Travis Hockersmith is the Group Vice President of Platform+ at VIZIO. Watch this video to find out more about his work and how he is a Limitless Leader.
How do you help customers solve problems?
We have a whole team built around helping customers solve problems. It starts at the beginning of the sales process, where we want to understand what the customer is looking to achieve. It's infrequent that the customer is just trying to run impressions, right? There's always a business objective behind what the customer is trying to achieve, and we built out a whole team to support that, from our sales team to our client services team to our research and analytics team.
And our research and analytics team, which we refer to internally as the “A team,” is kind of the tip of the spear in a lot of those conversations, because they can really come in to understand the customer's objectives, recommend targeting and measurement solutions against those objectives, instrument the campaigns accordingly, and then for the whole life cycle of the campaign provide back insights based on that target and measurement approach.
We've got kind of a mantra and ethos internally that we call WCCS, “World Class Customer Service,” and the entire team is really built around that ethos.
How do you describe the Home Screen experience?
The Homescreen experience, we believe, is the best experience for search and discovery in the CTV space. The way that I like to think about our Homescreen is, if I were to buy my parents a VIZIO TV, which I've done, I don't have to explain to them how to use it. I don't have to explain to them how to find the content that they're looking for. It's very intuitive, and to surface content that you didn't even know you were looking for, that you'd be interested in.
I think a lot of CTV environments are less intuitive than the VIZIO Homescreen environment. I think of it as the best search and discovery environment in the CTV space.
How does VIZIO’s programmatic offering work?
From day one, our approach has always been, “buy us how you want to buy us,” if you want to buy us programmatically, we're here to support. There's some real advantages to buying managed service as well, and we can explain those advantages of either buying approach, and depending on what the advertiser's preference is, we're here to support it. And that's always been our go-to-market approach, which is very different than a lot of companies in the CTV space that try to force one buying route or another.
If you want to buy programmatically as an advertiser, we've got a whole team of programmatic experts who are here to help you optimize the campaign, scale the campaign, and programmatic is something that we've embraced since, again, day one.
What’s VIZIO’s approach to measurement?
Our approach to measurement is a custom tailored approach. We of course, have our own measurement capabilities based on our ACR data, that a lot of our advertisers take advantage of. However, if you have an advertiser who is looking for, say, an offline outcome or even an online conversion, we can instrument campaigns to measure those outcomes, whether they be in the physical world or an online conversion. We have to understand––we have to have a deep understanding of the customer's objective and then we'll match the measurement approach with that.
What does limitless leadership mean to you?
Limitless leadership means to me, attracting the best talent in the industry to our team, empowering them with the tools that they need to do a great job, and then getting out of their way and letting them do a great job.
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