Inside Those Secret Meetings to Advance Advanced TV

Data has never been more important to adtech and the systems that are emerging for targeted advertising. In an important next step, some of the walled gardens are coming down as the industry is starting to coalesce around shared interests. I think specifically of the joint effort of Viacom, Fox and Turner with OpenAP.

The full adoption of Advanced TV has its strengths and its challenges. Obviously, the ability to more finely hone an ad message delivered to the right audience makes advanced TV a “must consider.” Yet, the available inventory is still somewhat restricted and issues like workflow, fragmentation and walled gardens need to be addressed.  Also, we need more overall industry participation to accelerate progress.

The takeaways from the Secret Society discussion were as follows.

Targeting. Finally there is a way to go beyond age and gender in a meaningful way. For those of us who have been in the industry for a while, the opportunity to target is seismic. “In 1975 when I was negotiating for broadcast TV, it was the first year that the guarantees were based on age and gender and not household,” said USIM Advanced Television strategist Mitch Oscar, who organizes the Secret Society meetings.  “At that time we said, ‘households don’t buy products, people do.’ Forty-plus years later, we are looking at households that have people of different ages and genders that exhibit behavioral characteristics as behavioral targets. We are getting closer to targeting people who might be interested in the product and eventually purchase it.”

Inventory. However, there are not enough national opportunities to target. The inventory currently available in advanced TV is two minutes of local inventory per hour.

Workflow and Fragmentation. “Workflow for audience systems does not exist,” Oscar noted. “We need a universal workflow instead of taking bits and pieces from various media companies.”  But even before the workflow, there is a need to address the myriad of platforms, networks and data sources that silo efforts. “The most important challenge is how many different platforms and data sources there are,” he continued, “Seven addressable TV platforms, 15 programmatic platforms, 6 contextual audience networks that offer 31 flavors of products, and over 68 data sources across these platforms makes it difficult to evaluate and implement.”

Participation. Getting more clients on board and involved is paramount according to Dave Morgan, CEO and Founder of Simulmedia. “It is critical that the advanced TV industry work harder to get clients -- the marketers -- much more directly involved in development,” he asserted.  “Customer and purchase data is the key fuel in all advanced TV applications and it is the client that controls that data.”

Marketing Focus.  Morgan believes, “We need to make it more about marketing -- driving provable sales, ROI and other desired business outcomes -- than advertising, delivering impressions and other media metrics,” Morgan said. “The future of advertising is about performance. That is where advanced TV efforts should be focused.”

Arguably the next step in advancing advanced TV is working together towards shared interests. Enter OpenAP.  Audrey Steele, Executive Vice President, Sales Research Insights and Strategy, Fox Networks Group, spoke about OpenAP as a way to break down some of the walled gardens, set some level of standardization and accelerate the adoption of Advanced TV advertising. She explained that the three partners -- Viacom, Fox and Turner -- are “frenemies” who are “similar in intent but the execution of sales inventory is different.”

Steele noted that OpenAp offers the ability to optimize existing base buys, is unified in need for standardization, offers the promise of digital programmatic, enables the most persuasive message for ad placement, is an immersive environment with digital precision for brand messages, is fraud free and is transparent.

Some media executives believe that the future of Advanced TV is now, and that it is quickly enlisting many more players.  “I think that we are going to see a significant acceleration of data-optimized linear TV ads, particularly as we see big enterprise tech companies like Oracle and Adobe getting more involved and as we see the big digital players like Facebook and Google getting more and more involved in TV advertising,” Morgan concluded.

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