TechBytes with Jay Prasad, Chief Strategy Officer at LiveRamp TV

Hi Jay, please tell us about your current role and the technology you handle at LiveRamp.

As the Chief Strategy Officer for LiveRamp TV, I am tasked with the role of executing strategic and revenue partnerships that accelerate the industry’s move to scale liquidity in cross-screen marketing and outcome-based measurement.

As the lines between TV, streaming and digital advertising continue to blur, the industry is in dire need of a neutral, scalable platform that can unify marketers, agencies, programmers and distributors like never before. LiveRamp TV is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation by powering holistic cross-screen activation and measurement to create an open, interoperable marketplace.

How did you manage to stay on top of your managerial and business goals through the lockdown phase? Please include any unique lesson you learned that you might want to share with our readers. 

The lockdown and the resulting change in working hours, meeting types, and how to lead teams has made me rethink week-to-week activities. Some things can seem counter intuitive, but there are some key things we implemented to help.

– Keep One-on-Ones: Even with Zoom fatigue, it can become easier to individually feel on top of all the fast moving elements in our business, as well as the market overall. With streaming and advertising, and data being so front and center and rapidly changing, this is important.

– Create one main dashboard: There are so many Google sheets, or boards to update, so we streamlined to one summary deck and Trello board that has the teams projects, pipelines, and updates in one place.

– External meetings: Ensure we have an agenda, seems intuitive, but in schedule chaos, this can stop happening. It ensures we all value each other’s time.

Tell us about the technology that drives your partnership with Kinetiq. 

Our collaboration with Kinetiq tackles antiquated measurement and attribution in TV head-on by streamlining measurement of all TV ad exposures across traditionally siloed channels.

With the addition of Kinetiq’s ad catalog of 2,600 TV stations across more than 85 countries, LiveRamp’s Data Plus Math TV measurement solution more accurately ties cross-screen ad exposure data to outcomes, leading to better, more comprehensive measurement and reporting. Capturing TV ad exposures across all formats, lengths and language variations, Kinetiq enables Data Plus Math to connect impressions to other data sources in order to determine ROI, access historic ad placement performance, and optimize future TV and digital buys.

How have TV Advertising analytics and intelligence evolved in the last 2-3 years? What has driven this evolution in the midst of AdTech growth / programmatic?

Until recently, TV has been an almost strictly linear medium with a standard unit of measurement for decades: the gross rating point (GRP). The emergence of connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) has ushered in a new era of analytics with cross-screen measurement taking a lead role, but it is not yet a perfect science. TV measurement often lacks speed and agility, facing gaps in coverage, exclusion of advanced ad formats, and inaccurate auditing of exposure data across platforms resulting in complexities. While linear measurement remains the biggest category for TV, we’ve seen increased focus on testing cross-screen tactics over the last two to three years, now only further accelerated by the pandemic’s impact on the TV industry. In joining forces with Kinetiq, we’re able to holistically measure the impact of the marketer’s ad across all streams and screens.

How do you prepare for the onslaught of data driven solutions for OTT and Live Video advertising solutions? 

While not all OTT or CTV services will be ad-supported, they all need infrastructure around data connectivity. As new methods of TV viewership emerge, creating an identity structure that can match data to other parts of the ecosystem is increasingly important in order to deliver superior user experiences.

Where do you stand in the growing demand for brand safety and advertising?

TV and Streaming on the big screen tends to have more natural brand safety inherent in the platforms.

Digital and keyword based approaches for this don’t naturally adapt to these environments, and there will be more innovation done to take technology such as ACR (automated content recognition) to be able to draw more context from objects and audio to create new indices that will have several use cases, one could be brand safety.

Your predictions for programmatic and TV AdTech players in 2021.

Cross-channel measurement, first-party data and privacy will be core themes in the months ahead.

As TV and video viewership continue to fragment, cross-screen measurement is crucial for brands looking to make investments more accountable through actual business outcomes, as well as for media owners to calculate accurate reach across linear and CTV. Beyond just TV, cross-platform planning, activation and measurement will become standardized across digital and premium video, unlocking real-time insights that allow buy- and sell-side companies to make adjustments, set genuine benchmarks and maximize ROI.

Media owners will also need to invest in a first-party data strategy to enable data-driven ad targeting and high-value yields with an authenticated solution. As data-led personalization has matured, there is an opportunity to collaborate with first-party data in order to deliver better customer experiences. By joining forces with their natural partners, media companies can deliver a better value proposition while reaping rewards in the process.

Lastly, much like their digital counterparts, those in the streaming TV space will seek ways to better target without sacrificing consumer privacy. It’s an issue we expect to be even more top-of-mind over the next several weeks, thanks to things like statewide lockdowns forcing people back indoors, as well as political and vaccine events garnering high news viewership.

As brands seek creative ways to reach audiences, deals with data providers, addressable activations, and fluidity across budgets will only grow in order to optimize reach and frequency

Thank you for answering all our questions!