This is the main takeaway from a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 focusing on advanced television targeting. Held at held the OMD Oasis at The Venetian, the panel featured sell-side executives from NBCUniversal and Turner, TV data specialist Kristin Dolan and Omnicom Media Group’s Chief Research Officer, Jonathan Steuer.

Steuer started things off on a positive note by opining that the industry has made more progress in using set-top box data for audience targeting and performance measurement in the last 18 months than it had in the past eight years. The elephant in the room: How buyers can use the data at scale across multiple TV networks and inventory pools in the most efficient way.

“The at scale is the tricky part,” said Steuer, whose research background includes a long stint at TiVo.

The desire for data consolidation didn’t come as a surprise to Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU. “I think we hear that loud and clear from all the folks on the buy side,” said Colella. “People want to do more audience buying. It isn’t easy.”

She added that it’s “incumbent upon us as an industry to figure out how do we facilitate more buying of audience products.”

Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, agreed that the process must be made more user friendly, particularly in comparison with the current modus operandi of most TV ad buyers.

“Agencies are structured and can do an enormous amount of business buying on Nielsen demo guarantees and running schedules. It’s a machine,” said Strober. “You talk about audience targeting and it’s like you threw a wrench in the gears.”

Since MVPD’s “won’t share their data,” moderator Matt Spiegel from MediaLink asked how data consolidation could occur.

Acknowledging reality, Strober said, “Those guys aren’t going to send data to each other” and suggested they should “put it in some sort of common format in one or a few different common repositories that made it possible for folks on our side of the table to access it.”

Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which helps buyers and sellers analyze audience data, said consolidation would help everyone. “On the sell side the opportunity to have people really want your inventory because it’s going to reach the people they’re trying to reach is helpful. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?” said Dolan.

Asked by Spiegel what entity could do the consolidating, Steuer suggested it would have to be standalone companies “because the alternative is people grading their own homework.”

Dolan also cited the reluctance to share on the part of MVPD’s, but said their data could be anonymized so that it can’t be used improperly. “Everybody’s trying to solve the same problem of how do I contribute without it negatively impacting me,” said Dolan. “I want the benefit but I don’t want the negative.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The narrow range of options was the focus of a Beet.TV panel discussion at CES 2017 conducted at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. It brought together representatives of 605, NBCUniversal, Omnicom Media Group and Turner Broadcasting.

Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink started the dialogue by stating “We don’t seem to making a lot of progress” in using data to deliver specific creative iterations to specific consumers.

“Some of that comes from the fact that measurement is still inherently broken,” said 605 CEO Kristin Dolan. She added that even measured at the segment level, a panel is not going to tell you whether your creative is good. “It will tell you that the one person who represents all the other people that are supposed to look like that person thought the creative was good or wasn’t good,” said Dolan.

Spiegel opined that dynamic ad targeting is “a soap box we should all be championing. You’re filming all this great video content. It seems way too hard to create five versions and be able to run them.”

Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, suggested reversing the cart and horse lineup. It would involve finding a way to identify an audience or segment and deriving insights based on certain things that are attracting that segment. This would both inform the creative brief and how the creative should be delivered.

“As opposed to we have the creative and which one should we allocate it to. I don’t know how that gets done,” Strober said.

“It’s about starting from the beginning of the process, which is the creative brief, and thinking about the audience targets and thinking about them together,” said Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. This would yield “the ability to incrementally check your work along the way.”

There is much inertia supporting the current status quo of television ad buying, said Strober, wherein much inventory is purchased in advance every year during the Upfronts.

“We have to move to a more campaign-based approach where we’re constantly measuring and optimizing and iterating,” said Strober. “That’s just not there yet because of the measurement and the ROI metrics.”

To Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCU, it’s about taking baby steps toward a common goal. “We have to crawl before we run,” she said, adding that getting her clients to work with her to understand which format they want to use with which targeting capability “I think would be a tremendous improvement.”

Dolan related how a couple of years ago, her Cablevision Systems Corp. was assisting Madison Square Garden promote a boxing match featuring a Russian boxer. No one had considered running a Hispanic version of a TV spot until Dolan pointed out that “Hispanics buy tickets to boxing and watch it on TV.”

The eventual Hispanic version of the ad created “a lift because we took a product that we knew appealed to a particular segment,” said Dolan. “Just even getting people to consider doing something different from the way they’ve always done it isn’t that much more expensive and can result in some learning.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Cable programmers have always gone narrow in the sense that their individual networks tended to be much more niche content designed around specific audiences,” notes Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer for Omnicom Media Group.

Over time, the individual networks got rolled up into giant network groups, Steuer explains in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.

“The giant network groups tried to sell everything bundled together. That meant that it wasn’t as easy to target the single audiences anymore,” says Steuer.

Now companies like NBCUniversal, Turner, Viacom and others are combing their ad inventory pools to help identify audiences of interest to brands.

“We’re thrilled whenever it’s easier to buy targeted advertising because it’s more efficient for our clients,” Steuer says. “The challenge is that if each of the network groups does it independently we’ll end up with a hodge-podge of different ways to buy similar audiences.”

Because media agencies want to reach their target TV audiences wherever they happen to be, programmers want to make them easier to buy.

“We’re early days,” says Steuer. “We think everyone will do it and what we need to figure out how to do on the buy is how to plan and buy across all those different audience-based strategies.”

Asked about the state of audience measurement across various forms of TV delivery like over the top, on demand and linear, Steuer concedes that its “really challenging” to combine viewership across different channels. “I think we’re evolving toward better solutions. I know Nielsen is trying with Total Content Ratings.”

Steuer hopes to see greater ability to target on-demand ad inventory, along with “more impression-based measurement based on real delivery.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In June, Gulf States Toyota, which comprises 150 dealerships, targeted 652,200 AT&T/DirecTV viewers believed to be in-market for a new Camry in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

But the dealer conglomerate didn’t stop there. Using data from Experian Marketing Services and geo-location capabilities from mobile data vendor NinthDecimal, Toyota was able to identify how many people exposed to the TV ads actually made a trip to their local dealer – or, in fact, to any dealer.

“We were able to prove that people exposed to that TV ad actually were … 19% increase over control (group)… they actually went to the Toyota lots,” Experian Marketing Service product marketing director Brie Pinnow tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“They not only used Experian data for a brand addressable campaign across the AT&T/DirecTV footprint,”

“But, together with NinthDecimal and their mobile footprint, we were able to use geo data to actually tell a story that says, ‘While we wait for this sales data to come in and understand if people actually went to purchase a Toyota, can we at least understand what car dealership lots they went to, did they go to a Toyota lot, did they go to a GMC lot?’

AdAge reports NinthDecimal gathers data on 150 million mobile devices each month through relationships with publishers of around 75,000 apps, and quotes Gulf States Toyota as saying the campaign was “definitely the first time that we had held any kind of media accountable to physically going into a dealership”.

As media agency IPG’s Media Lab writes: “This is the latest example of how brands can leverage the latest ad tech development in offline attribution to better measure their campaign performances. … More and more ad platforms such as the ones from Google, Facebook, and Snapchat have all made efforts to team up with location data providers and improve their capability in tracking offline attributions.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But that’s all changing now, as new technology allows ad-tech platforms to show live data and let clients respond by tweaking campaigns mid-flight.

That’s according to one ad-tech exec whose company helps advertisers use data segmenting to target linear TV ads.

“We’re seeing a lot of companies using data in ways that haven’t been used before,” says Cadent CTO Stephanie Mitchko in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Data has really become actionable. Companies are using it not just to create reports and post-buy analysis to tell clients what happened in the past, but using data in real-time to actually adjust campaigns, use campaigns in ways they haven’t been used before.”

Cadent’s offering takes cable set-top box viewing data and adds in first- or third-party behavioral data to let ad buyers target viewers more precisely.

Mitchko says attribution and measurement transparency is the hot topic for 2017, as ad-tech customers increasingly look to peak behind the curtain at the numbers behind the numbers.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

But that places a responsibility on advertisers to take advantage of the technology responsibly, says one executive from a leading ad agency.

In this video interview with Beet.TV at CES, OMD chief digital and innovation officer Doug Rozen says he is trying to help brands offer customers opportunities for “immersion”.

“There’s 200,000 people here,” Rozen says. “What it’s all about this year is immersive marketing.

“In the past, … we would just drive awareness one way. Then we got to ‘interactive’ in the last 20 years. Now it’s about immersive – it can be much more free-flowing, much more autonomous. That’s where virtual reality, AI and bots come in.”

VR and AR have surfaced in recent years as opportunities for both publishers and advertisers like. For some, appetite appears to have diminished in the last year. But Rozen says OMD is helping brands make 360-degree video experiences and “fully-immersive, ‘take me to a new world’ experiences”.

Now artificial intelligence, voice-controlled smart assistants and chat-controlled AI bots are being touted as the next wave of consumer interaction technologies that brands simply must embrace.

But OMD’s Rozen urges an excited caution. “My hope and desire is, we find the simplest way to celebrate the technology,” he says.

“A lot of times innovation is about just chasing shiny objects. One of the most important things not to lose sight of at CES is, while there’s a lot of gadget and a lot of flash, we have to find what’s going to be the simplest way to get a consumer to do something and drive business value.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In October, Flipboard, the flippable content aggregation app that borrows its interaction method from the page-turning paradigm, launched Storyboard, a new ad format for buyers.

Speaking with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show, CEO Mike McCue explains the thinking behind the idea.

“You will see gorgeous collections of videos, image galleries and articles you can navigate through,” he says.

“We’re using this, initially, for brands to be able to tell stories using the assets that they have. We’re also enabling some great work on an editorial front.”

Flipboard had snagged Mindshare, Sephora and SmartWool to use the format at launch.

To McCue, it is all about delivering brands an audience that is in “an aspirational state of mind”. Flipboard is setting out to do that by luring users in to tightly-defined topical and curated stories using an aggregation of lush-looking video and photos.

McCue says the model tries to target those aspirations of users who are engaged “as opposed to a snacking mentality”, and in a way that is just like Vogue”. It seems a play for the luxury end of the market.

McCue reckons 2017 will see more social platforms move toward a model where they serve up pre-defined topical newsfeeds to users.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

From year to year at CES, Shlachter sees a lot of incremental changes in technology, particularly regarding connected vehicles and homes. “For me what’s most interesting is what can we do with that? It’s been a promise for a long time and I think it’s going to become more of a reality now, particularly between the car and the home and the person itself,” he says.

Uniform standards for targeting people with ads one-on-one and measuring the results will provide “better value for consumers and make more use out of the space that we play in,” he adds.

The convergence of the digital and traditional media worlds now more than ever is opening a whole new world of opportunities from a creative standpoint, according to Shlachter. However, new approaches are needed to move things along.

“We have to get past the days of trying to fit one creative concept into a lot of different screens and formats, because we see that it doesn’t work as well,” Shlachter says before acknowledging that it’s hard to create a lot of native experiences for every single platform across a 360-degree media plan.

Finding better ways to integrate data and technology to automate creative delivery will be more useful than trying to “create some one-size-fits-all messaging that may help us scale but may not pay off,” he says.

In the meantime, Shlachter is excited about the one-to-many approach that Verizon took when partnering with other companies to live-stream the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016. As Broadcasting & Cable reports, NBCUniversal produced a live stream of the parade separate from NBC’s broadcast that was shot with 360-degree cameras and viewable on Verizon’s YouTube page.

Calling it a “monumental effort,” Shlachter says Verizon garnered “a ton of positive feedback and sentiment from everything we were able to measure.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

A year ago at the Consumer Electronics Show, chief revenue officer Kevin Gentzel announced to Beet.TV the company would be making daily VR content. Now USA Today has a weekly show, VRtually There, plus ad hoc productions and sponsor content in its VR strand.

A year later, Gentzel tells Beet.TV: The show has been a huge success, we’ve built a loyal audience already. Our shows are seeing millions of views by users across devices … on the touch web in 360 experiences, utilising (Google) Cardboard and all the way through the VR hardware space to Rift and Vive.

“In season two, which we’re currently shooting, we’re going to focus on three content themes…

• “VIP experiences – what it’s like to be backstage at a July 4th fireworks show.
• “Hardcore adventure experiences – what it’s like to be swimming with sharks…
• “American experiences like the American ballet theatre.”

So far, USA Today’s VR play has focused on visual spectacle over out-and-out storytelling. Perhaps such a tactic more naturally fits the novel medium than reportage.

The first live production under the VRtually There strand is the inauguration of new US president Donald Trump.

The publisher isn’t just producing editorial content, it also wants to make VR content for brand sponsors. Last year, Toyota, Macy’s, Amazon and Alcatel all paid USA Today for VR. For example:

• USA Today’s recent VR trip around Talinn, Estonia, includes pre-roll and mid-roll for Toyota.
• Its VR video putting viewers inside a burning building includes sponsorship from Nest, but outside of the video unit entirely.

But USA Today has also built an ad format it’s calling the “cubemercial“, for creating advertiser experiences inside the VR content itself.

Next up, Gentzel thinks brands are going to want to offer VR experiences through the publisher. “You’ll see us experiment more in 2017, likely to include experiential experiences for brands,” he tells Beet.TV. “Courageous brands are stepping up, saying ‘we want to experiment with this’.”

USA Today is on the cusp of discovering what works in this new medium. But it’s likely publishers and brands alike are going to be sensitive to over-delivery of advertising in what is a highly intimate media environment.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“It’s all about innovation, even in years like this when there hasn’t been something terribly disruptive to the industry,” de Nardis says in an interview with Bee.TV. “I think innovation is the key word and that is what attracts so many of our clients to come here each and every year.”

Once again, 2017 is the year of virtual reality “because we’ve been saying it for the last three years,” de Nardis muses. “It hasn’t been yet,” with the exception of limited audiences for the emerging technology, he adds. “I don’t think we’ve yet arrived to the final consumers because of the lack of content and amazingly expensive cost of the hardware.”

He lists three things that he particularly appreciates this year, “even if they’re not new.” The first is driverless vehicle opportunities. “Every year it gets closer to where we need it to be. In comparison to just a couple of years ago, it’s absolutely fantastic,” de Nardis says.

He calls self-driving vehicle technology “a major revolution” because it has the potential to create time. “It’s good to give back 60, 90 minutes of time every day to people over the years. People doing it for pleasure or doing it for work,” he says.

Moreover, “It’s going to change the look, feel and organization of our cities.”

The second is evolution is the Internet of things, because every year it gets a bit closer to what every family needs at home. The end goal is to realize “amazing opportunities for us to connect the brands we represent with some specific moments and partnerships at the moment of consumption,” says de Nardis.

In third place in his rankings is the application of smart data, sensors and other technology in everyday products. He cites the example of L’Oreal’s “smart” hair brush, which counts strokes, analyzes the force used when brushing and recommends the company’s Kérastase products, as CNBC reports.

Such products show the promise of connectedness for a variety of daily activities, “Even the most banal one, brushing your hair,” de Nardis says. “There is a value out of it, even at 200 dollars. But eventually we go down to 50.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Too often, marketers forget about marketing 101,” the company’s Director of Product Marketing says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017. “Consumer psychology. What do consumers want? What do they need? What is the hierarchy of needs?”

He suggests marketing concepts from the 1950’s and 1960’s can be useful when trying to create personalized experiences.

“Also what’s lost is the creative aspect of it,” he adds. “How do you create a better environment for consumers so that they’re more likely to make a purchase decision or more likely to have brand affinity for a particular product or service or company?”

Too often, the focus is solely on data and “we don’t focus on what people want,” says Foster. “Sort of the basics of marketing.”

While Adobe itself is slightly less than a quarter-century old, it seems to have been listening to what a lot of people in the tech space desire, particularly when it comes to video. Its 2016 acquisition of TubeMogul is the capstone in the creation of a “three-legged stool” to neatly capture both the demand side and supply side—and most points in between.

“Historically we’ve have a data management platform, we’ve had a performance marketing engine with Adobe Media Optimizer but we haven’t really had a demand side platform focused on brand building through video,” Foster explains. “And that’s really what we’re trying to accomplish with the TubeMogul acquisition.”

The next phase of the company’s video evolution is connecting the buy side through TubeMogul with the sell side via Adobe Primetime TV Media Management. This, says Foster, will create “tighter, stronger connections between media buyers, TV buyers, video buyers and broadcasters and MVPD’s that have professional video inventory to sell.”

Adobe is now equipped to assist brands from content ideation through to production and distribution video distribution, all the way through to measurement and monetization.

For the company’s media customers, Adobe’s primetime footprint and authentication touches over 99% of U.S. pay TV households, according to Foster. “That’s a significant footprint in premium inventory,” he says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

This was the consensus of media sellers and audience targeting specialists who participated in a Beet.TV panel discussion about commercial loads during CES 2017 held at the OMD Oasis at The Venetian. Moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink began by asking panelists what the TV world might look like five years from now, given the low tolerance many people have for watching commercials in the digital realm and their ability to avoid them via subscription services.

Kristin Dolan, CEO of 605, which provides data-driven, census-based audience measurement solutions, commended Turner Broadcasting’s drive to reduce commercial load. “I think it puts the customer first to say were not going to jam however many minutes in an hour,” said Dolan. Observing that “advertising is part of our existence, it’s not going anywhere,” Dolan said she doesn’t perceive outright antipathy toward advertising. “The more relevant the advertising is the more it actually could have a positive impact on the brand that’s surrounding the ad that’s being presented,” she said.

“We take a long-term view,” said Michael Strober, EVP, Client Strategy & Ad Innovation at Turner, before citing audience demographics showing how much people ages 18 to 24 watch on-demand programming as opposed to live TV. “What’s going to happen five to ten years from now when they are largely the key audience that most of our clients want to reach? If they go to linear TV and it still looks like it does today, we’re going to lose them.”

The key is to start to figure out now how to show fewer commercials “but each exposure or opportunity is incredibly impactful to the marketer and ultimately to the consumer,” Strober said.

Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, noted that the main objection to digital ads is their intrusiveness. It’s not that consumers don’t understand the value exchange at play when watching ad-supported content, according to Steuer.

“I think part of it is just about having a reasonable conversation with consumers at scale and looking at the data about what’s working and what’s not working and adjusting the mix accordingly,” said Steuer.

Asked by Spiegel to imagine a TV world in which ad delivery and performance is based on impressions as opposed to units, Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Ad Products & Strategy at NBCUniversal, said “It’s just a matter of time. In a couple more years the television on the wall will be able to deliver advertising in the same way that you get it on your phone or that you’re getting it on your tablet or on your laptop.”

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That’s according to one media-tech exec whose company just passed some milestones of its own.

4C Insights ingests social media platform data and TV ad data from around the world to help advertisers serve social ads up against TV viewing, or vice versa.

“We closed the year just shy of $1bn in annualised ad spend running across our platform,” 4C Insights chief marketing officer Aaron Goldman tells Beet.TV.

“We tallied north of 400m detections of assets across linear television.”

Goldman says social data through 4C’s “affinity graph” can activate linear national TV ad buys or on social media.

“As the plumbing and infrastructure gets upgraded, we can do some of the things we’ve been talking about for  along time,” he says. “You’re seeing the opportunity become a reality.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Discovery Engage, which is our linear optimisation platform, we started on the linear side,” Discovery Communication data analytics VP Sam Garfield tells beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re looking to broaden it out later to more the digital side as well.”

Discovery’s platform can ingest advertiser targets to better fuel media buys. And Garfield says this year he will add more such data to make the targeting more precise.

“This year is about bringing in additional data sets, working with additional data providers to look at what’s possible and be innovative in the space,” he adds.

But that doesn’t mean Garfield thinks full addressability will take over all of TV advertising.

“It’s still the early days,” he says. “To be able to reach broad scale in a branding opportunity will always be there.

“It’s interesting, but there are some hurdles. The data and technology are there to make it happen. But the hurdles (are) the business rules (in the TV industry).”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Joining Dolan on the dais were Denise Colella from NBCUniversal, Turner’s Michael Strober, Jonathan Steuer from Omnicom Media Network and moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.

Asked to trace the Dolan family’s pioneering involvement with addressable linear TV, she explained how for 27 years she helped run Cablevision—from its trucks to its call center—and oversaw the in-house marketing department. Cablevision started aggregating set-top box data with an initial sample size of 1% and around 2007 began dabbling with addressability. Located in the number one market, it would become the first 100% addressable U.S. cable system.

“We had lot of time and the benefit of some runway to really learn about addressability,” said Dolan. “Our sales teams used data from the set-top boxes to sell advertising on an impression basis. They could sell long-tail content because we could apply actual viewership information against those long-tail networks.”

Being a subscription-based business, Cablevision “utilized our own avails a lot” to target viewers to upsell services and for tune-in initiatives. “We could do frequency capping and media optimization within the marketplace, and integrate both the opportunity to have set-top box data and 100% addressability within our own company,” said Dolan.

After completing the sale of the company, the Dolans formed Dolan Family Ventures then acquired Analytics Media Group and formed 605, whose segmentation and targeting services started in political advertising and have expanded to serve companies like Walmart.

Given all of the “noise and the discussion about the marketplace right now” about marketers leveraging more precise audience data, Spiegel asked Dolan why 605 is starting out with a focus on the sell side.

She used the words “passion” and “passionate” to describe her affinity for using data to provide better audience targeting, noting that 40 million homes are reachable via addressable linear TV.

“Because our primary experience is coming from cable television and a lot of our relationships in the past have been with the programmers that’s the area we want to focus on first,” said Dolan.

This video was produced as part Beet. TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

CES 2017 proved to be a year that foreshadows incredible impact on the advertising industry. With the ‘Internet of EVERYthing’ and autonomous devices, shopping behaviors and the consumer touch points brands have today will be radically affected. If your washing machine automatically reorders your detergent, why would you ever switch brands? It would require more work. Advertising was founded on the core tenet that exposure to it can impact purchasing decisions and even spawn impulse buying. How can a consumer make an impulse purchase if they no longer shop?! And this is only one more mountain for retail to climb.

I go on to discuss other tipping points like the death of the UI and keyboard, as well as the continual incremental improvements in resolution of TVs, processing power, memory and the ubiquity of 5G. VR was lacking the presence I expected it to have, well, at least VR content creators.

After taking you through my Top 5 of the show, I examine in detail the impact these technologies may have on advertising and media, as well as affect on us as human beings. In my eyes, we are more connected than ever, but yet so out of touch.

– Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp

Sixteen years ago, co-founder Cenk Uygur launched The Young Turks on Sirius radio. since then, it has also built up a huge following for its online videos, with more expansion plans to come.

But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Uygur says new live broadcasting capabilities from social media operators are lighting up a whole new opportunity for the media network.

“Facebook and YouTube… once they gave their audience the ability to view it, viewers said, ‘Of course I want to watch things live!’,” Uygur says.

“I got kicked off a plane and started live-streaming it. All of a sudden, this giant audience across the world is watching this drama unfold. It’s a beautiful, amazing new world.

“The audience has got used to watching it live. Before in digital you’d watch it on-demand. Now you get these pop-ups saying ‘Cenk is live’.”

Case in point – on the day of the 2016 US presidential election, The Young Turks rolled its live broadcast out across its platforms – as hosts’ initial optimism turned to horror at the result.

But the outcome nevertheless proved one thing to Uygur.

“On election, we had a million hours of viewing in one day, on YouTube and Facebook Live,” he tells Beet.TV. “That’s when you now that live has arrived.”

And he is now targeting even newer platform opportunities, beyond social, to grow the audience further, like the live online TV app Pluto and “skinny” cable TV bundles that combine traditional and digital brands.

“We’re going to hire a lot more in the days to come, expand our shows, expand the platforms we’re on,” Uygur adds. “We’re going to keep on expanding until our lead is so large it depresses the competition.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That is according to one ad agency boss now helping clients understand and benefit from the changes.

“We are definitely entering an addressable age,” says Nikki Mendonça, OMD’s EMEA president, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Personalisation at scale is the holy grail of marketing at the moment.

“We’re having a myriad number of conversations with clients at the moment about how to achieve that relevance for them. Using data … is the sweet spot.”

OMD has been helping clients use opportunities like AdSmart, the addressable TV offering from Sky, the UK’s pay-TV leader.

“The relevance is giving very good ROI, even though you pay inflated CPMs,” she says. But other markets are less developed. Already, France and Germany are behind due to national limitations on use of data in advertising. And a big challenge is imminent across the continent.

“In other parts of Europe, addressability at large is still quite fetal,” Mendonça says. “The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming in to force in May 2018.

“If you are seen, as an advertiser, to flout any data protection rules, your penalty is 4% of your global turnover. We have to exercise some caution going in to a world of being abel to leverage trillions of data points.”

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, OMD strategy and product development director Jean-Paul Edwards says AI is nothing new – but it is now ready to make in-roads in to media.

“AI’s been with us for 50 years – it’s had a lot of false dawns,” Edwards says.

He should know. Edwards has been heading up future-facing tech strategies for agencies for years. But now he says AI is truly emerging.

After all, The Weather Company and IBM are now using IBM’s Watson AI engine to power conversational ad units.

“We’re starting to see AI in terms of … decisions around content delivery in the digital space,” Edwards says.

“The next step is to bring that to mass broadcast video … fitting broadcast-quality content in to pipes, through to curation algorithms …  (so that) a TV set knows exactly what you want to watch. … your brother-in-law’s YouTube videos or a specialist bit of content from a group n Facebook or the big new cop show on NBC.”

But there is no single product called “AI” that agencies can simply switch on. Rather, there is a messy, emergent set of tools Edwards is calling a “cognitive technology stack”, comprising data sources, sensors, APIs and bots.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Time Inc thinks it has done pretty well at converting its magazines to digital. Now it wants to tap their individual strengths to build cross-brand verticals.

Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Time Inc chief content officer Alan Murray says the group clocked 140m unique visitors last month.

“A lot of it has just been done by extending the magazines in to digital,” Murray says. “What we’re now trying to do is organise ourselves to take better advantage of digital opportunities.

“We have nine different magazines that do food content. South Living does a lot, Cooking Light, Real Simple. Each of them by themselves is not that big a player in the digital world. Put ‘em all together and they have 40m uniques – they are one of the power players in food.

“We’re creating an organization that allows us to take advantage of those kinds of opportunities. Same is true in health, in a number of different areas.”

Time Inc now has websites like Extra Crispy and Health whose content is partly taken from some of its specific magazine title sites.

Next up, Murray expects the video revolution to finally bed in soon.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We’re just beginning to experiment with one company that’s involved in that,” Geraci, who is President of National Broadcast for the media agency group, says in an interview with Beet.TV at CES 2017.

He describes it as “sort of a rethinking of the whole Canoe idea,” a reference to the 2008 launch of Canoe Ventures by a half dozen major cable operators. The initial concept of the company was to develop interactive TV ads, as ADWEEK reports.

The modern iteration would direct advertising not on a local basis as with addressable, which is limited to two minutes of local advertising inventory, but on a national basis based on what’s known about specific households.

It could involve “ten versions of a particular brand advertisement that has different meanings for different individuals,” Geraci says. “But really it would be in that one commercial position that the advertiser owns with a particular national network.”

As for local addressable TV ads, “As you get these distribution platforms to be bigger and of greater scale that can then precisely target households and you’re covering most of the U.S., it becomes a bigger idea,” he adds.

On the subject of commercial load within programming, Geraci lauds the efforts of media companies like Turner that are experimenting with fewer commercials in addition to offering brands sponsored content opportunities that are complementary with programming.

“I give them credit for trying to address this head one and de-commercialize at least one of their networks in a major way to see if that’s going to improve viewership,” Geraci says. “Let’s face it. If they build ratings by lowering commercial load then they’ve got more GRP’s to sell. So in their view I guess it’s a practical business model to try and do that.”

As for branded content that fills in as a substitute for traditional ads, Geraci says Omnicom has experimented with it but the format is limited to advertisers that have “a certain specific message” that ties in well with the content.

“When you’ve got that and can make that work, it’s sort of lightening in a bottle and it’s a wonderful execution to take advantage of. But I don’t think it’s a large scale business that just about everybody can be involved in,” Geraci says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

In the meantime, in an interview at CES 2017 with Beet.TV, Weather Company CEO and GM Cameron Clayton offers some advice for brands thinking about dipping their toes into cognitive advertising.

“Keep every audio recording your company collects. Don’t throw anything away if it’s voice related,” Clayton says. “Your call center logs, keep them all. Those are the crown jewels to train artificial intelligence in the future and to understand peoples’ intentions.”

The year 2017 will bring the debut of what Clayton describes as IBM’s cognitive media platform. It will put the power of Watson directly into the hands of marketers seeking to better understand consumer intent and create content that satisfies the intent.

“You bring your data set, we bring our data set,” Clayton explains. “We bring the artificial intelligence cognitive capability to help people make better decisions and personalize content across all screens, all devices.”

Among IBM’s main assets is scale, as evidenced by the 40 billion forecasts The Weather Company executes each day, consuming about 44 petabytes of data (one petabyte is 1 million gigabytes). While companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others also have massive scale, a big differentiator for IBM is cognitive capability.

“It’s the ability to understand with natural voice interaction and to learn and to access all kinds of data,” Clayton says. “Structured data, just like database, and unstructured data like tweets in twitter.”

IBM enables brands to scan the data to understand divine consumer intentions when interacting with natural language voice.

For The Weather Channel, it could be someone asking whether they will need an umbrella on a particular day. “What I really want to know is it going to rain on Saturday, but I didn’t ask that,” says Clayton. “The response from us is there’s an 80 percent chance it will rain on Saturday so yes, you should probably take an umbrella.”

IBM isn’t looking to replace humans altogether, according to Clayton. “Some companies are working on solutions to try and replace us. We foundationally believe it’s about helping people make better solutions,” Clayton says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Renault marketing communications VP Bastien Schupp told Beet.TV: “Moving from mass marketing to marketing to individuals is one of the key challenges for us in the next two to three years. (We plan), until 2019, to move from mass marketing to marketing to individuals.”

Schupp, a car marketing veteran, says the plan will be executed in different regions at different times, because different countries are more or less mature when it comes to data strategy, addressable TV and consumer readiness.

The motivation for the shift is fascinating. The car industry is one of the most important sectors to TV advertising. But we have recently heard from several ad-tech vendors that the auto industry also has most to gain from laser-targeted TV and video ads. Renault’s Schupp now explains for the car marque’s perspective.

“Today, at any given time, only 4% of the people are in-market to buy a car,” he says. “And yet, we put almost 90% of our resources against these people, just because we don’t know any better.

“Thanks to addressability, we should be able to reduce the amount of resource we put against convincing people to buy a specific car, take that money out and tell much more interesting, relevant stories to people who are not interested in buying a car tomorrow.”

Schupp says Renault’s big plan has three pillars:

1. Securing Renault’s data infrastructure.
2. Changing the way it produces ad creative for an age of dynamically-presented, individually-targeted ad assembly.
3. Altering the way in which the company buys its media.

Amid all that change, one thing will remain consistent, however, Schupp says – no matter what form it takes, creativity will remain paramount.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Unlike digital, we’re actually working in a futures market,” says Michael Strober by way of explaining Turner’s audience targeting process. “Everything we do has to be projected or estimated looking forward.”

During a break at CES 2017, Strober relates in an interview with Beet.TV how Turner has been providing advanced audience targeting for several years and has over a hundred different schedules to show for it.

“What we’re finding is that we can actually zero in on the audiences that our clients care about most in a linear fashion,” Strober says. “It doesn’t have to be addressable. We can do it in traditional linear television.”

Turner uses a proprietary algorithm and a model that provides audience estimates using historical indices. In addition, the company takes into account “a myriad of other variables” to identify desired audiences, according to Strober.

“The Algorithm goes through our inventory and will help isolate those particular shows limited to the half hour of each day of the week where a marketer’s audience would most likely be,” Strober explains.

The resulting schedule is trafficked in the same way as a traditional Nielsen demo-guaranteed schedule.

“When we get the findings afterward, we usually see a significant lift in the intended audience they care about most. On average it’s been about a 21 percent lift in that target,” says Strober.

Asked how Turner determines business outcomes resulting from a particular schedule, Strober says it requires fusing consumer behavioral data with viewership data.

“The fact that we can now apply data and analytics to linear television in ways that have never been done before I think is an enormous opportunity for both our clients and our agency partners to get on board,” Strober says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

That’s the worldview of Michael Zimbalist, CMO of marketing technology company Simulmedia, as he takes in the activities at CES 2017.

“The future will come,” Zimbalist says. “The future will be maybe like one to one, maybe not. One never knows. But there are so many things we can do today to optimize linear.”

Simulmedia does predictive planning informed by a single-source data set of viewing behavior from set-top boxes and smart TV’s plus purchase behavior. “We don’t have to be constrained by 40,000 plus Nielsen households,” Zimbalist says.

The company buys inventory from networks and cable operators to use TV as an “acquisition vehicle” for brands to gain new customers.

“When people talk about data, the most valuable data that any brand has is their customers,” he says. “The one asset that can’t be commoditized in this day and age if you’re a brand is your first-party data.”

The concept is to look forward instead of backward, according to Zimbalist. “We can now watch and see and anticipate what people are going to watch on TV, not just look retrospectively at what they’ve watched in the past to make a plan,” he explains.

Predictive modeling of viewing behavior as viewing behavior changes is a “fantastic opportunity” for planners, Zimbalist adds. “When you do that particular modeling against targets that are purchasers of your product and not just age and demo, you’ve optimized linear TV today,” he says.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.