Marketing Maestros
3D Network from ESPN to Be Closed Down
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: Jun 14, 2013 12:00am ET
It was just announced that ESPN’s 3D network, which was launched in June 2010, will be closed down by the end of the year. According to MediaPost, that decision follows a big slowdown in theatrical 3D films and an overall lack of 3D TV interest/adoption by consumers. Sorry to say, I am not surprised.
In my opinion, 3D is a special occasion experience – for a Saturday night movie or big game. But it’s not an everyday experience. And that’s because of the 3D glasses.
While watching television, many of us are on a laptop, tablet, and/or mobile phone—and you just can’t do that wearing those 3D glasses. Viewers want to multitask and not be tethered solely to the television.
Further, advertisers were reluctant to incur the expense or spend the time to product commercials in 3D. We heard that repeatedly from the ANA Production Management Committee.
According to the press reports, ESPN said they aren’t abandoning new TV technology. In a statement, the network said it was experimenting with Ultra-High Definition TV, also known as 4K TV which has four times the digital information as HDTV. We wish them luck!
comScore: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: Jun 14, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper, “Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,” highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of comScore’s offerings.
comScore provides audience and advertising analytics to measure how consumers use digital and TV platforms, including PCs/laptops, smartphones, tablets, “smart TVs,” gaming devices, and of course traditional TV. comScore measures behaviors such as online buying, website visitation, search, and viewing. The company also provides digital analytics and a variety of services tailored to mobile subscribers. comScore believes that accountability is now a multi-platform issue as television becomes digital, and that greater comparability between “traditional” television and digital platforms is needed.
What comScore Does Related to Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings
At comScore, brand-specific advertising measurement is an important foundation for both television and multi-platform services. Both TV and digital advertising are measured on an impression-by-impression basis for each individual creative execution. validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) is a multi-platform solution for measuring campaign delivery across television and digital. The comScore methodology for digital advertising includes behavioral measurement from its two-million-person panel combined with census measurements via comScore Census Network. The comScore methodology for TV uses brand-specific measurement via five million television set-top box households.
Measurement is a key challenge when trying to understand how digital advertising and TV advertising work together. New methodologies such as comScore’s solutions are required to answer key questions:
- What is the audience delivery on digital platforms and on the TV platform? Is the advertising program reaching the same consumers, or different consumers on television and online? How much audience is duplicated across platforms?
- What is the impact of mobile advertising? How does response to smartphone and tablet advertising differ?
- What is the impact of the campaign on key branding measures, such as awareness, favorability, and intent to purchase? What is the impact on online behaviors, such as search and website visitation? What is the impact on online and offline purchasing behavior?
- What is the right mix of advertising between mobile and TV platforms?
- Which creative executions perform the best? Can we more effectively measure commercial wear-out?
- How can we more effectively manage advertising programs to optimize against our objectives?
Previous blogs in this series have featured INVIDI Technologies, PrecisionDemand, Simulmedia, Rentrak, Kantar Media, and TRA.
Advertisers Cater to Hispanics via English Language Television
By Yasmin Melendez, director of committees and conferences, ANA
Posted: Jun 7, 2013 12:00am ET
Last June, Ford aired a Spanish language commercial for its Ford Escape during the fourth game of the NBA finals on ABC. While this initially confused some viewers, it signifies a recent trend of advertisers targeting Hispanics via English language television. According to a Nielsen 2012 study, if the US Hispanic market were a standalone country, its buying power would make it one of the top twenty economies in the world. The rising economic power of this segment has made advertisers pay attention to Hispanic consumers of all acculturated levels. Here are three of my favorite commercials that have aired on general market media:
- “Mi Tide- Abuela” - This commercial shows a bicultural, bilingual, millennial granddaughter translating her grandmother’s reaction to the new Tide. What resonated with me was how the younger generation is able to understand Spanish, even if they are not able to translate it word-for-word. I especially liked the insight of Hispanics use of “remedios caseros” or home remedies.
- Volkswagon Passat “Vamonos” – This commercial imagines what would happen if you took a cross country road trip with a friend and all you had to listen to was a Spanish language learning CD. Well, it turns out that after 13 hours you become fluent in Spanish. I found this “what if” scenario very humorous and appreciated the actor “talking with his hands,” which is common in Latin cultures.
- Target “Clap your Hands” – Target uses the children’s song “If you’re happy and you know it” and alternates between English and Spanish lyrics. As many people do, I watch TV while browsing an iPad and this spot cut through the clutter with the simple soundtrack. The insight portrayed is universal of a family caring for a newborn, but it targets Hispanic consumers through the soundtrack and casting.
Insights from Dick Costolo and Les Moonves from the Nielsen Consumer 360 Conference
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: Jun 6, 2013 12:00am ET
I attended the Nielsen Consumer 360 Conference earlier in the week in Phoenix, along with about 1000 other attendees. Below are highlights from the two opening speakers of the conference, Dick Costolo and Leslie Moonves.
Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, spoke of the interplay between television and social media, calling Twitter “the social soundtrack for television.” It is increasingly common for media companies to spark social conversations by integrating Twitter and hashtags into programs. Doing so extends the live reach of a show. Mr. Costolo encouraged marketers to jump into the conversation and then create campaigns based on those conversations. Those conversations can then become incredible earned media assets. He noted that the qualities of Twitter that lend themselves to engagement are being public, transparent, real-time, conversational,widely distributed, and totally auditable. Further, a new metric will help provide an indication of the depth of engagement – Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings will be introduced in the fall to measure the reach of tweets of programs and ads.
Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, emphasized how content drives everything as “he who has the best content ultimately wins.” He said that technology has become a friend, rather than an enemy, and noted Netflix, DVRs, Twitter, and cbs.com as additional ways for CBS to share its content. He spoke about how “binge consumption” of programming (i.e., watching an entire season of a program—often a serialized program—over a weekend) is becoming increasingly important and noted Breaking Bad as an example of a show whose success has been accelerated by binge consumption. Regarding the promise of interactive TV, Mr. Mooves said that he personally doesn’t want to interact with a drama but sees great promise for sports, live reality, and awards shows.
INVIDI Technologies: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: Jun 6, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper, “Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,” highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of INVIDI Technology’s offerings.
INVIDI Technologies calls itself “the world’s only truly addressable targeted television advertising and marketing solution for cable, satellite, and telco service providers.” The company was founded in 2000 to increase the effectiveness of television advertising by making it addressable to households and individual viewers.
INVIDI provides cable, satellite, and telco operators the opportunity to position their services as a comprehensive source for targeted advertising across those respective video delivery formats. INVIDI enables operators to selectively target television viewers with the same pinpoint accuracy as direct mail and database marketing without compromising viewer privacy, thereby enhancing existing revenue streams and cultivating significant new revenue opportunities.
INVIDI accesses geographic, demographic, and psychographic data provided by public or proprietary databases and then uses that information to serve the right commercial to the right viewer. Addressability can target viewers according to specific buyer attributes such as age and gender, geographic location, ethnicity, pet ownership, and car lease expiration.
INVIDI enables television service providers to simultaneously deliver multiple and distinct commercial streams to different households or individual set-top boxes during a single commercial break, while also controlling reach, frequency, and separation of the commercial assets.
This increases advertising inventory and revenue opportunities for operators while providing advertisers and media buyers with a measurable and accountable way to place television advertising in front of the desired viewer demographic. Advertisers can select specific households and individual audience demographics and target them with specific numbers of commercial impressions. Addressability allows advertisers to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time.
What INVIDI Technologies Does Related to Brand- Specific Commercial Ratings
INVIDI enables television service providers to simultaneously deliver multiple and distinct commercial streams to different households or individual set-top boxes during a single commercial break, while also controlling reach, frequency, and separation of the commercial assets. And INVIDI also reports on tune-outs from creative, which is an aid to making better creative decisions.
Previous blogs in this series have featured PrecisionDemand, Simulmedia, Rentrak, Kantar Media, and TRA.
PrecisionDemand: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: Jun 3, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper, “Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,” highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of PrecisionDemand’s offerings.
PrecisionDemand refers to itself as a “TV marketing firm with a solution for accurately targeting all TV and measuring its impact in real time” and “a marketing platform that leverages big data to provide insights and drive compelling efficiencies for clients.”
PrecisionDemand believes that customer data drives targeting and ROI. Their approach is rooted in an understanding of the customer. Rather than employing mass reach, they apply sophisticated analytic techniques to cost-efficiently target more impressions on an advertiser’s best prospects. PrecisionDemand taps second-by-second TV viewership data from 10+ million set-top boxes, along with demographic and purchase data from such parties as Acxiom and marketers’ own sales data, to devise better schedules for television commercials. Their technologies allow more efficient planning, buying, tracking, and measuring of TV media investments.
What PrecisionDemand Does Related to Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings
As noted above, PrecisionDemand taps second-by-second TV viewership data from set-top boxes along with demographic and purchase data to devise better schedules for marketers. That second-by-second viewership data provides brand-specific commercial ratings and can provide insight to marketers to help optimize media schedules.
Previous blogs in this series have featured Simulmedia, Rentrak, Kantar Media, and TRA.
Simulmedia: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: May 29, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper, “Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,” highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of Simulmedia’s offerings.
Simulmedia started with the idea of helping TV networks figure out when best to place their network promotions, before offering solutions for all advertisers that want to reach targeted television audiences. The company calls itself “an audience-driven ad network for television,” and sells television advertising campaigns.
Simulmedia is an “unwired network.” They access inventory via two sources: (1) locally through cable/satellite/telco operators and (2) nationally through relationships with 30+ cable networks. The Simulmedia Audience Network monetizes under-appreciated inventory from its television partners. The network is operated opaquely, meaning they don’t share spot level detail with advertisers until after the campaign, instead selling data-defined audiences rather than specific shows, networks, geographies, or time slots.
According to Simulmedia:
- Commercial and brand-specific ratings are critical to understanding advertising efficacy and are available today.
- Advertisers can and should demand accountability and more granular measurements across their entire media plan, especially with their television spend.
- More granular measurement/guarantees are essential to the long-term power and growth of television advertising.
Simulmedia customers include advertisers, agencies, and television content producers. The company is using commercial/brand-specific measurements to help its customers find, reach, and measure their TV ad campaigns. This level of granular measurement helps advertisers better analyze spend across all networks and maximize the impact of television campaigns across specific target audiences.
Case Study
Simulmedia has many broadcast and cable network clients, all of whom are using commercial ratings to help optimize their own programming promos. For a client in the tune-in space, Simulmedia worked with the TV network to understand which of their tune-in promotion spots drove the most conversions to the show, and when the campaign’s sweet spot was for conversions with respect to hours in advance of the show’s airtime. These types of analyses help advertisers get smarter about when to advertise, which ads drive viewers, and how they might optimize for future TV campaigns.
Previous blogs in this series have featured Rentrak, Kantar Media, and TRA.
Rentrak: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: May 20, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper, “Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,” highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of Rentrak’s offerings.
Rentrak is a media measurement and research company providing multiscreen reporting and analytics with services positioned in two categories: movies everywhere and TV everywhere. Rentrak measures television viewing via a national footprint of over 8.7 million homes and more than 22 million set-top boxes.
TV Essentials is the Rentrak product that helps television buyers and sellers make smarter transactions by giving them a deeper understanding of the true value of their viewing audience. This is done via census-like viewership information, which, according to the company, provides a level of granularity and stability absent from traditional television measurement services, and goes beyond C3 to provide an advertiser’s Exact Commercial Ratings — not an average of all ads in a telecast.
The Exact Commercial Ratings data metric allows ad agencies and advertisers to determine how specific national commercials perform within an ad pod, advancing the national TV industry standard from measuring an average of a commercial rating performance of a telecast (or C3) to providing individual ad metrics for each specific commercial. Exact Commercial Ratings tell network advertisers exactly how many viewers were exposed to their specific commercials in a campaign, allowing them to maximize the results of their television spend. There is strategic value (beyond currency) from Rentrak’s Exact Commercial Ratings:
- Measure value delivered: What did we get? How do my Exact Commercial Ratings compare to the rating of the telecast?
- Determine relative value: Could we have done better in this specific case? How do my Exact Commercial Ratings compare to other commercials in the telecast and in the pod?
- Improve scheduling and commercial production: Can we make better ads? When does my commercial wear out? Which commercial duration is most impactful?
- Buy placement: What can we do better in the future? Which networks, dayparts, or series work best: by quarter, month, daypart, pod position, position within pod, competitive set, and/or specific creative?
- Branded entertainment: Where is additional value?
Note that previous blogs in this series have featured Kantar Media and TRA.
Kantar Media: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: May 15, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper, “Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,” highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of Kantar Media’s offerings.
Kantar Media believes media measurement is evolving. It is going beyond broadcast and established networks, emerging channels, advanced advertising, and TV everywhere. It is also enabling advertisers to track commercial ratings, ad avoidance, promo evaluation, and behavior segmentation.
Kantar Media has pioneered the collection and processing of return path data (RPD), which measures television audience viewing behavior by collecting second-by-second tuning activity from TV set-top boxes. Kantar’s second-by-second tuning data enables companies to evaluate television campaigns across 10 measurable influences: specific program, program genre, channel, daypart, commercial duration, pod, position in pod, product category, time shifting, and frequency. With this data, advertisers can identify the actual audience for their commercials, determine which commercials are most effective and engaging, and monitor whether specific commercials are retaining audiences or experiencing wearout over time.
Kantar Case Study: Viewer Retention for High Definition Commercials
Using return path data, Kantar Media analyzed viewer retention for commercials shown in HD (High Definition) versus SD (Standard Definition). Their analysis found that HD commercials hold audiences better than SD, as measured by the share of viewers that tuned away from the commercials. For example, as seen in the chart below, 30 percent fewer viewers tuned away from auto commercials shown in HD as compared to SD.
TRA: Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings Solution Provider
By Bill Duggan, Group EVP, ANA
Posted: May 9, 2013 12:00am ET
The new ANA white paper,“Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers,”highlights solutions from eight companies for brand-specific commercial ratings. This blog provides a recap of TRA’s offerings.
TRA is a media measurement software, research, and analytics company whose products help advertisers, agencies, and television networks improve advertising targeting, accountability, and return on media investment. The company was founded in 2007 and acquired by TiVo in 2012.
TRA has been delivering brand-specific commercial audience metrics for six years. TRA collects immense banks of data, including second-by-second tuning data from set-top boxes in 4.2 million households, and matches that with household purchase and demographic data. Benefits include:
- Media agencies learn how variables such as networks, dayparts, program types, specific programs, time slots, and pod positions affect their ROI, and also how much time to spend on branded entertainment and what form that should take.
- Creative agencies can learn which creative works best. That knowledge can markedly improve the success rate of an agency’s creative product. When a commercial is “wearing out,” the agency can identify its decline in effectiveness by observing a drop in retention. Based on which target groups are responding to the brand and the messaging with their wallets, insights can be used to drive future creative. The graphic below tracks “switchaway” from a brand’s commercials over time as a measure of wearout, so it’s clear when to replace a commercial.
