Lawyers typically look to past legal precedents or statutes to guide their clients. In the field of data privacy law, though, “the technology is constantly changing, and the law can’t keep up,” said Noga Rosenthal, general counsel and chief privacy officer for Ampersand. 

In her 15-year career, Rosenthal has forged industry guidelines that govern how consumers’ personal information is collected and used in internet advertising. She now applies her experience to advising Ampersand and its television clients on the responsible use of viewer data to personalize advertising. 

“She is one of the absolute leaders, from a legal perspective, in data privacy,” said Nicolle Pangis, former CEO of Ampersand, the ad-sales and technology firm owned by Comcast, Cox Communications and Charter Communications. 

Rosenthal was commercial counsel for a WPP-owned tech company when she was first drawn to data-privacy law. “The federal government’s guidance to the advertising industry was: ‘Don’t be creepy,’ ” she said. “This was a subjective guideline that presents challenges in its practical application. What is creepy? How do we make sure we are not creepy?” 

Rosenthal began working with the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), first as a board member and then for three years as the association’s VP for compliance and policy, to establish standards and compliance rules. “I loved it,” she said. “There were complex moral and ethical dilemmas coming at us rapid-fire.” 

She hammered out guidelines on issues such as using an individual’s medical information, then convinced companies with different goals and business models — from small startups to giants like Google — to follow the same rules. “They didn’t always agree, but it was in all our interests to set up the right ethical standards for how we collected data and how we used it,” Rosenthal said. 

Industry associations remain her “crucial” resource for staying abreast of new regulations. She currently serves on committees for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measure­ment (CIMM).

In 2016, Rosenthal became chief privacy officer at global retail marketing company Epsilon, just as the regulatory landscape changed dramatically. The European Union had adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requiring all websites that collect data on EU viewers to ask for their consent. The GDPR has also been the model for most of the dozen data-privacy laws passed by U.S. states, she noted. 

When Pangis became CEO of Ampersand in 2018, Rosenthal was one of her first hires. Pangis’s goal was to collect and use data from numerous sources to help marketers personalize and target ads. “Sensible use of data insights was of incredible importance not only to Ampersand, but to our owners and our partners,” Pangis said. Rosenthal “had the perfect pedigree that we needed within the company.” 

Rosenthal was excited by the challenge of learning the television industry and “taking my digital expertise, knowledge and history, and bringing it to the TV world, which was starting to grapple with the same privacy and data-ethics issues,” she said. 

A Natural Teacher

Rosenthal is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and a frequent speaker at industry conferences. She draws on her teaching experience when explaining legal issues to executives, software engineers, and salespeople. 

“I think Noga is as good a student of law and privacy as she is a teacher of law and privacy,” Pangis said. “There were many times that we came up with an idea where Noga would say, ‘No, because these three things are likely to happen in the next three months, and you’ll have to rewind all the work on this.’ She was almost always right.” 

Rosenthal has recently been studying AI, and how its use might affect time limits on data storage: “When you’re working with AI, you want as much data as possible to make your AI models work better, and you may not care how old the data is,” she said. 

Rosenthal “educates, informs, and gets people comfortable with the why and the how,” said Patty Keenan, Ampersand’s chief people officer. “A lot of people seek Noga out for advice and guidance, and she embraces that. She’s a natural mentor, and people are drawn to her as a mentor.”

Rosenthal’s combination of specialized expertise and concern for employees make her “a well-rounded leader,” Keenan said. 

Advanced-advertising company Ampersand said it has created a system that automates the planning of addressable TV ad campaigns, cutting the time to market from days to hours.

In order to build national scale via pay TV, addressable campaigns need to place ads that run via multiple distributors with different technologies and protocols. Ampersand, owned by Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications, has been working to standardize addressable technology across distributors but coordinating campaigns remained a painstaking process, Ari Turner senior VP, sales operations at Ampersand, told Broadcasting+Cable.

“The new addressable functionality we have now in the And platform has now automated a lot of that back-and-forth process between us and our partners MVPDs, and it’s creating proposals for the agencies that come in a timely fashion,“ Turner said. ”It’s concise, it’s efficient and it provides the agencies with the ability to buy at scale.”

Also: Ampersand Amps Up Local TV Ad-Targeting Capabilities

Turner said the automation can lower the turnaround time for campaigns from days to hours. It could take longer if the agency is looking to create a complicated audience or bringing its own data, “but generally speaking, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

The automated system is just part of Ampersand’s plan for 2023. “The next phase is automated ordering and automated reporting,” Turner said. “That’s the next step for us.”

Also: Ampersand Offers Buyers a Total TV Measurement Solution

The new system means agency buyers need only specify which audience they want to reach and their budget for a national campaign on Ampersand’s “And” platform, and the technology automatically locates the viewers the advertiser is seeking and finds inventory across the 65 million homes serviced by Altice, Charter, Comcast, Cox and Verizon, which represent about 70% of the addressable homes in the U.S.

It requires very little training, he added, making it almost at the Addressable for Dummies level.

Media buyer Horizon Media has been using the new system. 

“It works exactly as advertised,” Horizon executive VP and chief data officer Laura McElhinney said. “Horizon is growing our addressability practice. This allows us to do that at scale now, which is great.”

Horizon has also integrated Blu, its connected marketing platform, with Ampersand’s And platform, enabling Horizon to create custom audiences for clients using its own data. The integration also enables Horizon to build scale for campaigns even when its initial target definition creates an audience that is too small.

“Because we have this connection, we can activate very quickly,” McElhinney said.  “We’re not waiting a week to understand the size of the audience. We know the size already within our planning platforms. That also allows us faster optimization.”

Using Ampersand’s automation, mounting addressable campaigns are less expensive because there is less money wasted and the campaign outcomes have been better. “I think this is a huge plus for us,” she said.

Ampersand expects to see increases in the number of addressable campaigns it does, Turner said. It has already seen growth in tie revenue per campaign. “We’re getting bigger campaigns, which is great,” he said. “I think we’re getting out of the test phase of addressable. We want to see more growth and more dollars.”

Ampersand said its addressable business is growing despite a declining number of cable households and a slowing ad market.

“I think what’s happening across the marketplace in general is pushing more people towards addressable,” Turner said. “I think it’s important for people to utilize addressable to find their audiences in a more efficient manner.”

Ampersand is also looking for ways to reach additional addressable homes, either via satellite or streaming.

“We do have access to over-the-top inventory and digital inventory within our addressable offering,” Turner said. “We’re always open for conversations when it comes to the satellites, both Dish and DirecTV. We think addressable as a business is something that we need to move more and more advertising dollars to. And so we want all of us to succeed in this together and give the buyers and agencies what they need. For right now, we see the dollars rising across the board for all addressable, and that’s good for business for everybody.” ▪️

Ampersand and Blockgraph have gotten together to make it easier for media buyers at Interpublic Group agencies to use data from IPG’s Acxiom unit to plan and buy audience driven multiscreen TV campaigns.

The agreement lets advertisers securely match their own data with the viewing data Ampersand has in its And platform about the 80 million households it reaches — 52 million of which are addressable.

Data from Ampersand and Acxiom will be available within a single, always-on interface, with consumers’ privacy preserved.

“This is a game changer,” Ampersand senior VP, data and analytics Justin Rosen told Broadcasting+Cable.

“This integration more directly, more seamlessly connects that Acxiom and IPG first- and third-party dataset directly with Ampersand’s distribution partners,” Rosen said. “It creates the speed of activation, really strong match rates and the ability to take these audiences and distribute them for cross-platform addressable TV.”

Ampersand is owned by cable companies Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications and sells their ad inventory to national and regional advertisers.

The combination will also lower costs as the frequency and scale of campaigns increase, said Jason Manningham, CEO of Blockgraph, the technology company owned by Charter Communications, Comcast NBCUniversal and Paramount that enables targeting and measurement with its Identity Operating System.

“As activations increase, and as measurement increases, you start seeing a lot of economies of scale,” Manningham said. “Our industry is evolving and trying new ways of working together. These huge partnerships bring together the scale for the marketplace and the cost savings will be meaningful for the industry.” ▪️

Initially, IPG agencies will be the first to have direct access to the Acxiom data though the arrangement with Ampersand and Blockgraph, but it will not be exclusive, said Conor Burgess, VP of business development at Acxiom.

“It’s really about solving the unique problem we have with identity supply chains and operational challenges. So the more seamless and frictionless you can make it is going to advantage anyone involved in the process,” Burgess said. “With data, if it’s scalable and match counts are accurate and it’s the audience you want to reach, you’ll use it.”

The demand for better ways of sharing data are increasing.

“I think the macro trends are clear. Brands have their own data. Whether that originates as first-party or third-part, they have their own data they want to use for planning data-driven linear, CTV linear addressable or VOD addressable campaigns,” Manningham said. “Being able to do that quickly with all of the controls that all of the data owner need is really essential.” ■

Ad-technology company Ampersand said it has added new tools to its And platform, making it easier for local advertisers to create targeted, data-driven campaigns via cable and streaming programming.

The new capabilities include Local Broadcast and Cable Insights, which gives clients the ability to monitor and optimize buys across all their television investments.

It has also added Audience Builder, which helps set audience targets. For example, an auto dealer planning a baseball-related promotion could target Ford brand loyalists and baseball fans or heavy sports watchers.

The third tool is RFP and Ordering Workflow, which gives clients an easy dashboard for planning, executing and updating campaigns.

Also: Ampersand Offers Buyers a Total TV Measurement Solution

Gerrit Niemeijer, chief technology officer at Ampersand, told Broadcasting+Cable that the company’s data capabilities help large and small advertisers utilize the persuasiveness and engagement of TV and the targeting of digital.

“For the longest time in television, there wasn’t that much data available,” Niemeijer said. “Now, there’s so much data available, and we want to make it easier for our clients to activate against that.“

Owned by cable companies Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, Ampersand draws viewer data from set-top boxes in 42 million homes and can mount campaigns that reach 80 million homes, including more than 70% of all addressable households.

Ampersand takes a “Total TV” approach. “I’m a big believer in the power of television. It’s all about the content,“ Niemijer said. ”Linear, CTV, OTT, it’s all television to me. And the impact of a good TV commercial, I believe, is much higher than the impact of a good display ad.” 

Working with cable operators also gives Ampersand an advantage over broadcast competitors in targeting campaigns. Geographically, Ampersand is able to run campaigns across multiple DMAs. It can also target advertising zones within a DMA. At the same time, while TV stations can only target viewers watching a single network, Ampersand’s cable operators insert commercials on dozens of channels, increasing their reach.

Niemeijer also trusts the viewing data that Ampersand gets from cable subscribers, who have a direct subscribing relationship with the operators. “We have a very authenticated relationship,” he said, and the more-reliable data leads to higher match rates for campaigns.

Niemeijer said Ampersand was originally set up to counter the growing fragmentation in the cable TV market. While cord-cutting is eating into cable subscriber numbers, because it can also target streamers, Ampersand can help advertisers reaggregate viewers.

“The whole point was to create one-stop shopping,“ he said. “We’ll take care of the complications.” ■

At a time when the accuracy of ratings stalwart Nielsen is under fire, Ampersand is offering media buyers and marketers Total TV Measurement to help plan, buy and evaluate multi screen campaigns.

Ampersand, an advanced advertising company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, sells local cable TV spots and addressable advertising that targets viewers based on viewing data from 40 million set-top box households.

Ampersand president Andrew Ward said Total TV Measurement measures all media used by a campaign--whether sold by Ampersand or not--to identify audiences that are being over-served and underserved. Ampersand can provide inventory to help reach the underserved audiences, making campaigns more effective.

“We’re not necessarily looking to replace Nielsen as a currency,” Ward told Broadcasting+Cable. “That being said, we do think there’s a migration away from panel survey data to more deterministic census-level data.”

Also Read: Ampersand Using Experian for Audience Segments in And Platform

In both national and local markets, Ward said, television ad sales are going to be driven by richer data, more precise delivery across a multiscreen environment, and greater levels of accountability.

"We don’t know that there will be a single currency of choice, Nielsen or otherwise, in the future," said Ward. "We increasingly find national spot TV buyers leveraging richer data to think about audiences and planning their campaigns."

Total TV Measurement can help marketers understand unduplicated reach for multi-screen campaigns, something for which advertisers have been searching. It can also help control the frequency with which many campaigns bombard heavy TV users with the same commercial.

Ward said Ampersand can tie its set-top box viewing information to brand data in order to identify Ford families and truck buyers for automotive advertisers, for example, and measure the performance of its campaigns.

Ampersand will be working with Nielsen and other data providers, including iSpotTV, but it also needed to build its own platform to secure the unique data assets that it has and be able to use them while protecting consumers' privacy, Ward said.

Ampersand has been building and testing Total TV Measurement for about six months.

"Ampersand’s Total TV measurement has empowered RPA and our clients with access to multi-screen insights, which was not possible before," said Brian McCord, senior VP, executive director of media strategy at RPA, a Santa Monica-based advertising agency and media buyer for Honda.

"The learnings have been instrumental to our strategic planning team, enabling them to plan the most effective and efficient campaigns that drive real business outcomes for our clients. RPA uses this tool to navigate planning across all TV to ensure we understand the unique viewership of our target audience and can collaborate with our investment teams accordingly," McCord said.

Ampersand sees Total TV Measurement as providing a competitive advantage. First, it helps the company create more effective campaigns, It is also a selling tool that provides advertisers with confirmation that its worth switching to data-driven campaigns from using the traditional age and sex demographics to target consumers.

More importantly, using data can make TV more competitive with digital advertising.

"How do we protect the $70 billion television marketplace? By introducing richer data, and better targeting capabilities across a multi-screen environment," said Ward.

Total TV Measurement is going to be available through Ampersand’s And platform, which enables ad buyers to see the data while planning and executing campaigns.

"Nobody doubts the sound strategy of delivering audiences in the multi screen environment or driving richer attribution or measurement on the back end," Ward said. "We can’t allow that sound strategy to get overwhelmed with executional burden. So the And platform gives buyers access to the insights in a more digital construct."

As the digital transformation of the linear TV industry progresses, a true multiscreen TV marketplace that blends linear and streaming inventory in a coherent, unified construct is upon us. Efficiency and scale of deterministic viewing insights and the impressions they derive are becoming fortified. Workflows, technology, and processes are also advancing.  All the boxes are being checked. Except for one—transactional currency.

In order for TV to truly meet the moment, we need to actually walk the walk and not just talk the talk; specifically, we need to accelerate progress industrywide to fully transacting TV inventory using impressions and finally do away with gross ratings points (GRPs) once and for all. The quicker we do this in earnest across the board, the faster we will achieve the benefits of closer alignment with how streaming inventory (and most other forms of media) are already transacted. That means finally shifting “one column over” on the spreadsheet from cost-per-point (CPP) to cost-per-thousand (CPM). Only then can the buy and sell sides achieve both transactional and measurement parity across linear and streaming for all holistic TV media plans. If we don’t, we will never truly achieve the full potential of today’s audience-first, multiscreen TV ecosystem. 

The TV industry has acknowledged for a while that the impression metric to transact will simplify how campaigns are evaluated across platforms - as well as for all levels of geographic precision, be it national, multi-market, or DMA. But the push towards universal adoption has been happening at a snail’s pace – especially in the Local TV ecosystem.

Why has this taken on greater urgency now? Because data and technology improvements are also finally meeting the moment. For example, it is now possible to verify through third-party sources all multiscreen audience impressions across TV & streaming. Further, associated operations like cross-platform billing for audience impression delivery are emerging. And all of this can connect seamlessly with enhanced campaign reporting containing audience-specific delivery metrics and efficiency calculations.

Don’t Let Perfection Be the Enemy of the Good

No longer can we drag our heels and hold out for the magic bullet solution. Going from CPP to CPM will have its pain points - any transition does - but they can be overcome with determination and focus. We all know change is hard, and it involves risk. It can also seem expensive in a fragmented, uncertain marketplace with margin pressure. Unsurprisingly, many default to inertia.

If You’re Local, Start Small

There can be flexibility and transitional steps in this evolution to an impression-based currency. For example, I know those of you in the Local TV arena have traditionally relied on a ratings metric as a means to generate a relative understanding of audience weight across markets of various sizes. However, there are now platform solutions available in the marketplace that will allow agency planning teams to still use ratings to plan Local TV with this in mind. That metric nonetheless can then be converted to impressions by your buying cohorts to use in negotiation. In 2021, National TV has been transacting increasingly on impressions the way the digital community has. Local TV can also make this transition relatively smoothly. The time to act is now.

Make Audience-First Impressions Count

Using Nielsen age/sex - but impressions not GRPs - is the prerequisite for where the industry must wind up: sculpted audience impressions. In other words, we will eventually transact linear TV media on more sophisticated, granular targets like luxury car buyers or heavy online shoppers, just like digital media does today. But in getting to these more refined audience segments, we must all first work together to ensure that data sources, audience definitions, and targeting technology are in reasonable alignment. This will ensure that the consistency of today’s age/sex world is maintained when we are audience-first.

At the end of the day, there will be some operational, technological and process hurdles to be overcome in transitioning from CPP to CPM, but the biggest challenge is legacy thinking and the inertia that it creates. For the TV ecosystem to stay strong as we emerge from our year of quarantine, we must no longer be so tentative when it comes to once and for all moving our transactional currency to CPM. Let’s commit, and collaborate with authority, to make our industry more simple and transparent.

Ampersand is the insights-based TV sales and platform company, providing audience-based buying and advanced measurement across linear and streaming TV.

Ampersand said it reached a deal to use data from Experian to create audience segments that will enable advertisers in multiple categories to target consumers with multi-screen campaigns through its And platform.

Owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and  Cox Communications, Ampersand has access to large amounts of viewing information from 40 million households and TV ad inventory across an 85 million home footprint. It has been stepping up its technology game as the advertising business has become increasingly digital with media plans combining linear TV, addressable TV, digital video, CTV and TV Everywhere.

Last year it set up the And platform, which allows clients to buy multi-screen ad campaigns either through a managed service or, more recently, on a self-serve basis. It also started adding consumer data, first for political advertisers from L2 and then for auto marketers with Polk data from IHS Markit.  

The Experian integration is pivotal to our audience-based multi-screen TV planning and buying because Experian allows us to go beyond specific categories,” said Kalyan Lanka, VP, product, Ampersand.

Also read: NBCU, Ampersand, DoubleVerify Join 2021 NewFronts Lineup

The data from Experian’s ConsumerView database -- which is separate from its credit database -- can be used to create segments based on psychographics and behavioral preferences, Lanka said, and the additional data will increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of clients’ ad campaigns.

“We can now understand with a greater degree of precision where these consumer segments are consuming content across multiple screens, which helps us improve or ability to plan and buy TV, and on the back end report insights on how campaigns performed against that audience segment, which give you further opportunities to optimize and improve campaigns,” Lanka said.

The data Ampersand is getting from Experian is not exclusive, but the segments created by combining the data with Ampersand’s viewing information are, he said.

For Experian, the advanced and connected TV markets are priority areas, said Aimee Irwin, VP of strategy, marketing services, Experian. 

Experian decided to do this deal because “Ampersand is a leader within the TV advertising ecosystem, and their technology combined with our data, can help streamline the ad-buying process and help marketers tell a consistent story and connect with consumers across digital, linear, addressable or Connected TV,” Irwin said.

Experian expects that its business with advertising and media companies is likely to grow. “We’re starting to see more and more marketers view audiences as an amalgamation of behaviors across digital devices rather than as a siloed view into channel-specific actions. And that’s our focus behind the scenes. We’re connecting hundreds of digital and offline touchpoints to build audiences that can be activated across all digital and offline campaigns,” said Irwin.

She noted that the marketing and media business continues to evolve. “Connected TV has only become a very important channel for brands and consumers within the last three years," Irwin noted. “And it’s only a matter of time before the next ‘big thing’ emerges. To that end, we’re constantly working with brands, agencies and media publishers to help them understand where people are consuming information and how to reach them with relevant messages.” 

The Experian-based audience segments will be available through the And platform to all Ampersand clients, not just those using its self-service capabilities.

About 20 advertisers and agencies are using a beta version self-serve version of the platform. 

The platform also allows marketers to upload first party data and use that as it builds cross platform campaigns.

All that data puts TV at parity with digital, said Meredith Miller, VP, marketing at Ampersand.

“This platform and this particular integration of these data sets get advertisers closer to having a simplified way of buying across all their media investments,” Miller said.

“Streaming is on the rise and it’s going to continue to grow, but the reality is linear is still the majority of TV viewing and advertisers need the ability to access the same unique and custom targeted audience segments on linear as they would on streaming or across digital,” she said. 

NBCUniversal has joined the companies presenting to media buyers as part of the NewFronts, an indication of how the traditional media powerhouses are shifting their focus to streaming and digital content.

Other newly announced participants in the 2021 NewFronts are Ampersand and DoubleVerify.

Organized by the IAB, this year’s event is using the theme “Living the Stream.“

Also Read: NewFronts Draw New Participants A+E, Amazon, Entrecom, Estrella, Vizio

The NewFronts will run from May 3 to May 6, a week before the traditional broadcast network upfront presentations.

The IAB has laid out this year’s NewFront schedule, which features Roku leading off. Hulu, which kicked off the streaming revolution, won’t be part of this year’s NewFronts. Instead it will be a part of the consolidated Disney Ad Sales presentations.

Here is the NewFront schedule:

Media planning and buying, driven by audience-based targeting strategies, has proven to be an unprecedented driver of effectiveness and efficiency in today’s marketing universe, starting with digital/programmatic sources of inventory, and now expanding to traditional media channels.  

The TV industry has made tremendous strides in recent years in utilizing consumer and brand data to optimize advertiser campaign performance. Much of this focus in the TV industry has centered on the national/network marketplace, and the scaling of addressable solutions--less attention has been paid to the local TV ecosystem.  Despite the desire of advertisers to bring audience-based planning and buying strategies and more robust campaign measurement/optimization into the local television marketplace, the reality is that local TV buyers and sellers have not had access to the platforms necessary to organize complex consumer data and set-top-box viewership insights at a DMA level. 

Here’s the good news though--these solutions are now available. Brands and agencies can now plan, buy and measure local TV buys using deterministic data to drive improved campaign creation, access rich optimization insights, and deliver improved efficiency.

The unique combination of viewership insights and brand/consumer data now available at a market-level will offer local advertisers a variety of benefits—at the top of the list is the ability to optimize reach and frequency. No longer will brands waste dollars by blindly blowing through frequency caps in their attempts to drive reach.  Access to DMA-level STB TV viewership and campaign exposure data, across both broadcast and cable inventory, is now available to support local TV buyers in their pursuit of optimal schedule design and more accountable campaign measurement.   With these new capabilities, buyers can use measurement and optimization insights as a feedback loop to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of future campaigns.  In this new construct, local advertisers will be able to achieve optimal spend efficiencies between broadcast and cable--don’t be surprised if “Cost of Incremental Reach” gains traction as a new transactional currency in the local TV marketplace alongside CPMs and GRPs.     

The timing of these developments coincides with a renewed appreciation for the importance of local TV. Although COVID-19 is a global pandemic, its impact has decidedly local implications. When economic operability varies wildly on a regional, statewide and even county-by-county basis, the critical value represented by the flexibility of local TV, enhanced by rich data and robust measurement, couldn’t be any more obvious. 

This new audience-based approach should resonate across the full range of advertiser verticals, including automotive, healthcare and financial services. And for categories like QSR/dining and general retail, which have been distinctly affected by the coronavirus outbreak, the urgency for new models couldn’t arguably be greater.  

One early adopter in this evolution to local audience-based TV planning and buying is the political advertising cohort. With the 2020 election season in full swing, campaigns of all stripes and sizes are already availing themselves of custom-built voter segments to better target their investments and achieve not only greater spend efficiency, but optimal audience reach. The 2008 Obama campaign marked the advent of data-informed political campaigning. Typically, Presidential elections can be swung by the candidate that targets and motivates a narrow swath of undecided voters. With so much at stake, political campaigns see the significant value in building campaigns by matching voter data with viewership insights aggregated anonymously across tens of millions of set-top boxes. These insights allow campaigns to manage frequency and drive incremental reach against their key target audiences—which can be the difference between winning and losing.  

A current Senate candidate recently extended reach against its key voter segment (A18-34 Democrats) by adding a local cable component to supplement its preexisting local broadcast buy in a given DMA. In so doing, the campaign added an incremental 5.5% reach of its voter audience that it otherwise would have missed entirely, and it did so with a 32% lower cost per reach point against the target audience. This audience-based approach revealed that 50% of the candidate’s broadcast impressions were generating massive frequency/wear out (exposure of 15x+ per week), and enabled the intelligent redeployment of investments leveraging cable inventory to deliver un/underexposed households.

As for general market implications, these capabilities can be the difference for brands between winning and losing market share.

As we turn the corner into 2021, brands will be charged with “doing more with less”, and it will be incumbent upon media providers to deliver the greatest level of accountability, transparency and efficiency. What is truly exciting is that the tools now exist for these brand expectations to be fulfilled in the local TV marketplace.   Local TV planners/buyers can now complement the brand-building power of television with richer and more robust planning, buying and measurement capabilities on a market-by-market basis.   

Ampersand is the insights-based TV sales and platform company, providing audience-based buying and advanced measurement across linear and streaming TV. 

Verizon Media on Tuesday said that it will be using Ampersand as the exclusive seller of Verizon Fios’ addressable TV inventory.

The move brings Ampersand’s addressable footprint to 42 million households representing more than 60% of the U.S.

Ampersand is owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox.

“Addressable TV and OTT advertising offer a unique and unparalleled opportunity to reach consumers in a targeted and meaningful way,” said Iván Markman, chief business officer, Verizon Media. “Together with Ampersand, we are extending advertiser reach and strengthening demand for publisher content. This relationship is another important milestone for Verizon Media’s roadmap to develop leading omnichannel capabilities for premium sources of demand.”

Verizon Media is also providing access to Verizon Fios TV addressable inventory through the Verizon Media DSP, which will be the only programmatic trading platform for Fios.

Ampersand has also selected Verizon Media’s DSP as its primary buying platform for CTV and OTT inventory.

Legacy linear brands bring a sense of credibility and gravitas that will help drive viewers and subscribers to new streaming offerings, a panel of TV executives said at the Future-produced Virtual Next TV Summit event Monday.

“Fundamentally, the value of a legacy brand or a well-known brand is simply trust,” PBS chief operating officer Jonathan Barzilay said during a panel session moderated by B&C contributing editor Paige Albiniak. He added that when the broadcaster started making short-form content for the web, it collectively did so via the PBS Digital Studio name. “By putting the PBS name on all of these independently produced short form series, that conveys something to the audience. ...The trust that people have in the PBS brand and the awareness that people have in the PBS brand, maybe gave us a little head start.”

At The Weather Group, parent of The Weather Channel network, president Tom O’Brien said its streaming offering Local Now benefits from the more established Weather Channel brand.

“The ability, the opportunity, is what you do with that brand. If you use it as an anchor, you use it as a basis of innovation,” O’Brien said.

Local Now is The Weather Group’s local news, weather, sports and traffic streaming service. O’Brien added that the service has added new programming -- a series offering advice and mental health insights during the COVID-19 pandemic called with Canadian author and therapist Dr. Wendy Walsh called Dr. Wendy Walsh Is Here for You, has expanded its American Science Lab science show during the COVID-19 lockdown and is live streaming the May 9 Feeding America Comedy Festival, a fundraiser for charity Feeding America. 

At BritBox, a joint venture between British television icons the BBC and ITV, the focus has been trying to balance those two brands to establish a new digital identity in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

“It’s an interesting balance because we want to build our own brand equity, but do so leveraging that of our parents,” said BritBox SVP and Commercial Head Emily Powers. “The way we do that is, it’s a lot about focusing on a content proposition that is both taking advantage of the vast library of our parents, as well as starting to launch some of our own originals. We convey to our audience, through our marketing materials, a certain tonality and sensibility that is respectful of the parent brands but also reaching a new audience.”

Ampersand SVP Agency Strategy Marion Hargett said legacy brands matter when launching OTT services because it gives potential viewers and customers a base on which to set their expectations.

“Many of the legacy players have a rooted history of delivering news and delivering content with standards to that delivery,” Hargett said. “... I think having a heritage is not a bad thing and I think being able to bring that knowledge to bear in the television ecosystem is really valuable.”

Picking the right distribution strategy also is important when a legacy brand launches a streaming option. At PBS, which is made up of hundreds of individual stations across the country all with a local presence, it made sense for PBS.org and the app to have a geo-location function so when a viewer logged in they were asked to verify their local station, and received information on the offerings on that channel. When PBS launched on YouTubeTV, it used the national feed.

“We do hope to eventually get to a place where that gets geo-targeted or tailored individually, but for right now it’s more important for us to be on the platform with some sort of presence rather than to precisely mirror the local station,” Barzilay said. “We do that wherever we can and whenever we can.”

At BritBox, Powers said that the distribution focus was initially to be on a few key platforms.

At launch, BritBox was available on Apple TV, Roku and also through syndicated channels like Amazon Channels and Apple TV Channels.

“For us it’s important to balance the business between direct-to-consumer and these channels because the channel gets you into every household, but does so in a way that has a much lower barrier to entry.”

Phase 2, she added, includes getting access to smart TV. BritBox has agreements with LG and Samsung, and expects more such deals in the future. 

The Virtual Next TV Summit is part of Future's Virtual NYC TV Week Spring. 

Ad-tech pioneer TVSquared has partnered with Ampersand, formerly NCC Media, to integrate always-on attribution reporting into Ampersand’s platform.

According to the companies, the partnership will allow Ampersand to provide advertisers with insights into the business outcomes from their TV investments and to leverage those insights to optimize TV schedules across the 85 million MVPD and cable homes within Ampersand’s reach.

“If you think about media there’s a define and find component, then it’s plan and activate and the third is measure and report,” Ampersand chief data officer Bob Ivins said in an interview. “I think TV has always come up a little short on that, especially if you compare it to the narrative the digital guys take out in terms of always-on measurement. TVSquared has developed technology that makes it happen at scale -- always on, real-time, at scale. As we start to dismantle the advantages that digital has had over TV, we felt that a partnership with TVSquared gives us the ability to have those always-on metrics to attribute the true value of what TV brings to brands.”

Ampersand, owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, reaches 85 million households and provides viewership insights and planning on 40 million homes in every DMA across more than 150 networks and in all dayparts. Formerly NCC Media, the company changed its name to Ampersand last month to better reflect its mission. 

Through Ampersand’s platform, advertisers can track TV campaigns’ influence on lower-funnel activity, such as website traffic and sales. Granular TV insights across different days, dayparts, networks and creatives are tracked in real-time and leveraged to inform where changes can be made to achieve client’s KPIs and improve performance across local and national TV investments.

TVSquared executive VP and chief revenue officer Jo Kinsella said in an interview that where brands may have been apprehensive to try television or have merely dabbled in the medium in the past, offering them insights on how their campaigns are performing and engaging with viewers is invaluable.

“When we shine a light onto TV performance and we can show them it’s the TV inventory that Ampersand is putting out that is really driving the engagement and really driving the business outcomes, all of a sudden you’ve seen this resurgence in TV where people are like, ‘Wow, now that we can prove it works, we’re going to invest more heavily,’” she said. 

NCC Media, the TV ad sales and technology company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, has changed its name to Ampersand, adding that it plans to aggregate viewership data from its partners for targeted advertising and to build on its Open AP partnership.

The new name reflects the company's mission of unifying the TV advertising ecosystem across all screens, inventory and audiences, Ampersand said in a press release.

In addition, Ampersand said it has unified aggregated viewership data from nearly 40 million households in the Comcast, Charter and Cox footprints. The company added it is building on its Open AP partnership, allowing advertisers who work with Ampersand’s Client Partnerships team to directly share audience definitions created in OpenAP for expression and use in local advanced advertising.

As part of that expanded relationship, Ampersand said it will serve as part of the central hub for network-enabled addressable ads for Comcast, Charter and Cox. Working in partnership with Canoe, Ampersand will help TV programmers enable addressable capabilities on their national linear and VOD TV inventory.

"Thirty years ago, NCC showed the TV world the power of working together, unifying the fragmented cable TV ad market within a single, open platform for the benefit of advertisers, agencies and MVPDs," Ampersand CEO Nicolle Pangis said in a press release. "The Ampersand name and the new audience products represent both a nod to our past and our vision for a successful TV future in which the industry rallies around a shared approach for connecting brands to audiences across the entirety of the viewing experience."