It will be an incredible three days of intense sessions, tapings and networking.  Lots of discussion about advanced TV and the imperative for the entire ecosystem to focus on “consumer first.”

We are delighted to announce our first presenting sponsor in Nicolle Pangis and her team NCC Media, NCC is the enormous advanced TV sales consortium of Charter (Liberty), Comcast, and Cox Communications.    More partners will be announced soon along with our keynote speakers.

In addition to our conversations of what’s happening in the States and globally, we will be joined by our colleagues in the San Juan media community. In partnership with Hearts & Science and GroupM, we will explore  innovative strategies  for the island and its media industry.  This program will include master classes at the University of the Sacred Heart and teen mentoring at the Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico.  These activities are optional and will happen in the afternoons when the Retreat sessions are finished for the day.

Why is the Beet Retreat so special?  Take it from these Retreat veterans Andre Swanston, CEO Tru Optik;  dataxu CEO Mike Baker; Omnicom research chief Jonathan Steuer’ and 4C’s Chief Product Officer Anupam Gupta.  We spoke with them last month in New York at our Beet Retreat in City program.

We are committed to Puerto Rico.   We  hope that our presence on the island will be a voice of support as it recovers and innovates for the future.  Please be a part of that.

To get more information, to request an invitation and to explore partnerships opportunities at this event, visit this  page.  And you can call always email me.

Best, Andy

The Beet Retreat San Juan is presented by

with

When you think about using the same technology for digital ad management, however, it becomes clear that the infrastructure would need to cope with tens of millions of transactions per second.

Many people are starting to talk about the prospect for blockchain, the technology underpinning crypto-currency, to help manage the digital ad supply chain. The reality that blockchain solutions today suffer from a kind of latency that makes them unsuitable to digital ad scale may put the brakes on those dreams.

But not for Babs Rangaiah.

“In the 90s, we knew that you could do a ton of things in marketing online – whether that’s video, video ads, video content – but no one had broadband,” says the IBM global marketing executive partner in this segment from the Beet Retreat moderated by Rob Norman:  “But in a few years we know it will, so, (we said), ‘let’s prepare ourselves’.”

Could the same be true for blockchain technology? A blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin, but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.

Advocates say blockchain can be used to track and trace any goods – physical or digital – that move within a system in which provenance is paramount. And much of the attention is turning to digital advertising, a sector which is mired in concern over fraud, accountability and identifying where every fraction of a cent is siphoned off.

Digital ad real-time bidding latency requirements are strict. A DSP typically requires a response within 60 to 75 seconds. There’s a real it’s called “real-time”.

That poses a challenge to blockchain dreams. Most blockchain solutions operate slower than that. In tests to mine crypto-currency, IBM’s Hyperledger infrastructure clocked more than 3500 transactions per second with 300 to 400 millisecond latency.

But bringing transparency to ad-tech doesn’t require mining for new virtual coins. And Rangaiah is convinced things will get quicker.

“If you’re thinking about blockchain, it’s a little bit like (broadband in the 90s),” he adds. “People think if you have high-volume transactions you won’t be able to do it on blockchain, it won’t be able to capture it and still get the consensus mechanisms in place with the smart contracts..

“The reality is it’s moving very fast, just like the internet. There’s a number of new companies coming in place.”

When the speed catches up, blockchain could be a perfect solution, premised on an “immutable ledger”, meaning actions that occur within the digital supply chain would be recorded in a way that cannot be tampered with.

At Cannes Lions, IBM and Mediaocean announced “a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain,” along with Unilever, Kellogg and Kimberly-Clark.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Norman, who recently retired from GroupM and is an Advisor to Beet.TV, kicked things off by noting a level of “sturm and drang” surrounding a desire in some circles to quickly abandon the traditional Nielsen demo-based ratings as a transaction currency. But will it actually happen?

Ray, who is President, Product & Innovation at Dentsu Aegis Network, said that it will, predicting a more addressable marketplace in 3-5 years and the accompanying changes in measurement that marketplace will bring.

As a former researcher, Schwartz painted a broad swath of change resulting from addressability. “It fundamentally changes how and what we do,” said Schwartz. “Because once you start getting to person–level addressability or even device-level addressability, the word research is out the window.”

Taking its place will be a mix of census, response and counting. “So we don’t have all those situations where the systems go down, the set-top box isn’t working or we have an underrepresentation. You’re seeing actual response and analysis,” Schwartz added.

The drawback? Not all households will be capable of being addressed, according to Schwartz, who is President of Investment, North America, GroupM.

Norman questioned whether those households will hold the least amount of value for advertisers. “I think some of them might be, but some of them might be all the way at the other end of the spectrum, that have the ability to be reached in a manner and not addressed. There’s the evolution of technology so I still believe that the top end will have a way to find out how to basically take themselves off the grid,” said Schwartz.

Ray predicated a bifurcation of how buyers and sellers look at video content. “The role of live content is going to be more valuable because it’s going to be tied to the cultural moments,” he said.

Asked by Norman whether all video is “born equal” and how advertisers should consider various screen sizes, Ray said much of that calculation depends on the desired outcome, be it click-through, engagement, response or “trying to change fundamental beliefs about the brand.”

Noting that hand-held screens are of better quality than some of the TV sets he grew up with, Schwartz said it’s not about size but environment and also proximity to what people are about to do, including buying something. “We have to take that all into account. So not all video is the same, but we need to know how and where to use it,” Schwartz said.

Norman wanted to know whether the industry is within “seeing distance” of a time when significant parts of the video market will be traded on business outcomes rather than exposure to commercials.

Schwartz said there is “a desire for a lot of people to get there,” but there are so many factors in the marketing spectrum “I don’t think we’re at the point where the buyer and seller want to predicate the price and the value on the return on investment yet.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By most definitions, that is a recession.

But Mike Baker thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. The CEO of ad-tech firm dataxu thinks digital and linear TV can combine to make something greater than the sum of their parts.

“I was a little-bit surprised how people were a little bit off on linear TV,” Baker said, describing the chat at our recent Beet Retreat industry event. “There was a lot of consternation about the viewership, about the ad effectiveness and whatnot.

“We’re definitely feeling some of the frustration, I think, in the middle of the upfront, with some of the viewership and the ad fatigue, if you like, on linear TV.”

But linear TV doesn’t have to stay linear, and ad buys don’t have to be so one-dimensional. These days, partners like dataXu are helping broadcast operators offer advertisers the best of both worlds.

“We have a product called One View, which we’ve used for the connected TV to take digital audiences and translate them into TV,” Baker adds.

“Now what we’re doing is really looking analytically at the linear TV to explain to linear TV buyers how connected TV can increment the reach.”

This interview was conducted by Matt Prohaska.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

With a successful 13-year career at Walmart and having spent eight years on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, Ramos had decided it was time for a change.

“What I did was great in the business sector, but then I think that as a Puerto Rican myself I have to make sure that I leave a legacy and that I work to make a difference,” says Ramos, who was a featured guest at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. In this interview with Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services at GroupM, Ramos explains how the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico—which is affiliated with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and has just celebrated its 50th year—had decided to shift its focus in the face of an economic crisis that has lasted for more than a decade.

Several years before Hurricane Maria, “We decided that we needed to do things differently. In order to prepare our kids and youth to be prepared for what the future has in store for them.”

At one of its 13 club houses, the organization set about trying to change “the systemic conditions in which our kids live” by concentrating on training them to benefit from tourism. From ages six to 12, youths began to learn about the tourism culture. “When they’re teens, we work with them on entreprenuership. We start putting that seed in their minds that there are things you can think through, there are things that you can come up with. You can have your own business or you can work through another business,” says Ramos.

Part of the effort involved training parents and guardians as well. “It’s about home stability and changing the conditions for the kids. The kids do not choose to live poor or to be born poor,” she adds.

This is different than in the U.S., where the focus is mainly in children, notes Cowdell, who along with many other GroupM representatives became active in Puerto Rico relief efforts immediately after Hurricane Maria struck. However, in Puerto Rico, “You can’t just help the child, you have to help the parent as well,” he says.

Among the success stories at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, one in particular stands out to Cowdell and Ramos, who had mentored a young girl in her high school years and was determined to help her succeed through college and beyond. “We had to involve her mother because it was a single mother trying to let her only girl go out and study,” Ramos recalls. The girl had posted grades of 4.0 in both high school and college, where she studied chemical engineering and won summer internships to Harvard, Georgetown and Ohio State University.

She eventually made her way to NASA with assistance from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.

“Everyone has human potential,” says Cowdell. Then he asks Ramos about the future.

“I think there’s hope,” she says. “Puerto Ricans are resilient.”

At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised more than $20,000.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Meanwhile, because linear television hasn’t given up the Upfront negotiating mainstay, it’s still going to have a longer purchase cycle than other media, Horstman explains in this one-on-one interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.

Swartz senses that the buy-side and sell-side are comfortable blaming each other for a lack of progress.

“People are using data as a mechanism or an edge to try to get a competitive advantage whether you’re a buyer or a seller,” replies Horstman, who is SVP GM, Advanced Media & Advertising at TiVo.

When the sell-side embraces advanced TV, “they want to use data to find inventory that surfaces for a targeted audience to actually make it more valuable.” On the buy-side, it’s akin to arbitrage in the search for “opportunities of inventory that that sell-side doesn’t understand is as valuable as it is. But I’ve got some insider proprietary data that I’m using to find those opportunities.”

With this dynamic as a backdrop, Horstman sees more flexibility on the buy-side.

“For the sellers, there may be a little bit of risk aversion to say what inventory are we going to promote as data-driven because we want to sort of control how much gets used and control the messaging and control what data gets put against it,” he says. “But if you’re a buyer, you can apply it to everything.”

One of the brightest spots that Horstman sees in the agency world is within the digital ranks. “Because for the first time, they don’t view TV as this mysterious media vehicle which has only been posted or measured or targeted using just your traditional Nielsen panel. Now they can get incredible insights around the matching of data from TV to their digital campaigns, social, mobile, connected TV, all the linages they can now have converged measurement and targeting.”

Digital practitioners “are taking a leadership role in this world” because they’ve not only lived with data and analytics but are used to doing things like attribution and media mix modeling very quickly, according to Horstman.

“Now for the first time, they’ve got access to what’s been going on over in the TV world and can understand the influence of what’s happening in TV on their digital campaigns and start to influence it.”

Asked by Swartz where the industry is on the overall timeline for advanced TV, Horstman says it depends on the speed at which different types of media can be transacted.

“We still have the Upfronts we still have a longer purchase cycle within linear television compared to digital, connected TV, what have you.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

As an example, he explained during a panel discussion at the recent Beet Retreat in the City the process involved in NBC executing dynamic ad insertion. “Through FreeWheel, there’s probably 700 right now end points of where we have to integrate into in order to be able do that. But it can be done,” said Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales.

That’s the good news. However, more than 90% of NBC’s impressions are still delivered in a live, linear fashion.

“It’s going to involve programmers and distributors, MVPD’s, virtual MVPD’s coming together both to solve for the tech as well for the business rules. We are a business of legacy. It’s hard to change that but the will is there,” said Rosen.

Moderator Laura Desmond, who until recently was CEO of Starcom, asked whether the traditional value exchange between content providers, consumers and advertisers is “broken.”

Vikram Somaya of ESPN said the value exchange “isn’t good enough. For a long time, everybody in the system was making money and it made it very hard to change. We’re getting to the point now where everyone in the system is not making the money they used to make and suddenly we have to look in the couch cushions a little more than we had to.”

Desmond described the efficiency and effectiveness of TV advertising before describing a scenario that is destined to become as antiquated as rabbit ear antennae on top of a TV set. “You push a button, the commercial goes out, it airs, time delay, you post it, done. That’s a pretty simple and easy model.”

So is lack of education inhibiting the adoption of addressable TV ads? “The ad-supported experience needs to change,” responded Rosen. “Limiting commercials, but also it is about relevancy. We do know that ads that are more relevant to the user are going to be less annoying or perhaps not annoying at all or even welcome. Data’s going to help us with that.”

Asked by Desmond about the role of automation, Metcalfe, who is GM of LiveRamp TV at LiveRamp, said technology isn’t the problem. She recalled that before LiveRamp was acquired in 2014 by Acxiom, companies like Facebook “weren’t really interested in working with us yet. We didn’t have the reputation we needed, etcetera. Acxiom brought that to us.”

LiveRamp was in the early stages of powering custom audiences for companies like Facebook, but it wasn’t easy working with them because they wanted to control every last detail. “And it’s very similar to what I’m seeing now working in the TV industry today because it started to ramp up and become a larger part of their business. Everybody has to get comfortable with losing a bit of control.”

Asked by Desmond whether ESPN parent Disney is ready to compete in direct-to-consumer content delivery with the likes of Roku, Hulu and YouTube TV, Pandit said one of the joys of sports is that “no matter where you go you will get advertising.

“We can’t put our heads in the sand and say we should not go down the DTC route because we’ve done very well with pay TV and very well with digital. We have to be open to what consumers want us to do,” said Pandit.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The technology company, owned by 21st Century Fox, helps consumers see fewer ads in digital video when they engage with an initial interactive commercial – effectively bartering their input for a benefit.

Over the last year, consumers have become more aware than ever of the same kind of value exchange – the one in which they are trading their personal data for free online services. That could be good timing for true[X] president Pooja Midha.

“If we want to capture better quality of attention, then we need to give the consumer back something for giving us that,” she tells OMD chief investment officer Ben Winkler in this fireside chat at Beet Retreat.

“And so the opportunity as it manifests in video is to either watch the rest of the episode ad-free in exchange for engaging for 30 seconds at a minimum, or to skip the rest of a commercial pod in exchange for engaging for a minimum of 30 seconds.”

Growing awareness of the economics of attention in technology are not the only way in which business is coming in to true[X]’s orbit. In broadcasting, too, networks are falling over themselves to reduce their ad length, ad load or pod duration, in response to booming ad-free subscription video consumption.

For broadcasters, fewer ads may sound like it would add up to fewer dollars. But, Midha says, when you manage to engage viewers, the opposite is true – advertisers will pay more for less.

“In our experience they will,” she says. “we’re operating in a business that has, for many, many years … transacted on a couple of very specific metrics. And, as a result, we’ve built an entire planning system at the agencies, we’ve built an entire evaluation system at the clients of those agencies, and we’ve built an entire culture inside the media companies, of focusing on a couple of numbers.”

When partners are shown alternative numbers – the ones that illustrate how engagement moves the needle – a light goes on.

“We get people nodding along, and they’re like, ‘Yup, this is exactly the kind of thing I want to buy’,” she claims.

Operators like Turner, Fox and NBCUniversal have been experimenting with reducing their ad load or length in response to growing consumer resistance to interruptive ad practices.

But it’s a furrow true[]X] has been plowing for a while. “A couple of years ago what we were doing was seen as bananas, and now you see every network head talking about it,” Midha suggests. “I’m really heartened by some of the changes that we see, and some of the movement we see.”

This fireside was anchored by OMD chief investment officer Ben Winkler.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But Kristin Dolan would like advertisers to get out of that siloed mindset. The former Cablevision exec, who jointly set up 605 to bring better ad insight to TV buyers, says the new age of advertising can support multiple goals.  She discussed this during a fireside chat with Rob Norman at the Beet Retreat earlier this month in Manhattan.

“It’s a mix, it’s a media mix,” she says. “To say, ‘I’m going to do digital instead of television’, or ‘I’m going to do television instead of digital’, or … ‘I’m going to do subway or outdoor instead of digital’ … you have to really look at the entire mix.”

That’s why 605 last month launched a new product to help brands do just that. Called Impact Index, it aims to be a scientifically-based approach for measuring the impact of TV advertising on both branding and sales – essentially, uniting both the top and bottom of the marketing “funnel”.

“The goal is to help people understand the comprehensive marketing mix, so that it’s not just about sales, but it’s about brand, and building the brand out, so that when you are trying to drive people to an actual behavior you can get there,” Dolan says in this interview for Beet.TV.

605 has already been helping brands go further with their ad insights, Dolan said:

Nissan: “The brand resonates favorably with Hispanics. So we look at what Nissan is doing with their media schedule, and they do focus heavily on utilization of Hispanic networks for their media.”

AT&T: “We looked at AT&T, and they really had, they had a propensity, where people were much more inclined TVLAND viewers versus some of the other Viacom networks. They spend a ton with Viacom, they don’t advertise on TVLAND.”

Walmart: “What we were able to do is look and really see if the people exposed to the reputational ads, did their favorability increase? Then we took it another step. We were actually able to determine that the people that were exposed to the ad, their reputation perception increased, and also their spend in store increased.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City.

The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The video ad-tech firm has spent the last few years trying to popularize technology that helps consumers see fewer ads in digital video when they engage with an initial interactive commercial – often met by raised eyebrows.

Whilst allowing viewers to eliminate the majority of ads may seem like a recipe for lost revenue, finally, in 2018, broadcast networks are racing to reduce their ad load, ad length or commercial pod duration in response to growing consumer resistance to interruptive ad formats.

“The idea that a better viewer experience and a better advertiser environment are not in conflict,” says Marchese, who founded the company and later sold it to Fox, in this Beet Retreat fireside with Rob Norman.

Operators like Turner, Fox and NBCUniversal have been experimenting with reducing the size of their ads, as more viewers flock to ad-free subscription video on demand.

But, whilst fewer ads may delight viewers, won’t fewer ads mean fewer dollars for broadcasters?

Marchese says he is still “working on” developing the metrics that show advertisers who high-engagement ads in a low-load environment can drive better outcomes. But some things he knows instinctively.

“Just by having less ads on a night and less commercial messages, you can make the ads that you do have more effective to your audience because they’re not confusing as many commercial messages,” he says.

Marchese says plenty is still in flux and plenty yet to be worked out.

But there is something he knows for sure: “Engagement is just proof of attention. The only currency is attention.”

This fireside was anchored by Rob Norman.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Overall, this year’s Upfront is “not all that different from a marketplace that’s reflective of a relatively healthy economic backdrop,” Geraci, who is President of National Video Investment at OMD, says in this interview conducted by OMD’s Ben Winkler at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. “There is a significant amount of pressure in certain areas, mostly due to supply dynamics in linear television and fragmented viewership, combined with some increased spending from advertisers that rely heavily on television,” says Geraci.

He pinpoints that reliance in large part as relating to older-skewing brands for which “television is still really the best place, the most fertile hunting ground.”

Asked about efforts by providers like Fox and NBCUniversal to roll out reduced ad-load offerings, Geraci responds, “Time will tell.”

While there are potential positives in making the linear TV experience more like what viewers can get with digital offerings, reducing commercial load comes with a big caveat. “When you restrict supply, there are going to be pricing issues, and we get that,” Geraci explains. “The astute buyer tries to pay the lower price and we’re making efforts in that regard.”

Asked by Winkler about the efforts by Fox and NBCU, Geraci says, “I don’t know that we’re there yet in terms of finding that price-value relationship, for at least the two being discussed now.”

Looking ahead, Geraci outlines his desired outcome. “Our hope is that over time, if the expectation is that the viewing experience is better, more people will interact with the programming, ratings will ultimately increase. That’s the hope is that if you improve the experience you’re going to ultimately further down the road build back supply simply by higher ratings of at last live or slightly delayed commercial television. That’s sort of the holy grail.”

As for his thoughts on OpenAP, the audience targeting consortium started by Fox, Turner and Viacom that both NBCU and Univision recently joined, Geraci calls it “sort of common ground if you will for the optimization systems. If you can bring standardization to anything that is not standardized, in general you create more interchangeability in the marketplace and basically a more level playing field, and you allow the advertiser to make better decisions and selections.”

Geraci notes that OpenAP is for planning using common audience target definitions across networks but not for actual purchasing of inventory. So buyers are still “forced to optimize within just their set of offerings. It’s not the completely fluid situation that we’d like to see.”

One thing that has changed for the better over the decades that Geraci has experienced the back and forth of Upfront dealings is the temperament. He says there’s “more of a sense of fair play I think nowadays than I think than there was in the earlier times.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“National advertisers don’t want 40 million. It’s a good start, but I think we’ve got some catch-up to play,” Kline says in this one-on-one discussion with Tatta at the recent Beet Retreat in the City.

Upon the sale of Cablevision to Altice, Tatta joined the startup 605, on whose board Kline now sits while also holding the roles of President of Spectrum Reach and EVP of Charter Communications. Tatta is President of 605.

Asked by Tatta to define the state of addressable TV, Kline points to the traditional business model of the cable providers whose participation is needed to expand the national footprint by using their two minutes of local ad time.

“I think a big reason for that is many operators, many distributors are in the subsection television business. They’re not in per se the advertising business, and I think that perception is starting to change,” Kline says.

“They’re always going to be in the subscription business, selling video products and high-speed data and telephony and soon mobile phone service for some of us,” Kline adds. “Advertising has always sort of been, ‘hey we’ll take that money, it’s great high margin, but we’re not going to invest that much in it.’”

Having just launched linear addressable in Los Angeles, Charter’s “footprint in New York will be months away. I think it’s not moved fast. Maybe it’s moved fast in cable years, but it hasn’t moved fast in anything else,” Kline says.

On the way to additional scale, addressable is providing a foundation upon which TV networks can enhance the value of their national inventory, according to Kline.

“If they really want to make their network inventory more valuable, they need to get it better targeted. More relevant. And we have the platforms that can do that.”

In the meantime, he sees the model for networks as acquiring the widest possible amount of distribution and collecting license fees from distributors. “But I’m not naïve. We know that things will evolve and viewership will move to other places. But there is still a ton of viewership on what we would call traditional platforms, and I think that’s going to continue for quite some time,” Kline says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The future of how TV is being delivered is changing. We believe all or virtually all what we now call television impressions will be addressable,” says Brett Hurwitz, Oath’s Business Lead for Advanced TV.

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Hurwitz sat down with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz to discuss the path to that advanced-TV future and how more big-brand marketers are embracing addressable TV.

“I still believe that indexed-based television is smarter for marketers than traditional TV buying,” says Hurwitz. “But Oath has made the decision that with the changes that are taking place in the way television’s delivered, having an offering in that space is not something that makes sense for us to be investing in.”

Instead, “We’re investing in what we see to be the future of premium video and the future of television.”

The Fios TV addressable offering was launched in the fall of 2016 and initially ran in parallel with One TV, as Multichannel News reports.

While the term “household addressable” has mainly been the province of MVPD-based offerings, advanced TV encompasses a broader set of solutions. They include index-based offerings by networks (for example OpenAP) along with OTT and connected TV.

Asked by Swartz, who is CEO of Furious Corp., whether the ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to use the same dataset to target audiences across all platforms, Hurwitz says it goes beyond that basic application.

“Going a step further, you can do things like based on a certain level of exposure to a television commercial then place a target on a digital kind of lower-funnel activation tactic,” Hurwitz says.

So will Oath’s previously programmatic offering revert to direct-sold inventory?

“I think the way we’re beginning to view these types of pieces of inventory is as super premium video, and so ultimately having that type of inventory available in our video programmatic environment is something that we’re exploring,” says Hurwitz.

He believes there will always be a place for the Upfront negotiating season and does not see the future becoming “one audience, one price.”

What Hurwitz is seeing right now is advertisers that originally were staying away from addressable now starting to come in.

“Because what they’re realizing is the data that you can get from addressable campaigns has tremendous application to what creative you run on your larger linear campaigns,” Hurwitz says.

“The kind of conventional notion that the only advertisers who should pay a premium CPM to work with addressable television are advertisers who have a relatively small target we’re seeing really start to change.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

With more than a decade in the media industry, including interactive TV pioneer Canoe Ventures, Schaffer likens his role to bringing “fire to cave men” in this interview with Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet Retreat in the City on June 6 in Manhattan.

What has long been done in other industries—process automation—has proven to be “very challenging” in the media industry because of its deep legacy infrastructure, closed systems and “a lot of challenges to being able to transact business electronically with trading partners,” Schaffer says.

Having “started life as a Price Waterhouse CPA,” Schaffer thinks the media industry is going through the latter stages “of what we have been studying for a long time and expecting. This notion of convergence. This notion of linear television becoming digital.”

With so much change being forced on the industry because of the way consumers are receiving and consuming content, the future must be one of “open systems, open communication, more efficient delivery of transactional information back and forth among trading parties. It seems to me it’s time to harmonize and streamline the transaction process.”

And it’s not just between buyers and sellers of media but within media companies themselves, according to Schaffer.

“There’s still the requirement of dealing within very siloed business units that are very, very separate, and there’s very little connecting those various systems inside an entity that allow them to transact with outside third parties in a more effective way,” he says.

Asked by Swartz whether change involves simply “chasing platforms,” Schaffer says it goes well beyond what consumers have largely become indifferent to: how they consume content.

Along with more open systems and data-driven decision making, “new measurement tools are going to be required, harmonization, being able to deal with multiple different measures and multiple different currencies.”

Asked to cite three major challenges facing media companies, Schaffer identifies becoming platform agnostic, achieving more efficient distribution and gaining scale. “Scale is incredibly important to media companies as we’re seeing a lot of pressure for each of them to become larger and frankly more global,” Schaffer says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That is the new idea bubbling in some sections of ad-land, as technology companies look for ways to take the new infrastructure to new customer categories beside crypto-currency.

For the uninitiated, a blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin – but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.

Over the last year, businesses of all kinds have explored the potential it offers to record every action and modification in a distributed ledger. So far, much of the talk still seems just that – hypothetical.

But, in this fireside chat with Rob Norman, Babs Rangaiah, the global marketing executive partner at IBM iX, the division working on blockchain solutions, offers up some concrete examples of how blockchain has real-world solutions – and could help bring transparency to the digital ad supply-chain.

Rangaiah says IBM iX is helping Walmart track and log the supply chain for pork produce in Chinese supermarkets, and also to ensure that mangos imported from Central America all go through a tracked and traced system, so that any health outbreaks can be traced to a specific batch.

Pork and mangos are all well and good. But what do meat and fruit mean for ad-tech?

For advertising buyers and sellers, who, over the last couple of years, have been plagued by the creeping realisation that much of their money is siphoned off by intermediary platforms without full disclosure, that could be mana from heaven. Blockchain could shine a spotlight on every fraction of a cent that might be taken by links in the chain.

That’s the theory. What’s the practice?

“We did a blockchain for media with Unilever earlier in the year,” Rangaiah adds. “We were literally tracking the ads because of all the different players in the programmatic mix now, and to understand where that money goes.

“If there’s a dollar leaving the market, it used to be 85 cents, it gets to the publisher, and now it’s 30 cents. Where is all that money going? So it’s total transparency to the chain. Nobody understands … how much money is going to each piece.”

IBM’s Rangaiah says blockchain can help in three key respects:

• “What blockchain will provide is very clear transparency of that.”
• “It will also provide a great way to clean up all the discrepancies that occur because of it.”
• “It gives, from a reporting standpoint, a dashboard that makes it very easy to track where you’re spending your money.”

How this all gets implemented is, to many, still a source of confusion. Interviewing Rangaiah for Beet.TV, Rob Norman, until recently the chief digital officer at Group M, the world’s biggest media agency, repeats one description of blockchain as “everything you don’t understand about finance, and everything you don’t understand about computers combined”.

For IBM’s part, it uses Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain-regulating technology that it helped contribute to the developer community, as an enterprise infrastructure, though specific industries then need unique applications built on top.

Rangaiah acknowledges: “It is very, very early. I think the potential is huge. So far, what we’ve done is worked on a direct type of buy. We’re now working on something that scales that, which will be more programatically based. It still won’t handle the number of transactions and volume that (happen) when you talk about very high speed.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City.  The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But, whilst that strategy has undoubtedly allowed marketers to reach consumers in new places, a growing school of thought holds that it has also created a whole new array of silos.

That’s the view of one ad agency man at the sharp end of making decisions about where brands’ spending should be allocated.

“We are starting to stop talking about ‘digital’ and ‘linear’ TV or ‘print’ and ‘online’ magazines,” says Lyle Schwartz, president of investment for Group M in North America.

Instead, he says, the agency is getting “to just the mere fact that there’s ‘video’, there’s ‘audio’, and there’s ‘image’ – ‘image’ being pages or it could be a billboard”, he says.

Variety previously called Schwartz “a new sheriff who would like to shake up the way advertisers pay for TV”.

That’s because Schwartz wants to break down the barriers which see buying agencies pay for campaigns in a different way depending on which devices are used. Schwartz thinks differently.

“It’s not the device the consumer’s interested in, it’s the content that they want,” he says.

“I think what we really do need to get is to holistic. Forget about the devices, forget about the ways which we do this, and understand what is working and at what levels with the consumer.”

The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In 2018, many buyers are struggling to bridge the chasm across multiple media channels like these, which they nevertheless need to deliver through.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dentsu Aegis Network’s product and innovation president Doug Ray says his organistion is in a good position after making an early bet.

“I like to think that we’re ahead because, even five years ago, we moved away from having a digital buying team and a television buying team, and we moved to, for example, a video buying team, and we’ve been doing that for a while,” Ray says.

“We’ve built tools that allow us to be able to look at the unduplicated reach between things like OTT platforms or even YouTube or Facebook video, combining that with traditional television platforms that might be measured through a Nielsen, as an example.”

The problem of measuring impact across channels is a thorny one. Many marketers want to continue buying TV ads, albeit often fewer of them. They also want to buy digital video ads. But the new imperative is to look at each of these things as a whole rather than as distinct.

Group M’s Lyle Schwartz has also told Beet.TV he wants to be buying media “holistically“, not as separate channels.

Dentsu Aegis Network’s Ray continues: “By combining those, we can understand the value of ‘If I move 10% of my dollars from linear television into digital video platforms, what’s the increase in unduplicated reach that I can achieve and what’s the reduction and perhaps, the cost per reach point, or the overall cost per thousand to reach those individuals?’”

He is grateful for having made the switch long ago: “That’s been game-changing for our clients for a number of years now.

The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“A lot of the conversations now are not such much about the promise of all the stuff we talk about. Data-driven, advanced TV, whatever. But it’s about how to practically make it happen,” he adds in this interview during a break at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City.

“And the challenges that people are facing who kind of said, ‘hey okay, I want to do this, now let’s roll it out to teams and what’s the process and how do you educate teams that have been doing it a certain way.’”

Asked by Beet.TV contributor Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principal of Prohaska Consulting, to recap the progress of 4C, which was founded in 2011 under a different name to operate in the social media space, Gupta says it’s been a journey on disparate platforms.

“So we started out in paid social, we extended to TV, toward the ultimate dream that what marketers need is really one platform to do audience-driven, cross-channel marketing,” says Gupta. “That’s really kind of what we’ve been moving towards.”

What he’s seeing now in the market is that brands and agencies alike “absolutely get it. They know that these media need to work together. They know that it can’t just be silos.

“So they get it but we’re in the process of deploying it. People, process, technology. How all these need to work together.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Time has proven that making the long-term bet is a good idea for both sides in the equation,” says Chris Geraci, President, National Video Investment, OMD.

Geraci was one of the featured speakers at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this video, they discuss the dynamics of the video marketplace and parse the semantics of what now constitutes “television.”

Geraci has seen lots of change since starting his advertising career in 1987 at BBDO New York. Yet amid a rapidly changing media landscape, the bedrock role of advertising hasn’t changed all that much.

“We support a crucial part of the entertainment industry by way of advertising dollars, that allows for production and better quality content to come forth if they can count on a longer term advertising commitment,” he says.

The economics of what is often referred to as a “futures market” remain in place during the negotiations that typify the Upfront.

“For the advertisers and agencies that service the advertisers, we know we’re generally getting a better deal by working in the Upfront model,” Geraci says. “It’s just more efficient from a cost-per-thousand basis, which is usually the metric that’s being used. It’s just a better deal in the Upfront.”

Asked by Swartz to describe the change he sees year to year, Geraci notes the increase in digital options available. “I think the consideration set keeps widening. We now have definitely more online opportunities to interact with what we consider to be premium content. So the choices are broader.”

Given a “solid economic backdrop,” Geraci says that with consumer marketers “having decent results” some are putting that money back into media. “There’s a little bit more supply in some areas, including sports, perhaps a little less in some of the linear TV dayparts. So that’s creating a little bit of pressure there.”

Asked by Swartz whether there remains a distinction between “television” and “video,” Geraci says he believes it’s all video right now.

“In fact, we removed the TV designation from all of our job titles to prove that point publicly. Television is simply a physical device as a way to deliver what quality content and ad-supported content is what we transact in.”

OMD’s clients have the same mindset, according to Geraci.

“For the most part, they’re in the same place,” he says. “I think it’s been very helpful that a lot of the linear TV based companies have sort of morphed what they serve the consumer to be a multiplatform experience.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV contributor and Furious Corp. CEO Ashley J. Swartz during a break at the Retreat, Reyes acknowledges that there’s been “a pretty sturdy debate” over the role of data when it comes to creating advertising campaigns.

“Specifically, does data prevent creativity from happening because it’s all about measurement or it’s all about numbers? And also, does data take humanity out of the creativity, which is one of the things we always in the industry pride ourselves on,” says Reyes, who is managing director of the advertising agency.

The bottom line for Reyes—who began her career at Ogilvy & Mather and D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles—is that if data are used to inform campaigns from the start as opposed to strictly measuring campaign results, the utility of data is unquestioned.

“We really feel like there are ways for data to inspire the work to be better and to be that much more poignant,” for example “data unlocking creative that would never have been possible without that data.”

To demonstrate how data can inform campaigns, Reyes explained her agency’s work for the postal service in the Netherlands. By examining the type and volume of mail to certain residences, the agency was able to locate people who were most likely to be lonely and encourage the general public to reach out.

“And the point is that they were able to ship some letters to those lonely people to make them feel great over the holiday season,” says Reyes. “But we wouldn’t have known who those people were and really if they were truly lonely people who lived alone if it wasn’t for the fact of data helping us through that example.”

The second campaign involved data not only providing insight and inspiration but becoming the creative itself.

“That’s one of the things that we struggle with a lot in our business,” Reyes says. “An idea can be really beautiful and simple, and then lots of people jump on top of it and mess it up. But sometimes data itself is the story.”

Helsinki has the highest per capita incidence of domestic violence globally. Using 911 data, “We know exactly where those people live,” so over a 48-hour period the agency studied the concentration of calls.

“So really, all we needed to do was put posters and television ads and radio ads in those specific areas, because one of the things that we found out was that when people know other people who are going through a similar experience they are more likely to seek help,” Reyes explains.

She believes “data is at the center of everything we do from now on. But I think it’s more beneficial to think about it in the beginning of any kind of campaign or effort than it is where it’s been today, which is mainly at the end.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

At last week’s Beet Retreat in the City, Midha—whose background includes ABC, Viacom and Dow Jones—was one of the featured speakers along with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp. In this one-on-one interview, Swartz asks about the utility of voice assistants in what she terms the “straddling of platforms and experiences.”

To Midha, it comes down to “breaking down that third wall. You want to bring someone into your ad creative. That’s when you really get to create that emotional connection that makes the difference between a product and a brand.”

Given the rise of in-home, voice-activated assistants and other ways consumers can talk to digital devices like laptops and mobile phones, Midha explains how the technology can induce viewer participation.

“So you can say, ‘turn off the lights.’ And the lights are going to turn off in the scene that you’re watching. You could say, ‘turn on the TV,’ and the TV inside the scene you’re watching of a living room is going to turn on and play your show.”

Asked by Swartz whether engagement with interactive ads is a generational thing, Midha says it’s all about the most appropriate creative. Her view is supported by the more than 10,000 engagement ads true[X] has executed in virtually every category “and pretty much every advertiser KPI we can think of.”

true[X] will be rolling out a new set of what Midha terms “engagement blueprints” based on “really strong database insights and learnings. So that’s how we see ourselves scaling.”

With the company having proven the efficacy of engagement ads in on-demand programming, she sees a huge opportunity in live programs like sports events and awards shows.

“Nothing captures people like live. What hasn’t evolved is the fact that we are streaming so many of these events and great moments on digital platforms and taking advantage of none of the capabilities that these digital platforms offer.”

One aspect of human behavior while watching live events is to pause the content. “When they come back, we give them the opportunity, if they’ve been gone long enough, we say ‘would you like to engage for thirty seconds or do you want to just pick up where you were?’”

If a viewer decides to engage for 30 seconds, they can skip the next commercial break and catch up in real time to where other viewers are with the game or program. “We have done a little bit of testing in terms of focus grouping the concept, we’ve built a live demo, we got really strong feedback,” says Midha, adding, “I just love the idea of not accepting live for what it is and saying, ‘this is already an amazing experience, let’s make it better.’”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“So when we first came in we took this decision that said set-top data must move at the speed of digital,” says Walt Horstman, TiVo’s SVP, GM, Advanced Media & Advertising. That meant “in a matter of seconds.”

The underlying motivation, Horstman explains in this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: “We’re in the golden age of TV, but we’re also in the golden age of TV data.”

Now advertisers and media companies “truly can understand how TV advertising changes consumer behavior,” he says in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This means “No longer using proxies, no longer using correlation metrics, but truly in a deterministic fashion understand how we can change consumer behavior through TV advertising, and that’s what’s really exciting,” says Horstman.

What’s gratifying to see on the buy-side is that the siloes between TV planners/buyers and digital planners/buyers “are really coming down. We are now using TV data with digital planners, analytics folks at agencies or brands.”

He says the “real momentum” is reflected in the realization that everyone needs to comprehend how TV and any kind of digital campaign work together.

“It’s all about integrating the effectiveness, the targeting, the measurement and understanding the impact of TV on digital campaigns and vice versa,” Horstman says.

In addition to bulking up on viewing data, TiVo has been advancing the cause of deeper audience engagement with its Personalized Content Discovery Platform, which groups viewers’ favorite shows, genres, interests—even actors and directors—into personalized carousels.

“We’ve given the consumer everything they ever wanted, which is all the content available on demand on any device. That has created a challenge for the consumer because it’s harder to find things.”

Content recommendation drives longer engagement, “which of course increases more advertising units, more monetization,” Horstman says.

Among the insights derived from the Personalized Content Discovery Platform is that from Monday through Friday of a typical week, “consumers are much more focused on watching what they’ve currently been watching, catching up with whatever their favorite shows are.”

Conversely, on weekends people are “much more interested in exploration of a broader set of offerings, and that’s where we can expand catalog consumption either for a content provider or for a service provider.”

An overarching goal is to keep people in the ad-supported TV environment.

“As we know, the biggest advertiser on television is television. And so we’re starting to bridge that story between personalized recommendations with also marketing content and merchandising in the same offering,” Horstman says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“People are still pretty confused about what’s possible and how it works,” Metcalfe explains in this interview with Laura Desmond at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose.

LiveRamp helps several hundred brands make the best use of their CRM data to implement people-based marketing across more than 500 publishers and digital marketing platforms, “and so there’s a natural extension in talking about television as well,” says Metcalfe.

In March, LiveRamp extended its IdentityLink platform to the TV space. Its Connect Select solution is designed to empower MVPD’s on the sell-side.

Educating LiveRamp’s brand clients has sparked a “tremendous movement on their behalf. I think we’ve got 40 brands that had never been in addressable TV working with us and executing campaigns in the last two quarters alone,” says Metcalfe.

Desmond was one of the early pioneers of addressable TV while at Starcom, beginning with a trial in Huntsville in 2005 with Charter and Comcast followed by more trials in 2009 and 2012.

“We actually were the mover that put DirecTV into the addressable business,” Desmond recalls. “In all four of those use cases, what we saw was a tremendous business case. Zapping was down by 33 percent, engagement increased anywhere between ten to forty percent. Yet the dollars aren’t flowing.”

Says Metcalfe, “There’s overwhelming evidence this works.” She notes that MVPD’s and companies like one2one Media “talk about how the majority of their business is repeat business. They have such high retention rates because once you try it, you see how well it works you come back.”

Underlying hurdles to adoption include brand procurement people not understanding why a CPM for an addressable campaign may be higher even though the effective CPM can be lower. Using a hypothetical household CPM of $25 for a non-addressable campaign, Desmond says, “It’s a good buy, it’s targeted but it comes with waste.” And while reducing waste can mean a higher effective CPM, “People have a hard time wrapping their arms around that.”

In a recent earnings call, LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe CEO said the company’s addressable TV unit is growing at a rate of 70 percent this year. What are the drivers of the growth?

“The activation of the buy side, I just can’t underplay that enough,” responds Metcalfe.

Another priority at LiveRamp is bringing TV-specific identifiers into its identity graph.

“Currently, our graph is PII based and email and mobile ID and device ID. We need to get to a point where we have IP to household that scales as well as the Roku ID or the Hulu ID or the Chrome stick ID. To really unlock those connected-TV cases to empower the networks to have a better understanding of true viewership of their content as well as the advertisers,” says Metcalfe.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But Ben Tatta doesn’t think marketers should focus only on a single goal. He wants to ensure they can measure everything.

That is why the company he is president of, 605, last month launched a new product to do just that.

Called Impact Index, it aims to be a scientifically-based approach for measuring the impact of TV advertising on both branding and sales – essentially, uniting both the top and bottom of the marketing “funnel”.

“We found that most of the focus is on sales attribution,” Tatta tells Beet.TV. “(It) is a necessity and it’s really important to understand true ROI to measure sales.

“But what we’ve seen with the campaigns that we’ve measured is that television delivers brand impact more powerfully than any other platform. So, if solely measuring on the basis of sales attribution, you’re only really going to measure a portion of the value that television delivers.”

Impact Index is the productisation of work 605 had already been carrying out in analytics for Walmart and Uber.

It includes a database of 12 million households and survey data, matched against known household ad exposure.

The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City at the post event reception by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That is the growth trajectory the industry is now seeing in the realm of advanced TV advertising, the practice of serving TV ads targeted to individual viewers.

“I think that the conversation has really shifted to advanced TV, whether that is even indexed linear, or it’s addressable linear through set-top box or satellite, and then of course connected TV and OTT,” says Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik, a data management platform which facilitates ads for connected TV platforms

“That’s what people are almost leading the conversation with now … and you’re seeing lots of dollars shift.”

Swanston was speaking with Beet.TV at Beet Retreat In The City. Tru Optik’s technology helps marketers with targeting OTT viewers, measuring consumption and tracking attribution using first- and third-party data.

The Stamford, CT-based outfit claims its technology has sight of what 500 million consumers in 150 countries are viewing or listening to, out of a library of 20 million titles.

Videology previously tapped Tru Optik, which sees clients of the former use the latter’s data about OTT viewing to better segment and target viewers.

“What we’ve seen, even anecdotally, is we’ve seen our existing clients and TV networks and publishers, even the ad tech platforms, we’ve seen like over 8X increase just in the last two quarters in terms of data used across connected TV and OTT,” Swanston adds.

“We don’t have quite as much visibility into like, the addressable TV, but I can imagine that it’s just kind of an industry-wide thing.”

Why the Beet Retreat Matters

Swanston also spoke about the Beet Retreat In The City event, saying he was pleasantly surprised to hear a panel discuss the potential benefits of blockchain in advertising.

“I don’t know how Andy and the team at Beet pull it off,” he said. “I mean, you don’t even have to ask for an intro to a big-name exec – just show up at a Beet event and you’ll eventually meet them. That’s why I think you’ll see people fly in from wherever. I’m happy that I keep getting an invite.”

The interview was conducted at the Beet Retreat in the City at the post event reception by Matt Prohaska, CEO and Principal of Prohaska Consulting.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.