7 Leading Voices at the Forefront of Video on Data-Informed Storytelling and Brand Safety

That will include direct-to-consumer brands eager to spin first-party data into next-generation marketing including video in all its forms, ranging from 6-second ads to long form as well as ad-supported OTT and social video. Adweek was pleased to once again host our annual NewFronts roundtable in partnership with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) at our headquarters in New York. Six industry execs who live and breathe in the burgeoning digital video market, along with moderator Anna Bager, evp of industry initiatives at the IAB, held an engaging and animated hour-long conversation on key forces shaping their respective platforms, content production and businesses.

At the fore of the discussion was the importance of listening to audiences’ needs across the myriad platforms—traditional, mobile and social—to create better-quality content and more effective branded efforts for clients, many of whom are still huddled in experimental mode. And that’s largely because of brand safety concerns in this millennial-driven ecosystem with new rules and light-speed cycles of fame and fade. Facing those concerns, the panelists discussed new processes and relationship mandates that they hope will calm CMO worries that his or her video output will be seen by the right audience in an appropriate environment for messaging. Here are their words.

Anna Bager (IAB): I want to start with those of you that are new to the NewFronts this year. That would be ESPN, Viacom and Meredith. Why did you decide to get involved and what are you most excited about this year? We can start with Viacom.

Kelly Day (Viacom): So this is the first year that Viacom in a long time has really heavily invested in digital content, in particular Viacom Digital Studios just launched four months ago. So it’s a relatively new venture and we were really excited to have the opportunity to tell the story about what we’re doing and to reach a wide audience in a very cohesive way and be able to talk about everything that’s going on. We’ve got a lot of new shows coming up, and with the acquisitions of VidCon and WhoSay, we feel like there’s a great story to tell.

Stan Pavlovsky (Meredith): As you mentioned, we’re sort of new to this event. Our colleagues at Time Inc. have been committed to NewFronts for the past five years and we’re bringing a couple of iconic companies together so that we feel this is a pretty good opportunity to tell the story of the new Meredith and our capabilities and our scale in video.

Travis Howe (ESPN): I think for ESPN we think that it’s an important time for us to participate to actually help set some strategy around what we see the future of sports to be, in addition to livestreaming, which we think is going to be a critical part of the digital ecosystem, but also ways in which you can tell stories around the game and storytelling about the game, whether it’s original content or breaking news and highlights. And so we think that this time of year is right for us given where sports sits and the conversation around engaging audiences and the role that we see in setting that strategy.

Bager: How about from founding partners YouTube and Google as well as veterans Twitter and Studio71?

Tara Walpert Levy (Google): When we first put it together that it was just an incredibly important moment for people to understand the trends in terms of how consumers are behaving and engaging with video and TV in a broader sense. And it’s awesome for us to see how it’s gone from like six partners back in the day to dozens. That reflects the vision that people are consuming content in fundamentally new ways. And I think the fact that you also have some traditional players at the table speaks to the fact that Nielsen says it’s very difficult to reach half the country via traditional TV.

Matt Derella (Twitter): For Twitter it came from us hearing from our customers who asked us to participate to show what we were doing with news, sports and entertainment. So we did and were able, I think, to present something that’s different than taking television and putting it on a mobile device, for example. We’re really trying to work with our partners to reimagine sports, news and entertainment for our mobile-first audience.

Reza Izad (Studio71): So yes, the NewFronts have always been a great stage to do announcements around big content partnerships. But with all the brand safety and adjacency conversations, we’re seeing a lot of demand from the holding companies to do real commitments. We think going forward it’s going to be more important because there’s going to be a lot more scarcity around adjacency.

Bager: In a world of so many shows, networks and platforms, what are your best practices for marketing new content?

Derella: The secret ingredient Twitter has is the conversations happening on Twitter. It is happening there first and that becomes the most powerful way for us to actually program. In addition, it really helps if you have incredible engineers working on products that are driving discoverability. So one of the things that we’ll be talking about at the NewFronts is some of the enhancements that we’re bringing to the service that’s really going to allow content to be surfaced to our audiences in a way that’s really timely and relevant and will help connect people with what they’re most passionate about.

Izad: One thing you have to figure out if you’re a content producer is the algorithms that everyone’s putting into place. It has become really important in understanding how you optimize your content in those feeds. Whether it’s on Netflix, which has a whole set of tools that recommend content, and YouTube and Instagram, Twitter and so on. It’s really changing how you’re producing and what you’re producing so that you’re really meeting the demands of those platforms.

Day: I would agree with that. For us it’s about having a really platform specific programming strategy first. Long gone are the days where you could create a piece of content or create a show and just distribute it everywhere. With Twitter it’s completely different, it’s about tapping into pop culture moments. Viacom has all these amazing cultural events like the VMAs the BET Experience, the Kids Choice Awards were a couple of weeks ago and Twitter is a perfect platform for leaning into those moments and capturing those moments. I think it really does start with thinking about what is the audience doing in that environment and creating shows and experiences in working with talent that resonate there.We’re really looking platform by platform and saying what’s going to work for that audience and then taking it a step further and saying “ok who are the talent or celebrities that dominate those platforms and how do we develop shows in conjunction with them?” With YouTube, obviously, it’s really working with YouTubers, it’s partnering with YouTubers and really looking at them as creative partners and thinking about how we develop projects in conjunction with them.

Walpert Levy:So when we green lit Cobra Kai, it was because we’d seen over a billion views of Karate Kid clips on YouTube, and that makes it easier when you then go to market to have that built-in audience.

Izad: All the marketing in the world is not going to overcome programming that misses the mark. So content is key.

Howe: For us, we have to get really good at predictive modeling around where we think the best games are going to be, how do we highlight those games and where we make those games available. But I also think the second part of our content strategy is telling the story around the game. So much of what we also do is about the breaking news; it’s also about the original series, it’s about creating fandom around their favorite team, their favorite player, their favorite league. And so for us a lot of it has to do with watching user behavior and actually doing listening per platform.

Bager: How do you balance the super fan niche content with more broad-based content distributed at the traditional notion of scale?

Howe: We have learned something very interesting in looking at our partnerships with some of our social partners. We have realized that 85 percent of our audience skew under the age of 35 or under the age of 25. So that’s a very different programming approach to SportsCenter, for example, than we would have historically taken. They don’t necessarily want to watch the SportsCenter that we have on our network, so it’s required for the vernacular or the tone and even the structure of that programming to live in an individual outlet like Snapchat, for example.

Pavlovsky: We’re pretty passionate about this topic and we debate it a lot. I think a lot of the innovation actually happens in niche programming—something for a particular audience that’s interested in, for example, pets, like our Paws & Claws series on PeopleTV. When you bring in those audiences that are extremely passionate, I think you have a real opportunity to then expose them to much broader programming and to differentiate what your brand stands for.

Walpert Levy: One thing that has been interesting is that the living room is actually the fastest-growing platform for YouTube. And one of the things that surprised us as we looked at the viewing patterns between television and mobile and desktop, the distinction is not as big as you would think. So we do see much longer session times in many cases on the television, but often they’re going in and out from short form to long form and back. And similarly we see a significant number of consumers will watch long form on mobile. I think it really helps us see that convergence not just between traditional TV and online video, but across device types in a way that I don’t know that people expect. And it just goes back to this theme that the consumer is driving the bus.

Derella: For example, we see that the conversation on Twitter around Game of Thrones just explodes after episodes. And that’s something that marketers really want to be attached to. They want to be around things that are big and popular and happening in culture. I think that’s a big opportunity that’s on CMOs’ minds. How do I better understand this trend toward non-ad-supported, high-quality video and how do I also connect with those users and those people that are watching it?

James Cooper: What are brand marketers underestimating about the video space and its evolution in the next 18 months?

Walpert Levy: Clients are still wrestling with how to define quality. Historically there’s been a very traditional, very ecosystem-driven definition of what quality looks like and it’s very high production and it’s typically long form. And we don’t see consumers making those same choices. What’s going to continue to be an important translation point over the next 18 months is really recognizing how you balance the environment that you feel safe in as a brand with what consumers are saying they’re passionate about and are paying attention to.

Izad: It’s surprising how many agencies we go into and ask, have you heard of Rhett and Link who’ve been on the platform for 10-plus years, and many people don’t even know who they are. That’s one of the biggest challenges: How do you cut through the clutter? Because there’s actually a ton of really well-produced content on the platform and it’s not just a bunch of kids on skateboards or whatever those old adages are. It’s the audience that isn’t watching TV. It’s the audience that everyone talks about but no one seems to understand where they fit into the cultural landscape.

Walpert Levy: I’d actually push back on that a tiny bit. I think it’s one of the areas where clients and agencies are making huge strides.

Izad: They definitely have, but it’s surprising given the investment they’re making how little they know about what they’re seeing. That’s been our perspective, and we go out and sell individual channels and it’s surprising how much work we have to do to create that market for these creators.

Bager: How do you leverage your data, your specific audiences and really the connection you have with them to create better content as well as branded content?

Howe: Talking about direct to consumer, brands are coming to I think all of us looking to how they can get closest to the audience. I think for us particularly, sports can be very emotional. It’s one of the only pieces of content where you can see grown adults cry whether or not their team won or lost. Sometimes it’s hard to determine who they’re crying for, but sports can have a very emotional response. And I think for us we’ve had to use that information to the best of the advantage of the marketer.

Pavlovsky: For branded content to be successful it requires a really good understanding of the audience. So through data and insights we have had a lot of success with clients in starting the conversation and having multiyear relationships. But what happens during the creative process is you’re trying to provide those insights around this custom content and then you have a negotiation process with the client to make sure that they’re happy. It’s bridging that gap between what we think will resonate with consumers and the perception that the client has around the content and the message that they want to tell about their brand. So having that data and being able to quickly react and shift is critical as you’re working with clients to optimize.

Cooper: What’s your take on ad length and the proper balance?

Day: So if we all thought it was hard to get people to watch a 30-second commercial, try getting an 18-year-old to stop scrolling Snapchat. These are really hard environments and very noisy environments to get consumers to stop and pay attention, whether it’s to your advertisement or a show. We acquired WhoSay earlier this year because we believe that having solutions for advertisers that involve everything from creating short-form spots to longer-form programming to in-store shopper activations is the way that advertising is going, and that we need to be a solutions-driven organization and to create all different types of experiences that are going to help people stop scrolling and pay attention to your message.

Cooper: What’s the most important thing you need to be doing now to make sure that your video capability will be important and relevant in the next two years?

Day: I think for publishers across the board we all have to be incredibly agile and flexible and responsive in how and what we’re producing. We all have to be really good at understanding how consumers navigate these platforms; they’re on everything. If you watch the way young people interact with their phones, they just go through these platforms at the speed of light. So over time as distribution becomes increasingly social, increasingly mobile, there’s basic blocking and tackling skills about knowing who the talent is, what the audience does and how to create content in these environments. You just have to be ready for anything.

Howe: It’s about continuing to aggregate the ecosystem that works today and looking at how you’re bringing in new platforms, whether for a moment or for a longer period of time in figuring out what that new platform means to your existing viewing ecosystem and then figuring out how you program accordingly based off of the viewing habits. And I think that that’s where data and technology play an interesting role in addition to the storytelling that happens on that individual platform.

Izad: So as I look across the room, whether it’s Viacom or ESPN or Meredith and Time, we’ve been working really closely for years and we look at our role in this digital landscape as a bridge, not an island. As a chance for us to bring the best of what we have, to bring new reach to these platforms, these content creators that make sense in our platform. It’s really important that we continue to nurture and build those partnerships even deeper, building off the foundation of the last five years. I think that really sets us up for a real balance in the marketplace where there’s a lot more choice for advertisers and consumers.

Bager: Obviously a huge issue in the ecosystem is brand safety. Where are we now in its evolution and what will drive important gains?

Pavlovsky: I think it would be great for the ANA and the 4A’s and the IAB, et cetera, to come up with some guidelines that media buyers can work with. There are a lot of different components to brand safety, and we haven’t even talked about data and data privacy. So I think we’re quite a bit away from having consistency in terms of a way to measure. Plus there’s so many different formats and we talked about different lengths and different contexts. But we definitely welcome more standardization and we’ll build around it.

Derella: We just try to simplify it. For marketers, if you want to be in control, we have a solution that allows you to pick specifically the content you want to run adjacent to. Some want more than others, and for us we just put that control in their hands so they can decide rather than us trying to arbitrate what is premium or what is safe.

Day: Viacom has always had a very strong position about brand safety because we operate in a kids brand. It is obviously a very sensitive issue for us and one that we take our role in quite seriously. I think that the simplest way that we have solved for it barring larger sort of macro changes is that we generally control our sales rates. So we like to be able to promise to advertisers that if you know that you buy from Viacom, we’re only going to run your ads in a brand safe.

Walpert Levy: I think this is such a critically important topic, and frankly the new explosion of content models and consumer attention is going to mean we’re going to have to pay attention to getting to a new normal for a long time. I will say, though, we clearly learned a lot the hard way along with many of our partners for which I think we apologized many times and will again. But I think the good news is that from that learning we announced a whole slew of brand safety initiatives at the beginning of this year that we’ve gotten tremendous feedback on from our clients. One of the fan favorites is that there will not be an ad that runs against the Google Preferred lineup at the upfront that is not vetted by a human. And there are other things that surround third-party verification and better algorithm signals. I think that continues to be a decent amount of work for our agencies and our brands. So I think we’re getting easier; I don’t know that we’re close to easy just yet.