BIA/Kelsey is partnering again with the Local Media Association to produce this year’s LMA Native Advertising Interactive Summit next July 15-16 in Washington, DC where we’ll share our latest native ad forecast, insights about marketplace dynamics and trend lines of how we’re seeing this sector evolve. (Note early bird discounts offered through June 15th). The plan overall is to offer a mix of data, best practices, hands-on workshops and take-home ideas for getting your native ad business into higher gear.

The program covers a lot of ground in just a day and half. Nancy Lane, LMA president kicks things off with white board session where she’ll be joined by several other speakers to Schurz Communications’ Kerry Oslund, VP of Publishing and Emerging Media, will share a disruptive new approach to native advertising they’re finding to be successful. Of course, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has done a lot of innovation around brands and native advertising as we’ll hear from Kelly Andresen, Director of the WP BrandStudio & Planning who will share winning case studies. You’ll hear speakers from Advance, Gatehouse, Desert Digital and Dispath among others discussion pricing and packaging native ad campaigns, content strategies, outsourcing, selling native effectively and since it’s Washington, we’ll also hear from Laura Sullivan, a staff attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who’s following native closely.

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One of the leading lights in evangelizing marketing technology , aka “martech” is Scott Brinker who writes the ChiefMartec.com blog. He’s now come up with “The Stackies: Marketing Technology Stack Awards” and for a good cause. Submit your martech stack diagram and if you win, he’ll donate up to $1,000 to a charity of your choice.

So what is a martech stack?

Scott covers this with some great examples in his recent blog post announcing The Stackies. He was speaking at the B2B Marketing Innovation Summit with Susan Ganeshan, Clarabridge’s CMO, Kristin Hersant, VP marketing for Livefyre and Franz Aman, SVP brand and demand at Informatica and each of these marketing executives shared top level views of their company’s martech stacks each comprising over 20 different applications in different application stacks.

The Clarabridge martech stack diagram is perhaps the most intuitive but still runs on over two dozen different applications across its various app stacks: Contacts, PR & Voice, Brand & Design, Content, Social, Advertising and Analytics. The JIRA stack is organized around PR & Social Media, Outbound Prospecting, Inbound Marketing, Website Content and Analytics. Finally, the Informatic martech stack is a more functional and workflow diagram encompassing Paid, Earned/Paid and Owned Communities stacks.

Three different approaches, all sensible, and each martech stack design to drive business goals by leveraging technology.

How good is your stack? Join the competition and find out.

The post Get Your Stack Together . . . and See If It's a Winner in the Stackies Award Competition appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

NCTA’s rebranded INTX: Internet & Television Expo (aka The Cable Show) finishes up today in Chicago. This show, like its sponsoring organization is having a bit of an identity crisis. Indeed, the name change may go beyond the show to its sponsoring organization.

Fourteen years ago, “NCTA” used to be an acronym for the “National Cable Television Association.” But on May 1, 2001 the Association changed its name to “National Cable & Telecommunications Association” in order to better reflect, “cable’s transformation from a one-way video supplier to a competitive supplier of advanced, two-way services including digital video, high-speed Internet, cable telephony and interactive TV.” To further reflect its evolutionary journey in self-identity, the NCTA’s iconic annual “The Cable Show” was rebranded as “INTX – Internet and Television Expo” to again reflect the industry’s transformation as it learns how to better focus on the digital media and entertainment economy. Now, there is some chatter that NCTA will once again change the name of the association, perhaps to NCTA: The Internet & Television Association: and just drop “cable” altogether.

What brave new world has cable entered? As FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler put it in his keynote address, “You deserve straight talk about what it means now that you are cable companies, video providers and network builders.” He then continued on to discuss his controversial stands on his “Open Internet Order” (i.e., net neutrality) and the Comcast/Time Warner acquisition he helped doom. Wheeler’s “straight talk” didn’t go over so well with the crowd. Liberty Global’s CEO Michael Fries drew robust applause in the panel following Wheeler’s keynote by saying, “I am baffled by the chairman’s remarks. There is a presumption of guilt for success I’ve never seen before.”

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts also had his moment during his otherwise business-like presentation about Comcast’s recent successes, including transitioning to a company serving more Internet than cable customers.

Roberts was showing off Comcast’s new Xfinity X1 remote control and user interface that responds to voice commands to bring up various viewing and other choices. “Show me the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger,” Roberts commanded. In response, we see on the big screen Van Diesel sprinting from a house that violently explodes just behind him in a scene from Furious 7. “That pretty much sums it up,” Roberts dead panned.

Beyond the rebranding, politics, and merger break-ups, it was clear from the various panels that industry leadership clearly is focusing on developing and executing on a new business order defined by ever more capable and integrated technology platforms, innovations in content and how users want to interact with this content, and interesting new ways to monetize an emerging set of services.

For example, Time Warner Cable’s EVP/COO Media Services Joan Gillman, who oversees TWC’s advanced advertising, data and interactive solutions for advertisers and network partners, was pressed into duty across several panels exploring monetization strategies. She led a a discussion with MediaLink’s president/COO Wenda Harris exploring the implications to cable providers, oops, I mean Internet and Television Providers, offering OTT services and the future of television advertising in a SVOD (subscription video on demand) world. Operators need to figure out the economics of linear television versus SVOD in ways that keep subscribers engaged and satisfied.

When it comes to the future of television and digital advertising, these worlds are meshing quickly, especially for the “not cable” industry as it leverages it data advantages in the fast breaking era of programmatic advertising. In a panel led by the Cable Advertising Bureau’s Sean Cunningham, Zachary Cunningham (ESPN), Billy Farina (Cox Media), Mark Lieberman (Viamedia) and Brett Wilson (TubeMogul) shared their views on programmatic.

Essentially, the takeaway is that programmatic is about all types of inventory including premium avails, audience targeting data, efficient and automated workflows in the buy/sell process, dynamically serving relevant content, better modeling attribution, and optimizing campaigns. Panelists estimated that by 2020 somewhere between 20% and 100% of television ad trading will be on programmatic platforms. The 20% comes from Lieberman’s assumption that it’s a totally automated process from the buyer’s perspective. The 100% comes from Wilson’s belief that the whole underlying system will be automated and programmatic, though actual trading likely will continue involve human creativity and negotiation in the mix.

Ultimately, the panel concluded that programmatic is just another sales channel. And everyone loses if the industry can’t figure out how to avoid channel conflicts between programmatic and good, old-fashioned human AEs who as direct sellers who will continue to drive high value returns on commercial inventory.

Across the program, content people consistently agreed it’s all about the content. The non-cable executives consistently agreed it’s all about creating compelling user experiences and satisfaction subscribers. Those in charge of generating revenue have to balance the cost of content with the ability to monetize it. What’s the better business? Well top-line revenue and margins tell different stories. Cablevision’s James Dolan put some numbers to it, “For every $1 in profit I make from television subscriptions, I make $7 in profit from selling broadband Internet connections.”

Well, good-bye cable and hello Internet.

The post INTX 2015 – Redefining the (Not) Cable Industry appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The digital audio space is really just beginning to hit its pace and so this is a perfect time for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to come out with its authoritative A Digital Audio Buyer’s Guide developed by IAB’s Digital Audio Committee (on which BIA/Kelsey serves).

The digital audio market felt a seismic rattle with the news yesterday of Spotify’s expected $400 million capital raise which would bring its valuation to $8.4 billion more than twice that of leading competitor, Pandora, who closed out yesterday with a $3.55 billion market cap.

As BIA/Kelsey noted in a digital audio report we released last year (sponsored by XAPPmedia), “The Internet radio revolution has been brewing for some time. Streaming audio has gone mainstream for audiences and advertisers. This revolution is foundational, meaning that new business models are forming around new audience behaviors supported by technology advances.”

IAB’s Digital Audio Buyer’s Guide is a comprehensive but very digestible 26 page educational and reference document that lays out in a clear fashion everything from “what is meant by ‘digital audio'” to sizing the digital audio market, providing best practices and digital audio ad samples to providing insights around planning and buying.

“Digital audio” is defined as comprising broadcast AM/FM stations online, pureplay online radio stations, streamed audio content with selections influenced by consumer input, and audio-on-demand (i.e., podcasts). With over 50% of the U.S. population as current monthly users of various digital audio services, IAB cites eMarketer data showing this will grow to over 190 monthly digital radio listeners by 2019.

In BIA/Kelsey’s updated forecast for broadcast radio, we’re estimating that the advertising revenue from AM/FM stations streaming online will double from $1 billion in 2014 to $2 billion by 2019. That’s a significant growth component for an industry that otherwise won’t see much revenue growth. And we see a lot of new competition both for listeners and in selling access to local audiences.

In the pureplay digital audio world, Pandora will be releasing its latest earnings report on April 23, 2015. We’ll see then how it stacks up in its drive to increase local ad revenues and how Spotify’s raise may impact its share price. Since Pandora beefed up its local sales force presence, it managed to grow its local ad revenues by 155% to over $150 million in 2014.

It appears that the local digital audio market is no longer so sleepy as it may have appeared as social, mobile and video digital advertising claimed all the headlines.

The post IAB’s New (Free) Digital Audio Buyer’s Guide – Informs a Breakout Category appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The digital audio space is really just beginning to hit its pace and so this is a perfect time for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to come out with its authoritative A Digital Audio Buyer’s Guide developed by IAB’s Digital Audio Committee (on which BIA/Kelsey serves).

The digital audio market felt a seismic rattle with the news yesterday of Spotify’s expected $400 million capital raise which would bring its valuation to $8.4 billion more than twice that of leading competitor, Pandora, who closed out yesterday with a $3.55 billion market cap.

As BIA/Kelsey noted in a digital audio report we released last year (sponsored by XAPPmedia), “The Internet radio revolution has been brewing for some time. Streaming audio has gone mainstream for audiences and advertisers. This revolution is foundational, meaning that new business models are forming around new audience behaviors supported by technology advances.”

IAB’s Digital Audio Buyer’s Guide is a comprehensive but very digestible 26 page educational and reference document that lays out in a clear fashion everything from “what is meant by ‘digital audio'” to sizing the digital audio market, providing best practices and digital audio ad samples to providing insights around planning and buying.

“Digital audio” is defined as comprising broadcast AM/FM stations online, pureplay online radio stations, streamed audio content with selections influenced by consumer input, and audio-on-demand (i.e., podcasts). With over 50% of the U.S. population as current monthly users of various digital audio services, IAB cites eMarketer data showing this will grow to over 190 monthly digital radio listeners by 2019.

In BIA/Kelsey’s updated forecast for broadcast radio, we’re estimating that the advertising revenue from AM/FM stations streaming online will double from $1 billion in 2014 to $2 billion by 2019. That’s a significant growth component for an industry that otherwise won’t see much revenue growth. And we see a lot of new competition both for listeners and in selling access to local audiences.

In the pureplay digital audio world, Pandora will be releasing its latest earnings report on April 23, 2015. We’ll see then how it stacks up in its drive to increase local ad revenues and how Spotify’s raise may impact its share price. Since Pandora beefed up its local sales force presence, it managed to grow its local ad revenues by 155% to over $150 million in 2014.

It appears that the local digital audio market is no longer so sleepy as it may have appeared as social, mobile and video digital advertising claimed all the headlines.

The post IAB's New (Free) Digital Audio Buyer's Guide – Informs a Breakout Category appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Gravy just got a nice boost of confidence per its $7.6M Series A round led by new investors Gannett, MetTel and several optimistic existing investors. Gravy is a local-mobile data analytics firms that develops consumer behavioral signals for segmentation and targeting based on participation and interest in local events and activities. The theory Gravy pursues is that this type of profiling provides a new level of accuracy in targeting consumers with behavioral and location signals.

Founded in 2011, Gravy will use its funding round to build out its Gravy GOLD data platform that is driven by verified customer attendance at local events and places. Gravy told us that their clients have developed actionable data gathered from customers motivated to invest their free time to physically attend events and activities provides a strong set of intent signals useful to marketers.

Gravy says its GOLD platform, enables brand marketers to quickly uncover the interests and affinities of individual mobile customers as they live their daily lives and use that knowledge to predict buying intent, deliver personalized engagement, gain granular competitive insights and execute pinpoint, in-the-moment targeting.

The rise of data science, data platforms and marketing analytics is disruptive by changing how marketers and publishers are now transacting on audience inventory rather than media inventory. Gravy makes for an interesting opportunity as it brings a new type of data to the game. Consumer behaviors around events and activities on face value would appear to be useful signals for targeting specific creative messaging and appeals as well as developing a new segmentation strategy.

As programmatic, location and mobile converge around data management platforms and consumer signaling, Gravy could be upping its game at a very relevant point in the industry’s evolution.

The post Gannett, MetTel Back Gravy, Local-Mobile Data Analytics Firm, in $7.6M Series A Raise appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The Google Fiber Team announced that it will be launching a trial of local television ads as part of its Google Fiber service in Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS. The locally targeted ads will appear “during existing ad breaks, along with national ads, on live TV and DVR related programs.”

The Google Fiber TV ads will be delivered in real time and will be matched to households based on factors including geography, type of program shown and viewing history. Viewers will be allowed to opt out of seeing ads.

Google says that local advertisers on the Google Fiber service will only pay for ads that run and they can limit the number of times an ad is shown to a particular TV set.

The post Google Fiber Testing Local TV Ads in Kansas City appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Heading back to Washington, DC’s snow, ice, and “wintry mixes” was not quite as stimulating as spending time networking and learning at Operative‘s second annual Ad Revenue and Operations Summit, aka “OP/ED” that attracted about 100 executive last week in Miami, FL. The invitation-only conference was held for Operative’s clients and partners to share best practices, insights and help set the agenda for 2015 and beyond.

Lorne Brown, Operative’s President/CEO and Founder will be speaking on BIA/Kelsey’s Programmatic Superforum at the NATIONAL show in Dallas, which is March 25-27. Among other things, Operative and BIA/Kelsey will be releasing a jointly developed local publisher cut of Operative’s publisher survey previewed at OP/ED that analyzed profitability practices and parameters. Brown will highlight this study at our conference and also speak to what’s on his mind for programmatic and ad work flow from the perspective of publishers.

At the top of the wish list at OP/ED was the goal of publishers being able to provide “One IO, One Invoice.” This ideal of having sellers prepare a single Insertion Order (IO) for an advertising package that includes multiple channels and offers and both have it fulfilled in an automated workflow….and have the client receive a single, integrated invoice listing out all the inventory purchased and billed remains a bit pie in the sky. But clearly this is a serious and committed vision that companies like Operative are building out.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, it’s hard to know which thread to start pulling on. Operative’s strategy and really the industry’s, is to continue focus on building out its core platforms but to enable that One IO, One Invoice for its clients by adopting an API Stack Strategy to support interoperable database applications. There’s no other way to do it, so this is smart and extremely helpful for both publishers and clients. Operative clients including Comcast Spotlight, Hulu, NBC Universal, Verizon and Univision shared excellent and helpful insights and best practices based on their particular approaches to the sales process.

Digging deeper in to the topics, Digital Content Next’s CEO Jason Kint kicked thing off in his keynote by highlighting other areas of urgent concern, namely: Viewability, Fraud, Programmatic, Declining CPMs, dealing with the shift to mobile and better tools and information flows to support campaign optimization and revenue yield management. Compared to dealing with winter in Boston… a piece of cake!

Really one of the burning issues was dealing with viewability and fraud. In the wrap-up session, Kelly Blue Book’s Mark Bernstein; Gawker’s John Price and Eric Harris from BuzzFeed detailed out their vision for what needs to happen with viewability. In their view, supporting viewability and the “vCPM” (viewable CPM) metric requires a three-phased approach. The goal is for systems like Operative’s need to support automated delivery reconciliation and delivery, reporting and yield management. Phase 1 is to lay the groundwork to sell, execute and invoice viewable orders. Phase 2 is to automate delivery, billing reconciliation and invoicing. Finally, Phase 3 is to support viewable reporting, forecasting and payments.

For those interested, there’s a fairly rich Twitter stream at #OpED15, check it out.

The post One IO, One Invoice. The "Impossible Dream"? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Heading back to Washington, DC’s snow, ice, and “wintry mixes” was not quite as stimulating as spending time networking and learning at Operative‘s second annual Ad Revenue and Operations Summit, aka “OP/ED” that attracted about 100 executive last week in Miami, FL. The invitation-only conference was held for Operative’s clients and partners to share best practices, insights and help set the agenda for 2015 and beyond.

Lorne Brown, Operative’s President/CEO and Founder will be speaking on BIA/Kelsey’s Programmatic Superforum at the NATIONAL show in Dallas, which is March 25-27. Among other things, Operative and BIA/Kelsey will be releasing a jointly developed local publisher cut of Operative’s publisher survey previewed at OP/ED that analyzed profitability practices and parameters. Brown will highlight this study at our conference and also speak to what’s on his mind for programmatic and ad work flow from the perspective of publishers.

At the top of the wish list at OP/ED was the goal of publishers being able to provide “One IO, One Invoice.” This ideal of having sellers prepare a single Insertion Order (IO) for an advertising package that includes multiple channels and offers and both have it fulfilled in an automated workflow….and have the client receive a single, integrated invoice listing out all the inventory purchased and billed remains a bit pie in the sky. But clearly this is a serious and committed vision that companies like Operative are building out.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, it’s hard to know which thread to start pulling on. Operative’s strategy and really the industry’s, is to continue focus on building out its core platforms but to enable that One IO, One Invoice for its clients by adopting an API Stack Strategy to support interoperable database applications. There’s no other way to do it, so this is smart and extremely helpful for both publishers and clients. Operative clients including Comcast Spotlight, Hulu, NBC Universal, Verizon and Univision shared excellent and helpful insights and best practices based on their particular approaches to the sales process.

Digging deeper in to the topics, Digital Content Next’s CEO Jason Kint kicked thing off in his keynote by highlighting other areas of urgent concern, namely: Viewability, Fraud, Programmatic, Declining CPMs, dealing with the shift to mobile and better tools and information flows to support campaign optimization and revenue yield management. Compared to dealing with winter in Boston… a piece of cake!

Really one of the burning issues was dealing with viewability and fraud. In the wrap-up session, Kelly Blue Book’s Mark Bernstein; Gawker’s John Price and Eric Harris from BuzzFeed detailed out their vision for what needs to happen with viewability. In their view, supporting viewability and the “vCPM” (viewable CPM) metric requires a three-phased approach. The goal is for systems like Operative’s need to support automated delivery reconciliation and delivery, reporting and yield management. Phase 1 is to lay the groundwork to sell, execute and invoice viewable orders. Phase 2 is to automate delivery, billing reconciliation and invoicing. Finally, Phase 3 is to support viewable reporting, forecasting and payments.

For those interested, there’s a fairly rich Twitter stream at #OpED15, check it out.

The post One IO, One Invoice. The “Impossible Dream”? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey: John, your company provides targeted, cross-screen video advertising. Video and programmatic targeting are particularly hot right now in the market. So let’s talk about that. We’ve seen this moving from national into local media with increased acceleration lately. Let?s start with the basics, how do you define “programmatic”?

McIntyre: Programmatic buying, in its most simple form, is the automated real-time bidding and purchasing of digital advertising inventory. It is undoubtedly a powerful tool, but a relatively “dumb” one. It’s a “go fetch” mechanism designed to buy digital media at the lowest bid for a broadly defined target audience. But as video reshapes the digital landscape before our eyes, the requirements for programmatic buying are also rapidly evolving. First, a little context… The rise of multi-screen video and the related explosion of online video advertising are well documented. comScore reports that each month, 225 million Americans now watch video online — including some 40 billion video ads.

BIA/Kelsey: Our forecasts show that local online video ad spend will continue to increase by double digits in the coming years. Some of those dollars are new incremental spend, but most of it is shifting from display, print and TV. How does programmatic play in this mix?

McIntyre: If, as the forecasts indicate, video is becoming the preferred digital ad medium, then programmatic must get smarter. We see two keys to unlocking its potential: 1. Buying micro-targeted audiences and optimizing on performance. First, this requires we apply advanced levels of intelligence to segmentation. We need to integrate highly reliable data that allows advanced segmentation beyond demographics, e.g., location, current topical context, device, recent behaviors (search, browsing, purchase, etc.), day part, purchase funnel position, etc. Second, we need to be able to adjust bids and buys based on how audiences respond to ads during campaigns. In other words, we need campaigns to become self-learning and optimize intelligently. 2. Personalizing ad content and seamlessly integrating it with micro-targeted buys Message relevance is becoming the new creative mantra. Producing versions of ads that resonate with viewers in different locations, at different times, with different interests dramatically increases response and engagement. We need to be able personalize ads quickly, affordibly and at scale, then deliver them with the appropriate buys.

BIA/Kelsey: John, you will be speaking at our BIA/Kelsey National conference next month about some of the work you’ve been doing in programmatic at Sightly. Could give us a teaser here of what you’ll be talking about?

McIntyre: Our platform incorporates these technologies today as part of programmatic buys of YouTube TrueView inventory so we’ve already seen its potential first hand. For example, here are a couple success stories featuring campaigns we ran for Wendy’s in which we combined ad personalization with micro-targeting and intelligent optimization to deliver exceptional results that led to an annual commitment for 2015.

BIA/Kelsey: Thanks, John. Looking forward to your discussion on our Programmatic SuperForum next month in Dallas at BIA/Kelsey’s National conference March 25-27.

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