views on how addressable will impact linear and remnant inventory measurement.

It should be noted that the definition of remnant inventory can vary by platform. For addressable it is often the fraction of a specific unit that might be unsold. In Linear it can be the full unit that might then be sold as direct response.

Charlene Weisler: What do you envision as the best methodology to measure addressable?

Tom Ziangas: Just by the virtue of legacy measurement and the utility of census level RTB STB data, we will need a hybrid approach to measure addressable ad exposure.  While today national ads are measured via Nielsen panel to provide C3/C7 commercial Ad Measurement, measuring national addressable will need the hybrid approach of panel and census level data.  Addressable will be a footprint of the total U.S., we will still need to back out the addressable impressions (census level RTB STB data) from the currency C3/C7 national panel measurement from Nielsen, and while this complicates measurement, we need to make sure that the advertiser is made whole and provide accurate measurements of their ad placement in the linear and digital world. This applies to both linear and remnant inventory with a little caveat, since most of remnant inventory is not guaranteed we may have more flexibility for non-currency reporting.

Weisler: What are the other challenges that you see regarding data and measurement in this space?

Ziangas: As stated above, the biggest challenges are the “mixing” of methodologies (panel and census) and creating standards amongst the addressable players in this space and how we will all work with Nielsen to get this done.  Just think about if we have Nielsen traditional linear measurement on one side and we will need to integrate addressable measurement from multiple players (Canoe, OAR, Nielsen Addressable, etc.) on the other side; all side will need to collaborate together to make the buying/selling process seamless.  If this does not happen, we will be in the same place VOD is in today, under-valued and under-monetized. These challenges affect both linear and remnant similarly, we need to have measures and metrics for both to best understand the performance of the casmpaigns.

Weisler: Where do you see measurement in this space next year at this time?

Ziangas: While addressable is moving in the right direction, it is not keeping up with the pace of change. While I am talking about measurement, there is a lot of work that needs to be done operationally, and along with that, we need the time to make sure this process from traffic to Broadcast & Technology to planning and reporting is all in sync.  So, we will take the steps as we are doing today, such as pilots with our partners, learning with our partners and implementation.  We will be in a better place next year this time, but it will continue to be a work in progress.

 

Addressable’s Measurement Conundrum. An Interview with Comscore’s Prasad Jogulkar

Earlier in August, Mitch Oscar, USIM's advanced TV strategist, assembled and hosted a panel on addressable advertising for BIA which brought together Comscore's Prasad Joglekar, AMC's Tom Ziangas, Carat's T.S. Kelly and Comcast's Larry Allen to discuss the state of the format.

Following the panel, I interviewed individual panelists to delve further into the discussion, especially as how it will impact linear and remnant inventory measurement. 

For Prasad Jogulkar, GM, TV and Cross Platform Products, Comscore, Addressable TV advertising can mean different things based on who you ask, so he defined it for our discussion as, “Addressable TV advertising is the idea of replacing ads, in a live broadcast content or the VOD/DVR version of such content, such that each viewer of the stream could get a different, tailored advertisement.”

Charlene Weisler: I am interested in knowing your overall view of addressable and whether it has changed or evolved over the past few months.

Prasad Jogulkar: Addressable advertising has long held a promise that each impression in a piece of content is individually tailored to the audience watching it thereby providing maximum value to the advertiser and minimum disruption to the consumer. A part of this promise has been a reality with operators like Dish, DirecTV and Altice who are all running profitable addressable businesses on their local 2 minutes. However, the expansion of these capabilities to national cable and broadcast networks – like Viacom, NBCU etc. has been limited for a variety of technical and contractual reasons. 

Over the last 12 months or so – even before the pandemic – several advances happened. First, with the launch and rapid scaling of various DTC services like Peacock, HBO Max and Disney+, networks have video distribution platforms that are, at least notionally, fully digital and addressable and owned directly by them. Second, various CTV providers have announced addressable programs, though many are very much in their infancies. This is again an offering directed at networks. Third, while legacy MVPDs continue to lose subscribers, they have lost far fewer addressable homes. Finally, and perhaps because of the first three developments, many operators and networks have either completed or advanced carriage dialogs that include addressable enablement and delivery. 

All this has generated a renewed interest in the monetization potential of addressable at national scale. And to properly monetize inventory the marketplace needs requires accurate, trusted, fairly priced and conflict-of-interest-free measurement, which Comscore is striving to provide to all participants.

Weisler: The question of measurement looms large, especially in how we treat remnant inventory. 

Jogulkar: It does indeed. In the legacy panel-based measurement systems, overnight programming on many cable networks, will have no rating. A large MVPD – say with 20% of the market – will also have a zero coverage-rating (i.e. rating on the MVPD’s footprint) on a late-night daypart on even a mid-size network. And if you are a station owner in a smaller market, broad zero ratings from panels are a fact of life. A direct effect of this is that ad-inventory in these instances will also get a “0” rating. 

In these instances, are we to believe that not a single soul is watching? Of course not. Rather, it is that the panel-instrument used to measure is not sensitive enough to pick up the signal. How is an ad-buyer to justify paying non-zero dollars for a “0” metric? How can a carriage deal ever fairly value a network that has multiple asterisks? It is because of this conundrum that smaller networks get labeled as “long tail networks” and overnight dayparts become “remnant”. 

From a network’s perspective, units that are low risk to enable for addressable test are the ones with zero or low ratings. Increasing the yield on these is a great business idea. Comscore’s longstanding and pioneering use of census set-top-box based ratings measurement has brought transparency and insight to this content. MVPDs have long used their view of Comscore’s data to negotiate the appropriate carriage fee for networks big and small, equalizing them on a cost-per-second-viewed basis. Networks, local stations and MVPD ad-sales teams are also using this better data to demonstrate value and generate incremental sales.

Weisler: Same too, measurement of addressable in linear TV. 

Jogulkar: Absolutely true. When a spot is made addressable, some homes watching that spot will be targeted for addressable delivery in that instant. But the majority is not. On average, ~30% of the impressions in a spot will be targeted. So, ~70% of impressions are not targeted. This phenomenon is generally true for all addressable spots. 

Comscore calls these 30% of homes as “Addressed Homes” and the impressions, naturally, as “Addressable Impressions”. The other 70% of homes not targeted in that instant are called “Under Addressed” homes and those impressions “Under Addressable”. The “Under” comes from the fact that in many delivery systems, the Addressable creative is quite literally overwriting the linear impression. 

The Under Addressed impressions are seen as suspect or remnant. After all, if they were valuable, someone would have bought them addressably. The advertiser who bought the linear spot and is only getting the Under Addressed impressions, will naturally feel that they are being sold a broken product. Absent some convincing information, the only way to account for this is to place a very low bid on this Under Addressed spot. 

This value-loss problem is very real. It can only be solved by decorating the Addressed and Under Addressed impressions with useful, actionable audience attributes, across all operators and insertion platforms. Age and Gender is not an actionable audience. After all, if the Addressed Impressions took away all the 25 year olds and left behind all the 54 year olds in a spot, it would still be a valid A25-54 spot. Would a buyer consider that a fair A25-54 deal?  This is a measurement and transparency problem that Comscore is ahead in the marketplace with our thinking and solutions. 

Weisler: What do you envision as the best methodology to measure addressable, panel, hybrid or …?

Jogulkar: The lifecycle of an addressable campaign goes something like this: The advertiser or agency creates a list of household IDs (or device IDs) that represent the audience of interest. This list is matched to various operator or distribution footprints. Then the addressable impressions are delivered to only those households in that list. Typically, at the end of the campaign households that saw impressions are matched up to next-period sales to do some attribution.

This entire workflow is anchored around addressing each of millions of households that are of interest – from targeting, to impression delivery to attribution. It’s a little naïve to believe that anything other than census-scale measurement will provide accurate and trusted measurement for these workflows. 

Further, the things that make Addressable TV interesting - the "breaking" of the live spot, the delivery of multiple advertisements within the same unit etc. - are precisely the things that make it impossible to measure with a panel, or as a traditional age-gender rating as we discussed earlier. Trying to shove what is inherently an impression-based buy into a spot-based measurement scheme doesn't work. There’s very limited value panels bring to this equation.

Weisler: What are the other challenges that you see regarding data and measurement in this space?

Jogulkar: The one additional one that I haven’t mentioned earlier is this: For national addressability, a 30-sec unit must be individually enabled in 3-5 different operator and distribution platforms. Each operator's addressable insertion, pacing and reporting stack is unique. It is a hard and laborious process to measure each platform individually, and then combine the numbers to create a true national view.

Weisler: Where do you see measurement in this space next year at this time?

Jogulkar: I think the whole space will have evolved quite substantially. We’ll see many pilots and beta programs being launched and their success or failure will be very instructive to all the players in the marketplace. Some of the debates about panel vs. census vs. hybrid are like religion; you can never decisively convince a non-believer. Those will continue. Economics of national addressable – for instance what is the price for the Addressed audience vs. the Under Addressed Audience – will start to be concrete and will be benchmarked.

Power of Local and of Data. Interview with Spectrum's Kim Norris

It is certainly a strange time for those of us grappling with the pandemic's impact on media. Budgets are more uncertain as advertising is readjusting to a new reality. For someone like Kim Norris (pictured at top), Group Vice President, Advanced Advertising Sales at Spectrum Reach, who manages a team across all TV and digital sales channels, COVID-19 has posed strategic challenges, creative opportunities and a cause for optimism.

The Redefining of Television Before and After the Pandemic
"Pre-pandemic we were seeing a significant shift in the way that television was being consumed and the way advertisers were starting to think about TV as an advertising medium," she explained, as digital technology expanded into the ecosystem and with television increasingly migrating to the IP-based digital platform. "We have seen an expansion of capability," she noted, "fueled by the use of data and its use in planning where linear television is increasingly employing digital techniques. And all of this innovation has ramped up fairly quickly."

She explained that, "For us at Spectrum Reach, television service has been available on the Spectrum TV app for a number of years with ads. That technology, along with consumers time-shifting their viewing with VOD, has propelled television viewing across devices and platforms in our households. Cross-platform has become much more of a way to consume TV."

Consumer Viewing Patterns
For Norris, this evolution in consumer viewing patterns has only accelerated during the pandemic. "What we are seeing is an interesting spike in the viewership. All of television viewing has increased. We are seeing it across live television, across the Spectrum app and across VOD," she said. It is an especially unique situation for advertisers, who, according to Norris, need to reassess their messaging and take into account the sensibilities of the time while also keeping an eye on brand positioning and long term strategy. "Do they have the right creative?" she asked. "The irony is that we have so much activity, inventory and impressions at a time where some advertisers have had to stop and rethink their strategy. It is certainly interesting times for both television and advertisers."

Seeing Opportunities for Advertisers
The changing environment need not be a barrier to messaging. In fact, one could argue that viewers are paying greater attention in their viewing experiences. The opportunity is there for advertisers. "One of the ways we responded at Spectrum was to very quickly address the issue of creative. Your creative message in television of all kinds is very important," she stated. One of the first things that Spectrum did was to offer advertisers a turnkey approach to producing their own creative. "We are already on the path of offering self-provisioning creative platforms primarily for local and regional advertising," she explained, "and this is certainly available for big brands as well." Currently, Spectrum "was able to offer these services at no charge to our local advertisers. We saw a very quick response being able to flip creative very quickly. And more of the agency holding companies and the large national advertisers came back to television with different types of messaging."

One of the biggest changes Norris sees in the advertising ecosystem is the nature of the messaging. "It's almost a positive (change)," she said, "Brands are trying to speak to their consumers in a very human-like way with supportive messaging, such as at a hyperlocal level by letting people know what stores are open and a lot of social service work."

Notable Bumps in Viewing Patterns
Viewing patterns during the pandemic obviously shifted as a result of people sheltering-in-place. Norris, whose company focuses on impressions data especially in local, is able to adeptly monitor trends across platforms. She has seen increases in content type with specific success in Spectrum Reach. Spectrum News' local coverage since mid-March has resulted in its highest Nielsen ratings over a two-month period dating back to at least 2011 and likely in its entire existence. "We have seen a pop in localized content," as well as content that offers escapism. "Entertainment content (viewing) has increased and we are seeing that the total viewership is increasing. It's not just viewing across screens, they are viewing a lot more overall. VOD is increasing and people are searching for new content. There is a lot of social chatter about 'what are you binge watching this week?' across screens."

Norris noted that their business is driven by impressions, especially through their apps. This is an advantage when it comes to measurement and planning. "Our inventory is a direct correlation to consumer engagement on platforms. We've seen a high in May in terms of how many impressions we actually saw coming through the platforms as a result of usage," she noted.

The Greater Importance of Data
When it comes to data, Norris is an expert with years of experience both at Cablevision (where, full disclosure, she hired me for a set-top box data project) and now at Spectrum. "We have been able to pull together our first-party anonymized and aggregated data in combination with third-party datasets, which have allowed us to be able to do more data-infused planning in linear TV as well as more targeted planning across all screens," she said, and added, "I think what we are seeing is an increasing interest into what types of insights and analytics we provide advertisers around that."

Norris shared an example where an advertiser who previously appeared in sports programming could be efficiently re-expressed into non-sports programming with the confidence that they would be reaching the same targeted viewers on both a national and local level. The application of data to ascertain reach and further target audiences has been accelerating since COVID-19 according to Norris and sparking greater interest among advertisers.

Looking Forward
Since the outbreak, Norris has seen that "local is the new normal. There are so many differences in what is happening in states and regions, parts of the country. I think our ability to utilize household addressability or reach at a geo level or a state level, all of our capabilities around broad reach versus more targeted reach can help brands be specific in their messaging in a more localized manner."
As dire as events may seem today, Norris is optimistic about the future. "It's amazing to me to see how adaptable we all are in the human condition. The optimist in me sees this marketplace of advertising come back in the third quarter. And it will be back in some sense and force for us in the television space. The activity we are seeing cross-screen will accelerate ever more than we might have seen before the pandemic as consumers and advertisers get more familiar with the shifting TV landscape."

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com