“The local marketers are some of the most sophisticated marketers that you’ll find out there,” says Comcast Spotlight Chief Revenue Officer Brendan Condon. “Primarily because when you think about their investment spend in media, in advertising, it could be a significant portion of their operating expense. So they can’t afford to make mistakes.”

In this Beet.TV interview at the recent Advanced Advertising Forum in Manhattan, Condon offers up the example of a local pizza client.

“I know exactly who my audiences are,” he quotes the client as saying. There’s the CEO of food (“the mom feeding her children”) followed by sports fanatics “who are only ordering pizza when they’re watching sports.” Then there is “this other segment of people who are buying pizza because it’s more cost effective or an efficient way to save money and yet have a sustainable meal while watching television or doing anything else.”

Armed with those insights, Comcast Spotlight produced three different audiences by types of viewers, the content they watch on TV and the corresponding geographic trading areas. Then it created “different proposals and plans so that they could have different creative or different messaging with the same creative to three different audiences, again within the same geography,” Condon says. “Three years ago we could not do that.”

Condon arrived at Comcast Spotlight in the fall of 2018 from AdMore, an audience-based programmatic television advertising platform, and REVShare, one of the nation’s largest short-form direct-response providers, at Cannella Media. He explains how Comcast Spotlight has reorganized to get even closer to local advertisers.

“We’ve de-layered the management team so that not only the senior leadership but all the way down to the sellers they’re freed up to spend more time with their clients. Being consultants and understanding what’s their business, what are the nuances and the challenges that they have and how can we provide a scalable viable solution for them.”

Part of the process is re-educating local businesses to the reality of modern-day TV consumption, given that the average household watches 17-plus networks on any given day.

“For us as an MVPD or anyone within the industry, you have to be able to go broader to get across those networks and go deep with the same level of out-of-pocket costs so that you’re therefore becoming much more efficient,” says Condon.

For marketers that have always wanted just to advertise in primetime programming, he cites The New TV-a recent white paper showing how just over two-thirds of all viewing occurs outside of primetime. Others have just wanted to be in live programming consisting of news and sports.

“There’s other things that happen episodically live that we can target on the localized basis on your behalf that will be just as effective if not even maybe more efficient than what you’ve been traditionally doing,” Condon says.

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

The squabbling is prominent in the addressable television advertising space, Gotlieb noted in his keynote speech at this week’s Advanced Advertising Forum in Manhattan. In this interview with Beet.TV, the advertising veteran says that while there have been some breakthroughs, there have been more frustrations.

“And the frustrations come from the fact that we operate in a context where the constraints are no longer technology based” given that the enabling technology for addressable TV has existed for nearly a dozen years.

What have gotten in the way are the various components of the industry, according to Gotlieb. “The MVPD’s have to execute the addressable ads. The content owners have to agree with it. The net problem here is that each have their own interests.”

One longstanding reality is that for decades, the relationship between TV distribution and content ownership has been, and continues to be, fundamentally adversarial. To prove his point, Gotlieb alludes to current headlines about carriage-renewal conflict between DirecTV and Viacom. “Those relationships are so adversarial that there isn’t the trust required to move things forward.”

Even with vertical integration, as evidenced by Comcast and AT&T, the ownership is the same “but the business interests remain somewhat siloed in that they operate their own independent P&L’s and are rewarded based on the performance of their P&L’s. And so these things get in the way,” says Gotlieb.

As a consequence, it is still “remarkably difficult to plan, to execute and to steward addressability or advanced advertising, far more so than it should be.”

Then there is the limitation on addressable advertising inventory, which predominantly consists of the two minutes per hour that the MVPD’s control. “And even there has been some internal squabbling between those people who feel that addressability is replacing geo targeting, and geo targeting usually accrues to the benefit of businesses like Spotlight, and everybody protects their turf,” Gotlieb says.

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

As it happens, speed also is one of the key attributes that WarnerMedia is touting to advertisers, along with a one-stop intersection of digital and TV audience opportunities fueled by AT&T Communications data, Riess explains in this Beet.TV interview.

In the formerly constricted world of linear TV ad formats, “We’re using full ad pods to tell brand stories that are longer. We are also using much shorter snippets of space and opportunities that we have to tell small, eye-opener pieces for brands.”

On the digital side, in addition to ad overlays and viewer interactivity, Turner Ignite is bringing commerce to social media posts in a new way. “So if we do a branded content piece with an insurance company through our Great Big Story brand and it goes out into Facebook, we’re actually driving directly to insurance signups,” Riess says.

Asked about the balance between ad loads and the viewing experience, he believes it’s in the “adolescent” stage across the industry right now. “Consumers don’t really want a whole ton of ads. I think there’s a lot further for it to go if we want to compete with the SVOD services that don’t have advertising.”

AT&T’s advertising company, Xandr, generates “an incredibly powerful consumer data set. As that data comes into WarnerMedia, we have tons of different opportunities to use it in many different ways,” Riess says.

Given that confluence of data from set-top boxes, Internet and app usage via broadband and mobile plus geo location insights, “we know what was seen, what was interacted with and what was the behavior that came out of that. The great thing about it is it’s fast.

“Most of the time, companies are stitching together different companies that have one of those three things,” he adds. “We have it all in one place so it’s much faster, the matching and accuracy is much better and it allows our advertising clients to be that much more efficient and powerful with what they’re doing.”

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

But that is only because, without access to return-path data, TV has never been able to boast the kinds of user attribution that new digital media do.

Now that TVs have got connected, however, all that is changing – and one ad-tech exec thinks this turns on its head the place of TV in the funnel.So,

“I think the big thing for us is to look at TV as a performance channel,” says Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

TVSquared is a company helping brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

But Kinsella doesn’t need a viewer to click from their TV to a website. TVSquared uses a range of other data to establish whether a viewer exposed to an ad took a follow-up action that led to a purchase.

“We get post logs … the time that the ad aired, and then we would typically deploy a pixel tracker to a website,” she says. “We will integrate with an app company to get app downloads or registrations. We take phone data. We take good old fashion SMS data. You name it, we’ve seen it all over the last six years.”

Kinsella credits “digital-thinking CMOs” that are now beginning to draw a line from linear TV to digital performance. Companies like Untuckit, Placed, Hello Fresh and Third Love are using the new capability, she says.

“You should be able to measure (TV) and optimize it,” Kinsella adds. “Linear wasn’t cool for a while, but actually people are realizing that it still has the quickest and easiest way to get reach and to get the name out there and to really drive sales or registrations, whatever the KPI is.”

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

Fifty-nine percent of homes which get TV over antennae now also subscribe to subscription video-on-demand, according to Nielsen.

US households are nearing three SVOD subscriptions per household, according to Ampere Analysis.

Whichever numbers you look at, subscription TV over internet is eating in to the traditional pay-TV and telco bundle – and more services are still yet to come.

In to that melee, Apple in March previewed its own TV ambitions, in an underwhelming presentation that left many onlookers confused.

But one thing is for sure – the SVOD arms race may not have infinite capacity to scale.

“I think there will be so much happening that the consumer will be overwhelmed,” says Irwin Gotlieb, WPP senior advisor, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“By the time you replace your triple play package with an internet package and a cell phone and a few content packages, you’re paying what you used to pay for the triple pay, if not more.

“There will be several that survive, but there will be substantial fallout over time. I think trying to market all these services at the same time is going to be really, really challenging because the consumer’s not going to understand or differentiate between them.”

To Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and many others, add Disney+, a new AT&T service and more yet to be unveiled to a growing list of subscription video operators.

They may be competing with traditional cable, but Gotlieb sees a historical pattern repeating itself – if SVOD services drive up their prices, as HBO did, they may stay with low subscriber numbers.

Breaking News Update:   On March 31, Comscore announced that Gotlieb will join the board as part of a major management shake-up.

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

Kosinksi’s digital background spans such media companies as Forbes, Yahoo!, Westwood One, Quantcast and Receptiv, while Bokor hails from Publicis Media, where he was SVP of Precision Video. The hires are a sign that Tru Optik is “listening to what the market needs and bringing on the right people,” Kosinksi explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Tru Optik services content producers, broadcasters and publishers, and agencies and marketers with what it calls its “core asset,” the OTT Household Graph representing 75 million homes. “We today have mapped, via direct measurement over eighty percent of all connected TV households,” says Kosinski.

On the targeting side, Tru Optik helps agencies and marketers use precise targeting of segments “that they’re very familiar with” and can access via their DSP’s with inventory available through its partnership with SpotX.

For measurement, the company provides transparency in connected-TV households in real time, according to Kosinski. It can determine reach against an audience, frequency of those audiences and in-target reach against them.

Some 92 million U.S. households have a smart TV, which Tru Optik uses as the “anchor” of its graph. Given the proliferation of other viewing devices, the company is able to aggregate “all of these different and disparate signals” into one common, household number. It provides other solutions based on the individual devices as well.

Tru Optik is the first connected-TV DMP to utilize the Oracle Data Cloud in an integrated audience solution, as MediaPost reports.

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.