“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.

Anton, who is President of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, has a theory for how this happened, as she explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Instead of organizing themselves to best serve consumers with optimal content, some marketing department brethren think, “Hey wait, I’m a channel lead. I’ve got to protect my channel. I need to make sure my budget’s as high as last year. I’m competing with the other folks that I work with.”

The answer, according to Anton: “Reorganize the marketing department around the consumer as opposed to being channel-centric.”

Having been in the content business for more than four decades, MXM is in sync with the content-generation demands of the current consumer marketplace. Now Anton is seeing some clients paring back on paid media for more reliance on organic earned and owned media, with search engine optimization critical to driving website traffic.

“Many of our clients have very ambitious goals around traffic generation and yet they don’t have big paid budgets,” Anton says. “So you really have to be creative about driving that traffic through excellent SEO.”

MXM planted its flag in the mobile space in 2008, so “We’ve been thinking mobile since way back,” Anton adds.

The agency has already embraced virtual reality in a pilot for a paint company client that shows consumers how certain colors look throughout an average day. “To have something like VR to be able to bring to clients is an awesome tool,” says Anton.

We interviewed her 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.

“If I have an extra million dollars, do I put it into marketing or trade funds or into new production innovation?” is one of several hypotheticals that Nichols poses in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Nichols, Chief Strategy Officer for the information technology and services provider, says it’s no longer about just media or marketing. “That’s the problem we’ve seen in the old world of media where they were looking at backward- looking media mix models or you’re looking at silo-centric digital attribution when the reality is you need to be looking at the entire picture,” Nichols explains.

Figuring out exactly when and where money should be spent “is a completely different beast,” he adds.

An automotive client of Neustar asks “should our next dollar go towards a pickup truck or economy line? Should I put it into Boston or Denver? Should I move money from this country to this country?” according to Nichols.

It’s an attempt “to balance brand building and sales, which are sometimes at odds with each other,” he says. This balancing act has its own nuances across verticals.

In BtoB it’s usually whether to put additional capital into marketing or hire five new salespeople because “BtoB tends to be very sales driven,” Nichols says. In packaged-goods, “it’s that tradeoff between brand and trade funds.”

While not all industries are as advanced as others in terms of their appetite for more data-driven decisions, “We’re finding a shift from being a nice to have to need to have very quickly,” he adds.

While television continues to work well, “it continues to be the big bucket that everyone seems to want to chip away at. But we continue see the indirect effects of television to be very powerful,” says Nichols.

The company licenses tools to media companies to help their ad sales people talk not about ratings and eyeballs and “soft metrics” but talking about business effects.

“We’re trying to shift that conversation from an eyeballs to an outcomes conversation right now, and that’s how we’re working with television companies,” Nichols says.

We interviewed him 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.

This is how Fariba Zamaniyan surveys the TV landscape while attending the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers. A former Nielsen executive who is now SVP, Sales & Client Service for TiVo, Zamaniyan explains how many of the thousands of brand marketing people in attendance have changed their thinking.

“What might have been more of an obstacle in the past with lots of these folks in the background is much more of a reality today than it was 10 years ago,” Zamaniyan says. “The challenge is change. Whether it be infrastructural or just a mindset change.”

The influx of digital media is forcing a rethinking of how media plans are brought to market and executed against, according to Zamaniyan.

“Now the technology and the availability of consuming content outside of traditional linear TV is forcing the marketplace to rethink,” Zamaniyan says.

A longtime set-top box data provider, TiVo recently upped its game in its acquisition by Rovi, best known as the company that has provided onscreen TV guide listings and metadata that power the media-search function on many platforms, along with advertising analytics and cloud services.

TiVo’s viewership data merged with Rovi’s analytics tools will enable better targeting of media spend for marketers and improved advertising inventory yield for media sellers.

“We feel very strongly that the measurement business and building efficiencies into media planning, the ability to measure them and execute against those plans is really critical to the growth of the industry,” says Zamaniyan.

We interviewed her 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.

“It translated into how we did our media planning and that we aligned ourselves with partners and publishers and media content that portrayed women accurately and that was more family friendly,” Bergsman explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

As AgencySpy reports, Georgia-Pacific via the Deutsch agency decided to take a different approach not only to selling paper products but metering out emotion at the right times and in the right places.

“Angel Soft started off with campaign where we highlighted and celebrated the challenges that single moms have,” Bergsma says. “Another video series for Angel Soft was about the challenges that step parents have with children that do not automatically love you back.”

Whereas G-P traditionally had been very functionally driven about promoting products like Dixie accessories, “We switched to recommending and inspiring people to be more here while they are at dinner. Put away their phones and connect with your mom and connect with your daughter,” says Bergsma.

The marketer’s media mix still consists in large part of traditional TV and video and has become “a little bit more emotional” in its online content compared with TV, according to Bergsma. “So what you see for Angel Soft on TV is different from what you see for Angel Soft in the social media space,” he says.

When it comes to in-store shopper marketing, G-P’s messaging is more functional than on TV for example. “So it’s kind of the closer you get to the point of purchase the more functional we get. The farther away we are from the point of purchase, the more emotional we are,” Bergsma says.

We interviewed him 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.

Whereas the AFE had previously focused on the quality of family entertainment overall, “This year we’ve really focused on #SeeHer, which is all about the accurate portrayal of women and girls in media,” Quinn says during a break at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

According to Quinn, data show that the vast majority of parents are dissatisfied with the content that’s available for families to view, and the number one issue within that is the portrayal of women and girls. “They believe it’s either negative or is not representative of the diversity that actually exists in families and society at large,” Quinn says.

This can take the form of unconscious bias, poor representation of women, or basically ignoring them. “That’s particularly why it’s called #SeeHer,” Quinn adds.

It’s not just about promoting gender equality per se. The AFE believes that companies will achiever greater ROI for their marketing spend in doing so.

On the eve of the Masters of Marketing event, Quinn shared proprietary new data with the ANA board of directors showing that removing conscious or unconscious gender bias from advertising increases purchase intent by more than 26% for all consumers and more than 45% among women. This is why the ANA and AFE hope their Gender Equality Metric, which is fueled by ongoing research, will become the industry standard.

Scores from the new metric will be presented to #SeeHer members quarterly to track progress and help the movement to reach its goal: a 20% increase in the accurate portrayal of women and girls in media by 2020.

On a broader palette, Quinn sees fruit in the labors of the ANA’s Marketing2020 initiative, kicked off in 2014 to help its members determine how to best align marketing strategy, structure, and capabilities for business growth. One of the big takeaways was the importance of “purposeful positioning” for brands.

“Even today I’ve seen so many examples on the screen here of brands that have taken on incredible things from a storytelling standpoint, values of the culture, that really adds an additional layer of purpose to the brand,” says Quinn. “The thing that I’m seeing this year especially is the need for the industry, the marketing profession, to be seen as doing something good and valuable to society.”

We interviewed him 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.

The purpose-driven theme that SunTrust dramatizes in its advertising is that everyone should be “able to be there in the moments that matter in life and to be financially confident so you can enjoy those moments that matter,” Ventura explains in a interview with Beet.TV while attending the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“So in a lot of our creative, you’ll see examples of really strong imagery that in a split second you know that’s an important moment in someone’s life,” says Ventura. That imagery was encapsulated in a commercial for SunTrust’s onUp Movement during Super Bowl 2016, as captured in this behind-the-scenes video.

By joining the onUp Movement, consumers are motivated to “Move from financial stress to confidence.” But first, SunTrust must get their attention.

“Consumers are always in charge, of course, and now there are so many things for them to focus on,” Ventura observes. “From a brand perspective, it’s hard to break through.”

In the pre-digital era, marketers looked at their media exposure in distinct buckets, but that no longer works.

“We used to think about everything separately, and now we have to think about everything the way the consumer receives it, which is all stacked,” says Ventura. “And so you can’t just say it was one media mix element or another. It’s about the combination of all of them that makes an impression, that’s compelling and ultimately gets the consumer to act.”

SunTrust is taking the approach that “it’s just not acceptable” for some 80% of people to report that their finances keep them up at night, according to Ventura. “What we’re trying to do is raise awareness of the fact that you can actually reduce your stress by doing some simple steps, like getting budgeting and setting up online alerts,” she says.

We interviewed her 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.

Amanda Brinkman is one of the stars of the eight-episode series Small Business Resolution—along with being Deluxe’s Chief Brand & Communications Officer. So the passion she exhibits when explaining the evolution of Revolution, crafted to highlight Deluxe’s evolution to a marketing services provider, is understandable.

“We really wanted to do something good in our 100th year,” Brinkman says in an interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers. “No other small businesses are more under siege than in our small towns, and we wanted to do something about that.”

Deluxe solicited nominations to determine which small town to support with a $500,000 makeover for its small business and downtown area. After nearly 10,000 nominations and 180,000 votes cast, Wabash, Indiana emerged on top.

The Small Business Resolution series, which is also available online, consists of interviews with local business owners whose offerings run the gamut from a bridal accessories to tattoos. Along the way, Deluxe representatives offer advice on such topics as brand design and website maximization.

“We evolved alongside those small businesses that we’ve been serving for 100 years and now offer a full suite of marketing services,” says Brinkman. “But people don’t really know us for that. To change perceptions, we thought we’d do something good at the same time.”

One thing most small businesses have in common is a lack of marketing expertise. “You don’t start your own business because you can’t wait to build a website or figure what SEO is or manage your twitter account,” Brinkman adds.

She is excited about the conversations around purpose-based marketing at the ANA confab, saying “At the core of it people want to interact with brands that are doing something that matters. It only benefits us all if the entire marketing community rallies around doing things that make a difference.”

We interviewed her 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.

In Spotify’s first trip to the Masters of Marketing Conference of the American Association of Advertisers, Kelly says in an interview with Beet.TV. that the key to the Branded Moments offerings is enabling listeners to mirror the “authenticity” of music.

“When we have 100 million active users connecting with over 30 million tracks against 2 billion playlists, that turns into something, and that something is a moment,” says Kelly.

One can easily imagine Gatorade sponsoring a 30-minute block of exercise-inducing tunes, or Baccardi if people select their favorite party accompaniment. Spotify wants brands to be there in those moments so they can “own this experience end to end,” Kelly explains. “You’ve never been able to do this before.”

The brand exposure encompasses an end cap, a vertical video and a mobile overlay for 30 minutes. “Anytime a listener press shuffle play, they’re going to be experiencing a relationship with that band. And that’s going to last 30 minutes, brought to you by Gatorade, or Bose, or Baccardi,” she says.

Asked how the return for the brands will be quantified at the end of the beta period, Kelly says Spotify is examining “what’s going to be the most effective way” to measure it. “We’re building in another layer of authenticity there. Unlike any other medium, it is a reflection of yourself,” Kelly says.

We interviewed her 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.

In an interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers, Spiegel cites a lack of clarity and trust expressed by some industry participants. “It’s been a kind of rebates and margin discussion” for the past couple of months.

“Now I think we’re actually getting more into the root of the problem, which is there’s just too many different partners doing too many overlapping things,” Spiegel says. “And the end result is the connection between a marketer and a consumer, to put that together is actually way harder than it should be.”

He’s not talking about companies doing sketchy things but things that aren’t truly productive.

“Let’s stop with all the hops, wasted partnerships,” Spiegel says. “I think we can clean that up and I think markers will get a better result. I think too many guys in the middle are focused on moving some media billings, and that’s not making the industry any better.”

Amid much digital innovation, the ad industry is still at the learning curve stage of what data and technology can do, according to Spiegel. “Now what happens is we can overcorrect,” he adds. “We’re in a risk that if we don’t get really clear on how this technology works, when it’s most applicable, what data is most useful, marketers could pull back.”

Spiegel thinks there’s been a rush to an “audiences matter and context doesn’t type analogy, which is just wrong. Of course experiences matter. Of course context matters.

“Let’s continue to have the experiential side of contextually understanding what an individual is doing, but let’s understand that individual a lot better when we market to them,” Spiegel says.

We interviewed him 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.

“Snapchat’s been really huge for our brand,” Bragg says in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers. “Snapchat is really a window into real-time Shake Shack. That’s what people want to see. They want to see the opening that’s coming to a town near them and how that plays out.”

Shake Shack has a presence on no fewer than 12 social media platforms, including Giphy and Periscope, where the restaurant chain has amassed just shy of 5,000 live-video followers.

“We use them for different reasons,” Bragg says. “We really give people behind the scenes and we think people really appreciate that access. Social media is an active dialogue, unfiltered.”

Most of its promotional efforts consist of Shake Shack’s own media, “and some select paid media on Facebook, which you need to do to make sure that your fans actually see what you’re sharing,” says Bragg.

The company waited five years from the time its mobile hot dog cart—created to support an outdoor art installation—had blossomed into a permanent kiosk to take the plunge on a second location, on the upper West Side. One of its chief calling cards is “high-quality food that’s all of value” and creating a welcoming atmosphere at its locations.

“We’ve put a lot of attention and detail into incredible design and finding great sites that we think will be a magnet for people to congregate,” Gragg says. “And that all goes back to our beginnings in the park.”

Of the ANA’s Masters confab, which attracts nearly 3,000 attendees, Gragg is enthused to be in such mixed company. “It’s a fun moment for us to be in a conversation with all these incredible brands,” says Gragg.

We interviewed him 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.

The solution lays in combining data sets in to a single customer “identity” profile. But, already, that discipline is transforming in to more than just combining and deduplicating, according to one ad-tech exec.

“A lot of people think that if I have an email address, postal address or cookie, I have some type of cookie,”according to Neustar marketing and communications SVP Steven Wolfe Pereira. “The reality is, you don’t. You only have one dimension. How can you do people-based marketing if you don’t understand identity?

“We think this is evolving, much more than just data. You need to understand connection. The next generation of this is going to be about connection science – understanding not just the analytics, but also how you address things and the authentication to connect all three.”

Neustar is an ad-tech company offering data management platform, customer data intelligence, marketing analytics, activation, compliance solutions and fraud detection.

The company just helped the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) judge its Genius awards.

“Everything is going to become connected – whether it’s products and services, communications and commerce, online and offline,” Wolfe Pereira adds. “How do you connect people, places and things?

We interviewed him 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.

Turner is fresh from winning ANA Genius Award for analytics science, as it looks to innovate on how advertisers can take advantage of the changing face of TV.

“We can use  data and analytics to help identify the audience,” Turner client strategy and ad innovation EVP Michael Strober tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “More importantly, we can now use data to help inform which is the right creative message to be targeted to that individual.”

AT&T has said its combination with Turner would create a company with customer insights across TV, mobile and broadband; offering more relevant and valuable addressable advertising that can innovate with ad-supported content models.

But Turner has already been working on some tricks of its own. “We’re working with our social partners, where we can do a lot of A/B testing, and help them map that back to our own audiences across our portfolio,” Strober adds.

“We have a capability that we built internally called Launchpad that allows us to span the entire digital and social universes and test custom audience segments that the creative resonates with. We take that insight and find where those audiences are across our linear portfolio.”

One of the biggest challenges with customizing TV ads for countless individual viewers is making enough video assets to assemble together in to myriad permutations. That doesn’t come cheap, especially if you are looking to produce the kind of quality TV viewers are used to.

The answer is still being worked out – but demand for an answer appears to be growing.

“Our clients don’t have unlimited budgets. How do you scale?,” Strober says. “I don’t think we’ve cracked the code on that yet. In linear television, it’s not as easy. But we do believe dynamic creative versioning is something a lot of clients are thinking about.”

The ANA Genius Awards aim to recognize the best, brightest, most innovative and most impactful work in marketing analytics today.

We interviewed 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.

“The reality is we did a ton of science” about TIAA customers, says EVP & CMO Connie Weaver, a self-described believer in “the art and science of branding.”

That meant not only understanding customers by their “name, rank and serial number” but also grasping how they really feel about financial planning, Weaver says in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“The reality is most Americans don’t feel very good,” says Weaver. “As an industry, we’re pretty complex and we throw a lot of words at people when it comes to investments. People of all ages would tend to shy away from that.”

Not surprisingly, TIAA-CREF communicated complexity to consumers, as ADWEEK reports of the company’s rebranding effort. That is partly due to its aged roots, as founded by Andrew Carnegie to provide a comfortable retirement for educators.

“If you think about how it’s grown over the years, it’s gone from being frankly the only game in town to having to compete in a highly vibrant, competitive environment and to remain relevant to people of all ages,” Weaver says.

Three key principles for the rebranding were having an intimate knowledge of customers, getting “radically simple” and becoming an engaged ally. “That’s building on the trust we have in an industry that a lot of people don’t trust,” says Weaver says of being an engaged ally.

The upside was that, facing such monumental change, TIAA had no shortage of options. “We had a lot of freedom to do things we had never done before,” she adds.

To plant its flag in public awareness and establish its mission and purpose, TIAA has used television plus “an awful lot of video,” according to Weaver. “As a matter of fact, almost half of what I’m doing is digital, but digital means a lot of video,” thus TV and video “are important and frankly they work together.”

For the very curious: CREF stood for College Retirement Equities Fund.

We interviewed her 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 wouldn’t expect to see us” on Snapchat, says Meredith Verdone, SVP Enterprise, Consumer & Wealth Management at BOA. Nonetheless, its llama lens—part of the bank’s mobile banking promotion—has garnered some two million views.

“What we’re seeing today to grow a modern brand is it’s more about the experience. We say it’s about 25 percent story, 75 percent experience,” Verdone says in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

BOA and other iconic brands are all grappling with the challenge of maintaining relevance in a world with more than enough brands and brand messages competing for consumer attention and engagement.

“We focus so much of our effort to say how is our brand resonating through the experience our customers have with us across every channel and how do we make sure it’s really a connected experience,” says Verdone. “For us, what happens at the ATM, what happens at the banking center, it all needs to be one connected experience.”

Verdone notes that contrary to some thinking, the millennial cohort cares very much about money. “They’re pretty sophisticated individuals. What they want to do is have enough money to live their lives,” she says.

With some 16 million millennials as customers, BOA has made “a dramatic shift” in its media mix. While channels like outdoor and television are still part of the mix, “We continue to try to learn and understand where our customers are and how can we be relevant on their terms,” Verdone says.

Hence the Snapchat llama and BOA’s partnership with VICE News, the latter of which falls under the Better Money Habits marketing umbrella. “We’re seeing tremendous engagement” with millennials, Verdone adds.

We interviewed her 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.

The agency involved in those ads is Havas, but the technology outfit enabling them is BrightLine. Now BrightLine says it will build on the launch by offering more ad formats from January.

Current features include “geolocate the viewer, inform them about local deals, the ability to buy your movie ticket, to full, branded, immersive experiences that look like microsites on your television,” BrightLine CEO Jacqueline Corbelli tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Hulu has gone a long way to create things that feel very natural to the viewer and we have several new products that will be launched at CES.”

BrightLine launched in 2003 to bring interactive ad experiences to TV. It just happens that it took more than a decade for the technology to get in to living rooms, to allow TV sets to benefit fully.

But now the over-the-top TV opportunity is really taking off, and Corbelli – whose clients also include ESPN, AMC and Disney – is excited.

“When Peter (Naylor, Hulu’s ad sales SVP) gave us the opportunity to go full-footprint across their entire app audience in the living room, we grabbed it,” she adds.

“We’re bringing the marketplace a way to target across digital screens and, from a measurement standpoint, to bring accountability to television advertising that, heretofore, was limited.”

We interviewed her 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.

In an interview with Beet.TV at the ANA’s annual Masters of Marketing conference, Pace says that the supply chain doesn’t properly reflect the needs of marketers who are “providing the revenue for this entire ecosystem.”

The former Global Chief Marketing Officer at the Subway sandwich chain says there’s still a fundamental disconnect between marketers and their media agencies. The ANA’s independent assessment from outside companies “found that the media practices right now have pervasive use of rebates across the entire ecosystem, which is not a good circumstance from the perspective of the marker.”

While the use of non-disclosed rebates from media sellers to media agencies and other opaque practices are being addressed on a company-to-company level, there is a bigger backdrop to consider.

“The entire digital media supply chain has some significant issues in it,” says Pace, referring not only to continual apprehension about ad fraud, viewability and other metrics but basic inefficiency. “There are an awful lot of intermediaries in the digital media supply chain that may or may not be essential to the entire process,” Pace says, adding “My perspective is that we need to take more control of that digital supply chain.”

Asked how this could be accomplished, Pace says “To be perfectly candid with you, if it were up to me I would push the reset button on the whole supply chain.”

He describes a scenario in which consumers, content creators, marketers and publishers could come together and be at “the center of the conversation.” If this group could choose from an a la carte menu of their desires and needs, “I imagine you would have a much sleeker digital media supply chain, which in the end would benefit everybody,” Pace says.

Is there a role for the government in reforming the digital media supply chain? “I’m a self regulation kind of guy,” Pace says. “I don’t think we need the government to get involved. But having said that, I think the marketers need to assert themselves.”

We interviewed him 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.

Pritchard showcased the Always campaign along with other P&G efforts for brands like Ariel and Pepto-Bismol during a presentation titled Raising the Bar on Creativity at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

In a subsequent interview with Beet.TV, having arduously defended advertising in his presentation amid so much industry talk about “content,” Pritchard observes that, “There are so many ways we can reach people and there are so many messages that our brands can actually provide while still looking like your brand.”

What’s most important is that “It has to be a great idea,” Pritchard says. “An idea that’s not that meaningful, you can buy and push and whatever all you want and it won’t make a difference.”

His presentation cited the Ariel laundry detergent that P&G with a “beautifully crafted film” created to show men in India that it’s not just women who should shoulder certain types of housework. “It makes Ariel meaningful,” notes Pritchard.

In the case of the Always campaign, which began four years ago, P&G linked the concepts of feminine protection and the confidence so that women could confront “demeaning phrases like ‘like a girl,’ and be able to make ‘like a girl’ mean amazing things,” Pritchard says.

“So not only are they talking about the performance of Always, they’re also able to express their point of view about an issue that is meaningful to women and girls around the world,” he adds. “And that’s good. That’s good for the business and that’s good for society.”

The video-centric Always messaging—which has generated 550 million views and 25 billion impressions—is on its fourth installment. While it garners its share of organic awareness, P&G also pays to deliver it at key moments.

“We put a 60-second version on the Super Bowl of Always Like a Girl the same time we had it online and then actually broke it up into different pieces,” Pritchard says. “We had a Snapchat version that was six seconds.”

But it all started with an idea “so powerful people want to view it, they want to talk about, they want to write about it and then they’re taking action on it as well,” says Pritchard.

We interviewed him 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.

“We’re working with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and Department of Justice,” Zaneis says during a break at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Word of TAG’s interaction with federal agencies surfaced earlier this year, as reported by Advertising Age and MediaPost.

Once the TAG collects information about fraudulent activity and shares it with the advertising industry, “We put it into an actionable format so that law enforcement can go after the criminals. That’s really key,” Zaneis explains.

With more than 120 member companies, TAG’s mandate is to bring greater transparency to the digital ecosphere. “So you know your business partners are legitimate companies, not criminals, and that you are getting what you think you are buying from a marketer’s perspective,” says Zaneis, who is the former EVP and General Counsel for the Internet Advertising Bureau.

Continued double-digit growth in digital advertising spending masks potential criminal activity, according to Zaneis. “We know there’s a lot of opacity, there’s a lot of criminal activity, ad-supported piracy, distribution of malware and, of course, the selling of non-human, fraudulent traffic,” says Zaneis.

While some people are willing to share more information about themselves than are others online, when it comes to identity theft, everyone’s on the same page.

“Advertising is actually used as a delivery mechanism for much of the malware that then allows for identify theft and privacy concerns,” Zaneis says. “The industry has to do better to protect consumers.”

Nonetheless, he believes this year marks a turning point in the efforts to combat digital ad fraud. “I think we’ll look at 2016 as that year of transition where the industry, at least in the U.S., was able to finally wrap our arms around some of these endemic challenges,” Zaneis says.

We interviewed  him 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.

Rangaiah ran herd over a variety of agencies during his 14 years at Unilever, where he was VP of Global Communications, Planning and Digital Innovation, until last March. In an interview with Beet.TV on the eve of the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers, Rangaiah reflects on the disruption in the advertising ecosphere.

“From my perspective as a marketer, it used to be that we had our advertising agency as the right hand for the CMO and then all the other agencies were managed by them as the lead agency,” Rangaiah says. “But because of the advent of technology and data and all the things happening now, that relationship isn’t quite the same.”

Unilever went from having an agency of record to “having several different agencies and social, mobile, data, digital whatever. I think it’s difficult for an ad agency, the big agency, to manage that and lead it,” he says.

IBM’s solution is iX (Interactive Experience), a self-described “next-generation services company” with a network of global studios offering all manner of services under one roof. “What IBM has which is great is we’re not a holding company. We’re truly one company,” Rangaiah says.

One longtime client is The Masters golf tournament, for which IBM built a website in 1996 and launched an iPhone app in 2009. That work was a prelude to IBM iX teeing up the Internet of Things to enhance the viewer experience.

“They came to us and said ‘we need a better mobile solution,’” Rangaiah explains. “What an agency would typically do is make an ad that would make sense for mobile. What a digital agency might do is create an app, which might be engaging in some manner.”

What IBM iX did was put IOT sensors on 18 trees along the Masters course so that viewers would not be confined to watching what network television decided to broadcast.

“That’s a mobile experience,” Rangaiah says. “It’s very different from running an ad. It engages consumers, it provides utility, it provides entertainment. All the things you’d like to do, but it’s not necessarily an ad.”

We interviewed him 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.

“So many advertisers are having a tough time competing in this marketplace,” Jim Tricarico, CRO of Cadent Network, says in an interview with Beet.TV, citing the dynamic of lower TV ratings but high demand for ad inventory. “And what does that mean? Media inflation. Prices are going up.”

This allows networks to be discriminating about the accounts they accept, snagging the highest CPM’s while tiering or capping their lower-priced offerings. “What we try to do is come in and be a solution to that media inflation,” says Tricarico.

Cadent’s core business is obtaining inventory from cable TV providers, among them Bright House, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, Fios and U-verse—in all, more than 200 MSO’s nationwide. “Whatever the MSO’s don’t sell, we go and get and aggregate across the country into a national footprint,” Tricarico says.

The second leg of Cadent’s trifecta is its advanced TV business, which it bolstered with a recent partnership with TiVo. Using Cadent’s TV targeting tool, media buyers can perform matches against the 2.3 million households that subscribe to TiVo, AdExchanger reports.

Augmenting the TiVo relationship is a micro-targeting relationship with Experian that enables advertisers to identify the best shows and programs on every network, according to Tricarico.

Most recently, Cadent dipped its toes into broadcast. “We haven’t jumped in with both feet but most recently secured new inventory from Metro Traffic and Weather, from CNN and TvB,” Tricarico says.

Cadent’s client base has diversified significantly in the last two or so years. “Now we’re working with all the major agencies and all the premium advertisers,” notes Tricarico. He says the company has added about 140 new advertisers over the last 24 months.

Some 14 months later, BlackArrow and Cadent serve a combined 200 pay TV providers and 300 advertisers and agencies. Reducing complexity is a top concern for all involved, according to Nick Troiano, CEO of Cadent.

“Every platform, whether it’s mobile, OTT, set-top box VOD or even live linear, has its own silo, its own data construct and workflow,” Troiano says in an interview with Beet.TV. “The challenge for advertisers and agencies is how to actually build a comprehensive and consistent campaign across all platforms.”

BlackArrow’s roots are in helping pay TV operators deliver more timely and efficient sales and marketing messages, extend TV services to new platforms, and gain real-time measurement and audience insights across multiple screens. Cadent had focused mainly on traditional TV.

Working together, they enable advertisers to purchase “data-driven inventory across live linear and multi-platform solutions and do it in a framework to provide national efficiency,” Troiano says.

While transparency and verification have long been hot buttons in the digital ad universe, “It’s the same issues we have in TV in terms of where’s my ad running, across what network and who am I reaching within that household,” says Troiano, citing multiple data and reporting infrastructures.

He notes that with regard scale, neither advertisers nor agencies have the bandwidth or capability to work with every single vendor across every single platform. “So when we think of scale and capabilities, those are must-haves to really move the television industry forward,” Troiano says.

With addressable TV currently reaching some 40 million households, “I think that’s the future of television,” adds Troiano. “It’s bringing digital technologies to a television environment.”