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Why Warner Bros Discovery Ditched and Rebuilt TV Targeting
00:16:01
Warner Bros. Discovery’s Bridget Jayaram breaks down the network's aggressive return to addressable TV advertising, revealing how traditional media giants are deploying first-party data, convergence strategies, and performance guarantees to win back ad dollars from tech platforms like Meta and Google.
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You know, I think a lot of these smaller clients that we've been talking to quite a bit lately, they grew up on Meta, they grew up on Google. They are very used to transparency, accountability, performance. And I think us even having the wherewithal and like the vigor to try to do this is the first step, right, and be more accountable and kind of what we're giving to our clients. And I think if we can show the power of IP content and data together, like, like it's going to be a no brainer for these guys to really kind of give us more money, start thinking a little bit less about the tech platforms. And also lowering our cost to investment has also been a lot easier to get those people on board as well.
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The TV upfronts made one thing very clear. It's not enough for addressable TV to run targeted buys. It has to prove outcomes. That's why the Go Addressable certification program is back with a two class addressable master track, giving agencies and brands the skills they need to buy, plan and execute addressable campaigns with confidence. Now available on Substack. Evan Shapiro, Media universe cartographer and founder of eShop TV and guest speakers unpack actionable insights into buying media in the addressable ecosystem and measurement and attribution and optimization. Learn addressable, become a master. Enroll today at goaddressable.substack.com this week on Next in Media, we've got a very
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special episode we recorded live at the
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Goaddressable Upfront Breakfast in New York a few weeks back. My guest this week is Bridget Jayron. She's the VP of Advanced Advertising at
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Warner Brothers Discovery, who talks about how
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the company is reinvested in making targeted advertising in TV more the norm, especially as brands demand more outcome based programs. So Bridget and I talked about how addressable TV helps companies cut across silos, especially on the TV side when data driven TV isn't as clunky and slow as its reputation. Bridget also has talked about how traditional TV companies are better together when trying to improve performance in comparison to the tech giants. Lots to get into. So let's get started. All right.
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Hi everybody. Good morning. Hey, Bridget.
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Hi, how are you?
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Why don't you introduce us yourself? Your title and everything.
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Absolutely. I'm Bridget Jerram. I work at Warner Brothers Discovery and I run all of our advanced advertising and programmatic now sales across everything we do at wbd.
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All right, so I've done an on location podcast before. I've never done one on a Manhattan rooftop where we might have a police Chase and my guest has a plane to catch. So this is kind of thrilling. We're going to make this a talking and dashing. You've had, you've had two runs at Warner Brothers Discovery. Everything's the same as it was, right. Things chill always.
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We've been the same company for the last decade.
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What. But what was. Give us like, what was addressable? Like, I think of addressable in the old days and it was that sort of complicated sounding thing with the extra two minutes in cable and it was like certain advertisers and now it's like remarkably different, I imagine. But give us like the journey. What did it look like back before and after?
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Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I started at what was Turner about a decade ago and DDL was even in its infancy. Right. Like we had just helped found Open ap. We were trying to get buyers to think more strategically about a medium that really was just kind of used for awareness. Right. DDL was able to drive precision, targeting, accountability and bring more focus on linear in terms of driving that performance. But when we launched our national addressable product, you know, around the time of the WarnerMedia merger, we were focused on the wrong things, if I'm being frank. All we were doing was screaming from the rooftops about how much scale we had, how many households were in our footprint that we got to sit in the 14 minutes of national ad time. Does anyone actually care about that? I don't think so. The USPs that we were going to market with didn't really outweigh the operational friction in the buying process and how clunky the workflow was. So we actually deemphasized addressable about four years ago when we merged with Discovery in lieu of really focusing on HBO Max and scaling our digital footprint, but with some key hires from industry leaders over the last 18 to 24 months, we are back and. And we're now very much focused on how addressability really allows us to get to convergence. The incrementality of the channel, the performance driving of the channel. And really how do we kind of make that gap, bridge that gap from linear to digital and make all of our inventory more performant and more accountable.
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It's funny to imagine that you de emphasized it, but that was the time where people were thinking like interruptive advertising is over and everyone's just going to stream with that ad and we have to figure something else out. And now things have radically changed. Clearly.
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Exactly.
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What, okay, so today, what. What does it look like when, you know, addressable is on the Rise for you guys, you're getting more demand. Is it just everybody's doing something a little bit better than demos or like is it really the sophisticated stuff that we're talking about? Because I used to think of as like advertisers would come to you with I want a lot of reach and frequency and then a little bit of addressable thrown in there to is it. I'm sure it's not like that. What does it look like today when they come to you?
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I mean to be fair, depending on the client profile, that still does remain true. But you know, we're very focused now on and independent client relationships. And quite frankly, you know those clients, those agencies, they're set up to be more nimble, they're set up to buy addressable. Sometimes when I go talk to the larger hold codes, it's difficult. Right. You still have teams that bilinear the bi digital. They don't really understand where addressable fits in the middle. So we're really, really challenging our clients to think about addressable. Like I said, as that gateway, we're making it easier. You bring your own data, we can target your audience, we can mitigate frequency and maximize reach and then also drive performance as part of sort of the convergence trifecta with line and digital on either side too. So a lot of it's education, a lot of it is proving that what we can do is good and better and faster than what we've done before.
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How often is it the case that brands are bringing their own data and trying to find their customers?
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Most of the time I would say like 80% of our audience driven business is probably on a first party segment. We've also seen in the last year or so a lot more intrigue in our own WBD data. We've always had off the shelf segments or we collect viewership information and try to package it up for clients. But I think really recent, when we think about driving insights and really understanding we know who our consumer is better than anybody across all of our endpoints. And so being able to use our first party information with a brand's first party information to provide greater fidelity and greater scalability across the portfolio has really been a key theme I think over the last year or so in driving success in all these mediums.
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All right, this is always my favorite part. What are the problems? Let's talk about. Where are you seeing the pitfalls? Is it there are things that just misconceptions do your partner, your advertisers and agencies fully understand, like some of the Scary slides we saw earlier about IP addresses are not necessarily as reliable as we think, things like that. Where do you see the challenges?
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I think they understand it. I think for us, the biggest kind of challenge is, quite frankly, like I said before, the operational friction in the buying process. We need to get better, we need to get faster, we need to get smarter about how we place these ads because there's demand for our addressable at this company, but we don't really have an infrastructure to support it since we deemphasized it. So I think in talking about all the panels today, as we build agentic workflows and really create interoperability even within our own systems, not even just external connections, that's going to allow us to get to market faster, place these buys a lot faster, and also just kind of prove what we've been saying about addressable for the last decade. And I don't think, frankly, we've done a great job of that. And I think we're really starting to get there now that we're modernizing the stack and really understanding kind of how, where and when we should be engaging with our consumers across the portfolio.
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What about a previous panelist mentioned this, the fragmentation challenge. Clients don't just spend with you guys, they want to do addressable everywhere. There are initiatives that we should talk about that the industry wants to work together. But I always wonder, how do you figure out how to prioritize collaboration versus everybody's got to compete for their own budgets and those kind of things.
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Yeah, I think over the last couple of years our profile has changed, our competitive profile has changed, the ecosystem system has changed. And so no longer do I look at my partners in the consortium at Open AP as my competition. They are my partners and we are better together when we're going up against. And I will say the words that we shouldn't be saying, but Amazon and Google and products, right. Like we need we're better together as a publisher ecosystem. And the fact that now we're even bringing together the conversion API with Open AP to really show the power of true video, sight, sound, motion, incredible IP and content across everyone that's involved in the Open AP consortium is really going to allow us to kind of put our money where our mouth is, improve the performance of what we do as these big mega publishers, you know, stepping
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back a little bit, talking about just this broader. We're in the middle of upfront week, everyone is talking about outcomes. It's, you know, it's inherently, I don't want to say difficult for Television, it's just different than, you know, something you see something on Instagram, you buy it or on Amazon that's never going to look the same as so many different products on television that have different windows of purchase patterns and stuff like that. How are we doing overall on, on, on tracking outcomes and able to deliver that for brands?
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I mean, I started my career in lead gen, so I would love to be selling TV on a cpa, but that's probably not going to happen. Right, But Charles is not going to, Charles is not going to love this, but we did just release that we're going to start guaranteeing region incrementality as it pertains to reach. Right? Because that's something that we can control with the stack that we have now, with the data that we have now, that's at least something that we can use as a proxy for driving mid and lower funnel metrics. We released a solution about two years ago. It's called Stream X. It's our version of convergence. And our hypothesis when we were going into that kind of beta test was that if we can maximize reach, mitigate frequency, it's going to have a halo effect on the rest of the KPIs that our clients actually care about. And it did. And so I think with guaranteeing reach and really being a part of this conversion API with OpenAP and we can start to get better signals around performance and actually understand where we do well and what maybe we do better at, you know, website visitation, maybe it is lift in sales. We need to understand that better because we have not had a secondary optimization or a concept of layering in additional data sets beyond an audience in quite some time. So this will at least give us signals to try to push further to outcomes. Because again, in a utopian future, I would love to be standing up here telling you that we're, you know, selling things on a cost per install or a cost per sale, but we're just not there yet.
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We've, we've talked a little bit about today about the importance of deterministic. Is it, it's interesting, is it the end all, be all when you're doing addressable tv, right? Because you'll see different AI upstarts and even the tech companies will talk about, well, you don't actually have to know someone if you know their behavior and you can show them the right ad and then it'll be, that's sort of addressable, right? And I don't know what are your, what are your thoughts and what are the, what does the industry think about the importance of addressing deterministic.
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I mean, I think it's really important. I do think that data, strategy and identity is foundational to everything that we do. And it's like, quite frankly, the most important piece of everything that we do. And we take a very interoperable, composable approach to identity, too. So we want to be able to use whatever persistent identifiers our clients are thinking are the most important. Right. Because we have our own flavor. You may have your own flavor, but we all need to work together to drive that performance. And I think that deterministic is very important. But when we think about skills, scale, and we think about really being able to maximize the power of investments across our portfolio, we need a more unified data approach and not just consistently rely on that single source of truth.
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Is that at one point we thought we might have. We'd have one identifier in television. Is that something that's realistic or something we should aspire to?
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I mean, I used to say, yes, I don't know anymore. I think it's really important to get signals. Like, I mean, even with ip, we used to think that was the best thing since slight spread and you see the numbers, right? So I think the more signals that we have and the more things that we can understand about a consumer and what's going on with the consumption patterns within and outside of the household, to me, that's the better approach. Right. Being able to have almost a waterfall approach to identity and making sure that, again, fidelity, scalability against these audiences is the most important thing.
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You talked a lot about it. Wouldn't it be. Wouldn't it be great if we could just have cell tv? Have TV is like a CPA kind of model and everything works really, really seamlessly. There are probably more as more smaller brands come on board, more dtc, those brands that are used to Instagram, they probably want something like that. But then you've got to cater to cars and other categories that just don't work that way. How do you. Are we moving too fast to make TV entirely accountable? And how do you balance those different kinds of categories? And advertisers?
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Yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit, to be frank. You know, I think a lot of these smaller clients that we've been talking to quite a bit lately, they grew up on Meta, they grew up on Google. They are very used to transparency, accountability, performance, and I think us even having the wherewithal and like the vigor to try to do this is the first step. Right. And be more accountable and kind of what we're giving to our clients and we're seeing that we're having a lot of success. Like I said before, you know, addressable has really become part of our convergence story. But with these smaller advertisers, managed service addressable by is really fantastic for them because they get that performance, they get that accountability. Again, context, content, relevancy. That's also super important in driving conversions. And I think if we can show the power of IP content and data together, it's going to be a no brainer for these guys to really kind of give us more money, start thinking a little bit less about the tech platforms. And also lowering our cost to investment has also been a lot easier to get those people on board as well.
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So we're here at the GO Addressable upfront event, right? A big mission here is education. How confident are you that like your agency partners are kind of, you're just understanding the benefits of addressable, the nuances? Where do things like the GO addressable certification come into play? Definitely, I would definitely say that they're all stupid and don't know they need a lot of help. But now where do you see the education gap coming into play?
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I mean, I think we all need more education. I think Joseph, I think had that chemistry chart up there, like every time we talk about addressable internally and everyone's like, this is organic chemistry. What is happening? Like, what does interoperability mean? What does DCR mean now? Capi, another acronym, we really need that. And so I think education goes a long way on both sides of the house. And quite frankly, I almost think that the onus is more on us as the publisher. We need to be educating you guys as our clients as to the value there, what the incrementality that we can drive with. The solution is what the performance is that we can drive. Right? And I think the onus is truly more on us than it is on our agency partners. But I do think education goes a long way for everyone.
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All right, Bridget, let's put your, put your marketer hat on, right? You know, how does WBD approach TV advertising as both a performance and brand vehicle? And where do addressable and deterministic fit together?
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I mean, we know sight, sound, motion, it drives performance across the entire funnel, right? Like really having a premium video experience can drive awareness, it can drive consideration. It can also drive purchase and purchase intent. And I think the more that we are able to prove that we're doing that across different mediums that you could buy within our portfolio, the better. We're served. Right. So we have high impact solutions, brand sponsorships. You can sponsor the premiere of the White Lotus and then guess what we can do beyond that for you. You can take that audience. We collect that user data using deterministic methods and viewership information that if you're AMEX and you sponsored the White Lotus, you can suppress that audience, extend reach beyond that big splashy sponsorship. You can retarget those users, create sequential messaging, drive people further from awareness down the funnel to conversion. We can also take that segment to an AMEX competitor and they can use it for conquesting. Right. There's a lot that we can do when we create these cultural moments to have that sort of earned audience, like, I guess, clout that you can retarget and really use for additional media campaigns as well.
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I believe the White Lotus is shooting in Cannes this year.
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It is.
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Are we going to be in the White Lotus, essentially?
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I hope so.
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It feels like that. Bridget, you got an Uber to catch. This was fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for interviewing.
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Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
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Thanks again to my guests this week. Warner Brothers Discoveries, Bridget Jerome and my
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partners at GO Addressable.
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If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more on what's Next in Media. Thanks for listening.