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Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
From GRPs to Outcomes: The New Playbook for Convergent TV with Tatari
00:13:27
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- [00:01]
A
This podcast is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in our industry. And that's exactly what the show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to the Build with Mike o' Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
All right, welcome to Market. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm here with Mike Fogarty from Tatari. You are the head of brand and agency partnerships there. So thanks for joining me.
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C
I'm excited to be here and do this with you.
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B
Yeah, yeah. We're here at Possible. If it wasn't obvious, what are you hoping to get out of Possible?
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C
This is actually my fourth Possible, so I've been to the last three. It's been incredible to see its growth, but to me it's always the serendipitous network conversations, seeing friends and family and colleagues from the space and just fruitful conversations on the ground. Want to try to catch some content. But there's a lot, there's some joke
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B
here with it being possible every year at some point it's got to be actual, right?
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C
Indeed. I mean, I know the big theme last year was that this is the US can, that was seemingly the US the framework on the ground. But I would say again, they're doing a great job. It's great to have another avenue and something on the circuit to engage with peers and partnerships.
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B
Absolutely. So let's talk about tv. So you talked to a lot of brands. Brands have been the lifeblood of the television industry for, I don't know, 80 years. What's changing? What are they interested in now? How are their expectations changing?
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C
Yeah, I would say that if I specifically go to a chief marketing officer, kind of ahead of growth inside of brands, obviously they're trying to make things very performant and go beyond the GRP of reach and frequency from Nielsen metrics. And so they have to be very outcome driven. And so as always, brands who are VC funded and perform and have to justify every dollar in expenditure. And I think it's great to see that we are now moving to this mindset of outcome driven mentality of bias. Sure.
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B
Well, outcomes, how that means a lot of things for some people it's, it's clicks and conversions on a website, but a lot of brands don't want that. So tell me about Kind of the breadth of conversations with brands and what they, what they mean by outcomes, what they want.
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C
Yeah. And to your point, so outcomes could mean reaching frequency to some people or basically site visits where I feel like the ceiling was, or maybe search lift, which by the way, they still do look at today. But where we look at it and where brands are really driven is incrementality or IROAs or those types of metrics where there's further justification towards did I actually move a product off the shelf? Did I drive somebody into the store? Can I have a very kind of fungible tracking towards the units and spots that aired and doing it in a test and control way where we have more conviction that the TV actually drove causality in that spike.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And so that's where I think we're again, GRPs and points matter to some and tune in moments matter, but I think at the end of the day, we need to be much more justified and judicious in how we plan our
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B
TV towards incrementality and our brands set up to do that. Is it, is it an uphill battle to figure out how to measure that?
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C
It's interesting for us, obviously we have our own homegrown incrementality methods and there's a lot of third parties in the space that we work with because we want to be interoperable to the source of truth for where the brands need to be. But I would say like match market testing and kind of geo holdouts, I would say are still quite common or kind of PSA holdouts. And I don't want to say that that's dated or not the right mentality, but I think there are different kind of systematic ways to do it without geographic holdouts, where there's more, whether it's ghost bidding holdouts or different kind of testing control methods, or we look at kind of dynamic baselining. So the way that I think about it is we're trying to track and understand, you know, users that would have already converted on your site.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And then obviously, are we actually going above baseline lift in those ways? And so we're, we're trying different methods.
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B
I love a good mention of ghost bidding on this podcast. That's my favorite subject. So let's talk about the inventory. So your team was at Market Extra Live a couple months ago and you've had some announcements around biddable versus non biddable inventory. Walk us through what you're talking about, why it's important and where it's going.
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C
Yeah, I love this question, Ari, because it's about operational kind of complexity. And I think there are pros and cons to both biddable and non biddable and you should be doing both with intention. And so the way that we kind of view the world and I'll kind of paint the canvas here, so if we think of a circle that's 100% and that could be opportunistic buys or reach and frequency. If 50% is linear and the other 50% is streaming and then a pocket of that is, let's say the biddable or non biddable through a DSP mindset, there's scale and growth, but you're also missing out on the other opportunistic side of the aisle, which is the linear or the direct insertion order volume that doesn't make its way towards that biddable inventory. And so, you know, for us, the way that we look at it is, you know, we built a technology called upstream which is in market and we'll be talking about it market texture, which is working to automate the direct insertion orders to make it look and feel more like a digital transaction. And so it creates automation. It's good for the publisher, it's good for you as the brand because campaigns get up faster, it eliminates human error. But the bigger thing is also the kind of pricing components in between because it's a direct tag integration into the ad server. And so you're getting a very good media principal pass through versus any potential bloat that could come from obviously buying through biddable pipes. But again, for us, like I look at it more as the execution model caught up with the growth of the industry. So it's less about the ideologies of biddable versus non biddable because again, we believe in both and you should be doing both.
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B
Well, yeah, I think one of the things that people don't think about so much is that a lot of what we think of as digital streaming is still not biddable.
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C
Right, Correct. And I think to your point, a lot of the direct transactions that you're seeing or PG deals, right, that are flowing in, you know, there's a lot of statements in the space that 90% of CTV is programmatic enabled. But I think you and I share, I believe, a common DNA that is it biddable? If it's pg, I would argue no enabled and biddable, it's enabled and biddable. Very different phrases.
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B
Correct.
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C
And so again, like, I think a lot of those transactions are starting on direct and they're meeting the marketers where they are via PG deal. But I don't fully consider that the
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B
biddable market and it's even more so with like sports or tentpole events. Right. The. The live event spike is a real thing and programmatic still not there. Right.
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C
Yeah. And look to give credit to the biddable programmatic side, whether it's the Olympics or it's overtime games or extra innings, like, they certainly have those opportunities and they're prepared to buy those packages if you need to off the shelf. But I would say for most of the major 10 poles or the seasonal moments, those are very much direct secured where there might be matching involved or you have to secure those upstream or custom particular creatives or units. And so yeah, that's a big moment for us where we see the value of that direct plus the linear combination is that sports tent poles and those signals are very much a direct ecosystem
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B
or a notable in digital. One of the big advantages is interactivity or creative formats. Right. And more often than not they aren't, you know, but. But we are seeing some innovation in CTV with like pause ads, which are the new. The hottest thing on around is a static ad that shows up when you pause your tv.
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C
Yes, I get hit with them often because I will pause and I will walk around. So I will give some kind of kudos to the pause ads. But I look, when I spent some time at Roku, we were kind of early in the kind of TV commerce of the shoppable kind of unit mechanism or what they called smashing the remote. And so trying to get people to. To essentially check out. Because I mean, if you are signing up for an OEM and you have all your P integrated. Right. And all the logistical things could go pretty quick. I do feel like there's a lot of merits and value towards the interactive ads. I don't think QR codes are performing where people think they may be, but they're quirky and they're cool, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. But there's a lot of interesting dynamic, you know, creative ad companies in the space that are trying different things. But I do find that the pause ads, like they're not intrusive. No, they're static. So they are constantly in view, or 100% view, if we want to use the phrase. If you're still in the room paying attention, you're not sleeping. But no, it's. It's great to see the evolution of also AI based creative and things are changing quickly.
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B
Do you want to give us a little sense about what Tatari is doing in that area?
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C
Yeah, so we don't do any in House, personal, creative. But a lot of our brands, they might be social first and they don't necessarily or the vertical kind of creator economy format and they don't have the right 15s or 30s. And so we work with a handful of partners where we create those connections. So either they are doing 100% AI based creative or they're reformatting. But we've seen both sides of it be successful. I don't think it's totally where it needs to be necessarily for certain linear broadcasts past moments and I obviously think some obviously perform better than others. But it's coming a long way and I think brands are leaning in. But I would say again it's very specific towards what is your product or solution you're selling and do you really more of a professional production versus can you trust a simple AI based creative streaming environment?
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B
Right. That makes a ton of sense. Sorry to interrupt. So we've got about seven or eight minutes into this conversation before the word AI showed up. So now we're here. You broke the seal. Let's talk about AI.
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C
Let's do it. I opened Pandora's box.
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B
Yeah. Right. So where is AI playing a role in TV right now? You mentioned creative for advertisers who don't have creative. Sure, that's sort of obvious. Where else is it playing a role right now?
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C
Yeah. So if I'm even just using this as an application that I think others are looking into, I think it's very much the media planning and buying and then there's also kind of creative workflow checks. So a lot of networks have quality controls or S and P handling. And so being able to go through those checks before it even goes into a live environment to make sure that you're mitigating cost, you're saving time is a big thing. But for us the media planning side of it is the most exciting. And so we were talking a little bit before this. Right. Kind of, you know, Tatari and our kind of timeline. And so we've been around for close to 10 years, billions of spend through the technology and we're using that data to train our models and our machine learning to be able to build comprehensive data driven plans across that convergence of linear and streaming. And so being able to build a clear box plan with 200 based use and line items in a matter of 30 seconds, that's doing it predicated on not only efficiency of what we call clearance in TV for rates, but also the outcome. So you're actually confeded. Hey, my CAC is this my IROAS is this and it's propagating those plans in a comprehensive way. That's where I'm seeing the most excitement for the brands and agencies.
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B
How do the brands react? Like they say, hey, we have this really complex plan and you're like here, done. Is that, is that good or bad?
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C
I would say that the good thing about it is that I mentioned the word clearbox because we are actually exposing the decisions that it wants to make and then it allows you to actually bring the human touch to it. So if you decide it was too aggressive here, there was kind of over under uncertainty or not enough day parts or not enough content genre, you can still interface with it, but some actually are just running it from an intelligence perspective where they have a thesis on their Persona or their ICPs and they're saying, hey, I think I want to buy these pockets. Let me actually run Tatari's media planning engine and see what it actually could surface from an incremental mindset. So it's fun to see how they are leaning into it. And I would say the agencies as well that we partner with are very much leaning into it. Some agencies have homegrown planning tools, but I think they're looking for different complements to their own ecosystem.
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B
It's pretty exciting to automate all that manual work.
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C
Yes, it is definitely a cumbersome process for anybody who's been in spreadsheets and dealing with the monotonous tasks of planning and investment conversations with the networks. Then you bring in the automation layer
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B
of that and then so that's planning analysis. Is any of the actual media buying using AI yet?
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C
Yeah, so I would say that there are certain components that we are looking at for like adding intelligence on top of the buys. And so there's a mix of data from publisher informed first party data to the third party markets that come in. And so yeah, we do have a lot of our own in house kind of technology around how we're thinking about, you know, adding our own personal intelligence to those transactions. So to your point, we talked about upstream earlier a little bit and how it's direct. But imagine kind of direct with added intelligence on top. So we're kind of going beyond the mundane direct insertion order. That's a paper trail.
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B
Super interesting. And so just to close out, what do you think about the future of Convergint tv? Are we in this world that's temporary where we have this biddable, non biddable break or is this long term trend and how is it all kind of coming together?
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C
My honest opinion area is like, this is becoming the standard. And I think sometimes people call conversion TV a media label, but I think of it more as kind of this continuous system because it to be fungible between the way you buy in the glass because the lines are blurring so quickly. Where it's is the World Series on Hulu linear streaming is Sunday ticket linear streaming. The answer is it's blended and it's already there and it's both.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And so, you know, we believe that the future is going to be that very kind of convergent mindset for how you plan, buy and measure. And, you know, we've been screaming for the decay of linear for the last five to 10 years, but there's a lot of great data out there even suggesting that through 2030, you might still have 40 million households with some type of virtual or pay TV subscription.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And so, again, like we all recognize, including us at Atari, the viewership is changing. Our own consumer habits change. But I think, you know, there's a large opportunistic market there on the other side that I think brands are. Are leaning into.
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B
All right, well, that was a great conversation. Thanks for giving us all the insights about what's going on at Tatari. We have Mike Fogarty from Tatari.
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C
Cheers. It's a pleasure.
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B
Thank you.