In this episode of the Business of Marketing podcast, we’re joined by James Grant, SVP and Head of Advanced TV at Equativ, a global ad tech platform powering the future of video advertising
James shares how streaming is transforming TV, why outcome-based measurement is on the rise, and what marketers need to know about identity, transparency, and the next wave of addressable advertising.
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Welcome to the Business Marketing Podcast recorded live at Advertising Week Europe. Today I have the great pleasure of welcoming James Grant, SVP and Head of Advanced TV at Equitive. James, welcome to the show.
Thanks. Thanks very much for having me, John.
So, hey look, before we dive into the future of Advanced TV, it’d be really great if you can just give us a little bit of an understanding of the business that you work for, its purpose, its reason for existence, and perhaps what attracted you to a career within the company you’re in and what that might have looked like.
Yeah, happy to. So Equitive is an ad tech monetization platform. We make technology from ad serving technology for publishers through to a supply side platform where we aggregate supply for people to buy. We also have demand side technology where buyers can come in and place campaigns and book them and manage them. And then we also have a server side ad insertion tool, a company we bought a few years ago for dynamic ad insertion and creative management. So our business is really focused on building the technology for monetization of streaming and online ads.
Cool. And let’s just rewind a little bit in terms of your own career. It’d be really interesting to understand how that’s sort of shapeshifted. You’ve obviously worked in a number of areas of digital media and what’s led you into this space.
Yeah, so I’m probably going to show my age a little bit, but I’m lucky enough to have worked in streaming for over 20 years. It was about 2002, I was a TV buyer at Mediacom and my manager at the time is a guy called Rhys McLachlan who works at ITV. And we were watching clips of the World Cup in South Korea. The time zone meant you would catch up on clips on a very former BBC website. And we realized that this is where our TV would come from, that the satellites would go, the signals would go, that the internet was going to be delivering our content. And I started to orient my career as a result in that direction between the continued aggregation basically of TV and streaming media and coming through the internet. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. So I’ve been a buyer, I’ve been a seller, I’ve done strategic positions, I managed startups and worked in startups on the ad serving and tech side. And most of my career has gravitated towards building or working for the companies that build the tech that allows either the monetization or the distribution of streaming TV.
Wow, I mean, that’s incredibly exciting in terms of seeing that evolution. Definitely. Progression over that period of time.
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, at the moment in terms of the space, in terms of the area, what keeps you most motivated?
Probably not allowed to say my inbox and my to-do list, but I think it’s a super exciting space to be in. This is, you know, our children and at home, you know, our families, we’re watching TV streaming. We’re using the product ourselves. And so you have this interest at a personal level and then at a professional level, what we can do, what we can sort of push the boundaries of where we build our businesses is just really exciting. I used to say to my kids that on a bad day, my job is really encouraging people to buy things they don’t need. And sometimes that’s what advertising is. But the brilliant thing about advertising and TV and streaming TV, actually on the best of days, on a good day, we are lowering the barriers to entry of great content. You watch this stuff for no upfront cost at a user level. That’s amazing. The amount of TV and content we can watch and consume today is huge. And it’s the ads that pay for that.
Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, you’ve just completely described my use behavior. It’s exciting, right? I get to work in streaming TV and it is good fun.
Yeah. I no longer watch terrestrial TV. I just watch on demands and I watch what I want in the time that I want to allocate to it. That time shifted, the ability to time shift your viewing is absolutely huge. I think that’s changed everyone’s behavior.And you really see it since COVID. I can schedule my content consumption as I want. I’m not stuck to that traditional broadcast schedule anymore. Yeah. Hey, look, before we go into some of the challenges within the industry, let’s start with some positives, I guess. Sure. So, you know, what’s exciting you right now of the world of, I’m going to call it advanced TV, and are there areas that you feel the industry is generally moving in terms of the right direction?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let’s start with the consumer. So I think, firstly, consumers have never had such a good deal as we just talked about. Their tech at their fingertips, the ability to consume the content as they want is huge. The concept of best available screen is massive. I can watch anytime. If I’m on a train, I can watch on my phone. If I’m at home, I have a better screen than ever. So the consumer’s options are huge. The streaming platforms have more and more content. You can be as niche or as mainstream as you want. That’s super exciting. And you can see that in the continued consumption of mainstream players, but also the growth of what we would consider more niche distribution or smaller content.
Then if you come to the ad side, we got loads of amazing tech. You can read an audience profile in 300 milliseconds and change the ads that get delivered in that stream, household level. That’s amazing, really. That means we can customize the ads.
Yeah, you can have some personalization. Huge, yeah. And you can manage subtitles. You can manage ad delivery, geographic locations, and the type of people. Your ability to localize or personalize the ads and the content has never been better. We’re getting better at frequency capping. We’re getting better at cross, let’s say, cross distribution measurement. And then for buyers, the people that actually place the ads, either the buyer direct or the advertiser direct, the ability to manage your return or outcome of your investment is better than ever. We’re joining everything up. We’re bringing more metrics. So there’s a lot to be positive about.
Actually, I’m just going to ask you a couple of questions around that in terms of opportunity that that creates as well. So, okay, great. You obviously have large national brands. You have agencies you can go to, and they’re going to advertise on behalf of those brands. But do you think in terms of that level of personalization that it’s opening up a gateway or an opportunity to mid-market companies as an example that might be more localized? So within the US, they could just be within a state. In the UK, they might just operate within a few boroughs within London, as an example.
A hundred percent. So anybody who has Sky will have potentially seen Sky AdSmart. And what Sky are doing is you’re seeing more localized creative delivery. Sometimes it’s a car dealership. There’s plenty of examples. But the ability to take that more medium-sized advertiser on TV and deliver the content to that area, definitely. That’s huge. It’s here today. You can do it. I think it’s a growth area. Not everyone is ready to take that leap. And, of course, we have to help as an industry. We have to help the advertiser. Can we help them with localized creative? If you had a, I don’t know, let’s say you had an FMCG brand with a discount code, you might only run the discount code in 50% of the postcodes you deliver on. We can help. As an industry, we can help with creative execution, targeting. But all of those opportunities exist today. And that really opens up the number of advertisers that can come onto TV. It makes a big difference.
Yeah, I mean, I can also see a world where I’m going to set my preferences as well. This is what I’m in market for. This is what I’m interested in. This is the kind of advertising that I want at this point in time. That’s not available yet, or is that something to come?
It’s not available yet. I’m with you. I would take it to a very simple use case that all of us can understand. Every time we open a website and we have to click on, do I accept these cookies or not, wouldn’t it be great if I just set up a cookie profile that could do that automatically for me? And then to your point, if I could do that at a household level for my advertising preferences, could I set those for me? Could I set them at a level where, you know, at certain times of the day it’s family-oriented, at other times of the day on my login it’s just for me? I’m with you. That would be brilliant.
We have a partnership with Titan OS, which is an operating software for TVs, and they’ve talked about personalization in this area. So definitely companies are thinking about it, but I don’t think it’s mainstream already quite yet.
Yeah, but maybe near to midterm future. I think so. I think it will comequicker than maybe people anticipate. And certainly it helps in terms of, you know, I guess people’s changing attitudes towards privacy. It gets away from the uncanny valley factor you talked about, frequency capping. Yeah, and frequency is still an issue. Being able to manage what people see and how they see it and when, we’re still not perfect at that. But a lot of it does come down to that identity management at a household level and making customers comfortable that what they share is appropriate. No one likes the idea that their phone listens to them. That’s fair. None of us do. We’re all consumers. But at a TV level, if you could set your preferences up front, I think people would feel more comfortable.
So let’s move on a little bit in terms of perhaps we’ll touch on market complexity and some strategic challenges. So on the flip side, whilst there’s momentum, there’s also a lot of noise. As part of that, advanced TV is full of promise. It’s great. We’ve touched on some of that. But it’s also fragmented. There’s a lot of overload. There’s a lot of acronyms out there. And there’s a lot that’s misunderstood by individuals, whether they’re marketers, whether they’re individuals within agencies.
As part of that, what are some of the biggest challenges you see for brands and agencies and what they’re facing right now at this point in time in terms of trying to activate within this space?
Okay, so on the buy side, on the brand and agency side, I think what they want is to be able to see reach. And that’s their primary metric, particularly on the television side. What percentage of my target audience can I reach? And then how do I optimize that and make it more efficient on both price but also delivery? That’s hard because we don’t have a unified audience universe across all of the different providers. We had it with traditional TV, or at least we had a model for it. And that’s something that we need to work on as an industry.
I think if you drill down one stage further and go to the advertiser, I think the advertisers, they are starting to bring in a little bit more outcome measurement to their buys, particularly if they bring them in-house. So the really large ones, the Procters and the J&Js, for instance, they will start to bring in more of an outcome-based metric that sits underneath their activity. So I think for them, they’re starting to explore what they add. But I think that unified measurement is really the big issue.
Yeah, I mean, you see that obviously with traditional TV advertising in the past anyway. So you run an ad, you’ll see a spike of traffic on the website, and you’ll see a level of outcome, I guess. That’s it. And that last stage of attribution gets talked a lot at all the conferences across the whole advertising model. I think it’s never been perfect. So we’ll constantly work on that as an industry. We’ve got a lot to iterate on.
I think what becomes a bit of a driver is audience fragmentation in shows is a big deal. And that’s been going on for a long time. So if you think Adolescence has been in the news a lot, really successful, huge show, lots of noise about it, lots of reasons to go and watch it. And the viewing figures were less than 10 million. There were sort of 6.1 million, I think, for the first, I can’t remember if it was day or week, but it was the number being touted was 6.1 million in the overnights, I think. That’s really small if you go back 20 years, where the largest programs, maybe a royal wedding, maybe a World Cup final, maybe the FA Cup final, they were north of 18 million viewers. So that fragmentation is a real problem for marketers. It’s a problem for all of us to try and solve.
Yeah. And then it’s actually the segmentation of our audience if you want to do a level of personalization. And therein lies both the good and the bad side. So you can get the audience quite niche. You can get them really interested in much narrower sort of targeting windows. But then how do you allow a brand or an advertiser to add those and aggregate the buy together for the most efficient campaign metrics? That’s the challenge.
Yeah. And to an extent, and we touched on this before, hey, we started recording the podcast, the idea of, I guess, over-reliance to an extent on legacy playbooks and the way that you have done things in the past. Yes. Yes. And I think that’s a really important point because the legacy business models are still what drives most people’s activity. And part of the transformation is not just the tech. It’s actually the business model. Is a CFO readyto change the models of which the last 10, 20 years of business have been structured? Because that’s a real part of the challenge. We can’t ignore it. Those metrics, those legacy metrics, almost we’ve got to try and carry them over and build the new ones at the same time. Yeah.
And then the other pieces in terms of the creative approach as well. Are there challenges or issues there in terms of, I’m going to call it creative misalignment? There definitely can be. I mean, one very easy one to call out is you can have a different player size. So for anyone who doesn’t know what that means, if you think of a literally a video player on your phone, it’s going to be a very different player size to one on your TV. You have to change the creatives sometimes in real time for that player. So you can have technical misalignment. You could have a ID of a household that is a family ID, but unknown to the TV, maybe a child has watched a program and you’ve got targeting misalignment. So creative misalignment is definitely a problem.
I think creative management, we have more tools than ever. So it really comes down to identification of who you’re targeting and then security of what creative you’re delivering. And having this most developed TV markets have a structure for linear TV around creative identification. I think we have to get better at adopting those across the board.
Cool. Hey, let’s just move on slightly and talk about how you guys solve these problems. So let’s look at, I guess, solutions, the shared innovations as part of this discussion. So from your standpoint, what are the most important ways that you’re helping marketers, media owners navigate this element of complexity, especially around subjects such as identity, transparency, addressability?
Sorry, what was the last one? Addressability. Addressability. OK, so I’ll start with identity. So how do you know who you’re targeting and how do you know what the target that you want to hit is? It’s really important that we have a concept of a household ID. So at Quative, we’re building our household ID graph. It all has to be within the structures of the law and GDPR, but you can build a structure of basically the television device ID. And then depending on what you’re allowed to do, sometimes a household and some other devices added. You can overlay some of the household ID with additional information such as the average credit score for a postcode. So let’s say you have 20 houses in a postcode. You can have an average credit score for that and you can tie those household IDs. So now without singling out individuals or a specific house, you can start to build profiles. That’s really important for us. And that’s really important for the service we offer. And that’s the direction we’re headed in for identity.
You can layer addressability in there. So addressability becomes, what are the tools to enable the advertiser to reach those audiences securely, accurately, and make sure they deliver them? Addressability is not just the audience, though it may be the time of day and it may be the device. So you’ve got to bring all of those items into play.
And then the last one was transparency. So this for me falls under a combination of both reporting and what we would think of as transparency as safety. So reporting, I mentioned the word outcomes earlier. It’s started to pick up in the industry. I think we are moving to an outcomes-based sort of age, if you like, of television. We know that performance from search is a metric that marketers like. We know that branding and share of voice comes from traditional TV. Outcomes is probably somewhere in the middle and is a great word. Marketers want outcomes. Of course they do. So I think that starts to come in with transparency. And then some security and transparency around where your ads ran and did they run against the addressable identities you targeted? All platforms have to have that. So we’re no different. We’re all moving in that direction.
And then in terms of this space, what are you seeing in terms of some of the most exciting innovations that are starting to emerge? Perhaps that’s something that’s more data-driven or data-driven creative or real-time measurement or even aspects of sustainability or perhaps shopping formats. What’s exciting in terms of some of these new emerging innovations?
Yeah, sure. So I think there’s two that you actually mentioned. So one is sustainability. So the industry hastaken a long, hard look at itself in the last three years. And we’re no different. And we recently launched our green PMP initiative. We are driving much more focus into the sustainability of the platforms and the systems that sit behind our monetization. We’re making that very transparent. We’re opening it up to our buyers and our users and our publishers. So that’s super exciting. We can really do a lot better in that space. And it’s great that the company is focused in that area.
And then data-driven sort of execution. I think as an industry, we’re seeing some really innovative things. ITV are doing some good stuff. Channel 4, they’re doing some really clever things where advertisers can bring their own data, overlay it in a secure way against the broadcaster data, and start to activate it. And most importantly, report on it at an advertiser level. What does the advertiser get back? I think all of us can do those things. But when the largest broadcasters in the market do it, you’re starting to see it scale. That means advertisers like it. So yeah, again, another really exciting opportunity to bring multiple data sets together and target the right people with the right message.
And then, hey, look, this is obviously an evolving market. You’ve obviously seen it evolve over a period of time. But where we’re at, it’s still, in my mind, relatively immature to an extent. So let’s look at maybe what’s broken and what needs to be fixed or perhaps changed. Sure. So there’s obviously a lot of progress out there. And there’s still some big unresolved issues in the ecosystem.
Based on that, in terms of looking at advanced TV or programmatic more broadly, perhaps in slightly more general terms, are there areas where the industry is potentially stuck or moving too slowly? Definitely that unified measurement. We talked about it already, but we’re stuck there. So I won’t talk about that one too much, but that is a big one. I think transparency we touched on, but it’s still a really important topic. So on the transparency front, knowing where your ad ran, knowing which ad ran where is super, super important. And we still have a lot of work to do in that space. Not all of the players in our space will show their log level data. Sometimes it’s a publisher that can’t do it. Sometimes it’s legacy. It could just be a legacy contract. But all of us need to get better at providing that kind of information.
And then there’s a supply path optimization issue. Today, I think the SPO setup is a bit blunt. It is one SSP has a primary connection to a publisher. But sometimes a publisher wants to add another SSP, but they don’t want to have to go through a full legal process. And today, that model doesn’t work very well. So I think I heard one of the broadcasters talk last week at a different event and say, well, we don’t really care about SPO in the way the industry sets it up today. We would rather share transparency in the logs and log level data so that we can just see where it went and who to. I think that’s super interesting. Maybe a more scalable.
There are a couple of areas I was thinking about. I actually have a few:
Cross-platform planning.
Transparency, as you just talked to.
The economics of supply as well.
Yeah, so economics of supply is super interesting. Obviously, the supplier wants the most yield possible for its audience so it can invest in more content. And the buyer wants the most efficient price possible to reach as much audience as possible. That’s always been a battle. That’s media trading. And there’s a skill to it. Skill to the planning and a skill to the execution. I think the transparency piece helps the economics a lot. And if we report on outcomes, again, that helps justify the spend at a marketer level because they get better insight into what’s driving their sales activity.
And who do you feel that needs to take the lead on this? Tech platforms, buyers, or perhaps regulators? I would hope that the industry as a whole can deal with it before the regulators have to step in. I think the tech platforms have to take a lead. I think they have a responsibility because they’re competing against each other. But what they can do is offer the service, and then it’s the buyers who have totake it on. There is also an element where the publishers have to accept it as well. And I think, though, that it’s a combination of the three, potentially with either the tech platforms either starting that initiative or the buyers. demanding it. And then I think it will snowball from there.
So, you know, let’s just move to some sort of closing reflections as it were. Sure. So looking at this, James, within your role, you sit at the intersection of innovation, commercial strategy, industry change. So as part of that, if you were to look ahead over the next two to three years, so not massive future gazing, how do you see the role of TV evolving within the broader media mix? And if there’s anything out there that you think will perhaps surprise us?
Okay, so it is fast moving. Three years is quite a long time in this space. Or even the nearer future. No, no, it’s okay. I think we can make some predictions. I think we will see an acceleration in viewing on streaming platforms. We’ve talked for a long time about a big drop off in linear. It’s never come. It looks like it will continue to be a gradual decline in linear. But I think we will see a big uptick in streaming. And I think we will see younger generations only stream as they get older and that three years we go through it. So I think that’s a straightforward prediction.
I think the outcomes piece that I’ve mentioned a few times, I think that is going to impact brand measurement. It should be for the positive, but I think more and more of the ecosystem of TV streaming advertising will focus on outcomes. How do we provide it? What was the target? How do we reconcile it? What does that mean to the spend? I think that will make an enormous difference. And I think we’ll see that really, really accelerate in three years.
Beyond that, I suspect there’s a surprise that none of us see. I think we’re due a new startup from a garage somewhere in the back end of nowhere in America probably. I think we’re definitely due one of those. But I also think that the movement of online tech to television is going to throw up a few more surprises. There’s going to be something that someone’s working on or that as an industry we haven’t fully discovered. And in that three years, it’s a long time. I think something else will turn up in that space too.
And we always close the show with elements that relate to advice. So first question, for marketers who are listening who want to future-proof their video strategy, what one piece of advice would you give them right now at this point in time?
So the number one piece of advice would be be clear on your expected outcomes. The clearer you are, the more transparent you are, the more the chain that executes your advertising can help you. So that’s I think number one.
I’m going to try and sneak a number two in if that’s okay. And that is don’t always think that television is just for the largest, biggest companies, biggest brands. There is a real growth in small to medium business opportunities for streaming TV, regional delivery, maybe even postcode local delivery. So don’t assume that. Go and check it out for yourself.
And then lastly, I always ask this question. So advice to younger people who are looking to get into the advertising, the marketing, perhaps even the TV industry. What piece of advice would you offer to perhaps a graduate at this point in time?
So I think the advice I’d offer is be open-minded about the roles you’re looking for. My first job was as a trainee TV buyer. And part of the reason I took that job was I didn’t think I could do sales. I have spoken to so many people over the years who say the same thing. Oh, I’m not sure I could sell. I don’t think I’m salesy. And the reality of businesses, we’re all selling somewhere. And don’t be put off by the concept of selling or being a salesperson because it’s actually probably your quickest route to commercial, like learning how businesses work than any other role. So just be open-minded about the roles you start with.
Great. Well, look, brilliant words of advice. It’s been fantastic having you on the show. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. I hope you really enjoy the rest of the day at Advertising Week Europe. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks, John. Thanksfor having me. You’re welcome. The Business of Marketing podcast was brought to you by Path 7, powered by partners built for performance.
