This topic gets a lot of attention these days.  DRMetrix clients often ask, “When will DRMetrix monitor over-the-top (OTT) or connected television (CTV) campaigns?”.  At the moment, we can only reply, “We don’t know” but we hope this blog post will provide some clarity and perspective on the topic.

As the evolution of the smart TV has taken root, the hope has been that these, and other smart devices such as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, etc., would be able to use automated content recognition (ACR) technology to track and confirm ad delivery at the consumer glass or device level.  Unfortunately, each OTT provider is currently operating within their own walled garden.  That is to say, that they have imposed contractual requirements that prohibit the use of automated content recognition (ACR) technology, which is required for ad monitoring.

There are a couple of basic requirements for ACR ad monitoring to work:

1.  The smart TV or device needs a reference database of commercial fingerprints to be able to recognize specific commercials.
2.  The smart TV or device needs to be running ACR technology to be able to compare live audio or video data against this database to find commercial matches.

Requirement 1 refers to “Ad Discovery” where technology attempts to detect ad breaks and looks for unknown ad content.  Today, human operators need to review unknown content to discover new ads from which to create unique ACR fingerprints.  When a new ad is identified, it must also be properly associated to the advertiser, brand, industry category, etc.  If advertisers decide to run unique ads for OTT and CTV campaigns, it would be difficult for companies like DRMetrix to gain access to these commercials in advance for fingerprinting purposes.   That said, it would be feasible for DRMetrix to detect OTT and/or CTV airings for existing national ads that we already have in our database.

Requirement 2 is reliant on requirement 1.  Additionally, the consumer owned smart TV or smart devices would have to be running ACR technology as this is what enables the recognition of unique ads.  Here is where the OTT companies have effectively created their “walled garden” model.  The smart TV and smart device manufacturers have to negotiate with the OTT companies in order to carry their apps.  This is currently playing out between Roku and Google’s Youtube TV where recently both parties have been unable to come to terms where Roku is willing to continue carrying the Youtube TV app.  Historically, the OTT companies have made it a requirement, as part of their contractual negotiations, that the smart devices must turn off their ACR capability once a consumer launches the OTT’s company’s app.  If the device manufacturer doesn’t agree, then they are not allowed to carry the app.  This is a struggle between opposing interests with consumers caught in the middle.  Unfortunately, this means that the smart TV or smart device is unable to use ACR (point #2 above) as a method of detecting ads being delivered to consumers through their devices.  This is a big challenge currently which is only dwarfed by the issue of consumer privacy with many consumers turning off the ACR features of their smart TV or smart device by simply opting out.  Some consumers don’t want their electronic devices spying on them and reporting to third parties the programming and commercials they are watching.  Both of these issues make point #2 above impossible which is the only way these devices can report on the commercials that are being delivered to individual consumers.

These are some of the issues that frustrate the monitoring of OTT campaigns.  CTV campaigns are somewhat similar in that they are targeted to specific consumers where one encounters the issues of ad discovery (requirement 1) and ACR ad recognition (requirement 2).  It has been difficult to determine upon ad recognition whether said ad is being inserted as part of a CTV campaign vs. a local cable or regional ad insertion.  There may be ways to solve these problems but it would require working with individual smart TV and/or smart device companies each of which would only provide a partial view of the marketplace.  The limiting factors are the scale that any one smart TV or smart device manufacturer has as well as how many of their users have not opted out of the ACR ad monitoring features.  Because there hasn’t been enough consolidation in the marketplace to date, the costs of collaborating with various smart TV and/or smart device companies continues to be cost prohibitive.  Of course, this may change in the future.

At DRMetrix, we have talked about subscribing to a variety of services and doing ad discovery and ACR ad recognition off of the OTT streams.  The problem is, DRMetrix would be one consumer of many and the ads we would see and report on would be of limited value.  For example, we could report those commercials that we discover running on our individual OTT streams but we would not be able to report on the size, scale, airings, or ad expenditures of various OTT campaigns.  As we would love your feedback on this issue, please consider leaving us a comment or question!

Following the success of it’s AdSphere™ research system, DRMetrix has been introducing a host of new features for its airing verification service known as “AVS”.

Unlike AdSphere™, AVS™ can be used to track airings for brand as well as direct-to-consumer campaigns.

Agencies and advertisers are finding AVS™ to be the most cost effective solution for tracking airings across 130+ national cable networks.  Airings data can be pulled down on a near real-time basis by integrating with the AVS™ API and/or agencies can pull down airings into media buying systems such as CORE on a daily basis.  AVS™ has recently integrated with Core Connect to completely automate the process.

AVS™ allows users to subscribe to their own campaigns as well as competitive campaigns. A built in custom report generator allows users to create individual outputs for different team members.  If an agency team is working on a particular account, they can receive airings data delivered for that campaign, as well as key competitive campaigns, on a daily and/or weekly basis.  The user interface of AVS™ is incredibly easy to use allowing different team members to login and setup their own outputs without requiring IT support.

AVS™ is capable of reporting the “break type” for each airing detected on national cable networks allowing agencies to differentiate between national and local “DPI” break airings.  For compatibility, users can assign their own network codes by network and break type.  This eliminates the traditional requirement to pay for two encodings to separate airings by break type.  In fact, AVS™ doesn’t require creative encoding so there is no costly requirement to replace air tapes in order to test drive the AVS™ service!

As part of a suite of automation tools, agencies can use the new AVS™ creative upload feature to have their creatives pre-registered before going to air.  This way, airings data is immediately available.  Users can also assign ISCI codes, unique creative names, and more as part of their creative submission.

Last, but certainly not least, DRMetrix launched a new BI tool called AVS™ Dashboards.  Now, in addition to pulling down airings data, AVS™ users can visualize airings data across multiple brand-campaigns and share the interactive reporting with colleagues and clients.  Unlike expensive BI tools such as Tableau, Microsoft BI, etc., the use of AVS™ dashboards is completely free and agencies can setup as many dashboards as they desire to share internally and/or with third parties.  The framework designed for AVS™ dashboards can be completely customized by users on a fee basis.  This is a great solution for agencies or anyone who wishes to customize their own BI solution building on DRMetrix’s existing AVS™ dashboard framework.

To learn more about the new AVS™ Dashboard offering, please click to watch the video below.

For clients interested in using AVS data with Google Data Studio, DRMetrix has created the DRMetrix AVS™ Connector. Information on how to use the new connector can be found by clicking here.

Existing AdSphere™ subscribers have access to a free tier of AVS™ which allows them to monitor unlimited creatives for up to 20 brand-campaigns a year.  If users require more, they can purchase additional brand-campaign subscriptions as needed.  Rather than charging by creative, DRMetrix charges a yearly fee of either $250 or $150 for each additional brand-campaign subscription which includes reporting for unlimited creatives for 12 months.  At the $250 rate, users can switch monitoring from one brand-campaign to another at any time throughout the year.  At $150 the monitoring is limited to a single brand-campaign for 12 months.  Over the course of the year, whether a brand/campaign launches one or dozens of new creatives, all are covered under one low yearly fee.

If you would like to learn more about AVS™, or AVS Dashboards™, please contact DRMetrix at info@drmetrix.com

It’s been a long time coming. With our latest AdSphere build, 28.5 minute airings will be treated as any other format allowing users to rollup total airings and spend by brand. Similar to other creative lengths, you’ll also be able to filter 28.5 minute creatives by product, lead generation, and brand/DR classifications. Instead of having separate brand classification sections for short and long form, there will instead be a single Brand Classification button as shown here.

When you open up the Brand Classification menu, this is what you’ll now see. All creative lengths have been unified and may now be selected which is the new default in AdSphere.

One of the things we love the most is that you can now bring all of the short and long form airings & spend together in a single view. Users won’t need to create separate short and long form reports anymore! For example, if you want a single report showing all new short and long form brands, this will now be possible. Gone are the days of having to view short and long form creatives separately.

If you would prefer to exclude long form airings, all you’ll need to do is open up the brand classification filter and unclick the 28.5m format.

For retailers using Adsphere™, they’ll be able to receive a single weekly excel output showing the aggregated spend for each ASONTV brand which will include both its short and long form spend.

We look forward to your feedback! Feel free to comment here or send an email to feedback@drmetrix.com

Coming soon!

Easy to build, real time competitive dashboards are coming!  Creating these dashboards will be free to all existing AdSphere clients.  They will be configurable within DRMetrix’s AVS system and each dashboard can be customized for specific groups of brands & creatives.   Bundled with AdSphere, AVS access includes monitoring for unlimited creatives for up to 20 brands a year.  Any of these creatives or brands can be utilized with any number of easy to create dashboards!

Please click on the image below to launch our Youtube Video overview of the types of data visualizations that will be included in the first generation of these configurable competitive dashboards!

DRMetrix released its newest 5 x 5 industry study today as a revision to its prior study released at the end of Q3 ’19.  The new study includes the complete data set for 2019 and well as an updated section regarding television attribution challenges & solutions.

DRMetrix has also been tracking the recent impacts of Covid-19 on the direct-to-consumer television industry by providing a daily/week interactive tracking page on its website.

On behalf of everyone at DRMetrix, we wish safety and health to all of our industry friends during these trying times.  We will get through this together and, for those of us spending quality time at home, we hope this ‘light’ reading material will help the time pass quickly.

TV viewing should be on the rise due to the coronavirus pandemic leaving millions of Americans housebound.  For direct-to-consumer television campaigns, who are able to measure consumer response and campaign performance in real time, will greater television viewership levels help to sustain the industry or will there be a pull back?  The U.S. economy relies heavily on consumer spending so how consumers respond to this type of advertising in coming days will determine the impact to this 17.8 billion dollar industry sector.  If traditional brand advertisers pull back, will we see more direct-to-consumer advertising filling the gap and, if so, what types?

To help answer these questions, DRMetrix has published a new interactive chart on its website that shows the daily airing count (ad units) for different classifications of direct-to-consumer advertising across 130 national networks monitored by its AdSphere research system.  The chart shows ad units by day beginning March 1 and will update daily.  One can see a recurring decrease in ad units on weekends which is normal.  It may take a week or two before the chart begins to paint a picture of what’s happening.

CLICK PICTURE ABOVE TO SEE LIVE CHART

Traditional Direct Response (“DR”) Campaigns 

(Campaigns using differing phone, web, or SMS codes in order to better track consumer results back to specific networks, dayparts, and TV creatives).

Short Form Products – Traditional call-to-order $19.95 types of campaigns.
Lead Generation – Campaigns that don’t advertise the full price of the product or service (ie: call for free information)
28.5 Minute Infomercials – Those late night program length advertisements

Brand/Direct Campaigns

(Campaigns using a single vanity phone or URL which makes it more challenging to measure the immediate impact of television)

Vanity 800 – Campaigns using a vanity 800 call to action
Web/Mobile/SMS – Campaigns that use a vanity web, mobile app, or SMS call to action

To learn more about these classifications, and historical trends over the past 5 years, please download DRMetrix’s latest industry study.

DRMetrix wishes to extend our thoughts and prayers for everyone’s safety and health during these trying times.  As an industry, we will get through this together.  Due to the cancellation of PDMI East, we will be celebrating our industry’s accomplishments, and honoring the top advertisers of 2019, at PDMI West in September.

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3/25/2020 Update – New “Cause of Change” section has been added to the report today.  For each brand classification, the top 10 daily brands are listed with the number of (+) plus or (-) minus ad units compared to the prior day.  Each brand listed includes a clickable play link.  Enjoy!

4/14/20 Update – Added toggle at top of graph to switch between daily or weekly data views.  Access historic cause of change results for any prior day or week by “clicking on” data points in top graph.  

We are dripping some new features on top of the FEB 2020 build which we’ll outline at the top of this post.

4-9-2020 Update – All ranking excel outputs now feature nested details on tab two (see image below). The excel outputs will take a little longer to run but now include all creative level details including play buttons good for 30 days. Now, it’s easier than ever to share creative details! Applying various filters to the ranking report, saving your filter settings, and using our new email automation features, allow for all kinds of exciting reporting options. Checkout our new updated Adsphere User Guide for all of the details!

3-5-2020 Update – We have made some minor UI enhancements to the main ranking system and included totals for airings and spend in the header of all ranking reports. This will make it much easier to trend spend levels over time without having to output a ranking report and total sum the columns. Here’s how it looks:

These totals have also been added to the header of all excel ranking reports (see below).

AdSphere’s user interface has been updated to work better across different screen resolutions on desktops as well as laptops. Support for tablets and eventually mobile devices is planned for later this year.

We are also pleased to introduce a new Dark Mode for AdSphere which replaces the prior black theme. This is a far more comprehensive graphic treatment that we hope will make AdSphere easier on the eyes for some.

Introducing Advertiser & Brand Lists

We are excited to bring forth a new game changing feature to AdSphere called “Lists” which allows one to create and save a custom list of advertisers or brands. When a saved list is applied to the ranking system, airings data will be filtered for just those specific advertisers or brands. Up to 100 brands or advertisers can be saved per list. There is no limit on the number of lists that can be created and shared with other AdSphere users on your company’s account.

In November of last year, AdSphere introduced a new network excel feature that maps the spend for all advertisers or brands on a ranking report across networks, dayparts, and programs. Now, by combining these two features, one can map the aggregated spend across a custom list of advertisers or brands. Multi-advertiser & brand analysis is now possible saving time and improving results!

Below please find a video tutorial showing how to create a custom list of advertisers or brands. You’ll also learn how to apply that list to the ranking system and run a custom network excel output!

Update to Global Search

When using Global Search in AdSphere, you can now put quotes around a search term or phrase to limit results to exact full word/phrase matches.

As an example, in the case of Copper Fit (without quotes) approximately 111 brands are returned that have some association with either the word Copper or Fit. In contrast, search for “Copper Fit” (with quotes) narrows the results down to just 17 brands with the exact phrase “Copper Fit” in the name.

With new builds, we’re always on the hunt for bugs. If you find anything that seems odd, please send a report to support@drmetrix.com Thank you in advance for your help!