He believes there are caveats to be considered along the way. “I think there’s some pros and cons to that. The pro is they have a lot of data and a lot of resources to tap into,” Kinsella says in an interview with Beet.tv. “The cons is you kind of lock yourself into a certain system and as we’ve seen the pace of change in this industry, you can get caught up trying to protect your point of view.”

On the latter point, he says the catch is you can get locked in to certain sources of information and cannot take advantage of others that might be “potentially less expensive.”

This is not to suggest that Kinsella isn’t on board the data train. Indeed, Havas having combined creative, media and data together in each of its U.S. offices was one reason he joined from Mindshare, where he had been CEO.

“The talk within the industry is maybe heading in the wrong direction because everybody wants more, more, more and different versions of data,” Kinsella says. “When it gets to be too big it almost becomes uncontrollable and unusable.”

Havas tries to find “the small pieces of data” that will actually drive clients’ businesses. “I think data is still a big area that agencies are trying to sort out. How deep to go and how effective going deeper really means,” says Kinsella.

What’s not a matter of contention is the need to follow consumers whose television viewing habits have shifted to mobile devices. “Sight, sound and motion,” says Kinsella. “Nothing’s ever beaten it” for explaining what brands are about and how they can benefit consumers.

Again, there should be limits at play in chasing the video prize. “We don’t have to jump off a cliff,” Kinsella observes. He sees a balancing act concerning “how much viewability is really there, how much fraud is in the online ecosystem and how do we balance that with the power of video getting in front of the right person.”

As he looks ahead to CES 2017, Kinsella doesn’t share the apprehension of some people who feel it’s a tough time of year to have to travel to Las Vegas. Calling it the “modern version of the World’s Fair,” he says it’s a great way to start the new year with clients “in an incredibly creative environment.”

People don’t go to CES “to see things that are going to happen today,” Kinsella says. “You go there to see what potentially could happen in three years, five years.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

This is the prognosis from GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman, who thinks advertisers will be “super interested” in the Internet of things for the data that it collects and the new interfaces people have with content and commerce.

“Everyone’s seen what Echo can do and what Google Home can do and those will be big focuses,” Norman says in an interview with Beet.tv.

He sees “huge competition” in the coming year is how different channels and program creators will incorporate themselves into skinny bundles. For many people, Netflix and Amazon Prime can almost be considered single-asset skinny bundles.

“One of the interesting bits of calculus for the consumer is going to be how do they go about assembling their entertainment portfolio,” says Norman, citing a data pipeline to the home, a mobile data plan and perhaps bundled home security and management services.

“We’re actually asking the consumer to put together a really complicated puzzle,” Norman adds.

This is because of the plethora of choices for watching traditional broadcast channels and streaming video. “They’ll be thinking about their entertainment lineup in terms of where they consume it, in terms of the devices in and out of the home,” Norman says.

He suspects there might need to be changes in the way that entertainment products are marketed.

“I get this feeling that expressions like Double Play, Triple Play and Quad Play are feeling a bit old and I think there’s going to be a new dialogue,” says Norman.

Likening consumer choices to those involved in putting together a portfolio of stocks, Norman has a whimsical suggestion for making things simpler.

“I think we need to create a sort of eHarmony for personal entertainment and communications,” he explains. “It’s your date with technology because it’s getting harder and harder and harder for people to work out.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

“I think one of the challenges that we’ve still got with that technology is consumers are really looking for that frictionless experience,” Di Richardson, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at global media agency UM Worldwide, says in an interview with Beet.tv. “We’ve been trained now with our phones, the way we live, that we don’t expect there to be dysfunction in our technology.”

Richardson cites as one example the latest iteration of wearable video technology (think Google Glass). “Time will tell, but what’s happening with Snapchat Spectacles right now, I think it’s a lot more seamless experience,” says Richardson. “I think once we get a more seamless experience, we can then have the ability to take that to more people more often.”

And there are always the contributions from Apple to inspire more fluid human/technology interaction. “Think about what Apple have done really well, they think about it from the consumer experience. I think we need a little bit more of that in some of the tech that’s being developed,” she adds.

While the use of data to better pinpoint target audiences and drive true brand engagement is happening on a heretofore-unachievable scale, there’s still more work ahead, according to Richardson. “Part of the challenge that brands have in the space right now is we’re still trying to get this right mix of creativity and the data,” she says. “And I think we’re learning a lot more, brands are learning a lot more, but we have to get to the point where the format makes the experience and I don’t think we’re quite there yet.”

The ability to change creative content and messaging on the fly has made great strides, particularly in the last two years, Richardson believes. But looking at the bigger picture with regard to creativity, the right ad for the right person at the right moment needs to go farther.

“But how do we scale that?” Richardson asks. “How do we actually bring back that love of engaging with brands again?”

Brands that have aligned themselves with a purpose are on the right track, to an extent. “I think brands are going to have to look beyond the end of their noses, so to speak, and think about what’s their role, their contribution, how is it beyond the product or service they’re offering that they can really drive a creative engagement with people,” says Richardson.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

In an interview with Beet.tv, Kawaja reflects on two significant deals in the convergent television space in 2016 and explains why he feels addressable linear TV should be getting more fanfare than programmatic TV.

Adobe’s November agreement to purchase TubeMogul brought to the Adobe Marketing Cloud a one-stop shop for video advertising and represented the recognition that Adobe “needed to be in the activation space, while primarily focus on digital but moving towards linear TV,” Kawaja observes.

The second deal is one LUMA had a hand in: the acquisition of INVIDI Technologies by the consortium of AT&T, DISH and WPP Group. Kawaja says it will have “significant implications” for the way TV is changing.

“Obviously AT&T is a new entrant buyer, which is always exciting,” Kawaja says, adding that the consortium buy is “particularly smart” because it ensures “that this particular technology would be widespread. I’m sure they will have conversations with other folks in the ecosystem because INVIDI is an ecosystem wide play.”

While programmatic TV seems to spark more industry talk than addressable linear TV, Kawaja emphasizes the latter.

“The reason being you already have a linear infrastructure, a linear market,” says Kawaja. “All you are doing with addressable is bringing additional data, targeting and precision to a bulk reach channel that already exists.” With addressable, “We’re simply taking set-top box data and being able to target this massive spend category on much more of an individual basis.”

As he looks ahead to CES 2017 in Las Vegas, Kawaja sees a “wide swath of buyers” in a variety of different categories, with both foreign and domestic players in such varied areas as data, media, TV and software. “We are seeing a maturation of this space, which is very healthy,” Kawaja says. “Let’s not forget the massive amount of fragmentation that exists in this space. It’s not sustainable. That can’t last.”

At CES, his focus will be less on emerging technology than on strategic meetings and discussions based on the technological innovations on display. With regard to AR, VR and the IOT, it’s the early worm that often gets eaten.

“From a business standpoint, strategic standpoint, what I advise people is that being early has the same financial profile as being wrong. You don’t want to be too early in terms of pursing deals in some of these nascent categories,” Kawaja says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

“What I think we’re going to start seeing with new technologies is using addressability as a way of versioning for national TV,” Winkler says in an interview with Beet.tv. “That’s really exciting stuff, particularly for our set of clients, many of whom are portfolio clients, all of whom are looking for growth.”

Media agencies have always touted their clout in getting the most advantageous rates for their clients owing to the sheer amount of money they spend. The same principle is still at play, but it’s just the starting point.

“Using technology, you can take the clout and those great rates but then deliver the right ad to the right person within that national buy,” Winkler says. “That’s a remarkable opportunity.”

More TV networks are realizing that in lieu of an increase in viewers, they need to bring more value to the table, according to Winkler. He cites NBC and Turner Broadcasting as examples of programmers using various data sets to optimize schedules on the fly. “And that’s a good thing. Just because we’re not doing pure programmatic doesn’t mean we’re not happy about the better performance we’re getting for our clients,” Winkler says.

For media agencies seeking to transition to the all-things-data approach to media planning and buying, the biggest change that Winkler has seen has been taking data out of the data silo “or even out of the digital silo, for that matter.”

OMD is seeing the biggest impact for its clients by “making data part of the beginning of the process and therefore affecting every medium that we plan and buy on behalf of our clients,” says Winkler. “When you do that, suddenly it’s 10X the impact. But only if you talk about data up front.”

As he looks ahead to CES 2017 in Las Vegas, Winkler will be trying to discern the most meaningful advances in television technology from the passing near-fads.

“We’ve seen a lot of gimmickry over the last few years, whether that’s curved TV’s or 3D TV’s,” he says.

So what went wrong? According to Winkler, manufacturers were focusing on the wrong types of technological advances.

“People want technology that makes it easier for them to watch more TV,” he explains. “Technology that lets you watch more TV is going to be embraced by the American public because we love to watch TV.”

Voice recognition could be that technological magic bullet. The ability to tell your TV set to play episode #4 of Seinfeld or a particular pro football game.

“Once you have the experience of asking technology to do something for you and it does it instantly and without hesitation and without a mistake, you will never go back,” Winkler says.

Who’s going to deliver it? Siri with Apple? Amazon Echo? Google?

“I’m not sure,” Winkler says. “That’s the new battlefront. Voice activation in the living room with a TV and may the best man win.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

This isn’t to suggest that GroupM does not have clients advertising in feed-based video. The media investment giant takes into account data showing the duration of views and uses that data “as a modifier when we’re advising clients as to how they allocate their money between different video platforms,” Norman says.

GroupM also is working on evolving viewability standards for such formats as outstream video, according to Norman. Outside of the mobile environment, the company “increasingly and almost exclusively” uses its standards for making client investment decisions.

Norman expresses disappointment that the market hasn’t “responded in the way one had hoped in terms of producing platform-specific creative.” In many environments, “I think for a lot of advertisers, very short format video remains a problem other than for simple brand recognition and depth point of view,” he adds.

It’s GroupM’s view that most media will end up embracing standards that the company can trade to, but for a lot of feed-based media it will examine duration data “and use that as a modifier about what we’re prepared to pay and how we allocate it,” Norman says.

When discussing standards and modifiers, Norman says the goal is to find the best instruments to value the duration of a view in any given platform.

“The outstream issue is different from the feed-based one because you’re not looking at it in a scrolling environment, you’re often not looking at it in an autoplay environment,” he says.

As for the difference between a standard and a modifier, Norman says it comes down to the specific use case.

“We thought the standard was absolutely necessary in the desktop display environment because we felt the physical nature of desktop publishing needed to be cleaned up to make ads viewable,” he explains.

It’s not the same scenario with regard to the mobile, feed-based environment. “It’s the actual measurement of time and exposure that needs to be established. They’re different use cases,” Norman says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

So what’s the big idea? For Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman, it’s about using the cloud to go beyond weather.

“We’re making a transition where the data that we provide is not just in the weather space,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’ve got a ton of geolocation data … everything from professional weather stations to amateur weather stations, but also to smart phones and cars, etc. All of that data is value that we can put to work for brands and for businesses.”

Why Watson? Because IBM’s software could be a secret weapon for ad targeting.

“It can take that data, learn from it just like you and I learn from anything, any lessons that we have, and then we can optimize it and put it back into the marketplace,” Bitterman adds.

“Being part of Watson, it enables us to take all the data that we have, put it together and combine it with our clients’ first party data or any other kind of third party data and utilize it for best effect on their business.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

As a “pure data play,” 605 doesn’t sell media or advertising, isn’t a media broker and doesn’t run an ad marketplace, according to President and Co-Founder Ben Tatta.

“Our goal is really to empower programmers and advertisers with data direct,” Tatta says in an interview with Beet.tv.

605 was formed this year by Dolan Family Ventures—which had sold East Coast MVPD Cablevision Systems Corp.—via the acquisition of Analytics Media Group, a pioneer in the use of set-top box data. Tatta had been President of Cablevision Media Sales.

The goal of 605 at CES is “to look at all the new devices that are out there, because ultimately these devices represent fragmentation, which present measurement challenges we can help solve,” Tatta explains.

By acquiring AMG, 605 enjoys access to data across roughly a half dozen MVPD’s. “Our goal is to build on top of that and also extend that beyond just addressable to programmers so they can do other forms of programming analytics,” says Tatta.

Given AMG’s roots, 605 has a deep perspective of the addressable TV landscape. So it’s more than familiar with the need for census-level data for more uniform audience targeting.

“The biggest challenge is that there isn’t a census level data set available,” says Tatta. “A lot of the data that’s used today is sort of pockets. Whether it’s a certain MVPD or certain device that might make their data available.”

Another limitation is the two minutes per hour of local ad inventory currently earmarked for addressable. While it’s beneficial to cable operators and local advertisers, it’s just not enough longer term.

“I think where over time this goes is addressable capability extending to the national advertising avails,” Tatta says. “That’s where it really starts to serve the programming interests well in the sense that they’re serving a national audience,” plus the ability to target based on discreet customer segments.

“This will take some time because it requires a lot of capacity to do addressable on a national basis, but I do think it’s coming,” Tatta adds.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

605 is the sponsor of Beet.TV’s upcoming coverage of CES 2017. 

The strategy derives from the knowledge that “Marketers want to be near news content. We pay a lot of attention to that,” says Duncan.

It’s already in place for NBC New’s TODAY, “which is a great TV brand but it’s also a brand that we’ve positioned digitally as a lifestyle brand,” Duncan explains, citing home and health related content as examples within the vertical.

Most recently, NBCU launched Mach from NBC News, whose mission is to chart the future “from technology to the scientific breakthroughs changing our lives,” as stated on the Mach beta website. Boeing, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary, had dominant ad positions on the site.

In February 2017, the company will offer a vertical called Better, “which is wellness for the whole you. Not just health but fitness, financial wellness, career wellness,” Duncan says.

Better will be followed by Think, whose content will include “big ideas, possibly political analysis, think pieces,” according to Duncan.

“We think those are great opportunities for advertisers to play in sort of a near news space,” Duncan says. “We are providing places where they can advertise against sort of a clear niche in a more welcoming space than sometimes the larger news product can be.”

Asked about video viewing and the user experience, Duncan recalls the origins of NBC New’s early decision to turn off auto-play, the dual reason for which was viewability concerns and understanding that people reading an article might not want a video to be playing as well.

“Business goals are important, but ultimately if you’re hurting your user experience you’re handicapping your business goals in the long run,” says Duncan. Advertising, he concedes, sometimes “gets in the way” of a quality experience.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

“Any eyeball in the U.S. that watches video has access to a Condé Nast video,” says Joy Marcus, EVP and GM of Digital Video, Condé Nast Entertainment.

Aside from its own platforms, Condé Nast distributes on all the obvious platforms, sometimes with non-obvious results. “We cannot believe it but it’s true. The AOL.com home page does really, really well for us and some of our brands,” Marcus says. “Most recently we’ve done an arrangement with Pinterest for GQ content, which is super interesting,” Marcus adds.

She believes we’re seeing a “hockey stick moment for video advertising,” rising from around $9 billion this year to between $20 billion and $23 billion in the next five years. One reason, according to Marcus, is that television is now growing in viewership “and lots and lots of money is still being thrown at TV. I think that video is incredibly well positioned to begin catching some of that money.”

With a direct-sales approach, Condé Nast sells out of its video inventory “and more,” Marcus observes, noting that the company has first sales right with almost all of its syndication partners. “That’s a model that we have really stuck to our guns with.”

Condé Nast already sells display ad space programmatically and is testing programmatic for its video inventory, according to Marcus. “I think you’re going to see a more full blown programmatic video program from Condé Nast in 2017,” she says.

In October, the company “planted a big stick in the ground with VR,” unveiling a series titled Invisible in collaboration with director Doug Liman and other Hollywood luminaries. “Our players now have been modified to include 360,” says Marcus. “We have exceeded our expectations in views.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Moreover, it’s “fraud-free, it’s 100% viewable,” Lawlor says in an interview with Beet.tv.

FreeWheel’s third quarter Video Monetization Report has all the numbers: Ad views grew 28% year over year, while video views increased 37%. The discrepancy, as MediaPost reports, is chalked up to a preponderance of short-form content with fewer ads during the quarter, owing to the Olympics and the presidential election.

As more audiences gather before the TV screen, OTT and set-top box video on demand now have a combined share of 38% versus 36% for desktop. Given all the OTT and VOD activity, dynamic ad insertion becomes increasingly important but is limited by the melding of technologies that facilitate it.

“We’re starting to see the pace of the integration of technologies to enable dynamic ad insertion on set-top box environments increasing,” says Lawlor.

Year over year there was roughly a 100% rise in set-top box VOD ad views and about 70% in OTT.

“The ability for programmers to sell into set-top box environments as well as OTT is becoming greater pretty much every quarter that we go through,” Lawlor says.

Sports and other live video programming “continues to be an important growth story for our major programmers,” Lawlor adds. “The programmers who have the sports rights continue to proliferate the ways by which they can distribute their content across every device.”

The Video Monetization Report also notes that programmers are embracing programmatic at different rates. Automated transaction models continued to grow at a significant rate (up 64% year over year) but still remain a relatively low percentage of overall premium video ad sales in the U.S., at 11.4%.

“Some of the factors that keep this number down include strong direct sales across the premium video economy, as well as risk factors related to managing user experience from Automated Transaction Models,” the report states.

In the third quarter, 7.3% of ad views were delivered programmatically, a 92% increase year over year from 5.5% of ad views in the third quarter of 2015.

The living room will be a big focus for FreeWheel at CES 2017, because Lawlor believes “there is tremendous opportunity” for programmers to explain the benefits of big-screen viewing of premium video.

“That is under penetrated in terms of an opportunity for the buy side right now,” Lawlor adds. “This is the most engaged viewer that you’re going to have: Somebody sitting in their living watching on their television screen through whichever pipes we’re running the ads and content through.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Now it’s considering its options for the next generation of advertising – virtual reality. Hulu began putting content in to VR in March, and is now looking at advertising there.

“Virtual reality Hulu is a big deal in that we’re agnostic,” the company’s ad sales SVP Peter Naylor explains to Beet.TV in this video interview. “We are on all the platforms that you can imagine, from Samsung Gear to Daydream and all points in between.

“We’ve built a pretty big library of both acquired and increasingly original content. We’ve done deals with HuffPo’s RYOT for some news and we’re doing work with LiveNation to do some music. We’re really leaning into it … I think we’ve got as good a shot as anybody to get attention from viewers.”

So what about the advertising execution?

“We’re free to experiment,” he says. “You can imagine everything from entitlement, you know, the following clip is brought to you by the good people at McDonald’s, all the way up until almost borrowing from an interruptive model.”

Let’s hedge our bets a little here. VR not yet widely adopted – and many brands are smarting from having bet wearables would be the next big screen. Even if VR does, finally take off, massive question marks hang over what an advertising deployment might look like. VR will be such an intimate environment, consumers may naturally feel sensitive to intrusion.

It’s a sensitivity Naylor is attuned to.

“A lot of people argue about, ‘You really can’t do a 30 second spot within a VR clip’. Maybe, maybe not. I think everything should be experimented with. In an age where everyone’s concerned about distracted viewing and multitasking, when you’ve got a VR experience happening, you cannot look away from the ad. I think the engagement and brand awareness for the advertisers just goes through the roof when you’re consuming content with a VR headset.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

If that’s not enough, there also will be disruption, the kind that is sweeping the video and television business and which MediaLink Chairman and CEO Michael Kassan will discuss on stage with media executive Barry Diller.

“We will have many other programs that focus on sensation,” Millard says in an interview with Beet.tv. “Lots of client meetings, lots of panels and our own immersive experiences.”

Among other challenges, MediaLink clients are “trying to get their arms around” the ever-changing video sector, according to Millard.

“It does seem very overwhelming with all the opportunities, but they are opportunities and markers are decidedly interested in being where their audiences are,” says Millard. “It’s almost an imperative for them to play in this new video environment and to figure out what works for them.”

Experiences and sensations involving virtual and augmented reality will be a particular focus at CES, even though “only a small sliver” of consumers has been exposed to these technologies, according to Millard.

“Like many things in this world, the East Coast and West Coast have a little bit of a lead in terms of what’s new,” says Millard. “I think the rest of the country in this particular case is probably not very up to speed on VR or AR.”

Nonetheless, she thinks it’s important for marketers to understand such emerging technologies.

“I think CES at large is a great opportunity for us not to necessarily focus on the technology itself buy the change in consumer behavior that’s facilitated by technology,” Millard adds. “And then look at the implications for our business and the potential applications.”

With virtual reality alone Millard sees “quite extraordinary” opportunities, citing sectors like education, health and entertainment.

“Exactly what that is and how we reach the mass audiences that so many marketers need, that’s all to come,” she says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Indeed, Beet.TV has already chronicled how the Postbuilt its own in-house ad server (Prizm),software to write better headlines (Bandito) and a semantic software analysis tool (Clavis).

That may sound like a departure for a newspaper company. But the Post’s technology efforts go even further than that. The Post’stech development is happeninginside a dedicated unit it’s calling Arc Publishingthat doesn’t only exist to give the paper alone a leg-up – Arc also wants to put its tools in the hands of rival publishers, advertisers and agency buyers.

In doing so, Arc wants to take control, to disintermediate the ad-tech vendors out there still swarming around publishers. And the number of products Arc already counts is growing.

As AdWeek puts it: “One year ago, the Washington Post decided it was done working with third-party ad-tech partners and instead started building its own slick tools and ad formats to tackle industry problems like speed, fraud and viewability.”

In this video interview with Beet.TV,Washington Post ad product and technology head Jarrod Dicker says Arc created a separate sub-group – the Research, Experimentation and Development (RED) team – to ensure the Postwas building products for commercial teams, not just editorial staff.

“We saw a huge opportunity to really start investing in experimenting different ideas just for the commercial side of the business,” he explains. “Can we replace third-party technologies and be the premier vendor within the space that helps build ad products for agencies, brands and other publishers that take in to account everything we know about experience … and the sales cycle?

“We’ve launched 10 proprietary products under the RED group which we do license to other publishers, agencies as well as sell on our site.”

The latest is FlexPlay, softwareadvertisers can use to customize a standard pre-roll video ad or 30-second TV ad for a plethora of digital deployments, including vertical and text overlay.

Dicker says more than 40 advertisers so far have used FlexPlay, including Morgan Stanley.

So, what’s the big idea? For Dicker, it’s about ensuring that product improvements made in the name of consumer experience for editorial teams also produce a better commercial experience, too – the two are intertwined.

“At the Post, we’ve broken down those silos,” he says. “We are very much like church-and-state when it comes to editorial, but our technology is like Switzerland – let’s identify trends and be first to market on both sides of the fence.”

In a year-end memo this week, the Post’s publisher reveals the company is profitable and planning to continue growing newsroom headcount in 2017.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

In addition to new tech and new devices, Richman will have an eye on the continuing evolution of measurement as consumer behavior shifts from linear to online video, to mobile, to over the top, as well as the different ad formats for those mediums. “As we have more platforms, we get more signals frrm consumers about how they’re watching, and when,” she says, and that input can help optimize ad offerings and measurement.

Richman also touched on addressable TV, emphasizing that the term itself is becoming more broadly defined. “Today as we talk about addressable, it can be how do we find new narrow segments online, what can we learn about them, what new targets can we discover about them that we can bring to TV. Much of that is available programmatically so we can get more precise with these audiences…and use that to understand what segments to invest in.”

Looking ahead, Richman expects this type of data-driven planning will play an even bigger role in the upfront. The availability of more data affords flexibility to move ad dollars across mediums to drive performance, she says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Ignite evolved from the realization that the TV industry had “overstuffed the bird” with too many ads and that creative content had to work harder for marketers, Dan Riess, EVP of Content Partnerships, says in an interview with Beet.tv.

During this “test and learn” year for Ignite, Turner has already cut the number of ads in its programming, according to Riess.

“What we are learning is that the shorter the ad breaks, in general the better performance for advertisers that are in that ad break,” he says. “Makes total sense, less clutter. We’re seeing it as less is more.”

After the self-imposed commercial “diet” came the “workout,” as Riess explains it.

“The workout part is to make the creative work harder in those pods. Start taking what would be a traditional ad pod of four, six, eight sometimes spots and putting in custom branded content,” Riess says.

Normally, viewers would emerge from a program segment and encounter a pod with several commercial messages, none of them related to the other. In its tests, Ignite swapped out the traditional pod and substituted a two- to three-minute exclusive branded content piece from an advertiser, then returned viewers to the program.

At the next commercial break, viewers were shown a 30-second ad for the company whose branded content they had previously viewed. This is a formula that Turner has executed 30-40 times across its networks, according to Riess.

Biometric testing with 4,500 viewers revealed that “you have a huge bump in engagement when you put a story in front of someone for two minutes plus,” Riess says. That has a huge effect.”

As for the 30-second ad, it “starts to perform extremely well” following the branded content “because it’s been essentially set up by the content piece,” says Riess.

Ignite does audience targeting via both contextual means and “a huge array of data sets, being Nielsen, be it MRI. Pretty much any dataset that a marketer would want to use we actually have in house and are willing to target against,” he says.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Also at CES, Ray will host a “fireside chat” with Hulu, looking at where the online TV service is today and where it’s going. “With the landscape of data changing so quickly, our ability to leverage their data to create better experiences for clients to connect linear TV experiences with non-linear TV is what we need to do to maximize the TV platforms,” Ray says.

He also touched on the risks and opportunities in the shifting over-the-top landscape. Carat analyzed video viewing from 2009 to today, and has seen a 16% increase in total hours consumed. The challenge is some of those platforms can’t be monetized. “We are working with many platform companies about how to leverage their data and create some partnerships to be as targeted and as addressable as we can in the formats that support ads, and in some non-supportive platforms we look at how to integrate into that content.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

Within the digital domain, everything is census-level data. “We have event-level data, cookie data, all those things, and they are pinned to individual profiles,” says Gotlieb.

Today, a single Nielsen respondent is representative “of circa 50,000 people in the population of the United States,” Gotlieb continues. “You can’t do attribution on that basis. It’s not granular enough.”

With truly census level data on TV, marketers can “do the kind of analytics to join the dots between what’s accomplished by digital media and legacy media and create the complete story,” says Gotlieb. “If you’re talking about census-level data as it relates to television, that’s comScore today, once it gets all the set-top box data rolled up is all you need.”

The same thing is needed on the sales side, according to Gotlieb, “whether it’s Kroger’s data or Walmart’s data or Nielsen Catalina, all those data sets are census level data.”

Aggregating all of the data provides insights into “what is an individual view on TV, what do they buy, where do they surf, what do they search, what are their social behaviors, etc.,” Gotlieb explains. “And you begin to understand what’s relevant to that individual, what moves them to buy a product and how effective your marketing is.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.

In an interview with Beet.tv, Marchese traces the path to the current state of consumers and their tolerance—or lack thereof—of ads from a longstanding blind spot.

For too long, the TV industry “thought too little about what consumers want and just thought this was a negotiation that was happening between content owners and advertisers,” says Marchese, who is President of Advanced Advertising at Fox. “In reality, it was a three-party negotiation: content owners, advertisers and viewers.”

The last group have “fought back” as evidenced by the rise of ad blockers, DVR’s, Netflix, Hulu Ad-Free and other choices, according to Marchese.

He cites “the rash of virtual MVPD’s” like AT&T’s new streaming offerings and as he looks ahead to CES 2017, believes there’s no doubt that TV and video content will increasingly be delivered via IP.

“If that’s true and people are going to be logging in to watch television even on the big screen at home, what does that finally mean for advertisers?” Marchese posits. “How do we realize that?”

Among other things, he sees IP delivery fostering personalized ads and enabling advertisers to become “smarter about targeting and reduce ad loads because the ads get better and more relevant.”

To Marchese, creativity doesn’t always mean interactive ad design. “Sometimes it means designing different length commercials for different viewing experiences,” he says. “Sometimes it will mean designing sequential commercial messages.”

In an IP environment, “We know that a person has seen commercial one,” Marchese says. “Let’s show them commercial two now. That’s a whole new way to think about advertising than a simple reach and frequency.”

In any event, more consumer choices have put the market in a very different place. “Content owners and marketers are going to need to work together more than ever before,” says Marchese.

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more vidoes from the series here. 

On the consumer electronics side, “I say this every year but it has never been more true than it is today. TV’s are getting bigger, better, cheaper and the pace at which that trend continues to go is escalating,” Gotlieb says.

While consumers will see “step change” as the trend plays out, Gotlieb notes that people on both the content side and manufacturing side are thinking even bigger. This group is “contemplating what an apartment of the future might look like and how it would need to be configured to have a video wall,” he says.

Among other things, such contemplation raises questions like “Do you do virtual reality with a helmet on your head, or do you do virtual reality with a 200-inch screen that represents an entire wall in your living room,” Gotlieb says.

Moreover, “What about a screen of that size with almost infinite resolution and autostereoscopy, which means 3D without glasses and what are the implications of those capabilities,” particularly for marketers, he adds.

In the computing space, Gotlieb observes that “mobility and computing have intersected with each other. Today we talk about not just the CPU but the GPU.”

He goes on to marvel at the rapid progress of NVIDIA processors, whose initial application facilitated the rendering of graphics in real time before being used in autonomous vehicles.

“And sure enough, last year NVIDIA moved to the automotive floor from the consumer electronics floor” at CES, Gotlieb recalls.

As for integration and the internet of things, he believes there will be increased emphasis this year on the risks involved, given that hackers have been able to infiltrate some IOT devices.

“We need to be very careful about how we develop the internet of things so that we can continue to secure our identities and our lives,” Gotlieb says. “But it’s going to be an exciting show, as always.”

This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more vidoes from the series here.