It’s going to be a steamy day here in New York, but AdMonsters are keeping cool by the waters of the Chelsea Piers, where we’ve gathered for our inaugural OPS TV conference. LiveRail will kick off DISH Media‘s Warren Schlichting’s keynote presentation on how to break and rebuild the TV model in this fast-paced digital age. Stay tuned to the live blog for our conference highlights!
9:10: OPS TV has been inspired by the convergence of traditional and digital media.
9:14: Mark Trefgarne kicks off the LiveRail presentation. He cites a LiveRail Real Time Bidding white paper (see: your table) to explain the growing importance of video-RTB.
Morning Keynote: Breaking the TV Model and Rebuilding It
9:26: Warren Schlichting of Dish Media Sales: “If you can’t run a spot and you can’t bill for that spot, you don’t have a business. In many ways, you guys are unsung heroes.”
9:28: Warren: “We are at the center of a radical transformation – a radical transformation in the traditional television business. And…wait for it…we think we’re digital.”
9:31: What is this traditional business anyway? But first – what is television? Is it a device? Is it a form of transmission? Is it a form of programming? Before we look at ‘traditional tv,” we have to step back further to examine what we mean by ‘television.’
9:35: Digital video revolution is in the form of expectations. We take for granted that we have internet everywhere; we can steam music videos from YouTube onto the navigation screen on the way to our lacrosse tournament. “Think about that: a 3G connection streaming video into the family Buick full of lacrosse sticks and Chipotle napkins.”
9:36: At this point, what’s the difference between digital and traditional?
9:40: Can the dinosaur survive? Can traditional advertising survive in a digital world? Not without adaptation…
9:42: Trying to move the backend of traditonal media is no small feat. We believed that traditional television could change from the top down.
9:48: Traditional seems simple: one ad reaches the whole country. At Dish, we saw data as a way to innovate.
9:51: We have now begun to use household addressable ads – targeting. This starts to look…kind of digital?
9:57: “Our OPS team is our revenue center.”
9:59: “May you live in interesting times”: Let’s redefine together what ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ mean.
Leveraging Discovery and Distribution to Reach Scale in Online Video
10:08: Ira Silberstein of Taboola and Rahul Chopra of The Wall Street Journal take the stage for a conversation about online video scale. WSJ has been able to build a cohesive product across different platforms. It’s been challenging, but they’ve found success.
10:10: We have to be aware that consumption changes across platforms and varies depending on the time of the day. Attention spans also seem to be decreasing based on some YouTube data – you have to get to the point.
10:15: We have an overall strategy of where we want to be and get to, but the pace of innovation and the quantity and frequency of feedback from users can dictate our own pace and direction.
Adobe Half Group: Beyond the Desktop
10:35: 3/4 of the US population will be watching video on a connected device by 2014.
10:40: Going beyond video on demand to real simulcast live-streaming. Going beyond the desktop to any IP-connected device.
10:41: “5:1: The ratio of mobile programmers to desktop programmers for digital video, as disclosed by a Top 3 Media company in the US.”
10:45: Quite a few challenges to executing on an IP video strategy, including: massively fragmented standards and technologies, user authentication, content protection, ad signaling & dynamic mid-roll insertion, duplicative backend work flows, analytics and optimization.
10:46: Adobe has a solution: Adobe Primetime.
11:02: Major League Baseball partnered with Auditude to deliver video fluidly across connected devices, with challenges including live game ad insertion and more. Seems to be working well!
Focus On Session: Buying TV in a Digital World
11:35: Rob Davis of OgilvyOne and Jack Smith of Simulmedia have seated themselves on the stage and have begun an often-humorous exchange on the ways digital video changes tv buying…and vice versa.
11:36: We have to talk in Nielsen’s currency, but with 100 million hours of TV viewing, the amount of data and new management techniques at large-scale, we have this ability. Now it’s about educating the folks who have not been in digital about what this data means and what you can do with it.
11:39: Ogilvy’s trying to find a balance between TV and digital. A project should not necessarily be digital or analog at its onset. It’s been a little bit of a challenge to cross this divide – in the minds of clients and agency people, it’s normally a binary between analog and digital.
11:42: We aren’t asking traditional people to give up their talents or what they’ve been doing. We’re asking them to add on to these skills. The whole process is additive.
11:46: We spend a lot of time optimizing content for a specific medium. A video or storyline that works on TV might not work as well on your smartphone.
11:48: The web is not just TV 2.0.
11:56: The audience is the atomic unit.
12:00: So much of the value we get from the web is data. When you look at the history of electronic media, the audience doesn’t usually get out ahead of the gatekeeper. In this case, however, they have. The elevation of the data about video consumption will enable us to predict what will happen in the future, which will help us better package media.
Keynote: Jack Myers – Future Economics of TV and Video
1:20: The next generation may be the greatest generation – EVER!
1:21: Millenials are broken into three groups: pre-Internet, post-Internet and the Hooked Up generation – hooked on the Internet, hooked into the Internet and hooked into each other through the Internet. Advertising is background noise – they like it, but they can turn it off and on.
1:25 60%-70% of college grads in next 10 years will be female – we’re coming upon a women-led business world.
1:30 The Internet is this gen’s dominant force – in many ways it’s their church. It’s a thing of stability. They have strong opinions, but are conflict averse – a trait they will bring to the workplace.
1:33 Change agents last 10-18 months – we must stop thinking of ourselves as agents of change but rather agents of stability.
1:35 Internet is equality, diversity is a birthright. However, HU gen needs to learn structure – collaboration is key.
1:37 Information has become garbage; move on to knowledge – from an information age to a knowledge era.
1:38 This is the last year we’ll see growth in marketing budgets until 2020 – decline by about 0.5% over the next decade. Digital advertising, however, is growing. Online originated video will grow 60% over the next decade. Estimated 2020 share of budget: 3.2%. Budget shifts are coming from direct-to-trade and direct mail promotions.
1:42 Messaging is becoming increasingly viral and interactive – two-way conversations.
1:46 Single most important fight of the future: who owns the databases, and who can manage them most effectively.
1:50 There seems to be too much concern over privacy issues when the consumers aren’t really screaming – in fact, the HU gen understands the value exchange. Data as a currency for content, services, etc.
Panel: Does the Media Industry Need a UPC Code to Track Content and Ads Across Platforms?
To understand more about CIMM and the trackable asset cross-platform initiative (TAXI), check out this background piece.
2:10 So why do we need a cross-platdoem trackable asset? Bulgrin: Consumers are picking and choosing where they view the data. The channels are integrated, but we don’t have a quick way to track where our content is landing.
2:15 Greene: How we got into this mess in the first place – we set up siloes and encouraged people to stay in their own channel. Media converged, departments did not.
2:20 TAXI is about accelarting registries such as Ad-ID and EIDER
Ad-Id:
Focus On Session: Social TV Interaction: A Meeting of Dadaists
Mitch Oscar of MPG and Phil Napoli of Fordham University begin to break down social TV interaction, with a few presentation-crashers.
3:19: What do social TV analytics do? Program performance assessment, content performance assessment, advertisement performance assessment, affinity tracking, trend analysis, and audience analysis – to name a few.
Trendrr, Alex Nagler: “Category-defining, television-specific research adn marketing solution for optimizing and understanding social TV.” Real-time social data curation for tv, social media, and advertising. Combine analytics & insights along with curation & publishing to unlock the value of social TV.
General Sentiment, Pete Moran: Sit on both sides of social media coin. We do traditional and social media analysis.View social & digital media as a prism
Bluefin Labs, Leslie Yee: Born out of MIT media labs. We look specifically at brands and brand activity – and how this is matched along with programming. Leads to a lot of things like media optimization. We realize that it’s not all about the game, but also about agencies etc. We can look at integrations, brand life, overall sentiment of the advertising, and segmetnation
3:43: I know it’s about shows and about networks – but what are we supposed to be doing about brands?
4:09: Matt O’Neill, AdMonsters President, begins the wrap up. We’ve got a string of events coming up – including OPS TV, a Publsher Forum, and the new Mobile Publisher Forum – and we are also happy to announce the launch of AdMonsters Monsters of Innovation, aimed to recognize the leaders of the next generation of media revenue engines. Applications accepted NOW!
4:14: Sirosh Tavakoli, Founder & CEO of Videoplaza: IP-delivered video changes everything again. The new IP-delivered TV has to be made profitable: that’s why Videoplaza exists.
4:16: Videoplaza have launched the findings of their study into the world of connected devices exclusively at AdMonsters’ OPS TV in New York on July 11, 2012. The report is titled “A Future for TV: IP-delivered video advertising in a connected world.” Check out the full report
Evan Krauss, Shazam: State of the Multiscreen Union
4:30 Problem with TV ads? 30 seconds and their over. Shazam wants to keep the experience going.
4:35 Apple sees 60% of tablet use during primetime; 88% of viewers watch and play with a device. It’s a great opportunity to leverage engagement.
4:41 Consider how much people snack with mobile – waiting for a meeting, sitting on a train.
Wrap-Up Panel: If Viewers Are in Control, Where Will They Take Us?
5:06: David Lipkin of Method wraps up OPS TV with Rany Ng of DoubleClick, Mike Sommers of Viggle, and Andrew Kippen of Boxee.
5:08: Users are firmly in control when it comes to engaging with content thanks to the myriad ways media has evolved to capture audiences’ attention. How does the industry deal with the demands of users with so many touch-points? The opportunities are there, but the industry needs to be savvy, strategic, and swiftly-adapting to capitalize on them.
5:12: They want to make the tablet act as a TV guide. They want to control the user experience. We want all our things to play nicely together.
5:16: When people are watching TV today, they’re generally interacting with another screen. People feel like that second screen is a way to escape from almost everyone else in the room.
5:17: “When I don’t want to engage with my husband or kids, I can just turn on my Nook or my iPad and watch what I want to watch.”
5:25: If you’re a cord-cutter, the money you’re saving is probably going to more of your tech toys. You’re probably much more deliberate in terms of what you engage with.
5:29: Consumer are not loyal to their cable networks or TV providers. People do align themselves with television shows. They are loyal to particular TV shows.
5:32: It’s important to think about how we scale. We have all these devices, all these platforms, all these app stores. It’s really hard as a publisher and as a brand to deal with this. The standards are beginning to be adopted, but there are still lots of exceptions. We need to figure out as an industry how we center our technology around particular tools. As a whole, we’re trying to move to an area where technology can be seamless across these screens.
5:33: There’s a lot of opportunity for you to take advantage of your content and your users and reimagine what an ad experience can be. The line between content and ad experience can be blurred.
5:36: The dream: I have a very small, engaged audience and there’s an easy way to buy it. Maybe what we need to do is figure out ways to get rid of ‘demographics.’
5:39: It boils down to relevance. Consumers are interested in relevant content. Advertisers are interested in a relevant audience. The degree to which we can understand who people are beyond standard targeting variables allows us to understand what is being consumed and how it’s being responded to. The relationship becomes deeper, based on personal relevance.
5:40: Make it simple. Offer small things that people care about. Ignore the rest.