FLX NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

Local OTT in Growth Mode

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 01:20:33 GMT

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The panel “Growing Local OTT” looked at how local media is supplementing linear commercials with targeted digital advertising. Panelists said the local platforms give national brands a more intimate relationship with consumers. Adam Gaynor, chief revenue officer of Cox Media Group’s Gamut Smart Media , said, “Local advertising is what allows brands to have conversations with communities.”

Asked about the pitfalls of advertising via connected TV, Dave Marquard, head of product at Premion , put fraud at the top of the list, calling it “a significant issue in CTV.”

Gamut Smart Media is “a direct sales business,” offered Gaynor, with key relationships among publishers. That means he does not have to worry about third-party platforms where fraud might pop up. Gaynor mentioned a “brand-safe environment, a fraud-less environment.”

The panel was part of the Advanced Advertising Summit during L.A. TV Week. Daniel Punt, senior managing director at FTI Consulting, moderated.

Marquard spoke of the importance of transparency in OTT transactions, down to the channel and the device. “I demand transparency in what I’m buying,” he said.

The panelists said the OTT community is growing so large that it can no longer be ignored by advertisers. “We understand that you’re only going to connect with a portion of our local audience,” said Tom Fleming, senior VP of sales at Fox Television Stations . Previously, he added, the OTT audience might be overlooked. Today, “we’re embracing it.”

Joe Marino, head of client success organization at MadHive , said local is not a very sexy category, but it’s getting there. As connected TV gets larger, “it’s pushing local five years into the future faster,” he said. “I do think CTV has expedited the local markets’ adoption of digital.”

Midterm political spending should expedite things as well. “There’s going to be a lot of inventory missing in the linear world in a few months,” said Gaynor. “CTV offers an opportunity for political money coming in.”

The onrush of political spend also encourages the non-political vendors to reserve their air time, panelists said, before they are squeezed out.

When considering OTT platforms, panelists said scale and measurement are prime factors. “You should demand [measurement capability] from whoever you’re buying from,” said Marquard.

Jack Mollins, senior VP of North American ad sales at Atmosphere, said “efficiency plus scale” is the winning combo.

It’s on ad firms to educate local business owners, well versed in buying linear spots, on the merits of OTT, according to Mollins. “They’ve been buying local TV forever,” he said. “Educating them on this is another opportunity for you.”

The panelists were asked how a recession might affect the local OTT business. “I think no one will be immune to a recession,” said Fleming.

A recession would likely contract the number of outfits fighting for local spend. “There are so many players in the space,” Marino said. “If we hit a recession, we’ll see who comes out of it.”

The panelists agreed that connected TV will continue to grow. “Consumers are choosing this,” said Fleming. “It’s here to stay.”

CTV Wrapped: 2021

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 15:50:46 GMT

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2021 was another year for the books. A perfect combination of events has CTV poised for even more long-term growth than expected. As audiences continue to cut their cable cords, 91% of advertisers will either maintain or grow their CTV spend in the next year. In this post, we’ll break down the top trends in digital TV this year.

As a note, we use the terms streaming, OTT, CTV, and digital TV interchangeably to avoid undue repetition. Like much of the industry, we have adopted a broad definition of TV advertising, encompassing linear broadcasting, data-driven linear, linear addressable TV, VOD, and streaming inventory

CTV is outpacing predictions.

CTV raked in $14.3 billion in 2021 — two billion more than experts predicted back in June. In the next two years, CTV ad spend will double, reaching $29.5 billion . But if history has taught us anything, it will likely exceed that.

Viewers are cutting their cable cords in droves, and ad-supported video services, like Hulu and Roku, are filling a real market need. In 2020, several new services entered the market, including Peacock and Discovery+. This year, established services like Crackle focused on enhancing their user experience to rival that of SVODs’, like Netflix. eMarketer expects AVOD viewers will rise 28% by 2025, reaching 194 million. Half of all streamers currently report using at least one ad-supported platform, and this trend will continue to accelerate as more services enter the market.

Digital advertising is booming.

According to Wall Street Journal, the advertising industry will hit $763 billion this year, and digital advertising will account for an impressive 64% of that growth. This share will consistently increase in the coming years. Even as pandemic restrictions ease, digital habits, like shopping online and binging TV shows, will endure.

Advertisers are investing heavily to reach online audiences — and CTV campaigns fit the bill. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are flocking to digital TV because they want both the audio-visual impact of a commercial and the metrics of a digital campaign. Next year, an entirely new generation of DTC brands that have maxed out performance through Facebook and Instagram will start to funnel ad dollars to CTV campaigns. Digitally delivered TV has lowered the barrier to entry for social-first brands looking to reach new audiences, while maintaining the precision and ROI they expect.

Campaigns can be as national — or as local — as you want.

Hyper-targeting isn’t new in digital advertising, but it’s really difficult to scale across the traditional TV ecosystem. With OTT, national brands can now target neighborhoods and viewers with personalized advertising. Fine-tuned campaigns can drill down to a very specific audience — for example, a millennial mom in Cleveland who’s been searching online for a new mattress.

Purely local OTT ad spending will total $1.1 billion this year. Next year, it will jump 57% due to the growth of digital advertising and the upcoming political season. CTV empowers local brands to reach a very targeted audience while collecting valuable data on them. This adds to the granular results they are already seeing in their email, search, and social campaigns. More small businesses (and politicians) are jumping on the bandwagon, especially as broadcasters make it easier for them to buy OTT.

Linear and CTV are the new power couple.

Ad spending on linear and CTV platforms will exceed $93 billion by 2025, compared to $80 billion this year. All of this growth will stem from CTV. Why? One of the main reasons is that CTV allows advertisers to reach new audiences. One in four people in the 25–54 demo are no longer reachable on linear TV.

Streaming audiences are diverse and growing. In the past, studies found that viewers who use more ad-supported services were older and less affluent, while viewers who subscribed to paid services like Netflix were younger. However, that’s quickly changing as ad-supported services become more mainstream due to the cost savings and availability of better content.

With that said, although streaming audiences are growing, linear audiences are far larger, accounting for 101 million homes . Traditional TV audiences tend to be older and more loyal. While they are increasingly gravitating towards free streaming services, they aren’t fully cable-free.

If you could target both of these sectors, why wouldn’t you? The tools are all here, and they’re better than ever. CTV gives traditional TV advertisers a deeper look into campaign performance. By running campaigns on both, advertisers can tap into modern tools — like ACR data — to extrapolate cross-platform performance.

Identity is still a challenge, but the industry is unifying.

Apple and Google disrupted adtech this year with their privacy changes, while Facebook admitted that their conversions were off by as much as 15%. This convinced advertisers to connect directly with consumers through personalized marketing — which is why so many are re-investing dollars they would normally allocate to digital, to CTV. Retailers and publishers are creating their own media networks and monetizing their first-party data.

As the walled gardens change their identity solutions even more, the CTV industry is taking steps to unify identity. At MadHive, we’ve made progress in the last year. In July, the MRC called on the industry to accept the technical standards set by the IAB. Consortiums like the TV Data Initiative and AdLedger are committed to standardizing technical definitions across the ecosystem.

Measurement is complex, but full of opportunity.

Advertising on digital TV is significantly more complex than advertising on digital channels like Facebook or Google. CTV campaigns leverage many different data sources. The average US household has 25 connected devices , including laptops, smartphones, streaming devices, smart TVs, headphones and gaming consoles. With multiple streaming services on top of that, each with different levels of addressability, there’s an astounding array of data to use.

Optimization and reporting really depend on the strength of data sets — and that’s why tech-forward companies will come to the forefront in 2022. OTT-first device graphs, real-time updates, modern programming languages, data clean rooms, and hot storage are vital to guarding advertisers from wasted ad spend and fraud.

Fraud is still here.

One of the year’s most infamous fraud schemes, Methbot , had adtech calling for significant reforms. However, fraud hasn’t slowed down. A recently discovered scam, called RapidFire , is estimated to be siphoning $20 million a month from advertisers.

One fraud solution is to collapse the supply chain as much as possible, working directly with SSPs and validating the identities of enterprises using cryptography. Sophisticated technology and fraud protection go hand-in-hand — the sharper the tech, the less likely a fraud scheme will pass security precautions. To learn more about how we’re tackling fraud at MadHive, see our blog post .

We have a lot to look forward to in 2022.

While CTV has its complexities and the category is still maturing, there is great opportunity ahead. Standardizing identity and measurement will be crucial to evolving how the TV ad industry collects, processes, and uses data. With local business and political campaigns ramping up, we expect to see a surge in ad dollars next year, and a lot more industry innovation as a result.

As advertisers continue to increase ad spend, CTV will evolve to leverage the best of what traditional TV and digital advertising have to offer. Linear broadcasters hold priceless content — and the world is ready to stream it. From DSPs to publishers to Smart TV manufacturers, we all have a role to play in pushing our industry forward. We’re excited to see what’s in store for 2022.

Fox’s FLX OTT Ad Product Integrated Into Strata Platform

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 21:20:22 GMT

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Fox TV Stations said it made a deal to integrate Fox FLX, its over-the-top advertising product, into the Strata buying platform operated by Comcast’s FreeWheel unit.

With viewers cutting the cord and traditional TV ratings down, Fox FLX lets local and regional advertisers extend their reach and target streaming viewers.

For Fox, FLX taps into the hot market for connected TV . Other station groups, including Tegna, Cox Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group and NBC have also created units selling over the top advertising .

“The entire space is seeing explosive growth,” Tom Fleming, senior VP, Fox Station Sales told Broadcasting+Cable . He didn’t say how fast Flex was expanding. “It’s been a rapidly growing tool in our arsenal,” he said.

Fox launched FLX as the pandemic was beginning in 2020. In October, it made a deal to make FLX available to buyers via Mediaocean.

Being on the Mediaocean platform gave buyers greater access to purchase flex inventory alongside traditional local inventory, said Tom Fleming, senior VP, Fox Station Sales.

“Ease of execution is important,” Fleming said. “We don’t want to be cumbersome to do business with. Mediaocean was certainly a step in that direction.”

While Mediaocean is used mainly by the bigger conglomerate agencies, Strata has a strong niche with 1,100 local and regional agencies, and handles about 25% of all U.S. ad spending, Fleming said.

“It’s a good fit with our footprint. We have 18 stations all over the country. We want to be everything to everyone, from the conglomerate agencies down to smaller or regional-type shops as well. Strata is a big step forward for that effort.”

Fox FLX has been integrated into Strata’s spot TV buying module, making it easy for spot buyers to make OTT and CTV transactions using the same tools they use for traditional local TV. to plan and buy campaigns, request avails, send electronic orders and request electronic invoices.

Fleming said that Fox FLX now covers 100% of DMAs on top of Fox’s station footprint. FLX offers advertisers 6,000 targeting parameters and 150 quality video partners, including content from the Fox Stations, Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment, Fox News and the Tubi streaming service.

Fox FLX is sold by a combination of Fox’s national sales organization and the local stations.

“We can target down to zip codes, we can reach an entire state outside of our station DMA footprint. It’s just given us a much more powerful footprint across the country.,” Fleming said.

Fox FLX could wind up on more buying platforms. “We’re searching on a daily basis for ways to make it easier for our customers to execute,” he said. “More importantly, we want to drive results that are quantifiable. Anything that adds to that equation, we’re going to be looking at closely.”

Fox Stations Launch FLX, A New Linear And OTT Advertising Service

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 22:23:56 GMT

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Fox Television Stations is rolling out a new advertising service called FLX that aims to one-up NBCUniversal’s Spot On, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s CompulseOTT and a host of other similar products.

FLX (pronounced flex), which has been in the beta testing phase for some time, provides advertisers with tools that allow them to purchase availabilities across the linear Fox TV stations along with about 150 over the top and connected TV options.

Fox has also extended its existing partnership with the pre-buy planning platform Mediaocean to include the new FLX service. “It allows us to target consumers with premium video inventory at scale from all levels of geography, from a ZIP code to a congressional district to across the country,” says Michael Page, VP of digital sales for Fox Television Stations.

The service encompasses full episode programming from Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment, Fox News, Discovery Communications as well as content distributed by Tubi, the ad-supported streaming platform that Fox acquired last year.

Page noted that FLX is a little late to the party, in that there are a number of other advertiser platforms that aim to service agencies and their clients in similar ways. In addition to Spot On and Compulse, there’s Cox’s Gamut Total, Premion, Scripps Octane and Charter Communications’ Spectrum Reach.

Michael Page

As cord-cutting and streaming consumption continued to escalate during the pandemic, Fox decided to take a deliberate approach, building out FLX in partnership with the software platform MadHive. It gave FLX a test drive on its stations in Chicago and Detroit about a year ago before expanding the beta test to all of Fox’s stations and the national Fox Station Sales group.

Page explains that it wanted to make sure its sales teams understood the new product; that all the kinks were ironed out; and that there was a thorough understanding of what separated it from the pack.

This month, FLX is managing about 150 campaigns. And Fox is just rolling out the expanded Mediaocean opportunity, which will make it easier for the large agency holding companies to use the service.

Page said there are three key ways that FLX is uniquely positioned. First, it uses blockchain technology to avoid any problems with fraud. “Any time there’s a new digital product out there, fraud follows,” he says. “MadHive was very focused in on the things that we can do to determine that we are giving true inventory of the highest quality and that it is legitimately targeted to a household, versus a bot or something like that.”

Second, FLX is focused on preventing another common OTT and CTV issue: ads that repeat too frequently. “We really work on optimizing frequency for advertising down to a household level,” Page says.

Third, it’s seeking to differentiate itself from the competition by avoiding the need for buyers to pay additional fees for extra targeting options. “We’re giving them all the targeting right up front,” Page says. “We’re doing everything we can to make it a high-quality product.”

The service also will give buyers insight into attribution, showing how a given ad drives consumers to websites or to purchase products and services. “We seamlessly included that in the product,” Page says.

“Our insights team can show [buyers] the impact that a campaign had on their business as the campaign is ongoing. We show them the results as they come in,” he adds. Fox is working to expand that attribution solution to the linear TV stations, so everything is on the same platform. “It’s a form that’s really designed to be a one-stop shop as a video-advertising resource.”