Advanced Advertising Archive

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Nielsen Tackles Inertia In Multiscreen Ad Space

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Operations, Metrics & Transactions Management

Shelly Palmer, managing director, Advanced Media Ventures Group

Shelly Palmer, managing director, Advanced Media Ventures Group

January 30, 2012 – There’s new hope the systemic gridlock that has silo’d online video and television advertising to the great detriment of premium TV Everywhere and over-the-top strategies alike will finally be broken. But it could be a long time coming.
 
Several initiatives are coming together to raise these possibilities. These include early execution on plans outlined last year by the advertising industry’s Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) project and a fast-moving push on the part of Nielsen toward “total video” measurements that marry TV with online viewing by mixing input from traditional panel methods and data gathered by third parties.

None of this is easy, notes advertising guru Shelley Palmer, who heads up the Advanced Media Ventures Group and hosts a variety of syndicated TV and radio shows devoted to digital culture. “TV Everywhere is awesome; measurement everywhere is mythology,” Palmer says.

Or, as Needham & Co. senior analyst Laura Martin puts it, the metrics that dominate ad purchasing in video are those tied to TV, not the Internet. “It’s something called a currency, and it is Nielsen,” Martin says. “I hand you my ratings; you hand me the cash.”

In contrast, she adds, when it comes to buying ads for video online “we are all going to sit there and fight about what the discount is, what does it really mean, is it really representative of the sample. We spend hours fighting over the data and how much I should pay you for the data.”

The 3MS initiative, backed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, is meant to overcome the problem of inconsistent online metrics by establishing a uniform approach to online audience measurement. The group hopes to set parameters that will achieve five goals, namely: to specify viewable versus served impressions, which is to say, impressions actually seen on a Web page; to categorize ad types; to count audience (unique individual impressions) rather than gross impressions; to standardize metrics in accord with their relevance to various brand goals, and to allow apples-to-apples integration of online measurements with metrics used in other media.

This is a slow-moving process, which has seen the outlining of goals and operating principles accomplished over the past year along with preparations for the first pilot tests, which are aimed at resolving the viewable impressions issue in time for a fourth-quarter launch. The group is still working on test schedules for the other parameters with no word on timing for completion of the whole set of specifications.

Meanwhile, Nielsen is pursuing a wide range of measures that could accelerate the ability of media buyers to engineer multiscreen video campaigns far more efficiently than has been possible up to now. “We’re trying to put out a kind of newer metric, if you will, a metric that we would call total video,” says Scott Brown, senior vice president for digital platforms at Nielsen.

“Total video is unconstrained,” Brown says. “It’s not video from your television, from your DVR, from your mobile phone. It’s video from all available sources that we need to aggregate and put together as one fixed number.”

A big step in this direction is the Media Rating Council’s accreditation of the Nielsen Online Campaign (OCR) as meeting MRC’s Minimum Standards for Media Rating Research, marking the first time the agency has accredited an Internet measurement system that provides demographic ratings for online campaigns. The Nielsen system employs a patent-pending process combining traditional Nielsen TV and online panel data with aggregated, anonymous demographic information from participating online data providers to provide overnight audience reach, frequency and Gross Rating Points (GRPs) for Internet display and video advertising.

Nielsen reports that early tests showed OCR could track 42 percent of impressions of a given ad, whereas its traditional panel sample online ad tracking methodology typically tracks three percent. Company officials say emergence of ORC as an industry-blessed component of the metric currency means that advertisers will be able to see how many people saw their campaign in three dimensions – only on television, only online and on both – on the same interface and in the same format.

Many leading players are now engaged in various stages of using the platform in their campaigns, including Disney/ABC, Proctor & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Starcom MediaVest and GroupM. O CR “helps build trust between buyers and sellers on a broad scale,” says Ted McConnell, executive vice president of digital for the Advertising Research Foundation. “Having something this technically complex validated by a third party like the MRC is especially important for the industry and will help buyers sleep better.”

Kate Sirkin, executive vice president for global research at Starcom MediaVest Group, agrees. The platform ‘provides both agencies and advertisers with the confidence that their campaigns are reaching their desired audience,” Sirkin says. “And it delivers appropriate metrics for post campaign analysis to understand how the campaigns worked to drive sales or other valuable brand behaviors.”

It’s a good start, but it’s just a start, Brown acknowledges. “We move about as fast as the industry allows us to move, because half of our clients unwittingly will tell us we’re moving too fast and the other half say we’re too slow,” he says.

It has taken a long time for the online upstarts to recognize they needed Nielsen and for Nielsen to take the online video side of the consumer experience seriously enough to move beyond its mode of operations in the traditional TV measurement business. As Brown notes, “The advertising community expected that digital media would be much easier to measure, because of the nature of the devices supplying the content, the signals, the information and the entertainment. But, in effect, what they found is that it’s just the opposite, that the digital media has been harder to monetize, harder to estimate, harder to get their hands around and understand, and particularly to understand the flow of media dollars, whether it goes from traditional media to digital media, whether digital media is purely an additive.”

Now Nielsen is bringing credibility that was missing, says Needham’s Martin. “Over the last 30 years [Nielsen ratings have] become a currency over which the TV ecosystem has bonded,” she says. The upshot is “the best chance the OTT guys have of monetizing [is] the day Nielsen arrives.”

In the year ahead Nielsen will partner with Tremor Video, a leading provider of in-stream Internet video advertising solutions, to give clients of Tremor’s VideoHub access to OCR’s GRP data. VideoHub allows advertisers to understand how audiences respond to campaigns and to identify key signals driving performance metrics like engagement and brand lift. With Nielsen’s GRPs, those advertisers will now see what demographic audiences their campaigns are reaching, says Kelly McEttrick, director of platform strategy for VideoHub.

In other words, McEttrick says, the collaboration gives advertisers a single metric for their gross reach – the total number of people exposed to an ad – and effective reach – more granular insight into the quality of the ad exposure and actual performance across all screens. “Debate over whether the GRP is good or bad for the digital space has gone on for years, but those days are coming to an end,” she says. “Advertisers can now look at their demographic reach, and then evaluate how their campaign performed within each audience segment.”

To advance the total video strategy Nielsen has also expanded its data-gathering efforts on the TV side, including engagements with a growing number of set-top data sources, which began in 2008 with a deal involving collection of anonymous set-top data from 330,000 households in the Los Angeles area. Last summer Nielsen announced an agreement with Kantar Media to use data from DirecTV devices in its ratings reports, and now it’s bringing other, unnamed sources into the fold.

Nielsen is also working with unnamed media companies to measure Time Warner Cable and Cablevision subscribers’ viewing habits on the iPad. The R&D project is using the small piece of code on the iPad known as ID3 tags in conjunction with server-side software to measure viewing.

Brown also reports Nielsen, working with forensic watermarking developer Digimarc, is introducing a new audio watermarking system for TV advertisements, complementing the watermarking system used for augmenting viewing metrics on TV programs that has been in operation for several years. “We’re ushering in an era where Nielsen is sort of separating out the program from the commercial inventory and being able to measure the pieces individually,” Brown says. “It puts in [advertisers’] hands the power to really help the industry move the ball forward from C3 [the time-shifted TV ad measurement platform] to the next evolution of measurement.

“I don’t know what that the next evolution might be,” he adds. “It might be an improvement upon C3. It might be a movement toward branded commercial ratings, which many in the industry have asked for.”

These are obviously big steps forward, but the question remains whether the inertia surrounding the way advertisers do business can be changed. Major brands often come to the table with six agencies, “minimally,” Palmer notes, including the buying agency, a planning agency, a creative agency, a digital agency, an outdoor group and a PR group. When it comes to a multiscreen type of buy, “the problem is each of their POVs (points of view) has to be, no, because it’s not inside their agenda, and they make money differently from the way the enterprise makes money,” he says.

“What we are lacking desperately is unified metrics, standardization so that you can bring this product to the advertisers and all six of their agencies, including their marketing departments and the merchants inside the organization, and say, look, you can buy this efficaciously and it will make you money by driving velocity at retail,” Palmer adds. And, once those agreed-on-metrics and agreed-on modes of driving velocity at retail are in place, successful execution of the TV Everywhere advertising model will require that “creative agencies and buying and planning groups come together and become whole agencies again where they can actually look at a problem and go solve it.”

That won’t be easy, notes Tim McAtee, research director at MAGNA-GLOBAL and IPG Media Labs. “I think the big problem we’re all facing is procurement offices,” McAtee says. “As long as procurement offices are trying to get the cheapest everything out of everybody, you’re always going to be battling each other and it’s never going to any sort of coherent strategy.”

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New Progress for Multiscreen Advertising Data Framework

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Operations, Metrics & Transactions Management

Suzanne Rainey, principal, Accord Media Group

Suzanne Rainey, principal, Accord Media Group

January 4, 2012 – In this discussion from ScreenPlays Media Innovations Summit executives leading the way in viewing measurement and data analytics explore strengths and weaknesses in various online and TV data environments and identify innovations that could take advertisers where they want to go with multiscreen campaigns.
 
Suzanne Rainey, principal, Accord Media – Just to put things in perspective before we get into our discussion, in 2010 the average person spent 2,000 hours using media on the Internet. This is a six percent increase from the previous year, and that was largely driven by social media and workers using software to access and manipulate information. Mobile was 77 hours, and that’s a 50 percent increase over the previous year. It’s expected to increase 35 percent this year to grow to 104 hours, and that’s thanks to the iPad and tablets. Astoundingly, the average person watches over 1,900 hours of television a year, and that’s a 0.2 percent increase over the previous year.

Let’s begin by having each of you briefly describe what you do.

William Merchan, VP, Business Development, MarketShare – I run business development for MarketShare to manage our partnerships with data and channel and agency partners. We’re a predictive analytics company using a lot of targeted media data.

Bill Feininger, SVP, Media Measurement, FourthWall Media – FourthWall Media provides a number of services in the cable space from EBIF platforms to applications. My specific area is in the data business.

Scott Brown, SVP, Digital Platforms, Nielsen – We’re obviously a company that provides measurement for television usage, product Internet and a variety of other products associated with media consumption. My role with Nielsen is largely to be an external speaker. Thought leadership is the more candid term that’s being bantered about these days. I’m in the communications and strategic relations areas as well.

Rainey – At Digital Hollywood last month one of the speakers said the current group of media buyers have to die in order to advance advertising. Is that what it’s going to take?

Brown – Hopefully there’s an alternative, because if it goes that far, then it’s gone too far. I think what the panel member at Digital Hollywood was probably trying to say – I was there – is that the media business as we know it today has been a slow grower – steady, sustained growth. It’s an industry that in effect doesn’t like a lot of change and in effect is very conservative for the most part.

The advertising community is very much the same. Programmer, buyer, seller, whatever, no one likes disruption. So what we’ve seen is an industry that every year grows by four, five or six percent. This past year in spite of a very rough economy we saw television usage increasing by 22 minutes more per month. We’ve seen that television is an amazing sustaining business. And the advertising community is obviously calling for improved measures of accountability, return on investment and harkening for an era when improved metrics can also follow. So I think every member of this panel in one form or another is interested in seeing the whole advertising paradigm move forward, interested in seeing improvements in the metrics and the insights that can be gained from those metrics.

Feininger – Not a lot to add to that. I do believe there’s a new wave of devices and a new wave of services, and somehow they’ve all got to get measured. Rather than relying on old techniques, and old services, there’s got to be new innovation in the research and on the collection side of that.

Merchan – We’re seeing that a lot of the media-buying decision making is being shifted to in-house CMO organizations, versus relying 100 percent on a media agency and a junior analyst at a spread sheet to make that decision, and thinking about it in terms of outcomes, revenue, profit, unit sales, instead of awareness and intent. I think those are fundamental shifts we’re seeing, and a lot of it is driven by the targeted media and the transparency of data.

Rainey – What was the biggest development in advanced advertising last year?

Merchan – I think the biggest development that we’ve seen is the larger brand advertisers putting more reliance and dependence on emerging media to drive impact. We’ve seen it with a lot of the clients we work with where, along the lines of what they were doing with search and display many years ago, where they were testing the waters before going all the way and making bigger buys in emerging media. Things like investing seven-digit media buys in Facebook and social media probably would have been unheard a couple of years ago. But last year you saw many large global advertisers do things like that.

Feininger – I think there’s been a lot of experimentation that has gone on. And unfortunately for the television side a lot of the dollars have left to go somewhere else to do some of those experiments. As an EBIF and technology provider for the cable industry, we think the opportunities are going to be coming back to television. That’s where the audience is. We think that as the platforms get out there, there’s much opportunity for that to take place and for more innovation and more reach to those consumers to happen in the television space.

Brown – I guess I would add to it from the Nielsen perspective, we’ve seen interactive television go through lots of starts and stops. We think back to the period when the Aurora trials were going on in 2001, and a lot was learned with AT&T Broadband and with Navic in that period of time. And most of what was learned was that the technology was not ready. Today it would appear from a Nielsen standpoint the technology is ready, beginning to deploy. Monetizing digital media is a huge challenge, because most people don’t understand what they have at this point in time.

Rainey – What do you think they have that they don’t understand they have?

Brown – There’s a gentleman by the name of Bob Liodice, who’s the CEO of the ANA [Association of National Advertisers], who got up and made a comment at a recent show that the advertising community expected that digital media would be much easier to measure, because of the nature of the devices supplying the content, the signals, the information and the entertainment. But, in effect, what they found is that it’s just the opposite, that the digital media has been harder to monetize, harder to estimate, harder to get their hands around and understand, and particularly to understand the flow of media dollars, whether it goes from traditional media to digital media, whether digital media is purely an additive.

The great issue that all companies face, and in particular Nielsen Co. faces, because we are first and foremost a measurement company, is to be able to attach measurement to each of the various small kernels, slivers of usage that are beginning to emerge. Fragmentation is multiplying. So every client is dealing with smaller slivers of usage.

The question is what is effective within those slivers. We can talk a lot about what has really changed. From my perspective the thing that’s most important for Nielsen is that we’ve been able to put in place partnerships with third-party companies that were talked about for many years but finally have reached fruition.

We have a partnership with Google where we actually provide them very deep information from our measurement panel to help them monetize their end of the business, which is separate from ours. We have an arrangement with Facebook for our new online campaign ratings, which basically dovetails panel-based viewing with subscription information and demographics that they’re enabled to collect. And by merging those two sources of data we now have a new currency that we can offer the industry for the online world and begin to allow advertisers and programmers to understand the monetization model that must exist there.

So a lot of change has occurred in the last three years, much of which gets lost in the shuffle of media coverage. And there are other companies that are going to put in place relationships, and ours is certainly seeking relationships with any provider of data that can help Nielsen provide more insight to our clients.

Rainey –It’s been said that people using analytics are overwhelmed by data that’s meaningless, and that they need data that’s actionable. What’s the reality of using the available data? And please comment on the quality of the data.

Feininger – I agree. There’s a lot of data emerging. There’s a lot of it that’s not very well done. It’s not very consistent.

We collect a lot of set-top data in our services. Today we’re in over two million set-top boxes across the United States in 14 MSOs. We understand the problem. We can collect from every single one of the devices we’re inside of.

We’ve beat the problem of how do you handle the back channel and how do you get consistent and clean, concise information back. We feel like we’ve created a new area for the industry. It’s a new way to get set-top data nice and actionable and useful into all kinds of other services.

Merchan – The thing we’ve seen is that the big data problem is obviously out there where marketers are swimming in terabytes of data. it’s only useful if you put context around all that data. We’ve used social media data, digital data and set-top box data and lots of different sources of that data to give insights to clients.

But I think just because the data is available, doesn’t mean it’s useful. How do you put context around that to help inform media decision or a marketing decision? With social media it’s great just to hear what’s happening out there is great, but if you don’t understand how to get more of that sentiment through traditional media buys it’s kind of useless. So we think providing context and insights to clients on how to drive more activity through the data that’s available now is really where there’s going to be a lot of value created.

Rainey – How do you do that?

Merchan – We do it with statistical models using these big data sets and build predictive models for clients on investments and marketing decisions for them.

Brown – I agree with your comment. Data by itself is an interesting commodity, but when it becomes information it becomes actionable. One point I guess I would like to echo is that, as all of you know, Nielsen has provided measurement data to national and local client advertisers and agencies for years and years and years. We move about as fast as the industry allows us to move, because half of our clients unwittingly will tell us we’re moving too fast and the other half say we’re too slow. So where do you meet?

The offerings of data we’ve been developing over the past couple of years have really grown to rather change our business model. Instead of being a purely panel-based company upon which we project audiences, we’re increasingly becoming more of a hybrid-based company, meaning we see the virtues of panel-based measurement, because it’s an opt-in, it’s an in-depth sort of analysis of who’s viewing, what they’re viewing and all of the kind of market characteristics that are important to clients, but also it’s one of taking advantage of third-party data sets, set-top data, data from any number of companies that actually can be integrated to create more depth of measurement, more breadth of measurement by virtue of the large volumes of data that can be secured.

So we’re really moving down that path of pushing with our client base this notion of going hybrid and trying to destroy some of the myths around set-top data, the myths being that set-top data doesn’t give you enough actionable information. We think it does. We’ve compared it to panel-based measurement, and set-top data is pretty good stuff for the most part.

There is no perfect data set. And anybody that believes there is is mistaken. Even our data is not perfect. There are weaknesses in every data set. But we think by virtue of combining the two and developing a number of models which we have developed for set-on, set-off demographics and so forth, we can offer to our clients at an affordable price a much more expansive business and a much more expansive set of metrics. And also having the ability to do the deep analytical dive into the data to understand the nuances, which so many of our clients require.

Rainey – Do we need standard demographics such as adult 18-49 in an advanced advertising world?

Brown – Gee, I thought Nielsen kind of standardized demographic reporting in one context. The answer is probably sure. I wouldn’t disagree with that. But I’d probably pass the mike to my friend Bill.

Feininger – I think the answer is, yes. But I think it’s a qualified yes. The reason I say that is for doing predictive modeling or for any kind of measurements you can place your products and services in front of consumers, you want to make sure you get it to the right place. And those services, advertisers and products still are trying to reach specific audiences. Many of them are built on age, gender and other kind of characteristics that are out there today. So I think the answer is yes.

Merchan – I’ll go ahead and be the no guy on the panel. I think the idea of demographic targeting or reach-based targeting was a means to an end historically. The reason you did that was you had no way to directly figure out whether this user was going to end up purchasing my product.

In a lot of ways those barriers are gone. You look at data providers that let you know attributes that are more relevant than a demographic – is this person in the market for a new car, do they have kids in the household – things that historically you wouldn’t even have a possibility of targeting against that now you can. As more and more devices light up more and more of that data will be available across platforms. I’d say historically it was a proxy for getting to that point, but now that you can do targeting in a more meaningful way to get better predictions as to how it might impact outcomes, you don’t need it any more.

Rainey – Analytics is driving the development of new metrics. What’s taking hold and what new metrics are being developed?

Merchan – A lot of our clients are using marketing ROI and doing it across all their portfolio of investmnets. What we’re doing is building resource allocation models for them. And so it’s not about what was my reach in a particular niche. It’s more about, if I’m going to dial up my investment by five or 50 million over the next quarter, how does that translate into sales? Ultimately their CEOs or CFOs are asking them to be accountable now whereas in the past they could have said, well, look what this says to our awareness or brand tracker. That’s not good enough anymore. The measurement we’re seeing many of the marketers we work with being accountable to now is all about marketing ROI, regardless of what channel they’re doing that marketing investment in.

Feininger – For new metrics there are two things we see over and over from our clients. They want to provide some way to determine engagement with the programming or the advertisement. Having set-top data and very granular information allows them to get to that, whatever particular algorithms they’re using to drive to that. That’s one.

The other I agree is with ROI. We see a lot of taking set-top data and merging it with other third-party data sets so they can try to find those segments, those groups or those consumers who are looking for something else. And so they can get that entire feedback loop now so that they can understand that.

Brown –Nielsen is also looking at how to cement data bases that we already have at our disposal to create more value for our customers and clients. Be it Catalina marketing, be it our Home Scan, all of that purchase data and linking in with the viewing data and then looking to see if we can basically create a cross-platform offering is being met with our clients with enthusiasm. Although the growth of mobile year over year seems very large, in the context of just regular video usage in the home, it’s a small fragment. The same is true for Internet. Yet we still launched the TV Everywhere extended screen measurement so that today homes that are part of our national panel that have PCs, we’re measuring those homes.

We’re measuring the PC streaming consumption, and the estimates, if you will, are additive for the reported C3 rating. That is a big step forward, to be able to measure the PC usage. It is cross platform in nature. So we’re really trying to tie it all together.

We’ve been issuing these quarterly cross-platform reports to our clients. It’s giving an interesting picture of what viewers and viewership is doing. We’ve been able to tease out some kind of interesting things from the data as well. We’ve learned, for instance, traditional light viewers who don’t tune into television a great deal are actually showing evidence of becoming heavier Web video users.

We’re seeing that over-the-top is becoming a bit more of a force. I don’t want to mislead. It’s not a huge segment of the viewing pie, but it’s a consistently growing segment. In concert with over-the-top content, people are increasingly making use of DVR and non-linear sorts of viewing arrangements in their homes. It skews younger, to the 18-34 year-old audience, which is more and more watching TV in a non-live environment.

All of those things have tremendous implications for an industry that measures progress sometimes in terms of single percentage points. A single percentage point change for an NBC or CBS is a big deal. So we try to provide a lot of the granularity behind that change and are trying to predict some of the shifts with the analytics we produce so that clients are not taken unaware. The worse thing a researcher wants to do is go to his boss and say, we missed this, we didn’t see this coming, because usually that costs somebody their employment.

Rainey – How does social media fit in and impact advanced advertising?

Brown – In many ways. The data has supported very strongly the contention that social
media is a very strong influencer. It’s a very strong influencer for video applications. We’re seeing more and more video moving into the social network world.

There’s a direct correlation. If you think about it, some of the major social media suppliers – Facebook, LinkedIn and others – you’re talking 300 million, 400 million subscribers. That’s a lot of people you’re impacting and influencing. We’ve seen correlations that directly indicate to us that more and more people will go to social media for viewing if the media is made available to them.

As a result Nielsen is really going down this path of cross-platform measurement but also trying to put out a kind of newer metric, if you will, a metric that we would call “total video.” Total video is unconstrained. It’s not video from your television, from your DVR, from your mobile phone. It’s video from all available sources that we need to aggregate and put together as one fixed number.

Feininger – I agree. The ecosystems may be around programs or profiles of people or what have you. That takes us in our business at FourthWall to developing technologies that allow you to connect these other devices back through to the television itself so that you can do some level of synchronization or some level of having your iPad work in conjunction with your EBIF-enabled set-top boxes. We see that as a way to help drive into that social environment and to be able to collect some metrics there and to be able to see the things that are going on between those two companion devices.

Merchan – We’ve seen that traditional media is a strong driver of social media. There’s this idea that you need to pick one or another, and it’s really not the case. You need to figure out how to orchestrate all of your media efforts together. If you launch the best Facebook page in the world, no one is going to go there unless you’re running traditional media against it in volume that actually matters. The more innovative brands are building a cross-platform approach, building a presence through their TV campaign that then drives people to social. And that’s where you’re going to see the best success. You can’t just have social be your only strategy, because you’re going to fall flat and lose.

Brown – I’d like to bounce it back to you as our moderator and ask, what are your thoughts?

Rainey – I think social is a whole category. I was talking to a researcher at USC a couple of weeks ago who’s an expert in gaming. He has a theory that social may impact 40 percent of decision making for a person. You see the growth of Facebook, 100 percent year over year. I think it’s going to continue to grow bigger and bigger. I wouldn’t think anyone would just use social as a strategy. It’s going to be a complement to other forms of advertising.

Brown – One of the interesting things we’ve delved into recently is that one of the fastest growing categories is in the 55-plus age group. What’s happening is, particularly on mobile devices, there’s a way of interfacing with family and friends, friends going back perhaps generations that you’ve lost touch with. It’s an interesting kind of experiment, if you will.

There are other companies looking at social media sites who are doing innovative things with trying to license and permission traditional video content and populate it within social media applications. Who knows if social media becomes another outlet for video consumption, but from a technology standpoint I don’t think anything prevents that. And it probably will be a viable video outlet for the future.

Rainey – How well are the cable, satellite, telephone companies and others using set-top box data, and are there significant differences in how well they’re using the data?

Feininger – All three have various amounts of data. They’re using it for various different reasons. On the cable side, we’re kind of early. We’re one of the first there that are really able to get a lot of cable data. We’ve heard lots about Canoe over the years, but frankly there hasn’t been a lot of data flowing there yet. In our case we’re doing what we can to help our clients. There’s a good amount of cable data that’s beginning to flow back both as raw data and as research reports, so they’re getting something they haven’t had before.

On the telco side there are two very different systems available today in the U.S. There are different thoughts as to how good it is or how much of it is available. There’s not a lot that’s available commercially today, but there is some. It seems to be pretty decent data.

And on the satellite side it’s kind of hit or miss. Satellite, because of the back channel not being consistent, there are some issues of reliability with it. Although there are large volumes, it just doesn’t seem to be as complete and as consistent. They do have some interesting interactive data in some cases. As we look at new ad models and new ad units that’s something that’s very important.

Our own system, our own ad widget system and TV widget systems which allow you to enhance programs or provide applications do provide a significant amount of data. So there are new areas on the cable side that are really jumping to the forefront.

I think it’s an interesting mix of data among the three. Cable in my opinion is ahead of the other two. It’s not quite as broad and wide, but I think it’s a little better data with the other two following behind fairly closely.

Brown –The process has led to incremental improvements over the years so that the data in our estimation and the data and we’ve seen – we have data from Charter and from Direct View today – actually it looks pretty good, clearly usable. And we will use the metered samples we collect for both our local People Meter markets and for the meter markets and for the national People Meter market as a control, if you will. Again, building the model so that we can fuse the data elements together and eventually get to a stage where we’ll be able to offer expanded sample sizes to our clients.

But everything is an iterative process of improvement. Nothing will look perfect out of the gate. For the Direct View data we’ve taken license to it will probably be sometime next year before we actually begin to share and release data. But we’ve already done three market trials with some of the data that we do have in house.

Rainey – Electronically traded bidding markets are developing alongside the upfront and conventional media markets resulting in decisions that are more data driven than relationship driven. Will the two markets come together?

Merchan – I think we’re seeing a lot of that happening already. You look at what Google is doing with Google TV; you look at the announced merger between MediaBank and Donovan. I think you are going to see a convergence there. There will always be some upfront, premium version of the TV marketplace, and you’ll still see it in digital media as well. Yahoo!’s Front Page is a valuable property. There are other places that you’re still going to see there’s need to guarantee delivery, guarantee that premium content.

But I think more and more you’re going to see media move into this world of bidded marketplaces and automation and linking the data sets together. The agencies are building up their tools and teams to be ready for that. Every major holding company has a group that’s focused squarely on that area. And most of it’s in display media today, but you can see how that can morph over time as more media comes online.

Feininger – I think all decisions will be more data driven. Whether it’s through the traditional up fronts or whether it’s through some bartering or trading system, more and more will be done by data-driven decisions. There’s more data out there. You’re certainly going to see more people use it. I think that as far as a trading system goes, it’s more likely it’s not going to happen in the up fronts. That kind of thing will be in the scatter market.

Brown – I agree.

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Ad Platform Advances Overcome Barriers to Multiscreen Campaigns

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Technology Platforms

John Gee, VP, sales, advanced advertising technology, NAGRA

John Gee, VP, sales, advanced advertising technology, NAGRA

December 22, 2011 –Several recent steps taken by leading ad technology suppliers to enable efficient management of multiscreen campaigns in the cable space have put the onus on the advertising community to come up with business models that can exploit these new capabilities.
 
While many of these advances are vendor specific and require implementations of new processing platforms, they all leverage an expanding base of standardized interfaces and messaging architecture developed under auspices of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers and CableLabs to allow multiple vendor solutions to interoperate. In essence, for the first time it’s possible for ad campaign management systems to interact with MSO databases to instantaneously draw up target audience profiles and to deliver ads on linear and on-demand content to whatever devices those audiences are using to access programming.

In one dramatic display of how all this comes together, ARRIS, combining technology from its recent acquisition of BigBand Networks and a new ad management system, has basically created an end-to-end solution that allows a single campaign to leverage ad management and placement techniques used in both the traditional TV and IP domains to deliver ads through a single point of insertion into the video streams for all devices.

The new ARRIS AdManager allows providers to extend advertising campaigns across addressable, IP-capable devices like tablets, connected TVs, game stations, laptops and smart phones while supporting legacy TV advertising in linear and VOD. New functionalities in the multifaceted edge Media Services Platform (MSP) developed by BigBand provide a means by which ads can be prepared and transcoded for specific devices and then spliced on the fly into encrypted linear MPEG-2 and IP streams on a targeted basis in response to commands from the ad management system.

In a demonstration of these capabilities at the SCTE Expo in Atlanta last month, Jay Chambers, vice president of business development for edge media processing at ARRIS, explained how the MSP executed delivery of three different BMW ads associated with a traditional broadcast channel – one splicing into the HD stream to the set-top with support for an EBIF-enabled interactive offering and two targeted individually to two subscribers viewing the same TV program on different iPads.

“Today the iPad is treated simply as an additional outlet,” Chambers said. “You want to be able to implement this service as a new revenue stream, but you don’t want to have to maintain three different advertising support infrastructures to achieve the level of monetization we’re showing with the MSP.”

For the advertising over IP streams to work in concert with traditional linear advertising insertion over MPEG-2 requires real-time implementation of a different set of processes, including the ability to respond to the manifest commands in the IP stream and to create the adaptive streaming segments that are part of the HTTP Live Streaming mode used with Apple devices. “We’re bridging the gap to multiscreen advertising by leveraging the existing ad campaign and delivery infrastructure,” Chambers explains. “I can ingest the campaign schedule on MSP, which will use information about which ads are to be directed to which streams to splice them in the right format, and I’ll return you the numbers as a run file showing the ads were spliced into the MPEG-2 stream to the set-top and into the H.264 service on the iPads.”

Breaking new ground in another key area, NAGRA, through its recent acquisition of the subscriber information system (SIS) developed by Sigma Systems, is helping a number of MSO customers utilize the first SCTE 130-certfied SIS to create audience qualifications (AQs) from multiple proprietary databases to facilitate targeted ad campaigns. This is a complex task where a lot of information about households residing in MSO databases must be pulled together and compiled into categories fitting various approaches to describing AQs that are intrinsic to definitions used by agencies and market monitoring entities such as Arbitron’s Scarboroug system.

The SIS gives service providers the ability to aggregate disparate sources of customer information – such as location, subscriber demographics, services and usage trends – into a single view for audience qualification, explains John Gee, vice president of sales for advanced advertising technologies at NAGRA. This in turn allows service providers to match relevant advertising with the appropriate audience on both linear and on-demand streams across multiple device platforms.

“SIS is a recently approved specification,” Gee notes. “This is the only SCTE 130 certified SIS on the market at this point.”

The functions performed by SIS are vital to the emerging addressable advertising market, which has prompted wide engagement with the NAGRA system, Gee says. “We’re working with several major clients on features implementations,” he says.

“Every advertiser wants to use their own descriptions to define target audiences,” he continues. “The menu SIS uses to create AQs specific to advertisers’ needs is quite long with hundreds of categories.”

An essential role of the SIS is to report from an MSO’s data base the number of subscribers associated with categories of interest to an advertiser, allowing choices to be quickly made as to the extent and variety of targeting that might be undertaken with any given campaign. “It’s really a tool for agencies and advertises to understand audiences,” Gee says, noting that NAGRA is issuing a new advanced version of the system it purchased from Sigma Systems.

The system allows advertisers to define which audience profiles they want to target by assembling multiple categories into an AQ for each profile. The interaction between SIS and devices, including set-tops and IP devices, reports the characteristics that determine the AQ for each device and therefor which ad should be sent to that device in just 17 milliseconds, well under the 20 milliseconds set by the SCTE standard, Gee notes.

“This has to be a very robust, fast platform,” he says. “With many campaigns running across a big MSO’s footprint you could have 40 million or more subscriber devices interacting with the SIS.”

0

New Progress for Multiscreen Advertising Data Framework

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Operations, Metrics & Transactions Management

Suzanne Rainey, principal, Accord Media Group

Suzanne Rainey, principal, Accord Media Group

December 16, 2011 – In this discussion from ScreenPlays Media Innovations Summit executives leading the way in viewing measurement and data analytics explore strengths and weaknesses in various online and TV data environments and identify innovations that could take advertisers where they want to go with multiscreen campaigns.
 
Suzanne Rainey, principal, Accord Media – Just to put things in perspective before we get into our discussion, in 2010 the average person spent 2,000 hours using media on the Internet. This is a six percent increase from the previous year, and that was largely driven by social media and workers using software to access and manipulate information. Mobile was 77 hours, and that’s a 50 percent increase over the previous year. It’s expected to increase 35 percent this year to grow to 104 hours, and that’s thanks to the iPad and tablets. Astoundingly, the average person watches over 1,900 hours of television a year, and that’s a 0.2 percent increase over the previous year.

Let’s begin by having each of you briefly describe what you do.

William Merchan, VP, Business Development, MarketShare – I run business development for MarketShare to manage our partnerships with data and channel and agency partners. We’re a predictive analytics company using a lot of targeted media data.

Bill Feininger, SVP, Media Measurement, FourthWall Media – FourthWall Media provides a number of services in the cable space from EBIF platforms to applications. My specific area is in the data business.

Scott Brown, SVP, Digital Platforms, Nielsen – We’re obviously a company that provides measurement for television usage, product Internet and a variety of other products associated with media consumption. My role with Nielsen is largely to be an external speaker. Thought leadership is the more candid term that’s being bantered about these days. I’m in the communications and strategic relations areas as well.

Rainey – At Digital Hollywood last month one of the speakers said the current group of media buyers have to die in order to advance advertising. Is that what it’s going to take?

Brown – Hopefully there’s an alternative, because if it goes that far, then it’s gone too far. I think what the panel member at Digital Hollywood was probably trying to say – I was there – is that the media business as we know it today has been a slow grower – steady, sustained growth. It’s an industry that in effect doesn’t like a lot of change and in effect is very conservative for the most part.

The advertising community is very much the same. Programmer, buyer, seller, whatever, no one likes disruption. So what we’ve seen is an industry that every year grows by four, five or six percent. This past year in spite of a very rough economy we saw television usage increasing by 22 minutes more per month. We’ve seen that television is an amazing sustaining business. And the advertising community is obviously calling for improved measures of accountability, return on investment and harkening for an era when improved metrics can also follow. So I think every member of this panel in one form or another is interested in seeing the whole advertising paradigm move forward, interested in seeing improvements in the metrics and the insights that can be gained from those metrics.

Feininger – Not a lot to add to that. I do believe there’s a new wave of devices and a new wave of services, and somehow they’ve all got to get measured. Rather than relying on old techniques, and old services, there’s got to be new innovation in the research and on the collection side of that.

Merchan – We’re seeing that a lot of the media-buying decision making is being shifted to in-house CMO organizations, versus relying 100 percent on a media agency and a junior analyst at a spread sheet to make that decision, and thinking about it in terms of outcomes, revenue, profit, unit sales, instead of awareness and intent. I think those are fundamental shifts we’re seeing, and a lot of it is driven by the targeted media and the transparency of data.

Rainey – What was the biggest development in advanced advertising last year?

Merchan – I think the biggest development that we’ve seen is the larger brand advertisers putting more reliance and dependence on emerging media to drive impact. We’ve seen it with a lot of the clients we work with where, along the lines of what they were doing with search and display many years ago, where they were testing the waters before going all the way and making bigger buys in emerging media. Things like investing seven-digit media buys in Facebook and social media probably would have been unheard a couple of years ago. But last year you saw many large global advertisers do things like that.

Feininger – I think there’s been a lot of experimentation that has gone on. And unfortunately for the television side a lot of the dollars have left to go somewhere else to do some of those experiments. As an EBIF and technology provider for the cable industry, we think the opportunities are going to be coming back to television. That’s where the audience is. We think that as the platforms get out there, there’s much opportunity for that to take place and for more innovation and more reach to those consumers to happen in the television space.

Brown – I guess I would add to it from the Nielsen perspective, we’ve seen interactive television go through lots of starts and stops. We think back to the period when the Aurora trials were going on in 2001, and a lot was learned with AT&T Broadband and with Navic in that period of time. And most of what was learned was that the technology was not ready. Today it would appear from a Nielsen standpoint the technology is ready, beginning to deploy. Monetizing digital media is a huge challenge, because most people don’t understand what they have at this point in time.

Rainey – What do you think they have that they don’t understand they have?

Brown – There’s a gentleman by the name of Bob Liodice, who’s the CEO of the ANA [Association of National Advertisers], who got up and made a comment at a recent show that the advertising community expected that digital media would be much easier to measure, because of the nature of the devices supplying the content, the signals, the information and the entertainment. But, in effect, what they found is that it’s just the opposite, that the digital media has been harder to monetize, harder to estimate, harder to get their hands around and understand, and particularly to understand the flow of media dollars, whether it goes from traditional media to digital media, whether digital media is purely an additive.

The great issue that all companies face, and in particular Nielsen Co. faces, because we are first and foremost a measurement company, is to be able to attach measurement to each of the various small kernels, slivers of usage that are beginning to emerge. Fragmentation is multiplying. So every client is dealing with smaller slivers of usage.

The question is what is effective within those slivers. We can talk a lot about what has really changed. From my perspective the thing that’s most important for Nielsen is that we’ve been able to put in place partnerships with third-party companies that were talked about for many years but finally have reached fruition.

We have a partnership with Google where we actually provide them very deep information from our measurement panel to help them monetize their end of the business, which is separate from ours. We have an arrangement with Facebook for our new online campaign ratings, which basically dovetails panel-based viewing with subscription information and demographics that they’re enabled to collect. And by merging those two sources of data we now have a new currency that we can offer the industry for the online world and begin to allow advertisers and programmers to understand the monetization model that must exist there.

So a lot of change has occurred in the last three years, much of which gets lost in the shuffle of media coverage. And there are other companies that are going to put in place relationships, and ours is certainly seeking relationships with any provider of data that can help Nielsen provide more insight to our clients.

Rainey –It’s been said that people using analytics are overwhelmed by data that’s meaningless, and that they need data that’s actionable. What’s the reality of using the available data? And please comment on the quality of the data.

Feininger – I agree. There’s a lot of data emerging. There’s a lot of it that’s not very well done. It’s not very consistent.

We collect a lot of set-top data in our services. Today we’re in over two million set-top boxes across the United States in 14 MSOs. We understand the problem. We can collect from every single one of the devices we’re inside of.

We’ve beat the problem of how do you handle the back channel and how do you get consistent and clean, concise information back. We feel like we’ve created a new area for the industry. It’s a new way to get set-top data nice and actionable and useful into all kinds of other services.

Merchan – The thing we’ve seen is that the big data problem is obviously out there where marketers are swimming in terabytes of data. it’s only useful if you put context around all that data. We’ve used social media data, digital data and set-top box data and lots of different sources of that data to give insights to clients.

But I think just because the data is available, doesn’t mean it’s useful. How do you put context around that to help inform media decision or a marketing decision? With social media it’s great just to hear what’s happening out there is great, but if you don’t understand how to get more of that sentiment through traditional media buys it’s kind of useless. So we think providing context and insights to clients on how to drive more activity through the data that’s available now is really where there’s going to be a lot of value created.

Rainey – How do you do that?

Merchan – We do it with statistical models using these big data sets and build predictive models for clients on investments and marketing decisions for them.

Brown – I agree with your comment. Data by itself is an interesting commodity, but when it becomes information it becomes actionable. One point I guess I would like to echo is that, as all of you know, Nielsen has provided measurement data to national and local client advertisers and agencies for years and years and years. We move about as fast as the industry allows us to move, because half of our clients unwittingly will tell us we’re moving too fast and the other half say we’re too slow. So where do you meet?

The offerings of data we’ve been developing over the past couple of years have really grown to rather change our business model. Instead of being a purely panel-based company upon which we project audiences, we’re increasingly becoming more of a hybrid-based company, meaning we see the virtues of panel-based measurement, because it’s an opt-in, it’s an in-depth sort of analysis of who’s viewing, what they’re viewing and all of the kind of market characteristics that are important to clients, but also it’s one of taking advantage of third-party data sets, set-top data, data from any number of companies that actually can be integrated to create more depth of measurement, more breadth of measurement by virtue of the large volumes of data that can be secured.

So we’re really moving down that path of pushing with our client base this notion of going hybrid and trying to destroy some of the myths around set-top data, the myths being that set-top data doesn’t give you enough actionable information. We think it does. We’ve compared it to panel-based measurement, and set-top data is pretty good stuff for the most part.

There is no perfect data set. And anybody that believes there is is mistaken. Even our data is not perfect. There are weaknesses in every data set. But we think by virtue of combining the two and developing a number of models which we have developed for set-on, set-off demographics and so forth, we can offer to our clients at an affordable price a much more expansive business and a much more expansive set of metrics. And also having the ability to do the deep analytical dive into the data to understand the nuances, which so many of our clients require.

Rainey – Do we need standard demographics such as adult 18-49 in an advanced advertising world?

Brown – Gee, I thought Nielsen kind of standardized demographic reporting in one context. The answer is probably sure. I wouldn’t disagree with that. But I’d probably pass the mike to my friend Bill.

Feininger – I think the answer is, yes. But I think it’s a qualified yes. The reason I say that is for doing predictive modeling or for any kind of measurements you can place your products and services in front of consumers, you want to make sure you get it to the right place. And those services, advertisers and products still are trying to reach specific audiences. Many of them are built on age, gender and other kind of characteristics that are out there today. So I think the answer is yes.

Merchan – I’ll go ahead and be the no guy on the panel. I think the idea of demographic targeting or reach-based targeting was a means to an end historically. The reason you did that was you had no way to directly figure out whether this user was going to end up purchasing my product.

In a lot of ways those barriers are gone. You look at data providers that let you know attributes that are more relevant than a demographic – is this person in the market for a new car, do they have kids in the household – things that historically you wouldn’t even have a possibility of targeting against that now you can. As more and more devices light up more and more of that data will be available across platforms. I’d say historically it was a proxy for getting to that point, but now that you can do targeting in a more meaningful way to get better predictions as to how it might impact outcomes, you don’t need it any more.

Rainey – Analytics is driving the development of new metrics. What’s taking hold and what new metrics are being developed?

Merchan – A lot of our clients are using marketing ROI and doing it across all their portfolio of investmnets. What we’re doing is building resource allocation models for them. And so it’s not about what was my reach in a particular niche. It’s more about, if I’m going to dial up my investment by five or 50 million over the next quarter, how does that translate into sales? Ultimately their CEOs or CFOs are asking them to be accountable now whereas in the past they could have said, well, look what this says to our awareness or brand tracker. That’s not good enough anymore. The measurement we’re seeing many of the marketers we work with being accountable to now is all about marketing ROI, regardless of what channel they’re doing that marketing investment in.

Feininger – For new metrics there are two things we see over and over from our clients. They want to provide some way to determine engagement with the programming or the advertisement. Having set-top data and very granular information allows them to get to that, whatever particular algorithms they’re using to drive to that. That’s one.

The other I agree is with ROI. We see a lot of taking set-top data and merging it with other third-party data sets so they can try to find those segments, those groups or those consumers who are looking for something else. And so they can get that entire feedback loop now so that they can understand that.

Brown –Nielsen is also looking at how to cement data bases that we already have at our disposal to create more value for our customers and clients. Be it Catalina marketing, be it our Home Scan, all of that purchase data and linking in with the viewing data and then looking to see if we can basically create a cross-platform offering is being met with our clients with enthusiasm. Although the growth of mobile year over year seems very large, in the context of just regular video usage in the home, it’s a small fragment. The same is true for Internet. Yet we still launched the TV Everywhere extended screen measurement so that today homes that are part of our national panel that have PCs, we’re measuring those homes.

We’re measuring the PC streaming consumption, and the estimates, if you will, are additive for the reported C3 rating. That is a big step forward, to be able to measure the PC usage. It is cross platform in nature. So we’re really trying to tie it all together.

We’ve been issuing these quarterly cross-platform reports to our clients. It’s giving an interesting picture of what viewers and viewership is doing. We’ve been able to tease out some kind of interesting things from the data as well. We’ve learned, for instance, traditional light viewers who don’t tune into television a great deal are actually showing evidence of becoming heavier Web video users.

We’re seeing that over-the-top is becoming a bit more of a force. I don’t want to mislead. It’s not a huge segment of the viewing pie, but it’s a consistently growing segment. In concert with over-the-top content, people are increasingly making use of DVR and non-linear sorts of viewing arrangements in their homes. It skews younger, to the 18-34 year-old audience, which is more and more watching TV in a non-live environment.

All of those things have tremendous implications for an industry that measures progress sometimes in terms of single percentage points. A single percentage point change for an NBC or CBS is a big deal. So we try to provide a lot of the granularity behind that change and are trying to predict some of the shifts with the analytics we produce so that clients are not taken unaware. The worse thing a researcher wants to do is go to his boss and say, we missed this, we didn’t see this coming, because usually that costs somebody their employment.

Rainey – How does social media fit in and impact advanced advertising?

Brown – In many ways. The data has supported very strongly the contention that social
media is a very strong influencer. It’s a very strong influencer for video applications. We’re seeing more and more video moving into the social network world.

There’s a direct correlation. If you think about it, some of the major social media suppliers – Facebook, LinkedIn and others – you’re talking 300 million, 400 million subscribers. That’s a lot of people you’re impacting and influencing. We’ve seen correlations that directly indicate to us that more and more people will go to social media for viewing if the media is made available to them.

As a result Nielsen is really going down this path of cross-platform measurement but also trying to put out a kind of newer metric, if you will, a metric that we would call “total video.” Total video is unconstrained. It’s not video from your television, from your DVR, from your mobile phone. It’s video from all available sources that we need to aggregate and put together as one fixed number.

Feininger – I agree. The ecosystems may be around programs or profiles of people or what have you. That takes us in our business at FourthWall to developing technologies that allow you to connect these other devices back through to the television itself so that you can do some level of synchronization or some level of having your iPad work in conjunction with your EBIF-enabled set-top boxes. We see that as a way to help drive into that social environment and to be able to collect some metrics there and to be able to see the things that are going on between those two companion devices.

Merchan – We’ve seen that traditional media is a strong driver of social media. There’s this idea that you need to pick one or another, and it’s really not the case. You need to figure out how to orchestrate all of your media efforts together. If you launch the best Facebook page in the world, no one is going to go there unless you’re running traditional media against it in volume that actually matters. The more innovative brands are building a cross-platform approach, building a presence through their TV campaign that then drives people to social. And that’s where you’re going to see the best success. You can’t just have social be your only strategy, because you’re going to fall flat and lose.

Brown – I’d like to bounce it back to you as our moderator and ask, what are your thoughts?

Rainey – I think social is a whole category. I was talking to a researcher at USC a couple of weeks ago who’s an expert in gaming. He has a theory that social may impact 40 percent of decision making for a person. You see the growth of Facebook, 100 percent year over year. I think it’s going to continue to grow bigger and bigger. I wouldn’t think anyone would just use social as a strategy. It’s going to be a complement to other forms of advertising.

Brown – One of the interesting things we’ve delved into recently is that one of the fastest growing categories is in the 55-plus age group. What’s happening is, particularly on mobile devices, there’s a way of interfacing with family and friends, friends going back perhaps generations that you’ve lost touch with. It’s an interesting kind of experiment, if you will.

There are other companies looking at social media sites who are doing innovative things with trying to license and permission traditional video content and populate it within social media applications. Who knows if social media becomes another outlet for video consumption, but from a technology standpoint I don’t think anything prevents that. And it probably will be a viable video outlet for the future.

Rainey – How well are the cable, satellite, telephone companies and others using set-top box data, and are there significant differences in how well they’re using the data?

Feininger – All three have various amounts of data. They’re using it for various different reasons. On the cable side, we’re kind of early. We’re one of the first there that are really able to get a lot of cable data. We’ve heard lots about Canoe over the years, but frankly there hasn’t been a lot of data flowing there yet. In our case we’re doing what we can to help our clients. There’s a good amount of cable data that’s beginning to flow back both as raw data and as research reports, so they’re getting something they haven’t had before.

On the telco side there are two very different systems available today in the U.S. There are different thoughts as to how good it is or how much of it is available. There’s not a lot that’s available commercially today, but there is some. It seems to be pretty decent data.

And on the satellite side it’s kind of hit or miss. Satellite, because of the back channel not being consistent, there are some issues of reliability with it. Although there are large volumes, it just doesn’t seem to be as complete and as consistent. They do have some interesting interactive data in some cases. As we look at new ad models and new ad units that’s something that’s very important.

Our own system, our own ad widget system and TV widget systems which allow you to enhance programs or provide applications do provide a significant amount of data. So there are new areas on the cable side that are really jumping to the forefront.

I think it’s an interesting mix of data among the three. Cable in my opinion is ahead of the other two. It’s not quite as broad and wide, but I think it’s a little better data with the other two following behind fairly closely.

Brown –The process has led to incremental improvements over the years so that the data in our estimation and the data and we’ve seen – we have data from Charter and from Direct View today – actually it looks pretty good, clearly usable. And we will use the metered samples we collect for both our local People Meter markets and for the meter markets and for the national People Meter market as a control, if you will. Again, building the model so that we can fuse the data elements together and eventually get to a stage where we’ll be able to offer expanded sample sizes to our clients.

But everything is an iterative process of improvement. Nothing will look perfect out of the gate. For the Direct View data we’ve taken license to it will probably be sometime next year before we actually begin to share and release data. But we’ve already done three market trials with some of the data that we do have in house.

Rainey – Electronically traded bidding markets are developing alongside the upfront and conventional media markets resulting in decisions that are more data driven than relationship driven. Will the two markets come together?

Merchan – I think we’re seeing a lot of that happening already. You look at what Google is doing with Google TV; you look at the announced merger between MediaBank and Donovan. I think you are going to see a convergence there. There will always be some upfront, premium version of the TV marketplace, and you’ll still see it in digital media as well. Yahoo!’s Front Page is a valuable property. There are other places that you’re still going to see there’s need to guarantee delivery, guarantee that premium content.

But I think more and more you’re going to see media move into this world of bidded marketplaces and automation and linking the data sets together. The agencies are building up their tools and teams to be ready for that. Every major holding company has a group that’s focused squarely on that area. And most of it’s in display media today, but you can see how that can morph over time as more media comes online.

Feininger – I think all decisions will be more data driven. Whether it’s through the traditional up fronts or whether it’s through some bartering or trading system, more and more will be done by data-driven decisions. There’s more data out there. You’re certainly going to see more people use it. I think that as far as a trading system goes, it’s more likely it’s not going to happen in the up fronts. That kind of thing will be in the scatter market.

Brown – I agree.

0

Bluefin Labs Turns Social Data Into Mass Scale Marketing Tool

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Technology Platforms

Deb Roy, co-founder & CEO, Bluefin Labs

Deb Roy, co-founder & CEO, Bluefin Labs

October 17, 2011 – The content and brand marketing potential that comes with mass usage of social networks has reached new heights with the emergence of Bluefin Labs from a concept at MIT to a full-scale commercial operation employing the latest tools in quantitative analysis.
 
“Bluefin Labs is the first company to start at scale linking publicly available conversations to TV viewing data,” says Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO of Bluefin and director of the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab. “We’re turning this data into a feedback loop that allows marketers to move beyond focus groups and surveys to get real-time information about people’s reactions to their products.”

The ability to tie together traditional viewing data such as Nielsen gathers with moment-to-moment ebbs and flows in conversations about any given brand, event or program aired on TV represents a fundamental shift in marketing techniques where cognitive science and psychographic become basic tools of the trade. “We can curate the chatter now radiating through layers and layers of social groups with viewing data to show how impressions are driving expressions,” Roy says.

Bluefin is a Web-based platform that tracks over three billion social media comments per month to provide comprehensive analysis of viewers’ responses to over 210,000 individual TV telecasts airing across more than 200 TV networks. “We believe we have the most complete index of TV anywhere,” Roy says, explaining that the index is built from metadata, closed-caption text, fingerprints and other information associated with each show.

Viewing and social commentary are tracked with time-shifted as well as live programming. In fact, Roy adds, “70 percent of our data link to time-shifted viewing.”

All of the TV and social media data are aggregated into a massive database Bluefin calls the “TV Genome,” which it defines as “data created by the mapping of social-media commentary back to its stimulus on TV.” A dashboard graphic rendering of the genome provides a constantly shifting snapshot of real-time chatter across millions of connections, allowing users to sort through by program category, time of day or any other dimension and then drill down from the mass aggregation level to very specific clusters of comments around specific show segments.

The firm’s flagship service, Bluefin Signals, delivers a wide range of graphics tools that render the analysis of social media data and viewing data into charts that help marketers better understand what’s driving the appeal of their brands and programs. For example, features known as Audience Profile Layer and On-Demand Audience Profile Creation give Bluefin clients the ability to analyze the television preferences of specific audience segments.

“You get new views of what’s happening with audiences,” Roy says. “You can see patterns never seen before.”

Bluefin has signed up wide range of clients since its commercial launch in July, including A+E Networks, AMC Networks, CBS, Comcast Spotlight, mcgarrybowen, MediaCom, Media Storm, Pepsi and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. “For TV networks, being able to mine social media commentary about TV represents great promise, but the data needs to be precise and the insights need to be specific,” notes Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at TBS. “Bluefin Labs’ analytics platform plays an important role in supporting these efforts.”

The use of cognitive science and advanced quantitative analytics has become an important new trend among ad agencies, which are adding experts in these fields to their staffs and, in some cases, have acquired firms specializing in these capabilities. “Prolific social media use gives us incredible insight into customers’ preferences and behavior beyond just demographics,” says Anush Prabhu, managing director of communications planning and analytics for the mcgarrybowen agency.

“Our clients tend to spend the bulk of their media monies in television,” Prabhu says. “Bluefin Labs’ data provides the ability for mcgarrybowen to harness social media insights towards the planning and optimizing of television media and creative, ultimately allowing us to deliver more integrated and efficient campaigns for our clients.”

Bluefin has begun exposing some of its research findings on its Web site to help people understand what the platform delivers. The free Signals Pulse dashboard provides “overnight ratings” from social TV chatter on top-rated programs that were viewed the day before and drills down into how programs or ads track with certain user categories, like hard gamers. Tracking goes much deeper to correlate various groups’ responses with segments within shows, even to the point of categorizing real-time comments on a second-by-second basis.

As an example, Roy shows how campaign managers could see how their candidates’ comments in debates are playing out in the social sphere on any given topic. “Just measuring the volume of expression is not enough,” Roy notes. “We can drill into available data using psychographics to get deeper insight into audience behavior.”

A marketer might zero in on people who are avid consumers of a particular soft drink by identifying who tends to send comments out on Twitter when an ad for the drink appears. This information can be used to determine what shows these people are most drawn to, which in turn can be used to better discern which shows are most appealing not only to current consumers of the drink but potential consumers as well.

For example, in a recent demonstration of the platform Bluefin identified consumers of Mountain Dew and then tracked what shows drew the most social media commentary from these “Dewheads.” It turns out these people tend to be enthusiastic about comedy shows, often registering high social rankings for programs which have middling popularity with the general population.

Given the irreverent comedic theme at the core of the brand, the demonstration offers a strong affirmation of how tastes and attitudes can be tapped through smart branding and how the effectiveness of that branding and placements of advertising are tracking with marketers’ goals. “How you advertise – the branding, creatives, placements – it’s all up for redefinition,” Roy says.

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New Directions in Creativity Shift Focus in TV Ad Debate

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies
Anthony Zuiker, creator and executive producer, CSI

Anthony Zuiker, creator and executive producer, CSI

October 24, 2011 – Even as proponents of advanced advertising strategies point to new signs of progress it appears the larger focus of programmers and advertisers is on how best to expand revenues by building audiences through multi-screen transmedia initiatives and greater socialization of content.

Ultimately, the benefits of interactive and targeted advertising will accrue to programming no matter what directions story-telling and community-building take, but innovative uses of technology, creativity and consumer behavior to pull audiences to content and thereby drive higher ad revenues is what has the TV business buzzing.

The new focus is on broadening content in mainstream TV programs to include online back stories about characters or incremental developments that enrich the main story, program-specific games or other types of extensions involving reality shows, sports or other kinds of programming. All of this is evident in plans taking shape at ABC under the creative guidance of Anthony Zuiker, the executive producer of the CSI series who recently signed on with ABC Studios to build new programming there.

Zuiker, describing what he will talk about at the forthcoming Media Innovations Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., says such extensions, tied to social networking and allowing viewers to participate in programming whenever they want on any device, need to be “baked into the DNA of a program from launch.” He will co-produce his first show for ABC, “Chameleon,” about a female undercover FBI agent, with the show’s writer, Andrea Berloff and studio-affiliated Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Zuiker declines to go into specifics of what he has in mind, saying he will save that for his presentation at the summit, but he makes clear he’s part of a vanguard that seeks to revolutionize TV by turning programs into multi-platform franchises that can engage viewers much more deeply than has been the case with traditional series. This is especially true when it comes to drawing young people into TV programming, he notes.

“TV viewers will demand more than they get today watching a show once a week 24 times a year with 20 minutes of advertising,” Zuiker says.

While TV has more than held its own against the onslaught of online video with year-to-year gains in total viewing hours per household, fragmentation of audiences drawn to cable networks has reduced viewing of prime-time broadcast TV, especially within the key 18-49 age demographic segment targeted by many advertisers. The number of people in that group watching prime-time broadcast TV during the first two weeks of the new TV season was down by 4.1 percent from a year earlier, according to Nielsen, marking the second straight year of declining viewership.

Overall, this has not hurt revenues as yet, because CPMs (costs per mille) at $30-$40 for this age group in prime time, are up by that much or more over the two-year timeframe. But this trend along with Neilsen’s new finding that the heavier users of online video in the 18-24 group are watching less TV are statistical vindications of widespread concerns that TV programmers are going to have to do more to sustain audience strength over the long run.

Moreover, to the extent that more frequent engagement of viewers who like a particular show, including socialization of program watching, can add hours of viewing to specific programs, the increased amount of viewing time per consumer is viewed as an essential counter weight to fragmentation. In fact, many people argue the emphasis in interactivity should be on viewer engagement with content rather than interactive advertising.

“The focus on advertising for ITV is wrong,” says Sangita Verma, CEO and co-founder of Rainmaker Digital Entertainment, a new firm specializing in apps designed to drive consumer engagement with TV programming. “It could lead to being a one-dimensional use of interactivity that focuses on RFIs and long-form versions of ads rather than on what consumers are interested in.”

Verma, who created the TAG Networks interactive game channel, since sold to ActiveVideo, doesn’t discount the importance of interactivity in advertising. But she says it needs to be ushered in on the strength of viewer acclimation to interactivity as part of the content experience if it’s to gain real traction.

“iTunes had 300,000 to 400,000 non-advertising applications in the market before they started running ads,” she notes. “This resulted in the ads being more consumer-centric. In ITV things have to be more well rounded with a standard platform in play. Right now there’s no clear path to define how developers are going to get apps in front of the TV viewer.”

The cable industry, through Canoe Ventures, of course, is trying to do something about this, having just announced a new brand, ExpandTV, for its ITV platform, the widely deployed set-top based solution known technically as EBIF (Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format). “We now have a program that the entire industry can rally around to promote the adoption of ITV,” says Vicki Lins, chief marketing officer at Canoe, which will manage licensing of the brand as a means of alerting consumers that an ad or program is supporting a trusted mode of interactivity.

The collaborative branding effort, involving various industry organizations, MSOs and programmers, is an important step toward accelerating “viewer awareness of and comfort with interactivity,” says Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers. Now, says Peter Stern, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Time Warner Cable, the industry needs to put more energy behind the idea of advanced advertising.

The idea of using the buttons on a remote to click for more information “is easy for consumers and advertisers,” Stern says. “You can click to get an email, a phone call or something in the mail. We’re worried if we can pull this off, but we should be focused on making it happen and on dynamic advertising for video on demand.”

The opportunity for cable is huge in the advanced advertising domain, agrees Jessica Reif Cohen, first vice president and managing director at Merrill Lynch. “Cable has the [support] infrastructure and should be paid for it,” she says.

However, she adds, “The goal of adding $14 billion [in ad revenues in a two-year timeframe following Canoe’s launch] was too aggressive.” Indeed, she notes, cable’s national inventory would be far more valuable if the industry can get to the level of technology coordination required to ensure smooth operations across the complex EBIF domain. Here, she notes, it’s critical to make a choice as to whether the coordinating vehicle will be Canoe or Comcast through its Comcast Media Center.

But, to whatever degree programmers avail themselves of the interactive opportunities created by the cable industry, it’s likely that the dominant theme in efforts to drive ad revenues will revolve around strategies that aim to enhance consumer engagement with programming. “Transmedia is the new buzz word of the entertainment industry,” says Bob Knorpp, president of the Cool Beans Group, a marketing and advertising consulting firm. “It has become a line item for them.”

The term encompasses virtually anything that might be done to enhance the content of a linear TV program, including soap opera-like back stories of characters in the main program story line, extra elements to the main story that can be viewed online and on mobile devices, games, support for social communities and much else. To many, the real interactivity that matters is the social interaction that occurs among people who are drawn into the extended programming experience.

“ITV is a total red herring,” asserts Gabe Zichermann, CEO of Gamification Co., a developer of marketing strategies that use games to develop and promote brands. “True interactivity will be around people interacting with each other, not with the program itself.”

To the extent transmedia provides a broader narrative across multiple devices in support of this interaction, the value of brands and any games that are built around those brands is enhanced, Zichermann adds. “Transmedia seems to be extending properties to other platforms, including print as well as mobile and online,” he notes. “It’s about choosing your own adventure. The consumer is interested in story development.”

Indeed, notes Kirk McDonald, former president for digital at Time Inc. and now president of
PubMatic, a digital media advertising firm, “each Facebook user is now a brand, and each brand surrounds itself with content. They reinforce their self images and reflect their values through the content they associate with.”

While automating advertising placement and measurements is essential, McDonald adds, the starting point is to build brands through the viral force of socialization. “We have to figure out how to build brands,” he says. “We have to allocate dollars to make the brand the topic of conversation at the virtual water cooler and to drive more interaction around the brand in real time.”

This requires a marriage of art and science to drive engagement, he continues. “You automate control of your advertising inventory, your audience data.” The feedback helps in the creative enterprise of making content more engaging.

“Great story telling is the basis of what becomes social,” adds Valeria Maltoni, principal in Conversation Agent, LLC, which helps brands develop viral marketing campaigns. “Content [as a vehicle for driving greater engagement and higher ad revenues] is a huge missed opportunity.”

By “unbundling” great content into constituent pieces programmers can “curate the content to invite people to participate” and then track how people engage, Maltoni explains. “You see what people are looking at and conversing about, and that is where advertising comes in.”

In this new environment thoughts of driving ad revenues for programs in the online environment as an independent digital enterprise are giving way to a return to a TV-centric strategy that views digital as an adjunct. “Online video as a sub-$2-billion revenue marketplace is not all that interesting,” says Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMAS Partners, a firm devoted to consulting on media transactions.

But, Kawaja adds, it’s not easy to bring online advertising into the campaign mix with linear TV. “The reality is the whole reason people are investing their time now on the [online] video side is to capture money on the linear side,” he says. “Obviously it’s a work in progress. The ability to launch a campaign is easy and relatively cheap in traditional media but hard online. Online has to consolidate.”

Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, a marketing catalyst arm of the Publicis Groupe, agrees. “You have to recognize the economics of most marketers are not built for the Internet,” Tobaccowala says. “There are too many steps and too many players in the process. There’s not going to be the great digital age that everyone speaks about. Just the increase in TV advertising for 2011 and 2012 will be two thirds the size of the entire online display marketplace.”

He adds: “the divide between analog and digital is a stupid divide. The way we look at it is as a whole. TV is the critical aspect and you put assets around it versus a model that starts with the Internet and waits 15 years for something to happen.”

But online is crucial as the support ecosystem for the socialization, game playing and back-story augmentation that represents the new template in TV program development. As Anthony Zuiker says, “We’re going to have to build a new white-label algorithm for creating TV programs into every project, regardless of whether or not a program is canceled. It’s the starting point, not the eventual end point of a successful show.”

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New Hope for Scaling Mobile Apps and Ads

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Technology Platforms

Pavan Mandhani, CEO, Mobifusion

Pavan Mandhani, CEO, Mobifusion

September 26, 2011 – Mobile app developers have been struggling a long time with the proliferation of form factors that impede efforts to get their products in front of the largest possible number of potential users. A few years ago, the talk was about creating standard interfaces or one operating system becoming dominant enough to deliver the scale everyone wanted.
 
Instead, of course, the world is awash in more competing handset platforms than ever, often within the same manufacturing environment where succeeding generations of operating systems adapting to new processing technologies are not backward compatible. Mobifusion, a five-year-old startup, decided to do something about this by trying to create a write-once, deliver-everywhere development platform for applications.

Remarkably, after several years of hard work, they appear to have succeeded. In this interview with ScreenPlays editor Fred Dawson, Mobifusion CEO Pavan Mandhani describes how this platform works and the types of apps it’s producing worldwide. He also reveals what’s next on the Mobivision horizon, some of which could have a big impact on the larger development community.

ScreenPlays – Mobifusion brings something unique to the table with respect to the efficiency of developing applications. A big issue in this whole field has been how do you get out applications to all these different operating systems with all these different phone generations coming out constantly and make a business out of that. Why don’t we begin by you giving us an idea of how you’re approaching the solution to that problem.

Pavan Mandhani – This is my second wireless company. Previously what we saw was the porting was the biggest problem. There were a lot of different operating systems for phones in the U.S. And if you went outside the U.S. where the majority of mobile users are, particularly in Japan and Korea, the porting was the biggest challenge. So everyone had to say, let’s pick an operating system or a handset and create everything for that. And then once a new handset comes out or a new operating system comes out or something happens you have to port again.

The normal style is people will call up and work together, whether it’s a product design team, the requirements team, the specs team, engineering team, delivery team – all of them are focused on one handset. So when I started this company we thought, why not take a different approach? Let’s break it down into two or three objects and, without thinking what the final operating system is or the handset looks like, let’s work on the process.

It’s all patented. We worked for many years on the technology and patenting process. So we’ve done it through the technology to become a platform that supports all kinds of handsets, thousands and thousands of handsets. You touch once, and then it’s ready, whether it’s an iPhone, an iPad, an Android tablet, Blackberry, you name it, and it’s ready.

SP – That’s pretty remarkable given how big a hurdle this has been. Is it a that the applications you develop are generally generic enough as far as being useful in different phone environments so there’s a certain commonality with how the different phones react to this stuff? You can’t get too specific on the platform, right?

Mandhani – That’s a good question. We started with the idea of let’s find the commonality and solve the problem, which everybody said we couldn’t do. There’s no way humanly possible you can touch once and deliver literally on all the handsets. You can, of course, create your own virtual platform to support development for specific devices. But we refused to do that. So it was a big challenge.

The first thing was why not solve the basic problem of getting something on every phone by just touching once. So that was our goal. And when our chief architect came and showed us all the phones working on an app we ported from our new platform, that was the biggest day for us, because we had solved one of the biggest problems.

Then we started working on the phones, and we realized that you can’t create the exact experience that fits the norm for each phone. It doesn’t work that way. So we’ve developed have a bridge module that is specific to each phone, has the best capability for that phone. We run a new app through that.

So, for example, we know on the iPhone there’s a touch screen and you can do things on a virtual keyboard, but on certain Blackberries or Nokia phones the keyboards are real buttons. So the bridge module automatically maps to them. And there are some limitations. In some cases if the keyboard is not involved with what you want to solve, you have to make some adjustments [in the app design for keyboard-oriented phones], which we can do on the fly. So we have taken into consideration each phone type, each operating system, the use cases, the capabilities, and then we optimize for that so that the experience is appropriate. We’ve tried to make the experience consistent.

SP – So it translates to writing it once on a single platform, and then the app goes into the bridge modules and gets tailored to any of the idiosyncrasies that characterize how that app runs on specific devices.

Mandhani – Right.

SP – How long have you been doing this with this platform?

Mandhani – We started this company about five and a half years ago. For the first few years we were totally focused on technology solving the big basic problem. For the last two and half years we’ve been coming with products on all platforms. And, of course, on Day 1 we hadn’t created platforms for modules for all handsets. So we started with Palm, because we acquired a company that had the technologies we needed to embed. Then we extended to Java and Brew-based phones. Then we added Blackberry. And then iPhone.

SP – So you did extend to iPhone?

Mandhani – Yes we have tons of apps on iPhones. We have a hundred or more apps on Android, the same apps, everything with the same look and field.

SP – So you are distributed across many mobile networks at this point. Worldwide?

Mandhani – We’re available – last time I looked, in 125 countries.

SP – In terms of the applications themselves, who are the people in the content space you’re working with?

Mandhani – We have a list of many of our partners on our Web site. We work with basically the media companies, the large media conglomerates with quite a few brands, or a single brand, which might be a part of a small company. Whatever it is, it will be about the brand, because brand has value.

As you ask me more questions you’ll realize brand is the way we want to bring traffic or sales or to promote a new product. So we are a three-step process. If you ask us what are the strengths, one is the technology which allows us to deliver on any handset. The second one is the distribution. We are on probably a hundred app stores, networks and operating systems. You name any country, and we probably are there. And the third one is the brand.

We don’t want to be inventing the brands. We want to power the brands. We are building with these brands, working with these media companies, and we bring the experience on any handset, any operating system worldwide by touching once.

SP – So give us an idea of what some of these applications are like. I assume we’re talking about interactivity, getting more information, doing things maybe in text messaging.

Mandhani – What you just referred to are the features. Is there a feature to send this or do that? But at the end of the day, if you look at it, you have to divide it into many ways. One is the operating system. Then there are the handset specific things.

The third one is the experience. Do people want to download an app? Or do they want to get a text message about it or get an alert or hear somebody? Or if it’s media, do we download it? Is it a snack video? Is it three hours of video? Is it streaming or is it non-streaming? Interactivity, personalization, customization and localization – these are the different deliverables.

You have to take care of all of this. Our platform provides all of this. And then, depending on the app, the category and what it does and what the owners want the experience to convey, we add those things. Some of those are horizontal features – for example, interactivity. You can send what you’re looking at to a friend via text message or email and so on through those horizontal features, which is like an operating system feature. When you have Microsoft Word versus Excel in your operating system, both of them have a feature called print, which makes a call to the operating system. So it’s a similar methodology.

On the other side we also have some vertical stuff driven by the brand. Let’s say, for example, Guinness World Records. The Guinness World Record experience is totally different from another app called, let’s say, Bartender Bible. Guinness World Record is all interactive, video. You can upload your video; they can look at it. You can be a winner. You can add tags and all. Whereas with Bartender Bible I just want to make a quick drink, see how it’s made, what do I need, do I need to buy it? So two different sets of features. Many of them will have the same horizontal features. Can I email a clip I’m looking at to a friend, or can I email the drink guide or whatever I did? And some of them are vertical.

SP – So if we see people on phones doing really erratic things we can assume they’re running your Guinness Book of Records app, right?

Mandhani – [Laughs] Hopefully.

SP – In terms of where all of this is going now, for all that you’ve accomplished, you’re still out there in a flood of applications. Is it getting harder and harder to come up with things that are compelling, that allow you to bubble to the surface? What is it you see as being the sweet spot for what is driving your business from the pure applications side?

Mandhani – That again is a good question. What is happening, there are about 300,000 apps in one app store and maybe a million apps in another app store. Now it’s become, like, my app store is bigger than your app store. How do you differentiate? The way we have targeted everybody is with the third part of our strategy. We have a great distributor network, so we are everywhere. We have a technology that allows us to support all the handset operating systems. But the third one is important, which is the brands.

If anyone is looking for records, they know there’s one big name in records, that’s Guinness World Records. If you’re making drinks, you know that Bartender Bible has been there forever. There is a source, and it happens every time. Everywhere the question people ask when they want to bring something new to market is how do you differentiate between others and yourselves? So our strategy is to power the brand. If you bring your brand with whatever it is you’re offering and it becomes a big hit, then it powers by itself. So we are working with the brand owners to market the mobile products.

SP – The natural next step is advertising. As we’re moving to higher bandwidth and ever more video, the advertising community is looking to take advantage of that, but not by just recycling 30-second spots from TV. Are you looking at that as another window of opportunity at this point?

Mandhani – Yes we are. In the U.S. we’re still mostly at 2G. But if you go to Korea, Malaysia, they talk about 4G and the networks are super fast. Pretty much you can watch a full movie. Once the technology is so scalable that thousands of users can watch movies on handsets, there’s an opportunity for advertisers to market their advertisements in such a way that there’s an ROI for that. So we are looking at it.

We have seen quite a few successes by companies in Korea and Japan making money through ad-based networks. And we believe that eventually will happen here, maybe in a year, maybe in three years.

But the ads have to be personalized. It cannot be just that while they’re watching sports you’re throwing them an ad about attending some conference or something else totally unrelated to what they’re interested in. The probability of them clicking on it is very low. So the ads have to be personalized, they have to be customized for the geographic, demographic parameters. Once you have the data and the right ads, we believe the ROI will be there.

SP – Have you been developing some of these ideas with some of your brand customers as yet?

Mandhani – Yes. Historically we’ve been on a premium app basis. We’ve just announced to the world that we’ve done about five million paid downloads. It has been working very well for us. But as you said it’s a natural path going toward the advertisements. We’ve released a few apps to just see how people react. What is there capability of absorbing that ad idea? You don’t want too much advertising versus not enough. It’s a fine thin line. So we’re working on those questions with our brand owners, and eventually we will get there.

SP – Have you moved into the companion device apps space where the application runs on a device in context with what’s on the television? The viewer is watching something that may be purely linear but is able to interact through their device.

Mandhani – I’m amazed you asked that, because we were just approached by one of the largest operators in Asia, who also does IPTV. They want to become the biggest media conglomerate by controlling your phones, TVs and so on. We’ve been asked why can’t we have this find-me, follow-me approach to companion apps. Maybe you’re watching the TV and you need to send a text message and get a reply, but then you suddenly walk out. The app knows where you are, and then you can start playing it on your phone. We are working on some of those ideas where the app isn’t just about the experience on a single device. It’s the TV, laptop, iPad or other tablets of the world, whatever you have, and it’s the phone, and we believe you will probably have all three of them or two of them for the next few years. And then there will be convergence.

SP – The next question, obviously, is are you going to keep this write-once, play-everywhere technology all to yourselves, or are you going let some other people exploit this and allow this thing to flow to where we’re not just talking about a few hundred thousand apps here and there, we’re talking about billions?

Mandhani – [Laughs] We are looking at that. I think there’s a time for opening of the technology. We wanted to contract it, make sure it’s ready, it’s automated and works on most of the top platforms. We believe we are there now. So we believe the time has come for us to open it so that others can benefit from the same technology. For us the good news is when they can create something we can also bring those features and functionalities to our platform faster, better and cheaper.

SP – We look forward to following how this all unfolds. Thanks a lot.

Mandhani – Thank you.

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Canoe Hiccups Aside, EBIF Is Taking Off with iTV Ads

By
Fred
Posted in: Advanced Advertising, Models & Strategies

Andy Addis, SVP, business development, Ensequence

Andy Addis, SVP, business development, Ensequence

July 25, 2011 – Notwithstanding strategic missteps and some drift in the execution of the cable industry’s advanced advertising agenda at the national level, the industry appears well on its way to leveraging its EBIF platform for interactive advertising sales at programming networks and at the local spot sales level.
 
The early driver behind the use of EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format) software now functioning on millions of cable set-tops is the application known as RFI (request for information), which Canoe Ventures is enabling as its first product at the national level and which is gaining traction locally with RFI implementations by Comcast Spotlight, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Cablevision and others who have not announced their rollouts.

That MSOs are racing ahead with RFI implementations in their local sales efforts while the Canoe implementation has taken far longer than anticipated is one indication of the problems that have plagued the national venture since it was formed three years ago by the six largest MSOs. Another indication was the decision of Canoe’s board earlier this month not to renew the contract of CEO David Verklin, who was replaced by COO Kathy Timko on an interim basis.

Canoe, which in 2009 had to scrap its first initiative, the Community Addressable Messaging application for zone-based placements of advertising when it failed to get cooperation on the sharing of data by MSO members, has been struggling to get its RFI product underway at the national level. The venture announced in May 2010 that its RFI template would be used on several networks by four national programmers – Discovery Communications, NBC Universal, Rainbow Media and Comcast Networks.

But in January Verklin acknowledged only three channels had implemented RFI. He said the others lined up for use of the template would get underway by sometime in April,, but there’s been no word of that.

Clearly, though, the ball has started to roll, says Andy Addis, senior vice president for business development in the service provider sector for Ensequence. “EBIF advertising is getting real traction now,” Addis says.

Ensequence is the supplier of the RFI template chosen by Canoe, notes Jessie Dawes, marketing manager at Ensequence. “Programmers are now selling the RFI application to advertisers,” she says. “They’re getting ready to roll out beyond the trial level.”

Along with announced deals with Comcast Spotlight and Time Warner Cable, Ensequence is engaged with another “big MSO’ that’s in the process of launching on the RFI template, Addis says. And, in addition to announced deals supporting various types of apps with Showtime and Rainbow Networks, “we’ve built apps for three or four other major networks that are waiting to get certified,” he says.

Other EBIF technology suppliers report activity is picking up as well, much of it involving national programmers who are working on apps, such as the Twitter app developed by Ensequence for Rainbow’s We tv and WeddingCentral, that aren’t part of the Canoe product portfolio. At the local level, Cablevision, employing the EBIF user agent supplied by Zodiac Networks, recently reported strong results for its Optimum Select RFI ad campaign involving email fulfillment on a 30-second Royal Caribbean Cruise Line promotion run by travel packaging broker ICE Enterprises.

ICE said it received some 3,000 unique email leads generating a 24 percent redemption rate from the two-week promotion, which featured an overlay message prompting viewers to request more information about a two-for-the-price-of-one Royal Caribbean vacation offer. ICE chairman and CEO John Rowley says the campaign was “truly a groundbreaking milestone.”

“It’s not unusual to have 15 to 20 percent of an audience clicking on an app to get more information,” Addis says. “Interactive advertising lets consumers go deeper into something they’re vested in emotionally. It’s noot just about cool apps.”

Comcast Spotlight says it has been running iTV advertising for two years on hundreds of campaigns with more than 1.5 million interactions. Now the unit is using the Ensequence iTV Manager implementation of EBIF for service providers to support RFI, VOD telescoping and an app dubbed “Remind Record,” which allows viewers to set an on-screen reminder or DVR recording of an upcoming program featured in an ad.

“We’ve had great success rolling out iTV advertising over the past two years,” says Steve Feingold, Comcast Spotlight’s senior vice president of operations and strategic planning. “The flexibility and ease in scaling that the Ensequence solution offers will be an important part of the next phase of our interactive advertising rollout.”

The iTV Manager is a lifecycle and workflow management platform designed to work with multiple EBIF user agents and to provide a unified means of extending applications into EBIF and non-EBIF outlets alike. For example, Addis notes, Ensequence worked in the EBIF domain with Verizon and in the proprietary space with DISH Network to support interactive applications for the Summer Olympics programming aired by NBC in 2008.

“We work with programmers to version, schedule and deploy interactive apps across cable, satellite and connected devices,” Addis says. “There’s an acute need for this in the programming space.”

This agenda was greatly facilitated a year ago when Ensequence announced it was partnering with interactive application streamer provider Softel, streamer provider S & T and broadcast automation vendor VDS to provide a single-source interactive TV platform for television service providers and programmers. This past May the firm extended its reach into connected devices with the debut of a Live Traffic application on the Yahoo! Connected TV Widget Engine used by Samsung, LG Electronics, Vizio, Sony and Toshiba.

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