VideoAmp plans to supplement its pitch about how its data is being adopted as currency with testimonials from buyers, sellers and advertisers about how using advanced metrics has made their campaigns more effective.
One of the companies challenging Nielsen’s dominance in TV ratings, VideoAmp is holding a VampFront event Tuesday ahead of the upfronts–an unusual move for a measurement company.
“We play such a large role in the upfront,” Peter Bradbury, VideoAmp’s chief commercial officer, told Broadcasting+Cable.
“We’ve never gotten all of the interested parties together and shared where we’re at, how we can enable them and share successes,” he said. “We at VideoAmp are very very aggressively trying to make the case to the industry empirically that there's a better way to transact.”
Bradbury, who spent more than two decades with Nielsen before joining VideoAmp in January, said the company is inviting high-level executives from the buy side, the sell side and industry groups to its event.
After VideoAmp execs lay out their vision of where the industry is heading, “we’re very quickly handing it off to our clients,” Bradbury said. “We’re very fortunate that we had a large group of clients jump at the opportunity to stand up and share their message about the progress they’ve made in their own shops in large part through the work they’ve been doing with us evolving their measurement and currency.”
A big part of VideoAmp’s message is that better measurement and advanced currencies aren’t part of the future, but a reality today.
“There are a lot of deals that are being done, north of a billion dollars in deals have been conducted on VideoAmp alone, not to mention the other more targeted currencies,” Bradbury said.
Other data points VideoAmp will present includes the assertion it is on track to have more than $1 billion in deal guaranteed by VideoAmp currency in 2024.
The company said it has 1,400% year-over-year growth in adoption for its measurement and currency solutions, and that it is doing business with 98% of publishers, 11 agency groups and more than 1,000 advertisers.
Campaigns guaranteed on advanced audiences with VideoAmp have generated an 11% increase in total conversions, based on VideoAmp Outcome Reports commissioned by Paramount for 13 Vantage data driven linear campaigns guaranteed on VideoAmp currencies in 2022 and 2023.
Guest speakers appearing in person at the VampFront are expected to include Katie Haniffy, head of media for PepsiCo Beverages, Fox Chief Advertising Research and Analytics Officer Mainak Mazumdar (another former Nielsen exec), and Maureen Bossetti, chief investment officer at IPG’s MediaBrands.
Speaking on tape will be clients from companies including Luxottica, OMG, Dentsu, Horizon Media, Paramount Advertising, Warner Bros. Discovery, TelevisaUnivision, NBCUniversal and Allen Media Group.
“I've been in the business almost 30 years and I can tell you when clients want to say nice things about you to other clients, it's a privileged position,” said Bradbury.
The event will primarily be a business meeting, though there will be some time for socializing afterwards.
“We're going to be low on shrimp, big on information and insights,” he said, countering VideoAmp's reputation for lavishly entertaining clients.
VideoAmp’s meeting comes a week after the American Association of Advertising Agencies put out a report questioning whether alternative currencies were “ready for prime time.”
Bradbury said that the study was already out of date, because it used data from 2022.
“I got calls from maybe 15 clients on both buy and sell side all with very similar messages,” he said.
“The takeaway was: ‘hey, you know what people. we’re actually smart enough to chew gum and walk at the same time,’” Bradbury said.
“And this idea that we should again delay using information that helps us to be more efficient and drive more profitability for our clients and ourselves, it's just crazy. It's antiquated and it clearly is clinging to some historical way of doing business,” he added. “I'm sure that their heart was in the right place. I'm sure they felt like they were being helpful to someone.”
Earlier this year VideoAmp restructured its management, bringing in Bradbury, and cutting headcount by 20%.
The company had hired people for some new businesses, that either didn’t work or weren’t core to what VideoAmp was doing. Now the company is “all systems go and focused on the future,” Bradbury said. “Our clients are asking us to do more. In fact they're kind of aggressively asking us to do more in a lot of areas.”
VideoAmp has been criticized for having an activation business, because some believe one company shouldn’t both be playing the game by buying media and keeping score by measuring reach and results.
Bradbury said VideoAmp will be focusing on currency measures.
“The industry has told us that’s where we can bring the most value,” he said. “That said, we do have clients to count on us for activation and we're committed to at some point a peaceful transition of power.” Until then, VideoAmp will continue to take care of its activation clients.
Nielsen bashing is a favorite hobby of people in the TV business. Will Bradbury be dunking on his old employer?
“No. Zero from us for sure, he said. “Our North Star is buy side and the sell side of the industry and what helps them drive their business. We have respect for folks who came before us and we will have respect for folks who come after us.”
