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

Cross-Platform Measurement Insights from the ARF’s Scott McDonald

Scott McDonald, CEO and President of the ARF, believes that cross-platform measurement still has a way to go before a standardize-able system is in place. Talking at the recent SXSW conference, he explained his view on cross-platform advertising trends. “There still is no consistent definition and tracking of cross-platform advertising that would allow us to say that it has grown by X percent since last year,” he stated. “When people talk about cross-platform, they really mean TV + Digital, though the media mix is often a lot more complex than that.”  But there is hope that, “advertisers have taken to heart the admonition that cross-platform campaigns need to be integrated with common themes, copy and images – but tailored to the specific context in which they are presented to consumers.”
 
Among some of the major challenges to rolling out cross-platform advertising, McDonald lists the following:

1. Exposure measurement – specifically measurement of unduplicated audience reach for specific targets.
2. Cross-device identity – many of the identifiers don’t cross the platforms, contributing to the persistent “walled garden” problem.
3. Because of this, it is difficult to manage campaign frequency and to get accurate results in back-end attribution models.

But there has been some measurement progress, he averred, with the industry moving toward a possible duration-weighted exposure measurement standard, “that would bridge the gap between linear TV and digital video – though the debate about the next ‘currency’ will continue to be hotly contested.”  Another positive trend is the improvement in automated content recognition and watermarking technologies that enable cross-platform measurement.

When it comes to 1-1 marketing, McDonald stated that, “It only works when there is a high level of REAL permission by the consumer because it requires so much personal information that it is prone to abuse.” And while we talk about efficiencies, there is still some value in some of the inefficiencies, by “letting people who are not current prospects know about your brand and build a favorable impression of it for later reference and action.”

Ultimately, for McDonald, there is no competition between the need for transparency for advertisers versus privacy for consumers. “Consumers need privacy and advertisers need to be transparent about what data they collect, what they do with it and how that benefits the consumer,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Facing the Challenge of Attribution. An Interview with Nielsen’s Matthew Krepsik

For many in marketing, deploying multi-touch attribution is more of an aspiration than a current reality, but that doesn’t mean we should defer efforts to find a complete attribution solution. There are many considerations when constructing a workable model, including variations in the consumer journey based on products and categories, the impact of unmeasurable factors like word of mouth and the ceaselessly expanding choice of datasets — some valuable and some, depending on the advertiser and category, not so much.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Matthew Krepsik, Global Head of Analytics for Nielsen to talk more about facing the challenge of attribution.

Charlene Weisler: Nielsen has always been proud that they own their data. Can you talk about the new reality where Nielsen will need to go beyond their own data and partner with other data suppliers who, in turn, control their own datasets?

Matthew Krepsik: From our point of view, we have a lot of unique and valuable data, just like other suppliers with walled gardens have incredibly valuable data. What we see as the biggest opportunity is our ability to co-mingle those data sets. If we think about our constituents and our users, whether marketers or  other business executives, what they really want is greater intelligence. We understand the complementary nature of all of these datasets and we can bring them together for specific use cases and help in enabling desired outcomes. This is where we generate the most value. As we think about the next generation of growth and innovation as a company, we think that the innovation stems from building across different partners. We have opened up access to our data with partners to make it easier to use and more permissible for marketers and brand owners across the value chain and in places where we don’t operate.

Weisler: How do you manage the de-duplication of data when you use other walled garden datasets?

Krepsik: There are a couple of dimensions of de-duplication around identity, around devices and around the cookie itself. So if you think about the ad model side, the ad tech really starts with the cookie. Your phone right now probably has more than 50 or 100 cookies on it. All of those cookies roll into a device. That device has to roll into other devices. So de-duplication is improving right now. Is it perfect? Not at all. But the first challenge is getting from cookies to devices and devices to people. I would say that we are getting more robust at the device level. The challenge is that they keep reinventing and updating the device. Every customer is getting a new phone. They are getting new laptops. They are getting new devices at home. Most households get new devices about every six months. So the challenge is that we have gone past the period of “build” and we have to constantly reinvest in the updating. The technology we have makes it easier to do this than ever before. The bigger challenge is de-duplicating your on-boarding data. That gives us a tremendous opportunity to get better at connecting to a digital consumer from an offline consumer. There is still a lot of work to do there.

Weisler: Looking at multi-touch attribution, where do you see it today, grading it from A to F?

Krepsik: I am going to answer this question along two dimensions. When I think about the overall need of a marketer or a CMO, I would give most attribution models a grade of D. If I think about the overall need for digital media planning, I think attribution models today are approaching a B+ / A- grade.

I say this because for a digital media manager, what you really want to know is whether this creative, or this site, or this device, or this placement working better than another one? Is this audience working better than another one? How do I make decisions and trade-offs across all of the possibilities out there? Today’s attribution models are really good at allowing digital owners to understand the cornucopia of media channels and how they can get more improvement out of them.

That being said, from an overall CMO standpoint, out of every revenue dollar that goes to the cash register, 25 cents is spent back on some form of marketing investment. Digital is only two cents of that quarter. So what they want to know is “should I be spending three cents on digital or should I be spending one cent on digital?” If you think about most attribution models today, they are not expressly measuring incrementality. They are not taking into account a lot of the “last mile” problems.

Weisler: Where do you see attribution going in the next couple of years?

Krepsik: Where I think the attribution industry has a chance to grow and where the marketing mix industry can take a step forward is bringing those two pieces together. Attribution models bring speed and granularity together and the marketing mix world offers scale and coverage. Where I see the industry going in the next two years is that both of those pieces come together; Leveraging the technology, real-time nature, and granularity in the attribution model with the scale, coverage, and sophistication of marketing mix modeling.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com