That’s a person-level frontier that FreeWheel plans to tackle, according to Claudio Marcus, the GM of the company’s Data Platform. In this interview with Beet.TV, Marcus recaps FreeWheel’s progress on TV advertising planning and attribution, calling measurement “a huge challenge.”

On the attribution side, FreeWheel took on the role of TV advocate in 2016 when it conducted research “just to understand the impact that TV advertising has on different types of clients’ business.” There followed secondary research in which FreeWheel hired a firm to find any study that touted cross-channel or multi-touch attribution.

“The more interesting part was actually the secondary research,” Marcus notes. That’s because out of some 164 studies, “only twelve actually included TV. So here is TV, the biggest communication channel in the world and it basically wasn’t getting its due credit when it came to cross-channel attribution.”

Since then, FreeWheel has provided to “qualified attribution firms” household-level ad exposure data, free of charge, “so that they could include that in their cross-channel studies and their ability to measure television more effectively. That’s been a big success.”

FreeWheel has also been working with the programmer members of the audience-targeting consortium OpenAP to understand de-duplicated reach across those members. “Because as things get more and more fragmented, advertisers want to be in those new places where there are audiences, whether it’s different channels or different platforms. But they also want to make sure that they’re not hitting the same people that they were hitting by going in traditional linear TV.”

Earlier this year, FreeWheel licensed VIZIO smart-TV data from Inscape and built a nationally representative model “which is really a co-mingled data set between the Comcast set-top box data and the smart-TV data.” Among other things, the data helps programmers that sell on national basis. “They want something that’s more nationally representative. They want to be able to forecast national impressions. They want to be able to measure on a national basis,” Marcus says.

There are disparities in data gathered from boxes and smart TV’s. Within Comcast Cable’s footprint, there’s an average of about 2.6 cable boxes compared to about 1.1 devices in homes with smart TV’s. “What that means is that there’s some viewing that you’re missing.”

Meanwhile, smart TV’s have their advantages over boxes. “It has lower latency, it covers OTT as long as it’s content that has been previously fingerprinted on linear,” Marcus says.

As IP-delivered content proliferates, so do devices that receive the content. Problem is, not all of the devices that connect to WiFi “are associated with people in a specific home” because some belong to visitors.

“As we think about moving TV measurement from a household level to an individual level, it helps us to understand who’s home and who’s not. So that we can start to get better models when it comes to what’s called viewer attribution.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Case in point – Publicis agency Spark Foundry is using machine learning on audience data points to enable the creation of dynamically-produced ad creative, customized for distinct audience types.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lisa Giacosa, Spark Foundry global EVP data, technology, analytics and insights, says the machine speed is fantastic – but she also wants the machine to become more human.

“The reality is is that we can’t move as fast as a machine can go,” she says. “We’ve already rolled out machine learning on a number of campaigns across the Publicis network, to great success.

“In an instance in Europe, we have over 500 permutations of creative running within a week, within one campaign across multiple markets. And that’s limitless – it starts to get to the point where you can get completely one-to-one in terms of how creative you can get in terms of the bespoke messaging.

“We have a plethora of data, enables us to truly understand where people are and what they are doing, but we need to overlay that emotional connection.”

So, how exactly is Spark Foundry getting data in to the machine learning system? And how is it building up those fragments in to a picture of an audience member’s actual identity.

Giacosa lifted the lid on a series of data sources she uses:

• “We’re taking what we know, in terms of the client first party data.
• “We’re bringing that into a data clearinghouse.
• “We’re then bringing in our own Publicis IDs, that we’ve built over time through a number of different data sources.
• “We have our own PACE panel that enables us to get to attitudinal and ID level across 44 different markets, seven million mobile devices, and so on.
• “Bring that in, pop that into the data clearinghouse, too.
• “Then we start to then meld that data together, and sort of match that data together, so that we can actually bring out the bottom, an appended data set that enables us to learn around ‘what is this set of people doing from this particular client’ versus ‘what we know about’ and enhance that with third party sources as well, to get to understanding how to best target people in terms of how they behave.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Wieser, who was a media and marketing soothsayer at the research firm and is now business intelligence global president for the agency, says TV ad spend will decline – even accounting for new over-the-top advanced ad offerings.

“We are forecasting underlying decline in (US) television, excluding political advertising, of around 2% in 2020,” Wieser tells Beet.TV.

“That includes connected TV. That includes over-the-top. That includes other forms of premium content-related advertising.”

Wieser’s figures come from “This Year, Next Year“, amongst the first of his forecast reports to release whilst at GroupM, which looks at the US advertising market.

In it, Wieser writes: “The trend probably doesn’t improve much any time soon; we expect a -0.2% decline in 2019 and a -2.3% decline in 2020.”

As a medium, television finds itself in the cross-hairs of some conflicting indicators.

• On the one hand, the growth in premium content, subscriptions and on-demand viewing suggests booming appetite for watching TV shows – of all kinds and on any screen.
• On the other, whilst the rise of direct-to-consumer brands is bringing new ad spending in to TV, new nervousness amongst traditional brands is causing a flight of some old spending.

Wieser explains to Beet.TV: “Television remains an incredibly durable and important medium for most of the world’s largest advertisers. It’s still the dominant medium on most media plans. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily keeps growing.”

Adjusting-out political ad spending, GroupM’s forecast expects a 4.8% growth in total US ad spending in 2019, with digital ad spend slowing to 14.7% that year, compared with 21.2% the prior year.

Marginal decline in US TV spending is the new norm. In February, eMarketer forecast TV ad spend would decline at 2.2% in 2019.

But GroupM’s Wieser is more optimistic than that – his report forecasts a 0.2% decline in 2019.

This video was taped at the roof deck of the new GroupM office in downtown Manhattan.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

That is according to one man whose primary medium has not always been considered adept at measuring through to actual consumer purchase – but, for Dan Riess, TV is learning new tricks.

“(Marketers’) job is now a lot more focused as a marketer on the end business result … as well as the actual campaign brand lift performance that we’re used to,” says Dan Riess, WarnerMedia EVP, Turner Ignite, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“A lot more of the work we do with our partners is around measuring the end business outcome. There’s a small handful of deals and partnerships that we do which are actually where we’re guaranteeing that business outcome.”

Many publishers these days are beginning to price ads based on outcomes – say, purchase or store visitation – that they know for sure are discoverable.

That is because, in the world of multi-channel digital signals, consumers are leaving breadcrumb trails across everything they do. Smart technology can link those breadcrumbs through to their end point – and trace back to an originator that may have led the cause to some effect.

For Riess, the secret sauce is AT&T. The former telco infrastructure company, after acquiring WarnerMedia incorporating Turner, is now a media power house with several TV networks, a mobile network and, in AppNexus, ad-tech infrastructure under its belt.

Furthermore, AT&T’s Xandr unit, dedicated to facilitating advanced TV ads, is driving offerings across the group.

“The way we do that is increasingly through the data we have with AT&T,” Riess adds. “Obviously our corporate owner who can measure a lot of things about audience behavior and purchase. They are the ones who collect the AT&T data set for advertising use and help us access it.

“We also use third parties in certain cases depending on the category and what the client is trying to learn.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

And that is exactly the message Domenic Venuto wants to bring to the upcoming Cannes Lions ad festival.

After a couple of years in which Amobee acquired Turn and Videology, its COO says the ad-tech company is all about helping advertisers get a better return across channels.

“What we’re seeing now come into the market is television data, data directly connected to devices, IP enabled hardware that is sending data signals,” Venuto says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“And then adding that into the programmatic mix to make better decisions and create greater insight, and also improve the optimization routines and doing them in shorter and shorter revision cycle.”

In the last few months, Amobee has been picked as the platform through which UK network ITV distributes its digital ad inventory and through which Univision creates audience data segments in North America.

“Amobee’s goal is to become the leading independent advertising platform for converged media,” Venuto says. “Now, to do that, we need to be able to cover both ends of the spectrum. And on one end is an onmichannel DSP, so being a DSP, a buying platform across multiple channels, whether they be your traditional channels of display, mobile, social, but now we’re also seeing the addition of out-of-home, digital out-of-home, as well as audio, and the last frontier, which is television.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Xandr, AT&T’s unit for advanced TV advertising, is barely nine months old, itself coming after a period in which AT&T has gobbled up WarnerMedia.

But, in May, it debuted Community, a new marketplace allowing advertisers to place video ads in all its brands and across different screen types.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rick Welday, Xandr Media president, explains why.

“Both buyers and publishers, sellers of advertising, are not happy with all of their options today,” he says. “There are a lot of challenges that they’re facing from brand safety to measurement to transparency.

“So we have been very pleased to pull together a marketplace that is a premium marketplace, that addresses those concerns, where an advertiser can feel more confident about what they’re getting for what they’re paying.”

Advanced ad targeting efforts of the major telco/media operators, whilst powerful for advertisers, are also rising in prominence amongst consumer advocates who see cross-device tracking as sinister.

But Welday thinks Community will be a boon.

“After the acquisition of Time Warner, we’re incredibly pleased with the scale of premium content within AT&T,” he says. “It includes all of our owned and operated inventory over time. You’ve got this amazing content out there, sports and news and kids. It’s just great fan engaged content, so that’s all in there.

“We also have the DirecTV content that’s in there. Both linear and satellite, and also digital like DirecTV now.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

“I think we’ve got a lot of bets in motion right now,” says Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader, Media & Entertainment, at professional services provider EY.

“Some bets are bringing things together and other bets are creating more walled gardens. Right now it remains to be seen how it all plays out, but I think we’re going through this open and closed ecosystem debate,” Balis adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

She lauds the efforts of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium as “a great step in that direction” of industry unification. Meanwhile, consumers are dabbling with a preponderance of OTT and streaming television choices while “the entire industry is playing catch-up mode” in figuring out how best to reach those viewers.

Referencing this year’s TV UpFront season, Balis sees a mix of legacy mindsets and behaviors and the reality of a shifting landscape. “I would imagine that next year’s UpFront will look quite different. I think right now it’s sort of got a foot in both worlds.”

Aside from media and technology companies, brand managers face major hurdles just trying to take advantage of audience segments in advanced TV. “Once we change all of those models, they have to change the entire infrastructure within their companies,” says Balis.

She sees a future in which marketing and customer experience, which today are often separate departments, will have to come together. “We have to build a smarter experience for consumers because that’s their human expectation of brands.”

Advertisers won’t be focusing just on the ROI of individual campaigns but “total lifetime value to get loyalty, retention and value from customers. Fundamentally, what that requires is embracing first-party data, enhancing it with second- and third-party data.”

Asked about her expectations for the upcoming Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Balis recognizes an underlying “tension” but reminds that, “Ultimately, Cannes Lions celebrates creativity and we have to remember that. It’s about the art of the craft and really celebrating the stories that are told.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Having helped to create Innovid 11 years ago to transform video experiences on the advertising side, “It’s finally here if you look at connected television. We see dramatic changes in that environment,” CEO & Co-Founder Zvika Netter says in this interview with Beet.TV. Among other topics, he discusses Innovid’s participation in special sessions featuring a roster of industry leaders at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month.

Citing companies like Netflix, Roku and Amazon, Netter observes, “if you see what they’re doing, they’re basically working on the experience. It’s the selection, it’s the quality of the content, the personalization, how you navigate. Companies are trading in the billions just because they pay attention to the user and optimizing their experience.”

What Innovid is about is “exactly that for advertising,” Netter adds. “How do we create the technology and the process and structure to create a better balance between advertising and content?”

If done correctly, this balancing act produces winners in the form of viewers, publishers and advertisers. “We work with all three contingencies. We’re in a great spot in the middle and we’re growing very fast.”

Earlier this year, Innovid secured $30 million in funding from Goldman Sachs to help expand its global footprint, and the company recently hired 60 more people. “We built a three-year plan to keep expanding the company both from a product offering but also geographically,” including in Japan, Spain and soon Germany.

“Connected TV is everywhere physically in the world. There are similar needs on that front,” Netter says.

“It finally has enough scale for them to care about it to have a conversation and see what the industry really needs,” Netter says of connected-TV. “It’s not just about us pushing the great next feature to buy something from your TV to your phone. It’s actually listening to CMO’s and publishers and understand what do they need, what do they care about these days and addressing that.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

One of Nielsen’s most recent acquisitions was of Sorenson Media. The company now has technical underpinnings of a platform for targeted TV ads that encompasses delivery, data-driven targeting, unified campaign management, and measurement, as Variety reports.

“All media is going to go addressable,” Kelly Abcarian, the GM of Nielsen’s new Advanced Video Advertising unit, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

She says some $4.7 billion worth of addressable ads will be bought next year. “That’s made up of OTT, advanced linear-driven audiences, as well as the cable two minutes of addressability that they’ve built a sizeable business against as well.”

In addition to Sorenson, Nielsen acquired Qterics, a smart-TV software and privacy management vendor, and Gracenote, which does automatic content recognition.

“First and foremost, measurement is the bedrock of what Nielsen provides to the marketplace and what we’ll continue to do,” Abcarian says. “We’re really trying to focus on how we unlock addressable in a way that brings standardization across all those impressions.”

She envisions an open platform. “As we look to do ad replacement on a television screen, we’re also creating unique capabilities in the ad decisioning space to enable buyers and sellers to execute against that efficiency alongside of other ad decisioning engines and algorithms and capabilities in the marketplace.”

Going beyond the traditional two minutes per hour of addressable TV ad inventory that goes to distributors, “We’re really unlocking the full sixteen minutes of inventory so that programmers, both broadcasters cable networks, can truly execute in a one to one addressable way.

“It’s a matter of setting up campaigns and getting those instructions across the buyers and sellers around what ads are eligible across linear television for replacement. We’re really sitting in the middle providing the measurement and the simplicity around understanding what was reached, how often were they reached across what platforms. Then providing mechanics to actually do the true ad replacement on the glass screen itself.”

In addition to Sorenson’s smart-TV data from Samsung, Nielsen is working with LG and chip maker MediaTek, according to Abcarian.

In this interview with Beet.TV, McGurn explains the company’s new relationships with distributors and why the upcoming Cannes Lions event is “always a dealmaker’s paradise” for Vevo, which is owned by Universal Music and Sony Music and has global music video licensing rights with hundreds of other labels as well.

About this time last year, Vevo decided to phase out elements of its owned and operated platforms. With its business centered on YouTube distribution, it wasn’t cost effective to continue funding video distribution on its own.

The subsequent strategy was “finding endpoints of distribution in neighborhoods that users frequent where they might enjoy music videos again on television,” says McGurn. Vevo is about to divulge “a number of partnerships” and is offering “inventory anchored in connected television in the YouTube application on the TV’s and in living rooms to market in the UpFront.” McGurn quantifies the inventory at “about a nine-figure body.”

Vevo has typical inventory sharing relationships with MVPD’s in the 10% to 15% range “and they sell it on an audience basis, nothing specific to music or videos.”

The company handles sales for the rest of its inventory, including the use of various programmatic channels and working with SpotX. “We have the mass majority of inventory that’s there and we are a centralized point of buying for music television on all these distributors,” says McGurn.

“The demand is there. We have a larger supply than most people would even know about. The reaction so far from those buyers has been very positive and we think we’ll be able to sell it out in the UpFront.”

McGurn says Vevo’s “technology stack in the living room starts with FreeWheel. That’s our dynamic ad insertion vehicle.”

Vevo is counting on search, discovery and recommendation to ramp up ad sales, along with its understanding of the viewing behavior associated with music television that “far exceeds short-form behavior. We can see all the way up to sixty-five minutes of viewing behavior in a lean-back experience on TV’s if that search and discovery and recommendation is hit right.”

Looking ahead to next month in France, McGurn says, “Cannes for us is always a dealmaker’s paradise” as the company seeks domestic and global deals based on its extensive video licensing rights. “Audiences are aging in the living room and we represent a great counterbalance, to reaching almost twenty-five percent of every country’s population that we operate in.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean Buckley, CRO of SpotX , says brands are now seeking out deeper, more meaningful relationships with fewer tech suppliers.

That follows a few years in which the number of point-solution tech products explosion. Now we are seeing something of an implosion, driven both by M&A and by changing buyer habits.

“We have seen a move toward consolidation in the space, which is actually a reversal of maybe how things were looking a few years ago,” Buckley says.

“What we’re seeing from the buy side is interest in fewer but much deeper partnerships. We’re seeing both the agencies as well as brands launch initiatives to really focus in on the partners who are trustworthy, important, and necessary in the supply chain, and then take those relationships to the next level.

“That’s been a major trend over the last few years, folks going from perhaps 30 or 40 downstream technology partners on the supply side to maybe only six or eight total partners.”

Buckley says over-the-top and connected TV have now become the majority of SpotX’s business – a topic on which the company will be hosting a panel at the upcoming Cannes Lions festival.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

In this interview with Beet.TV, Midha provides details about how the use of a one-question survey in a TV ad pod with the true[X] Uplift product can provide a myriad of insights about viewers in relation to their status in the purchase funnel.

Formerly a unit of FOX Networks and now owned by Walt Disney Co., true[X] is used across most broadcast and cable networks plus the Twitch gaming platform and OTT services, among others. “We really focus on high-attention environments. Places where there’s a really engaged consumer on the other end and where we think we can make the experience better,” says Midha.

Calling CTV an “incredibly rich canvas,” she talks about engagement ads for a variety of brands from Amazon to Lego to Harley Davidson to consumer packaged-goods, “which shows that this is a format that works for any number of categories.” A voice-enabled, engagement ad for Amazon’s Echo used speech-to-text conversion so that viewers could verbally interact with the ad.

Whereas ad attribution “only tells about a sale,” when brand lift occurs “you usually will see conversion down the chain,” says Midha, adding that because not all viewers are always in market for something, all ads provide value to brands.

“It’s still seeding an awareness, it’s still driving perception and it may even be creating preference so that when that consumer is in market, they will convert for that brand.”

The company is working with “several partners to use Uplift to measure video performance on their own sold campaigns” via the Uplift technology but apart from true[X]’s own engagement-ad units, according to Midha.

Giving viewers a choice of their ad experience and collecting the resulting data at scale can turn a one-question survey into a gold mine of information, she says.

“You can imagine it’s not very hard to get a lot of people to choose to take that survey, especially when it’s only one question. We let consumers place themselves on the purchase funnel by asking them how they would describe their relationship with a brand.”

A “control and expose group” can number 500-plus within days of a campaign launching, “and we also are able to make sure that the cohort for exposed looks like the cohort for control, both of which look like the cohort that was actually targeted for the campaign. So your survey group mirrors your campaign targeting.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

But knowing which channel to use and when is a thorny problem that must be solved before a marketer can really perform omni-channel effectively.

According to Greg Anderson, MD of WPP-owned outcome-based media tech company Xaxis, that means two software processes must improve.

“I would say the two are probably most around measurement and planning,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“I think, in order for people to really adopt omnichannel solutions, they need to understand that there’s a metric they can gauge it against (to answer) ‘is this really working?, ‘why am I investing into these channels or this type of approach?’

“For any type of new or emerging channel to be adopted, measurement is at the foundation of that. I think then that ties right back into planning, and how can we take that common metric, how can we take that measurement and use it as a way to start planning and buying across new types of opportunities that they’re looking to go to market with?”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Although Cannes Lions started in 1954, it wasn’t until the last decade or so that brand marketers began to attend, represented by the likes of Procter & Gamble. “They’re coming in a slightly different way,” Thomas notes in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think historically they were brought by their agencies but now they’re kind of coming on their own volition.”

Last year’s event saw the launch of the CMO Growth Council, a partnership with the CMO Masters Circle of the Association of National Advertisers featuring 25 CMO’s from some of the world’s biggest global brands. “Cannes Lions really is about how creativity will drive your business and that means growth. One place they believe they can unlock growth is through the use of creativity,” says Thomas.

The CMO Growth Council has since met in such locales as Dubai, Los Angeles, New York and London. “They’re coming together again at Cannes this year to continue to develop the conversations, publish white papers talk about the specific issues that marketers have.”

In adding two awards this year—the Entertainment Lions for Sport and the Creative Strategy Lions—the folks at Cannes had some doubts about the latter. “We didn’t know how the industry was going to respond,” Thomas says. Given initial estimate of perhaps 250 entries, “at the last count we’ve more than three times that many.”

CLX is designed around immersive and interactive experiences with some of the world’s best-known media and entertainment creators, including Activision Blizzard, Adobe, NBCUniversal and Tik Tok from China. “I think if we look across the festival over the last few years, that’s the most interesting thing is the number of different organizations that want to get engaged, who think they can provide solutions for clients and brands.

“It used to just be an advertising festival and it’s just not that anymore,” Thomas adds.

He mentions in passing last year’s Cannes Lions and the absence of Publicis Groupe, plus some shrinkage in the adtech space over the last few years. But events continue to be in demand because of a “human need, which is to be face-to-face and to be with other people,” Thomas says.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

But do marketers have what they need to succeed in this new world?

“Identity is really at the center of data-driven TV,” says Jason Manningham, General Manager of FreeWheel’s Blockgraph, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“If you think about the ability for a marketer to reach an audience across different distribution points in an increasingly fragmented environment, identity and being able to understand that audience across those different devices and distributors is the foundation.”

Blockgraph is video ad-tech firm FreeWheel’s new industry initiative focused on creating a more secure way to use data and share information. It is designed to become the “identity layer” for the TV industry, providing a platform on which media companies and publishers can offer marketers data capabilities without disclosing identifiable user data to third parties.

For a new white paper on the topic, Blockgraph has uncovered emerging trends.

For instance, the survey found that marketers imagine a growing proportion of their TV spend will be data-enabled, but 36% of marketers feel that identity resolution is one of the top three barriers preventing them from using data to build TV advertising segments.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.

NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.

“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”

Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.

In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”

Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.

Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”

NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”

Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.

“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.

Integral Ad Science’s (IAS) new CEO says she is focused on differentiation, on Internet TV and on big platforms.

“Many marketers are asking IAS, ‘Hey, get in the OTT game’, says Lisa Utzschneider, who was Yahoo’s chief revenue officer until its acquisition by Verizon, in this video interview with Beet.TV. We’re currently in alpha right now with a major wireless carrier and six broadcasters.”

The traditional world of TV never suffered from concerns over the whether TV ads were truly seen. But arguably that was because analog TV had poor means to even measure viewership at all.

So, why exactly does Utzschneider think over-the-top internet TV needs ad verification?

“There are over a hundred million households in the US alone that’s viewing content via OTT,” she says. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done both in terms of putting together the standards on how we will verify.”

But, for IAS, it’s not all about OTT. Utzschneider suggests internet video remains a focus. She suggests there is a big opportunity in providing Google and Facebook the third-party verification they need to allay their own advertisers’ concerns about what is really going on under the hood.

“With Google, we’re deeply integrated,” she adds. “We’re working on a joint product roadmap and showing that we’re properly resourced. Particularly with YouTube and how much marketers invest in running ads in YouTube, they want to know that there is an independent third-party verification company verifying that the ads that they’re running is running next to brand-safe content.

“If we detect high-risk content is running, we have a feedback loop back to YouTube to alert them and let them know. And then YouTube can make the decision whether or not they want to demonetize that ad and not run it.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Then… not much. The internet boomed and video eventually graced connected screens. But interactive TV was still largely an unrealized dream.

Until lately, that is. Because contemporary consumption of TV through connected devices isn’t just about on-demand selections, it is now becoming about realizing the earliest dreams of the format.

“The idea of interactive television has been around for a very long time,” says Tal Chalozin, Innovid CTO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But what’s happened in the last year or so is that people… they put their credit card in a Roku or an AppleTV or something else.

“They’re used to discovery with voice, like with Siri or Alexa or other stuff. The type of viewer for television is totally different viewer than what it used to be with an older Comcast or type of a box.”

Chalozin’s Innovid is one of the companies making it happen.

During this year’s Super Bowl, interactive ads for Kellogg’s Pringles, powered by Innovid’s  OTT Composer technology, enabled viewers of the CBS Sports app on Apple TV.

They let viewers skip to alternative versions of the ad and use a QR code through an iPhone to purchase the products.

“We created the first-ever large national scale interactive and shoppable television ad for the Super Bowl, the largest televised event.

“A lot of the idea that used to be under-categorized under innovation and the cool things are reaching maturity mostly because viewers expect and play along with them.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Last year, acquiring SpotX, pan-European RTL Group created Video Marketplace (VMP), an initiative to combine various source of online video ad inventory which its AdConnect sales house represents.

Now the outfit is doubling down on its US presence.

“(When) I stepped into the company we had 37 people  mostly in Europe,” says Stéphane Coruble, RTL AdConnect CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Now we’re reaching 100 people across the world and we’ve been opening lots of new offices.”

Mostly, AdConnect’s expansion has happened in the UK, where many international brands bridge in to Europe through major ad agencies. But AdConnect also set up camp in New York a year and a half ago, and is now opening a Los Angeles office, Coruble says.

“The US market is very dynamic,” he adds. “Many of our legacy clients are based here in the US, and it’s important that we get discussions and partnerships with them. (We want) to discuss with companies based in LA, but also based in San Francisco, in the Valley – direct consumer brands. Very important for us, especially for the European market.”

AdConnect represents broadcaster VOD, including its group’s own, totalling ore than a billion monthly views, Coruble claims.

VMP accesses premium inventory across linear TV and VOD, built on SpotX and Smartclip, both of which RTL acquired in recent years in addition to VideoAmp and Clypd.

Coruble’s strategy seems to tap two trends we are seeing in the marketplace;

• Around the world, operators are coming together in partnership, seeking scale to fight common media challenges against tech foes – but, whilst such partnerships are becoming commonplace in Europe and Latin America, they are as yet rarer in the US.
• The ongoing rise of direct consumer brands, which eschew marketing and retail intermediaries to sell as ecommerce operators, continues to provide impetus to marketing tech firms, many of which are now chasing their custom.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

Then, new regulations and changing consumer sentiment put the brakes on advanced ad techniques which sought to solve the cookie problem.

But the latest emerging tech promises to give open-web publishers a more promising outlook for selling digital ads.

“Cookies weren’t always the greatest thing, they were sloppy,” says Michael Barrett, Rubicon Project president and CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “This time around, let’s do it in a way that’s not as kludgy.”

Some of that tech may be coming in to view, as systems which help build “identity graphs” emerge to help piece together audience activities from across the different device use.

Identity graphs work by stitching together bundles of data known about users – overcoming the historic problem which occurred when a desktop web user’s data trail could not match up with her mobile browsing behaviour.

“There’s a real shot, a real shot now for the open web … to start to be able to feel, look to buyers like a platform,” says Barrett.

“A lot of folks are working on some pretty smart ideas, and I sense that, when we get through this as an industry, we’ll be in a far better position than we are today.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments. 

With just a few weeks to go before the annual ad industry shindig kicks off in June, it looks like Kassan has landed his catch.

“The original partners that we’ve announced already are Activision, NBC, Microsoft, Adobe, Tik Tok and a couple of more that are just about ready to be announced in these last few days as we’re leading up or last few weeks,” Kassan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

In February 2017, Cannes Lions’ organizer, London-based Ascential, a B2B media company, announced it would acquire MediaLink, which has more than 120 people in multiple US offices, with each company remaining independent.

The new CLX strand is one of the first visible fruits of the tie-up. It aims to help get brands up close and personal with leading entertainment companies.

According to the festival’s announcement: “CLX participants can partake in a selection of curated roundtables that will provide compelling insightful learnings and ideas for the creation of successful content.”

Those roundtables, specifically, hosted by senior execs:

• The Art and Science of Building Beloved Stories – Activision Blizzard
• The Power of Creative Storytelling. The Power of Comedy in Storytelling. Tell Me a Story: How to Break through the Noise and Form a Real Connection – NBCUniversal
• Authenticity wins: TikTok’s Formula for Success. Everyone is a Creator: Unlocking the Power of UGC – TikTok

“And we’ve got Jeffery (Katzenberg) and Meg (Whitman) in tow to talk about Quibi and their launch of their mobile platform,” Kassan adds.

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.”  The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.