Finding the Elusive Viewer: A Q&A with Samsung Ads Head of Insights Justin Fromm
I spoke with Justin Fromm, Head of Insights, Samsung Ads recently about how Samsung as an OEM works with consumer data.
Krefetz: You have the data that TV manufacturers capture, what do you do with this?
Fromm: I have the responsibility to tell the story about our audience. I’m talking about using all the data that we have at hand, first-party and third-party. Samsung has the biggest smart TV footprint in the world. Here in the U.S. we have line of sight across everything that happens on the TV. That’s the benefit and responsibility of being the OEM manufacturer.
If you’re a linear network, we know when people watch your content, we know what they’re seeing on your content. If you’re a streaming app, we know when people install your app, when they open and close it, how long they spend in it, and when they stop using it.
So, we approach churn slightly differently, whether it’s [for] ad-supported [services] or not. We’ve done plenty of analysis that demonstrates that after a user stops using an app for four months, they’re very likely to actually stop paying for that app. (although they don't see transaction data).
Krefetz: When we went from the predictable experience of linear advertising to streaming, how did that change the job of ad sales?
Fromm: When an advertiser bought an audience on Friday night on ABC, they could count on that audience coming back and they could understand the reach of their buy and then the potential frequency based off of where that audience was on Friday. With streaming, we've lost that.
The sales team works with their streaming app partners to help them understand the flow of audience. We share new users, people who are retained month after month, and the churners who showed up in the past 12 months, but not in the most recent quarter.
Krefetz: Has viewer churning increased, decreased, or stayed the same?
Fromm: Churn has been fairly steady. The metric we created is the Churn Ratio. We take the number of churned households as our denominator, and then we use the active users for month or the quarter as the numerator. In the fourth quarter of last year, across all of the apps that we looked at, for every active user, there were seven users who had churned out of that app. That’s across the big apps; the smaller apps have higher churn overall. But what's interesting is that churn for the Tier One and Tier Two apps has actually gone up year-over-year.
Krefetz: Why?
Fromm: For the most part, there’s not enough [content] when they finish something to keep them engaged.
Krefetz: Are viewers consuming non- or ad-supported content?
Fromm: The proportion of all streaming time has shifted heavily to ad-supported, and it’s been growing steadily over the last five or six quarters. The proportion year-over-year of streaming that is ad-free has continued to decline. I think people understand when they’re watching ads on streaming, the experience is better than it was on linear where ads were 16 to 22 minutes of an hour.
I always say advertising is culture. It’s why the Super Bowl advertisers build great ads. It’s because people enjoy advertising and they may not enjoy every ad, but they need to buy things and they need to learn about new products and advertising especially on TV is one of the best ways to do that.
Krefetz: How many apps are typically consumed?
Fromm: We looked at the households who were active for a whole year and we wanted to know how many apps they were watching 10 or more months out of a year. 64% of our households have this level of super loyalty to at least one app, but it’s less than three apps per household. They watch eight, but they're loyal to fewer than three.
Krefetz: Are advertisers trending toward linear or CTV?
Fromm: The biggest advertisers in the world no longer think about linear or CTV. They’re buying where the audience is, but that fragmentation becomes really hard for them. Understanding their audience may be in one app for a month watching one show and then not show up there again for three months or a year.
We're building solutions to help advertisers measure where the reach of their advertising across linear and streaming. We're demonstrating duplication based on our ACR data that’s on linear, and our app data as well as our panel data that allows us to understand what’s happening within apps. We’re helping them move some of that duplicated reach that they all understand exists to reach more of their target audience.
Krefetz: Bundles have become big. What happens to advertising in bundles?
Fromm: From an advertising standpoint, the question is, do the advertisers have the same benefit to have line of sight to those viewers who go back and forth between those different companies streaming apps?
Individual companies know when someone opens their app and what they watch. They have all kinds of information to share with advertisers. If it’s two different companies, the more streaming apps you throw into a bundle, the more sets of data have to align. We find that there is a lot of duplication in the analysis that we’ve done. [Also,] irrespective of bundles, we find that 39% of reach on today’s TV buys across linear and multiple AVOD services are duplicated.
Krefetz: When you have a bundle, what kind of Ad-IDs do you have—your own, or are you using somebody else’s?
Fromm: I think these are great questions that advertisers should be asking. We have household IDs and we have TV IDs so we know which TVs belong to which households, and we know the behavior across the apps in those households so we can understand where there’s duplication. Whether an advertiser who buys with those media companies independently understands that is a different question.
Krefetz: What are some of the top questions that an advertiser should be asking when they’re buying?
Fromm: They want to understand the predictability of reaching an audience over time. What proportion of your audience comes back weekly, monthly, every month? How many months out of the year? What percentage of your audience is coming back multiple months such that if I have a campaign going, I can count on reaching them across that? Are you able to de-duplicate across the audience when they’re watching linear, especially if you have a linear network as well as a streaming app Can you help me understand and identify the total reach there and then what that means for frequency?
I think they should really be seeking honesty as to the proportion of the total target audience that their partners can reach. There are 122 million TV households in the United States. With the growth of streaming and streaming-app walled gardens, those companies that have both linear and streaming offers often talk about reaching everyone. But they’re really only talking about their universe. An advertiser should make sure they understand what proportion of their target audience they’re able to reach.
Related Articles
At Streaming Media Connect, Media Cartographer Evan Shapiro sat down for virtual a fireside chat with Justin Evans, Head of Innovations & Insights, Samsung Ads to discuss the importance of data in advertising, the role of Samsung Ads in the streaming revolution, and the introduction of a new product called Optimal Reach.
14 Nov 2024