By Rahul Mehra, Chief Technology Officer, Consult Red

The opportunity for telco and Pay TV providers to diversify their retail offer has arrived but those with RDK and Linux middleware-based video devices risk getting left behind.

The provision of apps to users outside of Google’s own Android TV ecosystem remains challenging. Native apps are costly to develop and maintain while control over user experience and customer data is often ceded outside of the operator’s domain.

A new advanced application delivery platform changes this at a stroke. AndApps™ from Consult Red unlocks access to the vast library of Android applications directly on suitable RDK and Linux middleware-based devices. The solution empowers telco and Pay TV providers to manage the app’s full lifecycle from onboarding to deploying and managing subscriber availability – efficiently, effectively and securely.

With AndApps, operators can deliver any number of available and maintained Android apps alongside native RDK and Linux applications for a unified user experience.

What’s more, it keeps you firmly in control of your service delivery and your customer experience.

All the upsides

AndApps means you can engage and excite subscribers with the widest range of applications such as access to cloud gaming, local catch-up content, ‘must-have’ SVOD services and social media applications – all delivered within your existing user experience and on your deployed CPE devices. You can leverage many market-available applications to cut time to market and save on associated development costs while reducing reliance on developers to port or update applications for your platform.

AndApps greatly simplifies app onboarding. Rather than having to execute big software releases on an annual or bi-annual basis, you can control App lifecycles — nimbly deploying, updating or uninstalling apps and runtime updates on in-field devices using downloadable application container technology.

Because it is built on several open source projects, AndApps enables flexible development and future scalability. It leverages AOSP (Android Open Source Project), which is maintained by Google, community-contributed, field-proven and receives monthly security patches and regular bug fixes. Because you’ll be running applications on AOSP, you can also benefit from new app releases and features as soon as they are available, typically without re-porting or additional development.

Most importantly, you’ll maintain complete control of your customer experience and subscriber data. You decide which apps you make available, and on which devices, with the future option of monetisation via advertising and in-app purchases.

AndApps components

There are three components to the AndApps solution providing operators the flexibility to tailor deployment:

AndApps Runtime is the component of the platform that is deployed on the set-top box or connected TV device. It adds a containerised AOSP image, integrates drivers optimised for hardware profile, and adds components to enable seamless operations with your UI and application lifecycle management.

AndApps Cloud delivers the operator-centric management of the platform and enabled devices, including application and runtime lifecycle management. It is used for the delivery of AOSP security and version updates, and to deliver apps to the devices in the field.

AndApps Warehouse is a global application repository managed and populated by application vendors and Consult Red. These applications are made available for operator distribution via AndApps Cloud.

AndApps Services

AndApps is designed and delivered by Consult Red alongside comprehensive supporting services that include consultancy, device and end-to-end system integrations, development and any required customisation and optimisations. Once deployed, in-life services including app onboarding, maintenance, runtime updates, and QA, will ensure ongoing security and stable operation.

Why Consult Red?

AndApps has been developed by Consult Red, a trusted partner to some of the largest global media operators including Liberty Global, Comcast, Sky and DIRECTV. We have 20 years of middleware experience, over 10 years of RDK development experience and 5 years of experience in field-proven application containerisation for video CPE devices.

Come and see us at IBC 2023 or the RDK Global Summit to explore how you can take advantage of this next-generation consumer-facing opportunity. Reach out here.

Media agencies, broadcasters, tech providers and advertisers/brands are being asked to nominate someone they believe encompasses the core values behind the awards: Disruption, Leadership, Vision and Innovation. There is no barrier to entry based on age, experience or job title. Each entry form requests a maximum 600 word count, with a submission deadline of Friday, September 22. The results will be announced on October 31, and the judging panel will be announced soon.

Who can be nominated?

Any brilliant woman who is changing, influencing, and driving positive change and action across the TV ecosystem. The focus is on those working within our community, which would be anyone across Pay TV, broadcasting, streaming, studios, TV tech and TV advertising (brands and agencies). The Top 50 Women Gamechangers in TV – or ‘The 50 WGC’ will reflect the diverse nature of the video distribution industry and recognise the many areas that contribute to its success.

Find out more

All the information needed to enter the awards can be found at The 50 WGC website, here.

Alternatively, you can email the Adwanted Events team: team@mediatelevents.com

Total TV Measurement has been used with multiple GroupM clients already but was given its official go-to-market launch in June after receiving a stamp of approval from PwC, which conducted an exhaustive assurance review of the end-to-end processes and methodology used. This covered everything from data cleaning to data fusion, de-duplication and quality checks, with all nine categories of investigation passed.

Total TV Measurement first measures and de-duplicates addressable TV audience exposures across the entire Finecast supplier ecosystem, which includes linear broadcast addressable TV plus BVOD, AVOD and other ‘TV-like’ (i.e., high-quality, broadcaster equivalent standard) streaming. This is achieved by combining Finecast log-level data with measurement provided by AudienceProject, which runs its own viewing panel (complete with establishment survey). This cross-channel addressable audience view is then combined with BARB data via TechEdge to show de-duplicated reach and frequency across the addressable and classic linear portions of a campaign.

Currently the new product does not attempt to de-duplicate audiences between one streaming addressable source and another, with the focus on showing the difference a combined addressable buy makes on top of linear. This more granular de-duplication may come later.

The outputs from Total TV Measurement are: cross-channel addressable TV reach and frequency; linear campaign reach and frequency; overall de-duplicated reach and frequency; Finecast (addressable) and linear TV 1+ cover curves (with other custom cover curves considered).

Samantha Lister, Head of Marketing Science at Finecast, comments: “This is a solution for brands that want to understand how reach interacts across addressable TV and linear TV and how they can optimise reach across the two. It helps them consider the impact of budget allocation.”

She adds: “Historically, linear TV has been the most cost-effective medium when it comes to reach, but declining linear audiences and deflating [addressable TV] costs mean brands are leaning more into addressable TV. When we launched Finecast, it was ‘linear-first’ [on the plan] and then you added incremental reach [via addressable], but today it is not always linear first, depending on the audience you want to reach. There are some audiences where you should plan for addressable first or where you can invest less in linear before you move budget to addressable.”

As for the PwC verification to ISRS 4400 (Revised) standards, this was a proactive move, since the GroupM clients using the solution (and the GroupM agencies) were happy with the outcomes and their own due diligence. Lister wanted to get ahead of the curve. “As more budget shifts from linear to addressable, addressable comes under greater scrutiny. We are so proud of what we have done we wanted a seal of approval. There was no huge demand for an assurance review from our clients.”

One study for a GroupM client shows what they gain in terms of knowledge. It demonstrated +2.3% incremental reach into the 18-34 age group and +1.3% incremental gain across all adults when addressable was added to standard linear TV. Savings were also indicated – based on what it would have cost to achieve that level of incremental reach through continued linear buys. Total TV measurement is free on selected campaigns and the ambition is that it becomes standard practice for qualifying campaigns where linear and addressable are being combined.

The BEE solution (which stands for Brand Exposure & Engagement) harnesses data from 2+ million Bouygues Telecom set-top boxes plus existing Realytics technology to provide deterministic single-source measurement of national linear TV, BVOD and addressable TV. The exposure data can then be linked to downstream online consumer activity, such as website visits, app downloads, SMS responses and calls to a call centre (including incremental activity).

Realytics provides a platform that helps buyers optimise their media plans by harnessing a previous understanding of how TV advertising impacted business outcomes, and this is also wrapped into the BEE solution. Thus, advertisers are given a better understanding of the frequency needed to generate web activity, the number of impressions needed to deliver X% of incremental reach, and also the consequences of over-exposure of a household to the same campaign.

Guillaume Belmas, CEO of Realytics, believes the French market provides an outstanding model for how to deploy addressable TV successfully, due to the exceptional pan-industry collaboration that enabled rapid take-off. As we reported previously, his company has just authored the second edition of its ‘Addressable TV in France’ white paper series, outlining progress and next steps.

One of those next steps is improved measurement and attribution, and with a large part of French TV consumption still found on the set-top boxes of service providers like Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom, operator partnerships carry significant weight. Discussing the market needs generally, Belmas says: “There are still improvements to be made on reporting addressable TV advertising.

“Everyone has been focused on making targeted TV a reality and signing deals, but in the last few months both the buyside and sell-side agreed that we now need more proof of the efficacy of campaigns.”

He observes that usage of smart TV sets and connected TV apps is low in France compared to the rest of Europe.  Catch-up TV and BVOD are overwhelmingly consumed via set-top boxes, and this means measurement efforts must include a core focus on the service provider set-top box.

“The first goal of BEE is to measure exposure and reach, because one of the buyside priorities is to understand how they avoid audience duplication as they spread their money across advertising on linear TV, catch-up and addressable. Then there are questions about the performance of the different ‘channels’: does my linear TV perform better than my addressable TV campaign, and what about the BVOD campaign?

“Our history is as a TV attribution company, so we can show if campaigns are driving web traffic or other outcomes. One of the big questions for brands has always been, ‘How many impressions do I need to trigger an activity like a website visit or app download?’ That is a crucial insight if you want to fix the ideal frequency for a campaign. Before, we could not answer these questions, but now we can.”

Within its wider product portfolio, Realytics has its own TV detection technology that will flag in real-time when an ad has aired, using fingerprinting, but the focus with BEE is using set-top box data to determine exposure, and this is the basis for showing de-duplicated reach across the different ‘channels’ being measured and therefore the incremental reach that addressable TV can deliver.

“Some of the top questions that buyers want answered are: what is the duplication per channel, how do I optimise to avoid duplication, which is the second or third ‘channel’ I should buy [for example, adding BVOD onto a linear campaign first, or using addressable first and then BVOD], and what is the ideal combination of those channels?”

With BEE, buyers can focus on exposure to gain these reach and incremental reach optimisation insights, but there is also the option to investigate performance as a second stage, and this is when Realytics’ TV attribution solution is fired up. “Not everyone is concerned with ‘drive-to-web’ but everyone is concerned with reach and frequency,” Belmas explains.

Realytics expects to expand the footprint where its exposure and attribution technology can be used.

Realytics has a central role in the French addressable TV advertising market, especially through its work with Bouygues Telecom. In addition to providing enhanced capabilities for measuring exposure and effectiveness of addressable TV advertising with the telco, its Adkymia DSP is part of the TVMOTIK alliance and tech stack designed to rationalise buying of linear TV and catch-up addressable TV inventory from multiple broadcasters in Bouygues Telecom homes. This alliance also involves Equative, which contributes campaign development, ad decisioning and scheduling capabilities.

TVMOTIK is based upon the principles of technical harmonisation (including use of AF2M/SNPTV requirements for linear TV) and therefore interoperability, and is designed to rationalise buying across multiple channels for advertisers, providing a one-stop-shop. It includes technology services and sales support. It is viewed as a way to lower the barriers to entry for TV channels of any size if they want to make their inventory available for addressable advertising (on Bouygues Telecom STBs).

Last year, in another project, Realytics worked with SNPTV (the advocacy group for TV and audiovisual advertising media in France), to investigate the effect of using linear TV and addressable TV together. One of the main points of the study was to determine if addressable TV delivers incremental reach on top of linear.

As indicated above, the Realytics product portfolio spans ad detection, ad exposure confirmation, programmatic buying enablement and TV attribution. The Adkymia Demand Side Platform can be used to buy both linear and addressable TV campaigns programmatically and Realytics is also using eight years’ worth of data (and 7 million spot impressions in Europe) to feed AI processing that optimises media buying to maximise drive-to-web impact via this DSP.

Realytics helps advertisers to synchronise their TV and digital campaigns, like timing their paid search (and especially their bidding in order to reach top search spot) to coincide with television ads. This is viewed as a key optimisation that can help ‘drive-to-web’. Online impact can be attributed to TV at a granular level, including on a per-channel (TV distribution channel) or per-day basis. The key principle guiding this technology is the idea that the first impact of TV advertising is usually seen in search.

The company also supports retargeting of exposed TV audiences in digital, including on Facebook, and targeting of non-exposed audiences within digital. There is also the ability to find audiences in the digital space who are lookalikes for the TV exposed audience.

As part of smartclip and RTL Group, Realytics is taking a pan-European view of the cross-platform and addressable TV markets and Belmas believes that in markets where HbbTV is being used by broadcasters to enable addressable TV in free-to-air homes, via television sets, it is realistic to believe we can unify addressable TV planning and buying to cover this and the Pay TV operator STB inventory.

In terms of measurement and attribution, the data available from a telco/Pay TV home is much richer than anything Realytics can get from an HbbTV household, but publisher (broadcaster streaming) data would be one foundation stone for exposure, and other data sources including ACR could be harnessed.

Anil Malhotra, Co-founder of Bango, declares: “If you aggregate all the world’s telcos together, they reach something like 4-5 billion people, so if you think of that as a single platform it has more reach than anything else on earth. And they have a built-in billing relationship with those 4-5 billion people – a way to collect money on a monthly, recurring bill, in most cases.

“Align that with what subscription service providers want, which is a facility to monetise their service easily – a distribution mechanism that helps them acquire customers and also retain them.” Malhotra believes the evidence will show that when a streaming service is available as a managed and/or bundled subscription via a telco it helps retention and drives lifetime customer value for both parties.

Telcos understand the opportunity in front of them to become the hub where consumers pick and manage their growing pile of subscription-based services. “There is a high level of commitment among telcos to become a super-bundler and subscriptions hub,” Malhotra comments. “The interest is high because this hits all the KPIs they are interested in, like ARPU, retention and lifetime customer value.”

Bango is at the heart of this new opportunity with a SaaS-based solution that combines technical integration (including provisioning and entitlement management) with merchandising, data-driven marketing and even, where wanted, standardised commercial ‘handshakes’ (between subscription provider and telcos). All of this is designed to make the subscription hub and super-bundling opportunity easy to pursue for both parties, with endless one-to-one ‘merchant-to-reseller’ integrations avoided.

Last year, Bango partnered with Juniper Research to investigate the global subscriptions economy, with the analyst firm authoring a white paper called ‘How telcos must capitalize on the Super Bundling opportunity’. Juniper Research forecast that the global subscription economy will grow by 81% in the next three years to reach a value of $599 billion in 2026, buoyed by homes taking more services. In the UK, for example, each adult is forecast to take 5.2 subscription services by that year (up from 2.6 in 2018).

Two telcos that are leading the charge in the subscription hub market are Verizon in the USA and Optus in Australia. Verizon already onboarded leading streaming services like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Discovery and AMC+ but these have now been moved into the company’s +play platform “that allows users to discover, purchase and manage some of their favourite subscriptions across entertainment, audio, gaming, fitness, music, lifestyle and more – all in one place.”

+play has prompted an expansion of service offers, with new additions like Netflix, Peloton, Veep’s concert livestreams, WW International, A+E Networks, The Athletic, Calm Vix+ (from TelevisaUnivision) and even Duolingo. When announcing this innovation last year, Manon Brouillette, EVP and CEO at Verizon Consumer Group, said that “+play is a natural extension of our core strengths” and that it would scale choice through aggregation.

Optus, meanwhile, offers SubHub, where it tells consumers that they can easily manage their subscriptions by bringing them together in one place. “You’ll enjoy the ease of making just one simple payment each month, and it can help you make some big savings, too!” Partners (with subscription services available) range from Hayu, BritBox, Binge and Netflix to Kindle Unlimited, Microsoft 365 and Masterclass (which offers multi-topic skills classes ranging from leadership to photography and acting).

In both cases, there is no charge to the consumer for using these subscription hubs. This has all the hallmarks of a classic win-win-win. Both these telcos are Bango customers.

There is potential competition for telcos. Malhotra offers examples of the types of companies that could set themselves up as subscription management hubs, perhaps with their own specialisations. The first are from banking/finance. “This industry might take the angle that they consolidate your subscriptions to help you save money.” He points out that a ‘Premier’ banking service (designed for high net-worth clients) would be a suitable candidate for offering high-end car buyers subscriptions for their car tech.

He also believes employee benefit programme providers are interested in this concept, given that they already aggregate offers like health care, pension contributions and prize draws. “Increasingly, employee benefits are managed online, so they would have a similar operational exercise. These companies could decide to standardise the way they aggregate services and throw in new subscription services that are discounted.”

Retailers are on his list, but Malhotra reckons telcos will know more than companies in other verticals about our consumption habits, as one additional advantage. In a simple example, he says a high-performance broadband package could suggest a propensity to games and so an interest in game subscriptions or bundles.

The Bango solution avoids what would otherwise be costly integrations for the merchant (the subscription service provider) and the reseller (the telco). It manages the environment where consumers find, choose and manage subscriptions. It is described as a ready-made, plug-in, one-stop solution, and Bango likens it to a digital vending machine that can be stocked with the very latest subscription services and deals.

Key features of the technology include easy onboarding of multiple partners, rapid deployment, and a seamless customer experience.

The solution handles multiple billing arrangements like ‘charge to bill’, ‘card on file’ or ‘wallet’. It supports the ability to pick and choose services (a la carte rather than all-or-nothing bundles) and it delivers a single and real-time view across all customers, products, subscriptions, offers, entitlements and payments, among other things. Insights are provided for performance analysis.

Merchants can provide standardised business terms to Bango, which are then adopted by all telcos that plug into the system, or they can choose to arrange these individually. Bango makes its money with SaaS fees and a fee based on a small percentage charge for the value of a subscription that is taken.

As usual, good marketing will help drive success. Where requested, Bango can help by harnessing its whole-market knowledge of what services work together in bundles, which kinds of consumers are most likely to take different services, and what impact promotions can have, like discounts or free trials, for different ‘apps’.

The three top categories of subscription currently (in 2023), according to the research by Juniper Research, are digital video, digital music and physical goods boxes (like food and recipe boxes or regular hygiene products). Malhotra says the subscription services market is both broadening and deepening, using wellness (meditation and relaxation), education, language learning and religious content as examples of special interest services.

He refers to a Bango subscriber survey from 2022 that found that 78% of subscribers want a single platform to manage all their subscriptions. He thinks there is a clear opportunity for those telcos willing to provide that platform. And of course, none of the services above include smart home subscriptions that could accompany new applications ranging from cybersecurity to remote door locks. Malhotra agrees that the Smart Home could expand the subscription services market further.

Upwave is trying to bring a Google Analytics feel to brand metrics measurement – less like post-campaign research consultancy and more like hands-on, inflight daily insights into brand awareness and sentiment using a software solution that can also support top of funnel optimisation. “If we do our job, we make brand campaigns feel like performance campaigns, which you can constantly look at and optimise every hour in some channels. Brand was missing that,” says Kelly.

The next step in this ‘brand-treated-like-performance’ approach is the use of programmatic to optimise brand campaigns. Upwave has generated a persuadability score that can be applied to a brand and its favoured KPIs at a household level. Currently in laboratory testing with partners, this gives a household a score between zero and one based on how likely it is that consumers can be persuaded by a brand or a message. The score spins out of data analysis and modelling that is underpinned by a combination of deterministic exposure data (including ACR or set-top box data) and consumer opinion survey data.

The programmatic buying will be optimised against the persuadability score (with Upwave feeding the data to the DSP – the company does not buy or sell media itself). “Based on how persuadable a household is, a decision can be made on what to bid [to win an ad spot].” Upwave’s ambition is that programmatic buys can be optimised for brand outcomes as well as for conversion.

Upwave has industrialised consumer surveys to generate the data that helps it understand brand impact and persuadability, and this includes full automation. Kelly says the company surveys millions of consumers every year. “We don’t maintain a panel; there is no single group of consumers. For every campaign we find a large representative sample of consumers to get their opinions,” he explains. For any campaign, tens of thousands of people are surveyed, including both exposed and non-exposed homes.

Upwave does not try to link brand-level outcomes to actual business outcomes, leaving others to fuse these data sets if they want to. But the brand-level outcomes can be used as a predictor, by showing propensity to become a customer, Kelly claims. When Upwave conducted some tests to gauge the accuracy of its uplift-to-customer assumptions, using grocery sales data, the connection was very accurate, he notes. “We believe we can be used to forecast sales, though we are not tracking sales ourselves. Our early tracking with sales data has been very accurate.”

Kelly says the TV industry is spending a lot of time worrying about audience measurement and currency but needs to put as much effort into demonstrating outcomes – and that includes top of funnel outcomes, where his company specialises. “If a CMO wants to protect their TV budget, what do they want to show: currency statistics proving that they got what they paid for [they reached their target audience] and they were not ripped off, or metrics showing their top of funnel outcomes and that it was effective advertising?” he asks.

Returning to his American Football analogy, Kelly explains: “When a player scores in the end zone, that is a sales conversion. But what about all the plays that get you down the field into the end zone? We measure the movement down the field.” He points to the potentially huge impact of brand advertising, which at its best generates demand and increases lifetime value of customers you do secure, which pays back over years (like when people churn from other brands but stick with yours).

The long-term impact of brand advertising may be understood but when the CFO knocks on the door, CMOs may need some answers today. “Within a short timeframe, we can accurately forecast that you are generating the basis for customer lifetime value,” Kelly claims.

The paper, entitled: ‘Addressable TV: Digitalisation of an offline media’, is available to download now. It is the result of interviews with key players in the French addressable ecosystem including executives from Mindshare, Altice Media Ads & Connect, Gamned, Novembre, Canal+ Brand Solutions, M6 Publicité, SNPTV, Values, Jellyfish, Bouygues and France Televisions Publicité. This is the first time the annual white paper has been published in English and it is a good read for anyone that wants to understand the French addressable market since the law was changed in 2020 to permit household targeting.

The paper declares that, “Addressable TV has brought television into the digital age, sparking a renewed debate about its position in advertisers’ media mixes. This development allows the all-digital world to incorporate TV into its strategies, bridging the gap between a traditionally offline medium and the digital world.”

According to the SNPTV, the French TV advertising advocacy group, there were more than 1,300 addressable TV campaigns in France during 2022 – a three-fold increase over the previous year (the 2021 figure was 376 campaigns). Developments impacting reach include permission for prime-time ad substitution and the introduction of multiple targeted ads per ad break (in a market that opened with a rule allowing only one per break), while work is underway on a unified addressable TV solution that will get smaller TV sales houses into the game. Measurement is one of the big priorities ahead, and there is significant interest in what CRM onboarding (so use of advertiser data matching) can achieve and how that is implemented.

The paper, which is authored by Realytics and extensively quotes the interviewees, believes France now serves as a model for the rest of Europe when it comes to collaboration as the basis for addressable TV market growth. It points out that France is the only European country where all television channels and ISPs (telcos/service providers with Pay TV) have collaborated and agreed upon common specifications for addressable TV implementation. This includes clear rules and unified reporting for advertisers and agencies, and technology alignments to ensure a seamless viewer experience. SNPTV and AF2M have overseen the development of consistent standards. France has a standardised CPM buying method and uniform targeting, the paper observes.

Five of the TV sales houses (TF1 Publicité, France TV, M6 Publicité, Canal+ Brand Solutions, Altice Média Ads & Connect) have signed with Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom. M6 Publicité is already in the process of signing with Free. Addressable TV can be bought direct or programmatically. Third-party players are heavily involved in this ecosystem to support data (e.g., LiveRamp), performance measurement (e.g., Realytics) and programmatic buying (e.g., Adkymia and TheTradeDesk).

The paper outlines how addressable TV is being used in France today, with targets based on geolocation, household characteristics (e.g., income, family with children) and consumption (heavy to light TV users). By 2021, half of all campaigns used geolocation (and the figure was 52% in H2, 2022, and is expected to be 50% in 2023) with one-quarter based on household characteristics or TV usage.

Rapid growth has been recorded since 2021. Olivier Roberdeau, Head of Multiscreen at Mindshare, is quoted from the previous year’s white paper as he recorded how substitutions grew from 0.5% in January 2021 to 10% in January 2022. By 2022 addressable was gaining traction among traditional TV advertisers as well as new-to-TV advertisers, as witnessed by Isabelle Vignon, General Delegate for Marketing at SNPTV. One executive says the priority is to bring more of the 2,000 existing TV advertisers into this new market. Half of addressable TV advertisers in France are still new to TV, as of 2022.

By 2023, half of addressable TV advertisers came back for more, according to Nathalie Dinis, Deputy Executive, Director of Trade at France Télévisions Publicité. Five sectors stood out as addressable TV users in 2022, the paper says: tourism, retail, services, culture & leisure, and automobile. Beyond geo-targeting, use-cases include reach extension beyond linear TV (including into light TV households).

The white paper notes the importance of measurement. Since March 2021, Médiamétrie has been re-evaluating the corrected Gross Rating Points of broadcasted advertisements that were impacted by addressable TV spots. This recalculation is based on the number of impressions served during these spots.

Mindshare’s Roberdeau is quoted saying: “Advertisers treat addressable TV like digital media and anticipate receiving data similar to digital campaigns to maximise their investments across campaigns. In this regard, the BEE measurement study developed by Realytics presents an excellent opportunity”.

As the paper explains, with BEE, Realytics can deterministically measure the performance of national linear TV, addressable TV, IPTV and Replay TV campaigns in households with Bouygues Telecom TVs. The purpose is to show how complementary different TV-activated devices are, in terms of both audience and online engagement. This includes measurement of audience conversion into website or mobile app activity. In 2022, BEE measured the effectiveness of addressable TV campaigns, including when combined with either a national linear TV campaign or an IPTV Replay campaign.

The white paper suggests that the effectiveness of addressable TV will come under the microscope in 2023, with most sales houses focused on demonstrating the impact via test campaigns conducted near the end of 2022. TV sales houses and ISPs (Pay TV operators) are collaborating in these tests.

Another focus for 2023, and looking ahead, is the use of advertiser CRM data to enhance targeting and personalisation. This first-party data matching comes with both technical and legal hurdles (including the need for new consents), and one executive points to the need for large customer bases to even begin this journey. Additional costs, and therefore higher CPMs, may also need to be factored in. Nevertheless, the paper reports that 2022 saw a significant increase in discussions around this subject.

As of 2022, France Televisions Publicité was offering more addressable TV inventory than BVOD, and between H1 2021 and H1 2022 the French addressable customer base grew by 54% to 6.3 million households, the paper reports. Free’s entry into addressable TV could potentially add 6.9 million more subscribers to the audience pot.

The white paper is 71 pages long, so this summary barely touches the surface. If you want to get the deep-dive, you can download the English language version here. It includes full interviews with all the contributors, in addition to analysis of all the research. The paper argues that ‘addressable TV is strengthening the convergence between TV and digital advertising. The brand-safe environment and high completion rates with digital metrics are reviving the TV medium. TV is positioning itself as a valuable complement to video strategies.”

Vevo represents the music labels, and offers a VOD catalogue of 800,000 titles as well as FAST channels, with its content available through multiple platforms including Samsung TV Plus, Roku, Apple, Amazon and also Pay TV platforms like Sky Q. Vevo on YouTube accounts for a large part of the reach for the music-focused programmer. McGurn describes Vevo as a ‘high reach, low frequency’ solution for advertisers, with that characteristic largely a result of how people watch music videos.

“This is what advertisers come to us for: reach extension with moderate frequency,” he declares. “What is interesting about campaigns on Vevo, from advertisers across consumer electronics to film and auto insurance, is that no matter what you buy from us, we deliver the audience, but frequency never reaches above three. That speaks to the diversity of the video offer. For one advertiser, we had to narrow the reach to dial-up the frequency they wanted, but I think it is a better challenge to increase frequency than deal with too much frequency.”

Vevo has rapidly expanded its FAST channel offering and viewers can now find up to 15 of these linear (ad supported) streamed channels on a typical connected TV platform. This is a lean-back, curated experience and because the channels are genre-based (spanning Pop to Hip-Hop, Country and Latino, for example) or decade-based (e.g., ‘80s or ‘90s) advertisers can reach largely different groups of people via each channel. “There is massive incrementality – as much as 95% incrementality,” reveals McGurn, drawing on research that Vevo presented at the IAB NewFronts in New York.

For consumers, FAST is about removing the decisions needed every four minutes on what to watch next, McGurn says. “It is too much work to constantly choose, and with the curated channels you have passive playback and if you don’t like what is on one channel, you can go to another. We can still keep them [the viewer] on the Vevo network. For us, it is also fun. We like being a curator and that is what the music industry expects from us – we are supposed to be promoters of new music and fandom.”

Asked if Vevo would like to be more than an app on Pay TV/MVPD platforms, in the way that direct-to-consumer streamers like Disney and Netflix are being deeply integrated into the home screen content promotions today, McGurn would only say that “we know our content will be popular wherever it sits, but it is not for us to decide how it should be promoted.” He did admit interest in Vevo appearing within broadcaster streaming (BVOD) services, as some broadcasters start to include third-party content. Vevo is not found in any primary BVOD services yet, “but I would see us as a great content addition in that environment.”

Another part of the Vevo ‘pitch’ to advertisers this year is its increasing understanding of context, down to the detail of what appears within scenes in music videos. This is then used to better match advertising to content. The company already offered mood-based advertising (since February 2021, when advertisers could start buying against moods like ‘heartfelt’ or ‘empowering’, for example). Most recently the company added the ability to match advertising creative to the ‘creative’ look-and-feel of a music video.

Colours, and even the beat of music, can be matched to ads. One illustration shown privately used a music beat and colour-feel that fed exceptionally well into an ad for an electric car. This is better seen than explained, but McGurn gives an example that is easy to imagine: you have an ad creative that is half-human and half-animated, and it might match well against the famous Aha video for Take on Me.

With the help of an AI tech partner, Vevo has also processed its entire music catalogue to find every example where a music video contains a brand representation, whether a coke bottle or a Cadillac car. This has been used to create a targeting package where brands can advertise against the content that contains these images. This is part of a second-by-second analysis of each video to uncover and then label elements of interest, whether logos, items or themes. Advertising packages can also be created for videos tagged with the same keywords – and the example given is ‘beach’ and ‘party’ to create a ‘beach party’ viewing hour, with brand sponsorship available.

McGurn admits the AI-enabled video intelligence does not foretell a tectonic shift in the advertising industry – but it does match advertiser desires for advertising UX innovation. He observes that Vevo can invest in this kind of innovation because its content is evergreen. Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns N’ Roses) received approximately 200 million views across the Vevo network last year, as one illustration of his point.

“You could not do this with television shows because everyone watches them and then they’re done, albeit with some later binge viewing. With music videos, we know the viewing and the ad revenues will be the same in ten years’ time, using the same insights.”

Sky Glass is the revolutionary go-to-market concept that puts the Sky entertainment OS inside a private-labelled Smart TV, removing the need for a set-top box (and removing the requirement for a satellite dish, as it is a streaming-only solution). But Reglinski emphasised that Sky Glass is an experience that can be replicated on multiple endpoints, including streaming puck set-top boxes like Sky Stream. This device takes the Sky Glass UX onto any television set via HDMI.

Where a syndication partner intends to deliver the entertainment OS inside its own Smart TVs (the ‘Smarter than a Smart TV’ vision articulated in current UK consumer advertising), they order the television hardware via Sky, which leverages its now established supply chain. “The experience can be on Sky Glass hardware or Sky Stream – and we can look at putting the experience onto other compatible devices,” Reglinski reveals.

“[Syndication partner] operators can bring their own content, apps and their own brand to the experience. Very importantly, they retain the customer relationship and the billing relationship with their customers, and they are in control of the data and the monetisation of the platform,” Reglinski explained. “The integrations can be very bespoke, depending on the operator, but obviously there will be localisation [e.g., language, content, apps]. They might want a mobile companion app. Often operators want to control how they show content, how it is merchandised, and there is a lot of flexibility in the editorial tooling.”

Sky Glass is powered by the Comcast Global Technology Platform, which is also common to Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex (the streaming-only box that is bundled with broadband in the U.S.), Sky Q and XClass TV. XClass TV is another example of how a Pay TV operator builds its OS into a Smart TV, only this time it is the Comcast entertainment UX, and it is a third-party branded Smart TV maker that provides the hardware (i.e., Hisense models in the U.S.), sold in retail stores without the need for an Xfinity subscription (including outside of Comcast’s geographic service footprint).

Reglinski pointed to the scale of the Comcast Global Technology Platform: 75 million [broadband and streaming] connected devices are running off this now, with 40m voice commands processed a day, as an example of scale for just one advanced feature (voice search and command). The American MVPD Cox and the Canadian BDUs Shaw, Rogers and Videotron are already syndication partners for the Global Technology Platform, with Cox making use of the X1 OS/UX since late 2015.

The Syndication of Sky Glass has already begun, with Foxtel in Australia and Multichoice in South Africa signed up. “Foxtel was the first and they signed up even before the Sky Glass launch in the UK,” Reglinski confirms. “We are currently in the process of getting them onto the platform.”

Why is the Sky/Comcast group syndicating Sky Glass in the first place, given it has significant scale for its tech platform and development already? According to Reglinski, “A lot of Pay TV operators and telcos face the same challenges we do, and there is an opportunity for global MVPDs [Pay TV operators] to power their entertainment and connectivity services via our platform. We are excited by the chance to bring this [Sky Glass] experience to as many consumers as possible.

“Secondly, platform scale benefits everyone. The more investment we make in our platform the more innovation we can drive, and the more consumers and operators benefit globally.” She says syndication partners find this appealing, given the need to keep ahead of consumers, who are becoming more demanding.

“It is important that this is not a standard technology relationship,” she added. “We are developing true partnerships here, and the [syndication] customers we bring into our system want flexibility, including how they talk to their consumers, and they get quite a lot of control on how that is done.”

Reglinski views the Sky Glass model as a new market opportunity for syndication partners. “We’ve learnt from our own markets that if you launch a proposition that is rooted in true consumer insight and simplicity and you take that to market in a way that talks to consumers, you can break into a new segment and drive customer satisfaction. There are lots of learnings from the Sky and Comcast go-to-market approaches and operators are really interested in us sharing those learnings and helping them to drive their business objectives.

“This is not a point-in-time purchase – you are buying into a roadmap and benefit from all the investments and innovations that we introduce for our own consumers over time. Even in ‘live’ we get unique requests from partners, and we consider those as we develop the platform. And of course, there is live operational support.”

Michelle Reglinski was speaking at Connected TV World Summit.

ViewersLogic claims that its panel-based, single-source data represents a revolution in measuring media effectiveness. On its website, it declares: “Reach, frequency, attention and emotional response are inaccurate proxies that are used to try to answer the real question – how did people change their behaviour after being exposed to your campaign? Stop measuring uncorrelated proxies and start measuring the actual uplift of your campaign.”

It gives examples of real outcomes, like product purchase, sign-up or website visits. Sales lift, and incremental app store visits and app downloads, can be linked back to TV ad exposure. As well as helping to demonstrate campaign ROI, the ViewersLogic technology shows how each cross-platform channel contributed to success.

The company offers a long list of how exposure measurement and/or advanced attribution can be used to boost media planning and campaign strategy. These span customer targeting, competitor customer targeting, inflight media mix optimisation, assessing competitor campaign performance, benchmarking against past campaigns, benchmarking against competitor campaigns, and more. All of this is underpinned by some smart technology for demonstrating when someone is in front of a television when an ad is played, and inventive use of GDPR to generate a waterfall of precious, free purchasing data.

ViewersLogic recruits its panellists online and they download the ViewersLogic app to their smartphones. They are incentivised to give access to their data: data collection is rewarded with points (the more data, the more points) and these are turned into Amazon vouchers. In return, the phone app is permitted to sync with a set-top box and track channel changes (by ‘speaking’ with the STB via the home Wi-Fi router, rather than directly). This syncing is also possible with some Smart TV models from LG and Samsung if viewers are using the Freeview service (UK free-to-air television) on them.

At the same time, the app senses the signal from all local Wi-Fi routers (in the home and from neighbours) to create a reception fingerprint that is unique for each room in a building. This Wi-Fi triangulation means the phone, carrying the app, can be located to a specific room. ViewersLogic looks at where the channel change takes place, and as 70-80% of the channel changes happen when the phone owner is in a specific room, this is used to determine that the television set is in this room. The company can therefore demonstrate ‘person present in front of television’. You can read more detail about the methodology at the bottom of this story – ultimately the system uses a probability threshold that is acceptable to advertisers.

Using BARB data, ViewersLogic then interrogates channel playout schedules to see which ads were shown at which times on the tuned-in channel, to make the connection between person present and the precise ads they were exposed to.

According to Ronny Golan, CEO and Co-Founder at ViewersLogic: “It takes two minutes for a panellist to sign up. The whole process is totally GDPR compliant because the app does nothing except collect your data and pay you money. There is a very clear value exchange there. The app tracks television behaviour, phone behaviour and location to show offline behaviour. We track activity right through to purchasing.

“Think of our app as a remote-control app that is not controlling anything. To see if our panellist is in front of the television, we look at Wi-Fi signal strength, using AI. You need to be carrying the phone, and most people do when watching TV, but if the phone is not present we will not consider it a view, as we cannot show someone is in front of the TV.”

ViewersLogic does not rely on ACR (automatic content recognition) for its UK operations, but Golan says this can be part of the solution and the company is talking to ACR vendors in other markets. “There are several technologies we can use – the architecture means we can change how we collect the data.”

ViewersLogic has found a way to access some of the most valuable purchase data available anywhere to show the downstream impact of the ad exposures. It gets free access to supermarket loyalty card data, like from Tesco Clubcard, by working GDPR laws to its advantage.

“GDPR is our greatest friend,” Golan declares. “When the law came out, everyone was afraid, but we were counting down the days until it arrived. Loyalty cards know everything you buy, but it is not their data, it is your data, and they must give it back to you in machine readable format on request. You [the consumer] can make a request through their website, so with the full consent of our users [panellists], we make a GDPR request on their behalf and ask for the data to be sent to ViewersLogic. The law says the data can go to a third-party – that is data portability’.”

Golan says loyalty card data is available for most of the ViewersLogic panel, and a subset of the panel can be assessed using both loyalty card data and NielsenIQ (Retail Measurement) data, which tracks sales in physical stores as well as ecommerce. He says his company is processing 2 billion data points every day. The solution keeps data live for a year so brands can interrogate the impact of older campaigns. Viewers can be split into exposed and non-exposed groups to show campaign effect.

The company claims it offers a better understanding of exposure-to-impact than alternative solutions and has various case studies to show what has been achieved. Proven brand uplift is one example, and another shows the value of a sponsorship when sponsorship was combined with regular TV ads (vs regular TV ads without sponsorship). ViewersLogic says new-to-TV brands can learn from what other brands have achieved in their sector, too.

The company, which has a UK HQ and R&D in Tel Aviv, claims it is disrupting ‘traditional’ attribution models that fuse data from different silos to find what it describes as “weak correlations between ad viewing and sales”. The innovation includes the option to extend the attribution window beyond the five-minutes considered typical on ‘traditional’ attribution models to one-week and beyond.

There are no patents on the ViewersLogic solution, with Golan declaring that “in software, patents don’t protect you, only good software engineering”. He points to barriers to replicating the ViewersLogic approach. “With data and AI, you have to develop technology to collect the data and then collect the data for a year before you can create a model to train your AI on, and you also have to build the panel,” he points out.

The ViewersLogic methodology – some more detail

To establish ‘person present in front of TV’, the mobile phone (containing the ViewersLogic panel app) constantly checks for Wi-Fi networks and every couple of minutes relays the results of this ‘survey’. ViewersLogic compares the fingerprint of the survey with the fingerprint of the rooms in the house (to determine which room the panellist is in).

What if the phone is on charge in the kitchen, where there is a television set playing, but the panellist is in their front room reading a book?

Golan admits this would cause a wrong reading, “but when you look at the entire data, these cases are so rare they do not affect the results of our analysis. We can know if the phone is being charged and the last time you touched it, and, for example, decide not to use the TV data if the phone is being charged and was not used for more than an hour. From our research, these cases are very rare.”

To cope with someone moving from watching television in one room to watching a different television in another room, each viewing instance would be treated as a separate process, with the viewing combined at the data analysis phase. Golan explains: “We connect to all the supported TVs and STBs in your house and constantly collect their data. We constantly get Wi-Fi survey results from the phone. We do nothing in real-time, but when we analyse the data, we only consider TV viewing if you are in the room with the TV.”

What about if someone is hanging around in the doorway, watching the television on their way to leaving the room – how does ViewersLogic understand whether you are ‘inside the border’ where you can still be watching TV, or outside it? Golan says: “The AI algorithm that looks at the in-house location gives us a probability that you are in the room – so if you are in the middle of the room, the probability that you are in the room will be very high, and when you are in the doorway it will be smaller.

“Clearly, we do not have an exact map of the house, so we decided that we consider you to be watching TV only if the probability is very high. We have performed a lot of testing to define this.”