SnapStream Blog

How Local TV Stations Should Prepare for a Future of Addressable TV Ads (Part 2 of 3)

September 19 2019 by Tina Nazerian

SnapStream Series: The Future of Broadcast Monitoring & Compliance 

This is the second blog post of a three-part series on a future of addressable TV ads 

 james-shears-photo                                                                                   

 

Key Takeaways

Addressable advertising can help local TV stations grow their revenues. To prepare for a future of addressable broadcast TV advertising, ad sellers at local TV stations should:

1) focus on their advertising sweet spots—for example, the automotive industry 

2) find different ways to get viewers' geographic location and geolocation data

3) segment viewers in a specific way, such as who is in the market for a pickup truck

 


 

As broadcast TV advertising is becoming addressable, it’s not just Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs) such as Verizon, Comcast, and DirecTV who have to gear up for that future


Local TV stations have to prepare as well—and James Shears, the Vice President of Advanced Advertising at Extreme Reach, a creative asset management platform that helps ads get to the screens they need to be, has tips on how they can do so.


Think About Geographic Location, Geolocation, and Advertising Sweet Spots

Shears says that for local TV stations, addressable advertising is geared toward both geographic location and geolocation. 

“It’s really about understanding where the consumer is,” he says. “Can you target based on zip code? Can you target based on location derived from a cell phone? The answer is yes.” 

Local TV stations also need to consider what their advertising strong suits are. 

“Your sweet spots are probably automotive, sometimes real estate and finance, and sometimes quick service restaurants—all things that are really bundled up with geolocation,” Shears says. “The first thing that you should think about is the automotive industry.” 

For example, Shears says that ad buyers at tier two auto dealerships (a group of regional dealerships who have pooled ad budgets), stipulate a simplistic targeting approach, such as wanting to reach viewers within a particular zip code. 

However, ad sellers at local TV stations should try to segment their audience in a more specific way. For instance, they could identify viewers who are in the market for a pickup truck. 

 

Seek Different Ways to Get Viewers' Geographic Location and Geolocation

Shears says that local TV stations have several options when it comes to getting their viewers’ geographic location and geolocation data. 

Sometimes, they can use authenticated opportunities to gather first-party data. Maybe they have an app that people need to sign-in to use, or maybe they can run a sweepstakes online which viewers have to give their email addresses or names and physical addresses to enter. 

Local TV stations can partner with data companies to get that data too. 

“The stations should focus on those companies that offer insight into first, the home where the TV actually is,” Shears says. “And look at some forms of device graphs to measure effectiveness. Did the person that saw the ad go to car showroom, as an example?”

Additionally, Shears notes that the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard will create data opportunities for local TV stations. 

“It will provide different data points,” Shears says. “Now, that's probably a year or two away, but what it does is it allows you to leverage IP addresses, and from IP addresses you can kind of back in to your audience. Obviously, it would be anonymized, but you can figure out their location and census-level information, typically about who would be in that household, et cetera. That will help you build out your data profile.”

 

Get Specific Data About Viewers

How can local broadcasters get very specific information about viewers, like who is the market for a pickup truck? 

“Some of it is behavioral,” Shears explains. “You can kind of figure out what shows they’re watching. If you're a local broadcaster, you're probably hyper-focused on news. You can get some insights in terms of what stories are really resonating with people—are there things throughout the daytime block that they're really focused on?” 

From there, he says a local broadcaster can partner with a data company that does “look-alike modeling,” which is also a common technique in online advertising. That means the data company will find audiences that look like one another. It would look at the characteristics of a specific segment, and then go find audiences that are similar. 

To trace that information back to particular viewers, local broadcasters can partner further with MVPDs, which have the viewership data that happens on their set-top boxes. From there, the MVPDs could pinpoint viewers in an anonymous, privacy-compliant way. 

Shears also points to Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, which is quickly hitting mainstream. Smart TVs, he says, rely a lot on ACR data. Since they’re connected to the internet, they operate from an IP address. 

“From the IP address, data safe havens can be used to pull attributes from that specific household,” he explains. “Really, the companies can apply census-level information. On top of that, smart TVs and ACR technology can capture genres of shows, engagement scores, and so forth. Because of that, these data sets could be quite comprehensive, covering both behavioral and demographic.” 

Local broadcasters can also turn to Nielsen, which packages up “vast amounts of data,” including census-level information on who is watching particular programming. Nielsen also has data on things such as “overnight ratings for quick insights.” 

Ultimately, Shears believes that there are so many data sets and vendors available that local broadcasters should not focus on one option.


With SnapStream Monitoring & Compliance, you can monitor your feeds for regulatory compliance and advertising proof of performance. Our solution includes closed captioning verification, loudness monitoring, audio watermark detection, and more. SnapStream also offers tools for searching TVsharing TV clips to Twitter, Facebook, and more; and sharing clips of live events to social media in real-time. 

The Future of Local TV News: Social

January 17 2017 by Sara Howard

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Examining the current state of local TV news, we notice two trends. 1.) Local TV viewership is declining, and 2.) About 6 in 10 Americans get their local news from social media.

How can local TV news position itself in this future of digital media? To answer this, we take a look at this changing landscape and into how local TV news stations are keeping audiences engaged on Twitter & Facebook. Read more

 

Monitoring TV channels with PEG Funds

August 06 2013 by MLopez

Recently, I attended the Texas Association of Municipal Information Officers (TAMIO) conference in College Station, TX. There was one session that really grabbed my attention, it was the session amazingly named: “Better than beer money! 101 ways to spend your PEG funds.” Based on the reaction and conversation that I heard regarding this session, I knew that this was one that I definitely wanted to attend!

What are PEG Funds?

PEG funds are simply funds that are provided to a local government to help support their public access channel(s). These funds can be easily applied to capital expenditures for the channel, for items such as cameras, lights, audio equipment and so forth. The main stipulation for the use of the funds is that they have to be used for broadcasting and running the channel. So, what other projects could these funds be used for? SnapStream?


Monitoring your PEG Channel

Monitoring your PEG channel

I returned to work Monday after the conference and began researching more and more about PEG funds. I spoke with Keith Reeves, Station Manager for Austin's Channel 6, who has tons of first-hand experience with the subject matter. The City of Austin has been a long-time friend of SnapStream and they recently purchased SnapStream using PEG funds.

Keith filled me in on a lot of interesting pieces of information:

  • Who gets PEG funds?
  • How are PEG funds distributed in Texas?
  • How can SnapStream's technology benefit PEG channels?
  • Do these funds roll over year to year?

PEG Funds Webinar

Using PEG funds to monitor TV

On Wednesday, August 14 at 2 p.m. CDT, we are hosting a PEG funds 101 Webinar with Keith Reeves, to share how the City of Austin was able to underwrite 100% of their SnapStream purchase using PEG funds.

Join us to learn more about the little known funds that you may be sitting on and how you can easily address your media monitoring needs while not affecting the city's overall budget.

Sign up for the Webinar

SnapStream TV Search in Action: Plane Crash in the Hudson

January 21 2009 by Lynne Burke

I was deep in marketing-land on Thursday (also known as "writing a case study"), when I heard about the US Airways plane that crash-landed in the Hudson. I grew up in Houston, but lived in NYC for 5 years and moved back last year. I still have lots of friends there...so when I hear news like that coming out of NY I still feel like it's My News and it feels personal. Within minutes, my boss showed me that rescue picture that Janis Krums took from the ferry and posted to Twitter. I was really amazed by how quickly that picture got out. I watched as the number of "views" went from the dozens to the thousands. It was posted and cross-posted on lots of different blogs as the page views overloaded the Twitter server. Twitter is an amazing thing. I posted it to my Facebook page; I had friends in NY who learned of the plane crash from my Facebook post. Incredible.

A few minutes later, I ran across an article on Silicon Alley Insider, "U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work." I was astonished at how quickly that all happened. I know that sounds cliche...but not just the news of the plane crash - but also how quickly the photo some random guy took from his iPhone got thousands upon thousands of views within minutes; according to Dan Frommer, he was interviewed live on MSNBC just 34 minutes after he posted that photo to Twitter. Pretty cool. It got me thinking about how much technology has changed the way journalists cover the news.

Which got me wondering over the weekend, if I were a video blogger, how quickly could I get up a story about that plane crash? Here in the SnapStream office, we record most of the National news programs for our own interest and example purposes, and we've got alerts that are set up for "breaking news" (read more about that here). I went to my email alerts, did a quick search through Gmail for "Plane Crash" and got several results. I clicked right through to the program through the link in my alert:

In the end, though, I was just fascinated by how quickly that news spread, and how new technologies like Twitter and SnapStream can help journalists keep track of an unfolding event. Pretty cool.

Here's the clip of the TV broadcast my "breaking news" alert linked me to.

Chatting With FreshDV's Matt Jeppsen About How "The Soup" and Others Are Using SnapStream

January 05 2009 by Lynne Burke

In this half-hour podcast, Rakesh talks with Matt about how different industries - including entertainment programs like "The Soup" - are using SnapStream TV search servers, and why. Check out the podcast here:

FreshDV Podcast - Snapstream Media’s DVR on Steroids

Searching television for "breaking news"

December 05 2008 by Rakesh

Sometimes, we hear about cool and unexpected ways that our customers are using our TV search technology. This one example.

Local TV stations live and die by their local news operations. In their 2008 "State of the News Media", The Project for E

xcellence in Journalism says:

Newsrooms are a big factor in the economic success of local television. They contributed 42% to a station’s total revenue, according to local news directors. And the majority of these news directors say their newsrooms are profitable.

So competitive intelligence for a local TV station is important -- this means knowing who's getting the scoop on local news stories and how other local TV stations are covering the local news. And that's why one of our local TV station customers started using their SnapStream Server to scan for the words "breaking news" filtered on the names of their local news competitors.

This particular local TV station setup multiple SnapStream E-mail TV Alerts on the exact phrase "breaking news" for each of their local market competitors. And by setting the frequency to "as it happens", the news director of this TV station now gets an e-mail alert everytime a competitive local station is reporting on "breaking news"!

For example, at 10pm yesterday, they might have received this mention of breaking news on our local ABC station:

13 Eyewitness News at 10PM Yesterday, 10:00 PM - 13 hours ago
>>> Breaking news tops the news, right now firefighters are battling a two-alarm warehouse fire. Authorities are not sure exactly what is burning at the elwood warehouse but they are evacuating that building. We have on the telephone assistant fire chief from the houston fire department omar longoria.
Channel: 13 (KTRK) - Show Length:34:27 - Play - View Transcript - Download Transcript - More

We thought this was pretty cool, so we've setup e-mail TV alerts on "breaking news" on a couple of the SnapStream Servers we are running here in our office.

So whether it's sports news on ESPN:

SportsCenter Today, 9:12 AM - 2 hours ago
The sentencing hearing will be carried live here on "sportscenter" at noon eastern. Roger cossack will return to discuss that. We appreciate the insights this morning. >> My pleasure.breaking news out of the nfl and it is about the new england patriots who have signed another player. You may have heard of him before, linebacker junior seau entering his 19th season. He's returning to the patriots once again. He played for them in 2006 and in 2007, a 12-time pro bowler.
Channel: 33 (ESPN) - Show Length:59:42 - Play - View Transcript - Download Transcript - More

Or celebrity gossip on EXTRA (OK, maybe they shouldn't be calling some of this stuff "breaking news"!):

EXTRA Wed 12/3, 4:33 PM - 2 days ago
I have a contrac through 2011. So right now that's what I have. Until somebody wris me another one. Ok? >> We need you. >> No, you don't. >> Oprah was in new york last night honoring susan taylor. Breaking news. She reveals there's big time confusion about who's throwing the party of all parties at obama's inauguration next mom. >> Everybody is calling me about having a party.
Channel: 12 (KPRC) - Show Length:33:53 - Play - View Transcript - Download Transcript - More

Or national news on Fox News:

Hannity & Colmes Yesterday, 8:31 PM - 15 hours ago
The next news break is about an hour away, "hannity and colmes" continues right now. breaking news tonight in the minnesota senate recount. While most of the votes are recounted norm coleman is sill in the lead. Yesterday 171 ballots turned up giving franken an extra 37 votes, and with thousands of challenged ballots, his 316 lead could easily change. According to the republican party of minnesota franken is calling for an investigation into a minneapolis church and could possibly be connected to more than a hundred missing votes.
Channel: 38 (FNC) - Show Length:1:03:53 - Play - View Transcript - Download Transcript - More

Searching on the term "breaking news" is one useful way to put your finger on the pulse of television!

How to find SnapStream at NAB 2008

April 10 2008 by Rakesh

The Las Vegas Convention center is huge at 3.2 million square feet and while at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, SnapStream only occupies 100 sq. ft. of that space. And based on feedback from visitors last year, we know that the SnapStream booth was hard to find.

Hopefully this year we're easier to find simply because we're not as far back in the South Upper Hall as we were last year (many thanks to our contact at the NAB, Joy Lindsey!):

NAB south upper bird’s eye view

But, we still wanted to make it easier for you to find us so here are some maps and directions.

Directions to SnapStream at NAB2008:

1. Get to the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (veterans of the Las Vegas Convention Center will know that this is on one end of the convention center, furthest away from the Hilton and the North Hall)

2. Take the escalator up to the South Upper Hall

3. Walk down the main corridor of the South Upper Hall (you'll pass massive booths from companies like Sony and Motorola)

4. When you see the Ross Video booth, hang a left.

5. You'll see us on a corner to your right -- our booth number is #SU6008.

See you at NAB!

NAB map to SnapStream

NAB map to SnapStream

What is SnapStream? There's an unlimited amount of video content out there: 24/7 news channels, breaking news events, sports, talk shows, awards galas, entertainment shows, and so much more.

SnapStream makes a real-time news and media search engine that makes it fast and easy to find the video moments that support our customers telling great stories.

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