Who everyone on all the erics and principle and Eric's strategy and insights, and welcome to our session overcoming fragmentation and TV advertising.
And I think this topic and this discussion.
Are very necessary for the situation in FACE today for two reasons. First, it's financial crunch time for all of the TV landscaping. And it's the same whether we're talking about broadcast, streaming, linear, on demand, live, doesn't matter. High performance, the high performance in the industry, particularly revenue margin and profitability and through all crucial goals and maximizing modernization and revenue performance, particularly to be an advertisement has never been
more important with the financial health of the industry. The second, actually pulling us off, actually doing so has never been more challenging. And so you have audiences spread out across broadcasts and streaming, across liner and on demand and across roughly twenty and growing different smart TV platforms globally, and so fragmentation is really significant earl to conquer if you're trying to really maximize the performance of.
TV advertising today. So how do you deal it and do it well?
Well, we're luck because we have a terrific mix of perspectives from our panelists who are doing it today who can give us all practical not theoretical insights on dealing with fragmentation.
And we're joined by Jeff Blasi It's Blasick, but yeah, I'm sorry. My apology.
Jeff, who's s VP of Physics, Operations and Strategy, Show Seeker, Matthew van Helm who's SVP of Product ad Offs and Services and Business Development and Direct TV Advertising. Michelle Stone is VP of Advanced Advertising Product and Planning a Paramount, Rob Jason, who's EVP of Insights and Analytics at USIM, and Steve Reynolds, the president of the Magic Communications.
Welcome everyone, thanks for being.
Here today, and I'd like to kick things off by pulling back a viewpoint a bit. Let's start by framing the fragmentation issue.
In a bigger picture way.
Do you think the overcoming the channel is a fragmentation and advertising this fragment of landscape.
Does it come down to solving technical issues?
Is better ad tech needed that's you know, designed for the problems of today or is it business issues process implementation methodology or is it both both technical a business?
You know?
Based on this assessment, can some of you shed.
Blight on how you would adapt from a strategy perspective based on your experience actually tag the fragmentation issue today, Jeff like.
To take a first step of the Sure, I'm not glad to start that.
You know, the question is is it technical or is it a business problem?
Right, and so it's really a bit of both.
Although the technology is really starting to emerge and starting to come together to be able to allow us to navigate through all the complexity of the of the ecosystem and so so really I think one of the things that we really focus on is how do we align you know, the technology along with the business practices so that we're you know, actually building out plans and planning ahead for all the variety of tactics and requirements that our customers have, and then make sure that those tools
that we're using technologies are really just tools that they actually execute on those business plans, so that so we can actually get you know, the the requirements that that customer is looking for. You know, often I think we still look at any you know, the whole fragmentation problem by saying, well, you know, we know what we're doing, you know, so we do this standardized plan that we've done for over and over, and then we connect on
or we add to those plans with different tactics. Well, when you get to measurement, we'll probably talk about that after a while. That becomes really a complicated problem to be able to align a variety of different tactics with the original plan and how do we measure against that so that it all comes together, Because it's all you know, everybody sort of creates a different idea or a different you know, methodology for reaching that customer and saying, hey,
you know we delivered this to this person. Well that person may be consuming that media in a different way the next time. Are they the same or are they different? So how do you deal with reach and frequency and all those things? So so, yeah, so the short answer is, yeah, it's a little bit of a technology problem, but I think it's more of a business problem and coming up with how are we actually executing on a tactical campaign for our customers that we can then measure At the.
End, Rob from USIM perspective, you have obviously looking at insights.
What are your thoughts on whether it's the mixer of tech or business.
Well, I mean the answer is yes, it's it's it's it's clearly a bit of both. You know, what we have to keep in mind from the buyside representing clients is the reason that spend money in advertising is to sell more product profitably.
What is the way to do that?
And how do we then address the fragmentation, especially in CTV of audiences and the reduction in mass reach And is that to the benefit of selling more product profitably? And this is where you know, we sometimes got a little there's potential to become diverted from the goal through technology.
If I am concentrating on reach of small segments, ever slimmer segments of the buying population through greater technology, I might possibly lose some of the benefits of TV advertising In the first place, we're still advertising on mainscreen TV. The aim of that is to build brands. The aim of that is to differentiate the client's brand, to build brand equities in the long term, get customers loyally to
buy more product profitably. If I'm concentrated on the smallest, most technical segments, oftentimes delivered as we do from client first party data, that is fantastic for driving what we call performance TV that is measuring conversion but is that widening the top of the funnel. Is that creating awareness and brand equity amongst people who might not have considered our brand. Are we bringing that brand to the top of mind for somebody who's never bought before, that's a
little more difficult. So, you know, it is a strategy issue in that we have to go beyond the lowest hanging fruit of easy to reach customer segments and broaden our view to try to build the brand, which is the purpose of TV advertising in the first place.
Hello, okay, from the paramount perspective.
So I I from the paramount perspective I think, or from from my perspective as well as the paramount I would assume is it's both right, it's technology, it's process, it's business, it's all of the above, and it's it's like who can who can get there first. It's almost like we're competing in technology in a lot of ways because there is no one size fits all for managing this fragmented landscape.
Right.
So at Paramount we have deals that can run across broadcasts, cable addressable, digital addressable, across five six different partners, and that poses a different set of problems than someone else might have in a different set of technology needs, process needs than someone else might have. So I think I think we've found ourselves in a place where everybody is building their own technology to manage these challenges, and it's now become a competitive advantage if you can do it right.
And you know a lot of times publishers, you know, we're fortunate that we can do it in a way that does feel convergent. We could activate against everything, We can optimize and measure against everything in a way that even some of our agency partners can't because they don't have that same view of each of those inventory pools in a system or in an operational way that they can activate against it. So they're kind of relying on us in some areas to manage that full approach across
each of these. So it's both it's technology, but I think it's primarily technology, but it is in order for people to adopt and implement this type of the type of technology that's needed, you need everyone to understand the business challenges, the process challenges, and prioritize it in moving.
Forward in a new way. Thanks the schell.
Hold on to that thought because it leads into my next question. I was thinking, Okay, if we pull back a perspective from the fragmentation issue itself at its most essential, we're still looking at a single broad landscape of consumers that we want to reach, albeit with plenty of different nuances and complications along.
The way to do so.
And in advertising reality today, how effectively can Nistry engage in and converge activations to reach across this veried landscape? You know, what are best practices today and what still needs to be done? Actually, at rob start and then I'll pitch it to man Steve here.
So our best practice, we tend to start with our own customers data, our brand data, starting with who is currently buying the brand. Using CRM data has become ever more important for our clients to effectively figure out who new prospects might be in the CTV world. So we use seeds of current clients, we segment CRM data. We then start to use that with our partners to start to build new audiences of how we want to then target potential converts.
You know, we marry that with.
The ability to target people buying potential switches, people buying other brands, and then balance those audiences and look at the potential reach within different partners that we're buying from. So I think you know first we start with customer data.
Great, thanks job, Matt.
DirecTV advertising has a lot of experience, years of experience, but also experience dealing with multiple types of audiences across all these different complications.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, audience fragmentation is real, it is accelerating. There is steady progress in converged solutions. We you know directivy, we've had converged solutions in markets since twenty nineteen. You have the ability to buy satellite television streaming. You can buy it through live or VOD. It's extended to the fast environment. To Michelle's point, it takes a significant technology investment. Once that technology messine is made. We've built parody into our products.
We treat everything as an impression, whether it is on a ten foot device, on a couch, on a mobile phone. We're able to deliver for that campaign doing the targeting that you just mentioned, whether it's viewership data, whether it's CRM data, whether it's first party data, You're able to execute and deliver a campaign across screens. You're able to
aggregate reporting and deliver attribution and understand the KPIs. You know, as a distributor, having that data and having the technology maybe gives us somewhat of an advantage, but from our seat, you know, converged solutions have worked unbelievably well, be able to compliment and find that audience where they are, deliver that relevant ad right time, right place, and then be
able to measure on it. So you know in every inventory type, every platform, with the right technology investment, you can absolutely get there and you can frequency cap across both streaming and TV. This is the world we live in today, So hoping everybody gets on board.
I think that's a good point too.
It's the data availability of it and who has access to those different data points, right, So big publisher DirecTV has access to the data who the consumers are in a privacy compliant way of course, and they can string that together when you're looking at you know, publishers have access to their exposure data. They know who those people are. But the linear data is a third party source. The addressable data is a third party source.
So making sure you have the right.
Connection points in the middle of all of that and the right partnerships in place to be able to string it all together. And I think that's part of the technology problem we're trying to solve, is the data availability and the connections.
Within well, and both of you talked about the necessity that you find to have to build your own tech to and I think all companies are kind of finding that, and some are more well invested in being able to do that and have the technology and the skill and
the proper developers to make those things happen. But that's where we sort of fragment it even further, right, because it's not widely available for everybody, and so we need to figure out how do we take the kinds of developments that you guys are doing for your internal use, make it more of a standardization so that across all of the you know, we've got fantastic systems that actually can pull data and extract it and put them all together.
And then the delivery systems are really amazing now, you know where we can years ago it's like, well, how do I actually get this AD to run in this connected TV or this one spot right? And how do I make it look like it's all the same. And so I think we have to have that conversation that actually creates the blend of technology on the buy side and the sell side and the delivery side, so that everybody has sort of a common dictionary and a common set of language that we're working with.
I think what Jeff's pointing towards there really is the key problem that the industry has to talk about from from my perspective. And you know, we're imagine works in markets all around the world, right, so we're working in some markets that are a lot more advanced than the US market where this kind of CTV reaggregation is already working.
The problem that the.
US market has it ties into.
Something Michelle said earlier, which is where all of the people who are selling inventory are trying to differentiate that inventory and the workflow by which they sell and execute and report on that has actually become a differentiating factor. It's almost like the people who control the inventory don't want to.
Do things the same way because they see that as part of their value proposition.
From a technology perspective, all of this stuff already works.
I mean, we have the ability to deliver.
Across linear, on demand streaming, addressable addressable in six different flavors. That technology works. What doesn't work yet is the business model by which the byside interacts with the cell side, and then the cell side ultimately executes and delivers on that. Like I said, in other markets, and I'll point to the UK market is probably being the one that's the most advanced. There has been an agreement around things like common currency. In the UK market, you can buy linear
television on an audience basis. You can buy impressions on linear television, you can buy impressions on streaming, you can buy impressions.
And on demand.
They figured it out.
There's probably some stuff to learn from those more advanced markets. How well that scales into the US market is the question that I don't think we've answered yet.
Good points.
And when we talk about looking at a converged audience or essentially aggregating an audience into a whole, are there specific challenges when it comes to aggregating audiences today, particularly when it comes to the nitta gritty delivering to all of them, everybody across that aggregated audience. What solutions are proving effective in the current market. Can you give us some perspective from the view point of view.
Yeah, I mean, listen, you've got a big rise of safe havens and data bunkers and opportunities to do deterministic matching against subscriber bases based on various you know, targeting criteria. When I think about, you know, the campaigns that we run, you know, addressably thousands of campaigns a year for ourselves and for other programmers that have enabled you know, you see you know, basically a third to third to third. You see a lot of first party data coming in.
You see companies wanting to acquire third party data that they have access to and apply that. And then you have times where they'll look for you know, viewership data from a platform where we've got viewership data available, so understanding you know, the age old concern is making sure the brand knows where that where their audience is and who their audience is well defined, being able to look
at what those various targeting capabilities are. In our case, we've built the technology that that those that targeting can get pushed either into linear or digital. You want to make sure that you've got your delivery through your linear and you know digital ad server, and then you're gonna roll that back up and you're gonna aggree and you're gonna understand how those audiences performed. You know, education is
a big part of that. Right, You're only going to be you're going to see that ROI if you've got the right level of targeting. And what we found is, you know, you need to be available to do all of the above, first party, second party data, third party.
Data, match data. You've got to be open.
We've got twenty two data vendors that we use, right, you know, so you have to be available where that client wants to be based on their prefer partnerships. And then from a targeting perspective, right, you have a lot of different planning systems that exist out there, and so you know, being a consultedative seller, I think you just mentioned it right.
It's commoditization of the same media.
You can buy an MTV avail from from paramount, or from a distributor, or from you. Right, there's lots of locations to buy that. You can trade it on the open market. It's bidable. But again, how do you differentiate yourself? I think it's part of that workflow you just mentioned. It's part of your consultative approach. It's the back end reporting. It's how do I make this client smarter? How do I make their next plan better? How can they deliver
more effectively? Where is their audience where they didn't think their audience was. They thought their audience was at six o'clock on a general entertainment network, but they're actually you can get that same audience for a fraction of the price on a Thursday morning on HGTV.
I'm making it up right.
So all of those things contribute to delivering against those rois. That's really what we focus on as the KPIs and the rest is just levers we pull to hit those objectives.
Yeah, thanks, Matt Steve. You would imagine have a lot of experience doing this. So what's your respective So I.
Think this year, I think in twenty twenty five, or I should say next year. One of the things we're going to see is the people that sell the inventory getting a lot smarter about how.
To guide buyers towards buying the right thing.
You know, in some of the markets we work in, programmatic went too far too fast, and programmatic is actually not a great way to preserve the value of inventory if you are a seller.
There's a lot of buyers.
Who love programmatic because it gives them the ability to kind of cherry pick inventory and arbitrage across multiple suppliers, but it's not necessarily the right way to optimize the value of the inventory.
So I think what we're going to see, you.
Know, next year, is a real focus around creating differentiated value within the inventory, and a big piece of that is going to be the sellers helping guide buyers towards the right way to buy. Rob and I were talking earlier about you know, some of the quality of what you see on the CTV advertising is really low. I guess it's my demographic, but I see a lot of pharmaceutical ads.
I don't know what that says about me.
And what they think about my profile, but I'll tell you what, it doesn't make me want to buy those products. It's not a well curated experience. It's not something that's really appealing to me as a buyer. That's got to get solved. The root of that problem is programmatic buying. We need to move back towards a model where high value inventory is being sold on a direct base as part of a curate ad campaign. That's how you build value back into the inventory side for these sellers.
Thanks Steve, and I want to touch on something that you mentioned earlier, measurement and currency. So although the UK has made a lot of progress, let's look at the US or North America at least.
What are some of the specific issues.
That arise when you're trying to deliver to all of these different platforms, especially when you have different levels of reporting right from all of them. And we're a long way from solving the well hopefully not, but we're a ways from solving the measurement issue and having common currency
and so on. So let's think about not one needs to be done there, Let's think about what works today, right working around with the state of things today and navigating around these issues around measurement and reporting and delivering effectively to this mix of platforms. Jeff from the show seeker perspective, what are your thoughts and making the work today?
Sure?
I think it, you know, kind of us back to having a real strategic business plan that actually says this is the objectives that I'm trying to reach for my customer. And when we do that, the currency sort of flattens out a little bit. I mean, obviously we're working towards an opportunity to find a common currency currency, but it's just going to take some time, and the way that we deliver on legacy content and now future and extra
types of TV content is going to be different. And so what I think we have to do is have reporting that reflects the objectives that that customer is actually trying to reach, and then make sure that our aggregation of all the data from the multiple sources that we're doing, because that's where the complexity lies, right, is that in traditional television we're saying, hey, you know, I've got one source and it's all coming back in very easy to measure.
Well, now we have.
Multiple sources returning that that data path from you know, from all the different services, types of advertising, everything else that are coming back together. And so we really do have have the Steve talked about, We have the technology to do that. It's about saying, hey, did we actually accomplish what we set out to do and we need
to do that with the data. And actually, as we do that more and more, then the currency starts to I think funnel into a It sort of funnels itself into more of a common currency, as opposed to saying, hey, I just want to convert this other thing into this new thing and make it look like it's the same thing that that that's where I think we fall apart. And if we can actually match back to the plan, then we we've actually accomplished them.
Right the comment I mean from from a from a buy side, I common currency, great, your common reach is more important from a buyside, which seems like it's a long way away. Right, Even if you might be able to do it in a in a direct TV environment, that's a small part of a total environment that the buyside might be looking at. And that presents the problem. You know, let's hope that it gets solved that some way. I figuring out how to how to at least get
cross cross platform reach. In the meantime, we tend to look at, uh, you know, business outcomes and measuring how do we tie business outcomes to exposure And we don't expect that to be a you know, we can look at that in the past using marketing or media mixed modeling. But in the future we're expecting our partners, you know, too, to tie back an exposure in a video platform back to some form of engagement, some form of customer engagement
with the brand. And and and that is the way that we start to think about a convergence and a comparison to allow us to think about equitable distribution of funds across different video platforms, and so we have to bypass some of that cross platform reach that just seems out of breach.
Thanks Rob Michelle from what you're seeing here amount what works today and navigate around currency measurement reporting issues.
Well, I think I think it's important to really recognize that the past ten years, maybe even the past five years more so, have had such a drastic change in how people consume content, the amount of platforms and areas that you can watch TV or video or whatever it is, and that, coupled with all of the advancements in technology and data availability, I think is the reason that we're in this scenario where we're evaluating what is the right currency?
Are there multiple.
And how do we evolve from the way things have been done in the past, because the way things were done ten years ago just can't continue to be the way things are done now, which I think has kind of led itself to the optionality in a currency measurement worlds because there is no right way to do anything right now, right like there is not one single source
of truth. There is so much fragmentation and advancements in data and technology that allow us to think about things differently and allow us to evaluate currently which measurement partner provides the greatest value, whether it's from planning holistically or
counting numbers or measuring convergent reach. So it's an interesting time to be able to like evaluate maybe there isn't just one currency right Maybe right now there is not one way to think about things, and maybe there's different providers for each partner, for each client that gives them a certain advantage in evaluating data in the way that
they want to evaluate it. Right So to the points around audiences, being able to take an audience, understand how that audience used content across everything, plan against that, measure against it, and that's the attribution against it. There's different currency or measurement providers or sometimes both for each of those workflows. Ideally you use one for that whole cycle, and there's just different opportunities and advantages that I think
we're evaluating right now. One day when we come back to one or two, maybe, but for now, I think there is a big change in the marketplace that.
We need to take advantage of Thanks Michelle, and I think when you bring up mindset, that leads me to
my next question. Sorry to spill the water here, which I want to ask of Steve, because I think you've got some overarching perspective that's really I will hear when when we look at some of the challenges of advertising to fragmented audiences, is it related to legacy industry thinking and mindset, you know, old versus new, conservatism versus aggression and so on when it comes to looking at new possibilities versus just going with what worked before.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, you know, I was just listening to what Michelle was saying, and I think that's a really interesting perspective that ties into what you're asking here. There is conservative conservatism on both sides of the equation, right on the byside and seal side. People don't want to change the way that they've been doing things in general, because they've got business.
Models that are built on top of the way things that happen.
But it's going to have to change, and maybe you know that. The part of the answer towards that is it does have to change in an evolutionary fashion.
We're going to have to change over.
The course of the next couple of years, maybe even the next decade, to move.
Towards these newer models.
But I can't help but wonder where it ultimately changes too. Is that there is not a single currency, There is not a single ubiquitous workflow, There is not a single way for buyers to buy, which means that what we need to be able to do, and Jeff and I work together a lot on this kind of stuff, is make sure that the underlying data platforms have the openness that is going to be required in order for the people who sell inventory and the people who buy inventory to be.
Able to get access into those systems.
Transform the data the way that they need it in order to create meaningful reporting on things like attribution and proof of performance. To me, that's what the future of this whole ecosystem is going to look like. It's going to be a much more open data platform where the buyers may have different ways of evaluating the performance of the ads they're buying. We'll all be able to work together to provide that and ultimately build the value in the inventory.
Excellent, and I think we have time for one last question, which I think multiple, multiple of you will have comments on.
Let me flip things a little bit.
We focused on the challenges of delivering to a lot of different platforms as a whole. But let's turn that around and let's look at the possibilities presented by all of these variables. Are there ways to really take advantage of that, you know, and innovate and to take maximum advantage of some of the unique capabilities that exist in these different universes. How does the industry take advantage of that? What works now to really maximize performance by leveraging some
of these unique possibilities. And Matt, I know you mentioned earlier that DIRECTIVI is doing a lot of work to try and do this.
Create.
Unique campaigns, unique advantages, explore the possibilities.
You want to start on this question? Sure?
Sure, yeah, I mean listen, you you want to be able to have a smart dademic inventory that you can serve in these campaigns and be able to do all things that we just talked about. I think the measurement piece is not the long pole in the tent. You've got comScore, you've got Nielsen, you've got all measurement with video amp and eyespot, Right, that's not necessarily where we
find friction. What we want to be able to do is take these various video platforms, whether it's a fast, free front porch or again whether it's satellite and live or VOD or whether it's pure play streaming, and we ought to be able to aggregate those audiences like we've just talked about, want to be able to deliver those campaigns, and then we want to really focus on those business outcomes, so making sure that whether it's geographically delivered or whether
it's delivered based on socioeconomic variables. Did they go to the store, did they search on the web? Did they make a purchase? At the product skeu level, This is the information from the ad exposure that we're providing back to the buy side so they can again move the units that they need to make. So what we've done and we found a lot of success, is that we've really made TV and digital one thing impressions and we've made it all performance based and that's been a big
boon to our business. Right, we can serve certainly branding campaigns and we do that at scale, but the opportunity to use the data and technology that are available for us today, which is available across all those platforms is a very very powerful tool for us, and that's what gets people renewing. I've got you know, addressable is evergreen.
You know, there are a lot of these campaigns are never off air, right because from a performance perspective, continuing to mind those clients, they're continuing to see the value there, and so you can continue to optimize, tweak and optimize, tweak and optimize. It's been great, it's been very successful.
Thanks Pat. Jeff.
Yeah, I think you know, as we as we kind of look as we're moving towards the future, the reality is that the tools need to be strong and robust. They need to be advanced enough to do the types of business practice that we want to have, and they need to be easy and simil to use. You know, this is the big challenge that we have, and we know that the ecosystem keeps getting more and more complex. Well, as we do that, we just create more and more fragmentation.
And so what I think we really have to be focused on is how do we get the tools to be smart enough to be able to execute on the design of the campaign that the buyer that really wants to what they really want out of their ad LOK.
Michelle, Yeah, I think that's a really great point because I think there's actually been so much innovation over the last ten years. Then now it's time to put it into practice. Right Like every publisher, every agency, every tech company, I've had these innovation teams, right, Like I am on the advanced advertising team at Paramount and we have been innovating for eight years since I've been there, And same thing at the agencies, right they have like an innovation
advanced advertising team. Now it's time to actually take all those things that have been built, all the new ways of doing things, and making sure that everybody from the innovation team down to an entry level analyst understands the new ways of thinking about and doing things and using that technology and tools for the future of advertising and getting uncomfortable, right, Like we talked about is it technology, is it process? It's getting really uncomfortable to move forward.
For the future. Thanks to show, Steve, you've got the last word here.
Well, I guess you know what Michelle does say and kind of ties into where we were earlier. Twenty twenty five is the year when we've all really got to focus on taking the things that do work well, and I mean from a technical perspective, and making that work for the business right, making it effective for the people to buy the advertising, making it profitable for the people who sell the advertising, and ultimately delivering to the brands
that are trying to attract consumers. So if that could be the theme of twenty twenty five, I think we'd all be a lot happier when we get together next year wherever.
Tracy gonna do this, Thanks Steve we I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today, so I'd like to close by giving thanks to Steve, Rob, Jeff, Matt, and Michelle for their time today.
Thank you for your perspective.
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