TORONTO — While Canada may still lag a little behind other countries in rolling out more advanced advertising such as addressable ads, Canadian media companies are seeing some success with using data-enhanced TV capabilities to provide value and better targeted audiences to advertisers.
At last week’s CTAM Canada Broadcaster Forum, two separate panel discussions provided an overview of the advanced advertising landscape in Canada and other markets, including the U.S. and the U.K.
Kristie Painting, vice-president of digital platforms and revenue management for Bell Media, said her company uses both addressable TV and data-enhanced TV to provide advanced advertising options to marketers. As explained by Painting, addressable TV is household-level dynamic ad insertion that allows different ads to be delivered to different households, which is a capability Bell primarily uses on its carrier division’s VOD platform.
Data-enhanced TV is used by Bell on its linear channels to optimize audience reach by using data layers beyond basic age and gender demographic information to identify more finely tuned audience segments for advertisers, Painting said. That way a marketer of kids’ cereal, for example, can target programming popular with moms who have small children, rather than merely focusing on a general 25-to-54 demographic audience.
Rogers Media has been experimenting with data-enhanced TV to reach audience segments across all screens, said Michka Mancini, vice-president of digital sales, in the innovation and emerging media group at Rogers Media. With data-enhanced TV capabilities, Rogers will be able to identify what viewers are watching on the company’s own TV networks and what they’re doing online, to better target audiences on both its linear and digital platforms, she said. “The ability to reach that audience is far greater when it’s powered by data.”
Two months into the fall 2017 broadcast season, Corus Entertainment already has 92 advertisers using data-enhanced optimization, said Barry Marcus, director of advanced advertising sales for Corus. Using data-enhanced TV, Corus can help advertisers to understand a given show’s audience to better target and schedule ads, Marcus said.
“Planners spend a lot of time on segmentation, really trying to assess who they’re trying to sell to. What this does is it allows that information to flow through to the buying side, so you can at least concentrate your bullseye and aggregate your target, without losing the benefits of mass reach,” Marcus said.
Addressable advertising is one area where Canada is lagging behind the rest of the world. According to Alan Dark, senior vice-president of media sales for Rogers, recent statistics from the United Kingdom suggest addressable ad impressions account for just 3% of all advertising in the U.K., where media companies such as Sky TV have been doing addressable ads for quite a while, compared to Canada. Dark said the expectation is that addressable advertising in the U.K. is going to “hockey stick” and grow substantially.
In the U.S., some sort of advanced advertising is embedded in about 20% of all advertising, according to Chris Pizzurro, head of sales and marketing for VOD dynamic ad insertion platform Canoe. He estimated that addressable advertising specifically represents about 7% of the U.S. market. (Canoe’s platform allows more than 100 TV networks, carried by three U.S. cable operators, to deliver ad campaigns to 36 million households.)
The U.S. is still in the early stages of deploying addressable ad capabilities, according to James Rooke, general manager, publisher platform, for Freewheel, an ad management platform provider that is one of Canoe’s partners. Freewheel provides both set-top box VOD and linear addressable ad management for TV operators and programmers.
Rooke spoke about the challenges of doing quality scale and being able to measure ad reach and effectiveness across multiple platforms.
“We believe, we may be wrong, that a world with a single currency provider that covers all screens is not going to take place.” – James Rooke, Freewheel
“If you want to transact quality scale, then it’s going to be across a number of end points,” Rooke said. “At Freewheel, we service 250 end points any given day, and all of those have different quirks associated with them. If you want to make it easier for a brand marketer or agency to go buy a lot of good stuff, then you’re going to have to make it easier to transact on that even in a world where you may have a mosaic of different measurement that sits in different platforms, but it has to be put together as a mosaic, as a single something. But we believe, we may be wrong, that a world with a single currency provider that covers all screens is not going to take place.”
Measurement challenges
While Canada may be lagging behind on addressable advertising, the vertically integrated nature of the country’s big media companies provides an advantage, said Marcus. “When we do things like linear optimization or data-enhanced TV, we can apply it to every show and every spot we have, and it’s on a national basis. You’re looking at every program. We can do it in primetime, we can do it in fringe. We can do it in big networks, we can do it in small networks. And you can rack them all up together. It’s a function of the concentration here. We’ve seen success in doing that,” Marcus said.
Bell’s Painting pointed out that Canada has different regulatory and technical environments compared to the U.S., which at times can accelerate advances in the market and at other times slow them down. “We’re not really that far behind. We’re about six to 12 months behind where the U.S. is, but we’re right on track,” Painting said.
Rogers Media’s Mancini added: “When you think about the amazing work that’s right now being done by all broadcasters, around (data-enhanced television), I think that’s a huge step forward from where we were a few years ago.”
Discussing the issue of measurement, Painting said there are challenges when it comes to educating ad buyers about the new digital tools to measure audience reach. (Ed note: And the industry still doesn’t have a set top box measurement system ready.)
“Right now, we have our VOD product and it is impression-based. But typically, the folks buying from us are broadcast buyers, so it’s kind of a digital measurement system that is being used by buyers who are accustomed to buying an audience. You kind of have this situation where it’s a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll, and nobody really knows exactly how to characterize it,” Painting said.
Generally speaking, advertising agencies and clients say they are willing to pay more if broadcasters can 
demonstrate the value of data-enhanced TV ad campaigns, according to Marcus.
“What I love about advanced advertising and the capabilities and opportunities that are coming up is it allows us to start reframing the conversations about value vs. price. It’s a rare opportunity to potentially be able to repackage and reprice a legacy product. Those don’t come along that often, and I think this is one of those inflection points where if you can prove good value to the agencies, they have indicated a willingness to pay more,” Marcus said.
Referring to Painting’s example of a kids’ cereal marketer trying to reach young mothers with its ads, Mancini added that broadcasters can demonstrate the higher value of the targeted ads enabled by data-enhanced TV.
“In a linear world, you’re still going to bring ads in a fashion of one to many, so one commercial spot hitting many people. If you’ve done your homework in a (data enhanced TV) world, you’re going to have a higher likelihood of hitting that mom if you use that data. Once you move to the IP model where there is a one-to-one relationship, there’s zero waste. So immediately, you’re able to establish value for hitting the audience that they’re actually looking to reach,” Mancini said.
Painting said Bell Media has been experimenting with tracking how exposure to television ads might affect a particular audience’s digital search behaviour. Using an automotive example, it might be possible to track whether certain households that saw a car dealership ad ended up searching online for that dealership, Painting said. With that information, broadcasters would be able to establish attribution, in terms of showing advertisers that exposure to TV ads on their networks had a direct influence on viewers who did an online search or even visited the dealership in question, Painting said. She added that all of the technical capability is there, it’s just a matter of linking all the right parts together.
“I think that’s actually going to be the most interesting piece of the next 12 to 18 months, is how we are able to connect the dots on that and show that kind of attribution,” Painting said, adding that some of the pieces will require permission from clients to have deep access to their personal information.
“If you’re talking about Facebook, they have a single persistent ID which follows them everywhere, so there’s no need to make those connections and make those leaps and deal with the regulatory issues around privacy, because it’s all given to you.” – Kristie Painting, Bell Media
Mancini expanded on Painting’s point by saying: “The data points are there but it’s a matter of being able to connect the dots while respecting the privacy of the individual who is looking into that dealership… We need to work through that and also build the models where we can connect 10 different systems where the data is essentially sitting, that integrates with a mobile environment, to be able to connect the dots for that user.”
As Painting pointed out, these are challenges that the broadcasters’ digital competitors don’t face in the same way. “If you’re talking about Facebook, they have a single persistent ID which follows them everywhere, so there’s no need to make those connections and make those leaps and deal with the regulatory issues around privacy, because it’s all given to you,” Painting said.
Freewheel’s Rooke said he is seeing U.S. broadcasters becoming more vocal against attribution claims made by digital players such as Facebook and Google, who have pushed the idea that ads on their platforms generate product purchases among their users. Just because a user clicked there last doesn’t mean all the credit goes to Google. That user was likely driven to Google from a TV ad.
“U.S. broadcasters (such as ABC) are saying multiplatform long-form video was being under attributed and valued for moving stuff off shelves, relative to non-premium video…It’s just being able to prove it,” Rooke said. “There’s going to be a media push from the premium TV space for proving better attribution…If you sit back and don’t do that, then Google and Facebook are going to take all the credit.”
Marcus agreed, saying: “It will be very nice when television repatriates the segmentation attribution story from Google and Facebook, because it doesn’t start with the first click or the last click, it starts way before that.”
Photo of one of the advanced advertising panels, from left, Greg O'Brien, Cartt.ca; Michka Mancini, Rogers Media; Kristie Painting, Bell Media; and Barry Marcus, Corus Entertainment, courtesy of CTAM Canada.
