This was the view shared by representatives of MEC and Videology at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and moderated by Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink.

When MEC’s Global CEO, Tim Castree, considers TV and video convergence he’s less concerned with where it’s at than he is in the context for doing it, because context “is where the motivation comes from” for the industry to move faster.

“We are in a really consequential time for our industry. For agencies, it’s a jump ball whether we’re going to more relevant or less relevant five years from now,” said Castree.

The best hedge against a lack of relevance “is solving technologically the cross-screen convergence opportunity. I actually see it as a competitive imperative that we continue to solve this challenge.”

Asked by Spiegel why agencies should fixate on that particular challenge, Castree pointed to the sheer ad dollars brands invest in television and premium video inventory and the manner in which they do so. He says this inventory will always be traded principally in an upfront, futures manner, which lends itself to media agencies’ “trading scale and the role we play in the market as the market makers.”

Adding technology to achieve more advanced optimization would seal the deal, according to Castree.

“Obviously, Google, Facebook, Accenture are never going to be traders of the upfront commodity of television and premium video. So bringing those two things together gives us a unique hedge against what others are trying to do to us,” he said.

Videology’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said that Castree “nailed it in terms of his answer” and went on to list companies that are gradually invading the space that has long been the territory of agencies.

“The number of times we’re hearing names like Oracle and Accenture and PWC in conversations these days which we didn’t hear a year ago is incredible,” Jamboretz observed.

Spiegel opined that it’s not as if the more established media players like NBCUniversal, Viacom and Turner under AT&T are going away anytime soon.

“They are essential, they probably aren’t going anywhere, but they’re in the same fight we’re in,” said Castree.

For both the buy-side and sell-side, the rate of change needs to increase dramatically, regardless of what has already taken place, he added.

“We’ve had a massive rate of change in our business in the last five years. But if the rate of change in our business for the next five years looks like the last five, we will have fallen behind,” Castree said.

Meanwhile, on the the sell side, “The more complex and advanced guys are saying, ‘How do I use this to stitch together all my distribution points into a converged offer,’” said Jamboretz.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

So when an Alphonso SDK in a tablet, smartphone, smart set-top box or TV set recognizes what’s being watched, an ad can be served in real time, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Gall, explained during a panel discussion about the state of advanced TV sponsored by the MEC agency at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

“Now we’re able to target one-to-one on a deterministic manner from TV to mobile but also, and even more importantly, show ROI,” said Gall.

Alphonso’s technology is present in more than 45 million devices in 32 million U.S. TV households, representing about one in three of the latter. It identifies TV shows and commercials and “fingerprints” them. The company plans to make its presence known in the U.K. in the fourth quarter of 2017.

“Most people are using a second screen while watching TV,” Gall said in responsive to a question from moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. “We are now solving the problem of connecting TV to mobile.”

In addition to being able to extend frequency and build reach in real time, advertisers can use Alphonso’s technology to attribute ad exposure to sales and traffic to online sites and auto dealerships, among other things.

“At the end of the day, we’re able to prove the ad was recognized and watched and you bought something,” Gall said.

If someone is watching a commercial on TV for, say, Walmart, a Walmart ad can be served to that person’s device. Contrarily, a competitor could have a conquest ad served. With paid streaming, someone watching Game of Thrones might be avoiding ads during that programming but they can be served ads via Alphonso.

Gall referenced a project his company is doing with an unidentified retailer in which the retailer’s CRM data is matched with Alphonso’s TV viewing database. This way the retailer can focus its resources on reaching its most valuable shoppers.

“Now you can focus in on the seven or eight networks, or the two or three paid streaming shows that they watched, and target them. And don’t worry about the shopper who’s only spending $20 a year. Worry about the ones that are spending $600 a year,” said Gall.

For a glimpse of Alphonso’s database of TV commercials, visit this page.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

The result, as moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink termed it during an MEC-sponsored panel discussion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, could well be dubbed “myth busting.”

The A+E project involved some 350 million ad-exposure records for 40 million addressable-TV-enabled households over a few months matched with transactional data to produce indices, according to panelist Ben Tatta, Co-Founder & President of 605.

While it’s true that a network like Lifetime is a great venue for reaching buyers of health care, beauty and packaged-goods products, digging deeper unearthed some interesting insights, said panelist Mel Berning, A+E’s President and Chief Revenue Officer.

“What we’re also finding out is that it’s a wonderful environment for reaching women who are the principle decision makers for buying cars. Or investments,” Berning explained.

“One of the things that was really interesting was that across the board for all of the A+E Networks, responsiveness to TV way over-indexed versus the average television viewer,” said Tatta.

Now for the myth busting. It turns out that Lifetime over-indexed both for viewers who are particularly weight conscious and those who are burger lovers. Men’s apparel was among the top-indexed categories for Lifetime viewers, while A+E overall “indexed high against younger families,” running counter to “today’s myth that younger audiences are migrating off the dial,” said Tatta.

As the discussion turned to how a company like A+E balances programming across platforms with the most appropriate ad formats, Berning separated out linear. For those nearly 100 million households, “The quality of the viewing experience is such a key factor to the environment on those networks,” he said. “We’re thinking about ad loads, we’re thinking about the ability to reduce clutter, to deliver a more engaged audience to the ad.”

With cross-platform, advertisers are at “different places in terms of the way they’re thinking about building their media plan across platforms,” Berning said. “It’s very easy to engage advertisers in terms of their requirements for linear. As you then engage them on what are your requirements on other platforms, there is a huge organizational effort to bring all of those pieces together.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

“That’s really more what we’re focused on versus worrying too much about getting to a fixed definition of what’s premium and what’s not,” said Tim Castree, Global CEO of MEC, during a panel discussion at Beet.TV’s Advanced TV Summit hosted by MEC at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Castree was responding to a question by moderator Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, who offered that premium content “is one of those words that doesn’t really have a definition.”

From premium content the discussion turned to the consumer video ad experience, the preponderance of tech solutions and the challenges to content sellers and buyers posed by the mixed trading model most publishers are having to deal with.

Asked by Spiegel whether Videology is seeing video stream providers paying more attention to the quality of the consumer experience then just doling out lots of ad impressions, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ryan Jamboretz, said things have definitely improved.

Five or six years ago, Jamboretz noted, when broadcasters “put their over-the-top television out they were over-monetizing, I would argue. They were putting way too many ads in the streams at the beginning.”

He acknowledged “some really great work being done by people like Fox around what is the appropriate ad load” while stating that “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Spiegel asked whether there are too many technology stacks and not enough standards and commonality.

“It’s highly ambitious if a bit naïve to think that any one company is going to be the full stack,” said Jamboretz. “For us it’s all about interoperability.”

He cited as one company that is “doing it right” Sky in Europe, which is a sell-side client of Videology. “We’re their monetization solution on the supply side but we also work for Tim’s company and many others in that market as a demand-side platform,” said Jamboretz. “So we play both of those functions. And that works better than having to be the top-to-bottom stack for every cable company in Europe or in the U.S.”

According to Castree, one advancement that would greatly benefit the industry is better publisher yield management. Publishers are “dealing with a very complicated environment,” given their remnant interaction with supply side platforms, premium deals in the UpFronts, direct programmatic transactions—some of it on demographics, others on audiences.

He said this mixed trading model is one reason “we’re struggling technologically with all these home-grown solutions.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

He sees these trends as a welcome sign that the industry is moving beyond traditional age/sex demographics for audience targeting and defends the broadcast TV environment against newer platforms.

Whereas targeting traditionally has been the province of the advertisers, they have been “very protective of their data and very protective of sharing information about who their real target is,” Berning says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I don’t think any of that is going to change.”

However, he perceives “much more of an appetite to work together in terms of advertisers, data suppliers and networks like A+E” for a deeper understanding of audiences.

This involves moving beyond the concept of, say, women 18-49 who buy certain products to “women who live certain kinds of lifestyles or who have certain mind frames use products for a bunch of reasons, and it’s really delving into those reasons.”

He says marketers have long chosen certain types of content based on their intuition that scripted content might be appropriate for certain brands and unscripted “because it’s very energetic” for others.

“But now we have a lot more data that proves that certain kinds of people with certain kinds of likes and dislikes and different amounts of receptivity to messaging are all part of the audience,” Berning says.

The big difference between an A+E and newer content providers, according to Berning, “is really the quality of our content.”

From an advertising standpoint, “We think there’s a pacing and a quality to the environment because of the content that we provide that really makes the audience more receptive.”

He points to Viceland, History Channel’s scripted series Vikings and SIX and Live PD as standouts at A+E.

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

That future is now, as a new crop of TV ad data companies is rising up to offer not just TV ad tracking – but tracking of real-world viewer movements motivated by the ads.

One of those companies is Alphonso, which says it is finding the movie theater to be a key areana for the new technology.

“Movie studios spend a lot of money on television – they want to know who are the people who went and saw the movie,” says Alphonso chief product officer Raghu Kodige, in this video interview with Beet.TV”

Alphonso’s technology, which the company claims is on TV viewing devices in a third of US TV households as well as on smartphones, can see whether a TV viewer has seen a TV ad for a movie, then can see whether that viewer is sitting in her chair in the theater.

Does Alphonso know whether she also bought popcorn? In fact, it does, as the company also looks at consumers’ credit card records to find purchases and attribute them back to that original TV ad.

Isn’t there a consumer privacy concern in all of this? “If they are aware of it, they are happy to give consent,” Kodihge adds. “The holy grail of advertising is to figure out what is working.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.

“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.

This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.

Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.

As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.

In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.

Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.

One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

This is the viewpoint that Tim Castree brought to global advertising and media planning agency MEC upon his arrival as CEO from Videology, following stints at MediaVest and Leo Burnett. Having been tapped to lead the merger of GroupM’s MEC and Maxus earlier this month, Castree sees a need for more standardization for targeting and measurement and fewer “home-grown” solutions.

Many people look at advanced TV and premium video “and say it’s obvious, we get better targeting, we get better performance, etcetera,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV. “But there’s a larger context that I’m not sure people are talking about in the industry that’s really essential.”

While companies like Google and Facebook are “fantastic, important partners” they represent “disintermediation against the agency model at the moment,” according to Castree.

Meanwhile, he alludes to consultancies that are attempting to lower the rank of agencies on the value chain.

“They want to give all the smart advice and try to relegate us to execution,” Castree says.

So the opportunity for better optimization of advanced TV and premium video isn’t just about better performance. “It’s our bulwark. It’s our big hedge against the competitive threats and disintermediation.”

The route to erecting these ramparts is by bringing more data, targeting and addressability “but more importantly more standardization to the approach behind which we transact in premium video.”

In other words, a common way to apply different types of data to targeting and measurement.

“The challenge we’re having at the moment is everybody is building a home- grown solution,” Castree observes. “There’s just a multitude of home-grown solutions so it’s getting more fragmented, more difficult to navigate and the power is in some form of consolidation around that.”

This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.

It’s called “branding”, raising awareness at the very start of the marketing funnel – with no real ability to track a TV ad’s specific impact on sales.

But all that is changing, thanks to new technology that tracks consumers’ TV viewing – and follows consumers all the way to the checkout.

“We index all of television across the United States, so we know what people are watching,” says Mark Gall, chief revenue officer of Alphonso, one of the companies enabling the new practice.

“We have distribution in one out of three US households, where we have the Alphonso SDK (software development kit). We’re able to recognise what’s on TV in one out of every three US TV households.

“The (consumers’) smartphone goes to the store and we’re able to identify that smartphone’s been in a store nine minutes, you’re purchasing a product, and you’re able to use Nielsen Catalina or ROI to demonstrate a sale.”

This kind of attribution for TV ad viewership could change the game, bringing far greater certainty to TV ad spending – and perhaps even change TV advertising in to a medium used by companies that don’t just want to raise awareness, they want to achieve specific end sales.