Diane Strutner, CEO of Datazoom, joins me for a detailed discussion on the current state of advertising data and the complex road ahead as inventory moves to digital and CTV. We discuss the seismic industry shift from siloed to a converged currency models, and the ensuing challenges in valuing digital and streaming ad impressions. Learn the crucial distinctions between accreditation and certification, particularly in relation to how they relate to audience measurement, and the impact on advertisers.
The conversation takes a turn towards transparency, or lack thereof, in Nielsen's methodology and their conspicuous absence from new industry initiatives and committees. Diane emphasizes understanding true ROI, and the inherent risks of decision-making without adequate revenue insights, and the lack of data that is behind enormous funding decisions, and publishing and media & entertainment’s push for profitability.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
Diane Strutner, CEO of Datazoom, joins me for a detailed discussion on the current state of advertising data and the complex road ahead as inventory moves to digital and CTV. We discuss the seismic industry shift from siloed to a converged currency models, and the ensuing challenges in valuing digital and streaming ad impressions. Learn the crucial distinctions between accreditation and certification, particularly in relation to how they relate to audience measurement, and the impact on advertisers.
The conversation takes a turn towards transparency, or lack thereof, in Nielsen's methodology and their conspicuous absence from new industry initiatives and committees. Diane emphasizes understanding true ROI, and the inherent risks of decision-making without adequate revenue insights, and the lack of data that is behind enormous funding decisions, and publishing and media & entertainment’s push for profitability.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the pulse of the streaming media industry.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn and today I am doing another special podcast episode called Executive Interviews, where I talk to an executive in the industry about something that they're seeing that's unique, different the restraints in the market where we're actually going to see growth in the market. So today we're going to be talking about a lot of detailed information, tying into ad measurement data and metrics when it comes to video advertising. Joining me today is Diane Struttner. Diane is the CEO and founder of DataZoom and what I would basically just call an absolute data nerd, which is why I'm having her super nerd. Diane. Right, you're super nerd.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:So, diane, thanks for joining me today. Why don't you give everyone a little bit of background of just who you are, where you've been in the space and what DataZoom does today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great to be here. So my background comes from the video analytics space and I've been deep diving in data more broadly across the media ecosystem for the past six years. I started DataZoom about six years ago. We are a data as a service platform and our role in the industry is to collect, process and deliver data in real time, so really acting like a data pipeline and as a data processing layer before storage and analytics and other data driven processes.
Speaker 3:Wow, has it really been six years?
Speaker 1:It's been six years.
Speaker 3:Wow, okay, six years. So full disclosure for the listeners. I think transparency is important. I was the first investor in DataZoom, so I gave Diane some money to help start her company. I didn't think it was six years ago. Really wow, I didn't realize it was that long you didn't have time.
Speaker 1:Flies when you're having fun, Dan.
Speaker 3:It does. It does so Diane and I know each other from back when she was at, and Paul, nice people at work. So her background, exactly what we're going to be talking about today. And, just for those that see all these news stories in the market between Nielsen ad measurement in terms of certifications, accreditation, obviously, third party measurement how that's going to change with cookies disappearing over time. So we're going to try and get in a lot today but keep it a bit higher levels. We're not breaking down some of the engineering technology which Diane can definitely do way above my head. So let's just start, Diane, with the current state of the market for ad measurement today, because we hear so much in the media. Some of it is not accurate, but what is working today and what isn't?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what's happening in the market is that we're going from this previous state where, since we introduced digital and streaming, there's been, let's say, multiple currencies in the market and so you would do ad buying separately across digital and OTT and streaming, and that's separate from your broadcast inventory.
Speaker 1:And, as we all know, since cable and broadcast, traditional television is continuing to decline, what the market is doing is trying to converge all these currencies so we can say, hey, the same impression that I was delivering over broadcast is. I think the current challenge is validating A. It's minimally as valuable as the broadcast impression, and the future state that the industry needs to get to is to prove that actually a digital ad impression is more valuable than broadcast, and we can get into why that should be the condition moving forward. And so what's working on that front is that we continue to see the market definitely moving away from cable and onto streaming and digital, and we see a lot of progression of new streaming services and a huge ecosystem that's developed around streaming and digital content. What's not been working very well, and is we're kind of force feeding the market into, is this transition into really understanding the value of digital and streaming ad impressions and trying to get acceptance from all stakeholders in the industry to accept a single currency model.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's a good word acceptance that you're using. So, while I don't disagree with what you're saying, here's what's driving me nuts. So today I had a conversation with one of the largest OTT platforms. Everyone knows you can think of around the world doing live sports and they're talking about comparing, obviously to your point, diane measurement TV now moving to online. But the problem here is we're talking about measurement but nobody's also defining the difference in the user experience and quality. What I mean by that is when someone watches an ad on TV, we know it's being delivered, we know the quality of that ad, we know it's a high definition means no matter what broadcast channel you turn to. But for some of these stats that we now see content owners and OTT providers and sports leagues putting out and they say something like average minute audience or they say viewer, I still can't get from them. Nor will they disclose how they define a viewer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. So let's take it a quick step into something you pointed out, which is the difference in the traditional measurement that we get from broadcast versus the digital and streaming measurement that we can get with a digitally served ad impression. So the best we could ever get from broadcast was to know how many, or to estimate to not even to know but to simply estimate through panels mainly how many users were watching that stream, and that's traditionally been done by having various types of devices in the home looking at either physically at the viewers in the house or gleaning off of the packets that are sent over the network, or manually having people record what they're watching at what time and that reporting. Obviously we can't do that at scale. So they've taken, they took panels and they extrapolate off of the total audience, the consumption of shows versus other shows and the demographics of the users streaming that content or watching that content. This is all for so far, for the traditional cable we've talked about. What's different in digital and streaming is that, especially for any IP based delivery, we can get actual numbers of users that are connected to streams. And what is even better than broadcast is that we can actually start to tie this in a much more granular basis back to the specific users on the streams and the content that those ads are being associated to.
Speaker 1:And so I think part of the challenge that we have today is that the ecosystem around advertising has been accepting of the fact that certain things were not possible for a very long time and cable was impossible to really track every single user connected to a stream.
Speaker 1:But in digital it is possible, and there's a misalignment of the way that we report on this. I can speak to some measurement companies in this space. When we have worked with measurement companies to help expose the data about end users consumption and, for example, there's been an interest in carrying over a concept of a segment no-transcript and in discussions with them, we're talking about hey, we don't need to be talking about segments anymore, we're talking about digital and streaming. There is no segments for digital and yet we have measurement companies still reporting on digital segments being used across digital and streaming television. So, and I think the reason why we see this lag and adjusting and adopting better metrics for digital and streaming is because the buyers on the far side, the agencies and the direct advertisers, are the slowest to understand the technology changes and slowest to understand, frankly, like what they can be demanding in terms of reporting and are also responsible for keeping today's measurement ecosystem lackluster. It's-.
Speaker 3:And that's not surprising.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So what are you hearing from the advertisers and agencies in terms of what they're really concerned with today, from a reporting measurement standpoint, cause vendors will say, oh, they wanna know this. But many times when I talk to the actual advertiser they're like that's not what we're interested in. You're talking to them every day. What do they care the most about?
Speaker 1:Well, ultimately it's the job of an advertiser or agency to have to spend money and get a repeatable outcome and ideally a better outcome over time with the same ad spend right and so kind of backing into what's important to them. One is understanding data quality and bias. So in speaking with advertisers they'll say frankly, we really don't care if the data is coming from is first party, second party or third party data, as long as when I make the ad spend I can consistently get the same results or better, I can adjust and improve my results for a future ad buy using that data set. And so data quality and bias. So one of the concerns is that do we have data?
Speaker 1:Hey, we're in a digital world. Why do I get rolled up reports? Instead of getting per impression data about every ad that gets delivered to an end user, I wanna be able to tie ultimately impressions back to users and demographics and content and brand safety and brand awareness. So one is that angle. Another angle is the speed of reporting. It takes advertisers and agencies often four to six weeks to get any insight back from a publisher on digital ad spend.
Speaker 1:That's ridiculous, what's ridiculous, what's ridiculous, and what that means is that there's exactly zero opportunity to do any type of in-flight campaign adjustments. It's just like broadcast in that sense, which is not the standard we should be holding ourselves to.
Speaker 3:And why do they allow that? Is it a lack of the vendors not wanting to change? Are they not able to from a technology standpoint?
Speaker 1:There's a bit of a chicken and egg situation here, which is that the publishers are asked by the advertisers and agencies to use several different third party vendors to understand different concepts audience, ad viewability, impressions of ads, and is that being tracked against industry standards and the challenge for a publisher is it's then their job to use an artistic approach instead of a scientific approach to compiling the siloed results from each of these vendors and to create a cohesive storyline around. Here's your audience. This is the percent of real users versus bot traffic, viewable ads versus non-viewable ads, and therefore here's how we delivered your campaign. So the tools themselves that advertisers are asking for create challenges for the publishers in delivering these reports more swiftly. The other challenge is that the technology used by those measurement companies had been focused on creating high level reports and were a carryover from broadcast, in the sense that they were never intended, they were never built to be granular enough to do some of the things that advertisers really want, which is outcome analysis, and I think, if you to carry on the subject for just one second longer, there's a really great corollary here in terms of, if we think of digital ad spend, and that now includes video what everyone loves about things like Google AdWords is that you can tie a click and an impression of your ad back to a user doing something on your site through a referral URL.
Speaker 1:Typically that contains this UTM parameter, which is a tracking, a one-to-one tracking of from Google back to your site and therefore attaches all of the outcomes back to that campaign. We have no video quote unquote UTM parameter today, but it's possible If we collected the right dataset, and the right dataset means if we can collect an impression against a user and a piece of content at a time of day on devices, so on and so forth, then we can use identity services and identity spines to link that back to end users who have taken action on our marketers and buyers, websites and e-commerce platforms and we can actually recreate that UTM type of experience. And I think this is the crux of the frustration with video advertisers and agencies is that we could be doing so much better. They know it's possible. They don't necessarily know how to ask for it.
Speaker 3:Interesting. I mean you mentioned artistic. That's an artistic way of doing it. It's an interesting way to describe it. I've never heard that before. It sounds like something a marketing person wrote to describe it, or artistic. What does that mean?
Speaker 1:You know, when it's impossible to actually correlate together reports from different services. It's kind of like creating an impressionist painting, where you know exactly know where one thing starts with the thing ends, but when you stand apart in a fact it kind of looks good, but when you dive in close it's just a bunch of brush marks and that's pretty much what's done today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have no standards, so I'm not surprised. So let's talk about accreditation and certifications. We've been hearing a lot about that in the market Nielsen Video, ant by Spot, a lot of companies in terms of who's doing what the difference? Talk about the difference between the MRC and the IAB and, just more importantly, why should advertisers care, cause I get the sense that many of them don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So advertisers should care, cause ultimately it would benefit them the most if they cared. So that's the first shutout. But let's dig into kind of the accreditation approach, which is what the MRC takes, versus the certification approach, which is what the IAB takes. The MRC is the Media Ratings Council, which is formed by Congress or the House, some government body, I don't know look on the website A while in the 70s and the goal was to create 1963.
Speaker 3:1963, okay, yeah, the request of US Congress, wow.
Speaker 1:We before my time and which is scary cause I'm getting older now, but anyway, it was created a long time ago and it served the purpose of trying to help understand what was happening in broadcast, make sure that certain percentages of quality of content and types of public messaging was actually being broadcasted, and it ended up getting used to help create cert accreditations around how audience measurement is done and certifying these mechanisms that companies like Nielsen have used to go out and have their panel-based measurement today.
Speaker 1:And so, at the end of the day, an accreditation is you pay a fee, you join the MRC you pay a large fee, by the way and they will give you an accreditation for reviewing your internal processes and seeing if they meet basically a reliable way of doing analysis, doing data collection that doesn't introduce any bias, and so, ultimately, the accreditation process itself is subjective.
Speaker 1:There is someone from Ernest and Yang who shows up and looks at all of your stuff and your documentation and maybe runs some tests, and they give you an accreditation, which, when we don't have any ability to do better, is fine. The difference with the IAB is that this is a certification process, meaning that the IAB has published some standards for how data can be collected for the purpose of exposing XYZ type of functionality. So, for example, the IAB recently published a specification for podcast measurement. So if you wanna get into podcast measurement, you can provide an offering that collects data according to a specification for podcast measurement and the IAB will certify that you followed the specification. And that is a truly much more objective process, because you've already defined an objective level with the specification and now you're certifying in an objective level that you've met and you follow that specification, versus an accreditation which is, you know, everyone will we accept. Everyone does things differently, but this seems quote unquote fair.
Speaker 3:Thank you, so big difference between the two.
Speaker 1:A huge difference because one means if you follow accreditation, means that you accept that the same audience, the same content, can be measured differently from various vendors and the results can be different and they're both still approved. Versus certification should mean that different vendors measure the same content in audiences and the number should align.
Speaker 1:So what it means for scalability for the industry is that advertisers should want to have more data that allows them to use as many vendors as they like. That are create the same base level data collection, which is objective, and what they then buy is the enrichment and the enhancement of that data set that these measurement companies offer.
Speaker 3:So when you look at some of the details MRC has on their website, it's pretty interesting that their audits they say they perform audits they actually list out what they're auditing. One of the things they audit is platform availability to find out. Another one is data extraction. Okay, internal procedures for welcoming new clients pretty broad, not a lot of detail there.
Speaker 1:Well, and I guess part of it is. You know there's not a lot of detail there, and they're also not, you know, doing any job to help advertisers understand the potential differences between the services that they've accredited. And so an advertiser is left with saying I can only choose one because I want all of my numbers to equally align, versus if I go through a certification process, I can work with many different vendors to get the data that I need.
Speaker 3:All right. Well, let's go on to Nielsen. Nielsen is an absolute mess. I've been writing about Nielsen for a long time. It's fascinating how there's just no transparency into their methodology. They don't define things. The fact that every time they release this report every month online and they know what's being viewed they have to put a video with it to explain the methodology. And I still can't understand it, even with the video explanation. And they're also not measuring from live streaming services or virtual MVPDs Hulu Plus, live TV, youtube TV they're not measuring from that at all. They're also not measuring on smaller screens, so tablets and phones they're not measuring. So there's a huge issue on the just in terms of what they measure lack of transparency. So people haven't heard.
Speaker 3:They've said for now they're not going to join the new joint industry committee, which is a cross industry council. Member of media companies that are trying to develop a standard. Now, they're not the only one, there's some others who are not in it as well. But why hasn't Nielsen been replaced at this point from a digital side? Because there are so many other companies out there who have a lot of money Video Amp just raised another $150 million who are approaching it differently, who are trying to add more transparency. Can they even replace Nielsen?
Speaker 1:I think it's a I see them rolled a measurement as a green field opportunity for anyone in the next five years to come take, and it could be Nielsen maintaining their position if they're able to, I think, pivot and pivot their current course of action into align themselves with more openness and transparency and this industry committee, open AP, how they need themselves. But if not, I do think that they are setting themselves up for failure. If advertisers get the opportunity to have faster reporting, more granular reporting, the ability to use that insights in flight with their campaigns it creates, it takes away the benefit that Nielsen has, which is having kind of vast coverage as they've had to date. And I think that you know frankly, I think that Nielsen has the most to lose by joining a committee like open AP. It's someone who they've had a target on their back for a long time and if they fall into a place where they aligned over industry standards it, it facilitates the switch away for two other vendors and but what I will say is that I don't think this is a maintainable position. I don't think that they will.
Speaker 1:I think the industry wants change so badly and basically, you know, frankly, all industry stakeholders publishers, agencies and advertisers and even measurement companies have vested interest in seeing this evolve. If Nielsen wanted to approach measurement and lead the industry, this is the best time to do it. They have the largest footprint. They have great relationships with publishers and advertisers, meaning you know history and relationships as a day with publishers and advertisers. This would be a great time for them to to change pace and I think that you know for example, their willingness to accept data from Amazon Prime has been announced pretty publicly is an interesting shift in their strategy, let's put it that way and maybe a signal that, moving forward, they might be more open to some of these standards that other industry organizations are putting together. But I agree with you, it's a mess and it'll be interesting to see how Nielsen responds in the next six or 12 months.
Speaker 3:Do you think that we should have one measurement platform for all types of ads out there? Because I'm just thinking with your answer there, should you have vendor companies in the space that are specializing in tracking, measuring ads delivered just for video, on mobile versus desktop, versus live versus device, like, should it be split based on device or business model or no?
Speaker 1:No, so I don't, and here's my reasoning.
Speaker 1:So, from a from a publisher's perspective, like, let's say, you're a big media publisher and you have different types of ad spots.
Speaker 1:You have clickable ads, you have, you know, display, you have text ads and you have video ads, and so you have this broad scope of inventory, and now, with digital, we have the opportunity to track that the same users are clicking or seeing or watching each of these different types of ad creatives and they all have their purpose in the marketing funnel From the flip side.
Speaker 1:Marketers know that they are there. You want to engage with potential, you know end user customers on different platforms, with different creatives and different messages, and customizing them to reach them at the right stage of the buying process or in the right stage of creating awareness of the brand. And so I think it would be a disservice if we ever moved away from having a more holistic understanding of advertising for both publishers and advertisers. But what we need to do is a better job at converging all of this tracking. So, as an example, today you know we run into major publishers who don't mix the revenue that they get from display ads with video ads on a page or an app or piece of content which seems kind of shocking if you think about it.
Speaker 3:That's odd yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a total revenue that you're trying to get to, and I think that actually, in fact, some of the challenges of this industry have been created by the fact that you've traditionally had different teams that are tracking these things. So, video I like to say that video started as, like you know, the weird team in the back corner and has now grown to take center stage inside of many digital publishing companies and at the same time, and because of that, because of the way that this industry came together, this reporting has always been looked at separately, has been done by different teams, has been done in different tools, data has been stored in different places. So a lot of what we're seeing, I do think, is part of this. I hate the cliched word, but digital transformation that we see happening across all stakeholders here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it makes sense. I mean you're really talking about the depth and breadth of what advertisers are buying. It makes sense you want to try and compare it all in one place. Well, so let's talk about just the ads we're getting here. So I mean, I'm pretty relaxed at all times. It takes a lot to really get me upset, but it drives me nuts when I get the same ad 10 times in a row. Like programmatic was supposed to be this be all to end all, even when it's a sponsor. So Amazon Thursday Night Football I get that Subway is a sponsor, but should I get 20 subway ads to the course of the game? I don't think I should. So what is the problem there?
Speaker 1:Yeah well, there could be a few things happening. I would say that anything that's sold directly, the sky's the limit for what the agreement is between the advertiser and the publisher in terms of showcasing those ads. I will say that we have the ability to track that For you, dan. You probably get pissed off after you've seen the same ad five or six times, and you might get so pissed you might even stop watching the show, right brand burnout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brand burnout, and so we have ways to track these things. Now if anyone actually uses those things in a direct buy, uses those insights to inform direct buy, capping limitations and stuff, I don't know that's to anyone's knowledge, but I think, more generally, part of the challenge is that header bidding for server side ad insertion just doesn't carry enough data as when compared to client side ad insertion, and so the amount of campaigns that can be unlocked and therefore the bids that can be one that potentially lead to you seeing many more of the same ad, especially if capping isn't being correctly recorded, it's not a shocker that you're seeing the same ad so many times. There's a lot that still has to be done when we talk about the changes in technology that lead to having a challenging viewing experience.
Speaker 3:So that leads me to the next question, though, because I looked up, before we did the podcast 15 years ago, I wrote a post on my blog about why am I getting the same ad delivered 10 times in a row? 15 years later, this industry is still having that same user experience. So are we having a business problem here? Are we having a technology problem?
Speaker 1:I think in terms of your specific challenge that you face, I mean there's a few things happening how much inventory do we have? How many different types of campaigns do we have applicable to that inventory? And then, as our technology evolves, are we carrying through all of the ways that we can do targeting to the next technology? So I'm partially not shocked that 15 years later we have this problem, because 15 years later we have an entirely new technology stack that is probably at the targeting ability of where we were 15 years ago. So I think eventually that will be resolved. But I think in terms of our industry, I mean we've seen layoffs and reporting of loss widespread across the media and entertainment space and I often get this question, which is that is this industry just not suited for advertising? Are we ever going to be able to make this profitable?
Speaker 1:And I do think that ultimately this is not a technology issue.
Speaker 1:It's not that us serving up content over the internet is unsustainable in comparison to the study pipes of broadcast. It is a business problem and ultimately it's a problem of in an ad based world where we don't have a huge bolstering of repeatable dollars from subscribers. It's ultimately about how can we showcase the value to the people paying us the most money, which are the advertisers in this case. So I think, until we work on some of the challenges with the video advertising industry more broadly and this is specifically the poor reporting we have, the inability to influence campaigns in flight, the inability to provide better reporting that is unique to digital ad spends, like outcome analysis then we're going to continue to have these problems moving forward with the business. The fact that we can walk into a publisher, and if you ask a publisher and I've posted about this too if you ask a publisher, what is the user that earns you the most money seeing ads? Or you ask a publisher, what is the piece of content that earns you the most money seeing ads Do?
Speaker 3:they know.
Speaker 1:They don't know because the only thing they have today is they know. I had this many minutes viewed and maybe this piece of content took X percentage and this user saw Y percentage of that on one side and then the other side. They have total money they've earned on advertising. But if you think about how advertising works, you can have CPMs that go from 10 cents to $500. So the question is, if you're not tallying every single ad impression and tying each of those impressions back to a user and a piece of content, what type of business insight do you have?
Speaker 3:None.
Speaker 1:You got nothing. Can you think, Dan, of another industry? I know you love to dig in financials. Can you think of another industry that has such poor financial data in this space?
Speaker 3:I'd have to think about that one. I mean, there's got to be other industries out there, but you would think at this point, as far as long as we are in the industry, considering someone like Disney has spent over $10 billion today just on direct consumer you would think this wouldn't be allowed at this point, in this stage in the game, because, to your point, this is now a big business. Companies are setting their future on this. Absolutely, absolutely, and they still have that little insight. That's scary.
Speaker 1:It is scary and the good news is that the technology exists to do it the right way. It's a matter of using it. It's a matter of having people think in a mindset where they need to attach everything back to a dollar and that until we see more interest in understanding true monetization, which then allows us to understand ROI or negative ROI, then I don't see a way to move this forward. Here's an example let's say that you have a user who logs in, doesn't engage very much, but they end up seeing CPMs that are 10 times the value of other end users and your modeling says okay, a user must watch X amount of dollars for us to be profitable and X amount of content for us to be profitable. It could be that you're turning off campaigns that are bringing in your highest value users and you don't even know it, right? I mean, it traces back to everything. If you don't know how much money your users earn you, how can you inform marketing campaigns to bring you new subscribers?
Speaker 1:Or new and general, if you don't know, how much a piece of content or as you earns you. How can you really negotiate both content? You know content licensing contracts and that's in both directions. How can you influence content licensing contracts to bring content onto your platform or to syndicate it out? That are fair.
Speaker 3:It's a guess.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Well, they're guessing. Look at. Look at what we've seen with the number of OTT platforms that are now removing Content from their platform because it's costing them money. They're now realizing they're not making as much or what they need to from an Avod standpoint. It's incredible, though the lack of insight. Now, some of this doesn't surprise me, because when I do talk to some of the large OTT platforms, what they were told internally, what management told them, was listen, we'll add in all the call its smartness Later on. For now, just get big fast. The Amazon model from back in the days like get into other countries, get internationally, grow everywhere. And now, when it comes to Add decisioning data, what they're collecting, when it comes to password sharing, all these other things now it seems like they're all trying to throw that in afterwards and add the intelligence to the platform Because it was never built in the beginning.
Speaker 1:Do you know what that is? That is the, the epitome of data and analytics is an afterthought To every industry. You launch a product, you want to get it up there. We'll figure out the analytics later we see, that's crazy, all the time. But but you're right that when push comes a shove and people have to understand how to make money. This is why I think you actually see more investment in data analytics projects, because Otherwise they have nowhere to get the answers.
Speaker 3:Right and your methodology is is. Your data is only as good as your methodology. So garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:All right, so we have a little bit of time left. You're talking about different measurement metrics. What are some of the let's call the new metrics that you think are needed in the market Now?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's a great question. So I think the first thing is that we already spend a boatload of money on existing measurement today, but because vendors, data and insights exist in silos and we can't Look at them across vendors, I think the first area of lows hanging fruit is being able to converge existing measurement together, meaning, for example, show me the same impression that we tracked with you know, double verify, for example, for viewability, and show me that viewable ad in com score as an audience Need, demographic they were attached to. That's one example. So converging existing measurement together is one area of New measurement. Let's say and then others have to do more with kind of understanding that the outcome of Seeing something should carry different expectations than an outcome of, you know, clicking on something. So there's this concept that's come to market and Double verify has is the first company to get. I forgot, honestly, if it's the MRC or the AB, but I I want to say it's the MRC to discuss attention metrics, which is how do I know someone's actually paying attention on the stream? How do I know I've just not turned on a Stream and let it run for eight hours while I'm, you know, cooking and Running errands and leaving the room and not actually consuming that impression.
Speaker 1:And A third area I think is interesting is quality of experience and quality of service metrics for the ad itself. So I once asked an advertiser the following question and I said here's a such a scenario. You have a very specific target market and it has to require a brand-safe environment. What would be more important to you that you that your ad was only seen by mothers who had young children or that, but the? But the quality of that creative was poor, the video buffered, it was pixelated. What's more important, important that your message was delivered and that you paid for an impression that was delivered to a targeted audience. Or imagine zero targeting, but your ad delivery quality will be flawless, meaning that it will be shown in high quality, high bit rates, no pixelation and there'll be no, you know, buffering or stalling during delivery of the ad. And he said, to my surprise, that the quality of experience and quality of service, of actually getting that ad delivered to the end user, was more important to him and he would trade that in lieu of any targeting.
Speaker 3:Smart. Your message means everything. If nobody can get your message, who cares if it's targeted?
Speaker 1:Message means everything and the quality. You know there's a perception of this advertiser has a piss poor ad versus. You know whatever's happening behind the seams that's pulling down the ad, creative and retranscoting it and all that stuff and you know a lot of those things as an advertiser and agency is not aware of, right.
Speaker 3:They don't even know about it, right? Although when I ask, when I ask some advertisers and buyers or agencies, they'll they'll say right off the bat we know and we tell our clients that 10% or less of all the ads are paying for aren't even being delivered, and that number ranges from 5 to 10%, based on the ones I asked. They just they almost chalk it up to. I compare it to theft in a in a shopping center, like they just know, like okay, we're going to, we're going to lose some of our stuff, some of it's going to be stolen, yeah, yeah, which is wild to me.
Speaker 3:That's not how a business should be run, especially when you have the means to track that All right. So last question then when do you see this going in the next 12 months? You know I don't ask you three, five years down the line, because what I'm always trying to do whether it's the podcast, the blog and the streaming shows is provide real world data that that people can use in their business immediately, as opposed to five years from now. So what do you see the next 12 months that listeners should really know?
Speaker 1:I think we're going to see a lot more people focused on data and data standards and using them, leveraging them in the space. So I think I think efforts around you know what, for example, open APTV is doing and the supporting publishers and vendors of that initiative I think that's going to go. I think it's going to have a lot of legs. I also think that we're going to find publishers and advertisers working more directly together because ultimately, in a direct relationship, without third parties convoluting the ability to provide reporting, you might be able to deliver more value. So things like outcome analysis, where you can actually tie an impression back to a purchase I think that any publisher could differentiate their inventory by providing that and any advertiser could be comforted in their ad buying if they knew that there was actual attribution of ad spend. Back to the top line.
Speaker 3:Now you know what I'm going to throw another question in, because that made me think when you said that of two new formats I'm seeing, One was on last Thursday nights Thursday NFL game on Amazon because they were throwing ads up on the screen and it was like, hey, click your 5TV remote if you want to learn more about this product. And then it sends an email to you from Amazon with a link that says if you want to learn more about this product, click here. Then you got to go on the Amazon website.
Speaker 3:I thought that was an interesting one, but we're never going to find out. Is that working?
Speaker 1:That's a great experience that Amazon has put together and a lot of value that's added for advertisers. I will say that, but how do we know that?
Speaker 1:Well, going back to. So I think that second screen devices is probably the way that most people consume content today. So I imagine that, given the opportunity, that creating this in-app experience that Amazon does does add value, but I don't have any direct knowledge of that. What I will say is that it might take companies, it might take these manufacturers, like Apple and Amazon, of devices or streaming sticks, to have to create these kind of like out of ad stream experiences, because when we go back to targeting, one thing that can't happen today is you can't deliver. You can't request a certain ad format, an ad creative, to go to a certain ad format, an ad platform. So the example is hey, on every time that my ad gets shown on Roku, I want to show an ad that ends in a QR code. There is no targeting that allows the advertiser to only show a QR code to users that are coming through through Roku device on a third party app like Disney, for example.
Speaker 1:Right, Interesting we literally can't define that. So when I say there's so much value that advertisers can get through targeting and we can't even enable them to deliver a message specific to a device type, today we have a long way to go.
Speaker 3:I had to think that, you know, 20 or 2023 marks the 26th year when we first started streaming audio on the internet. I've really thought this on the advertising side would move faster than it has. I feel like it's not fast enough.
Speaker 1:Think of the potential. I mean, one of the things that gives me hope in this industry is, way before I got into the video streaming space, I did so online advertising, and we would sell, you know, and the ad out of our site is kind of like a Google AdWords product for you know, over 25 bucks a click. I mean, good goodness, that was just really high. And I think, well, that's what we're getting from a text ad. We deliver so much more value with what video can do, the memory and the emotional deliverance of what a video ad can deliver. We can't get and secure the value of that experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, agreed, and we're going to have to over time as an industry because, you know, I think of Pluto, I think of 2B these companies would not have survived on their own if they had not been acquired by conglomerates like Fox and others. There's no way. I looked up earlier, before we started, that over $3 billion that I could find have been invested in ad vendors over the last 20 years that are all under and didn't get acquired for value. You know assets sold to run over $3 billion. So, to your point, I think industry wise, at some point this needs to be solved to show advertisers where they're making money. And the fact that you now have Netflix with an AVOD service, which obviously changed the market over time. We have more coming to the market with AVOD. This is becoming more of an important source of revenue for the OTT companies out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's going to have to be solved. Well, diane, thank you for your time today. Appreciate it. As listeners can tell, diane's the super nerd in the space. So if you want to reach out to her and nerd out, you can at Diane at datazoomio I'll also put on the archives here. If you look on the page, I'll have linked her name to her LinkedIn profile already. She's really good in terms of being responsive, reach out to her. There's also a lot in terms of that. Diane's pushing out on LinkedIn every once in a while just in terms of interesting pieces of news she sees in the space tied specifically to advertising, measurement data and metrics. So if you want to follow her, that's a good way to see some of what she's reading as well.
Speaker 3:I think it's always important for those in the space that are specialists right, diane's a specialist in advertising. Others are, for instance, saying, transcoding they can. It's important to see what they are reading. They're the ones who are really in the trenches every day dealing with a specific topic. They're going to see more great content being created that maybe many of us will miss. Who are looking at streaming media from a higher level, broader perspective. So definitely follow her. Diane. Thanks very much for being here. If anyone has any questions you want to. Introduction to Diane. You can also reach out to me, diane, at dameabrencom. Thanks everyone for listening and we'll join you next time with another guest on the executive podcast series. Thank you.
Speaker 2:If you enjoyed the show, send it to a friend, have questions for Dan or Mark, connect with them on LinkedIn at any time, and be sure to check out Dan's blog at streamingmediablogcom.