TechBytes with Jessica Hogue, GM Measurement & Analytics at Innovid

Please tell us about your role and the technology you handle at Innovid.

As GM of Measurement and Analytics, I’m charged with developing Marketing Analytics offerings for our agency, brand, and publisher partners to help grow their businesses. We have a heavy focus on CTV given the growth we see on our platform and the markets need for more insights into this channel.

The underlying technology is our Omnichannel platform that creates and serves digital and addressable creatives around the world. We’re deeply integrated into the digital workflow, so we have a pretty unique look at exposure and what signals consumers respond to. My team is also responsible for developing the data science that supports these offerings – refining the raw data into intelligence that provides answers to Marketing-driven questions.

Tell us a bit more about your ‘superpower’ and how you use it to positively influence your team.

I am naturally curious, observant, and love to connect details to the big picture. It’s allowed me to see around corners, develop a vision, and communicate a path forward.

I love rolling up my sleeves and working alongside our team. I feel, it creates a deeper understanding of what we do and also creates empathy for how others approach their work.

Where do you see the whole TV Advertising marketplace moving to, in the next 3-4 years?

The upfront market has been changing for the last few years and COVID-19 has increased the need for agility and flexibility in how TV is transacted. I think we’ll see far greater adoption of programmatic CTV and media owners needing to enable these capabilities, particularly traditional networks.

Given the increasing shift to dynamically inserted ads into more traditional forms of television consumption and streaming, this will fuel a faster transition to using impressions across the board. Ultimately this will allow marketers to more easily make comparisons across channels.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Hotstar, and a bunch of other Video streaming platforms have disrupted the Video market. Do you like the way consumers are adopting these brands?

As a consumer and a parent, it is fun to experience the different features and experiences that streaming platforms offer. I’m particularly attracted to those that are innovating on the Advertising experience within streaming with pause ads and interactivity.

I believe the innovation in these experiences and the formats themselves are at a real inflection point. It is likely to get harder for services to differentiate on content alone so the Advertising experience is ripe for differentiation, which will fuel innovation. That’s a win for consumers and advertisers.

COVID is a global wrecker. How has it impacted your business? How do you cope with it?

It’s obvious that COVID-19 has impacted Video viewing behavior in a number of ways and as a platform with deep expertise in all things Video, we’ve been on the frontlines of that transformation. We’re now reporting on those shifts across our platform and specifically digging into the rise of streaming and what it means for advertisers. It creates new opportunities in dynamic creative and interactive CTV certainly and we’re seeing verticals that we’re necessarily adopting dynamic before starting to experiment.

From an operational point of view, there is no question that there is stress and anxiety given the unknown. My approach to navigating this for myself and my team is to continue to provide focus, break the goals down into smaller experiments or actions, and to go with the highest point of certainty and adjust along the way.

Businesses are suffering heavily due to coronavirus pandemic. Those who have a MarTech/AdTech stack or enterprise automation on the go, may not face the brunt of the business. Do you agree?

I think everyone is going to experience a degree of fallout from the pandemic, but those that have embraced digital automation may be able to pivot faster than those without, thus avoiding some painful cuts.

One of the key advantages of Digital Advertising is the ability to test and learn what’s resonating in real-time, thus making messaging and spend optimizations faster than those who have not.

The Olympics have been postponed. Many events and conferences have been canceled. Normalcy looks beyond speculation now. Which Advertising verticals will be hit particularly hard from this move?

The industry is seeing major sporting events and seasons being canceled forcing advertisers to pivot their strategies. The challenge reaching those audiences is universal and this is an unprecedented time for advertisers to pay attention to rapidly changing trends in consumer consumption.

Our data is showing a surge in global Video impressions being served on CTV devices, outpacing mobile for the first time this year. By vertical, we’re seeing a decline in auto and retail, but telecom and pharma are increasing global Video impressions. We’re also seeing changes week to week as advertisers find new ways to communicate with their consumers.

Tag a person in the industry whose answers you would like to read here:

Aleck Shleider, SVP, Client and Data Strategy at Amobee.