LAS VEGAS – While the convergence of television and digital media requires much desired industry standards for viewing metrics to effectively sell advertising, with such standards will come the need for media companies to address yield curves across platforms.
“That’s something that everyone’s taking very seriously when they’re talking about this idea of coexistence of linear and digital ad stacks and how those things need to come together in different places,” says Lorne Brown, who is President, CEO and Founder of software and services provider Operative Media. Earlier this month, Brown was named to chair the new Digital Committee of the 2016 NAB Show, where he was interviewed by Beet.TV.
Noting that more than 100 media companies turned out for this year’s event, Brown acknowledges the complexity involved in how media companies price their inventories given the growth of video viewing choices.
“As they break their yield curve up in terms of ‘I’m going to sell this with a GRP, or sell this for primetime, or this by daypart, this across my OTT device’ there’s a lot of yield equations that go into that,” Brown says. The bottom line—literally—is “if we get these standards, how do we ensure that we value goes up for clients and we get the highest CPM’s to keep the ecosystem moving?”
To Brown, one of the more interesting concepts discussed at the NAB event was linear optimization of advertising, which involves using anonymous viewer data from multichannel video program distributors (MVPD’s) to allow for certain levels of commercial targeting beyond age and gender. While useful for some but not all advertisers, this approach in and of itself requires standards, according to Brown.
“If you have data coming from multiple MVPD’s, even though that’s anonymized, there needs to be some rigor around that, some understanding that these data sets were put together in a similar way,” says Brown.
We interviewed him as part of our series on the need for standards around premium video advertising. The series was produced around the NAB Digital Summit in Las Vegas. This series on Beet.TV is sponsored by the NAB.
