Exclusive Interview: GroupM’s Irwin Gotlieb

August 21, 2012 World Screen

PREMIUM: Irwin Gotlieb, the chairman of GroupM, tells World Screen about how his keen interest in technology has driven him to always look for the most innovative and effective ways of helping clients market their brands.

 

WS: How do addressable ads, targeted ads to individual households, work?
GOTLIEB: GroupM [a division of WPP] has been running addressable ads since last October on 7 million DISH Network set-top boxes. The simplest way to describe the technology is that these are all executed through a set-top box. The principle mechanism is the ads are pre-loaded into individual DVRs, so they are already resident on the DVR in the household, usually from the night before. There is a key tone for the addressable ad and a very compact instruction, so the set-top box actually switches to the DVR to run the commercial and then switches back to the linear stream. And it does it with inconsequential latency.
 
WS: And how would the advertiser or the agency know which ad I want to see?
GOTLIEB: That’s a very, very complex question but there is a huge amount of data that is available at the household level, without any personal identifiable information. And that is how the optimization of the individually addressable ads is executed.
 
WS: What else is on the horizon?
GOTLIEB: I don’t have to tell you how quickly tablets and smart phones are growing in penetration. Everybody knows that the consumer is multi-tasking. Television is one medium that has been impacted, in the past, probably not in a positive way, by multitasking, because people are doing something on a tablet or on a smart phone that is likely not to relate to the content they are consuming on the big screen. So the whole idea of the second-screen application is that there is additional information related to what is on the big screen going to the second screen, in some synchronized fashion. If you are watching sports, instead of over-cluttering the big screen with highly detailed statistics on individual players, for example, that data would go to a second screen. We have always used terms like lean forward for a PC and lean back for a TV. And these second-screen devices make something that we now refer to as comfortably lean forward. For example, if it’s news, the in-depth news story can go to the second screen. If it’s a service show like the Today show or Good Morning America, if there is a cooking segment, the recipe can go to the second screen. You could do remarkable things in election coverage. On reality programming you can really redefine the level of interaction on the part of the consumer. And the concept here is that what has previously been a multitasking activity that has taken away from the engagement level of television will now be used to enhance the experience.
 
When that happens, you can also enhance commercials. So you may see a 30-second spot on the big screen but you can request information, request the sample, request a coupon, request further details. If it’s an ad for a theatrical movie that will run this weekend, you might request the trailer, you might actually buy the tickets. What is of the essence here is that to some extent we have always been able to interact with the television and for many years, for many of our clients, we have on the big screen put up the client’s URL. But typing in a URL into a PC while watching TV is in our view too uncomfortably lean forward for the kind of experience you are looking for. And if you could just have, in a fully synchronized fashion, the relevant content coming to your second screen that will allow for interaction in a very comfortable lean-back environment.
 
WS: What can be done to make television a more precise medium? Are advertisers satisfied with the kind of data they get?
GOTLIEB: We are not satisfied with the data on television, but then to be blunt, we’re not satisfied with the data we get from the web either! Television’s measurement systems are about to undergo some significant revision. And the critical thing is, it’s inappropriate to refer to television as old media vis-à-vis new media for one simple reason. The new media isn’t that new anymore. Think about it, when cable came along we looked at it as new media for three or four years and then it was same old. Why is the web still considered new media? At the same time, what some people characterize as old media is already broadly distributed by a digital means. Digital set-top boxes now represent more than two-thirds of the set-top box population in the U.S. And if we are using digital delivery, the potential for census-level data reporting is there. We already have measurement capability in the U.S. for well over 20 million set-top boxes. There are of course issues with that data—it is not statistically representative. But we are learning to use it. In the course of the next few years, we will begin to shift to census-level data for media categories like television. Print in the past was measured through surveys and print runs. In the future we will have digital data because it’s going to be consumed largely on tablets. So is that new media or is it old media? Or is it no longer appropriate to classify media that way? And set-top box data is wonderful, but the set-top box doesn’t tell me if it’s the lady of the house, or the man of the house, or the child who is watching. So we will always have television panel data and we will have to learn how to fuse the two to something that informs our strategies and our tactics.

 

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