In the 90s my company Next Century Media invented addressable commercials and TV Big Data (BD), winning a technology Emmy®. Our system Opti*Mark was deployed by John Malone’s TCI, the largest MVPD in the world at the time, with John Hendricks’ Your Choice TV, as well as by BellSouth and other MVPDs. We warned the television industry that it was essential to shift to addressability, interactivity, and BD measurability, because digital was coming to take away the business using exactly those three things. Our plan was to amalgamate all inventory through one delivery system so as to be able to control frequency at a campaign level. We called that idea “frequency capping”.
We all know what happened instead. In today’s digital-first world, TV is no longer the base in the buy. And what happened to frequency capping? Everyone does it for their own platform, but a normal buy of 30+ platforms still has tons of excess and insufficient frequency. Let’s say you tell each platform to cap it at 6 frequency for the campaign: with 30+ platforms, some folks will still be receiving the same ad 180 times in one flight.
Frequency capping can only work if the buy is consolidated through one pipe.
And let’s not forget insufficient frequency, it is as big a problem as excess frequency. In any typical campaign using digital + TV, about 70% of the people reached are getting either too little or too much frequency.This is illustrated in these two slides:
So, what is this new breakthrough? It’s called UltiMedia and it’s a unification system that enables multitudes of sell-side and buy-side entities to optimize in both directions at once: that IP came from my company, NCM, and is now owned by Bill Harvey Consulting (BHC). The only practical way that both buy and sell side can optimize at once is by increasing the sales effect, and that technology comes from BHC and RMT, which each have many proofs of lifting ROAS and branding effects. The foundation of the system comes from tvbeat, a company that unifies all of the inventory of video sell-side enterprises for yield maximization and programmatic delivery, has 40 clients in nine countries, including Spectrum in the US, Sky in Europe, Foxtel in Australia, et al, and has many proofs of lifting yield.
The business plan of UltiMedia is to pool television inventory from all interested parties, not all of their inventory, just a test sample at first, probably the inventory that is hardest to sell. At least one of the top agency holding companies has already expressed interest in doing business with UltiMedia.
While the catalytic idea was to solve the WFA/ANA 60-country bête noir of excess frequency, UltiMedia actually solves many problems at once:
- Maximizing reach against the best brand growth prospect target at the lowest cost per new customer
- Maximizing the value and yield of all premium video inventory and thereby restoring profitability growth to the television industry
- Interconnectivity with all relevant industry systems
- Maximizing efficiency of workflow
- Making all linear inventory through the system programmatic with a 96% reduction in programmatic middlemen cost
- A better consumer experience (no excess frequency)
- Fill-in of missing reach and of insufficient frequency with addressable
The best news is that tvbeat, which is the foundation of UltiMedia, is already doing most of these things. RMT is also at 100% readiness for the mission, and it will not take long to build the BHC optimization layers since they have all been built by Bill Harvey before for other companies.
Once proven to its customers and scaled with more inventory, UltiMedia will be like the digital giants except not a walled garden, and with more ROAS, no fraud, and no brand safety risks.
We are not alone in thinking this way. TVB with Magnite and ITN has separately conceived a portion of this plan. Universal Ads is executing a digital-only version. Audyns is also biting off something smaller in the same direction. Perhaps we can gather these geniuses together to make UltiMedia a true industry collaboration.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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