Cadent's Tony Yi On The Enduring Appeal Of Local Content
This is the third of five Innovator Spotlight articles from our newest TVREV Special Report, Local TV: Perils And Promise In The Age Of Streaming, which you can download for free.
“Local news to me is irreplaceable,” says Tony Yi, Cadent’s Executive Vice President BD & GM Platform Direct. “I am a diehard Philadelphia sports fan, so I follow local sports, but sports is just one example. There’s news about local businesses. There’s news about local crime. It's all incredibly intimate to me and that's not replaceable by any kind of national or even regional entity.” That helps explain why both Yi and Cadent are invested in helping local broadcasters and advertisers navigate today’s increasingly complex media environment.
ALAN WOLK (AW): Can you explain what Cadent does and where you fit into the local broadcast ecosystem?
TONY YI (TY): The basic premise of our Aperture Platform is that it is a data-driven solution that connects the TV and digital ecosystems. So, we ingest first-party data and match it up against our household graph, Aperture Viewer Graph, which has one of the highest match rate graphs in the industry. Nine times out of 10 we beat all the other household graphs for match rate and accuracy.
Our Audience Studio product, within our platform, is incredibly important to us; we can push our data out to any DSP, SSP, or ad server. We can also push it to our own DSP, and we are launching an SSP as well. It's really about collapsing the ad stack. If you do it right, you have less of what we call the “ad tax”—the fee you pay to multiple vendors on any single transaction. We've collapsed that entire value chain down to one player to maximize data fidelity.
AW: Can you explain what “data fidelity” is?
TY: Every time you go from a data targeting platform with its own universe, to a DSP, with its own universe, to an SSP with its own universe, to a measurement body with its own universe, you're losing 10 to 30 percent of that audience with each pass. By the time it gets to the publisher, you see a significant degradation of the size of the audience that you're trying to target. It may look beautiful in your data targeting platform, but as it passes through the system, that segment shrinks, and shrinks, and shrinks.
AW: Where do local broadcasters fit in all of this and how are they adapting to streaming?
TY: Cadent works with most of the large local broadcasters and the major satellite companies. They are all finally getting wise to the fact that the digital players are able to maintain a national footprint. They are not restricted by geography,whereas the local broadcasters are only able to reach the households in their DMA. But now OTT streaming gives them the ability to extend their reach beyond their DMA—and Cadent can help them to do so.
I’m seeing campaigns start local and move national. You start with your seed being the local campaign which is doing very well against certain demos and types of programming. Then you provide the advertiser with the ability to replicate that audience and create a regional or even national campaign to stretch it out. That is incredibly powerful and it speaks to the continued impact of local audiences.
AW: How are you helping local broadcasters extend their reach?
TY: What we've done is actually created a solution, using Aperture Platform, our Viewer Graph, and our DSP for them to invest in audience extension. What it does is it allows them to get beyond their own footprint to sell both regionally and nationally. We’re already seeing this happening today— local broadcasters are engaging us to create solutions to give them a wider footprint. They’re doing it because linear audiences are shrinking and they realize they need to expand their reach beyond broadcast and cable. Streaming provides the ability to not only expand reach but also to engage different demographics.
AW: What are some of the challenges you see when local broadcasters embrace streaming?
TY: People are cutting the cord, and they are consuming local news through social media platforms, CTV channels, and so on. Targeting is also becoming a lot more complex,and in a strange way, that complexity offers a lot of opportunity for companies like ours to introduce solutions that solve for their pain points. People feel a real connection to local content, and so I think targeting is only going to grow in importance. At the same time, it's getting a lot more complex to execute against all those different distribution points. And if you want a frequency cap on your ads, then end-to-end platforms like Aperture become even more important.
AW: Do you think local news and local content in general, still resonates with TV audiences?
TY: I think it still resonates a great deal. People really have loyalty to their hometowns, and to their regions. If you were to try and measure someone's brain activity around local content and there was a story about their favorite sports team or local business, their brain waves would go off the Richter scale watching that versus something with a more national spin. There’s just a much higher level of engagement.
AW: What about younger audiences—are they still interested in local content?
TY: That is a fascinating question. The thesis from many local broadcasters is that yes, younger demographics are still consuming their content, they just consume it in different ways. Some younger viewers like watching snippets of the news, everything from crime to feel-good stories to sports. But there are definitely other younger viewers who want to watch, read, and listen to everything and anything about their local region. You'll also find those who are occasional viewers of local TV news and sports. So, I think you've got a wide spectrum in the under-35 demographic.
