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AudienceXpress |
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September 8, 2014 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Programmatic TV Sales Platform that Automates the TV Buying and Selling Workflow |
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About AudienceXpress: AudienceXpress, the leading programmatic TV sales platform, automates the planning, audience buying, optimization, and daily reporting for TV campaigns across a national footprint. AudienceXpress optimizes media buying based on the efficiency of reaching a specific audience, using connected TV and leading 3rd party data and analytics to deliver clear, quick results. Since its launch in 2013, AudienceXpress has delivered hundreds of advertiser campaigns across all major verticals, and billions of TV audience impressions.
President
As President of AudienceXpress and head of data partnership development, Walt brings a deep understanding of the TV advertising industry and of technology. Having launched the industry’s first addressable TV campaigns, Walt is a leader in advanced advertising. Walt leads the AudienceXpress team in developing and executing on the group’s business strategy, driving deployment of the AudienceXpress platform with both ad inventory sellers and buyers, and developing its product strategy and roadmap. Walt came to AudienceXpress from Visible World, where he was Senior Vice President, Media. Previously, Walt was a Director at Cablevision in Product Management, and a management consultant in the Strategy group at Accenture. He holds a BA in Economics and German from Amherst College, and an MBA from Stanford University.
CEOCFO: Mr. Horstman, what is the concept for AudienceXpress? Mr. Horstman: AudienceXpress is a programmatic TV, sell-side platform. We automate the existing TV buying and selling work flow, as well as add third-party and first-party audience data to make TV smarter and more targeted.
CEOCFO: What do you fundamentally understand about the process, not just the technology, that has allowed AudienceXpress to create a meaningful platform? Mr. Horstman: There is a legacy in television that its TV workflow, which has historically been fairly manual. and a little bit rigid, because managing TV inventory is very hard. It is a complex optimization problem that is very difficult to do. Therefore, by bringing new technology and automation, we are improving upon those legacies, systems and workflows.
What this is doing is making the whole process of buying, reporting, planning and optimization of television much more flexible. It is similar to the way that digital and other online media have grown up with a high degree of flexibility and targetability, which is what the agencies and advertiser community have become accustomed to. Therefore, we are now bringing that same level of flexibility to television.
CEOCFO: What were some of the technology challenges that you were able to overcome? What did you need to do to get it to work? Mr. Horstman: I would say that the biggest technology challenge is integrating our hardware and software within the existing legacy TV technology infrastructure. Therefore, we have, with our parent company, Visible World, installed proprietary hardware and software deep inside the infrastructure across the cable industry. Making all of that technology integrated, seamless and working smoothly with the legacy systems was the biggest challenge and it has been something that we have been working on for the better part of a decade. We have now really started to reap the benefits of it, as has the whole industry.
CEOCFO: Is that more on the reporting side than buying side or equally on both? Mr. Horstman: That is a great question. There are advantages to both the buying side and the selling side. For our TV inventory partners, who are on the sell side, what we are bringing is a touchless workflow for their legacy infrastructure. By bringing this technology, we are increasing the value of their inventory. That is because we are making it easier to access as well as applying this additional data, which drives up the value.
In the ongoing discussions and strategic partnerships that we have with our inventory partners, we have absolutely been delivering on that promise of increasing the value of the inventory, which is critical to make something like AudienceXpress work.
For the agency side or the buy-side community, the technology and the data allow us to report out the delivery, the viewership and the audience impressions of a campaign, every single day through an automated dashboard. This has never happened in television before, where an agency can log in to the AudienceXpress dashboard, see how their campaign is delivering against different networks, against different dayparts and against different audience segments, without anyone having to generate a report or having delays in that reporting. That has been a significant game changer for us, providing this to the industry. That is because, as a TV planner and buyer, you do not want any surprises. If reporting is delayed or reporting takes a week or sometimes up to a month, not knowing what actually happened until after the fact and if something happened that was unexpected is the worst case scenario for television. Therefore, our ability to report out exactly what is happening each day and optimizing a campaign each day is a huge value to agencies and then also for their clients.
CEOCFO: How do you monitor audience impressions? Mr. Horstman: We transact audience impressions using traditional Nielsen, age and gender demo impressions. The reason we do that is because that is what the TV industry, at this point, is just very comfortable with. We will optimize the campaign on additional audience data sets beyond age and gender, such as household income or age and presence of children, more sophisticated data sets that we work with that look at viewership based on matching credit card spending data or shopper card data. We have a whole host of third party data sets where, if we have an advertiser who is a retailer, we can look at the different networks and dayparts that their customers are watching. We can then optimize the campaign to follow that audience on television as their viewership patterns shift.
CEOCFO: When an agency is buying TV time today, if they buy something and they want it to run for two weeks in a certain market and they look at the dashboard and see the next day that they have gone wrong, are they able to switch quickly with the TV stations? How does it work so that they can make use of what they can see the next day to change quickly? Mr. Horstman: Most of any changes in optimization are actually handled by our technology. This is not an uncommon occurrence. The advertiser could say, “I have this ad and something has just happened in the industry and we need to pull the ad.” For example, that just happened with one of our advertisers. There was a celebrity in one of the ads, with which there is always risk with celebrities; something of consequence happened and we needed to pull the ad. Therefore, we have the technology to pull an ad very, very quickly, and in many cases, the same day. However, what the technology is doing automatically is to optimize and make sure all of the commitments that were made in the upfront plan that was built in the system are followed and if there are any changes to viewership, then the system is automatically optimizing.
Therefore, in a perfect world, and this is how most of our campaigns run, the advertiser or agency says, “This is my audience, this is my target that I want to reach,” we build a plan based on that. It is executed and then it is monitored each day by the system. The advertiser can modify. If something happens that they then need to change the plan diverts from what we agreed to, then of course that can all be adjusted. However, this is a system and a service that does have automated optimization reporting, so that a client does not have to go in and start to adjust. To be clear, we are not doing things like real time bidding or auctions where the client may go in and do something every day.
CEOCFO: For the business model, are the advertising agencies your clients? Are the cable companies paying you as well? Mr. Horstman: We are a sell-side platform. Therefore, we are working hand in glove with our TV inventory partners. This is what is quite unique about the way that we have approached this, compared to other folks who have tried this in the past. We work very hand in glove our TV inventory partners to sell inventory to a whole host of agencies, large, medium and small, and some cases directly to advertisers.
CEOCFO: What is a typical engagement for you with an agency? Is it project by project? Mr. Horstman: We work on a campaign by campaign basis. Therefore, it is very straightforward. An agency will frequently come to us and say, “Here is my client, in whatever industry vertical, and we are looking for a TV campaign that is going to run for the next four weeks. Here is our audience segment that we would like to optimize against. Can you build me a plan that fits in with the parameters that we are interested in?” Then, that all gets fed into the plan generator and a plan is created. The agency takes a look at it, can make modifications to it and when it is all agreed to, it gets executed. What we have found over the last eighteen months that we have been doing this is that we always deliver on what we say we are going to do. That is because we have the technology and we have the view into what is happening across the inventory and the data. Therefore, we have developed an extraordinary amount of trust with our agency partners. What we have found is that an agency will come to us and say, “I am new to the AudienceXpress platform, so let me work with you with one of my clients.” That goes well and then they appreciate the fact that we deliver on what we say we are going to do with the daily reporting—and that trust is formed.
Therefore, they bring more of their clients and continue to work more and more with us. As much as this has a lot of technology behind it, television is still fundamentally a people and relationship business. Therefore, we know and take very seriously the trust and the credibility that we have built and will continue to build with our agency partners and with our TV inventory partners.
CEOCFO: When you are talking with a prospective client is there an aha moment when they understand the depth of what you offer and what sounds to me like a superior offering or is it after they have tried the first time and are able to see for themselves? Mr. Horstman: I think when we tell the story, which is a very simple story, which is that technology is improving workflow automation and then we have audience data, people are clearly intrigued and they get started. I think the aha moment is after the first campaign when, especially for an agency, their client says, “You have made my life so much easier because you are a platform that provides one stop shopping for me across eighty to one hundred ad insertable cable networks. You build a plan through your technology. You report out on it. All of that work that I historically would have done very manually and spent the lion’s share of my time as an agency doing a lot of un-sexy transactional work, has now been taken care of. What I get to do now is spend my time working with my clients to explore how much more value that we can bring as an agency.” That is the aha moment, which is, “You have just take much of the burden of my job away, which lets me do more interesting things for my client.”
CEOCFO: It seems fairly hard to resist! Mr. Horstman: We are growing very rapidly. I will say that it has been like steering a rocket ship. It has been an extraordinary past eighteen months. I think what we have done plays into the evolution of the television industry. Timing is everything for all businesses, right? We have tapped into the moment when television needs to be more automated and smarter. There is a high degree of interest receptivity from agencies and advertisers and also inventory partners. We started first, of course, very quietly, working with all of our inventory partners with whom we have long relationships, to say we want to do this. It is the right moment in the history of TV advertising for this.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about the recently announced agreement with TubeMogul? Mr. Horstman: Absolutely! When we launched the business it was very much in the mindset of wanting to bring many of the benefits that agencies and advertisers have become accustomed in digital, namely flexibility, automation and advanced data to television, that pique the interest and curiosity of a whole range of folks in the digital video and display industries. Therefore, we have been talking to TubeMogul for quite a few months about how to work together. They were and are very interested in adding television to their platform, so that they can work with their clients to deliver cross platform campaigns, using a common data set, using common reporting and common measurement, for digital video and for television. Therefore, it is really a natural evolution where we are seeing this fusion more and more of digital video and television. Making both of those channels work together for a client is what this is all about.
CEOCFO: What might be missed when people first take a look at AudienceXpress? Mr. Horstman: Thinking about something that I just said, which is that if we are doing so well it is because we treat this as a relationship and a people business that uses best in class technology. I should mention that we do not think of this as a technology first company. That is very important, because the relationships and the partnering that are part of the television industry are just absolutely paramount.
As I said, when folks have come in through television and said, “I am a technologist first and foremost and I want to X, Y and Z,” they have been unsuccessful. We are just beginning. This is the early stages of the fusion of automation and audience data for television. The television industry has never been brighter in terms of viewership, investment in programming, diversity of programming and quality of programming. The automation and the application of audience data will just continue to make the whole ecosystem that much healthier. |
“We are just beginning. This is the early stages of the fusion of automation and audience data for television. The television industry has never been brighter in terms of viewership, investment in programming, diversity of programming and quality of programming. The automation and the application of audience data will just continue to make the whole ecosystem that much healthier.”- Walt Horstman
AudienceXpress 212.356.8070
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Programmatic TV Sell-Side Platform, AudienceXpress, Technology Companies, CEO Interviews 2014, Walt Horstman, Programmatic TV Sales Platform the Automates the TV Buying and Selling Workflow, automating adverting campaigns, across all major verticals, and billions of TV audience impressions, Recent CEO Interviews, the leading programmatic TV sales platform, automates the planning, audience buying, optimization, and daily reporting for TV campaigns across a national footprint, optimize media buying based on the efficiency of reaching a specific audience, using connected TV and leading 3rd party data and analytics to deliver clear, quick results, we automate the existing TV buying and selling work flow, as well as add third-party and first-party audience data to make TV smarter and more targeted, AudienceXpress Press Releases, News, Tech Stock, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, technology companies seeking investors, advertising automation companies needing investment capital |
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Walt
Horstman