In addition to new tech and new devices, Richman will have an eye on the continuing evolution of measurement as consumer behavior shifts from linear to online video, to mobile, to over the top, as well as the different ad formats for those mediums. “As we have more platforms, we get more signals frrm consumers about how they’re watching, and when,” she says, and that input can help optimize ad offerings and measurement.

Richman also touched on addressable TV, emphasizing that the term itself is becoming more broadly defined. “Today as we talk about addressable, it can be how do we find new narrow segments online, what can we learn about them, what new targets can we discover about them that we can bring to TV. Much of that is available programmatically so we can get more precise with these audiences…and use that to understand what segments to invest in.”

Looking ahead, Richman expects this type of data-driven planning will play an even bigger role in the upfront. The availability of more data affords flexibility to move ad dollars across mediums to drive performance, she says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Also at CES, Ray will host a “fireside chat” with Hulu, looking at where the online TV service is today and where it’s going. “With the landscape of data changing so quickly, our ability to leverage their data to create better experiences for clients to connect linear TV experiences with non-linear TV is what we need to do to maximize the TV platforms,” Ray says.

He also touched on the risks and opportunities in the shifting over-the-top landscape. Carat analyzed video viewing from 2009 to today, and has seen a 16% increase in total hours consumed. The challenge is some of those platforms can’t be monetized. “We are working with many platform companies about how to leverage their data and create some partnerships to be as targeted and as addressable as we can in the formats that support ads, and in some non-supportive platforms we look at how to integrate into that content.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

At the Beet Retreat, Swartz led a deep dive into the future of TV advertising, especially as it relates to data and measurement.

Key players in the TV advertising landscape are looking for a unified system that pulls in legacy TV, over-the-top and digital and lets marketers and providers plan and optimize against that, Koester says during the discussion.

To get there, the industry needs to take risks on media, new measurement and new integration. “We need to push the envelope and go out of traditional measurement and try new things. Get new measurement for some campaigns. We are working with advertisers to get some insight on a correlation of media with sales. . .it’s not an overnight solution,” says Kevin Patrick Smith, Senior VP at Comcast 360 Media. “But I love working with partners who will work with us and will change the game.”

One of the biggest questions for the future of TV and digital advertising is what sort of backend measurement can enable standardized metrics. “You need to allow for standardized data modeling that lets you drive the transaction for operators, programmers and advertisers,” says Art Minnaugh, Senior Business Development Manager, Adobe Primetime.

Understanding audience data consistently cross the customer footprint is key to Charter, says Rob Klippel, SVP Advanced Ads and Strategy at Charter. “That’s the foundation to everything we try to do. For us, that’s to drive capabilities to let us become more efficient marketing partners for our advertisers, to turn around media campaigns and media plans, and to help them accomplish their goals and have the data to prove that out.”

This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

“It’s about understanding the customer journey pre-, during- and post-funnel, from call center, to commerce, to app development and user experience. Not only do marketers need a broader toolkit, but brands need partners who can help them in an expanded agreement not just in communications but a great digital customer experience.”

Schulman says his goal is to arm the CMO with the type of scorecards and metrics that translate into tangible business results in today’s “always-on” world, rather than just practicing an old school “what commercial do you run in Super Bowl” type of marketing. “What are the best organizational models to be an always-on creator? We have to think of less channel-based storytelling and more holistically as something that will be everywhere and will take different lengths from short to long to medium . . . and what is the content strategy and how much is video? As we think about addressable and using real-time data to power it, that’s where the future is going to be.”

We interviewed Schulman at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“There is a huge chunk of consumers who don’t have access to the financial system. Getting them is a huge opportunity,” he explains. “We have started getting involved and working with government to get these folks into the financial system. It’s both humanitarian and economic.”

Another opportunity lies in technology. That’s because the kind of advancements in media technology in the last few years haven’t fully spread to financial services. “Look at virtual reality and new ways of reaching consumers through technology,” he says. “Financial services has not yet fully taken advantage of that.”

Finally, Rajamannar believes another opportunity for financial services firms lies in understanding and acting on how consumers do and don’t segment their lives. “Consumers don’t segregate their life into buckets. They don’t say ‘this is my financial services bucket, this is my restaurant bucket and this is the experience bucket where I want to have fun.’ It is one seamless life. If companies see this, that’s a huge opportunity.”

For more insight into what’s next in marketing and reaching consumers in the future, check out this video interview.

We interviewed Rajamannar at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series,please visit this page.

“You can speak to the ad and it gives you customized solutions. We believe that will be the future of ads,” she tells us. “We expect all ads will be more engaging and personalized.”

Interestingly, this type of ad is both innovative and also traditional in that it leans on something Campbell’s has done for years — provide recipes. “This is just the next iteration,” Rani says. The ads appear in-app, on desktop and on mobile screens. They are weather-trigged and contextual, she adds.

Campbell’s is also experimenting with addressability and is making strides in performance and measurement with lookalike audiences that match to TV inventory.

We interviewed Rani at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series,please visit this page.

When the two hotels merged, the loyalty programs were also meshed, and that’s added even more weight to email marketing as a means to reach regular customers, she explains. “Our loyalty program is important because we brought those together,” she says. “If we have a loyalty member we can target them with a very personalized email about an upcoming stay, and we might also buy advertising to introduce a new brand to them or to tell the story of how to link and join accounts.”

Content marketing is vital too, and so is social, and that’s why the travel brand relies on a so-called “command center for social media.” That’s like a newsroom to monitor and manage social and contact with customers, and Starwood-Marritott counts those centers on the East Coast, in London, and in Hong Kong, and also has a Spanish-language command center.

“If we see a conversation coming together in social media we might do some real-time buying in digital to add more gas to the fire. If we hear something cresting in social it’s important to pivot quickly,” she says.

Timpone adds that Marriott is studying virtual reality opportunities as they may have key applications in the travel sector. “We are trying to take the aspiration of travel and use new technologies to expand the story. That can get shared socially too [as in] ‘Look at the cool places you can go.” The chain also continues to explore geo-location tools combined with targeting, she says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference, 2016, presented by The TradeDesk. Please find additional videos from the Conference here.

Instead, NBCU is focused on showcasing to brand partners its multiplatform approach to marketing content, he says. The media giant has built a content studio and uses that to create custom content for brand partners that can be distributed across its digital ecosystem. That lets NBCU rely on its assets and sound stages, for instance, on behalf of marketers. As an example, NBCU worked with Sabra to introduce a guacamole dip via a series of parodies of cooking videos that it pushed out across its digital platforms. “We had great results with that in driving customers to purchase Sabra dip,” Schiller tell us.

Schiller says that what brands want from media partners is premium content, quality data about customers, and also premium distribution. He adds that NBC was able to do bring that all to bear recently for the Olympics by working with SnapChat and BuzzFeed to create content advertisers could participate in.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference, 2016, presented by The TradeDesk. Please find additional videos from the Conference here.

“Everyone has data, but it’s largely unstructured. The key is making it useful and structured. Making it intelligent. Data needs to be turned into intelligence and we believe that intelligence can make everything we do better,” she says. That includes creative as well as media.

When it comes to programmatic buying, data, of course, is essential to making programmatic media buys work. “It can be a little twitch or nudge in the data that informs an entire platform,” she says. Clark joined DDB earlier this year after serving in key roles at Coca-Cola.

In addition, Clark points out that agencies and marketers need to be faster and also more efficient. “If speed is the currency of business today, we need to be much faster. Our entire structure needs to lean into that pace of the marketplace,” she says.

The report found that many U.S. advertising agencies had been engaging in “non-transparent business practices” that included taking rebates from media companies, and in some cases these rebates amounted to up to 20% of media spend.

“It was a wakeup call for marketers to make sure our contracts are clear about our expectations of our agencies and their holding companies, and the opportunity is to set the bar clearly moving forward,” he tells us. “At the end of the day, the ANA has done a good thing by uncovering these potential issues and I applaud them, and I’ve had great conversations with my agencies to know where we stand.”

Marketers should understand what’s in the report, analyze their agency agreements, and update their own with their agencies, he adds.

“The standards [for targeted ads] that we are developing are around IAB’s ‘rising stars’ ads. We’re thinking about the ads not being in a box, but in terms of components — components of creativity, of delivery and maybe of a ratio. It’s about each individual asset within an ad as standing alone, and being able optimize when an asset goes to a consumer and if it resonated. We haven’t had any standards around this yet,” Tilds says to Beet.TV.

Standards in this area will better set up the digital media future for things like artificial intelligence and making ad creativity a bit more programmatic in some ways, she says.

Other opportunities on the interactive ad front lie in shoppable and buyable ads. “We have talked about video as a way in which we can interact and you don’t have to leave the environment of an ad to try a different color or price, and evolving that too in the near future so you can buy within the ad.” But to reach that future in ads requires shifts in industry standards, ad serving, and media and planning for such experiences, she says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to Cannes”, presented by FreeWheel. Please visit this page for additional segments.

“It’s not different than the lens we need to put on ourselves as human beings. What’s the authentic expression of yourself that gets people to want to engage? It’s the same thing for brands — finding the authenticity within the brand’s persona,” she tells Beet.TV. Increasingly, these issues are top of mind for marketers as brands become media owners with their own channels, thanks to the proliferation of YouTube, online video and new ways to push content to consumers that didn’t exist before.

In addition to authenticity, figuring out how to differentiate amidst a sea of content remains a key issue too, she says. Thalberg contends there’s no formula to what makes branded content shine — comedy and pathos can both work, depending on the venue.

“We still believe in TV. Our brand is mass, but I like to tell deeper stories too and engage in fun ways. The challenge is how to do the whole thing. That’s made the job of a marketer harder,” she says.

We interviewed Thalberg last week at the Digitas UpFronts event in Manhattan.

That’s what DDB NY did when working with the Wildlife Conservation Film Festival in a pro bono capacity to drive awareness about the nature conservancy. “They wanted to come up with a way to engage the youth to think about endangered species,” says Icaro Doria, Chief Creative Officer at DDB NY in an interview with Beet.TV.

That sparked the creation of the “endangered love” brand. “The most effective way to avoid extinction is having sex, so we showed pandas, rhinos, sloths having sex,” Doria explains. The agency created online videos set to the Lonely Island tune of “I Just Had Sex” and featuring cartoon pandas having just done the deed. The video rolled out in the last few weeks and is designed to foster awareness of “global biodiversity.”

“People liked the song and wanted to engage with it, so that gave us a head start. Add in the panda factor, and you don’t have to do much else,” he says.

The canvas that online video affords creatives in the ad business is tremendous, he says. “When I started you had limited space — a radio spot, a TV spot, a print ad. Now the amount of things we can come up with that people will engage with is so exciting.”

The range of options also raises the bar for creativity, he adds.

“In the last year, we pushed heavily into the proposition that media could be a growth driver, and using data and analytics could tie media towards business objectives and optimize to growth, rather than cutting the bottom line,” she says.

The abundance of data as well as the improved integration of teams within an agency are making this transition possible. “What we have leaned into is clients want a business result  — a perception change, ROI, or an action. Our goal is to pull many pieces together to deliver on the business objective,” she says. That process relies on a foundation of data and analytics across channels and media forms.

“We have the capability to get more strategic and focused on the target. We have always been able to execute in digital and we can execute that way in multiple channels now. So it’s less of a single plan focused on reaching that big broad target, and more mini plans against smaller targets that are reacting and being optimized. And that is a different paradigm shift,” she says.

This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami.   For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.

“What candidates are looking for is an experience. They ask, what experience can one organization give me over another?'” she says, explaining how job seekers are changing the conversation in advertising hiring.

MEC has paired up with LinkedIn to access data on how to better reach new candidates who might be ideal fits. In addition, the agency also urges its employees to help ‘create content’ about what the work environment is like at MEC on job sites like Glassdoor.

For more insight on the talent search today, check out this interview.

This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami.   For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.

“Now that we have a staff of people who understand technology we do a lot of consulting around data for our clients,” she says. Beyond media planning and buying, the goal is to take brands on a so-called “data journey,” to help them understand how to best use what first-party data they have and how to complement that with second- and third-party data. “We are trying to provide less fragmentation so you don’t have a Frankenstein of ad technology,” she says.

Another key area of focus is mobile, and creating campaigns that incorporate mobile signals and data. “When you know someone’s location over time you can use it for your mobile marketing over time,” she says. Better mobile data also allows for better cross-screen marketing, so that marketers can follow consumers in and out of mobile and on to other platforms, including Facebook.

This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.

Look for brands to provide more personal services in mobile to help solve real-world problems, he explains. “How can a bank help people find the right home? What the good schools are? Or how can a brand in the CPG space help people cook better?”

In addition, he expects more interaction between the mobile phone and the big screen TV to link the two. Voice controls and conversational interfaces for brands to interact with consumers will play a bigger role in mobile shopping, he adds. Finally, ad avoidance is a key issue. “Think more about native formats. What environment you’re putting the ads in. What value they’re bringing to the content.”

But the answers aren’t as simple as more ad load or different video formats, she explains. “This is an industry that is going through a media revolution. We have a great responsibility to figure that out,” she says. “This is about how to help media companies be successful and how to help marketers at the heart of the value exchange. There is a shared value proposition of making audiences happy with content they love and letting brands participate…How do we build an adaptable enterprise solution that allows a media company to look at the entirety of its revenue across its portfolio of products and use its inventory to drive audience?”

The solution may be found in providing better business planning tools to optimize revenue and also to integrate the enterprise more tightly. In addition, many players in the industry, from publishers to media companies, don’t use the same terms, and a common language is needed for growth. These are among the challenges digital video faces, but Swartz is optimistic that these hurdles can be crossed.

The biggest hindrance for brands in programmatic buying lies in the existence of both “silos of execution and silos of technology,” he explains. “The goal is duplicated audience reach in the right time period. Every brand has a different periodicity in unduplicated reach in video.” The issues that impede this are rooted in the separation of key aspects of buying, such as portfolio optimization, buying for long-term in one area, buying for endemic in another, and seeing these areas split as they’re executed, he says.

These problems arises in part because agency structure can often drive strategy, but that’s not always ideal, Castree says. “People need to be specialized and technology needs to be horizontal. We think with platform and technology, and the right application of data across the workflow, we can break down silos so brands can make the most effective decisions for marketing.”

Ultimately, brands can do this by focusing on managing their portfolio of inventory against their KPI. This is something that Videology aims to help with through its tools, he adds. “The next level of efficiency in portfolio management for marketers, publishers and agencies is when we can find unduplicated reach, but also use the portfolio in the most effective ways,” he says. Keep an eye on “universal IDs” as that’s an area more players in the industry are exploring, he says.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology.  You can find more videos from the session here.

Hand in hand, he anticipates a boost in third-party ad serving, based on the growth his firm has seen in that area. Medialets grew its business 100% in 2015, and expects continued gains in the years ahead, given the boon in mobile. Medialets works with the five big holding companies.

“We will see a snap back and I think there is a huge pent-up need for mobile advertising by all the leading advertisers since usage is far surpassing digital on the desktop,” he says, and that growth includes in third party ad serving. There is a realization that advertisers need an independent count and measurement for their ads, he explains.

Another area of growth and change will be in the creative associated with mobile video. Given the consumption of short-form videos from YouTube and SnapChat, advertisers are considering whether three-second spots could work in mobile, he says. “It is a whole rethinking of how the creative shops view video,” he says.

With smart phone growth taking off worldwide and in developing countries, bandwidths costs will go down. Brands are testing different strategies in different regions and integrating apps into the phone in a deeper way. “The phone is becoming a deeper extension of the digital life and that all becomes a virtuous circle for a better, faster, cheaper phone,” Glassberg says.

The company was acquired by WPP last year.

“If you only target at the moment when the transaction is likely to occur, how does the consumer develop aspiration, knowledge and interest in a product early enough so that when the time is right the consumer is interested?” That’s why broad targeting is important for marketers as well as more narrow targeting.

In fact, Videology has found that the ideal split of media dollars should be between fully addressable ads, content-centric ones, and the traditional demographic type. “Our stats show maximum yield from a media company perspective with one third, one third, one third,” he says. He also delves into how trade marketing may change over time, given shifts in consumer buying habits.

Hulu joins HBO, Netflix, and Amazon among contenders in the comedy category, and ranks as the only ad-supported provider, he says. Naylor points out that in spite of all the talk of ad-blocking these days, Hulu’s research shows most consumers accept ads. He says that 7% of the population will avoid ads at all costs, adding that the corollary to that is 93% of the population is on the spectrum of so-called “ad acceptance,” according to Hulu’s studies.

“It’s up to us as a publisher to make sure that our ad load isn’t too aggressive,” he says. Hulu carries about two to three ads per break. In addition, the online programmer is working with advertisers to offer a range of options, from five-second ads, in some cases, to consecutive storytelling creative, to the ad selector that lets consumers choose the type of ads they want to watch.

Attribution according to business outcome is a critical topic with advertisers, Naylor adds. “Everyone has their KPI and ROI indicators. We are happy to examine business outcomes as a currency,” he says.

On the programming front, look for more originals in 2016, including shows created by Stephen King and JJ Abrams, as well as a Seth Rogen vehicle. “We are gathering ideas for the upfront in May,” Naylor says.

This videos is part of our lead-up to CES titled The Road to CES presented by YuMe.

The challenge is clients don’t always have the right tools at their disposal to find out which inventory is most valuable for different needs, he explains. “They have data but it’s not always applied to media properly. They have sales tools to set up campaigns, but when you look at the ability to sell across multiple types of models, layering in inventory, and how are systems taking into account the overlaps of hundreds if not thousands of pieces of data, that is where we see the speadshseets of the world falling apart,” he says.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

“We are seeing digital viewership on Roku, Apple TV, Xbox, and Amazon fire. The challenge in mobile and over-the-top has been getting the buy side to fully embrace those,” he says and that’s where better measurement will help. Partnerships with Nielsen for content ratings and Comscore for video metrics can help provide the transparency that the buy side wants, by validating the size of the audience and providing cross-platform metrics that can mesh with traditional metrics, he says.

First-party data is also key to bringing the buy side on board. A&E has amassed its own first-party data and can connect that with buy side data to provide better intelligence for buying and planning.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen.

You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.

At DISH Network, the focus in the last year has been on launching the programmatic platform and getting Sling up and running. “The Sling product without ads would not be able to be $20 per month so the ad element is front and center in the company. It’s a harbinger of how we become more targeted in general with ads,” says Adam Gaynor Dish Network, VP Media Sales and Analytics, Dish Network during the session.

Meanwhile, AT&T and DirecTV has devoted its attention into integrating two ad platforms and products, says AT&T AdWorks’ ad sales VP Chris Monteferrante. “To the consumer we need to make them seamless. If you go into an AT&T store, you’ll see packaging for DirectTV as your video service and U-verse, where it’s lit up, as your broadband provider,” he says. The next step will be to package those two services with mobile service and, ideally, reach a new level of growth, he says.

Comcast’s attention in the last year on this front has been investing in acquisitions and in plants to leverage its assets. “Our focus on advertising is to leverage the technologies for our internal use,” says Kevin Patrick Smith, SVP Comcast Media 360.

Making the most of the network is essential for Cablevision, says Ben Tatta, Cablevision’s Media Sales President. “We have a singular network and can reassemble data and info across the network and on any connected device and root that back to subscriber data, using real credentials and authenticated viewing.”

The key to navigating the shifting landscape as an operator or as a media company is to zero in on the customer, says Jamie Elden, Media General’s Chief Revenue Officer. “The market is consolidating dramatically, and we are all chasing the consumer and what we think is the next path.”

That’s why partnerships are more common than they were three years ago, he says.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology with Adobe, AT&T AdWorks and Nielsen. You can find more videos from the Beet Retreat on this page.