A Focus on Linear Media Today and Tomorrow: MediaPost’s Forecasts for 2019 and 2024

Today in linear media, we are going through the Fourth Industrial Revolution where advanced technology is disrupting several industries, according to Forbes. MediaPost’s Media Forecast 2019-2024 conference had experts peer into their crystal balls to see where our industry is headed in the next five years.

2019: Smooth Sailing

Since US ad spending growth at 3.7 percent is expected to lag behind national GDP growth, as reported by Broadcasting & Cable, are we beginning to see a seismic shift this year in ad spend and linear media?

Most panelists at the conference generally agreed that there will not be any dramatic change in 2019, even with GDPR. But for David Campanelli, EVP, co-chief investment officer at Horizon Media, agencies will see significant operational change to prove that ad campaigns drive sales results. Geoffrey Sanders, SVP of Growth at Casper, believed that there will be greater emphasis on attribution so as to better understand “which partners help us get incremental value.” This push towards attribution incrementality could bode well for local TV. The medium benefits from the addressability of ATSC 3.0 and programmatic, which has always been focused on targeting and accountability.

TV is projected to remain a dominant medium as it pivots....

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Programmatic Advertising and AI: Insight From MediaPost’s Marketing AI Conference

Among the various means of buying media content, programmatic launched as one of the few forms that fully embraced advancing technology—and it’s artificial intelligence (AI) that’s helping to bring about that profound technological change.

At MediaPost’s recent Marketing AI conference held in Manhattan, media experts explored the impact that this protocol will have on buying, selling, agencies, commerce, customer experience, and marketing. Here’s insight from some of the featured speakers.

The Changing World of Media Buying

While AI has been in the conversation for a while, “the hype is starting to get real,” according to Ross Fadner, director of event programming at MediaPost. “There are more efficient products, and questions are arising as to how AI is being applied and what it means.”

There is talk that technology like machine learning and AI will replace humans in a variety of media jobs, but author Ken Auletta questions whether that is really true. Ultimately, “you have to rely on humans and not on machines,” he stated.

Trust is a large factor in how we balance the use of targeting data and the legacy...

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Do We Really Need Blockchain in Media?

The word on everyone’s lips today has to be blockchain. Bloomberg Businessweek writes about its use in farm-to-table tracking for food safety. In brand marketing, we talk about how blockchain in media can be used in attribution to better gauge ROI. However an industry uses it, blockchain’s lofty promise is sure to change the buy-sell dynamic.

The recent MediaPost Blockchain Marketing Forum, held in Manhattan, outlined the promise and the perils of this protocol technology, how it impacts the media supply chain, how it offers verifiability, and how it might streamline logistics. Professionals across the industry offer their insight on the protocol.

The Advantages of Blockchain

Although definitions vary, Rolfe William Swinton, cofounder and director of data assets at GfK, describes the blockchain protocol as an open global infrastructure that offers a decentralized, self-owned, and self-controlled public ledger. It allows complete user access to the entire chain and is transacted in cryptocurrency. Therefore, it provides a tamper-proof method of global distribution that bypasses traditional intermediaries...

Read the full article at the Videa blog.

When Agencies Predict the Ad Market: MediaPost’s Outfront Forum

As a strategist myself, I’m finding that it’s becoming harder and harder to predict the industry even five years out. 

So it was with great interest that I attended MediaPost’s Outfront Forum, where agencies debated the future of the upcoming upfronts, as well as what the upfront might look like five years from now.

Upfronts 2018-2019

There are some topics that seem to swirl through the media ecosystem in waves. This year it’s blockchain, the advanced advertising platform OpenAP, and the reduced ad load on certain networks, which might lead to increased pricing. Panelists prognosticating on the next few months were concerned about how pricing would impact their buys, though they understood the need to reduce clutter in order to improve viewer engagement and attention.

“I support the fact that we live in fragmented world,” stated Maureen Bosetti, chief investment officer at Initiative. “The networks are trying to create a more engaging ad experience and increase attention. They created a world with more clutter and are now trying to pull back.”

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

CIMM Lexicon on Mediapost - A Word A Week

CIMM, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, whose Lexicon of Set Top Box Data terms and definitions has helped to standardize the language associated with STB data and its measurement has just launched a weekly column on Mediapost's TV Board called A Word A Week. This column selects a term and definition from the CIMM Lexicon and places it in context.

As a compiler and editor of the CIMM Lexicon, I am pleased to see that the terms and definitions will be showcased to a wide audience via Mediapost and hope that this will help facilitate STB data standardization, measurement and usage in the industry.

A Set Top Box Data Ratio

MPG held its Collaborative Alliance meeting in New York on June 3, 2010. At the meeting, a group of us who formed the Collaborative Set Top Box Data Committee posited a method to apply set top box data to help networks that are not rated by Nielsen to translate their data for use by the agencies and their national television buyers. As we stressed during the meeting, this is directional and not intended as a data comparison.


Background
This ratio percentage was not created in a vacuum. We consider it a next step in a series of careful analyses of various cuts of set top box data from different data aggregators. We present it as one more example of the efficacy and usability of set top box data for measurement.

Past analyses have shown that when set top box data results are compared to Nielsen:
 There are similar performance ranks for larger networks
 There are similar percent share of GRPs for broadcast networks
 There is a high correlation between homes delivery of the two data sets in some local markets.

With the knowledge gained from these past analyses, we felt that we could create a ratio percentage using STB data that can be used to help translate the performance of networks that are not measured by Nielsen into an agency’s measurement parlance. What we did was to compare the delivery of a chosen network to a select affinity group of measured-by-Nielsen networks (such as Kids, Sports, Business and General Entertainment) in STB data and then apply this ratio to the actual Nielsen delivery for those same measured networks.

We examined a range of networks using Rentrak’s AT&T U-Verse data including Bloomberg, INSP, Sprout and Wealth. All these networks subscribed to Rentrak measurement. This does not include set top boxes in their Dish and other platforms. For the record, Rentrak reaches over 15 million tv sets. For the purposes of this analysis we used a subset which was the complete U-Verse universe of 2.5 million homes.

The following people were involved in discussions about the project at some point in its development: Joe Abruzzo (MPG), Brad Adgate (Horizon), Matthew Bayer (Carat), Shari Anne Brill (Independent), John Cogan (OMD), Ed DiNicola (Independent), Andy Donchin (Carat), Joan Fitzgerald (comScore), Frank Foster (AT&T U-Verse), Jason Kanefsky (MPG), Bill Livik (Rentrak), John Morse (Byron Media), Jim Multari (PBS Sprout), Mitch Oscar (MPG),
Stu Rodnick (Three Screen Nation), Art Salisch (Scarborough), Jonathan Steuer (AT&T U-Verse), Rick Wardell (INSP), Charlene Weisler (Independent) and Leslie Wood (Independent).


Sprout Example
In creating a ratio percentage for Sprout, we chose three Kids prototype networks that were measured by Nielsen and that best matched the Sprout profile. Using Rentrak AT&T U-Verse of 2.5 Million households for Primetime 8-11p we examined the following weeks: January 18-24, 2010, October 19-25, 2009, July 20-26, 2009 and April 20-26, 2009. We examined the same week per quarter to help ascertain seasonality.

Starting with January 18-24, 2010, we grossed and then averaged the audience delivery for the three prototype networks. Then we calculated Sprout’s percentage delivery of that average which was 9% for that January week.

Rentrak AT&T U-Verse Universe Impressions (Average Audience)
Cartoon 17,379 -
ABC Family 13,259 -
Nickelodeon 38,389 -
Total 69,027 (100%)
Average 23,009 -
Sprout 2,037 (9%)

We then examined Nielsen performance for the three prototype networks for the same week in January, grossed and averaged these deliveries and then applied the 4% ratio to the average. The result was 38,357 or Sprout.

Nielsen National Impressions (Average Audience)
Cartoon 382,521
ABC Family 680,379
Nickelodeon 215,683
Total 1,278,583
Average 426,194

Ratio % 9%
Sprout Average Audience 38,357

After calculating January, we wanted to be sure that the ratio was stable and not subject to seasonality. In applying the methodology to the other three quarters we found that the ratio percentage was comparable.

2Q09 3Q09 4Q09 1Q10
Sprout Ratio % 10% 8% 10% 9%


Conclusion
While the creation of performance ratios through Set Top Box Data is still in its developmental stages, the ratios created with prototypes using Rentrak’s AT&T U-Verse data has met with research and buyer sign-off as a plausible approach at agencies such as MPG and Carat. We hope to be able to examine more datasets over the next few months. This initial step indicates to us that the ratio method has the potential to create meaningful, comparable delivery impressions for certain networks in the television universe for use at the agencies.