Michael Bologna, chief accelerator at BrightLine, delivered the closing keynote at the Advanced Advertising Summit. Under the title “What’s Working Now, and a Look into the Future,” Bologna spoke about how ad agencies, media companies and marketing brands must work closer together to ensure better advertising results. 

“When those three constituents work together, I do think advertisers are well served,” he said. “They’re not when one or more of those parties fall back.”

B+C senior content producer Jon Lafayette interviewed Bologna, who described BrightLine as “the standard for interactive advertising within connected television.”

Asked about Irwin Gotlieb’s assessment of the ad industry earlier in the day, which saw Gotlieb say, “Are these the best of times? Hell, no,” Bologna agreed with a lot of what his former boss shared, including the industry’s reluctance to work together on common issues. 

“I do think every last one of us had plenty of time to prepare for where we are today,” he added. “We brought it upon ourselves when we chose not to act.”

The ad industry is “very good about pointing out what’s wrong, what’s broken, what needs to be fixed, what we don’t like,” he added. “We’re not so good at making hard decisions about what we need to fix those.”

The Advanced Advertising Summit is part of NYC TV Week, hosted by Broadcasting+Cable, Multichannel News and Next TV. Advanced Ads happens September 9, Next TV Summit takes place September 10, Hispanic TV Summit is September 11 and 40 Under 40 happens September 12. The first three events take place at etc.venues in midtown Manhattan, and 40 Under 40 is at 230 5th. 

The discussion turned to streaming, and Bologna said there could, and should, be more consistency in terms of ad formats among those players. “Google, Netflix, Amazon, the user experience is fantastic,” he said. “But they all have different models when it comes to commercials, they all have different models when it comes to ad formats.”

“They’re not doing us a great service,” Bologna added. 

Bologna added that the streamers are a bit behind the curve in terms of addressable formats in advertising. If Disney and NBC can agree to use a common format, he noted, the big streamers, be it Amazon or Netflix, can too. 

As the keynote wrapped, he again urged agencies, media companies and advertising brands to work better with one other. 

“Everybody can’t win all the time,” Bologna said. “There has to be a bit of give and take.”

Advanced advertising pioneer Michael Bologna has joined Brightline as chief accelerator.

Bologna will be helping Brightline introduce its new product OTT Accelerator, which enables TV networks and distributors to create targeted, personalized interactive and shoppable experiences during commercials on connected TV.

“Going to work for what used to be my biggest competitor sounded like the craziest thing in the world when I first thought about it,” Bologna told Broadcasting+Cable. 

While he was heading advanced advertising for GroupM, Brightline would pitch Bologna’s clients its own advanced advertising products. “That’s how I got to know Jacqui [Brightline co-founder Jacqueline Corbelli]. But this is my passion: data, technology, television, interactive. That’s what I love to do and I couldn't turn it down.”

Bologna said that Brightline pivoted to CTV, working with networks as clients, rather than advertisers. Those clients now include media companies like Disney, NBCUniversal, Discovery, Fox, A+E Networks, AMC Networks and platforms like Roku, Samsung, Apple and Amazon.

With the growth of CTV, Brightline's business has taken off as well. 

“As a TV-first company, we tackled the CTV ecosystem early, and that’s why we have this colossal footprint in place now,” said Rob Aksman, Brightline co-founder. “The world has entered our wheelhouse at just the right time. There is only one way you can run interactive, personalized shoppable ads across every one of the major streamers, and that’s through BrightLine’s technology.”

The new OTT Accelerator is intended to make Brightline grow even faster.

“Our technology gets installed into [clients] apps,” Bologna said. ”Think of Accelerator more as an ad experience, not an interactive ad. You don’t click through to something else on television. It’s a new experience that happens during the 30 second ad.”

Most recently Bologna was president and chief revenue officer of start-up measurement company HyphaMetrics. He continues as an investor and chairman of its advisory board.

Before that he was president of One2One Media, which became part of Cadent.

That’s 24 years in the business, most of them involved with advanced advertising.

“So much has changed. Everything that we’ve always been talking about is now happening,” he said. 

“The way people watch television has changed and the technology being the way people watch ads has caught up with it, with targeting and interactivity,” he said. “These ads are personalized, interactive, they’re shoppable and they are accountable.”

Bologna said new people coming into the industry find it hard to understand how TV used to work in the olden days, particularly the economics of advertising.

“The terminology has changed and perspectives have changed, but the people that have always been passionate about this stuff, they’re still around, at least most of them,” he said. “It’s a good time to be in the business. If I were a young kid coming out of college right now, all of the new mechanisms of advertising  would excite me about being in the media business.” ■

In the advertising business, it’s easy to state problems and demand change, but offering an unbiased solution compatible with the entire ecosystem is another story. 

Nielsen’s 2021 Annual Marketing Report found that brands of all sizes and categories have little confidence in existing measurement capabilities. T.S, Kelly, executive VP of Media Effectiveness at Carat, recently told Adweek that his biggest challenges include, comparing (campaign results) between measurement vendors, a lack of transparency in understanding campaign insights, and linkage to different data sets in the funnel. Put simply, his challenge is with advertising measurement’s lack of interoperability. 

This fundamental gap results in a disproportionately valued marketplace that hinders both the buy side and the sell side.

UPFRONT ECONOMICS

Our path to improved measurement requires us to examine the current state of the marketplace. What better place to start that evaluation than the 2021/22 upfront?

Few will argue that the demand to trade media holistically exists, and yet linear and digital markets continue to move in separate funnels. If we want to remove the silos between linear and digital to create a truly holistic view of the video marketplace, terms and conditions need to reflect that unified approach.

We continue to see a shift of linear TV budgets to CTV and other digital mediums, but we don’t have a holistic view of how these campaigns performed or a way to plan and evaluate audiences across all screens to optimal capacity. Planning, activation, and measurement of campaigns across all these different screens can happen in dozens of different products and platforms. 

This absence of true cross-channel measurement and the inability to de-duplicate audiences forces the industry to resort to work arounds. Instead of really understanding where their audiences are and targeting them precisely with the right message at the right time, buyers have resorted to methods such as frequency caps at a higher rate than usual. These caps serve as a buy-side defense against overexposure to the same audience and the potentially wasted dollars that go along with it, but they make it harder for media owners to fulfill schedules. 

CHANGING CONSUMER BEHAVIORS

In simpler times, a single currency could accurately reflect the true viewing behaviors of consumers. But as new devices and delivery methods have ushered in new viewing circumstances, existing measurement approaches have failed to deliver a unified reflection of these behaviors. 

Take binge viewing. This behavior tends to generate frequency over unique reach. This throws off the economic structure, as binge viewers are much harder to monetize than less frequent viewers. Things become increasingly complex when considering that binge viewing largely occurs inside walled garden environments,  making a true apple to apples comparison of viewers or households nearly impossible. 

“The demand for premium video has increased substantially,” said Neal Weinberg CEO of video exchange Addressable Media. “But so have the requests for more precise measurement across channels.  This has been evidenced by a large uptick in our Q4 business.” 

There needs to be a reconciliation of dollars spent across all forms of viewing in order for advertisers to confidently invest where their audiences are watching. And with M&A activity on the rise and changing OEM business models, the fragmentation will only grow-- leaving stakeholders on both sides of ad transactions scratching their heads. 

THE SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION

The industry requires measurement that is fundamentally cross screen, single source, 3rd party, consented, and completely neutral in order to provide a truly holistic picture of how people are interacting with media today. This will serve as a source of truth through which today’s disparate data sources -- from STB and Smart TV -- can be calibrated and device graphs can be validated. Self-reported data can only get us so far. Only with the integration of this neutral, cross-device, omnichannel data source will it become possible to qualify the appropriate value of impressions.

For legacy programmers to compete in a world that is increasingly dominated by a digital ecosystem, they need a way to deploy this type of data consistently and at scale. Data is not licensed universally to platforms or advertisers other than on a campaign basis, which makes it difficult for both the buy and sell side to adopt a consistent model for the benefit of driving incremental revenue.

LOOKING FORWARD 

Stakeholders across the media ecosystem have been vocal about the waning relevance of a single currency to trade media. Instead, we are moving toward a world where there will be multiple measurement solutions that work together interoperably. 

We collectively must standardize definitions to move towards a future with more granular insights and analytics to power the economics of our business. With the emergence of this network of interoperable data sources, we can democratize media measurement and create a better world for advertisers, media owners, and consumers alike. ■

Advanced advertising pioneer Michael Bologna has raised $2 million for a startup company that measures cross-screen exposure to advertising and content.

The company HyphaMetrics, co-founded by former Comscore executive Joanna Drews, has launched two products and has a third in the pipeline.

Its MobileMetrics, which captures the many unique media occurrences that take place across mobile media environments, has been licensed by MadHive to inform its data science and machine learning.

Also available now is ContentMetrics, which focuses on how time is spent across every platform, allowing users to understand who within a household, is watching what content, whether live, time-shifted or streaming.

Expected to be in market in the second quarter of 2021 is ClearviewMetrics, which captures unduplicated viewing data across every network, program, advertisement, product placement, streaming app and gaming environment for every device in a household using proprietary panel technology. HyphaMetrics expects to have 5,000 homes and 15,000 devices using its technology.

"Panels are critical to providing a fully opted-in source of truth," said Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive. "We believe the addition of our proprietary partnership with HyphaMetrics to our OTT-first device graph gives advertisers access to innovative, high fidelity targeting and attribution capabilities across screens."

In addition to Bologna, who will be president and chief revenue officer of HyphaMetrics, and CEO Drews, the executive team includes chief technology officer Gerardo Lopez Zamudio and Chuck Shuttles, chief panel officer.

Bologna ran GroupM’s addressable advertising unit Modi Media and started one2one media, which became a part of Cadent.

Drews was director of product management and emerging assets at Comscore and a partner in GroupM’s research practice.

HyphaMetrics said it raised $2 million from executives in the agency, network, MVPD, research and media platform businesses.

It’s advisory board includes Jim Balbirer and Scott Collins, Brian Danzis, Rodrigo Espinosa, Geoff Farris, Gabe Gottlieb, Charlie Guevara, Adam Helfgott. Amol Purohit, Rosario Sanchez Robles, Larry Samuels, Alan Schanzert, Howard Shimmel, Ed Swindler and angel investor Kyle Tortora.

“The drive for true cross-platform measurement, with de-duplicated reach, is the ultimate goal of our industry,” said Jane Clarke, CEO and managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement. “To get there, it will be the innovation and vision of companies such as HyphaMetrics that will enable us to realize that goal.”  

Anyone who has spent any time in the TV business has heard the mantra before: This year is advanced advertising’s year. But unlike the past two decades, in which many a promising ad-tech initiative has stumbled, cable and broadcast executives may finally have the incentive to make targeted ads reality.

For advanced advertising — using the torrent of data from set-top boxes, digital and mobile devices to target messages to specific households and individuals — the erosion of the traditional TV model could be the force that frees the technology. As viewing habits have shifted away from linear TV, distributors, networks and advertisers themselves all have a vested interest in reaching that elusive market.

“When models reach the breaking point, that’s when breakouts happen,” Tom Rogers, chairman of TRget Media LLC and the former TiVo CEO, said in an interview. “It’s been clear for some time that the traditional linear TV model has had its challenges. We’re really beginning to see some things happen that are very, very significant accelerations.”

And networks, distributors and ad buyers alike are buying in, with distributors like Comcast and Altice USA snapping up small ad-tech companies, networks forming consortiums like OpenAP to identify opportunities and set standards, and even, in the case of NBCUniversal, devoting a growing piece of their ad budgets to targeting.

Related: The Future of Television Is Now

In March, NBCU said it would offer about $1 billion in inventory to targeted ads this year. And at the recent upfronts, NBCU chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships Linda Yaccarino slammed the questionable reach of some digital ads.

“Has a ‘view’ ever bought any of your products?” Yaccarino asked at NBCU’s May 15 upfront event. “Has a ‘like’ ever walked into a store? … Viewers buy products.”

Related: Data Drives Some Talk at Upfront Presentations [subscription required]

First-Quarter Slippage
Exacerbating the need for more focused ads is the mounting evidence that cord-cutting, cord-shaving and skinny programming bundles are gaining steam. In the first quarter, the pay TV distribution market fell by 762,000 subscribers, the single largest first-quarter decline ever, according to MoffettNathanson. And once indestructible brands, like The Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, have seen their subscriber bases shrink as viewers move to other venues and devices to fill their content needs.

ESPN has lost between 12 million and 13 million subscribers from its peak and plans to launch a direct-to-consumer service targeted at younger viewers later this year. At the same time, ratings stalwart the National Football League saw its ratings fall 9% last year (double that for the coveted 18-24 year old demographic), while other sports are getting older. Meanwhile, younger viewers are staying away from the living room TV set.

According to TechCrunch, viewers are watching 1 billion hours of YouTube video clips per day.

Related: OTT Players Poised to Win TV’s Future [subscription required]

Traditional distributors and programmers are taking notice. Comcast has purchased several ad-tech companies over the past few years, including FreeWheel, StickyAds.tv and Visible World. Altice USA bought advanced ad company Audience Partners in March, and in April programmers Viacom, Turner and 21st Century Fox formed consortium OpenAP to standardize the way targeted audiences are defined and measured.

The TV industry still has some time before the ad model completely disintegrates, Pivotal Research Group senior analyst Brian Weiser said.

“To me, it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary,” Wieser said. “Ratings can fall by double digits, yet traditional TV is a source of premium video content with adjacent advertising opportunities. It continues to dwarf everything else.”

Industry group the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) pegged digital video ad revenue at about $9.1 billion in 2016, compared with $69 billion for TV ads.

Wieser said a dramatic shift in viewers could sway the market, but it would have to be very dramatic.

“For TV to find itself in a position where advertisers would all of a sudden make radical changes, you would have to find a good core of the audience evaporate,” Wieser said. “And by evaporate I mean reach goes away.”

The emergence of groups like OpenAP are more a means to show the industry that programmers are not out of step with the times, Weiser said, adding that perception is a bigger force of change in the ad market than reality.

“Decisions end up getting made based on the perception of how things are going, and fear,” Wieser said. He pointed to the TV ad market in 2015, which to some was the indicator that the traditional TV ad model had broken, but was, Wieser said, merely a bad year made to look worse by unfavorable comparables to the prior year. In 2016, when heavy ad spending by such daily fantasy sports sites as FanDuel and DraftKings spurred the TV market, the problem appeared to be solved. Now in 2017, the ad market is in decline again.

“What’s happening now is what people feared would happen a couple of years ago,” Wieser said. “Cost constraints are more pronounced than they have ever been. Now we’re at a place where I’m feeling doubtful that national TV will grow again. But it’s not because of digital, per se.”

At TVSquared, an ad-tech company that tracks brand traffic and helps advertisers choose how to target their messages, chief technology officer Kevin O’Reilly agreed fears the TV ad model is dead are overblown.

O’Reilly said the TV apocalypse has been coming for the past 15 years, and this wave is being fueled by the emergence of the second screen.

“If the apocalypse is coming, it’s coming slowly,” he said. But he added that ad buyers and sellers are realizing that both traditional and advanced models can coexist.

“Advertisers are saying, look, I know linear TV works, it really does drive efficient traffic. And one of the big benefits of efficiency is if I can find a way to be slightly more efficient in an efficient marketplace, I’m going to make money,” O’Reilly said. “There is major value in still reaching a very large audience, I just want to make sure I’m reaching the right part of that audience. And when I’m not reaching the right part of the audience, I can change my buy and optimize it into parts where I’m seeing it perform better.”

Getting to that point will probably take a round of consolidation in the business, Rogers said, creating one-stop shops for participants to access the expertise they need.

“The problem is, there are so many silos, so many companies, that it is a bit of a mess,” Rogers said, adding that there is an increasing need to put ad-tech solutions under a single roof. “Until that is solved, it’s going to be difficult for a massive breakthrough.”

The convergence of ad tech and distribution has been a long time coming with the inherent convergence of data-driven advertising and those who compile the data, said Waller Capital Partners managing director Roddy Moon, who leads the boutique investment bank’s digital media practice and who has covered the ad-tech sector since its early days.

Related: Waller Capital's Video Services Consolidation Chart

Helping to spur along that convergence is the dominance of digital behemoths Google and Facebook in the digital ad space. Morgan Stanley estimates that about 85 cents of every new online ad dollar goes to those two companies.

“There are still a tremendous number of companies chasing that remaining 15 cents,” Moon said. “But that’s just digital ad spend; the 800-pound gorilla is still TV ad budgets.”

To address that market, Moon said, the industry is beginning to realize it needs a common, integrated data-driven platform. With scores of small, medium and large ad-tech companies out there, many are realizing that creating a one-stop shop for distributors, content owners and advertisers can help the development along.

“It used to be that it was an ‘either-or’ mentality,” Moon said of the ad-tech business. “You were either digital or traditional television. Now there is more of a mindset from the marketing side that it should be holistic.”

Cable Jumps In, Too
At the same time, cable and telco distributors are trying to dispel the notion that others are taking over this emerging business. Comcast started buying ad-tech firms in 2005, with Strata Marketing, followed by Seattle-based thePlatform in 2006. In the past three years, Comcast has purchased video ad startup FreeWheel (2014), This Technology (2015), Visible World (2015) and StickyAds (2016), all with a view toward offering more targeted ad product.

Earlier this month, Comcast named Marcien Jenckes, a former ad-tech entrepreneur, as president of advertising. Jenckes has held several roles at Comcast since joining the company in 2010 — he was most recently executive vice president of consumer services at Comcast Cable, where he oversaw its video, internet, voice and Xfinity Home businesses.

The newest entry to the U.S. cable space — Altice USA, a unit of European telecom company Altice N.V. — has also dipped its toes in the ad-tech space. Altice USA purchased Suddenlink Communications in December 2015 for $9.1 billion and in June 2016 bought Cablevision Systems for $17.7 billion, making it the fourth largest cable operator in the country with 4.6 million residential and business services subscribers.

Cablevision had been a pioneer in taking a digital-like approach to advertising, Altice USA chief data officer Paul Haddad said. Haddad had served as senior vice president and general manager of advanced data and analytics at Cablevision, playing a key role in its advanced advertising strategy.

That expertise and experience now in demand in the business, Haddad said, and advertisers and networks, who may have given advanced ads short shrift in the past, are getting a lot more serious.

“We’re being asked to discuss our strategy with major players,” Haddad said. “In previous years, people were assessing the value proposition, versus today I can sense they want to test, they want to discuss business plans. To us, this is the real sign that, yes, we think it’s going to start gaining major traction starting this year. In 18 to 24 months I could see it becoming a standard request when it comes to advertising in the industry.”

Already, some early aggregators are beginning to emerge. In 2016, former Cablevision CEO James Dolan and his wife, former cable company chief operating officer Kristin, formed Dolan Family Ventures, an investment company focused on the ad-tech space. Dolan Family Ventures formed data analytics company 605 shortly after its purchase of Analytics Media Group, a New York-based data analytics specialist. The idea behind 605 is to combine AMG’s analytics and technology platform with set-top box data to provide clients with the kind of information that can help them develop targeted, optimized ad campaigns.

Kristin Dolan serves as CEO of 605, overseeing a management team that includes several former AMG and Cablevision ad executives, including former Cablevision Media Sales president Ben Tatta.

As ad buyers, distributors and networks become increasingly frustrated over how ads are sold, targeting will gain traction, Kristin Dolan said in an interview.

“In order to continue selling television advertising, the advertisers and the brands are expecting that they will get the same capability to target people that they have been experiencing on digital for years,” she said. “The time has come.”

And with NBCUniversal committing $1 billion to targeted inventory and consortiums like OpenAP emerging, she added that she sees the light at the end of the targeting tunnel.

“Television advertising is a great medium; [it’s] the best way to reach large audiences,” Dolan said. “Coupled with targeted calls to action, it really allows the brand to be more effective. Hopefully in the next 12 to 18 months, you will see significant increase in utilization to drive the industry forward. Buyers are demanding it, and the sellers like NBC are responding, as are the MVPDs. Everybody seems finally ready to move on this.”

That buyers are finally stepping up to the advanced ad plate is a significant development. In the past, as cable companies and data firms touted their ability to pinpoint homes via set-top box data, buyers have dismissed the technology as not being specific enough. An age-old argument against targeted ads was that just knowing a household buys dog food isn’t enough; advertisers wanted to know who was buying it and what they were watching.

Getting Real
But advances in data have made what was once the Holy Grail of targeted advertising a reality.

“Now you can do that,” One2One Media president Michael Bologna, a 20-year veteran of the advanced advertising business, said. “Media marketers are getting pressure from CMOs, and they are now pushing their buyers and their agencies and they are now changing the conversation.

“Will there be a time when an advertiser will say, ‘I completely don’t care what the program is as long as I know it’s the audience?’ We’re definitely headed down that road in certain ways, but content will always play a factor,” Bologna added. “But now that the advertisers are seeing first hand that they can target these granular segments, and they see that targeting these granular segments is generating sales, they are becoming less focused on ‘I have to be on this particular show at this particular time.’ That’s a really interesting and fulfilling trend.”

Bologna said advanced ad addressability won’t take over the TV ad market — he estimated that when fully deployed, 25% to 35% of an advertiser’s ad budget will go to addressable — but it will balance it.

“No major advertiser is ever going to put 100% of their budget toward addressability,” Bologna said. “If you wait until someone is 40 years old to show them a Mercedes ad when they can afford to buy a Mercedes, you’ve missed them. What addressability will ultimately do, in the long run, is help balance the frequency of messaging to the mass audience versus the very niche audience. And between now and then, every advertiser is going to have their own allocation methodology.”