This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of International CES 2016 presented by Adobe.
]]>After the final whistle, Yahoo claimed to have broken ground by attracting 15m viewers. That would have made the game almost as popular as a regular NFL game on main television.
But the claim has riled traditional media measurers in a debate that crystallizes the uncertainty over how to effectively assess audiences across online and traditional TV broadcasts.
“That was well-intentioned but those were the wrong metrics,” Nielsen US media president Lynda Clarizio tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It was comparing apples to oranges.
“Contrast it to an NFL game on television – per the Nielsen ratings, an average NFL telecast has a Nielsen rating of 18m.
The Yahoo number was a reach or (total) unique audience number; the Nielsen rating, the GRP, is derivation of the audience in an average minute, as opposed to unique audience going in quickly and out of a game.
“An average NFL game has a reach of about 45m. That was the right comparison. If you translate both of them to the average minute, the Yahoo game did about 1.5m compared with 18m.”
Advertisers increasingly want to be able to buy moving-image ads across platforms, whether it slots in to an in-stream pre-roll, a prime-time TV show or a Facebook newsfeed video.
Clarizio acknowledges the quest for “a common language between television and digital video so that buyers and sellers and the industry can have the same metrics when they’re looking at viewership”.
But claims like Yahoo’s show divergent metrics are “still confusing”, “it’s not serving the industry well”, she says.
This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.
]]>USA Today publisher Gannett was in town to unveil its latest branded content offering, three months after Kelly Andresen was hired from the Washington Post as Gannett’s branded content head.
“The work we’re doing across the USA Today Network to help brands power their stories will be called Get Creative,” Gannett chief revenue officer Kevin Gentzel, a former WaPo colleague, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Our audience of 100m readers across the US, their interests and passion points in topics like country music, racing, flight out of Pensacola gives us a unique value proposition to power brands to tell stories.”
What does that mean in practice? Gentzel reckons the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Country Music Awards affords USA Today Network – the newly-merged unit comprising Gannett’s national and local brands – an opportunity to produce “articles, infographics and videos celebrating the modern country music fan”, bankrolled by a brand.
He thinks heartland markets like Nashville, Indianapolis and Pensacola present opportunities for brands in music, motor racing or airplanes… “stories that happen to line up with stories we’re telling our readers”.
But that’s the content. Systematically, Gentzel also wants to exploit Gannett’s new combined scale: “On the backend, we’re working hard to scale and promote the branded content in native ad units across all 100 of our sites with the potential to reach all 100m of our readers.”
This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.
]]>At least, it may look like that from the outside. The Santa Monica-based outfit spent plenty of time perfecting its platform before taking on a $15m first venture round in November, the latest in German broadcaster RTL Group’s ad-tech roll-up.
Now VideoAmp CEO Ross McCray says 2016 is primed to be “the year of execution” for the company he co-founded. So what does VideoAmp bring to the party?
A “cross-device graph”, McCray says: “We associate multiple device IDs to a user, we append intelligence to those devices. We’ll say, ‘here’s everything those devices have consumed’; it watches these ads or shows on TV.
“Today, we over 150m unique users in the United States and over a billion devices associated underneath those users, and consumption data across all of them.”
That means advertisers will get to more smartly target ads based on a holistic understanding of who exactly is behind the many devices that are now used throughout households.
McCray says an earlier seed round had funded the engineering build-out, but the effort in 2016 will be about sales.
This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.
]]>We spoke with Straight at the CES show about partnerships for SpotX and prospects for the growth of the automated video marketplace.
This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.
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“We have 22 films in different stages of development, and four television shows in production as we speak,” Conde Nast CEO Robert A. Sauerberg tells Beet.TV in this video interview from Consumer Electronics Show.
“Whether it’s Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ or Glamor, it’s such a natural extension for us to take it from a magazine to video. We’ve hired the best people we can find, Dawn Ostroff leading a great team.”
Sauerberg hired Ostroff, the former CW network head, to lead his new Conde Nast Entertainment division, the unit tasked with making moves in video as well as in publishing – a move that was considered bold. Productions include:
Sauerberg says magazines are thriving: “It is far from being dead. Consumers love magazines. In a world of ad avoidance, it’s such an engaging thing.
“Our brands are really learning how to get the DNA of what they’re doing in sight, sound and motion,” Sauerberg continues. A huge part of our future is in video. This is a huge growth area for Conde Nast.”
Se interviewed Sauerberg Wednesday night at the MediaLink executive dinner.
Our coverage of CES 2016 is presented by Adobe.
]]>For its new NYT VR app, the Gray Lady last year began commissioning virtual reality video reportage like The Displaced, taking viewers inside the lives of three children displaced by the global refugee crisis, and Take Flight, a celebration of air travel.
But the scheme’s real genius was in putting cheap, introductory VR viewers in to the hands of a million of its newspaper home delivery subscribers, via Google’s self-assembly Cardboard headset.
“Although Google Cardboard is an intermediary technology … the evidence is that the entire thing worked,” NYT CEO Mark Thompson tells Beet.TV in this video interview at the Consumer Electronics Show. “People understood the concept, were intrigued and excited by it, tried it out and enjoyed it enough that they kept it in their homes.
“VR is already margin-positive for us. We’re making money out of VR. We expect to make money from VR again in 2016.”
That’s a far cry from Oculus Rift, the impressive – and now Facebook-owned – VR headset that has blazed a trail for quality while in development, and has now upset expectant customers with a high, $600 price tag. But VR buzz continues apace.
“This CES, VR is one of the big topics,” Thompson observed. “There’s a real difference, though, between what we’re doing and what other people are doing. Many publishers are talking about it – we are putting more money in to a program of films with an expectation that, most months of 2016, there will be a new, big piece of work from us. We’re (also) going to be curating VR content, in partnership with Sundance.”
With an editorial pipeline finally building behind a technology that has been mooted for two decades now, is the time right, too, for advertising in virtual worlds?
“We had great early success with commercial partnerships – GE and Mini were the launch partners,” Thompson says of NYT VR. “We are in multiple conversations here at CES about new partnerships.
“Indeed, I would say there is immense marketer interest – they can see both that we have the commitment to the quality of content and experience, but also we’ve got actual viewers. Most people who talk about VR don’t have a way of actually getting VR in front of consumers.”
Our coverage of CES 2016 is presented by Adobe.
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In July 2014, the big European broadcaster RTL Group acquired a controlling interest in the company. Then, last year, the outfit rebranded from its former name, SpotXchange, as it gained traction in Europe thanks to the RTL deal. At the end of 2015, SpotX also partnered with RTL Digital Hub stablemate Clypd to support optimized targeting of ads on TiVo set-top boxes in the US.
After a year of “thought leadership”, CEO and founder Mike Shehan says the company is now embarking on a 2016 that will be “the year of execution”, with some company announcements coming soon.
First, Shehan says SpotX will be revealing which broadcasters are using its Clypd relationship to buy TV ads programmatically
1. Programmatic TV
“We’ll be announcing our first clients”, he says. “Those will be broadcasters, media owners who will be managing media with a link solution that’s both digital and linear.”
“You’ll also see some announcements from us in Europe, with set-top box activity – advertising on TV through the set-top box.”
2. Asia launch
In addition to its UK office, SpotX also opened in Amsterdam and a German joint venture last year. Now another continent is on the roadmap, and soon.
“The same announcements you saw in Europe we’re going to be making in Asia … next week,” Shehan says.
Connected TV
Shehan says advertisers are getting excited about over-the-top TV devices: “We saw, just over the holidays, traffic triple from Apple TV. A lot more people are buying them. That inventory is really desired by the advertiser side.”
After the sale
Despite selling up to a big company, entrepreneur Shehan says he is not moving on from the mothership any time soon: “RTL allow me to run the business. Our executive team is still in place, we’re still motivated and we still have pretty big goals to achieve.
Our coverage of CES is presented by SpotX.
]]>Now the Hub is on the hunt for more ad-tech acquisitions.
“We will also look for further investment opportunities that add on, that complement, that strengthen the existing portfolio,” RTL Digital Hub EVP Marcel Reichart tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
So far, RTL Group has made the following moves:
“If you look at the portfolio, those are all strong companies, leaders in their markets,” Reichart adds.
“The 2016 mandate is to ensure these companies and CEOs can grow these companies in the best way forward. 2015 showed very good growth and maturing – we believe 2016 could give that opportunity as well.”
Our coverage of CES is presented by SpotX.
]]>For an overview on Gannett’s commitment and plans for VR, we spoke with Kevin Gentzel, Chief Revenue Officer.
Our series from CES is sponsored by Adobe.
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