Month: June 2019

Here are some highlights:

• Jess Davies did an oral history of the ad tech harbor at Cannes. The influx of yachts marked a high water mark for the industry. Story here
• 41% of executives attending Cannes do not buy a festival pass, based on a Digiday Research survey of 169 industry executives who have or are attending Cannes.
• Reminder: Register to attend a live taping of the Digiday Podcast today. I’ll be interviewing Twitter’s Sarah Personette at the Twitter Beach at 2pm. Register here

Lead story: Facebook’s effort to regain trust (and change the topic)
Brand safety is arguably more pervasive at Cannes than ever before as recent issues like the livestream of the New Zealand shooting on Facebook and predatory comments on YouTube videos plagued the industry. Facebook, for one, wishes it didn’t have to be that way.

“The number one job of any CMO is growth. That is on everyone’s agenda. The less time we all have to spend discussing this and getting more focused on how do we grow business, that’s good. That’s good for everybody,” Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vp of global marketing solutions, told Digiday.

Everson, along with her colleagues Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CMO Antonio Lucio, have touted Facebook’s commitment to brand safety publicly and privately at Cannes. One of her stops was a panel at WPP Beach on Tuesday morning, announcing the creation of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. The coalition’s purpose is to align advertisers, agencies, platforms and other industry association on how to improve “digital safety,” including limiting the spread of fake news and other harmful content. Facebook is one of the participating platforms at launch along with Google/YouTube, NBCUniversal, Teads, TrustX, Twitter, Unruly and Verizon Media.

Despite the nice PR and the ability to collaborate, Everson said in a conversation after the panel that Facebook would be committed to the effort with or without the alliance. “We have to do this and we have been doing this. We reorganized the company and have invested billions of dollars. If the alliance never existed, we would keep doing that,” Everson said.

But there’s notable absence among the platforms in the alliance such as Reddit, Snap and Pinterest. Reddit wasn’t invited, a Reddit spokesperson said. Though, Reddit has been invested in brand safety on its own. On Tuesday, Reddit announced a partnership with Oracle for a third-party verification system that will scan its user-generated feeds and allow marketers to advertise next to content that matches their own brand safety scale.

Of course, being a part of an alliance or adding one verification party doesn’t necessarily fix the problem. Kieley Taylor, managing partner, global head of social at GroupM, spoke to Facebook’s issue with their third-party partners not working across the product on a panel at Reddit House.

“If you talk to Facebook, they say of course we have DoubleVerify, IAS and you say, ‘Where does it run? In-stream and Audience Network, not news feed where we advertiser.’ And they’re like that’s a great question. And I’m like I’m tired of having great questions. Don’t assume one partnership is all-inclusive,” Taylor said.

But some advertisers have forgave Facebook, or at least are over discussing brand safety as much. Everson said she spoke with a “large marketer” Tuesday morning who said, “You don’t have to spend 20 minutes on [brand safety]. We know you’re on it. Let’s move to innovation on the platform. We have to flex to whatever they want to talk about. If they want to talk about safety, we want to talk about it.”

— Kerry Flynn

Hearst’s Troy Young on building a new B2B data business
There’s a notion that business-to-business media is “sexy” nowadays. That’s not quite true. What is true is that many media companies like what they see in B2B business models. Namely, business media by its nature is more diversified than consumer media, with a strong paid component — ahem, sign up for Digiday+ — that is helped by being expensable more often than not.

A year after being named president of Hearst Magazines, Troy Young is embarking on an ambitious initiative to build an entirely new company within Hearst that is meant to be the “Bloomberg terminal for fashion and beauty.” Hearst plans to sucking up its various consumer data, along with third-party information and even client data to deliver insights to trend-conscious marketers. This is also a way to utilize (and monetize) Hearst’s stable of women’s lifestyle brands, like Cosmo and Elle, which are unlikely to adopt digital subscriptions models.The trick will be, as Young said on the Digiday Podcast Cannes edition, keeping it separate from the media business so it doesn’t become just an add-on to advertising deals.

“We’ve staffed it and we have a really ambitious plan,” he said of Pattern and Shape, as Hearst is calling the nascent data offering. “Pattern and Shape will be made useful by a combination of data sets. The unique data we have is we know what people are reading and buying across a lot of categories. We have a lot of data, every single day, hundreds of millions of touchpoints with consumers.”

Listen to the entire episode here.

Confessions

“Every time a big corporation is talking about hiring for diversity — the thought process just boggles my mind. It most often is: ‘Oh, we need to do something on diversity. Hey, where are we the closest with diversity? Women! OK let’s get some middle-management women into more senior positions.’ It’s like corporate responsibility doesn’t actually matter, it’s more a self-service by picking the easiest thing you could do [versus making a more substantial effort in hiring people from diverse backgrounds].” — Publishing exec at the Digiday Media Leaders Dinner (this exec is not pictured).

Yacht watch
Cannes keeps changing. One noticeable change in recent years was the rise of the ad tech marina. The influx of big boats rented by well-funded ad tech firms was symbolic of an era. Of course, these days with privacy regulations on the march and the stranglehold of the duopoly, the ad tech sector overall is a bit more bruised. But the ad tech yacht is not sunk. Smart has an impressive boat in the marina, snug next to one from Rubicon. The latter is an interesting case of an ad tech firm that cratered but has slowly made a comeback in the past year. (Rubicon’s stock is double this Cannes than last year.) Other ad tech yachts: Nielsen, Teads and PlaceIQ/Zefr.

Receipt watch

For those asking for another receipt! #Canneslion2019 pic.twitter.com/CJ4o5pDa57

— Paul Gubbins (@Gu881n5) June 18, 2019

About $17 for some OJ.

Newcomer tip
Avoid the Gutter Bar. Yes, it’s something of a Cannes institution, but it’s a relic of the past. You’ll just overpay for 1664s and end up with a headache in the morning.

Spotted
Hip-hop legend and the man who once dreamt of being president of Haiti Wyclef Jean was at the Carlton Tuesday in a New York Knicks jersey. Here’s to hoping that Wyclef’s Cannes has been going better than the Knicks’ offseason plans.

What to do
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman will be talking Quibi. Palais at 10am.

FreeWheel is hosting a breakfast and several back-to-back morning panels about the future of TV. The first panel, moderated by Digiday’s Kerry Flynn, is about measurement and features executives from FreeWheel, Comscore, Fox and DDB Worldwide. FreeWheel Beach at 10:10am.

Facebook CMO Antonio Lucio is speaking on his role at Facebook and recent brand campaigns from the company. Facebook Beach at 10am.

RTL Group will host a panel on the future of TV advertising, moderated by Digiday’s Sahil Patel. 11am.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will chat about Facebook’s priorities this year. She will probably say Facebook is doing better and is more invested than ever in consumer privacy. Lumiere Theatre, Palais 1 at 1pm.

Digiday editor-in-chief Brian Morrissey and Sarah Personette, vp of global client solutions for Twitter will have a live edition of the Digiday Podcast. Twitter Beach at 2pm.

Spotify is hosting an event about what trends to watch from millennials and Gen Z. Spotify Beach at 3pm.

Nightcap
8pm: FreeWheel’s party titled “Drive Me Crazy” features Charli XCX at FreeWheel Beach.

9pm: Spotify’s party, round three, has Bebe Rexha and Tove Lo at Spotify Beach.

9pm: Steve Aoki is stopping by Page Six along with Sam Ronson at Open Mic Beach Lounge.

9:30pm: Cadent, GABBCON and MadHive are co-hosting a party with Travie McCoy at Liquid Sky yacht.

10pm: PlaceIQ and Zefr are co-hosting a party at Alter Ego Yacht.

The post Cannes Briefing: Facebook wants to regain trust (and change the topic) appeared first on Digiday.

Since the start of 2019, Facebook has been pitching advertisers and agencies in search of upfront deals for its Facebook Watch video service. Facebook’s upfront program, called Showcase, includes its In-Stream Reserve bundles of inventory from Watch’s top video channels, including content category-specific options, as well as opportunities to sponsor individual Watch shows.

Facebook’s inaugural foray into the upfront market has served as an opportunity for the company to familiarize advertisers and agencies with its video platform and solicit their feedback on its video ad products. That would appear to establish a baseline from which Facebook could stake a bigger claim as the TV and digital video markets continue to converge. “With respect to the upfront, I think it’s more about trial. That is in line with we all see next year to be a bigger year,” said Erik Geisler, head of U.S. agency sales at Facebook.

However, for Facebook to have a big year among advertisers, Facebook first needs to prove that Watch is a big hit among audiences. Facebook said in June that 140 million people spend at least one minute a day tuning into Watch videos and those daily Watch viewers, on average, spend 26 minutes a day viewing those videos. Numbers like that should help, especially if Facebook can tie them specifically to the episodic series that it is trying to get advertisers to commit upfront budgets to sponsor.

“Can we see the actual users’ desire to engage with this content? When that happens, there will be a shift to thinking of that type of inventory from a commitment standpoint,” said a second agency exec.

In the interim, Facebook will need to grapple with ad buyers’ perceptions of its video platform. Facebook’s programming strategy for Watch has been something of a moving target since the platform’s inception when it centered on short-form programming. Given the history of not only Watch but video on Facebook in general, agency execs largely continue to perceive videos on Facebook to be short clips that attempt to catch people’s attentions as they scroll through feeds on their phones, not episodic shows that audiences sit back to stream on their connected TVs. “It’s not what we would consider in that premium, long-form genre or realm,” said a third agency exec of Watch.

Stealing TV dollars
While the comparison to traditional TV has burdened Facebook’s upfront pitch in some respects, it has been a boon in others. Linear TV’s viewership decline has increased ad prices and created an urgency among ad buyers to find opportunities online that provide them with scale as well as more competition to leverage in negotiations. That craving for competition has helped Facebook to secure some upfront commitments from advertisers, including advertisers that the first agency exec described as “heavy” TV advertisers.  “It’s not social video money that would have gone to Facebook anyway. It’s incremental money coming from linear TV,” said that exec.

It also helps that Facebook’s upfront packages are significantly cheaper than the commitments that TV networks are seeking, according to the agency execs. While the execs declined to say how much money Facebook is looking for advertisers to commit because it varies by client, they described it as significantly lower than TV. “It’s a decimal point if you compare it to the commitment with a linear network,” said the first agency exec.

Sizing up against other digital platforms
Facebook faces a somewhat less favorable comparison when it’s pitted against other video platforms, particularly Hulu and YouTube, that have competed in the upfront market for years and offer similar packages to what Facebook is pitching with Showcase.

Individual show sponsorships are part of seemingly every TV network’s, digital platform’s and individual publisher’s upfront pitch, which makes it harder for Facebook’s programming to stand out in ad buyers’ minds, especially if it’s yet to break out among audiences. Additionally, Facebook’s In-Stream Reserve packages resemble YouTube’s Google Preferred program, and the prices between the two programs are comparable, according to agency execs.

“If you look at comparing something like Showcase to [Google Preferred], we have a lot more insights and exposure there. There’s just this burden of proof that exists on Facebook’s end,” said the second agency exec.

Show sponsorships vs. In-Stream Reserve
Despite that overall burden of proof, Facebook has been able to give ad buyers some evidence of what they can expect in return for their upfront commitments. The company has been selling in-stream video ads since 2017, and since at least the start of 2018, it had been out pitching its In-Stream Reserve program, which it officially debuted in September 2018 and has since added to the Showcase program. “We have seen positive outcomes from testing in stream (reserve and auction), specifically with proving the incremental reach of Video on Facebook,” said Jess Richards, evp and managing director fo social at Havas Media, in an email.

Given that, it may be unsurprising that Facebook has received more interest in its In-Stream Reserve bundles of Watch inventory than individual show sponsorships, according to agency execs.

Facebook has made a point of highlighting show sponsorships in its meetings with agencies, even bringing in a red table as a prop to promote Jada Pinkett Smith’s Watch talk show “Red Table Talk.” However, ad buyers are wary of committing money upfront to sponsor Watch shows, especially ones that have yet to premiere.

But buyers are also wary of existing series because they feel that they do not have enough historical evidence — “proof of performance,” as the second agency exec put it — to judge whether such a bet would pay off for a brand. In particular, ad buyers are looking for information, such as how quickly a show accumulates viewers for new episodes, or how capable it is of retaining those viewers for not only an episode but an entire season, that can serve as a baseline.

While Facebook has run ads on TV to promote some of the Watch shows it is pitching for sponsorships, including “Red Table Talk,” “Stephen vs. The Game” and “The Real World: Atlanta,” none have become the kind of breakout hit that would make advertisers feel like sponsoring Facebook’s programming is a must-buy. “The sponsorship aspect would be very attractive for advertisers to own a share of voice. But where’s that buzz to really drive advertiser interest?” said the second agency exec.

Compounding matters, Facebook has yet to fully iron out what show sponsorships will entail. Geisler confirmed that Facebook is positioning show sponsorships as a beta test and plans to test show sponsorships heading into 2020. “They’re saying show sponsorships are in beta testing, which basically means they are going to come to us and ask us what we want, assuming each advertiser wants a different thing,” said the first agency exec.

Sizing up against TV
Facebook’s bid for advertisers’ upfront budgets has been beset by a tricky predicament. In some respects, the company’s pitch is considered not enough like TV, while in others, it is too much like TV, according to agency execs.

TV ad buyers are looking to strike deals with digital platforms that have audiences tuning into their programming on TV, which is why Hulu and YouTube make such a point of talking up their connected TV watch time. While Facebook has a Watch app on several connected TV platforms, including Apple TV and Amazon’s Fire TV, the perception among agency execs is that people are watching Watch videos on their phones and computers, with some agency execs unaware that Facebook had any connected TV apps for Watch.

Additionally, Facebook is still firming up how it will handle situations where it’s unable to deliver the guaranteed number of impressions to an advertiser’s target audience, an established TV practice called “make-goods.”

“It’s still being discussed, but Facebook seems to be willing to make reasonable allowances,” said the second agency exec, who said the specifics of those allowances get buried in the contractual details. According to Geisler, Facebook has been able to deliver on advertisers’ impression goals in full “for every single campaign. We plan on that.”

On the other hand, Facebook’s targeting options for In-Stream Reserve are limited to viewers’ age and gender, though Geisler said Facebook is looking into enabling more granular audience targeting for In-Stream Reserve campaigns. Until then, the program’s demographic-based targeting contrasts with the more granular targeting that Facebook is known for. In fairness to Facebook, the first agency exec acknowledged that ad buyers have pushed companies like Facebook to embrace more TV-like buying options in order to make for an easier comparison to TV and an easier bridge between TV and digital.

That may seem unfair, but that is the nature of the marketplace of which Facebook wants to be a part. Hulu and YouTube had to adopt TV-like buying options to assert themselves as viable competition to the TV networks. More recently the TV networks have had to adopt more granular targeting options for their digital inventory to remain viable in competition with the digital platforms. Now Facebook must learn how to adapt its upfront pitch to contend with its competition on both sides as the TV and digital video markets continue to converge.

“It’s a missed opportunity here, but we are also to blame,” said this exec.

The post ‘Burden of proof’: Inside Facebook’s bid to compete for advertisers’ upfront budgets appeared first on Digiday.

Regardless, Amazon has still managed to buy two of Sizmek’s core products for a song. Although the final bid is likely now higher than the initial price tag, $30 million is roughly a third of what Sizmek’s annual revenues are, according to sources with knowledge of the business.

What Amazon would stand to gain from the buyout, has been well documented. But there is just as much talk in the ad tech industry as to what challenges the retail giant may face after buying the Sizmek ad server in particular.

Here’s a look at some of those challenges:

Maintaining an expensive ad server infrastructure
Some ad tech executives believe the Sizmek ad server was not getting the full attention it needed over the last few years. In fact, Sizmek had tried and failed to relaunch its upgraded ad server several times with success. The first and second attempts were “a disaster,” said an ad tech exec who previously worked for Sizmek. However, over the last year, the team had rallied under the new leadership of CEO Mark Grether, who joined in 2017, and managed to overhaul plans with the result that a  successful upgrade was launched last Spring, complete with far more sophisticated attribution features.

However, migrating ad servers even internally, is a major undertaking. Only some Sizmek clients have migrated over to the new ad server platform. Many of Sizmek’s largest clients remain on the old ad server, which a former Sizmek employee said was due to the fact that these clients required sophisticated attribution features that hadn’t been available on the new platform. That means that currently, Sizmek is running dual ad-server platforms — at great cost.

“It takes a lot of development resources to keep an ad server’s features competitive in the market, especially when competing with Google,” said Arnaud Créput, CEO of ad server Smart. Amazon’s move demonstrates how hard it is to build an ad server from scratch, even for them, he added. “Many companies have acquired or built ad servers and then struggled to keep the solutions competitive and to make those businesses work.”

Although Amazon has the server capacity to help ease this, it will initially need to fork out a chunky sum in order to keep those dual ad servers going, before eventually migrating all clients over to the newer version, according to ad tech sources.

Retaining Sizmek talent
In order to sort through and manage some of the challenges that will arise on the technical side, Amazon will need to retain key Sizmek product talent. Even a business with Amazon’s engineering clout, won’t necessarily find it a walk in the park to pick up and run with another business’ ad server. They’ll need an in-depth understanding of the nuances of that particular ad server’s infrastructure, as well as a deep understanding of the digital ad ecosystem and how everyone fits and plugs into each other. “You can have the greatest coders in the world, but if they’re fresh into the ads business, it’s different,” said an ad tech executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. “When people talk about the [Amazon’s] DSP itself they say it’s one of the worst. Their tech isn’t known as the best in ad tech, they’re known for their data and their name.”

It wouldn’t have helped that many of Sizmek’s top engineers have left the company in droves over the last few years. Retaining the remaining staff, will be critical. “If they [Amazon] are unable to retain the talent who worked on the [ad server] project that is going to be very tough,” said Kees de Jong, managing partner of headhunting consultancy Uncommon People and former Sizmek general manager for EMEA. “[Building ad servers] is a complex beast, and if you come in completely fresh then it’s difficult.”

Migrating Amazon-suspicious clients
Not all existing Sizmek ad server clients will be thrilled to be adopted by Amazon. The current company line is that Amazon Advertising and Sizmek will continue to operate separately for the time being. However, some ad executives have claimed that certain clients will be more sensitive to being on an Amazon-owned ad server than others. For starters, those on the old ad server infrastructure will need to undergo the same laborious task of any ad server migration, as they are gradually shifted over to the upgraded version — an outcome many ad executives believe will be inevitable. “From the inside out Sizmek will be difficult to sort out and manage,” said an ad tech executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But clients that compete with Amazon, or ones that actively sell their products to Amazon, are likely to be unnerved by any shift to the retail giant’s products suite. “That are certain types of [Sizmek] clients that may not be super comfortable with their data running across Amazon-owned products,” said de Jong. “You then have the scenario of the teacher marking its own homework.”

Far larger global footprint
While we tend to think of Amazon as a global company, in reality, its core markets are predominantly U.S. and Europe, particularly the U.K. Whereas Sizmek’s footprint is genuinely worldwide. The ad tech company has offices across three continents, although several offices have been seriously downsized since the bankruptcy filing, according to ad tech sources. Naturally, that footprint represents an opportunity for Amazon to gain a foothold in those markets, but it will also be a serious challenge to manage teams in such fragmented regions, particularly when it’s accustomed to its core market — the U.S. — being a single country.

Several ad executives anticipate more cuts, though not everyone is cynical on that front. “The amount of consumer touch points Sizmek has across the world, that across the world that Amazon doesn’t have, will help it to map the global population, and create a universal ID which is compelling and not cookie-based,” said de Jong. “That will be where the battle is fought.”

Monetizing ad serving is a tough gig
Ad serving remains a fundamental part of the underlying tech that powers digital advertising. But that doesn’t make it sexy. In fact, it’s become somewhat commoditized, and that makes it very tough to monetize. Sizmek was known in the market for its successful managed-services business, though that had begun to wane over the last two years, according to agency executives. Some ad executives pointed to the purchase of DSP Rocketfuel as a key moment when critical attention was drawn away from the ad server core product. “Then everything got slowed down as they put all their eggs in the DSP basket because they thought that would be the savior for money going forward,” said an ad tech executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Google doesn’t rely on ad serving for the bulk of its monetization, but rather its other ad products. That’s why, in some instances, it would be fruitless to attempt to compete long term with Google for standalone buy-side ad serving, according to ad tech executives. “The opportunity is to compete with Google for advertising spend using this tech to create a closed ecosystem, aka a walled garden, added Créput. “The ad server is a key strategic asset to control the relationship with agencies and derive the full value of their DSP.”

The post What challenges Amazon will face buying Sizmek ad server appeared first on Digiday.

However, as Project OAR races to have a technical standard in place within the first half of 2020, it is not the only organization endeavoring to devise the technology to deliver addressable, or targeted, ads across TV networks’ linear and on-demand inventory. Nielsen is working on its own addressable TV advertising platform, which may complicate Project OAR’s odds of winning enough support across the TV ecosystem to become the industry standard.

A day after Vizio’s automated content recognition firm Inscape and a coalition of TV networks announced Project OAR (which stands for “Open Addressable Ready”) on March 12, a top media agency exec wondered in passing whether the group’s effort to open up addressable TV advertising was real. The question signaled the interest among TV advertisers in attempts to make more TV inventory available for household-level targeting, as well as the concern that such efforts remain a pipe dream.

Other signals showed up on the phone and inbox of Jodie McAfee, svp of sales and marketing at Inscape, which is developing the technology behind Project OAR that will be released as open-source specifications for any company to adopt.

“Within 48 hours [of the March 12 announcement], I had received an email or a phone call from every [agency] holding company in our business asking how they could participate,” said McAfee.

McAfee and the other members of Project OAR had known they would need support from advertisers and agencies because the consortium will eventually need the support of all sides of the TV advertising industry in order for Project OAR to standardize addressable TV advertising by enabling dynamic ad insertion for both linear and on-demand TV inventory.

A working prototype
The technology that Project OAR is developing promises to overhaul the way traditional TV advertising works. While pay-TV providers such as Dish Network and DirecTV are able to target ads on TV networks’ linear channels to individual households, they are only allotted two minutes per hour of inventory. The ads shown for the other 14 minutes, whether they are served to someone who is a shopaholic in New York or a sports enthusiast in New Orleans, are the same for all viewers.

Project OAR seeks to change this by making networks’ national ad load as targetable as the local inventory allotted to the pay-TV providers, enabling a TV network to replace a nationally targeted ad on the fly with an ad targeted to a more specific audience segment.

In a private meeting of Project OAR members in May, Inscape execs demonstrated a working prototype of the technology that is at the center of Project OAR. With the same content streaming to multiple Vizio TVs, the technology overlaid a different ad atop the original ad, the former representing the targeted spot and the latter the non-targeted spot.

The Project OAR members in the room were encouraged by the prototype. But now it has to adapt the technology into a technical standard so that others, including smart TV manufacturers, connected TV platforms and ad tech platforms, can develop their own versions and adapt it to their individual needs. “Now that we know the underlying technology works, the next phase is we have to know that it plays nice with others,” said McAfee.

“The technical spec to enable it is one thing, but the commonality and agreeing to the measurement and what are the reports going to look like, how is this going to be calibrated and accounted for — that’s the other big piece of bringing it to life,” said Dan Callahan, vp of audience and automated sales at Fox Corporation, which has joined Project OAR.

An agency advisory committee
To that end, Project OAR has formed an agency advisory committee to lend advertiser input to the standard’s development and broaden the initiative’s base of supporters. Buy-side support is crucial to gaining the backing of the smart TV manufacturers, connected TV platforms, ad tech vendors and measurement providers that will be needed to make Project OAR’s technical specifications into an industry standard.

“Project OAR becomes a catalyst for how do we at least start the conversation for better measurement and storytelling through dynamic ad insertion. It’s a crawl-walk-run strategy,” said Yale Cohen, evp of digital investment and standards at Publicis Media Exchange.

Project OAR’s agency advisory committee convened its first meeting in May at Disney’s offices in New York. The three-hour meeting was more of an introductory gathering for Inscape execs to explain what Project OAR is, its technical workflow and how it fits into the broader TV advertising infrastructure. The committee also began to organize sub-groups to focus on specific topics, starting with measurement, with more expected to follow.

“In order for the buy side and sell side to really make this happen to transact, we have to have the measurement in place,” said Maggie Zhang, svp of video research and insights in the U.S. for Amplifi, who is a member of that measurement sub-group.

Specifically, the measurement sub-group is working on drafting “a measurement spec” for Project OAR to guide how these targeted ads can be measured at the impression level and ensure that any participating measurement providers are privacy compliant, said Helen Katz, svp of global data partnerships at Publicis Spine, who is also a member of the measurement sub-group.

The measurement sub-group held its first call on June 14 with plans for more calls in the coming weeks, and its members have been collaborating on a Google Doc to draft the spec, said Zhang.

That measurement spec will be important to Project OAR’s potential to become an industry standard. It is being designed so that it can be adopted by seemingly any measurement provider, be it Nielsen, Comscore or others. “It removes friction from the process,” said Katz.

A fly in the ointment
Of course, there may be friction in the process anyway. After acquiring addressable TV tech provider Sorenson Media’s technology in February, Nielsen is working on its own addressable TV advertising technology that industry executives see as competitive with Project OAR. So Project OAR’s members will need to determine whether the industry’s foremost measurement provider will support the industry’s other addressable TV initiative in addition to its own — or whether they will need Nielsen’s support.

Additionally, Project OAR’s technical specification will need to be adopted by smart TV manufacturers and connected TV platforms in order for these targeted ads to work on TVs other than Vizio’s.

But that’s what the next, third phase of Project OAR is for, and it’s already underway. “We are in conversations with several [smart TV manufacturers] to add to the footprint,” said McAfee.

The post Project OAR’s bid to standardize addressable TV advertising moves into phase two appeared first on Digiday.

My kids just flipped that switch from “I’m up at 5:30 a.m. every day, and I want to make pancakes” to “I don’t want to get out of bed, ever.” Now I get up early to just kind of get some shit done, for me. It’s when my mind is least cluttered.

It’s not getting through emails. I want to be clear about that. From like 6 a.m. to 7 a.m., before my wife gets up and we have to start waking the kids up, that’s my time to think of the big things we need to be thinking about. It’s so easy, in this day and age, to get lost in the speed and the iterations and all the crazy shit going on.

I get here anywhere between 8 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., but I’m working from 8:15 a.m. when the kids go to school. Then the phone comes out.

Part II: “I don’t do that Michael’s thing”
I do a lot of breakfast meetings. What I love is the breakfast at the Knickerbocker Hotel. It’s on the fourth floor, there’s almost nobody from our business that goes there. It’s a lot of foreign tourists, so you can have almost any meeting with anybody and not get known. You can talk about anything out loud and not worry about it. I’m not a see and be seen kind of guy. I don’t do that Michael’s thing.

Today, I took the subway in.

Part III: Zero Inbox
I am a zero inbox guy. I’m not saying I answer everything, but what I do is categorize them. The actionable stuff, I’m probably getting 100-125 actionable emails a day, and 50% of them are actionable in a yes-no type of way. I went from having 850-900 emails a day of actionable stuff three years ago, when we hired Christian Baysler, to over the past 14 months, 15 months, I’ve gotten my directs down.

I’m aware of everything that goes on, but I’m not as operationally involved. You can’t run a company, allocate 5-10% of your time to strategic stuff and continue to stay ahead. As the bets get bigger, you need to allocate more time.

Part IV: Meetings, meetings, meetings
I usually start my days with the most important meetings of the day. On Mondays I do my catch-up with Christian: Are we on-pace from a year perspective, and a quarter perspective? Are we making the right bets on the maturation of those businesses?

I used to hate the departmental meetings. When we were more executionally focused, we were spending 90% of our time talking about executional issues, rather than making sure our strategy was correct.

Three years ago, we were 98% advertising-driven. It was very similar stuff, so you could spend more time talking about execution. And then we spent three years talking about how we were going to diversify. Now we’re at less than 50% advertising. We have a nice events business, we’re about to start our second ComplexCon. Our licensing business is doing well. And we have an e-commerce business that supports those other businesses.

Each of those is not nascent anymore. Now we should think about how we can improve them, versus execute better.

Part V: Hammer through
For lunch, I don’t go out anymore. I try to get home for my kids. If I made the choice to be crazy and stay in the city, to not be home [at a reasonable hour] and see my kids on both sides of every day would be crazy. I hammer through the day.

My assistant controls my schedule, and she is a master at rejiggering things when situations come up. I try to get out of here by 6 p.m. Not that I’m done working, but I try to get out of here by 6 p.m.

Part VI: Math Dad
Everybody grabs dinner. My wife and I do the divide and conquer thing. By the time everybody does get home, there’s an hour of family catchup.

I end up doing math homework a lot with both my kids. My wife is super-creative. She’s the other side. I’ve become “Math Dad.” High school math is gonna be interesting. I know I remember how to do it. I was pretty good at it before, but that’s theoretical stuff.

I usually do my catchup from 10 p.m. until like 11:15-11:30 p.m. I’m a huge sports guy, so I’m a second screener on my emails and modeling and notes. The NBA Playoffs have been great, but I’m a big baseball guy. I have MLB Network on constantly. I’m a Yankees guy, but I’ll watch the Royals play the Mariners.

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