Vizio said it is growing its advertising business, adding Oscar “Oz” Lang and Ben Sullins to its in-house ad-tech team.

The company said it opened a tech Innovation center in Denver in December. It now houses 140 of Vizio’s engineering and tech specialists working on Vizio’s software ad product and entertainment ecosystem. Between Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, the Vizio Ads and Innovation team has more than 400 people.

Lang was named VP of product management at Vizio. He had been head of product for Adobe’s Advertising Cloud TV business.

Sullins is VP of product engineering. He had been senior VP of engineering at SpotX.

Vizio said other recent ad tech hires have come from WarnerMedia, Comcast, Discovery, Magnite and Vevo.

Also: Vizio Adds Streaming VOD to WatchFree Plus Service

“Since our IPO last year, we have been heavily investing in engineering and software to scale our Platform Plus operations and build out our in-house ad tech team,” said David Rudnick, senior VP of product engineering at Vizio. “This investment will not only provide unique opportunities and measurable outcomes for advertisers, but it also helps us drive better consumer experiences.”

Vizio’s ad products are powered by viewing data from Vizio’s Inscape unit. Vizio Ads’ line of products include True Incremental Reach, Universal Frequency Control and Household Connect, an omnichannel offering helping marketers expand audience reach for cross-device campaigns.

Also: Vizio Claims $100 Million in Upfront Ad Commitments

Vizio’s Homescreen is the first stop for millions households, streamlining the search-and-discovery process for viewers, while providing exclusive opportunities for marketers to reach those viewers with tune-in ads and brand messaging.

“Consumers are rapidly shifting to the Smart TV experience, and because we own the hardware, software, and data, we are able to innovate in ways that others can’t,” Rudnick said. ”With continued momentum on the Platform Plus side of our business, which is a function of better personalization and engagement on SmartCast, we are driving interest with brands, advertisers and content partners to work with Vizio.” ■

Many businesses stared down a massive wall of uncertainty when the realities of COVID-19 started to hit. This resulted in an almost unprecedented exodus from TV advertising as video and content providers grappled with the dichotomy of canceled spots in the face of surging viewership. While their television ad systems could accommodate normal market fluctuations on an as-needed basis, they were not designed to handle enormous volumes that saw thousands of cancellations per day. It was an unanticipated scenario and one made all the more burdensome by manual processes required to make changes and salvage certain bookings.

While the greatest surge in rebookings and cancellations is past us, there remains a continued need for increased agility as conditions change. The lessons learned and counterstrategies developed in the past several months are being continually fine-tuned as content distributors and their partners position to be better prepared for challenges ahead — including a possible resurgence of the disease this fall and the anticipated fits and starts of a return to normalcy over the next two years.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Picture a restaurant chain that had placed spots across multiple local, regional and national outlets months in advance of March of this year. When dining rooms were ordered to be closed, canceling or redirecting a campaign in such a fragmented environment proved problematic. Cancellations of individual orders within ad management systems were required to ensure removal of all spots. Some businesses wanted to change their messaging on the fly to reassure customers that steps were being taken to keep them safe.

Even large brands and video providers, both with great resources, struggled to keep up.So consider the challenges that less-resourced players faced and the en masse cancellations start to make sense. With the unprecedented wave of cancellations taxing both ad-management systems and personnel, sales portals and traffic management systems crashed or timed out, leading to an increase in support calls. One major operator switched to staggered shifts and scheduled more than 100 hours of additional human effort to process the flood of requests.

Through it all, Imagine Communications worked closely with its customers to brainstorm quick fixes, workarounds and paths forward to get them into the clear. Next time, the goal is to keep clients ahead of the game. Based on our experience, we believe the following principles are essential for improved operational readiness and responses for future emergencies:

• Speed is essential: When events overwhelm systems, it’s vital to get ahead of the problem as soon as possible. By quickly convening the necessary resources, we were able to work with customers to isolate specific transaction types where unprecedented volume was causing critical delays. This allowed us to deliver a new function designed specifically to optimize key transactions, saving hours of time and virtually eliminating workflow bottlenecks.

• Collaboration is key: The more players in the mix, the greater the temptation to point fingers. What’s more productive is to recognize that unexpected emergencies require communication, listening and problem-solving from all stakeholders. Convening and participating in task forces that worked closely with our customers and their third-party partners (even competitors sometimes) helped us quickly communicate and strategize fast fixes. Bringing all resources to the table at the same time ensured clearer communication and strategies that could be delivered on by all necessary parties, mitigating the chance that addressing new problems would result in other unintended issues.

• Supportive services: While many spot pulls were due to unexpected revenue loss, some were simply about not wanting to deliver the wrong brand message for the time. Especially on a local level, video providers can preserve revenues by offering free or discounted production services to help change ads to incorporate more relevant messages.

• Solutions, not Band-Aids: While we've seen customers devote substantial human effort to fulfilling advertising cancellations and changes, including working with advertisers to have change orders submitted during the overnight hours, the long-term need was for a permanent fix. In this case, we determined that creating, testing and delivering a brand new function specifically optimized to process “cancel before start” requests (which generated 90% of the volume increase impacting performance of the legacy service) allowed for just these specific requests to be routed to the new function, completely isolating risks and causing no impact on legacy code or other vendors. The major takeaway is to always work to address what is causing the problem, not simply deal with the fallout.

• Stay ahead of trouble: An important decision at the start of the pandemic was to call every customer for permission to conduct practice runs on remote connections to their systems to identify possible trouble scenarios. When trouble is on the horizon, huddling with customers to address concerns, anticipated challenges and strategies for workarounds is a critical step to getting everyone on the same page quickly and figuring out what may go wrong before it actually does.

• Automated optimization goes a long way: More video distributors are experimenting with automated optimization of inventory. When a change or cancellation happens, inventory optimizers automatically shift spots around to accommodate the change and ensure the right audiences are being delivered. It is nearly impossible for this to be done manually as changes occur faster than humans can keep up. In this respect, automated optimization can be the difference between revenue that is saved and that which simply evaporates.

Plotting for Preparedness

In the months ahead, nothing will be as predictable as unpredictability. As advertisers experience sudden changes in needs, service providers and vendors alike will benefit from the ability to quickly implement the lessons learned from the pandemic, as well as the implementation of automation solutions that dramatically improve rescheduling or cancellation of spots. By taking these steps, the industry can quickly address shifts in the landscape to meet advertising partners’ needs and drive business results.

One final thought: Throughout the current crisis, the public increasingly has turned to television for news, information and entertainment, and the industry has risen to the challenge. Broadcasters, service providers and workforces have stepped up by doing whatever has been necessary to keep the world on-air — and connected. Amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic, the media’s uninterrupted presence has been a constant that deserves admiration and thanks from all of us. 

Michelle Stone is senior manager, ad tech client success management for Imagine Communications.

Comcast is looking to beef up its targeted advertising portfolio with the possible acquisitions of ad-tech startups Cadent and DataXu, AdExchanger reports.

The effort is being driven by competition from AT&T, which is making fast advancements with its Xandr operating unit in the race for targeted advertising supremacy in the media and telecom sectors.

Comcast didn’t immediately respond to MCN’s inquiry for comment.

According to the Wall Street Journal, DataXu began working with investment bank GCA Advisors LLC to prep for a sale that would value the company at around $300 million. DataXu was founded in 2009 and has raised around $87.5 million in funding from investors including recent Comcast acquisition of Sky.

DataXu and New York-based Cadent Network would beef up Comcast’s ad tech holdings at a time in which the cable conglomerate’s FreeWheel unit has struggled with the client defections Disney and Google, AdExchanger points out.

“If brands and advertisers start embracing the AT&T/Xandr model and clients start looking for something similar, there is definitely a case to be made that Comcast wants a seat at the table,” said Elgin Thompson, managing director of tech investment firm Digital Capital Advisors (DCA), told AdExchanger. 

Inside ad tech, we place enormous value on disruption. To digital people, it’s shorthand for systemic innovations that will revolutionize any industry. But to those on the receiving end, it’s often seen as code for decimation.

That’s the current line of demarcation between ad tech’s disruptors and television’s old guard. Traditional television, which has profited tremendously to date, sees any change as a threat. On the other side, digital companies see an online ecosystem where data is the essential ingredient to delivering audience, and wonder how long their counterparts inside the television bubble can ignore the inevitability of innovation.

Bridging this divide isn’t easy, and at times digital companies approach television with naiveté, assuming their way is better and that traditionalists would be fools not to adapt. Call it arrogance, if you like. Some ad tech companies believe that better technology, better data, faster transactions and automation are the panacea for all issues, including those surrounding television. But what that mindset fails to account for is the fact that the $75 billion TV industry was built over the course of 60 years, via disparate systems that are held together by imperfect, but accepted practices that have served them well. In other words, television represents a massive achievement that’s gotten right more than it has gotten wrong, even if there are obvious places for improvement.

Currently, we’re at an impasse. Now that cord-cutting has shown some real damage in subscriber losses and digital advertising is creeping into TV ad budgets, media companies are recognizing the need to shift to an audience-based strategy. But when the audience you’re reaching is watching on linear TV, mobile apps, OTT apps, MVPD video-on-demand and browsers, how do you offer a cohesive audience to your clients?

To date, wary television companies have tried to solve that challenge on their own terms by building walls around their audiences that cordon off content on any device, whether it be a television, computer, phone or tablet. Stitching audiences together looks like a solution, but once those audiences have been on-boarded, off-boarded and ID-mapped, they still exist in silos. That should give advertisers pause, because they’re being asked to rely solely on an audience created inside a seller’s black box.

In the short run, advertisers might gamble on those siloed audiences because they want their brands associated with TV’s premium content. But soon enough, two forces will conspire to knock down television’s walls. First, younger audiences will reject television’s outdated rules. The millennials who are buying houses and starting families right now have no concept of appointment television and think a “lead-in” is the next suggested video on YouTube. Second, advertisers that went along with the black box will eventually demand the transparency of digital media.

For years, TV has transacted billions of dollars on limited options for audiences based on small panels of viewers. Now that programming is spreading across many screens and distributors, and that ad tech has promised marketers precision in targeting, traditional TV is feeling the weight of this force from all sides.

The truth is, digital isn’t here to stop television; it’s here to save it. Consumers want more binge-worthy shows, and if that business is going to be sustainable over the long haul, digital media experts need to partner with TV veterans to create the common data language that’s a necessary prerequisite for monetization in the 21st century.

Ryan Reed is director of TV solutions at Lotame, a New York-based data management company.

Adstream, a United Kingdom-based digital asset management firm, said it has acquired Deluxe Entertainment Services Group's AdServices business. Terms were not disclosed but the deal was described as in eight figures by the buyer, which hopes to gain more of a presence in the U.S. and Canadian TV and video service delivery markets. Matthew Ruffi, who had been senior vice president of operations for Deluxe AdServices, becomes Adstream's chief operating officer, North America.

The advertising technology mergers-and-acquisition area has been quite active lately, including the announcement earlier today that Norway-based Telenor Group had purchased Tapad Inc. for $360 million; Cannella Response Television's deal in late January to buy programmatic-ad vendor AdMore's parent, Media Properties Holdings; and data analytics firm Acxiom's acquisition of the data unit of Allant Group.

In a release, Adstream CEO Gerry Sutton said: “This is a significant step that will expand our DAM and delivery business in the North American market and drive our growth globally. We have been very impressed with the Deluxe AdServices team, their service ethic and clients. The expanded company will have a notable advantage in servicing key U.S. and global clients. We look forward to working with the new team, clients and existing partners in providing exceptional service and value to the market.” 

London-based Adstream said its Adstream Technology Platform allows agencies and brands to collaborate, review and store all forms of marketing content as well as delivery across multiple channels in a single system. 

Adstream's Deluxe AdServices is an established player in the North American advertising delivery market and has experienced significant growth in recent years though a strong focus on customer service and technology development. This year it will deliver between 10%-20% of all Super Bowl spots to be aired during the game.