Matching Ads with Emotional Context to Programming. An AI Approach with Wurl

Wurl, a connected TV adtech company owned by marketing platform AppLovin, has embarked on an interesting approach to ad monetization. Partnering with BrandDiscovery with its GenAI-powered contextual targeting, Wurl is said to be able to, “precisely match ads with the emotion and context of programming in real time,” according to Wurl’s VP of Business Development for Agencies and Brands, Peter Crofut.

He explained that by aligning an ad’s emotion to the content’s emotion, brands can improve viewer memorability and campaign engagement which he says, “ultimately drives stronger outcomes and performance. Our own data has shown that advertisers can experience a significant uplift in conversion of 2-3x when they find moments of emotional resonance.”

Charlene Weisler: How does the AI matching component work?

Peter Crofut: Wurl uses GenAI to analyze the emotion of the content in the scene closest to the ad break. That analysis is based on Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions which includes eight primary emotions at three different intensities (high, medium, and low) that can be combined to represent the full spectrum of human emotional states. Once the emotional score for the scene is determined, it is then matched to an ad with a similar emotional score. This prevents viewers from having a jarring experience where, say, they’re crying from watching a sad scene and are then disrupted with an overly upbeat ad. When scenes and ads are misaligned that’s where negative attention can be created for a brand.

Weisler: What data is collected – how is the platform measured?

Crofut: To determine the emotional segments of the content for BrandDiscovery, we leverage GenAI to view and analyze content from a variety of different sources including images, sound, and text. From there, BrandDiscovery assigns, at a scene level, the corresponding emotional value as determined by the AI. Notably with GenAI, we offer scene-level targeting through BrandDiscovery as opposed to categorizing an entire program, series or channel under any one contextual category. Equally, BrandDiscovery’s targeting is free – we don’t charge any data fees for emotional segments. In terms of measurement, we work with independent partners like EDO and Kantar to look at things like campaign effectiveness, brand awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent for BrandDiscovery campaigns.

Weisler: How does scene-level analysis work?

Crofut: BrandDiscovery was born out of a curiosity to consider whether or not ads that were emotionally aligned with content perform better. During initial testing, we discovered that the most significant correlation with ad engagement took place when the emotions depicted in the scene just before the ad break aligned with those portrayed in the ad creative. As a result, Wurl developed its own GenAI models trained against millions of assets to analyze content in real time. As noted earlier, we use Plutchik’s wheel of emotions to determine the emotional score of the scene, and then match it with an ad that scored similarly. This analysis is calculated in real time across FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) channels just before the ad break for highest relevance.

Weisler: Can you give an example of what a campaign looks like?

Crofut: We recently partnered with Media.Monks, who was tasked with executing a CTV campaign for a financial services client to expand its audience, improve awareness, and ultimately boost purchase intent. Using BrandDiscovery’s emotion-based targeting to run CTV ads across Wurl’s network of premium content publishers, Media.Monks was able to bolster the resonance of their client’s brand messaging and optimize targeting for more impactful brand engagements. The client saw a 7x lift in aided brand awareness and 2x lift in purchase intent compared to five-year industry benchmarks for Lending brand impact studies.

Weisler: What are the opportunities here?

Crofut: CTV offers massive potential for brands to connect with audiences in meaningful ways, especially as the biggest screen in the home. And, while contextual targeting on CTV certainly isn’t a new concept, we’re confident in the idea that emotions-based targeting is truly reshaping how we think about this approach today. By aligning ads based on the emotional context of the scene right before the ad break, brands can meet audiences where they already are and not just increase attention, but increase positive attention among viewers.

Weisler: What are the challenges?

Crofut: Media buyers today face a fragmented CTV ecosystem with multiple walled gardens and no standardized metadata – one movie or TV show could be categorized as multiple different genres depending on where you look. And, while CTV offers a significant step above linear in that it offers the ability to control who sees an ad, it still lacks control over the placement of the ad. All of this has resulted in limited transparency into where ads are displayed and in what contexts, ultimately contributing to the fact that advertising dollars have not kept pace with the shift in viewership from linear to CTV. By aligning ads’ emotions with the emotions of the programming, brands can have more confidence that their ads will show up in the appropriate context and better resonate with audiences.

Weisler: What are your next steps?

Crofut: In advertising, we hear a lot of talk about finding the right user at the right time with the right ad – though, in reality, we don’t really know what “right” is. As with all AI-driven innovation, the technology only gets stronger over time as it learns from more inputs. Right now, we’re in the early stages of seeing brands utilize emotions-based contextual targeting on CTV – as more advertisers adopt this approach, we’ll have even greater knowledge to learn and grow from as an industry and help us define what the “right” context truly is.

 

 This article first appeared in Mediapost.com 

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

MultiScreen TV Buyers Can Overcome Market Challenges According to DeepIntent’s John Mangano

For multiscreen TV buyers, the current television landscape presents more than a few challenges. As viewers increasingly consume content across an increasingly varied set of platforms, the issue of metrics and measurement looms large.  John Mangano, DeepIntent’s Senior Vice President of Analytics offers some advice.

The problem, according to Mangano, “is the way we are buying it, transacting and ultimately measuring TV. Historically, buying and measurement from the 1950s to now hasn't really changed. It’s still tied to GRPs.” For Mangano, that misses a great deal of opportunities for both marketers and viewers. “It was something that was fine for many decades, but today it feels very prehistoric,” he asserted.

“Historically, the GRP was based off of reach and frequency. We didn't really have the ability to go much further. Now we target one to one in the majority of cases. The measurement also needs to be on a one to one basis as well,” he noted. Mangano explained that a campaign can have, “massive frequency and reach very few people or you can reach a lot of people and have very low frequency.” But now we have the ability to be very specific in how we identify viewers and aggregate them, beyond the usual demographics, to include very specific buying inclinations and motivations. Measurement must be able to keep up with the marketplace. “You need to get to the next level, which is a profile of who you're reaching so you know you're reaching the right targets,” he added.

DeepIntent’s focus is on the health sector and here, the value and importance of one to one targeting is paramount. “If we're reaching a lot of men and it's a health condition that only affects women it's not good. Because we're a DSP, the foundation of what we do is retargeting one to one. The DSP is the backbone of how the Internet serves ads,” he noted. And, with the addition of CTV, “television is now moving into a platform that is has the kind of accuracy that digital ads have had for years.” This now enables TV in the form of CTV to have the same level of targetability as there currently is in digital.

For viewers, the experience is seamless. He explained that, “We've done research and found that TV viewers have no idea whether they're watching CTV or regular TV. They're just watching TV and they're getting served ads.” He also shared that these viewers are okay with ads, understanding that advertising is the foundation of TV content funding. All of this enables companies like DeepIntent to not only target but also quantify very specifically who they are reaching.

In an era of one to one targeting, privacy is a huge priority. “There are two levels of privacy. One is legal, which is a top priority of ours. The other is ethical,” he stated.  Sometimes you can adhere to legal standards of privacy but the ethically, it may be a no go. This is especially true in medical advertising. “The key thing we always do is we never use health information for one to one. We build models that help us find people more likely, but the reality of it is not based off of anyone's individual health information,” he assured. The data from the served ads is aggregated and anonymized which gives Mangano the ability to measure, “the rate at which you reach the right patients or the people who are exposed and took specific actions. But we'll never know which one of the million people actually were the ones.”

DeepIntent is also able to parse, “How frequently we reach individuals and on what platforms. That platform could be TV versus mobile phone versus desktop, and it also could be app or channel for which you have been exposed. All that gives us the ability to have a full picture of the media campaign itself,” he noted. In addition, the data is also placed in an analytics engine which delineates specifically what different combinations of exposures drove action. “And because we also market to physicians, we also do analysis where we identify the patients who went to the doctors,” as a result of seeing the campaign.

“With our CTV analyses compared to linear TV, we are typically seeing an increase in the ability to find the right patients using CTV over linear TV as well as seeing higher rates of treatment,” he explained. There are huge benefits in finding the right patients for a medication, “because you're impacting more people for every marketing dollar spend and that ultimately means healthier people, living longer happier lives,” he added.

The past is not necessarily prologue for the future of pharma advertising. “When I first started in the health analytics industry 15 years ago, I spent a lot of my time trying to help pharma understand the internet space and market it. A lot has changed in terms of more advanced marketing and the industry has changed too. There is a lot more focus on privacy and other laws,” he explained.

Since the pandemic, which has normalized telemedicine while at the same time caused some people to delay treatments, the call for better and more individualized treatments has never been greater.  “The pharma industry has realized that digitally there are many ways to reach both doctors and patients and they're leveraging that more than ever. We're starting to see behavior changes that support more digitally focused communications and interactions. For us at DeepIntent, our ability to deliver the messages, whether to patients or doctors, creates efficiencies that weren't there five years ago,” he concluded.

 This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

 

 

DeepIntent Demonstrates the Power of CTV to Deliver for Pharma

DeepIntent, a company specializing in the health sector, has just released the results of study focusing on CTV and its impact on consumer patient efficacy. Why CTV? According to John Mangano, Senior Vice President Analytics, DeepIntent, “CTV holds the next big media change,” because while it has been around for over 70 years, the backend is transforming to an effective way for advertisers, “to target and reach the right patients. In pharma, reaching the right patients can mean the difference between someone having a positive health outcome and not seeking treatment at all.”

DeepIntent is focused on deep data dives from a variety of sources. What makes this study different is the use of behavioral data that specifically surveyed people who were LG TV owners. “Through our partnership with LG, we had access to indicators of what kind of TV viewing they did, whether it was CTV or linear or both in a privacy safe way,” Mangano explained. The study focused on those who were exposed to the ad campaign. “We were able to match that up against health claims data to identify if the individual had a different action in terms of getting on scripts.”

Through their analytics platform, “in a privacy, safe and hipaa safe way, identify if these individuals who had positive healthy outcomes in terms of actually getting on script and doing it at a greater rate compared to say linear TV,” he noted. In this way questions could be asked about their behaviors and then reconcile their answers against their actual behavior and also give insight into incrementality and attribution.

Arguably the biggest takeaway from this study, according to Mangano, is the difference in exposure to the ad. “We serve the exact same ad during the exact same period for the exact same drug and the only difference was the ability to reach the right patients.” When they looked at the rate of reaching the right patients in regular linear TV, it was much lower than the rate of reaching the right patients on CTV. “So if you reach the right patient with that message and ideally have the right message and it's relevant, that is going to drive very different action, which is common sense, but when you can quantify it to that degree, it is impactful.”

For Marcella Milliet Sciorra, DeepIntent’s Chief Marketing Officer, an interesting takeaway was that for consumers, there isn’t any difference between linear and CTV when it comes to how they watch. “For consumers, 96% of them said that they exclusively watch linear TV versus Connected TV or streaming. But when we looked at the ACR data, we saw that really only 48% of those that responded were actually viewing linear TV. For consumers it's all TV,” no matter where the content comes from.

 

The other big takeaway was the acceptance of advertising, especially relevant messaging. “We asked, ‘Would you be open to watching ads or having ads being part of your TV viewing if they helped pay for your service or reduced the cost of your subscription?’ The majority said yes. They are accepting of ads because it's a part of the process of getting content and it keeps our shows free,” Mangano shared.  “In pharma, we asked if the ads are relevant, how do you feel, and over 50% said we're very open to it and made the experience a better experience,” and increasing their knowledge about the condition, often spurring them to consult a doctor. This, “helps our goal as a company that's trying to improve the health of the people that we touch on a daily basis,” he added.

 

Essentially, “If the ad is relevant to the patient, they will be much more receptive to receiving it so it was nice to see that the same results that we had before were also relevant for CTV,” noted Sciorra. She explained too that when analyzing the clinical data associated with the campaign, “We deliver up to four times higher audience quality and up to five times higher brand script rate based on the health condition for the CTV campaigns versus the linear campaign.”

 

Other key findings include:

    ● 65% say targeted ads improve their experience

    ● 57% say CTV ads are more relevant than linear TV ads

    ● 55% rate the relevance of the pharma ads they see as poor or very poor

    ● 30% of people feel pharma ads provide helpful information to someone in their household and 27%

 

For Mangano, “Working with the LG ACR data gave us the ability to have a thorough understanding on  what we knew about TV viewers with much more granular than you ever would have gotten 20 years ago. Then, the ability to tie that to a survey of individuals to understand their opinion on top of their actual behavior is really something that it was unheard of not too long ago and gives us insights that we would just never would have had otherwise.”

Sciorra added, “As an industry we have a huge opportunity for healthcare marketers to improve the quality of the ads are they are serving and the capabilities to reach the patient with the right message or their physician with the right message. There is a lot of work to be done there. I'm proud of the work that we're doing at DeepIntent to help get the right message at the right time to the right condition.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

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

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

 

 

 

Julia Zangwill Shares the Results From the 10th Annual FreeWheel’s Video Marketplace Report

This year marks the 10^th anniversary of FreeWheel’s Video Marketplace Report, a seminal study on the state and future of premium video. The study is a valuable track of the emergence and growing popularity of premium video in the marketplace.

Methodology

“The report started in 2010,” explained Julia Zangwill, Director of Advisory Services at FreeWheel, “and we saw the need to highlight the trends in the premium ecosystem.” Over time it went from three pages to thirty pages and from just the U.S. market to the U.S. and the EU. The basis of the analysis is derived from the rich data set culled from the FreeWheel platform on premium video. “It’s all aggregated and anonymized and it is ad views data as well as video views data,” she explained.

Premium video is a term that can be loosely defined nowadays. For Zangwill, “It is a bit of a hot potato. The way we define it is around professionally produced, mostly long-form video, that has monetization rights. Those are MVPDs, Distributors as well as Programmers. It is the traditional television players that we focus on.”

Keeping it Fresh

In order to keep the study up-to-date, accurate and relevant in a highly changing and evolving ecosystem, changes were made in the analytical structure of the study. “We re-architected the way we analyze the world’s largest dataset of premium video ad impressions to reflect the changes we’ve seen in the market over the last ten years,” she noted and added, “This year, we see a long pattern of fragmentation across systems, content, and operations move towards integration, with notable examples of content aggregation, system simplification, and operational consolidation.” To that end, FreeWheel readjusted the way the database and queries were structured. “We took last year’s study, broke it apart and put it back together so we have a lot more flexibility going forward.”

Study Takeaways

Zangwill reflected that, “Overall, the past ten years we saw incredible growth. Technology was always one step ahead of consumers. When TV Everywhere services were first introduced in 2011 there was a lot of confusion on ‘how do I log in?’ and ‘on what devices does it work?’ and ‘what content is available inside or outside the home?’ But fast forward to the past year, we reached an inflection point where the technology and the content and the operations are starting to simplify.” In 2020, TVE made up 40% of ad views, but ad supported streaming services were 38% of ad views and continue to accelerate. With all of the device fragmentation, “Connected TV has emerged as #1, with close to 75% of device consumption” she stated.

What has facilitated CTV adoption, according to Zangwill, was the rich choice of high quality content especially in 2013. She referred to it as “the Golden Age of TV comprised of high caliber, scripted shows including AMC’s Breaking Bad and FX’s The Shield,” that consumers wanted to view on the larger screen. This timing, aligned with advanced technology like Roku boxes and Firesticks, accelerated CTV adoption. “Back then it was 2% of ad views and it more than doubled the next year. Seven years later, CTV makes up 62% of ad views proving CTV is here to stay,” she concluded.

The study also confirmed the Power of Live Sports. “Five years ago, the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil led consumers to watch more live sports on digital platforms than ever before.  In 2020 live content made up 55% of content consumption, and we expect the 2021 Tokyo Olympics will set new records later this year,” she noted.

Another takeaway is the rise of Programmatic. “It is another new data cut that we can now track moving forward. It was in its infancy in the past decade, specifically around video. But it has been in a mature state now for a long time. In 2015, header bidding made the transition from display to video. Today 24% of impressions are executed programmatically,” she explained, “We expect to see that accelerate and continue in the next few years.”

The pandemic, according to Zangwill, created decision fatigue which led viewers to passively stream content throughout the day to fill the time. This trend could continue with live sports coming back.

Next Steps

Looking to the future, “There is a lot of competition out there when it comes to ad supported services and there are going to be organizations to opt-in for a low cost value proposition. There will also be other players who are going to be more premium and have a higher price point that offers a different ad experience or different content. The value proposition will become very important,” she predicted.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com