At the CIMM Summit this week, I had the honor of participating in a panel entitled “A Plan for Television’s Comeback” with Audrey Steele, President of RMT, Brad Seitter, Executive Vice President of TVB, and Todd Gordon, Co-Founder of Audyns. Why was this the most important panel of my life? As you can imagine, there is a story behind it.
I won a Technology Emmy for introducing set-top box data and addressable commercials, but I considered that I had failed at the larger objective. My dream had been to unite the MVPDs and TV networks to create, in 1997, a platform very much like Google and Meta have today for their own very different sort of ad inventory. Making it not only easier to buy TV, but also using addressable to fill in homes that had received insufficient frequency, and to switch a campaign from linear to addressable as soon as some substantial number of targets was beginning to get excessive frequency. The addressable ads would hit not only the latter “insufficients”, but also those targets completely unreached so far.
Also: not only optimizing for the buy-side brand growth, but also for the sell-side revenue yield at the same time. The idea was that if the buy side got a 50% increase in ROAS, they could afford to pay a 15% premium and still have a 35% ROAS increase. The buy side would benefit because the whole world benefits when TV programmers can create terrific new programming.
Also: speeding up data delivery to overnight.
These were my unfulfilled aspirations.
I had invented frequency capping, and that is being used today, but not at a holistic campaign level, so it has very little effect on stopping excess frequency, a bugaboo that WFA/ANA has been working on since 2019, with $90 million already invested in measuring the phenomenon. But measuring it does not solve it.
UltiMedia is a new platform that does all of those things. It is already in place, open for business, in 30 million U.S. homes – the Spectrum footprint. And other inventory owners are leaning in, and in some cases already cooperating with UltiMedia, because they are on the same track to making TV easier to buy. High on this list are the TVB and Audyns. TVB is seeking to aggregate local broadcaster inventory, and Audyns is seeking to roll up long-tail national network cable inventory. TVB and Audyns are building their own platforms. UltiMedia’s platform is tvbeat, which Spectrum is using, as are 40 other TV broadcasters and MVPDs in nine countries, and we have added additional optimization layers on top of tvbeat’s optimizers, from RMT, Bill Harvey Consulting, and datafuelX, and the ability to bring in more addressable inventory through Invidi.
The zeitgeist has brought its muse-like effect to even more players in our industry, and I’ve tried to list them all in this previous post.
This is an idea whose time has come. UltiMedia, TVB, and Audyns are coming at it from slightly different directions, although aligned on all of them. Both TVB and Audyns are aimed at making TV easier to buy above all else. UltiMedia is seeking to do that and also to solve the WFA/ANA problem of excess frequency, and is also trying to get the most accurate data to be used on a daily basis as regards measuring the impact of each media type on brand growth, which is the number one aim of all marketers and 70% of all CEOs interviewed by McKinsey recently. When the most accurate data are used, television is shown to more than pay back its higher CPMs, even for addressable TV with its $40 CPMs – I should say especially addressable TV.
The over-rotation to digital first ahead of TV has been spurred by numerous factors including one stop shop ease of buying, fast data feedback, low CPMs, herd mentality, but also by the ability of walled gardens who give themselves their own report cards to make it seem as if all those sales are being caused by digital, when most of those buyers also saw the brand’s ads on television and/or would have made the same purchase without the ads. UltiMedia’s plan is to bring in the ARF and make sure that only the most impeccable methodologies are being used to measure outcomes. A truly level playing field with all the transparency that television has always had, and clean room technology to eliminate all privacy and confidentiality concerns.
Most important to the Ultimedia plan: AI win/win optimization using proven advanced audiences and proven RMT resonance, proven fast-growth markets, proven predictability of shopping trips, and addressable ability to reach people right before those trips, plus the fabulous methods developed by each of the leading agencies and advertisers. Only AI can tie all that together in real-time, and all of this has been built. The win/win of it was built by my company Next Century Media 20 years ago. (Not all of this AI optimization is ready for a flight that has to start next week, but the three most powerful parts are ready for next week: those are RMT.ai, advanced audiences, and addressables for targeted reach/frequency optimization.)
Ready to go right now in 30 million U.S. homes. With all of you ready buyers out there you better move fast because the inventory will soon become scarce. We expect to get a lot more inventory for you soon. Please join us and make this an all-industry effort. There is a win in there for all of us, even for digital. This is 22nd Century Media.
RMT and Source Digital Announce Partnership
RMT, which has previously announced partnerships with other AIs, including Wharton Neuroscience/AI, Semasio, and Viomba, has just concluded a partnership development arrangement with Source Digital, an AI company that adds psychological metadata to content and ads at the second-by-second level. This provides Source Digital with more training data by RMT’s proven sales/ratings lifting technology for advertising, including tune-in, and enables RMT to scale by moving to 100% AI functionality. We can now measure the motivations in thousands of ads per day, and optimize the exact moment to insert exactly the right overlay ads in smart TV content allowing that, and do much more.
Image: Pier 57, NYC. Source: hudsonriverpark.org
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