How To Layer Local Linear Sports Advertising and Streaming TV with Shelley Stansfield, Co-founder of Centriply

Tim Rowe, Host:
Welcome to the State of Streaming Podcast. In today's conversation, we're learning all about how to layer local linear sports advertising with the best of streaming TV targeting and measurement. My name is Tim Rowe, and today I'm joined by Shelley Stansfield, co-founder of Centriply, a leading tech-enabled agency who has found a sweet spot serving advertisers who want to layer live sports audiences on streaming and cable. So if that's a blind spot that you're solving for, or you want to learn more about how to activate a strategy like this, then this is the episode for you. Enjoy. You are a part of the founding team at Centriply.. You've been around TV, obviously through a big part of this evolution. So can you tell us a little bit more about the team?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Sure. Well, first of all, Centriply is a specialty media buying service and an ad tech developer. Now we focus on audience based linear TV. So that means we're finding the same households in the same audience segment as digital, and then we're applying it to local campaigns. That makes sense. By starting with highly detailed, mapping at the census block level and the census track level, we can provide the detail and the reporting that is really expected of digital now all the time. So when working with big brands, it's a national level, local campaign. So we find the pockets of the audience. We don't prefer any certain kind of programming. It's what that audience is looking for.

Tim Rowe, Host: It's the household. It's the humans who live in that house.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yes, absolutely. And we've been going from everything from political, which doesn't line up in any way with DMAs. and moving off to commercial and different niche advertisers to heavy ups for national brands that know that they have to have a certain amount of impressions beyond what their share of voice may have to be in a market to make something happen. and we can do ROI throughout the entire funnel. It can be branding, it can be performance, it can be sales, it can be all sorts of things.

Tim Rowe, Host: is that just the simple reminder of these are TVs in houses, the household level targeting. I feel like that gets a little bit lost in the streaming app user numbers and you're seeing, I think, right, Disney, Netflix, they're gonna move away from publishing subscriber numbers and things like that. How important is the household piece of this conversation?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, we feel it's really important because the households don't move.

Tim Rowe, Host: They sure don't. They don't move.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: The households give you a common meeting point, not only for the people in them, but for the zip codes where certain billing numbers, you know, where a billing address goes to or a voter registration roll that those households make up the zips and the counties and the voting districts and for commercial people, for the distributor regions. You know, it doesn't have to be a traditional TV DMA to get measured. And it can work with a business needs instead of a TV needs. So we're looking at it from how is the business affected by the number of impressions that are delivered into a measured area? and that makes it measured for everybody. So you can measure your mobile impressions, you can measure your CTV impressions, and you can measure your linear impressions all into the same area and start to understand what the impact is.

Tim Rowe, Host: Shelley, one of the things that I really want to make sure we touch on and you painted the picture just then of how you layer maybe against a streaming by the local sports by or the local linear by. But can we talk more specifically about how combining the two unlocks new efficiencies? Like what? What do you see by combining the streaming by with the local by? Can we maybe spend some time on that?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yeah. So we tell clients don't stop at just CTV or just linear. I mean, there's, there's no reason really to pick sides. And with women's sports, you know, you can think of that as like pristine beachfront real estate, you know, there's high demand, low clutter, and you can stake your claim way before anybody else shows up.

Tim Rowe, Host: So

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: In the environment where authentic stories flourish, you know, the creative can really carry further because it's sitting by itself. You know, everybody's looking for that Super Bowl passion, but nobody wants the Super Bowl price tag. So by combining the two channels of CTV and TV, you're filling in the customer journey and meeting them wherever they are. So if you're more of a digital viewer, then you're reaching them in one place. If you're more of a traditional TV viewer, you're also getting them and then they can really meet both types of customer. That really is an advantage.

Tim Rowe, Host: It's an interesting way to think about it, right? It's the same event. It's just two different sets of eyeballs watching in different ways. You want to reach all of them, but to your point, I like, I like the beach analogy. There it is. When you get there early enough, you get the best spot on the beach and you set up your blank and you hope you hope that no one just like comes up. There's always that one person they just set up right next to you. Like, really? Really?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yeah, you got the entire beach here.

Tim Rowe, Host: We got the whole beach. I'll share this stat. We have this piece out on stateofstreaming.com. Just recently, EDO report finds streaming exclusive NFL games delivering 66% higher impact than a Super Bowl spot. So I believe it makes sense, right? And there's lots of reasons for that. But I think that that, uh, that is partially the buried lead is, Hey, there's lots of opportunities that aren't the Superbowl. You can create your own Superbowl moment by showing up in a way that's meaningful in that moment.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Absolutely. You know, there, well, there's so much personalization in sports fans, you know, that's who, They really want full-on identity. There's a reason team colors appear in email signatures. Heated debates light up on Twitter until past midnight. It's an audience that doesn't just consume, they champion.

Tim Rowe, Host: And that creative is the opportunity, right? Show up in a way that's don't just run your same evergreen spot that you've had running on everything. No, be thoughtful. Maybe you can find some local talent or just incorporate the team colors into the creative to your point. I think there's lots of ways to do that.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, there's so many more ways now than there used to be. I mean, it's easy for us to sit here and say, oh, don't do the same old evergreen thing. But, you know, when you when you finally have the opportunity to connect with whether it's, you know, a fan or a consumer, you know, to be able to highlight them is going to be so much more authentic.

Tim Rowe, Host: You know what? I like that. You can make your fans the stars of the creative. How about that? What's more grassroots?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: It gets risky. You know, the lawyers are not going to like that.

Tim Rowe, Host: Oh, yeah. Brand safety. I forgot. This is not the brand safety podcast, though. So you'll have to come back for that episode. Some of those fans can be unruly.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. You know, they really get into trouble sometimes.

Tim Rowe, Host: So good.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: And you can't you can't control them. I mean, you know, influencers get tough.

Tim Rowe, Host: That's true. Tough to manage them.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Lawyers will never be without something to do.

Tim Rowe, Host: No kidding. Gainfully employed. Oh, yes. Digital was clean. It was right. The Internet we were building from from the ground up. But TV were really evolving a technology that has been built into literally the infrastructure of our cities, of our communities to now cutting the cord, streaming and all of the challenges that come with that. Can you maybe take us back in time to when you first started seeing this evolution take place?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: You know, I'm not going to pretend that, you know, putting this all together is fun and games. Scaling the hyperlocal multi-market combinations It's, it's like trying to run the same play in every stadium across the country. You know, you quickly find out that Boston and St. Louis do not watch TV in the same way. So we've got these ever-changing carriage agreements and a jungle of rep contracts, you know, plus everybody's got a slightly different flavor of what is a sports recap. So you multiply the complexity of organic growth of TV by 210 DMAs. And by combining each one you want to reach, each channel, each campaign objective, and then suddenly, you know, you feel like you're chasing Hail Marys. It's fragmented, it's regional, stations vary in coverage, market rules, sales reps, upfront deals, you know, all sorts of things are up for grabs. So one network's sports highlight can be another's weekend wrap up. So, you know, if you like metaphors, you know, it's like herding cats with a clipboard.

Tim Rowe, Host: Well, that sounds fun that you know what that would be like a sport that you saw on ESPN The Ocho that might actually be a sport somewhere Maybe let's come back on a couple of things would love to define a few terms. You said carriage agreements. What is that for? Maybe a listener who hasn't heard that term before what does that mean?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: So there are stations that have media owners and And they're always looking for content. That's something that, you know, digital people know all about. So they make agreements with different networks and different content providers, and they pay for that. And then The networks have retransmission fees that they love because here we're making the content. We'll send it out to five stations over here and two over there. So then they make their money back on creating the content. So it, it's a legacy situation. Not everybody gets the same type of or amount of content in every station.

Tim Rowe, Host: So it's all different. And this i'm guessing it really transcends all leagues all sports from. Professional leagues down to maybe amateur or local level sports regional sports networks is it is it all encompassing is it everything is it all of that.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Now, I think I, you know, just look at the headlines, everything from regional sports, especially during COVID ended up getting hit really hard. Uh, I think somebody like Sinclair went and bought Bally's or created Bally's regional sport network. And that was going to be all a bunch of baseball teams. Well, COVID hit like right after that, um, deal happened and they got creamed, you know, nobody could come to the stadiums. Nobody watched anything. It really changed the complexity of which teams get which licensing agreements and things like that. So it's constantly moving. And now with different sports taking on different media providers, like a YouTube or Samsung or LG or whatever, you know, each one is trying to get more and more income from all of their transmissions.

Tim Rowe, Host: And you also mentioned resellers, it would seem to obviously that there are different ways that the inventory then gets priced and packaged and who has access to which sales rights on which of the I mean, it all can become it makes sense that this is hard.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yeah. And each, I mean, if you, if you look each of the 210 markets has probably 10 stations and cable systems. And now with all sorts of CTV and streamers, you've got a huge amount of options and the carrot agreements and the rep contracts just start getting so convoluted. It's really hard to figure out who, who has what.

Tim Rowe, Host: So, you know, coming from the out of home industry, the billboard world, we talked about fragmentation there. This is like fragmentation on a whole different level. And it's fragmentation that everyone wants a part of. Everyone wants to advertise against sports and especially live sports. So that challenge then becomes a little bit more technical. We were talking last time in preparation for this conversation, you'd mentioned just the way that the inventory even gets submitted to be bought is a little bit outdated is maybe a fair way to phrase it.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, there are definitely different stages of advancement, you know.

Tim Rowe, Host: Very, very nicely stated. I like that. Stages. That's better than my outdated stages of advancement. I like that.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, uh, you know, how they, how they do contracts, how they send logs out, what are the invoices? It makes how you receive all of the inventory into your application even more difficult. So is it an XML? Is it a C SCX? Is it HTML? What format is this thing coming? Is it still one of facts?

null: Yeah.

Tim Rowe, Host: Get out of town.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: No, no.

Tim Rowe, Host: Hang on. We just just for the record, this is 2025 that we're recording this. And you're saying that there's still data being transmitted via fax. Occasionally, I mean just the fact that occasionally like the fact that it is it is a non zero number is staggering, but no, okay, so you've got 210 local markets times 10 stations is more than 2000 different partners and then you have different file formats and then I'm guessing that the data inside the file itself format aside that could be structured differently too.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Right and it doesn't always play nice together see what I did there.

Tim Rowe, Host: Awesome I like that.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yeah, the naming conventions, you know, aren't inconsistent that they can be outright bewildering. One station's prime time slot could be labeled three different ways depending on who input from the station. So.

Tim Rowe, Host: A human.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yes, exactly.

Tim Rowe, Host: who we appreciate them putting it in, but it is still prone to human subjectivity, error, what have you, an added space in the file.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yes, absolutely. So the, the simple act of just filtering what they sent can be so confusing. So we had to figure out how to standardize across all of these applications, things like MediaOcean and WideOrbit and the traffic systems, so that it's starting to get better. And rearranging the spots shouldn't be something that the stations have to do to meet a buyer spec. So to give it all of the tools that we have for other applications We've now streamlined it into a way to pull it in, standardize, and hit a button so it meets the spec. And it takes a couple minutes to go through 70,000 lines of inventory to make the parameters that you wanted and you asked for to begin with. So we're getting there. We're definitely getting there.

Tim Rowe, Host: Sounds like progress being made and certainly part of that organic evolution like it. It really is so many times just who can figure out how to make the spreadsheet make sense to another spreadsheet and if those things can all connect then we can all do more of the things we want to do that thing being advertised on local sports do you have a sense then of like. I don't even know that there'd be a good way to kind of imagine that the universe of what's available and the universe of what's actually being like activated. Do you have a set like, Oh, is there a ton of opportunity there that I questioned before?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Because I have a great chart. Oh, we love charts.

Tim Rowe, Host: Right now. You know what? Send us, send us the chart and we'll, we'll release it with this, with this conversation. We'd love to love to share that.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: There's a great chart that shows all of the impressions by sports. by quarter, by week, or we can do it by month. Because yeah, we need to know exactly how many pieces of inventory are available. So you've got the program and then you've got the breaks. So is the break a 60 second break? Is it a 30 second break? Is it a 15? And now with all these overlays, are available on TV on broadcasters, you know, you can split the screen and then there's things that are going, you know, either ads or stats or pop outs or whatever on the screen. So those are available to a lot of times. So you can manage all sorts of opportunities to get different eyeballs and different impressions.

Tim Rowe, Host: And is this is am I buying this on a guaranteed basis? Is this programmatic? Is it a PMP? Like what is the structure?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: What we do, we call it advanced TV and it's a combination of linear impressions. They are guaranteed. It's considered a guaranteed kind of private marketplace. It has a lot of the same abilities of programmatic, but we don't sit on the programmatic platform at the moment. The CTV sellers often will layer, especially like with fast channels, depending on what you're looking for, they'll layer with the fast channels or a content deal specifically for a certain league. Like, you know, maybe it's the baseball or it's volleyball or it's college. sports. So it has a lot of the applications of programmatic, but we are not currently in a programmatic platform. So it's a little on the side, but we take all of our reporting and can match it up to a programmatic format because the detail and the performance for us is what's really important. So you get the scale of local linear that can then be combined with the audiences of programmatic. and the parameters of programmatic.

Tim Rowe, Host: Sounds like you're sitting right in that middle part of that organic evolution. You know, that's the that's the piece that you really need to then do the next part, which is buy it in an automated way where I'm buying across multiple markets and packaging deals together. So thank you. Thank you for. doing this part and figuring it out for us and getting us this close. Some stats, the US Open posted record numbers, 3 million streaming viewers on the men's final, 2.4 million on the women's final. How big of an opportunity is women's sports? I feel like that's not getting enough, not getting enough attention.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, it's becoming the main event. That's for sure. It's an emotional investment. The audiences don't want to just watch. They want to champion the athlete. They want to cheer. They want to mobilize. They want to get behind something. It's not just good PR for a brand. It's an authentic alignment many times with values that today's consumers are looking for. They're looking for inclusion and progress and empowerment. And it shows up both on and off the field now with all of the coverage that the athletes are getting. And if you get into the data, the proof is everywhere. The women's sports fans don't just passively tune in. You know, they're vocal, they're active, they're engaged, they're advocates. They're proud to align with the brands that support their leagues and their players. You know, that kind of authentic passion quickly transforms to brand loyalty. You know, turning a casual sponsor into a household name.

Tim Rowe, Host: Kaitlin Clark being a great example of that, right?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Exactly.

Tim Rowe, Host: No, I don't know. I did not know that many Iowa basketball fans, but there are a whole lot of Caitlin Clark fans now. Oh, my God. It's exactly to that. It is. It's almost a hybrid of like the kind of the creator economy merged with sports. But to your point, with something deeper, tying it all together, I think that's a powerful way for us to think about it.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, a lot of times the message just doesn't stop at halftime or when the broadcast is over. There is something about it echoing through the communities and the online chats and the family rooms, you know, way beyond the final whistle.

Tim Rowe, Host: Yeah, absolutely. Shelley, that is a walk off in the ways to end it category. Thank you. Folks want to connect with you on socials. If they want to learn more about what you do at central apply, give them the lat long, give them the, uh, give them the household address. If you will, where should they find you?

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Uh, reach out on LinkedIn. I'll, um, supply definitely some, uh, contact information that you guys can publish.

Tim Rowe, Host: Easy enough. We will keep it close and we close by to this conversation. It will not be hard to find Shelley.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Well, thanks for the delightful.

Tim Rowe, Host: Big piece of the kickoff conversation to the State of Streaming podcast. So thank you for being a part of it. We will make sure to publish this, tag you everywhere. And if you found this conversation to be helpful, we encourage you to share it with a colleague or a client. Start a conversation today. Wherever you're listening, make sure to smash that subscribe button, like, comment, follow, do all those things that help the podcast grow. We'll see y'all.

Shelley Stansfield, Co-Founder @ Centriply: Yeah, Reclout, we're here.

Tim Rowe, Host: Absolutely. See you next time.