Convergence is the mission for local broadcasters who seek to merge data across linear and digital platforms in order to offer clients one meaningful number to track the performance of their buys. But with accurate demographic measurement of local markets still unavailable, that goal lingers on the horizon, said panelists at TVNewsCheck’s Working Lunch Webinar on Data, Technology and Optimizing Local Advertising last week.
“We want to give digital the protected environment that linear offers. And we want to make linear faster and easier to transact like digital can be,” said J.W. Linkenauger, VP of advanced advertising support operations at Sinclair Broadcast Group. “It’s really about how we quickly get data to our buyers so that they can make good choices.”
“The biggest thing is focusing on analytics and big data and understanding how data science can really drive new ways of thinking about how we optimize our business, using tools to help us better work with our agencies — making it more seamless and providing more depth,” said John Brauer, SVP of insights and media measurement for Fox Television Stations.
Fortunately for broadcasters, technology is on the way that should bring about their dream of convergence. Cloud-based software platforms with flexible APIs are allowing data to flow across sales silos and business departments. Measurement companies, including Nielsen and Comscore, are working on big-data solutions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is speeding up data processing, allowing decisions to be made faster and freeing up time for sales staff. And NextGen TV means that performance can increasingly be assessed via ACR data grabbed from smart TV screens instead of waiting for results from a third-party provider.
Part of freeing data from silos and automating processes is moving it on to the cloud, and service providers such as Operative and WideOrbit offer products that allow broadcasters to do that while keeping data safe and private.
“Cloud-based computing frees the data for exchange and analysis and ultimately provides better outcomes because it also improves workflows,” said David Dembowski, head of global sales and account management for Operative. “That includes time to market, the ability to service clients faster and the ability to both target and measure results faster.
“At Operative, our AOS system is entirely cloud based,” Dembowski said. “It allows for data fluidity, but also for the ability of dashboarding for data analytics and review.”
WideOrbit is rolling out its cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) system called WO Fusion, which hooks into Wide Orbit’s well-established traffic and other systems and allows users to access them on the cloud.
“We’re building out WO Fusion, which fuses all of these different products, and allows our clients to be able to do cross-platform sales on the cloud using one software system,” said Ed Salgado, SVP, software engineering, at Wide Orbit.
The need to provide consumers with content across platforms is one big reason why people are pushing for impressions over ratings to be the currency of the realm. While digital business is transacted on impressions, linear broadcasting remains dictated by ratings. And with audiences so fragmented at the local level, it’s hard to capture enough viewers in one relatively small national panel to determine accurate demographic ratings information across markets.
“We’re very much in favor of moving to impressions, because, as we work to sell across platforms, impressions become a good cross-platform measurement,” Linkenauger said. “The challenge with panels is that there’s such a high degree of variability that you can go from zero to something or something to zero very easily, and it’s hard to have a stable number.
“We find impressions to be a bit more stable,” he said. “But if we can get inside the glass on the TV, that’s ultimately the best benefit. And so, a lot of our efforts are to do exactly that, especially with our rollout of ATSC 3.0/NextGen TV. We want to collect that data, get that data and make use of it to the betterment of our clients, and give them that transparency and viewership.”
Sinclair is one of the country’s leading broadcasters when it comes to rolling out ATSC 3.0, with 76% of its markets having converted, covering about 29% of the U.S. The group is eager to use the standard to start collecting first-party data and put out an app to that effect, but the technology is still not widely available in consumer devices such as smart TVs and phones.
“We need more of these devices to get data consistency to be able to transact on that and we’re not quite there yet,” Linkenauger said. “That’s why we still have the reliance on Nielsen and Comscore and the panels that are measuring linear TV. Of course, on the digital side we’re getting good data across the board.”
Besides an accurate data picture, buyers also want to see robust attribution against their buys. While attribution on some level has always been part of advertising — an ad would run and customers would flood into a store or a 1-800 number would appear on a TV screen and the phones would start ringing off the hook — in today’s world, buyers want to see more precise metrics against their buys.
“With our flex local news and our streaming products in general, we’ve really been able to embrace what we can do with attribution in streaming,” Brauer said. “It makes it easier because we have impression-level measurement so we can work with attribution providers to understand website visitation, or football traffic or or in-store sales. All of that’s possible with streaming.
“When we move into the linear space, it gets more challenging,” Brauer added. “Data science will help us. Our providers can model and project results similar to what we do with our ratings data, but it is a slower process, and it doesn’t have the same sort of dynamism that we get in our streaming solutions, where we’re using that data to immediately be able to respond to do more of what’s working and improve it.”
Getting that sort of convergent information and attribution is key to agencies buying in the local space.
“We’re looking for that return on investment, knowing whether the consumer saw the ad and whether they went to the website, or actually there was some foot traffic,” said Karine McMaster, SVP, group director, local investment, Dentsu. “We’re not getting that side of attribution with our current buys right now in that local space, and that’s what we need to move forward. We need the local sellers to help us out with that.”
The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning could play a helpful role in solving many of these problems.
“It’s taking all of this data right that’s available to us now and turning that data chaos into data intelligence. That’s the first step we see where AI becomes incredibly applicable, particularly across platforms and across multiple inventory sources, and really helping our clients make sense of their data,” Dembowski said.
But everything that AI does doesn’t have to be that high tech. “One of the places we find AI to be incredibly effective is that when we talk about adopting new platforms, we also deal with managing change,” he said. “The actual end users themselves can benefit from interaction with AI. It could be as simple as a user guide or a how-to or a step-by-step, but AI can be a great stopgap or a bridge as our end users adopt new platforms and technologies.”