Partner Spotlight with The Network

We recently sat down with Mike Moses, Creative Affairs & Brand Partnerships, from The Network. We discussed the newest streaming platform in the market and how The Network approaches both streaming and advertising differently. Read more of our conversation below:    Congratulations on the big launch! Now that The Network is officially out in market, can you tell us a bit more about what separates your service from the competition for viewers? With 8 original series this year (and nothing else) we are the ONLY premium streamer offering a star studded line-up for absolutely free! We aim to combat scroll fatigue by only bringing unique/buzzy original series to the platform and nothing else. We are the Robin Hood of the streamers if you will…   What about for advertiser partners? Our founders’ background is in the ad space, and agency world – we created a platform to be a better partner to advertisers, because we saw so many top streamers casting aside their partnerships as secondary to paid subscribers – We have the ability to offer concise audience segmentation – an in-house studio for free custom ad integrations – an attribution model built to the needs of each of our advertisers. And most of all – elevated brand loyalty and emotional connection from our subscribers – Much like wikipedia, our subscribers understand the need for ads to keep our platform free – and that elevates their connections to the brands keeping their premium content for free.    Ads are obviously a big part of the streaming experience. What role does programmatic play in your inventory monetization? We are a results based partner – naturally the nature of programmatic is at its core what we strive to support – We believe we can be an integral programmatic partner who offers a higher level of segmentation, targeting and customization along the way.   …it was within the first 15 minutes that we knew Nexxen was the unrivaled option – not only does Nexxen offer partnership in helping us push the boundaries on HOW we serve ads, but they also have an unparalleled support team that we feel truly has our backs and will move mountains to ensure we see success and in turn success for our advertisers…   We’re so excited that you’ve added the Nexxen Ad Server into your tech stack. What made Nexxen stand out from other options? After meeting with and kicking the tires on 7 different ad servers, it was within the first 15 minutes that we knew Nexxen was the unrivaled option – Not only does Nexxen offer partnership in helping us push the boundaries on HOW we serve ads, but they also have an unparalleled support team that we feel truly has our backs and will move mountains to ensure we see success and in turn success for our advertisers. No one in the space is more forward thinking – or prolific in how they approach the tech either.   Alright, time to spill the beans! Any teasers you can share with our readers about what’s comping up next for The Network? We are in the midst of our first two premieres with shows featuring  John Leguizamo, Steve Coogan, Paul Rudd, Sienna Miller, John C. Reilly  and Wanda Sykes – While we can’t reveal what’s next, we CAN say you can expect popular 90s IP re-imagined as Network Originals from top stars… Original Docu-series from top journalists, and original reality programming from internet breaking hosts! Stay tuned! It’s only the beginning!     Connect With Us Learn how you can effectively and meaningfully leverage today’s video and CTV opportunities with our end-to-end platform, data and insights. Contact Us

Reflections on the Programmatic Pioneers Summit

Nexxen Sales Director Rob Petherick joined a panel at the Programmatic Pioneers Summit in London to discuss all things omnichannel. Read more for his top takeaways and insights from the event – including a look at the rising power of ACR data.

Life At Nexxen with Jennifer Mandeville

In our latest installment of Life at Nexxen, we sat down with Mike Connon, Sr. Sales Director on the Strategic Sales Team. We discussed what it’s like to manage your own team, the skills you need in any sales role, and the musical start to his career.

Introducing the flexible, unified Nexxen Data Platform

Advertisers, agencies and publishers have become increasingly sophisticated as well as heavily reliant on data and technology to navigate a fragmented, rapidly evolving media landscape. Such massive industry evolutions shifted these key stakeholders from exclusively transacting on media to instead focusing more on their audiences, how best to understand target consumers and reaching these people holistically.  Data-fueled, innovative partners that can offer robust, yet granular capabilities will best support buyers and sellers to solve the challenging task of identifying as well as reaching target audiences in a privacy-safe way.    At Nexxen, we have invested in and built an incredibly advanced tech stack inclusive of a DSP, SSP and a robust DMP (data management platform). To put the scale of our data footprint into perspective, we work with over 1,000 advertiser and agency customers as well as over 1,600 publisher customers and have third-party data relationships with over 65 partners. We also have access to TV and streaming viewership data across millions of households through partnerships with major TV and streaming data players. Our platform has direct access to publish ads on roughly 225,000 sites and apps and handles roughly 199 billion daily ad requests. Roughly 86% of our campaigns are now data-enabled, and 39% of all campaigns are using our first party Nexxen data. We believe that as data becomes increasingly more valuable to our customers, so too is the value proposition of our platform. (source: Nexxen International Ltd. Fourth Quarter 2023 Financial Results Mar 6, 2024)  Today we are incredibly excited to announce our latest data solution for partners across the media supply chain: the Nexxen Data Platform.   The Nexxen Data Platform evolves our DMP to enable partners to license out our full suite of data capabilities. It provides a robust ecosystem to help these partners effectively maximize their target consumer relationships by offering a compliant, omnichannel, comprehensive and 360-degree view of valuable audiences.  Like the rest of Nexxen’s technology, we built the Nexxen Data Platform on top of our own and operated infrastructure.  We believe that as data becomes increasingly more valuable to our customers, so too is the value proposition of our platform. We believe that as data becomes increasingly more valuable to our customers, so too is the value proposition of our platform. For example, a buyer can directly onboard their own audiences and leverage Nexxen’s tools to create enriched audiences to activate across Nexxen’s unified tech stack or via select 3P DSP or SSP platforms through four key pillars:  Data onboarding:  we unite the buyer’s data assets like their first-party data with Nexxen data assets through our clean room capabilities to provide a comprehensive and privacy safe view of target customers  Data assets: These assets include unique sources that take that buyer’s data to the next level, such as exclusive ACR data from VIDAA, streaming viewership data from PeerLogix, 3P partnerships data and more.  Data applications: A buyer then taps into these enhanced data sets through Nexxen-exclusive applications like Nexxen Discovery, TV Intelligence and our Unified Identity Graph. Data activations: Once Nexxen’s applications create the enhanced, holistic audiences, the buyer can then activate against them through:           a. The Nexxen SSP and DSP         b. The Nexxen SSP via private marketplace deals (PMPs) with select third-party DSPs          c. Select third-party SSPs and DSPs  We look forward to seeing the multiple ways our partners leverage the Nexxen Data Platform, capturing as much data efficiency and impact as possible. For Nexxen, the Nexxen Data Platforms serves as another example for how Nexxen is well positioned for the continued industry evolution.  You can learn more about the Nexxen Data Platform at nexxen.com/nexxen-data-platform. Read Next

How Nexxen’s Discovery Platform, DSP and Human Intelligence Helps Lexus Achieve Success YoY

Interviewed by: Carol Gillard Linkedin Icon-xtwitterlogo-black Albert Thompson, Managing Director at Walton Isaacson is a seasoned marketer with 20 years of experience working with auto clients, and 16 of those years have been focused on Lexus. He continuously looks to data that helps him better understand consumer intent before activating his campaigns to drive performance for his client–going beyond CTRs and VTRs as metrics for success. As a long-standing partner using Nexxen’s Discovery tool and DSP (Albert and Walton Isaacson’s relationship spans many mergers and acquisitions), we sat down with him to learn more about why he chooses Nexxen as a partner. Nexxen, has always been about unpacking the decisions people make and better understanding them. That’s what’s unique about the Nexxen DSP, it’s probably the only engine that is bolted onto a business intelligence framework, so we know real consumer intent and how to target before execution. Nexxen, has always been about unpacking the decisions people make and better understanding them. That’s what’s unique about the Nexxen DSP, it’s probably the only engine that is bolted onto a business intelligence framework, so we know real consumer intent and how to target before execution. Consumer intent-level data for precision targeting through DSP I work in an agency, but I’ll tell people I’m not an agency person or media person either–all I care about is why consumers buy what they buy. So, I think my relationship with Amobee, and now Nexxen, has always been about unpacking the decisions people make and better understanding them. That’s what’s unique about the Nexxen DSP, it’s probably the only engine that is bolted onto a business intelligence framework, so we know real consumer intent and how to target before execution.  For instance, we know that Lexus dealers want a warm lead–someone who knows what they want. So, the only way we started with our Nexxen campaigns was using the narrow domain of interest around the Lexus vehicle to target–this is data we got from the Discovery tool.   Supply path optimization before “SPO” was a pressing issue Cleaning up the supply chain is a conversation that Walton Isaacson and Nexxen (since the Amobee days) have always had. This goes back years before anyone talked about removing unnecessary intermediaries and wasting impressions on junk sites. So, we never had MFA, or click bait, or quality of audience targeting, or brand safety issues when working together. With this sort of “excellence in the details” mantra, we collectively were always about understanding the real “why” behind performance.    Audience intelligence informed by AI and people My philosophy is that if you marry human thinking and intelligence with a machine that can do that at scale, then that deep learning then feeds the targeting engine and execution; that’s like marrying a consulting firm with a big buying agency with smart people. That’s why consultancy firms started buying agencies, because they’re tethering strategic consulting to execution, which is the way it should have been from the beginning.  But what’s missing is robust technology that can accelerate all that. To me, that’s really what Nexxen does.  I only worked with partners who let me “program the machine.” I need to be able to provide intel, send white papers, reports, industry research, client data, because the only way that the highest threshold of intelligence in an engine can be achieved is when there’s human input. Nexxen’s DMP functions more like a CDP–it’s evolved over time to house more intent-based data sources and store that data longer. That makes it so much easier for the machine to be fed and learn, and that’s what I’ve been doing with the Discovery platform for years. A long-term relationship built from dedicated customer service and consultative collaboration Nexxen has a good team of people and good tech–I know from speaking to your engineers. I always tell people if you get to the 10th person removed from your rep and you still like them [the company], it’s a good organization.  You guys have always done a great job of having account people and engineers all in the room at the same time to have multidimensional dialogue in the same conversation, and most other companies just don’t. That’s a lost art in this business. Intelligence data that fuels business not solely campaigns If a partner hands me an audience report, Nexxen Discovery is the kind of report that needs to be the standard–they’re the reports that I can hand to a client for them to make better business decisions with. When I look at everyone else’s, the reporting is not robust and it’s just basic one-size-fits-all. During COVID we gave Lexus the Discovery reports that looked at hybrid interest and adoption and monitored it go down and then rebound, which was key for local markets at the dealer level [to know]. All that was worth gold to a marketing type because the only category and the only industry where I see that kind of intelligence is pharmaceutical. Proven results YoY Early in the relationship with Nexxen, when we were optimizing the DMP with Discovery data around online inquiries, we had so much success with the campaign that I think it was unbelievable to the client. At first, they noted that purchase inquiries were a very narrow KPI–but then the number of test drives were so off the charts that they didn’t believe it until we were doing it year-over-year. Read the Lexus case study Read Next

Life At Nexxen with Mike Connon

In our latest installment of Life at Nexxen, we sat down with Mike Connon, Sr. Sales Director on the Strategic Sales Team. We discussed what it’s like to manage your own team, the skills you need in any sales role, and the musical start to his career.

What Should You Know About Voice-to-Action Campaigns? A Q&A with Say It Now

Interviewed by: Adam Mugridge, Director of Creative Solutions, Nexxen Studio Linkedin Icon-xtwitterlogo-black Last month, I had the pleasure of joining leading voice-to-action ad tech group Say It Now – and a handful of their clients and partners – for an afternoon discussing all things actionable audio advertising. I walked the crowd through the ways in which connected TV (CTV) and voice-to-action can work in tandem to engage audiences and drive action, and had the privilege of listening to a few members of the Say It Now team discuss the opportunities that lie ahead in this space. Afterwards, I sat down with Say It Now’s CEO, Charlie Cadbury, to dive a bit deeper into the future of voice-to-action tech (particularly in relation to CTV campaigns). Here’s what he had to say.   First and foremost, can you tell us about Say It Now and its voice-to-action technology?    With pleasure! Say It Now is an ad tech business helping brands engage with the 60% of UK homes and 90 million US homes that now have a smart speaker. The point of an advertisement is to raise understanding and inspire an action. It is easier to engage ‘in the moment’ by saying a few words out loud than to get out your phone, unlock it, open a browser and type a brand CTA into a search engine where you are often met with many challenger sales. Think of it like voice-enabled QR codes. We have built a suite of technology that makes it simple to create, launch and measure these types of campaigns, and their popularity is massively on the rise.  How does this voice-to-action tech integrate with CTV?   Seamlessly.  There is no technical integration.  The only change on the creative unit is the call-to-action, which tells the audience they can engage by saying things like, ‘Alexa, Let’s Texas!’ We create a branded voice ‘landing page’ that sits within Alexa, waiting for someone to invoke them by saying ‘Alexa, let’s Texas.’ Once they have a short-branded conversation, building on the ad creative and are often then offered an opportunity to be sent a link to find out more. Every step of this engagement is measured and reported back through the Say It Now data studio. What are the opportunities for brands and advertisers who are looking to utilise both CTV and voice-to-action in future campaigns?    Many and varied. We have seen great successes in QSR, Travel, Auto, Retail and Technology verticals, with advertisers driving to appointment booking, offers, app download or voice commerce.  We are building out vertical-specific benchmarking, but as these are often net new engagement metrics for a brand, the best benchmark to beat is your own.  We are seeing several clients charting a path to more performance through their CTV campaigns using this new data.  It is easier to engage ‘in the moment’ by saying a few words out loud than to get out your phone, unlock it, open a browser and type a brand CTA into a search engine where you are often met with many challenger sales. It is easier to engage ‘in the moment’ by saying a few words out loud than to get out your phone, unlock it, open a browser and type a brand CTA into a search engine where you are often met with many challenger sales. And what are some key considerations these brands and advertisers should keep top-of-mind?    They will be leaders. This is still a nascent area, and many categories are still to have ‘firsts,’ which means these campaigns are more likely to get extra exposure. Their case studies are going to be poured over by competitors, who will then follow. I guess the biggest consideration is do you like to lead or follow?   Last but not least, how can brands measure the effectiveness of their CTV and voice-to-action campaigns, after they’ve run?   This is the best bit. Real-time information has always been hard to get with CTV campaigns. We can report on engagement as the campaign runs, so brands have access to information they can use to understand and optimise the efficacy of their campaigns. They can then take that insight to make the same spend go further. We can report on impressions, engagement, conversational dwell time with the branded voice experience and conversational outcomes. We are adding more insight all the time.    Read Next Connect With Us Learn how you can effectively and meaningfully leverage today’s video and CTV opportunities with our end-to-end platform, data and insights. Contact Us

Integrating Data Science into Product and Technology Organizations

Integrating data science into a product or technology organization is a strategic move that can drive innovation, enhance decision-making, and create competitive advantages. However, the process is not without its challenges, including aligning data science projects with business goals, ensuring effective communication between data scientists and other teams, and implementing scalable solutions. In this blog post, we’ll explore Nexxen’s key strategies for successfully integrating data science into a product or technology organization. 1. Define Clear Objectives and Metrics The first step in integrating data science into a product organization is to define clear objectives and metrics. This involves understanding the business goals and how data science can contribute to achieving these goals. It’s important to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives, along with key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress. This clarity helps align the data science team’s efforts with the organization’s strategic goals and provides a framework for measuring success. 2. Foster Collaboration and Communication Effective collaboration and communication between data scientists, product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders are crucial for the success of data science projects. Encourage regular cross-functional meetings, where team members can share updates, discuss challenges, and brainstorm solutions. Tools such as shared project management software can help facilitate communication and keep everyone on the same page. Additionally, promoting a culture of data literacy across the organization can enhance understanding and collaboration. 3. Implement Agile Data Science Practices Adopting agile methodologies can significantly benefit the integration of data science into product development. Agile practices, such as iterative development and continuous feedback, allow data science teams to be more adaptive and responsive to changing business needs. This approach encourages experimentation, rapid prototyping, and the flexibility to pivot as required, leading to more innovative and effective solutions. Promoting a culture of data literacy across the organization can enhance understanding and collaboration. 4. Ensure Data Quality and Accessibility The foundation of any successful data science initiative is high-quality, accessible data. Invest in the infrastructure and processes needed to collect, store, and manage data effectively. This includes implementing robust data governance policies, ensuring data privacy and security compliance, and providing data scientists with the tools and access needed to analyze data efficiently. A centralized data platform can facilitate data sharing and collaboration, while also maintaining data integrity. 5. Build Scalable and Maintainable Solutions As data science projects move from prototype to production, it’s important to focus on scalability and maintainability. Work closely with the engineering team to ensure that data science models can be integrated into the product in a way that is scalable, reliable, and easy to maintain. This might involve adopting microservices architectures, containerization, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices to streamline deployment and updates. 6. Cultivate a Data-Driven Culture Finally, integrating data science into a product organization requires cultivating a data-driven culture. This means encouraging decision-making based on data and analysis rather than intuition or assumption. Provide training and resources to help employees understand the value of data science, and celebrate successes when data-driven projects achieve significant results. A data-driven culture fosters innovation, encourages evidence-based decision-making, and can significantly enhance the organization’s competitive edge. A data-driven culture fosters innovation, encourages evidence-based decision-making, and can significantly enhance the organization’s competitive edge. Conclusion Integrating data science into a product organization is a complex but rewarding endeavor. By defining clear objectives, fostering collaboration, implementing agile practices, ensuring data quality, building scalable solutions, and cultivating a data-driven culture, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data science capabilities. This strategic integration can lead to more innovative products, improved customer experiences, and a significant competitive advantage in the market. Join our Team Read Next

Life At Nexxen with Vanessa Nguyen

In our latest installment of Life at Nexxen, we sat down with Vanessa Nguyen – a senior manager on our product marketing team. Vanessa dives into the general product launch process, what she enjoys about where she lives, and what she’s most excited about for Nexxen’s identity resolution offerings this year.