Bringing Back Music Videos. An Interview with Kevin McGurn of Vevo

Vevo is going where no programmer has been for years – into Music Video programming. Kevin McGurn, Vevo’s President of Sales and Distribution, is enthusiastic about his company and this programming format. 

“Vevo is the world’s largest all-premium music video platform. Our content sees more than 26 billion views globally on average per month,” he explained, “Because of our reach and scale we provide access to hard to reach audiences at scale within a brand safe, contextually relevant environment.”

Charlene Weisler: Why music videos? What is the value proposition? How many do you have, how is it curated and how diverse is the library?

Kevin McGurn: For brands and agencies, we guarantee massive reach and quality by aligning their messages with the latest in pop culture. In addition to global general audience media, we offer local, spot, multicultural and addressability. In short, we can be bought just like TV, and delivered directly to viewers watching in the living room. For artists and music labels, we provide a dynamic global platform for delivering high-quality music videos. Beyond that, we serve as their marketers, working on original shoots, promoting their videos, help them achieve views, and more. Music video viewership is global, now more than ever in today’s connected world. Latin music, for example, is experiencing huge popularity worldwide. For example, in 2020, the Latin genre was our second most viewed genre (after Pop), bringing in 75 billion views globally, and Colombian star J Balvin was our most viewed artist, with 2.7 billion global views.

Music is also a great unifier and something that people turn to, especially during tough times. We have a timeless catalog of over 450,000 music videos across all genres and countries, including official releases, original content and live performances. Examples of our original series include DSCVR, which showcase new artists, and LIFT and CTRL, which consist of exclusive live performances. We also curate our content into playlists by genre, holiday, mood and more. Additionally, we are seeing more and more consumers watching music videos on their living room television sets. This is a growing trend, and one that was accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic as consumers stay at home. In fact, our global connected TV viewership has grown 30% since 2019.

Weisler: How are you overcoming challenges regarding music videos such as length of tune?

McGurn: There are several factors at play, due to visual and audio having a symbiotic relationship. Our content is snackable, so we know it fits into daily habits in a number of ways. We offer brands and clients a way to advertise around the most sought after content and show them real value through partnership with us. With over 200 million views across our content on Thanksgiving Day (2020) in the US alone, we see many obvious benefits to our content.

We also know that the digital space is hugely competitive. We compete for attention and time and spend much time working to ensure that we have a strong proposition to make our content stand out across any of the platforms we distribute to.

Weisler: What is your footprint, number of platforms, types of platforms, overall distribution?

McGurn: We currently operate in 14 markets, though our content can be pretty much viewed anywhere in the world through our YoutTube distribution. In addition to YouTube You can find Vevo videos on any of our linear and VOD streaming partners. We have at least 22 partners to date and reach approximately one billion people each month.

Weisler: What metrics do you use?

McGurn: We organize our inventory first, and foremost, around the audience. The mass majority of our media is demo guaranteed and priced and measured according to the latest metrics available for connected television, including Nielsen and TVision.  In addition, all of our content and advertising is delivered through internet protocol, so we marry the data and targeting effectiveness of digital with the reach and content quality and transparency of broadcast TV.

Outside of viewership metrics, we also partner with leading brand measurement providers, like Kantar Millward Brown and DISQO, to understand the efficacy of ads on our platform. And, we know that audiences view our ads, remember them, and take action after exposure.

Weisler: What do you offer an advertiser?

McGurn: Few platforms can match our reach and scale. We reach roughly half of the population in the United States and Australia monthly and more than a third of the population for almost every other country in the 14 markets we operate. And being at the forefront of pop culture, whether it be a highly anticipated premiere by The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, J Balvin, or Taylor Swift, our content is culturally relevant and of the moment. We also give advertisers the ability to connect with hard-to-reach audiences in a way that traditional TV does not.  More than two-thirds of Vevo viewers fall into the 18-49 age group, and more than half of this age group are light TV viewers. Despite many of our viewers not watching traditional TV, we can be bought like TV. And, we offer advertisers a content rating system for brand safety, in the exact same currency that TV shows are rated.

Weisler: Has the pandemic impacted your business and if so how?

McGurn: Vevo, and indeed the art form of the music video, is “Always on. Never postponed. Never cancelled.” We saw an acceleration in our already fast-growing connected television viewership beginning with the stay-at-home orders. In fact, according to TVision, this surge included a rise in co-viewing where families gathered in the living room to watch music videos together. That momentum has sustained and allowed Vevo to be a viable alternative to cancelled sporting events and original programming no longer in production.

Through the Spring and Summer cancellation options, Vevo has become the go to place to re-express undelivered GRPs, and that behavior carried us into the largest upfront in the company’s history. The music video has returned to the living room and also to the TV ad buying marketplace … and we will be here for good.

Weisler: Do you have any partnerships?

McGurn: We have been hard at work over the last 24 months building a distribution network and partnering with the likes of Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Roku, PlutoTV, Apple TV, NetRange, Foxxum, Virgin Media, Sky, Vewd, Xumo, Samsung TV Plus, and most recently, VIZIO. We are announcing several new partnerships this year as part of our continued expansion into linear and streaming television, including in newer markets like the UK, Europe, Canada, Mexico and Australia.

Weisler: Where do you see your business three years from now?

McGurn: We will deliver the best music video experience -- when, where and how the fans want it. The advertising community will have fully realized the power of our global audience, the contextual versatility for brand alignment, and the massive reach and addressable efficiency of the music video once again.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

 

 

Scott McDonald Reveals What to Expect at the Next ARF AUDIENCExSCIENCE Conference

Scott McDonald is optimistic about cross-platform measurement. “I see solid signs of progress,” he stated, with “better use of projectable samples and panels for calibration, better integration of statistical adjustments to correct for known biases in behavioral data streams (that previously were venerated simply because they were large) and better automated content recognition.” 

He is also fairly bullish about attribution measurement, though he admits that there still needs to be better inputs and a more expansive ability to calculate across all media and marketing. 

I sat down with him to find out what we might expect to see and hear at the next annual ARF AUDIENCExSCIENCE event scheduled for April 15-16, 2019. 

Progress in Cross Platform Measurement …

The overall theme of the conference will be the vectors of progress in cross-platform audience measurement. According to McDonald, the industry is “making progress in coverage, in integrating audience data from different streams and in automating content recognition.”  But, he averred, “We still need to build better consensus on the core metrics to use for reporting and trading.”

The obstacles seem to be more political and economic than technical, he noted while adding that “there is compelling evidence from the UK around how it is a costly mistake to under-invest in upper-funnel brand support and over-invest in lower-funnel activation but,” he added, “it is rarely fatal if recognized and remedied.”

There have been milestones in these areas since last year’s conference. “The MRC’s proposed duration-weighted standard for cross-platform video measurement represents an important milestone in the long-running effort to get consensus on the underlying metric,” stated McDonald. “That standard will be hotly debated at this next AUDIENCExSCIENCE, but I consider it a significant step forward to be having that debate now about a very specific proposal.”

Progress in Attribution …

McDonald sees some signs of progress in integrating digital attribution with market mix modeling approaches, but, “there still a need for better inputs (ad exposure data) and greater transparency about underlying models.”

He believes that, “when properly executed, attribution efforts premised upon true, randomized control tests have the strongest causal claims.” However, attribution models are still operating under very limited spheres that don’t apply across all elements of the media and marketing spectrum, “so they don’t have as much practical utility for many marketers.” 

Plus, they are often siloed, only working within one complete end-to-end platform, resulting in limited scope and of potential conflict of interest, he noted. “So when we go beyond these methodologically pure randomized control panel (RCT) exercises, the most meaningful attribution studies are those that reflect a bit of modesty and humility about their own limitations.”

Time Table for Measurement?

I asked McDonald, how soon did he think it will take for us to get to an industry standard cross platform measurement? “To some degree, it will always be a work in progress,” he admitted, “So I don’t think that we will ever be at a place where we can just go on auto-pilot.” But, looking forward, he saw that, “5G will have all kinds of knock-on effects on how we consume media and advertising, and the whole field is so ripe with innovation that the goalpost will constantly be moving.”

He believes that there has been a lot of progress so far through the efforts of individual companies and of industry organizations. “To some extent we are on the threshold of a new era if the MRC standard survives the inevitable scrutiny and goes on to win the support of marketers,” he stated.

In terms of actual metrics, McDonald ranks the following as the most important:

Ø  Exposure metrics (impressions, reach, frequency),

Ø  Attention metrics (duration, cognitive measures),

Ø  Affiliation metrics (often reflected in social media), and

Ø  Market metrics (sales, pricing power, brand equity).

“Looking ahead to the next five years where do you see the media ecosystem in terms of measurement, data, analytics, privacy and attribution?” I asked. His response was swift. “Five years is an eternity in this business.  We will be farther along – powered more by AI and 5G – but still with plenty of work to do solving the problems that will be frustrating us in 2023.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Letting Consumers Take Control of The Ads They See. An Interview with Joe Mandese.

As consumers take more control of who they allow into their viewing space, advertisers will have to be more cognizant of how their ads are delivered and received. Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost, has been working on an initiative called Bid/r which has the potential to change the ad delivery dynamic. 

Charlene Weisler: Over the next three years, what are the greatest changes facing the ad community?

Joe Mandese: Nigel Morris, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network, when asked the same question a few years ago, said, “The problem is we’ve shifted from an era of information scarcity to one of information ubiquity.” He meant that advertising originally evolved in a world of finite media options -- a handful of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio options -- where big advertisers and agencies had the leverage of their ad budgets to efficiently buy people’s attention. If you had enough money you could buy enough reach and frequency to scale people’s attention.

That started to break down with the explosion of media options in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to multichannel television. Today, literally every single human being on the planet is a media channel. The supply of media options is virtually unlimited. The signal-to-noise ratio between consumers and brands has grown out of whack, and to paraphrase Nigel Morris, we’ve shifted from a time when there was a scarcity of media to one when there’s a scarcity of human attention.

Weisler: What is Bid/r?

Mandese: Bid/r is a marketplace where brands can bid directly for a finite supply of the most valuable consumer attention: attention consumers want to pay to a brand.  Users download a simple app to “list” themselves on an exchange where they receive offers directly from brands. There is a cap on the amount of “inventory” they can trade to five minutes daily, because we want both consumers and brands to understand the scarcity and value of their attention. Consumers are in total control of their trades and brands only pay when the consumer fulfills 100% of the terms of the trade.

Brands can offer anything they want to win the user’s attention: samples, swag, unique experiences, access to media content, even cash and for any action they want the consumer to complete, not just paying attention to an ad, but higher order functions like visiting a brand’s site, downloading information, sampling a product, participating in research, enrolling in a loyalty program, etc.

From a consumer’s perspective, it’s like Tinder for brands. They see a feed of potential brands and swipe left or right depending on which ones they actually want to engage with. From a brand’s point-of-view, they might be looking to have a first date with a consumer or build a long-term, lasting relationship.

Weisler: Can the industry solve for ad blocking? For fraud? For viewability?

Mandese: Of course, but it comes down to defining what the industry means by “ad blocking,” “fraud” and “viewability.” Depending on how you define them, all of those problems have always existed for the advertising industry.

People have always had the ability -- with a few exceptions -- of controlling what ads they see or not. I used to quip that print media like newspapers and magazines were the original digital interactive media. If you saw an ad you didn’t like, you flipped the page. I remember seeing Brian Monahan (formerly at Walmart and now at Pinterest) present data on TV commercial zapping and said, “The biggest threat to our TV commercials is not the DVR, it’s people turning their heads.”

Right now, ad blockers are making it easier to skip ads, but we’re already seeing a new generation of anti-ad-blockers and even more recently a generation of anti-anti-ad-blockers. It’s as if the ad industry has entered into a rapidly escalating arms race with its own consumers.

Same with fraud. We have new jargon like “non-human traffic” or “non-viewable impressions,” but those behaviors always existed and it was just a question of how -- and how much -- they happened, not whether they happened. When I started covering the business, agencies had virtual armies of ad checkers to handle “discrepancy resolutions” for ads they were being charged for that never aired or aired in the wrong way. Those problems have always existed, and if anything, technology has made it easier for brands and agencies to detect them.

There are a number of promising blockchain technologies that will likely help, but it’s all premised on advertisers and agencies defining exactly what they want -- and don’t want -- and communicating it clearly as part of their contracts with the media.

Weisler: What metrics do you think are the most important indicator of a successful ad campaign?

Mandese: It comes down to what a brand and agency are trying to achieve with their ad campaign. It can be multiple things -- exposure, engagement, action, etc. -- but ultimately, they have to focus on one key indicator they use to measure performance.

I’m a big fan of time-spent and duration metrics, not just because it’s what Bid/r is premised on, but because I think it’s the best way to measure if a user was actually engaged with the ad campaign. What that duration should be, is up to different stakeholders -- brands, agencies, media, and yes, even consumers -- to hash out, but I think the time of using simple impressions or exposure-based metrics is over.

I think the Media Rating Council’s (MRC’s) new “digital audience-based measurement standards,” and the fact that they are duration-weighted, is a step in the right direction, because it creates an even playing field for all stakeholders participating in a measurement method that they all agree to. But ultimately, they have to agree about what they’re agreeing to measure.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Note:  Jack Myers and Charlene Weisler are both investors in Bid/r.  Joe Mandese was the editor of The Myers Report newsletter, the forerunner to MediaVillage.

Know Your Ad Server. Interview with Brian DeFrancesco

Brian DeFrancesco, co-founder of LKQD has deep experience in ad-tech space building and deploying large-scale ad servers. His latest venture, LKQD, is a self-service video ad-serving platform that works across programmatic, direct, and non-direct demand mediation and optimization.    

“Ad servers have evolved from being closed stack systems that provide basic operational support to open platforms that enable companies to work with vendors of their choice for ad targeting, verification, and programmatic initiatives,” DeFrancesco explained, “The role of an ad server is becoming increasingly important as it defines a company's capabilities to secure and execute ad buys in today’s complex ad tech ecosystem.”

Charlene Weisler: There are several ad-serving companies in the media ecosystem. What distinguishes LKQD?

Brian DeFrancesco: First, there were many legacy ad servers built and architected to run on Flash.  Back in 2014, we knew the future for video advertising would be mobile and HTML5, and no one was taking the mobile video advertising space seriously.  Second, we wanted to release a VPAID (Video Player Ad Serving Interface Definition) compatible solution for mobile.  We had watched the industry transition from VAST to VPAID in desktop due to the advantages of measurement and security offered by VPAID.  We build a VPAID solution from day one for mobile and have offered a VPAID compatible ad player with built in viewability detection since 2014.  We are seeing the early moving agencies adapt mobile and HTML5 VPAID at scale.  We think this will continue to be a large growth area during Q4 2016 and looking forward into 2017.

Charlene Weisler:  What is seamless video advertising?

Brian DeFrancesco: Seamless video advertising is about offering the customer everything they need to run their full business on our platform.  We offer a single self-service platform for mobile apps, connected TV, desktop and mobile web.  We have a customizable ad player, pre-built ad formats, a best-in-class mediation layer that uses a technology to automatically optimize itself based on up to the minute reporting data, paired with creative hosting, 3rd party integrations with Moat, WhiteOps, Krux, and Oracle.  Seamless video advertising is about building technology solutions to address the problems that publishers and advertisers face in the market so that they can stop worrying about technology challenges and focus on their business. We’ve recently taken this one step further with the introduction of LKQD Fusion.

Charlene Weisler:  What is LKQD Fusion?

Brian DeFrancesco: LKQD FUSION provides real-time communication and functionality 'bridges' between Flash and HTML5 video ads. This enables desktop Publishers to support video ads from all Advertisers regardless if they have transitioned to HTML5 or still utilize Flash.  LKQD FUSION partners can maximize their revenue by delivering both Flash and HTML5 video ads on all inventory while also becoming fully prepared for the inevitable end of Flash being pushed by every major browser on the market.  The technology is not focused on content recognition per se, but rather on providing publishers with a simple single solution so they do not need to worry about the codebase of the content, and can focus on running their business.  We rolled out the product publicly in July and have seen incredible traction in desktop since public launch.  LKQD FUSION publishers now have a future-proof solution for desktop to complement LKQD's already best in class solutions for mobile video, making us a platform of choice for over 200 publishers globally.

Charlene Weisler: What types of data do you collect and what metrics do you use?

Brian DeFrancesco: We use both in-house and third party metrics for measuring video ad performance, ROI, and brand safety.  These include: completion rate, click thru rate, viewability, audibility, true domain or app where ad display, human vs. non-human traffic, and many others.

Charlene Weisler: Where do you see the ad serving space five years from now?

Brian DeFrancesco: I believe open platforms will play a vital role in the future of ad tech, especially for Publishers.  Ad servers will provide the core ad delivery infrastructure (uptime, scale, real-time reporting, data management, third party integrations) that will enable companies to build their own business models on top of.  Ultimately, it’s about providing the tools for success and letting Publishers build their own strategy unique to their properties and their audience.