Michael Bologna and Jamie Power – both leaders from GroupM’s advanced television-buying unit Modi Media – have left the media agency and founded an addressable TV media-buying startup called one2one Media.
One2one is owned by Cross MediaWorks, a consortium of media and advertising companies.
One2one matches advertiser first- and third-party data to multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), then runs the campaigns. Early MVPDs in one2one’s network include Altice, AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Dish Network and Spectrum (formerly Time Warner).
One2one then centralizes reporting from across those broadcasters so brands or agencies can measure the campaigns.
Addressable TV buying requires collaborations from media and tech vendors. Most addressable TV campaigns have limited scale and can’t be measured well against other addressable TV buys.
“A major challenge for addressable television is that it’s an extremely manual process,” said Bologna, president of one2one Media. “Many different MVPDs, all with addressable insertion capability, are doing it very differently in terms of reporting, data and technology, so what our managed service does is stitch together those campaigns.”
One2one also can measure alongside other advertising channels like social or mobile, said one2one COO Jamie Power, via partnerships with analytics providers 4C and 4INFO.
There are no hard feelings between Modi and its former top brass, as the agency buying division is on board as one2one’s flagship client.
The industry needs independent advertising solutions to sit between holding companies and the fragmented market for data-driven TV inventory, Bologna said.
“It’s a big issue in the industry,” he said, “because Modi was an exclusive advanced TV unit within GroupM and will remain that way, but doing work with outside clients wasn’t a realistic option because of the affiliation.”
To maintain one2one’s independent status, the startup won’t be bundled into pricing across Cross MediaWorks’ portfolio of businesses for pre-existing clients, said Cross MediaWorks CEO Nick Troiano. “It’s important that (one2one Media) is separate and distinct, but the benefit Cross MediaWorks companies bring is the underlying technology and integration capabilities.”
